Ships from the West

One

14 ^th Forialon, Year of the Saint 567

The knot of riders pummelled along the sea cliffs in a billow of tawny dust. Young men on tall horses, they came to a thundering halt scant inches from the edge and sat their snorting mounts there laughing and slapping dust from their clothes. The sun, bright as a cymbal, beat down on the sky-blue sea far below and made the glitter of the horizon too bright for the eye to bear. It caused the sere mountains behind the riders to ripple and shimmer like a vision.

Cantering up to join the horsemen came another, but this was an older man, his dress sombre, and his beard gun-metal grey. His mount came to a sober halt and he wiped sweat from his temples.

'You'll break your damn fool necks if you're not careful. Don't you know the rock is rotten there at the edge?'

Most of the younger men eased their horses away from the fearsome drop sheepishly, but one remained in place, a broad-shouldered youth with pale blue eyes and hair black as a raven's feather. His mount was a handsome grey gelding which stood prick-eared and attentive between his knees.

'Bevan, where would I be without you? I suppose Mother told you to follow us.'

'She did, small wonder. Now get away from the edge, Bleyn. Make an old man happy.'

Bleyn smiled and backed the grey from the brink of the sea cliff one yard, two. Then he dismounted in a motion as easy as the flow of water, patted the neck of the sweating horse and slapped dust from his riding leathers. On foot he was shorter than one would have guessed, with a powerfully built torso set square on a pair of stout legs. The physique of a longshore shy;man topped by the incongruously fine-boned face of an aristocrat.

'We came to see if we could catch a glimpse of the fleet,' he said, somewhat contrite.

'Then look to the headland there – Grios Point. They'll be coming into view any time now, with this breeze. They weighed anchor in the middle of the night.'

The other riders dismounted also, hobbled their horses and unhooked wineskins from their saddles.

'What's it all about anyway, Bevan?' one of them asked. 'Stuck out here in the provinces, we're always the last to know.'

'It's a huge pirate fleet, I hear’ another said. 'Up from the Macassars looking for blood and plunder.'

‘I don't know about pirates,' Bevan said slowly, 'but I do know that your father, Bleyn, had to call up all the retainers on the estate and tear off to Abrusio with them in tow. It's a general levy, and we haven't seen one of those in … oh sixteen, seventeen years now.'

'He's not my father,' Bleyn said quickly, his fine-boned face flushing dark.

Bevan looked at him. 'Now listen-'

'There they are!' one of the others shouted excitedly. 'Just coming round the point.'

They all stared, silent now. The cicadas clicked endlessly in the heat around them, but there was a breeze off the barren mountains at their backs.

Around the rocky headland, over a league away. Coming into view was what resembled a flock of far-off birds perched on the waves. It was the brightness of the sails which was striking at first – the heavy swell partially hid their hulls. Tall men-of-war with the scarlet pennants of Hebrion snapping from their mainmasts. Twelve, fifteen, twenty great ships in line of battle, smashing aside the waves and forging out to sea with the wind on their starboard beam and their sails bright as a swan's wing.

'It's the entire western fleet,' Bevan murmured. 'What in the world . . . ?'

He turned to Bleyn, who was shading his eyes with one hand and peering intently seawards.

'They're beautiful,' the young man said, awed. 'They truly are.'

'Ten thousand men you're looking at there, lad. The greatest navy in the world. Your- Lord Murad will be aboard, and no doubt half the Galiapeno retainers, puking their guts out I'll be bound.'

'Lucky bastards,' Bleyn breathed. 'And here we are like a bunch of widows at a ball, watching them go.'

'What is it all for? Is it a war we haven't heard of?' one of the others asked, perplexed.

'Damned if I know,' Bevan rasped. 'It's something big, to draw out the entire fleet like that.'

'Maybe it's the Himerians and the Knights Militant, come invading at last,' one of the younger ones squeaked.

'They'd come through the Hebros passes, fool. They've no ships worth speaking of.'

'The Sea-Merduks then.'

'We've been at peace with them these forty years or more.'

'Well there's something out there. You don't send a fleet out to sea for the fun of it.'

'Mother will know,' Bleyn said abruptly. He turned and remounted the tall grey in one fluid movement. 'I'm going home. Bevan, you stay with this lot. You'll slow me down.' The gelding pranced like a sprightly ghost below him, snort shy;ing.

'You just wait a moment-' Bevan began, but he was already gone, leaving only a zephyr of dust behind.

Lady Jemilla was a striking woman with hair still as dark as her son's. Only in bright sunlight could the grey be seen threading it through, like silver veining the face of a mine. She had been a famous beauty in her youth, and it was rumoured that the King himself had at one time honoured her with his attentions; but she was now the dutiful well-bred wife of Hebrion's High Chamberlain, Lord Murad of Galiapeno, and had been for almost fifteen years. The colourful escapades that had enlivened her youth were now all but forgotten at court, and Bleyn knew nothing of them.

Murad's fiefdom, tucked away on the Galapen Peninsula south-west of Abrusio, was something of a backwater, and the high manse which had housed his family for generations was an austere fortress-like edifice built out of cold Hebros stone. In the heat of high summer it still retained an echo of winter chill and there was a low fire burning in the cavernous hearth of Jemilla's apartments. She was running over the household accounts at her desk, whilst beside her an open window afforded a view of the sun-baked olive groves of her hus shy;band's estates like some brightly lit fragment of a sunnier world.

The clamour of her son's arrival was unmistakable. She smiled, losing ten years in an instant, and knuckled her small fists into the hollow of her back as she arched, cat-like, from the desk.

The door opened and a grinning footman appeared. 'Lady-'

'Let him in, Dominan.' 'Yes, lady.'

Bleyn blew in like a gale, reeking of horse and sweat and warm leather. He embraced his mother, and she kissed him on the lips. 'What is it this time?'

'Ships – a million ships – well a great fleet at any rate. They passed by Grios Point this morning. Bevan tells me that Murad is aboard, with the retainers he took to Abrusio last month. What's afoot, Mother? What great events are sailing us by this time?' Bleyn collapsed on to a nearby couch, shedding dust and horsehair over its antique velvet.

'He is Lord Murad to you, Bleyn,' Jemilla said tartly. 'Even a son must not be too familiar when his father is of the high nobility.'

'He's not my father.' An automatic snap of petulance. Jemilla leaned forward wearily, lowering her voice in turn. 'To the world he is. Now, these ships-'

'But we know better, Mother. Why pretend?'

'If you want to keep your head on your shoulders, then to you he must be Father also. Prate to your friends all you want – I have them watched. But in front of strangers, you will swallow this pill with a smile. Understand me now, Bleyn. I am tired explaining.'

'I am tired pretending. I am seventeen, Mother – a man in my own right.'

'When you cease pretending, this man you have suddenly become will no longer have a life to be tired of, I promise you. Abeleyn will not tolerate a cuckoo – not yet – for all that that Astaran whore has a womb as barren as a salted field.'

'I don't understand. Surely even a bastard heir is better than no heir at all.'

'It comes of the Civil War. He wants everything absolutely clear. A legitimate king's heir, with whom no one can quibble. He is not yet fifty, and she is younger. And they have that sorcerer Golophin weaving his spells, coaxing his seed into her year by year.'

'And all for nothing.'

'Yes. Be patient, Bleyn. He will come to his senses in the end and realise, as you say, that a bastard is better than nothing.' Jemilla smiled as she said this, and her smile was not altogether pleasant. She saw how it wounded him. Well and good – it was something he would have to get used to.

She ruffled his dust-caked hair. 'What is this about a fleet of ships then?'

He was sullen, slow to answer, but she could see the curiosity burning away the sulk.

'The whole battle fleet, Bevan says. What's going on, Mother? What war have we missed?'

Now it was she who paused. 'I – I don't know.'

'You must know. He tells you everything.'

'He does not. I know little more than you do. All the households have been turned out, and there has been a Grand Alliance signed, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the First Empire. Hebrion, Astarac-'

'-Gabrion, Torunna and the Sea-Merduks. Yes Mother, that has been old news for months now. So the Himerians are finally invading – is that it? But they have no fleet worth speaking of. And Bevan said our ships are westbound. What's out there but empty ocean?'

'What indeed? A host of rumours and legends, perhaps. A myth about to be made flesh.'

'And now you talk in riddles again. Cannot you ever give me a straight answer?'

'Hold your tongue', Jemilla snapped. 'You're barely seven shy;teen summers old in the way of the world, and you think you can bandy words with me and belittle your – your father? Whelp.'

He subsided, glowering.

In a softer tone she went on, 'There are legends of a land out in the uttermost west, a new world that remains undiscovered and uninhabited. They are the stuff of chil shy;dren's bedtime stories here in Hebrion, and have been for centuries. But what if the children's tales were true – what if there was indeed a vast, unknown continent out there in the west – and what if I told you that Hebrian ships had already been there, Hebrian feet had trodden those uncharted strands?'

‘I would say, bravo for Hebrian enterprise, but what has this to do with the armada I saw this morning?'

'There's been talk at court, Bleyn, and even here I have caught the gist of it. Hebrion is about to face the threat of invasion, it would seem.'

'So it is the Himerians!'

'No. It is something else. Something from the west.'

'The west? Why – aha – you mean there really is some new empire out beyond the sea? Mother, this is amazing news! How can you sit there so calm? What marvellous times we live in!' Bleyn leapt up and began striding back and forth across the chamber, slapping the palms of his hands together in his excitement. His mother watched him dourly. Still a boy, with a boy's enthusiasms, and a boy's ignorance. She had thought to have done better. Perhaps if his father had truly been Abeleyn – or Murad – he would have been different, but this pup was the progeny of one Richard Hawkwood, a man Jemilla might once, ironically enough, have actually loved shy;the only man she might once have loved – but a commoner, and thus useless to her life and her ambitions. Still, she thought, one must work with the tools one is given. And he is my son, after all. I am his mother. And I do love him – there is no gainsaying that.

'Not an empire,' she corrected him. 'Or at least, not yet. Whatever it is that has arisen out there, it seems to have been connected to events here, in Normannia, for untold centuries. How, I am not sure, but the Himerians are part of it, and the Second Empire somehow within its control.'

'You are very vague, Mother,' said Bleyn with some cir shy;cumspection.

'It is all I know. Few men anywhere know more except Lord Murad, and the King, and Golophin his wizard.'

And Richard Hawkwood. The thought came unbidden to her. He too would know everything, having captained that unhappy voyage all those years ago. The greatest feat of maritime navigation in history, it was said, but the Crown had clamped down on all mention of it in subsequent years. The initial interest – nay, hysteria – had faded within a year. No log books were ever published, no survivor ever hawked his story in street-sold handbills. It was as though it had never happened.

Her husband it was who had seen to that. Murad forgot nothing, forgave nothing. The man was obsessed with ruining Richard Hawkwood – why, Jemilla could not fathom. Some shy;thing had happened to them out there in the west, something horrible. It was as if Murad were trying to expunge it from his soul. And if he could not, then he would bury every reminder of it he could.

If he ever found out that Bleyn were actually the mariner's son . . . Jemilla's face grew cold at the thought.

So Hawkwood had gained nothing from his great voyage, once the initial run of banquets and audiences had run their course. It had been a nine-day wonder, quickly forgotten. Even the King, she thought, had been happy to have it that way. What had happened out there, to destroy their expedi shy;tion and so blight their lives?

And what was coming from that terrible place now that warranted such preparations? Alliances, ship-building pro shy;grammes, fortification projects: in the last five years Hebrion and her allies had been preparing for a vast struggle with the unknown. And now, it had begun. She could sense it as surely as if it were some noisome reek brought on the back of the wind.

Bleyn was watching her. 'How can you sit here like this, Mother – so uninterested? You're a woman, I know – but not like any other-'

'You know so many then?'

'I know other noblewomen. You are a hawk amongst pigeons.'

She laughed. Perhaps he was not so much of a boy as she had thought. 'I keep my place, Bleyn, as I must. Lord Murad is not a man to cross lightly, as you know, and he prefers that you and I stay away from court. The King prefers it that way also. We are a skeleton long hidden in the back of a closet. We must be patient, is all.'

'I am a man now. I can sit a horse as well as any trooper, and I'm the best fencer in all of Galiapeno. I should be out there on those ships, or at least commanding a tercio in the city garrison. My blood demands it. It would demand it even were I Murad's son and not the King's.'

'Yes, it would.'

'What kind of education do you think I get out here in the country? I know nothing of court or of the other nobility-'

"That's enough, Bleyn. I can only counsel patience. Your time will come.'

Bleyn's voice rose. 'It will come when at last I am a dodder shy;ing greybeard and my youth has been poured out on the stones of this damned backwater!' He stormed out of the chamber, his shoulder thumping the door frame as he went. The dust of his passage hung in the air after him. Jemilla could smell it. Dust. All that was left of sixteen years of her life. She had aimed high once – too high – and this semi-imprisonment had been her punishment, Murad her jailer. She was lucky to be alive. But Bleyn was right. It was time to chance another cast perhaps, before sixteen more years passed in the arid dust and sunlight of this damned backwater.