The Second Empire

PROLOGUE

The makeshift tiller bucked under their hands, bruising ribs. Hawkwood gripped it tighter to his sore chest along with the others, teeth set, his mind a flare of foul curses-a helpless fury which damned the wind, the ship, the sea itself, and the vast, uncaring world upon which they raced in mad career.

The wind backed a point-he could feel it spike into his right ear, heavy with chill rain. He unclenched his jaws long enough to shriek forward over the lashing gale.

“Brace the yards-it’s backing round. Brace around that mainyard, God rot you!”

Other men appeared on the wave-swept deck, tottering out of their hiding places and staggering across the plunging waist of the carrack. They were in rags, some looking as though they might once have been soldiers, with the wreck of military uniforms still flapping around their torsos. They were clumsy and torpid in the bitter soaking spindrift, and looked as though they belonged in a sick-bed rather than on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

From the depths of the pitching vessel a terrible growling roar echoed up, rising above the thrumming cacophony of the wind and the rageing waves and the groaning rigging. It sounded like some huge, caged beast venting its viciousness upon the world. The men on deck paused in their manipulation of the sodden rigging, and some made the Sign of the Saint. For a second sheer terror shone through the exhaustion that dulled their eyes. Then they went back to their work. The men at the stern felt the heavings of the tiller ease a trifle as the yards were braced around to meet the changing wind. They had it abaft the larboard beam now, and the carrack was powering forward like a horse breasting deep snow. She was sailing under a reefed mainsail, no more. The rest of her canvass billowed in strips from the yards, and where the mizzen-topmast had once been was only a splintered stump with the rags of shrouds flapping about it in black skeins.

Not so very far now, Hawkwood thought, and he turned to his three companions.

“She’ll go easier now the wind’s on the quarter.” He had to shout to be heard over the storm. “But keep her thus. If it strengthens we’ll have to run before it and be damned to navigation.”

One of the men at the helm with him was a tall, lean, white-faced fellow with a terrible scar that distorted one side of his forehead and temple. The remnants of riding leathers clung to his back.

“We were damned long ago, Hawkwood, and our enterprise with us. Better to give it up and let her sink with that abomination chained in the hold.”

“He’s my friend, Murad,” Hawkwood spat at him. “And we are almost home.”

“Almost home indeed! What will you do with him when we get there, make a watchdog of him?”

“He saved our lives before now-”

“Only because he’s in league with those monsters from the west.”

“-And his master, Golophin, will be able to cure him.”

“We should throw him overboard.”

“You do, and you can pilot this damned ship yourself, and see how far you get with her.”

The two glared at one another with naked hatred, before Hawkwood turned and leaned his weight against the trembling tiller with the others once more, keeping the carrack on her easterly course. Pointing her towards home.

And in the hold below their feet, the beast howled in chorus with the storm.

26th Day of Miderialon, Year of the Saint 552.

Wind NNW, backing. Heavy gale. Course SSE under reefed mainsail, running before the wind. Three feet of water in the well, pumps barely keeping pace with it.

Hawkwood paused. He had his knees braced against the heavy fixed table in the middle of the stern-cabin and the inkwell was curled up in his left fist, but even so he had to strain to remain in his seat. A heavy following sea, and the carrack was cranky for lack of ballast, the water in her hold moving with every pitch. At least with a stern wind they did not feel the lack of the mizzen so much.

As the ship’s movement grew less violent, he resumed his writing.

Of the two hundred and sixty-six souls who left Abrusio harbour some seven and a half months ago, only eighteen remain. Poor Garolvo was washed overboard in the middle watch, may God have mercy on his soul.

Hawkwood paused a moment, shaking his head at the pity of it. To have survived the massacre in the west, all that horror, merely to be drowned when home waters were almost in sight.

We have been at sea almost three months, and by dead-reckoning I estimate our easting to be some fifteen hundred leagues, though we have travelled half as far as that again to the north. But the southerlies have failed us now, and we are being driven off our course once more. By cross-staff reckoning, our latitude is approximately that of Gabrion. The wind must keep backing around if it is to enable us to make landfall somewhere in Normannia itself. Our lives are in the hand of God.

“The hand of God,” Hawkwood said quietly. Seawater dripped out of his beard on to the battered log and he blotted it hurriedly. The cabin was sloshing ankle-deep, as was every other compartment in the ship. They had all forgotten long ago what it was like to be dry or have a full belly; several of them had loose and rotting teeth and scars which had healed ten years before were oozing: the symptoms of scurvy.

How had it come to this? What had so wrecked their proud and well-manned little flotilla? But he knew the answer, of course, knew it only too well. It kept him awake through the graveyard watch though his exhausted body craved oblivion. It growled and roared in the hold of his poor Osprey. It raved in the midnight spasms of Murad’s nightmares.

He stoppered up the inkwell and folded the log away in its layers of oilskin. On the table before him was a flaccid wineskin which he slung around his neck. Then he sloshed and staggered across the pitching cabin to the door in the far bulkhead and stepped over the storm-sill into the companion-way beyond. It was dark here, as it was throughout every compartment in the ship. They had few candles left and only a precious pint or two of oil for the storm-lanterns. One of these hung swinging on a hook in the companionway, and Hawkwood took it and made his way forward to where a hatch in the deck led down into the hold. He hesitated there with the ship pitching and groaning around him and the seawater coursing around his ankles, then cursed aloud and began to work the hatch-cover free. He lifted it off a yawning hole and gingerly lowered himself down the ladder there, into the blackness below.

At the ladder’s foot he wedged himself into a corner and fumbled for the flint and steel that was contained in a bottom compartment of the storm-lantern. An aching, maddening time of striking spark after spark until one caught on the oil-soaked wick of the lantern and he was able to lower the thick glass that protected it and stand it in a pool of yellow light.

The hold was eerily empty, home only to a dozen casks of rotting salt meat and noisome water that constituted the last of the crew’s provisions. Water pouring everywhere, and the noise of his poor tormented Osprey an agonised symphony of creaks and moans, the sea roaring like a beast beyond the tortured hull. He laid a hand against the timbres of the ship and felt them work apart as she laboured in the gale-driven waves. Fragments of oakum floated about in the water around his feet. The seams were opening. No wonder the men on the pumps could make no headway. The ship was dying.

From below his feet there came an animal howl which rivalled even the thundering bellow of the wind. Hawkwood flinched, and then stumbled forward to where another hatch led below to the bottom-most compartment of the ship, the bilge.

It was stinking down here. The Osprey’s ballast had not been changed in a long time and the tropical heat of the Western Continent seemed to have lent it a particularly foul stench. But it was not the ballast alone which stank. There was another smell down here. It reminded Hawkwood of the beasts’ enclosure in a travelling circus-that musk-like reek of a great animal. He paused, his heart hammering within his ribs, and then made himself walk forward, crouching low under the beams, the lantern swinging in a chaotic tumble of light and dark and sloshing liquid. The water was over his knees already.

Something ahead, moving in the liquid filth of the bilge. The rattle of metal clinking upon metal. It saw him and ceased its struggles. Two yellow eyes gleamed in the dark. Hawkwood halted a scant two yards from where it lay chained to the very keelson of the carrack.

The beast blinked, and then, terrible out of that animal muzzle, came recognizable speech.

“Captain. How good of you to come.”

Hawkwood’s mouth was as dry as salt. “Hello Bardolin,” he said.

“Come to make sure the beast is still in his lair?”

“Something like that.”

“Are we about to sink?”

“Not yet-not just yet, anyway.”

The great wolf bared its fangs in what might have been a grin. “Well, we must be thankful.”

“How much longer will you be like this?”

“I don’t know. I am beginning to control it. This morning-was it morning? One cannot tell down here-I stayed human for almost half a watch. Two hours.” A low growl came out of the beast’s mouth, something like a moan. “In the name of God, why do you not let Murad kill me?”

“Murad is mad. You are not, despite this-this thing that has happened to you. We were friends, Bardolin. You saved my life. When we get back to Hebrion I will take you to your master, Golophin. He will cure you.” Even to himself Hawkwood’s words felt hollow. He had repeated them too many times.

“I do not think so. There is no cure for the black change.”

“We’ll see,” Hawkwood said stubbornly. He noticed the lumps of salt meat which bobbed in the filthy water of the bilge. “Can’t you eat?”

“I crave fresher meat. The beast wants blood. There is nothing I can do about it.”

“Are you thirsty?”

“God, yes.”

“All right.” Hawkwood unslung the wineskin he had about his neck, tugged out the stopper, and hung the lantern on a hook in the hull. He half crawled forward, trying not to retch at the stench which rose up about him. The heat the animal gave off was unearthly, unnatural. He had to force himself close to it and when the head tilted up he tipped the neck of the wineskin against its maw and let it drink, a black tongue licking every drop of moisture away.

“Thank you, Hawkwood,” the wolf said. “Now let me try something.”

There was a shimmer in the air, and something happened that Hawkwood’s eyes could not quite follow. The black fur of the beast withered away and in seconds it was Bardolin the Mage who crouched there, naked and bearded, his body covered in saltwater sores.

“Good to have you back,” Hawkwood said with a weak smile.

“It feels worse this way. I am weaker. In the name of God, Hawkwood, get some iron down here. One nick, and I am at peace.”

“No.” The chains that held Bardolin fast were of bronze, forged from the metal of one of the ship’s falconets. They were roughly cast, and their edges had scored his flesh into bloody meat at the wrists and ankles, but every time he shifted in and out of beast form, the wounds healed somewhat. It was an interminable form of torture, Hawkwood knew, but there was no other way to secure the wolf when it returned.

“I’m sorry, Bardolin… Has he been back?”

“Yes. He appears in the night-watches and sits where you are now. He says I am his-I will be his right hand one day. And Hawkwood, I find myself listening to him, believing him.”

“Fight it. Don’t forget who you are. Don’t let the bastard win.”

“How much longer? How far is there to go?”

“Not so far now. Another week or ten days perhaps. Less if the wind backs. This is only a passing squall-it’ll soon blow itself out.”

“I don’t know if I can survive. It eats into my mind like a maggot… stay back, it comes again. Oh sweet Lord God-”

Bardolin screamed, and his body bucked and thrashed against the chains which held him down. His face seemed to explode outwards. The scream turned into an animal roar of rage and pain. As Hawkwood watched, horrified, his body bent and grew and cracked sickeningly. His skin sprouted fur and two horn-like ears thrust up from his skull. The wolf had returned. It howled in anguish and wrenched at its confining chains. Hawkwood backed away, shaken.

“Kill me-kill me and give me peace!” the wolf shrieked, and then the words dissolved into a manic bellowing. Hawkwood retrieved the storm-lantern and retreated through the muck of the bilge, leaving Bardolin alone to fight the battle for his soul in the darkness of the ship’s belly.

What God would allow the practise of such abominations upon the world he had made? What manner of man would inflict them upon another?

Unwillingly, his mind was drawn back to that terrible place of sorcery and slaughter and emerald jungle. The Western Continent. They had sought to claim a new world there, and had ended up fleeing for their lives. He could remember every stifling, terror-ridden hour of it. In the wave-racked carcase of his once-proud ship, he had it thrust vivid and unforgettable into his mind’s eye once again.