Hawkwood's voyage

TWENTY-FIVE

The north-easter stayed with them, as steady and as welcome as the Hebrian trade. Hawkwood could feel the constant thrumming of its power on the ship as though it were acting on the marrow of his very bones. The Osprey was alive, afloat, running before the wind. His mind relaxed and wandered off to that other place once more.

H E was a boy again, at sea for the first time on the clumsy caravel which had been the first Hawkwood-owned ship. His father was there, shouting obscenities at the straining seamen, and the white spray was coming aboard in packets as the vessel ran before the wind on the peridot-green swells of the Levangore. If he looked aft he could see the pale, dust-coloured coast of Gabrion with the darker rises of forests among the inland hills; and to larboard were the first islands of the Malacar Archipelago, floating like insubstantial ghosts in the haze of heat that had settled on the horizon.

Up and down, up and down the bow of the caravel went, the green waves like shimmering walls looming up and retreating again, the gulls screeching and calling and dropping guano over the deck, the rigging straining and creaking in time to the working timbers of the ship, and the blessed wind they had harnessed bellying out the booming and flapping sails.

This, he had thought, is the sea. And he had never questioned his right to be on it; rather he had welcomed his craft as a man would his wife.

Hawkwood could not move. He was drenched in sweat and as immobile as a marble caryatid. There was an unfamiliar smell in his nostrils. Burning.

A vast shudder as the ships came together, their hulls crunching and colliding.

“Fire!” Hawkwood yelled, and along the deck the men whipped the smoking slow-match across the touch-holes of the guns. Like a rippling thunder they exploded in sequence, leaping back on their carriages like startled bulls. There was an enormous noise, unlike any other. Louder than a storm-surf striking a rocky shore or a tempest in the heights of the Hebros. The whole starboard side of the ship disappeared in smoke and fire. Only men’s screams and the shrieking of the blasted timbers carried above the roar.

The corsairs fired their own broadside, the muzzles of their culverins touching the very side of the carrack. They elevated the muzzles so the shot plunged upwards through the deck. The air exploded, became full of jagged shards of wood which ripped men apart, flung them clear across the deck or tossed them overboard like gutted fish. Hawkwood clambered on to the starboard quarterdeck rail and raised the heavy cutlass above his head. “Now, lads, at them. Boarding parties away!”

And then he leapt on to the crowded slaughterhouse of the enemy ship.

“Richard!’ she cried as he pushed into her, expending himself, driving her backbone into the stuffed softness of the bed. The sweat dripped off his face to land on her collar-bone and trickled between her breasts. Jemilla grinned fiercely up at him, her body answering his, struggling against him. The sweat was a slick glue between them so their skins sucked and slid as they moved together and apart, like a ship breasting a heavy swell, the keel burying itself in each wave.

But the heat. His body was on fire, lying in a pool of liquid metal, every movement a torment, every pore oozing his life’s fluid. The heat squeezed the water out of him until he was as dry and withered as the salted fish they had barrelled in the hold. If he moved he would crackle and creak and break apart into fragments as fine and desiccated as ash.

“Richard.”

He opened his eyes.

Bardolin smiled. “So you have returned from your voyaging at last.”

The ship moved about him, a lulling presence. He sensed that the wind was fine and steady on the quarter, a fresh breeze pushing them ever westwards. In the almost-quiet he heard the ship’s bell struck three times, and the noise was incredibly comforting, like hearing the sound of a familiar voice.

He turned his face to one side and immediately the pain began, a molten glow that was centred deep in his right shoulder. He groaned involuntarily.

“Easy.” The mage’s strong fingers steadied his head, grasping his chin.

“The fire,” he croaked.

“We got it under control. The ship is safe, Captain, and we are making good progress.”

“Help me sit up.”

“No. You-”

“Help me up!”

The pain came and went in sobbing waves, but he blinked and ground his teeth until it was a bearable presence, something he could live with.

Their surroundings were unfamiliar to him. A small cabin, with a culverin squatting against one wall.

“Where is this?”

“The gundeck. The carpenter rigged up some partitions for you. You needed the peace.”

So. He recognized it now, but it was strangely silent, as though the deck were almost deserted. He could hear many feet thumping above his head, and voices murmuring.

“The fire. The stern cabin-”

“More or less patched up. Chips has been working like a man possessed. We have no new glass for the stern windows though, so they must be shuttered most of the time.”

“The log. Bardolin, did the log survive?”

The mage looked grim. “No. It went in the fire, as did most of your charts and the old rutter.”

“Griella?”

“She is at peace. I was wrong ever to bring her on this voyage, and yet she saved our lives, I think. Murad’s, anyway. It is hard to know. A hard thing to have done.”

“She loved him.” It could have been question or statement.

“In her own way, yes. But no good would have come of it. They would have destroyed each other in the end and it is better, perhaps, that it has come about this way.” The mage’s arm, unexpectedly strong, steadied Hawkwood as he swayed. “Be careful, Captain. We don’t want anything springing its seams again.”

“Ortelius,” Hawkwood was saying, ignoring him. “I can’t believe it.”

“Yes, who would have? An Inceptine cleric also a werewolf! That raises many questions, Captain, both for us on board ship and for the great and the good back home. I have this feeling that we have overlooked something, in our pride and our wisdom. There is something deep down in our society which we had not thought to find. Something abominable.”

“Mateo, ere he changed, said his master was high in a society. I don’t think he meant the one we know.”

“We may find some answers in the west, I suppose. I do not see this as a voyage of discovery any longer, Captain, or an attempt at colonization. It is more of an armed reconnaissance. Murad concurs.”

“The west. You think-?”

“That it is inhabited? Yes, but by what manner of men or beasts or both I know not.”

Hawkwood swung his legs off the hanging cot. He could manage the pain now. It came and went like a tide. His right arm was strapped tightly to the side of his chest, unbalancing him.

“How bad is this?”

“The thing bit your collar-bone clean through, and mangled the ends of the bone. I have been cleaning the wound, removing the splinters. A couple of the oldwives have sat with me and kept wound-sickness at bay. It smells sweet enough and I think we have brought it off, but you will have a terrible scar and a lump, and your right arm will never be as strong again.”

But I’m alive, Hawkwood thought. That is something. And my ship is afloat; that is something more.

He was wearing only a clout of linen about his loins and his legs seemed oddly pale to him, the feet a long distance away. He stared at them absently, and then a jet of fear thrilled him.

“Bardolin, the beast bit me. Does that mean I have its disease? Will I change?”

“The black disease is not contagious in the way people think. It is not carried in a bite.”

“But Ortelius made a werewolf of Mateo.”

“Yes. That intrigues me, I must admit. Fear not, Captain, whatever arcane and bloody initiation turned the ship’s boy into a shifter was not practised on you. Men do not catch lycanthropy from a bite, no matter what the superstitions say. Gregory confirms it, and my old master, Golophin, believed it also. There is something more at work which we cannot yet understand.”

Relieved somewhat, Hawkwood relaxed. “Why did he do it? Why did he do that to poor Mateo?”

“My guess is he needed help. He had seen how determined we were to continue west and was set on wiping out the three of us-you, Murad and I. To do that swiftly and in one swoop, he would need a fellow conspirator. He may also have been. . lonely. Who knows? I cannot lay claim to any great insights into the souls of shifters, for all that I knew Griella better than most. There is a mystery in them that has to do with the relationship between the man-or the woman-and the beast.” He halted and smiled wryly. “My apologies. I had not intended to confront you with a treatise.”

“You knew-you knew what she was before ever she came aboard.”

“I knew, may God forgive me. I was a little in love with her also, you see. I thought I could control her. I even had wild ideas of curing her. But that is done with. I will have it on my conscience.”

“It’s all right. It’s over with anyway-for the best, maybe. Tell me, how long has it been since the fire and the rest? How long have I been on my back?”

“Eight days.”

“Eight days! Sweet Saints in heaven! Help me to my feet, Bardolin. I must talk to Velasca. I must check our course.”

Bardolin pushed him gently but inexorably back on to the cot.

“Velasca, it seems, knows how to sail due west, and the wind has been as steady as you please. I will send him down to you if you desire, but you are not going anywhere. Not for a while yet.”

Hawkwood sank on to the blankets once more. His head was spinning.

“Very well. Send him down at once, and get someone to help me dress, will you? And send Chips, too. I want to talk to him about the repairs.”

“All right, Captain. I’ll get them down as soon as I may.”

Bardolin left him, frowning.

Eight days. They might be within a sennight of reaching land, if Velasca had kept to his course. They were going to do it. Hawkwood could feel it in his mangled bones. He could feel the land, bulking somewhere on some unconscious horizon illuminated only by a mariner’s intuition. It was there, and they were closing on it with every hour the carrack ploughed on before the kindly wind.

M URAD stood at the break of the quarterdeck with his officers on either side, his stance adjusting itself automatically to the roll of the ship. His long lank hair was flying free and he was dressed in his black riding leathers. His rapier hung scabbarded by his side. Though his face was white as chalk, the scar that furrowed one hollow cheek seemed to have been kindled by the wind into a blazing carmine and his eyes were as dark as sloes.

The waist was packed with people, the gangways lined with watching soldiers. Nearly all the ship’s company were present for punishment.

“Carry on, Sequero,” Murad said tonelessly.

Sequero stepped forward to the rail. “Sergeant Mensurado, bring the man forward.”

There was a boil of activity in the waist. Mensurado and two other soldiers thrust through the throng with a fourth man whose hands were tied behind his back.

“Read the charges, Ensign.”

Sequero called out in a clear voice so the assembled company could hear:

“Gabriello Habrar, you are charged that on the eleventh day of Endorion in the year of the Saint five hundred and fifty-one, you did in the forecastle of the carrack Gabrian Osprey utter remarks detrimental to the morale and determination of a crown-sponsored expedition and thus did revile and denigrate the authority of our commander and his lord, our sovereign King, Abeleyn of Hebrion and Imerdon.”

Sequero paused and glanced at Murad. The lean nobleman nodded curtly.

“You are therefore sentenced to the strappado. Sergeant Mensurado, carry on. Drummer.”

A harsh, dry drumming began as one of the soldiers started to ply the goatskin of his instrument. A sailor perched on the main yardarm let down a rope which Mensurado and his comrades fastened to the wrists of the accused man. The other end of the rope was thrown to the soldiers on the gangway.

Murad lifted a hand.

The bound man was hauled into the air by the wrists, his hands at a horrible angle up his back and his shoulder-blades protruding grotesquely. He screamed in agony, but the rasping drumroll smothered the sound. Then he dangled, kicking and twisting. After a few minutes the screaming stopped and he swayed on the end of the rope like a sack of meat, his eyes bulging, blood trickling from his bitten tongue.

“Cut him down,” Murad ordered, and turned away from the sight to a contemplation of the carrack’s wake. Sequero and di Souza went to him.

“I will have discipline,” Murad said coldly. “You, gentlemen, have not been doing your job. The men are muttering and mutinous. I will have that out of them if I have to flog and strappado every last one of the dastards. Is that clear?”

Di Souza mumbled an agreement. Sequero did not speak, but his eyes were blazing.

“Have you something you wish to say, Ensign?” Murad demanded, turning on his aristocratic subordinate.

“Only that if you strappado every man in the tercio we’ll have damned few fit to shoulder an arquebus when finally we hit land,” Sequero said, not one whit intimidated by the snake-blank eyes of his superior officer.

Murad stared at him for a long moment, and the ensign blenched but stood his ground. Finally a smile twisted the older man’s face.

“I would sooner have a maimed man who is loyal than a fit one who is not,” he said quietly. “It would seem, Sequero, that you are developing some regard for your fellow men, scum from the bottom of the heap though they might be. Perhaps this voyage is teaching you the compassion of a commoner or a Mendicant Friar. If at any stage your burgeoning sympathy for the common soldiery interferes with your duty and your loyalty to your superior and your king, you will, I am sure, be the first to let me know.”

Sequero said nothing, but he looked at his senior officer with open hatred. Murad smiled again, that dead, cold smile which was worse than an angry glare.

“You may go, both of you. See to Habrar, di Souza. Get one of these witches on board to have a look at him. Sequero, we will have small-arms practice this evening after the meal.”

They both saluted, then turned on their heels and left the quarterdeck. The crowd in the waist was already dispersing, many black looks being thrown at the nobleman who lounged at the carrack’s taffrail.

Murad did not care. He knew that his vision of a colony in the west governed by himself was a pipe-dream, morning mist to be burned away by the sun. Talking to Bardolin, he had found himself agreeing with the mage that there must be something in the west, something Ortelius had been charged to keep them from discovering. But by whom had he been charged? Either the shape-shifting cleric had been sent on his mission by a Ramusian monarch, which was unlikely-none of the western kings would willingly use both an Inceptine and a werewolf as an agent-or he was working for someone already in the west. Murad’s undiscovered continent had already been claimed.

But by whom?

Werewolves. Shifters. Mages. He was sick to death of the lot of them. They made him shudder. And the memory of his dreams-what he had thought were dreams-still caused him to lie open-eyed and sweating in the night. He had shared a bed with the beast, had felt its heat and the baleful regard of its eyes.

He remembered Griella’s body taut as cord under him, the tawny smoothness of her skin. And he turned his face to the carrack’s wake once more so that none of the scum below might see the burning brightness that flooded his expressionless black eyes.

T HE carrack was regularly running off sixty leagues a day, the north-easter propelling her along at a smooth seven knots. Four hundred and eighty leagues, perhaps, since Hawkwood had been confined to his bunk. They had travelled the distance from the southern Calmaric deserts to the far frozen north of Yazdegard; the extent of the known world. And still it seemed there was no sign of an end to the ocean.

The fire on board had caught the mizzen course and burned away the mizzen backstays and a fair portion of the shrouds. If a squall had hit them then they would have lost the mast, but the sea had been kind to them. The flames had been doused with Dweomer-pumped seawater, some of the sorcerers on board lifting hundred-gallon packets of the stuff out of the waves and dumping it over the mizzen, the quarterdeck and the stern. Whilst Hawkwood had been unconscious the repairs had gone on apace, and the carrack was whole again with only a few black charred scars to mark how close to disaster she had come. But as the carpenter informed Hawkwood that afternoon, they had used up the last of their timber stores to put right the damage and could now do no more. If the ship was damaged again they would have nothing to repair her with. They had no spare cordage or cable, either. It would be knotting and splicing until they made landfall.

Velasca made his report also. He had kept a tolerably legible log in the days he had conned the ship alone, but he was obviously relieved to have his captain conscious and clear-headed. He knew little of the nuances of navigation, being just about able to take a cross-staff reading and keep the ship on a compass bearing. As soon as he was able, Hawkwood was up on deck, taking sightings from the Pole Star and checking his deadreckoning over and over. He had a man in the forechains day and night with the deep-sea lead, sounding for the bottom, and he shortened sail at night despite the protests of Murad, who wanted them to tear along under every scrap of canvas the carrack possessed. He could not convince the nobleman of his own conviction that they were nearing land at last. It was a mariner’s guess, something in the smell of the air, perhaps, or the appearance of the ocean, but Hawkwood was sure that the Western Continent was not far away.

O N the twentieth day of Endorion, nine days after Hawkwood had woken to find Bardolin leaning over him, the leadsman in the forechains raised his voice into a strangled shout that made every man and woman on board look up. For days he had been chanting monotonously: “No bottom. No bottom here with this line.” But now he yelled excitedly:

“Eighty fathoms! Eighty fathoms with this line!”

Hawkwood and Murad were on the quarterdeck, Hawkwood bending over the table they had brought up from below, writing laboriously and painfully with his left hand into his new log.

“Seventy-five! Seventy-five fathoms!” the leadsman called. And the ship was swept with a buzz of excited talk. The companionways thundered as passengers and soldiers clambered out on deck to see what was going on.

“Seventy fathoms! White sand and seashells in the lead!”

“Keep sounding!” Hawkwood bellowed forward. “All hands! All hands to shorten sail!”

Eight bells in the last dog-watch had just been struck and the watch had changed, but the whole ship’s crew came scampering out into the waist and forecastle.

“Velasca!” Hawkwood roared over the soft thudding of feet and the rising babble. Topsails alone! Keep her braced round there!”

“Is it land?” Murad was asking, his eyes glittering. “Is that it? I can see nothing.”

Hawkwood ignored him and peered up at the foretop where the lookout was stationed.

“In the foretop there! What do you see?”

There was a pause.

“Nothing but haze out to six or seven leagues, sir.”

“Keep a good eye out, then.”

“What is happening?” Murad demanded, his face puce with anger.

“We are on a shelving shore, Lord Murad,” Hawkwood said calmly. “The sea is shallowing.”

“Does that mean we are approaching landfall?”

“Possibly, yes.”

“How far away is it?” Murad scanned the horizon as though he fully expected the Western Continent to pop up over it at that very second.

“I have no way of knowing, but we’re shortening sail so we don’t run full-tilt on to any reefs.”

“Saints in heaven!” Murad said hoarsely. “It’s really out there, isn’t it?”

Hawkwood allowed himself to grin.

“Yes, Murad, it really is.”

O N into the evening the carrack ran smoothly with the wind on her quarter and most of the ship’s company on deck, their faces turned towards the west. When the first stars came out in the towering blue-black vault of the night sky the passengers retired below to eat, but Hawkwood kept both watches on deck, chewing salt pork and ship’s biscuit. And the leadsman continued his chant from the forechains:

“Sixty fathoms. Sixty fathoms with this line.”

There was a different quality to the air. The sailors could feel it. There was something more humid and cloying about it that was entirely at odds with the usual keen nature of the open sea, and Hawkwood thought he could smell something now; that growing smell like a breath of a summer garden. It was not far away.

“White foam! White foam dead ahead two cables!” the lookout screamed.

Hawkwood bent to call down the tiller-hatch. “Tiller there! Larboard by two points. West-sou’-west.”

“Aye, sir.”

The carrack moved smoothly round, the wind coming right aft now. The crew rushed to the braces to trim the yards. Hawkwood saw the white flicker and rush of foam breaking on black rocks off on the starboard side.

“Leadsman! What’s our depth?”

There was a splash, a long waiting minute, then the leadsman declared, “Forty fathoms, sir, and white sand!”

“Take in topsails!” Hawkwood shouted.

The crew raced up the shrouds, bent over the topsail yards and began folding in the pale expanses of canvas. The ship lost speed.

“Why are we slowing down, Captain?” It was Murad, coming up the quarterdeck ladder almost at a run.

“Breakers ahead!” the lookout shrieked. “Starboard and larboard. Three cables from the bow!”

“God almighty!” Hawkwood exclaimed, startled. “Let go anchor!”

A seaman knocked loose the heavy sea anchor from the bows with the blow of a mallet. There was an enormous splash that lit up the black sea and the ship lost way, coming gradually to a full stop. She began to yaw as the wind pushed her stern around.

“Get a bower anchor out from the stern, Velasca,” Hawkwood told his first mate. “And pray it holds in this ground.”

He could see them himself: a broken line of white water barely visible off in the night and there was a new sound, the distant roar of surf. Hawkwood found he was trembling, his shoulder a scarlet flame of pain and the sweat sour and slick about him. But for the vigilance of the lookout, the ship would still be sailing towards the distant rocks.

“Is that it?” Murad asked in a breath, gazing out at the white foam which sliced open the darkness.

“Maybe. It might be a reef. We can’t take any chances. I’ve dropped anchor. I don’t like the ground, but there’s no way I’m going any further in at night. We’ll have to wait for daylight.”

They both listened, watched. Hard to imagine what might be out there in the night; what manner of country lay beyond the humid darkness and the line of treacherous breakers.

“Stern anchor out and holding, sir,” Velasca reported.

“Very good. Send down the larboard watch, and have the starboards haul the boats out over the side. They need a wetting, or they’ll leak like sieves in the morning.”

“Aye, sir.”

Hawkwood stared out into the darkness, feeling the ship roll and pitch beneath his feet like a tethered animal bucking the halter. The heat of the night seemed more intense now, and he thought he saw the tiny bodies of insects flickering about the stern lantern. Not an isolated reef, then, but something more substantial. It was hard to believe after all this time that their destination was most likely out there in the darkness, under their lee.

He wondered what Haukal would have made of it, and for a moment pondered the disappearance of his other ship, the graceful little caravel and the good seamen who had manned her. Were they sailing still, on some distant latitude? Or were the fishes gnawing at their bones? He might never know.

Murad had gone. Hawkwood could hear the nobleman shouting orders down in the waist, calling for his officers and sergeants. He must have everything polished and shining; they would be claiming a new world for their king in the morning.

T HAT last night, Hawkwood, Murad and Bardolin shared a bottle of Candelarian wine in the stern cabin, the shutters open to let in some air. A moth flew in the glassless windows and flapped about the table lantern like a thing entranced, and they, equally entranced, watched it avidly until it ventured too close to the flame and fell to the table, blackened. They let it lie there like some sort of mocking talisman, a promise of things to come, perhaps. And they toasted the voyage and whatever the morning might bring in the good wine, saving the last drops for a libation to be poured into the sea in a ritual far older than any vision of Ramusio’s. They drank to those whose souls had been lost in their passage of the ocean and to whatever future might appear to them out of the sunrise.

In the morning the sun came up out of a belt of molten cloud, like the product of some vast furnace housed below the eastern horizon. Every member of the ship’s company was on deck dressed in their best; Hawkwood was even wearing a sword. They could hear clearly the thunder of breaking surf, feel the damp, heavy air of the land. There were birds perched in the rigging, little dun sparrow-like creatures that twittered and sang with the rising of the sun. It was a sound that had the crew staring and smiling with wonder. Birdsong-something from a former life.

There was a mist, honeyed by the sunrise. The lookout in the foretop was the first man to be clear of it, and he yelled out to the depth of his lungs:

“Land ho! Abaft the starboard beam there-hills and trees. Great God!”

There was a spasm of cheering which Murad and his officers silenced. The mist thinned moment by moment.

And there it was. A green country of thick vegetation solidifying out of the veils of morning. Mountains rearing up into a clear sky, and the gathering sunrise gilding it.

“Man the boats,” Hawkwood said hoarsely.

The crews of the two ship’s boats that had survived scrambled down the ship’s side, the soldiers clumsy with armour and weapons, the seamen agile as apes.

“Cast off!” Hawkwood shouted as soon as they were seated on the thwarts. There was no need to say anything else; all the crew had been well briefed, and Velasca knew his duty.

The lines were flung clear of the gunwales and the oars were lowered. The men began to row steadily, the exertion squeezing sweat out of their pores despite the youth of the morning. The ship grew smaller behind them.

There was a long gap in the breakers which would have accommodated the Osprey the night before, had there been the light to see it. The two boats powered through, lifted and tossed by the breaking waves. Within the reefs the water was calmer and they could see a ribbon of white sand fringing the unbroken curtain of jungle ahead.

“Captain!” one of the men cried. “Captain, look aft, on the landward side of the reef!”

Hawkwood and Murad turned as one to squint into the morning sun.

“I can’t-” Murad began, and then was silent.

There on the westward side of the reef was the fragment of a ship. It was a beakhead part of a keel and a few other skeletal timbers. It looked as though the ship had run full tilt upon the reef, the fore part of the hull riding over it, the rest smashed away and sunk.

It was the Grace of God.

Men made the Sign of the Saint at their breasts, murmuring. Hawkwood’s eyes were stinging as though in sympathy with his aching shoulder. To have come so far only to fail. So many good men.

“God have mercy on them,” he murmured.

“Could any have survived?” Murad asked.

He shook his head slowly, studying the fragmented wreck and the booming surf, the jagged reef. It was sheer fluke that a portion of the ship had remained caught on the reef; it had been wedged there by the explosive force of the breakers. Only a miracle could have preserved those aboard.

“We are alone then,” Murad said.

“We are alone,” Hawkwood agreed.

The water shallowed. They could feel the heat of the land like a wall. The men raised their oars and a few seconds later the bottom of the boats kissed the sand.

Richard Hawkwood splashed out of the first boat, closely followed by Murad. Through the noise of the breakers out on the reef a glimmer of strange birdsong could be heard from the wall of jungle ahead.

They walked up out of the shallows and stood in hot white sand with the early sun heating their backs. The crews hauled the boats out of the water and stood panting. Soldiers held their arquebuses at the ready.

Murad turned to look at Hawkwood, and without a word they both began walking up the blazing beach, to where the jungle of the Western Continent gleamed dark and impenetrable before them.