Hawkwood's voyage

NINE

Bardolin stared impassively at the wreckage of his home. The tower’s massive walls had shrugged off the fury of the mob but the interior had been gutted. The walls were black with soot, the floor inches deep in it. Someone had smashed the jar of Ur-blood and it had gelled into a slithering, gelatinous, slug-like creature, incorporating the ashes and the fragments of scale and bone that were all that was left of his specimen collection. It was the Ur-creature that had finally frightened them off, he guessed. He stared at it as its pseudopodia blindly touched the air, trying to make sense out of this new world it had been so violently born into.

For a second Bardolin felt like reshaping it, adding the crocodile skull that lay mouldering in a corner, giving it the sabre-cat claws he had picked up on a trip to Macassar, and then launching the finished, unholy beast into the streets to wreak his revenge. But he settled for unbinding the Ur-blood from its gathered organic fragments and letting it sink, mere liquid again, into the scorched floor.

All gone-everything. His books, some of which dated back to before the Fimbrian Hegemony, his spell grimoires, his references, his collections of birdskins and insects, even his clothes.

The imp tiptoed across the ravaged chamber with wide, bewildered eyes. It clambered up Bardolin’s shoulder and nestled in the hollow of his neck, seeking reassurance. He could feel the fear and confusion in its mind. Thank God he had removed it from the rejuvenating jar before he had left and had taken it with him, hidden in the bosom of his robe. Otherwise it would be one more rotting mess amid the littered debris.

There were things here which disturbed him, unanswered questions amid the ruin of his home which hinted at larger answers; but he was too blasted and bewildered to tackle them now. How had they forced the mage bolt on the door? How had they known he was not at home, but was away watching poor Orquil burn?

Orquil. He shut his eyes. Despite the cool sea breeze that washed over the city like a blessing, he could still smell burnt flesh. Not in the air, but off his own clothes. He had stood at the foot of the boy’s pyre looking up into his apprentice’s pitifully young face, as pale as chalk, but smiling somehow; and he had smote him with a bullet of pure thaumaturgy as potent as his grief and rage could make. The boy had been dead before the first flames began to lick round his shins. The first life Bardolin had ever taken with magic, though he had taken many more with blade and arquebus ball.

There will be more taken by magic before I am done, he promised himself, the bitter anger rising in him. He wondered if Griella felt like this when the black change was upon her. That unfocused hatred, the mounting fury craving outlet in some act of extreme violence.

But that was not the mage way. Anger did no one any good. And besides, if Bardolin were truly honest with himself, he would have to admit that it was guilt that fuelled his rage as much as grief. The fact that he himself had not burned.

Griella entered the blasted room. She had a sack slung over one slim shoulder and her hands were black with ash.

“I tried to salvage some things, but there’s not much left.” She smiled as the imp chirruped at her, but then her face went flat again. “If you had let me stay, I would have stopped it,” she said.

Bardolin did not look at her.

“How? By slaughtering them like cattle? And then the city guard would have been swarming over this place like flies around summer dung.”

“I don’t think so. I think they would not have come here whatever happened. I think they were told to stay away.”

Bardolin did look at her now, startled by the depth of her reasoning.

“Something does not smell right, it is true,” he admitted. “Golophin has ensured our safety, by order of the King himself; but someone else is determined to hurt us ere we take ship for the West.”

“Well, we’ve less to pack at any rate,” Griella said brightly.

Her smile eventually drew an answering one from him. The heavy sun pouring through the splintered windows gave her hair the aspect of beaten bronze. Her very skin seemed golden.

“You are still sure you want to take ship with me, then?” Bardolin asked.

“Of course! I shall become your new apprentice, to replace the one they burned today. And I shall keep you safe. Not even when the change is upon me would I hurt you, I think.”

Bardolin said nothing. When she had come round from the spell of unconsciousness she had been both furious and fascinated. She had never dreamed there could be a power to knock out a full-blooded shifter in the midst of the change. She had been a little in awe of him afterwards. But she was young, and she was not apt for an apprenticeship in the Seven Disciplines; shifters never were. And there was an aspect of her he had glimpsed whilst wrestling the beast down into oblivion, a hunger that was not part of the werewolf she became, but that was buried in her human soul. He had seen it only briefly, flickering as if in the depths of a long abyss, but it gave him doubts as to the wisdom of letting her accompany him on the voyage.

But what alternative was there for her here in Abrusio? She had been abused before; it would happen again, and then she would become the beast once more, and she would be hunted down. They would cut off the beast’s head with a silver knife and stick it on a spear in the market place. In a few hours the head would change, and it would be her brown eyes staring down, that bronze helmet of shining hair atop the ragged stump of the neck. He had seen it before. He could not allow it to happen to her, and he would not yet allow himself to ask why.

He rose to his feet. He had only a leather satchel to carry; they had saved pitifully little. His magicks would be crude for a while, and reduced in power, for his memory was not up to the task of remembering all the subtleties and nuances of casting that were necessary to make a piece of thaumaturgy perfect. He hoped that some of his fellow passengers on the voyage would be able to help him regain his lost knowledge.

The imp crawled into the bosom of his robe, not minding the smell of the pyre. New clothes; he must have new clothes, and get rid of this reek.

“Let us leave this place,” he said. “We have things to do. I would like to see these ships that are to bear us, and perhaps buy a few things to make the voyage more tolerable.”

“Salt beef and wormy bread are what sailors eat,” Griella informed him. “And unwatered wine. They wash in seawater, when they wash at all, and they use each other in the way a man uses a woman.”

“Enough,” Bardolin said, uncomfortable with hearing such things from such a young mouth. “To the harbour, then. Let’s take a look at these terrible seafarers.”

There was one thing he could still do, though. As they left through the shattered doorway of his burned-out tower, Bardolin traced in the stone lintel a glyph of warding. It flamed briefly as his fingers brushed the stone, then died into invisibility. If anyone came after, picking around the bones of his home, the glyph would burst into an inferno and mayhap burn the bastards while they rummaged.

To a landsman, the Great Harbour of Abrusio was a vast and labyrinthine place. Now that the Hebrian trade had started up again, ships that had lain becalmed beyond the curve of the horizon were working in under all the canvas they could bear. The place was a stinking chaos of shouting men, squealing trucks and pulleys, creaking rope and thundering noise as a convoy of caravels out of Cartigella disgorged their cargoes of wine tuns on the quays and the enormous barrels were rolled up into waiting waggons which in turn would transport them to the public cellars.

On another wharf a beast transport had her square hull doors open wide, letting out a stench of animal excrement as the frightened cattle within were prodded and cursed down the ramps, scattering dung and straw as they went.

Bardolin and Griella paused to watch a Royal dispatch-runner, a lateen-rigged galleass, come sweeping into the harbour like some precisely rhythmed sea insect, the oars soaring up and out of the water at the same moment and the crew backing the mizzen to heave her to within yards of a free berth. These were the famous deep-water berths of Abrusio, hollowed out by the Fimbrians in past centuries using forced Hebrian labour. Abrusio could accommodate a thousand fully rigged ships at her wharves, it was said, and still have space for more.

Here were boxes of fish and sea squid shining in the hard sunlight, sacks of pepper from Punt or Ridawan, gleaming piles of marmorill tusks from the jungles of Macassar and, stumbling, chained lines of slaves bought from the Rovenan corsairs to work the estates of the Hebrian nobility.

Sailors, fishermen, marines, merchants, vintners and longshoremen. They worked without pause in the unrelenting heat with the sweat shining on their faces and limbs unable, it seemed, to communicate in anything less than a bellow. Bardolin and Griella found themselves holding hands in the crush to avoid being separated, for all the world like father and daughter. The heat glued their palms together with slick perspiration, and inside Bardolin’s robe the imp whimpered with the noise and the smells and the jostling press of it.

They stopped half a dozen times to ask for the Hawkwood vessels, but each time were regarded pityingly, like imbeciles abroad by mistake, and then the throng pushed them along again. Finally they found themselves inside the tall, stone-built harbour offices, and there were told by a harried clerk to go to the twenty-sixth outfitting berth and ask for the Grace of God or the Gabrian Osprey, Ricardo Hawkwood, Master. They would find them easily, they were told. A ship-rigged caravel of one hundred tons, and a low-fo’c’sled carrack twice that tonnage with a mouldy looking bird for a figurehead.

They left the place only slightly less bewildered than when they had entered. This was a different world, down here by the water’s edge. This was the world of the sea, with its own rules, laws, and even language. They felt like travellers in a foreign country as they pushed past ship after ship, wharf after wharf, and passed men of every land and faith and colour as they went. Since the easing of the edict in the wake of the Prelate of Abrusio’s departure for the Charibon Synod, foreign ships had been putting into Abrusio without let-up. It was as though they were trying to make up for the time they had lost-or would lose again once the Prelate returned and foreigners were once more hauled off their ships and into the catacombs by the hundred.

“There,” Bardolin said at last. “I think that’s them. See the bird figurehead? It’s a sea osprey from the Levangore. One knows from the speckles on its breast.”

They stood before a wide stone dock dotted with mooring bollards and littered with guano. Snug in the berth behind the dock were two ships, their bowsprits projecting out over Bardolin’s head and their masts tall, rope-tangled edifices towering up into the blue sky.

There were men everywhere it seemed, clinging to every piece of rigging and every rail. Some were out on the hulls on stages, painting the sea-battered wood with what looked like white lead. Others were knotting and splicing furiously in the shrouds. A gang of them were heaving on the windlass, and Bardolin saw that they were replacing a topmast. He knew little of ships, but he knew it was unusual, not to say revolutionary, to have masts in several pieces instead of one long, massive yard. This Hawkwood seemed to take his calling seriously.

Yet more men were on the dock, hauling on tackles attached to the mainyard, lifting net-wrapped bundles of casks and crates up over the ships’ sides and on to the decks. On the decks themselves the hatches were wide open and gaping to receive the dangling goods, and Bardolin was astonished to see sheep, goats and cages of chickens go up in the air along with the wine barrels and boxes of salt meat and ship’s biscuit. He noted with approval a huge sack of lemons being loaded also. It was thought by many that they combated the killer disease of scurvy, though many others believed the condition was caused by the unsanitary conditions aboard any ship.

“Who are we to talk to?” Griella asked wide-eyed. Her grip on the wizard’s hand had not relaxed one whit.

Bardolin pointed to a burly, ornately mustachioed figure on the larger of the two ships. He was standing at the back-the quarterdeck? — and shouting furiously at a group of men down in the waist of the ship. He had a long, eastern water-pipe in one hand and he shook it at the men as though it were a weapon. His hair was cut so short that the sunlight made his scalp gleam through the bristle.

“I would say he is in charge,” Bardolin decided.

“Is he this Hawkwood man?”

“I don’t know, child. We’ll have to ask.”

He and Griella made their tortuous way through the piled provisions and cordage and timber on the wharf to where a gangway with raised planks for steps had been thrown down from the waist of the larger ship. Some of the sailors stopped to stare at the hard-faced, soldierly looking man and the shining-haired girl on his arm. There was an appreciative whistle and ribald chatter in a language even Bardolin did not recognize; but the meaning and the gesture that accompanied it were obvious.

Griella spun round on the obscenely capering seamen. With the sunlight in her eyes it seemed they had a yellow glow, and the lips drew back from her white teeth in a snarl.

Bardolin tugged her on, leaving the sailors staring after the pair. One man hurriedly made the Sign of the Saint.

They laboured up the precarious gangplank, which seemed designed for the agility of apes rather than that of men. Once on deck, Bardolin raised a hand to the furious mustachioed man and shouted in his best sergeant of arquebusiers voice:

“Ho there, Captain! Might we have a word with you?”

The man yanked his water-pipe out of his mouth as though it had bitten him and glared at the pair.

“Who in the name of the Prophet’s Arse are you?”

“Someone who is to take ship with you in a short while. May we speak to you?”

The man’s eyes rolled in his head. “A warlock I shouldn’t wonder, and his doxy with him too. Sweet Saints, what a trip this is promising to be!”

He turned away from the quarterdeck rail, muttering to himself. Bardolin and Griella looked at one another, and then clambered up towards him, feeling two dozen baleful stares on their backs as they went. It was like intruding on the territory of some alien, primitive tribe.

The quarterdeck was littered with coiled ropes and light spars of timber. Everywhere lines of the running rigging came down to be hitched about fiferails. A brass bell glittered, painfully bright in the sun, and the huge tiller that steered the ship from the half-deck below had been unshipped and lay to one side. The man was leaning on the taffrail and puffing on his gurgling pipe. His eyes were slits of suspicion.

“Well, what do you want? We’re outfitting for a blue-water voyage and we’re short of men. I have things to do, and passing the time of day with landsmen is not one of them.”

“I am Bardolin of Carreirida and this is my ward, Griella Tabard. We have been told we are to be passengers on one of the vessels of Ricardo Hawkwood, and we wanted to see them and ask for advice on preparing for the coming voyage.”

The man looked as though he were about to give a sneering answer, but something in Bardolin’s eye stopped him.

“You’ve been a soldier,” he said instead. “I can see the helm scar. You don’t look like a wizard.” He paused, staring into the glass-sided bubble of his pipe for a second, then grudgingly said: “I am Billerand, first mate of the Osprey, so don’t call me captain, not yet at least. Richard is up in the city wrestling with the provisioners and moneylenders. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

The imp squirmed in Bardolin’s bosom, making Billerand gape.

“Might we talk below?” Bardolin asked. “There are many sets of ears up here.”

“All right.”

The mate led them down a companionway in the deck and they blinked in the gloom, startling after the harsh brightness of the day. It was close down here; the heat seemed to hang like a tangible thing in their throats. They could smell the wood of the ship, the pitch that caulked the seams, soft and bitter-smelling, and the faint stink of the bilge, like filth and water left to lie stagnant in a warm place. They could hear, too, the thumps and shouts of men off in the ship’s hold. It sounded like a fight going on in the adjacent room of a large house, muffled but somehow very near.

They went through a door, stepping over a high storm sill, and found themselves in the Master’s cabin. One side of it was taken up by the long stern windows. They could look out and see the harbour sunlit and framed by the curving lines of the interior bulkheads, like a backlit painting of sharp brilliance. There were two small culverins on either side of the cabin, lashed up tight against their closed gunports. Billerand sat down behind the table that ran athwartships, the scene of the harbour behind him.

“Is that a familiar you have there?” he asked, pointing to the wriggling movement in the breast of Bardolin’s robe.

“Aye, an imp.”

The mate’s face seemed to lighten somewhat. “They’re lucky things to have on a ship, imps. They keep the rats down. The men will be pleased with that at least. Let him out, if you please.”

Bardolin let the imp crawl out of the neck of his robe. The tiny creature blinked its eyes, its ears moving and quivering on either side of its head. Bardolin could feel its fear and fascination.

Billerand’s fierce face relaxed into a smile. “Here, little one. See what I have for you?” He produced a small quid of tobacco from a neck pouch and held it out. The imp looked at Bardolin, and then leapt on to the table and sniffed at the tobacco. It took it delicately in one minute, clawed hand and then began to gnaw on it like a squirrel working at a nut. Billerand scratched it gently behind the ear and his smile widened into a grin.

“As I said, the hands will be pleased.” He leaned back again. “What would you have me tell you then, Bardolin of Carreirida?”

“What do you know of this voyage we are to undertake?”

“Very little. Only that it is to the west. The Brenn Isles, maybe. And we are not taking cargo, only passengers and some Hebrian soldiery. We’ll be packed in these two ships tighter than a couple on their honeymoon night.”

“And the nature of the other passengers, besides the soldiers?”

“Dweomer-folk, like yourself. The hands do not know it yet, and I’d as soon leave it that way for the moment.”

“Do you know who is sponsoring the voyage?”

“There is talk of a nobleman, and even of a Royal warrant. Richard has yet to brief his officers.”

“What kind of a man is this Hawkwood?”

“A good seaman, even a great one. He has redesigned his ships according to his own lights, despite the grumbling of the older hands. They’ll make less leeway than any vessel in this port, I’ll promise you. And they’re drier than any other ships of their class. I’ve been in this carrack in a tearing gale off the Malacar Straits with a lee shore a scant league away and a south-easter roaring in off the starboard quarter, but she weathered it. Many another ship, under many another captain, would have been driven on to the shoals and broken.”

“Is he a Hebrian native?”

“No, and neither are most of his crews. Nay, our Richard is Gabrionese, one of the mariner race, though he has made his home in Abrusio these twenty years, ever since his marriage to one of the Calochins.”

“Is he a. . pious man?”

Billerand roared with laughter, and a spit of fluid sparked out of the brim of his pipe. The imp jumped, afraid, but he soothed it with the caress of one callused hand.

“Easy, little fellow, it’s all right. No, wizard, he is not particularly pious. Do you think he’d take your sort as supercargo if he was? Why, I’ve seen him make a sacrifice to Ran the god of storms to placate the tribesmen among the crew. If the Inceptines had heard of that he’d have been burnt flesh a long time ago. You need not fear; he loves the Ravens even less than the next man. They had Julius Albak, the first mate before me and a damned good shipmate, shot in front of our eyes and then they hauled half the crew of the Grace off to the catacombs to await the pyre-but our Richard got them back, God knows how.”

“Which lands do your seamen come from?” Bardolin asked with interest, perching on a seachest that rested against the forward bulkhead.

Billerand sucked a moment on his gurgling pipe.

“What are these questions in aid of, wizard? You wouldn’t be a spy of the Inceptines yourself, would you?”

“Far from it.” Bardolin’s face changed, going as white as marble, but his eyes flashed. “A friend of mine they burned today, sailor, a boy who was like a son to me. They have wrecked my home and the researches of thirty years. I am about to be exiled because of them. I have no love for the Ravens.”

Billerand nodded. “I believe you. And I’ll tell you that our crews are from every kingdom and sultanate in Normannia. We’ve men from Nalbeni and Ridawan, Kashdan and Ibnir. Men of Gabrion who sailed under Richard’s father; Northmen from far Hardalen, and even one from the jungles of Punt, though he don’t speak much on account of the Merduks cutting out his tongue. We have tribesmen from the Cimbrics captured by the Torunnans and sold as slaves. They were oarsmen in a Macassian galley which we took last year. Richard is their headman now. They have blue faces, with the tattooing.

“Myself, I’m from Narbosk, the Fimbrian electorate that broke off from the empire and went its own way back in my great-grandfather’s time. I’ve served my stint in the Fimbrian tercios, but it’s a boring life fighting the same battles on the Gaderian river every year. I tired of it, and took to the sea. Which army did you serve with?”

“The Hebrian. I was a sword-and-buckler man, and later an arquebusier. We fought the Fimbrians at Himerio, and they trounced us up and down. They pulled out of Imerdon, though, and thus it now belongs to the Hebrian crown.”

“Ah, the Fimbrians,” Billerand said, his eyes shining. Abruptly he reached under the table and produced a wide-bottomed bottle of dark glass. “Have a taste of Nabuksina with me, in memory of battling Fimbrians,” he said, his smile baring teeth as square and yellow as those of a horse.

They shared the fiery Fimbrian root spirit, slugging in turn from the bottle. The imp watched, grinning from ear to long, pointed ear, the tobacco a bulge in one cheek. Griella stirred restlessly. She was bored with this talk of battles and armies. When Bardolin noticed he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, as he had not done in years, and held up a hand when the bottle was proffered to him again.

“Some other time, perhaps, my friend. I have other questions for you.”

“Question away,” Billerand said expansively, curling one end of his luxurious moustache on a finger.

“Why are the soldiers taking ship with us? Is that usual?”

Billerand belched. “If a king’s warrant is involved, why then yes.”

“How many are coming?”

“We’ve been told to provision for fifty-a demi-tercio.”

“That’s a lot of fighting men for two vessels such as these.”

“Indeed. Perhaps they’re to keep the Dweomer-folk from magicking us when we’ve put to sea. We’ve to provide berths for half a dozen nags, too, both mares and stallions, so the nobles don’t wear out their boots when we make landfall.”

“And you’re sure you don’t know where that landfall will be?”

“Upon mine honour as a soldier, no. Richard is keeping that nugget to himself. He does that sometimes if we’re putting to sea in search of a prize, so that word will not get out over the harbour. Sailors can be like a bunch of gossiping old women when they choose, and they dearly love a prize.”

“This ship is a privateer also, then?”

“It is anything it has to be to make a little money; but we don’t like that too widely known in Hebrion. Our good captain has contacts with the sea-rovers, the corsairs of Rovenan, or Macassar as they call it now. Our culverins and falconets are not for decoration alone.”

“I’m sure,” Bardolin said, standing up. “Can you tell me when you expect to sail?”

Billerand shook his head mournfully. The drink was beginning to trickle into place behind his eyes, making them as glassy as wet marbles. “We weigh anchor some time in the next fortnight, that’s all I know. I doubt if even Richard himself knows the exact date yet. A lot depends on these nobles.”

“Then we’ll see you again, Billerand. Let us hope the voyage will be a prosperous one.”

Billerand winked one eye slowly, showing them his square-toothed grin again.

Back out on the dock Bardolin strolled along lost in thought, the imp fast asleep in his bosom. Griella had to jog beside him to keep up.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Well what?”

“What have you learned?”

“You were there-you heard what was said.”

“But you’ve guessed something. You’re not telling me everything.”

Bardolin stopped and gazed down at her. Her lower lip was caught up between her teeth. She looked absurdly fetching, and incredibly young.

“It is the presence of so many soldiers, and the nobles who command them. And the horses.”

“What about them?”

“We cannot be sailing to any port in any of the civilized kingdoms or principalities; their authorities would not readily permit so many foreign soldiery to put ashore. And the horses. Billerand said they were mares and stallions. Warhorses are geldings. Those horses are for breeding. And did you see the sheep being taken on board? I’ll wager they are for the same purpose.”

“What does it all mean?”

“That we are going somewhere where there are no sheep and no horses; where there is no recognized authority. We truly are sailing into the unknown.”

“But where?” Griella insisted, growing petulant.

Bardolin stared out across the maze of docks and ships and labouring men, out to where the flawless sky came down and merged with the brim of the horizon.

“West, we were told; maybe the Brenn Isles. But I reckon our worthy first mate was not telling us everything he knows. I think our course is set beyond them. I believe we are to sail further than any ship ever has before.”

“And what are we supposed to find?” Griella asked him irritably.

Bardolin smiled and put an arm about her slim shoulders.

“Who knows? A new beginning, perhaps.”