Hawkwood's voyage

ONE

Year of the Saint 551

The City of God was burning. .

Long plumes of fire sailed up from the streets like wind-coiled banners, detaching to consume themselves and become lost in the grim thunderheads of impenetrable smoke that lowered above the flames. For miles along the Ostian river the city burned and the buildings crumbled, their collapse lost in the all-encompassing roar of the fire. Even the continuing noise of battle by the western gates, where the rearguard was still fighting, was swallowed up by the bellowing inferno.

The cathedral of Carcasson, greatest in the world, stood stark and black against the flames, a solitary sentinel horned with steeples, nippled with domes. The massive granite shrugged off the heat but the lead on the roof was melting in rivulets and the timber beams were blazing all along their length. The bodies of priests littered the steps; the Blessed Ramusio gazed down sorrowfully with a horde of the lesser saints in attendance, their eyes cracking open, the bronze staffs they held buckling in the inferno. Here and there a gargoyle, outlined in scarlet, grinned malevolently down.

The palace of the High Pontiff was full of looting troops. The Merduks had ripped down tapestries, hacked apart relics for the precious stones that adorned them, and now they were drinking wine out of the Holy Vessels whilst they waited their turn with captured women. Truly, Ahrimuz had been good to them today.

Further westwards within the city, the streets were clogged with fleeing people and the troops who had been stationed here to guard them. Hundreds were trampled underfoot in the panic, children abandoned, the old and slow kicked aside. More than once a collapsing house would bury a score of them in a fury of blazing masonry, but the rest would spare hardly a glance. Westwards they forged, west towards the gates still held by Ramusian troops, the last remnant of John Mogen’s Torunnans, once the most feared soldiers in all the west. These were a desperate rabble now, their valour bled away by the siege and the six assaults which had preceded the last. And John Mogen was dead. Even now, the Merduks were crucifying his body above the eastern gate where he had fallen, cursing them to the last.

The Merduks poured through the city like a tide of cock-roaches, glinting and barbed in the light of the fires, their faces shining, sword arms bloody to the elbows. It had been a long siege and a good fight, and at last the greatest city of the west was theirs for the taking. Shahr Baraz had promised to let them loose once the city had fallen and they were intent on plunder. It was not they who were burning the city, but the retreating western troops. Sibastion Lejer, lieutenant of Mogen, had sworn to let not one building fall intact into the hands of the heathens and he and a remnant of men still under orders were methodically burning the palaces and arsenals, the storehouses and pleasure theatres and churches of Aekir, and slaughtering anyone, Merduk or Ramusian, who tried to stop them.

Corfe watched the tall curtains of flame shift against the darkened sky. The smoke of the burning had brought about a premature twilight, the end of a long day for the defenders of Aekir; for many thousands, the last day.

He was on a flat rooftop, apart from the maelstrom of screaming people below. The sound of them carried up in a solid wave. Fear, anger, desperation. It was as though Aekir itself were screaming, the tormented city in the midst of its death throes, the fire incinerating its vitals. The smoke stung Corfe’s eyes and he wiped them clear. He could feel ashes settling on his brow like a black snow.

A tatterdemalion figure, no longer the dapper ensign, he was scorched, ragged and bloodied. He had cast aside his half-armour in the flight from the walls, and wore only his doublet and the heavy sabre that was the mark of Mogen’s men. He was short, lithe, deep-eyed. In his gaze alternated murder and despair.

His wife was somewhere down there, enjoying the attentions of the Merduks or trampled underfoot in some cobbled alley, or a burnt corpse in the wreck of a house.

He wiped his eyes again. Damn smoke.

“Aekir cannot fall,” Mogen had told them. “It is impregnable, and the men on its walls are the best soldiers in the world. But that is not all. It is the Holy City of God, first home of the Blessed Ramusio. It cannot fall.” And they had cheered.

A quarter of a million Merduks had proved otherwise.

The soldier in him wondered briefly how many of the garrison had or would escape. Mogen’s bodyguards had fought to the death after he had gone down, and that had started the flight. Thirty-five thousand men had garrisoned Aekir. If a tenth of them made it through to the Ormann line they would be lucky.

“I can’t leave you, Corfe. You are my life. My place is here.” So she had said with that heartbreakingly lopsided smile of hers, the hair as dark as a raven’s feather across her face. And he, fool, fool, fool, had listened to her, and to John Mogen.

Impossible to find her. Their home, such as it was, had been in the shadow of the eastern bastion, the first place to fall. He had tried to get through three times before giving up. No man lived there now who did not worship Ahrimuz, and the women who survived were already being rounded up. Handmaidens of Ahrimuz they would become, inmates of the Merduk field brothels.

Damned stupid bitch. He had told her a hundred times to move, to get out before the siege lines began to cut the city off.

He looked out to the west. The crowds pulsed that way like sluggish blood in the arteries of a felled giant. It was rumoured that the Ormann road was still open all the way to the River Searil, where the Torunnans had built their second fortified line in twenty years. The Merduks had left that one slim way out deliberately, it was said, to tempt the garrison into evacuation. The population would be choking it up for twenty leagues. Corfe had seen it before, in the score of battles that had followed after the Merduks had first crossed the Jafrar Mountains.

Was she dead? He would never know. Oh, Heria.

His sword arm ached. He had never before been a part of such slaughter. It seemed to him that he had been fighting for ever, and yet the siege had lasted only three months. It had not, in fact, been a siege as The Military Manual knew one. The Merduks had isolated Aekir and then had commenced to pound it into the ground. There had been no attempt to starve the city into submission. They had merely kept on attacking with reckless abandon, losing five men for every defender who fell, until the final assault this morning. It had been pure savagery on the walls, a to and fro of carnage, until the critical moment had been reached, the cup finally brimming over and the Torunnans had begun the trickle off the ramparts which had turned into a rout. Old John had roared at them, before a Merduk scimitar cut him down. There had been near panic after that. No thought of a second line, a fighting retreat. The bitter tension of the siege, the multiple assaults, had left them too worn, as brittle as a rust-eaten blade. The memory made Corfe ashamed. Aekir’s walls had not even been breached; they had simply been abandoned.

Was that why he had paused, was standing here now like some spectator at an apocalypse? To make up for his flight, perhaps.

Or to lose himself in it. My wife. Down there somewhere, alive or dead.

Rumbling booms, concussions that shook the smoke-thick air. Sibastion was touching off the magazines. Crackles of arquebus fire. Someone was making a stand. Let them. It was time to abandon the city, and those he had loved here. Those fools who chose to fight on would leave their corpses in its gutters.

Corfe started down off the roof, wiping his eyes angrily. He probed the stairway before him with his sabre like a blind man tapping his stick.

It was suffocatingly hot as he came out on the street, and the acrid air made his throat ache. The raw sound of the crowds hit him like a moving wall, and then he was in amongst them, being carried along like a swimmer lost in a millrace. They stank of terror and ashes and their faces seemed hardly human to him in the hellish light. He could see unconscious men and women being held upright by the closeness of the throng, small children crawling upon the serried heads as though they were a carpet. Men were being crushed at the edges of the street as they were smeared along the sides of the confining walls. He could feel the bodies of others under his feet as he was propelled along. His heel slid on the face of a child. The sabre was lost, levered out of his hand in the press. He tilted his face to the shrouded sky, the flaming buildings, and fought for his share of the reeking air.

Lord God, he thought, I am in hell.

Aurungzeb the Golden, third Sultan of Ostrabar, was dallying with the pert breasts of his latest concubine when a eunuch paddled through the curtains at the end of the chamber and bowed deeply, his bald pate shining in the light of the lamps.

“Highness.”

Aurungzeb glared, his black eyes boring into the temerarious intruder, who remained bowed and trembling.

“What is it?”

“A messenger, Highness, from Shahr Baraz before Aekir. He says he has news from the army that will not wait.”

“Oh, won’t it?” Aurungzeb leapt up, hurling aside his pouting companion. “Am I at the beck and call, then, of every hairless eunuch and private soldier in the palace?” He kicked the eunuch sprawling. The glabrous face twisted silently.

Aurungzeb paused. “From the army, you say? Is it good news or bad? Is the siege broken? Has that dog Mogen routed my troops?”

The eunuch hauled himself to his hands and knees and wheezed at the fantastically coloured carpet. “He would not say, Highness. He will only relay the news to you personally. I told him this was very irregular but-” Another kick silenced him again.

“Send him in, and if he has bad news then I’ll make a eunuch of him too.”

A jerk of his head sent the concubine scurrying into the corner. From a jewelled chest the Sultan took a plain dagger with a worn hilt. It had seen much use, but had been put away as though it were something hugely precious. Aurungzeb tucked it into his waist sash, then clapped his hands.

The messenger was a Kolchuk, a race the Merduks had long ago conquered in their march west. The Kolchuks ate reindeer and made love to their sisters. Moreover, this man stood tall before Aurungzeb despite the hissings of the eunuch. He had somehow bypassed the Vizier and the Chamberlain of the Harem to come this far. It must be news indeed. If it was bad tidings Aurungzeb would make him less tall by a head.

“Well?”

The man had the unknowable eyes of the Kolchuks; flat stones behind slits in his expressionless face. But there was something of a glow about him, despite the fact that he swayed slightly as he stood. He smelt of dust and lathered horse, and Aurungzeb noticed with interest that there was a gout of dried blood blackening the gut of his armour.

Now the man did fall to one knee, but his face remained tilted upwards, shining.

“The compliments of Shahr Baraz, Commander in Chief of the Second Army of Ostrabar, Highness. He begs leave to report that, should it please your excellency, he has taken possession of the infidel city of Aekir and is even now cleansing it of the last of the western rabble. The army is at your disposal.”

Aekir has fallen.

The Vizier burst in followed by a pair of tulwar-wielding guards. He shouted something, and they grasped the kneeling Kolchuk by the shoulders. But Aurungzeb held up a hand.

“Aekir has fallen?”

The Kolchuk nodded, and for a second the inscrutable soldier and the silk-clad Sultan smiled at each other, men sharing a triumph only they could appreciate. Then Aurungzeb pursed his lips. It would not do to press the man for information; that would smack of eagerness, even gracelessness.

“Akran,” he barked at his glowering, uncertain Vizier. “Quarter this man in the palace. See that he is fed, bathed, and has whatever he wishes.”

“But Highness, a common soldier-”

“Do it, Akran. This common soldier could have been an assassin, but you let him slip past you into the very harem. Had it not been for Serrim”-here the eunuch coloured and simpered-“I would have been taken totally by surprise. I thought my father had taught you better, Akran.”

The Vizier looked bent and old. The guards shifted uneasily, contaminated with his guilt.

“Now go, all of you. No, wait. Your name, soldier. What is it and with whom do you serve?”

The Kolchuk gazed at him, remote once more. “I am Harafeng, Lord. I am one of the Shahr’s bodyguard.”

Aurungzeb raised an eyebrow. “Then, Harafeng, when you have eaten and washed, the Vizier will bring you back to me and we will discuss the fall of Aekir. You have my leave to go, all of you.”

The Kolchuk nodded curtly, which made Akran splutter with indignation, but Aurungzeb smiled. As soon as he was alone in the chamber his smile turned into a grin which split his beard, and it was possible to see the general of men that he had briefly been in his youth.

Aekir has fallen.

Ostrabar was counted third in might of the Seven Sultanates, coming after Hardukh and ancient Nalbeni, but this feat of arms, this glorious victory, would propel it into the first rank of the Merduk sultanates, and Aurungzeb at its head. Centuries hence they would talk of the sultan who had taken the holiest and most populous city of the Ramusians, who had broken the army of John Mogen.

The way lay open to Torunn itself now; there remained only the line of the River Searil and the fortress of Ormann Dyke. Once they fell there was no line of defence until the Cimbric Mountains, four hundred miles further west.

“Ahrimuz, all praise to thee!” the Sultan whispered through his grin, and then said sharply, “Gheg.”

A homunculus sidled from behind one of the embroidered curtains, flapped its leathery little wings and perched on a nearby table.

“Gheg,” it said in a tiny, dry voice, its face a picture in cunning malevolence.

“I wish to speak to your keeper, Gheg. Summon him for me.”

The homunculus, no larger than a pigeon, yawned, showing white needle-teeth in a red mouth. One clawed hand scratched its crotch negligently.

“Gheg hungry,” it said, disgruntled.

Aurungzeb’s nostrils flared. “You were fed last night, as fine a babe as you could wish. Now get me your keeper, hell-spawn.”

The homunculus glowered at him, then shrugged its tiny shoulders. “Gheg tired. Head hurts.”

“Do as I say or I’ll spit you like a quail.”

The homunculus smiled: a hideous sight. Then a different light came into its glowing eyes. In a deep, human tone it said, “I am here, Sultan.”

“Your pet is somewhat sullen of late, Orkh-one of the reasons I use him so seldom nowadays.”

“My apologies, Highness. He is getting old. I shall consign him to the jar soon and send you a new one. . What is your wish?”

“Where are you?” It was odd to hear petulance from such a big, hirsute figure.

“It is no matter. I am close enough. Have you a boon you would ask of me?”

Aurungzeb struggled visibly to control his temper.

“I would have you look south, to Aekir. Tell me what transpires there. I have had news. I wish to see it substantiated.”

“Of course.” There was a pause. “I see Carcasson afire. I see siege towers along the inner walls. There is a great burning, the howls of Ramusians. I congratulate you, Highness. Your troops run amok through the city.”

“Shahr Baraz. What of him?”

Another moment’s silence. When the voice came again it held mild surprise.

“He views the crucified body of John Mogen. He weeps, Sultan. In the midst of victory, he weeps.”

“He is of the old Hraib. He mourns his enemy, the romantic fool. The city burns, you say?”

“Yes. The streets are crawling with unbelievers. They fire the city as they go.”

“That will be Lejer, the dastard. He will leave us nothing but ashes. A curse on him and his children. I’ll have him crucified, if he is taken. Is the Ormann road open?”

The homunculus had come out in beads of shining sweat. It trembled and its wing tips drooped. The voice which came out of it did not change, however.

“Yes, Highness. It is clogged with carts and bodies, a veritable migration. The House of Ostrabar reigns supreme.”

Eighty years before the House of Ostrabar had consisted solely of Aurungzeb’s grandfather and a trio of hardy concubines. Generalship, not lineage, had reared it up out of the eastern steppes. If the Ostrabars could not win battles themselves, they hired someone who could. Hence Shahr Baraz, who had been Khedive to Aurungzeb’s father. Aurungzeb had commanded troops competently in his youth, but he could not inspire them in the same way. It was a lack he had never ceased to resent. Shahr Baraz, though originally an outsider, a nomad chief from far Kambaksk, had served three generations of Ostrabars honestly and ably. He was now in his eighties, a terrible old man much given to prayer and poetry. It was well that Aekir had fallen when it did; Shahr Baraz’s long life was near its close, and with it would go the last link between the Sultans and the horse-borne chieftains of the steppes who had preceded them.

Shahr Baraz had recommended that the Ormann road be left open. The influx of refugees would weaken and demoralize the men who manned the line of the Searil river, he said. Aurungzeb had wondered if some outdated chivalry had had a hand in the decision also. No matter.

“Tell the-” he began, and stopped. The homunculus was melting before his eyes, glaring at him reproachfully as it bubbled into a foul-smelling pool.

“Orkh! Tell the Khedive to push on to the Searil!”

The homunculus’ mouth moved but made no sound. It dissolved, steaming and reeking. In the nauseous puddle it became it was possible to make out the decaying foetus of a child, the wing-bones of a bird, the tail of a lizard. Aurungzeb gagged and clapped his hands for the eunuchs. Gheg had outlived its usefulness, but no doubt Orkh would send him another of the creatures soon. He had other messengers-not so swift, perhaps, but just as sure.

Aekir has fallen.

He began to laugh.