The Heretic Kings

TEN

The air was different, somehow heavy. It trickled down their throats and through the interstices in their armour and lodged there, a solid, unyielding presence. It ballooned their lungs and crimsoned their faces. It brought the sweat winking out in glassy beads on their foreheads. It made the soldiers pause to tug at the neck of their cuirasses as though they were trying to loosen a constricting collar.

The white sand clung to their boots. They screwed up their eyes against its brightness and slogged onwards. In a few steps, the boom of the surf out on the reef became distant, separate. The sun faded as the jungle enfolded them, and the heat became a wetter, danker thing.

The Western Continent.

Sand gave way to leaf mulch underfoot. They slashed aside creepers and the lower boughs of the trees, sharp palm fronds, huge ferns.

The noise of the sea, their universe for so long, faded away. It was as if they had entered some different kingdom, a place which had nothing to do with anything they had known before. It was a twilit world enshadowed by the canopy of the immense trees which soared up on all sides. Naked root systems like the tangled limbs of corpses on a battlefield tripped them up and plucked at their feet. Tree trunks two fathoms in diameter had discs of fungi embedded in their flanks. A bewildering tangle of living things, the very atmosphere full of buzzing, biting mites so that they drew them into their mouths when they breathed. And the stink of decay and damp and mould, overpowering, all-pervading.

They stumbled across a stream which must have had its outlet on the beach. Here the vegetation was less frenetic and they could make a path of sorts, slashing with cutlass and poniard.

When they halted to rest and catch their breath-so hard to do that here, so hard to draw the thick air into greedy lungs-they could hear the sound of this new world all around them. Screeches and wails and twitterings and warblings and hoots of human-sounding laughter off in the trees. A symphony of invisible, utterly unknown life cackling away to itself, indifferent to their presence or intentions.

Several of the soldiers made the Sign of the Saint. There were things moving far up in the canopy, where the world had light and colour and perhaps a breeze. Half-glimpsed leaping shadows and flutterings.

“The whole place is alive,” Hawkwood muttered.

They had found a tiny clearing wherein the stream burbled happily to itself, clear as crystal in a shaft of sunlight which had somehow contrived to survive to the forest floor.

“This will do,” Murad said, wiping sweat from his face. “Sergeant Mensurado, the flag.”

Mensurado stepped forward, his face half hidden in the shade of his casque, and stabbed the flagpole he had been bearing into the humus by the stream.

Murad produced a scroll from his belt pouch and unrolled it carefully as Mensurado’s bark brought the file of soldiers to attention.

“ ‘In this year of the Blessed Saint five hundred and fifty-one, on this the twenty-first day of Endorion, I, Lord Murad of Galiapeno do hereby claim this land on behalf of our noble and gracious sovereign, King Abeleyn the Fourth of Hebrion and Imerdon. From this moment on it shall be known as-’ ” he looked up at the cackling jungle, the towering trees-“as New Hebrion. And henceforth as is my right, I assume the titles of viceroy and governor of this, the westernmost of the possessions of the Hebriate crown.’ ”

“Sergeant, the salute.”

Mensurado’s parade-ground bellow put the jungle cacophony to shame.

“Present your pieces! Ready your pieces! Fire!”

A thunderous volley of shots went off as one. The clearing was filled with toiling grey smoke which hung like cotton in the airless space.

The forest had gone entirely silent.

The men stood looking up at the crowded vegetation, the huge absence of sound. Instinctively, everyone stepped closer together.

A crashing of undergrowth, and Ensign di Souza appeared, scarlet face and yellow hair above his cuirass, with a pair of sailors and Bardolin the mage labouring in his wake. The wizard’s imp rode on his shoulder, agog.

“Sir, we heard shooting,” he panted.

“We have seen off the enemy,” Murad drawled. He loosened the drawstrings on the Hebrian flag and it fell open, a limp gold and crimson rag.

“Report, Ensign,” he said sharply, waving powder-smoke from in front of his face.

“The second wave of boats are ashore, and the mariners are off-loading the water casks as we speak. Sequero asks your permission, sir, to get the surviving horses ashore and start hunting up fodder for them.”

“Permission denied,” Murad said crisply. “The horses are not a priority here. We must secure a campsite for the landing party first, and investigate the surrounding area. Who knows what may be lurking in this devil’s brush about us?”

Several of the soldiers glanced round uneasily, until Mensurado, with shouts and kicks, got them to reloading their arquebuses.

Murad considered the little clearing. The forest noises had started up again. Already they were becoming used to them, a background irritation, not a thing to fear.

“We’ll throw up a camp here,” he said. “It’s as good a place as any, and we’ll have fresh water. Captain Hawkwood, your men can refill their water casks here also.”

Hawkwood looked at the knee-deep stream, already muddied by the boots of the soldiers, and said nothing.

Bardolin joined him. The old wizard mopped his streaming face with his sleeve and gestured at the surrounding jungle.

“Have you ever seen anything like this before? Such trees!”

Hawkwood shook his head. “I’ve been to Macassar, the jungles inland from the Malacars, after ivory and hides and river-gold, but this is different. This has never been cleared; it is the original forest, a country where man has never made a mark. These trees might have stood here since the Creation.”

“Dreaming their strange dreams,” Bardolin said absently, caressing his imp with one hand. “There is power in this place, Hawkwood. Dweomer, and something else. Something to do with the very nature of the land, perhaps. It has not yet noticed us, I think, but it will, in its slow way.”

“We’ve always said the place might be inhabited.”

“I am not talking about inhabitants, I am talking about the land itself. Normannia has been scoured and gouged and raped for too long; we own it now. We are its blood. But here the land belongs only to itself.”

“I never took you for a mystic, Bardolin,” Hawkwood said with some irritation. His injured shoulder was paining him.

“Nor am I one.” The mage seemed to come awake. He smiled. “Maybe I’m just getting old.”

“Old! You’re more hale than I am.”

Two seamen appeared: Mihal and Masudi, one bearing a wooden box.

“Velasca wants to know if he can let the men have a run ashore, sir,” Masudi said, his black face gleaming.

“Not yet. This isn’t a blasted pleasure trip. Tell him to concentrate on getting the ship rewatered.”

“Aye, sir,” Masudi said. “Here’s the box you wanted from the cabin.”

“Put it down.”

Murad joined them. “I’m taking a party on a reconnaissance of the area. I want you two to come with us. Maybe you can sniff out things for us, Mage. And Hawkwood, you said-”

“I have it here,” Hawkwood interrupted him.

He bent to open the box at his feet. Inside was a brass bowl and an iron sliver which had been pasted on to a wafer of cork. Hawkwood filled the bowl from the stream. Some of the soldiers crowded round to look and he barked angrily: “Stand aside! I can’t have any metal around when I do this. Give me some space.”

The men retreated as he set the iron to bob on the water. He crouched for a long minute staring at it, and then said to Murad: “The stream heads off to nor’-nor’-west. If we followed it-and it’s the easiest passage-then we’d be coming back east-southeast.”

He poured the water off, put everything back in the box and straightened.

“A portable compass,” Bardolin said. “So simple! But then the principle remains the same. I should have realized.”

“We’ll move out and follow the line of the stream,” Murad said. He turned to di Souza. “We’ll fire three shots if there’s any trouble. When you hear them, pack up and get back to the ship. Do not try to come after us, Ensign. We’ll make our own way. The same procedure follows if anything occurs here while we’re gone. But I intend to return well before dark anyway.”

Di Souza saluted.

The party set out: Murad, Hawkwood, Bardolin and ten of the soldiers.

They tramped through the stream, as it was the path of least resistance, and it seemed to them that they were travelling through a green tunnel lit by some radiance far above. It was dusk down here, with occasional shafts of bright sun lancing through gaps in the canopy to provide a dazzling contrast to the pervading gloom.

They ducked under hanging limbs, skirted sprawling roots as thick as a man’s thigh which lolled in the water like torpid animals come to drink. They slashed aside hanging veils of moss and creeper, and staggered hurriedly away from the sudden brilliance of gem-bright snakes which slithered through the mulch of the forest floor, intent on their own business.

It grew hotter. The noise of the sea died away, the fading of a once-vivid memory. They were in a raucous cathedral whose columns were the titanic bulk of the great trees, whose roof sparkled with distant light and movement, the mocking cries of weird birdlife.

The ground rose under their feet and stones began to rear up out of the earth like the bones of the land come poking through its decaying hide. Their progress grew more laboured, the soldiers with their heads down and arquebuses on their shoulders puffing like fractured bellows. A cloud of tiny, iridescent birds swept through the company like airborne jewels. They flickered one way and then another, turning in unison like a shoal of twisting fish, their fleetness almost derisory. A few of the soldiers batted at them half-heartedly with gunstock and sword but they whispered away again in a spray of lapis lazuli and amethyst before swooping into the canopy overhead.

The stream disappeared into a tangle of boulders and bush, and the forest closed in on them completely. The ground was rising more steeply now, making every step an effort. The men scooped up handfuls and helmetfuls of the water, gulping it down and sluicing their faces. It was as warm as a wet nurse’s milk, and hardly seemed to moisten their mouths. Murad led them onwards, hacking with a seaman’s cutlass at the barrier of vegetation ahead, his feet slipping and turning on the mossy stones, boots squelching in mud.

They came across ants the size of a man’s little finger which carried bright green leaves like the mainsail of a schooner on their backs. They found beetles busily winking in the earth, their wingcases as broad as an apple, horns adorning their armoured heads. Wattle-necked lizards regarded them silently from overhead branches, the colours of their skin pulsing from emerald through to turquoise.

They took a new bearing from the source of the stream and headed north-west this time, as the way seemed easiest on that course. Murad detailed one of the soldiers to blaze a tree every twenty yards, so thick was the undergrowth. They stumbled onwards in the wake of the gaunt nobleman as though he were some kind of demented prophet leading them to paradise, and Sergeant Mensurado, his voice hoarsened to a croak with overuse, hurried the stragglers along with shoves and blows and venomous whispers.

The jungle began to open out a fraction. The trees were more widely spaced and the ground between them was littered with rocks, some as long as a ship’s culverin. The ground changed texture and became dark and gritty, almost like black sand. It filled their boots and rasped between their toes.

Then Murad stopped dead in his tracks.

Hawkwood and Bardolin were farther back in the file. He called them forward in a low hiss.

“What?” Hawkwood asked.

Murad pointed, his eyes not moving from whatever drew them.

Up in the tree, maybe forty feet off the ground. The canopy was broken there, bright with dappled sunlight. Hawkwood squinted in the unaccustomed glare.

“Holy God,” Bardolin said beside him.

Then Hawkwood saw it too.

It stood on a huge level branch, and had flattened itself against the trunk which spawned its perch. It was almost the same shade as the butternut-coloured tree bark, which was why Hawkwood had not seen it at first. But then the head turned, and the movement caught his eye.

A monstrous bird of some sort. Its wings were like those of a bat, only more leathery. They hugged the tree trunk: there were claws at the end of the skeletal frame. It was hard to be precisely sure as to where they began and the skin of the tree itself ended, so good was the beast’s camouflage, but the thing was big. Its wrinkled, featherless and hairless body was as tall as a man’s, and the span of the wings must have been three fathoms or more. The long neck supported a skull-like head, eyes surprisingly small, both set to the front of the face like an owl, and a wicked, black beak between them.

The eyes blinked slowly. They were yellow, slitted. The creature did not appear alarmed at the sight of the party, but regarded them with grave interest; almost, they might have said, with intelligence.

Bardolin stepped forward, and with his right hand he inscribed a little glimmer on the air. The creature stared at him, unafraid, seemingly intrigued.

There was a loud crack, a spurt of flame and billow of smoke.

“Hold your fire, God-damn you!” Murad cried.

The bird thing detached itself from the tree and seemed to fall backwards. It flipped in mid-fall with incredible speed and grace, then the great wings opened and flapped twice in huge whooshes of air which staggered the smoke and blew the plastered hair off Hawkwood’s brow. The wings boomed and cracked like sails. The thing wheeled up into the canopy, and then was a shape against the blue sky beyond, dwindling to a speck and disappearing.

“Who fired?” Murad demanded. “Whose weapon was that?” He was quivering with rage. A soldier whose arquebus was leaking smoke quailed visibly as Murad advanced on him.

Sergeant Mensurado stepped between them.

“My fault, sir. I told the men to keep their wheel-locks back, the match burning. Glabrio here, he tripped, sir. Must have been the sight of that monster. It won’t happen again. I’ll see to him myself when we get back.”

Murad glared at his sergeant, but at last only nodded. “See that you do, Mensurado. A pity the fool missed, since he had to fire a shot. I’d like to have had a closer look at that.”

Several of the soldiers were making the Sign of the Saint discreetly. They did not seem to share their commander’s wish.

“What was it, Bardolin?” Murad asked the wizard. “Any ideas?”

The old mage’s face was unusually troubled.

“I’ve never seen anything remotely like it, except perhaps in the pages of a bestiary. It was a warped, unnatural thing. Did you see its eyes? There was a mind behind them, Murad. And it stank of Dweomer.”

“It was a magical creature, then?” Hawkwood said.

“Yes. More than that, a created creature: not fashioned by the hand of God, but by the sorcery of men. But the power it would take to bring such a thing into the world, and then give it permanence. . it is staggering. I had not thought that any mage living could have such power. It would kill me, were I to attempt a similar thing.”

“What did you make glow in the air?” Murad demanded.

“A glyph. Feralism is one of my disciplines. I was trying to read the heart of the beast.”

“And could you?”

“No. . No, I could not.”

“Blast that whoreson idiot and his itchy trigger finger!”

“No, it was not that. I could not read the thing’s heart because it was not truly a beast.”

“What is this you’re saying, Mage?”

“I am not sure. What I think I am saying is that there was humanity there, in the beast. A soul, if you will.”

Murad and Hawkwood regarded the wizard in silence. The imp looked around and then cautiously took its fingers from out of its ears. It hated loud noises.

Murad realized that the soldiers were crowded around, listening. His face hardened.

“We’ll move on. We can discuss this later. Sergeant Mensurado, lead off and make sure the men have their wheels uncocked. I want no more discharges, or we will have Ensign di Souza evacuating the camp behind us.”

That raised a nervous laugh. The men shook out into file again, and set off. Bardolin trudged along wordlessly, the frown lines biting deep between his brows.

The ground continued to rise. It seemed that they were on the slopes of a hill or small mountain. It was hard going for all of them, because the black sand-like stuff of the forest floor sank under their boots. It was as if they were walking up the side of an enormous dune, their feet slipping back a yard for every yard advanced. “What is this stuff?” Murad asked. He slapped a sucking insect off his scarred cheek, grimacing.

“Ash, I think,” Hawkwood said. “There has been a great burning here. The stuff must be half a fathom deep.”

There were boulders, black and almost glassy in places. The trees were slowly splitting them apart and shifting them down-slope. And such trees! Nowhere in the world, Hawkwood thought, even in Gabrion, could there be trees like these, straight as lances, hard as bronze. A shipwright might fashion a mainmast from a single trunk, or a vessel’s keel from two. But the labour-the work of hewing down these forest giants. In this heat, it would kill a man.

A gasping, endless time in which they put down their heads and forgot everything but the next step in front of them. Several of the soldiers paused in their travails to vomit, their eyes popping. Murad gave them permission to take off their helmets and loosen their cuirasses, but they gave the impression that they were slowly being boiled alive inside the heavy armour.

At last there was a clear light ahead, an open space. The trees ended. There was a short stretch of bare rock and ash and gravel before them, and then nothing but blue, unclouded heaven.

They bent over to grasp their knees, their guts churning, the sunlight making them blink and scowl. Several of the soldiers collapsed on to their backs and lay there like bright, immobilized beetles, unable to do anything but suck in lungfuls of steaming air.

When Hawkwood finally straightened, the sight before them made him cry out in wonder.

They were above the jungle and on top of this world, it seemed. They had reached the summit of what proved to be a razor-backed ridge which was circular in shape, an eerily perfect symmetry.

Hawkwood could see for uncounted leagues in all directions. If he turned round he could see the Western Ocean stretching off to the horizon. There was the Osprey riding at anchor, distant as a child’s toy. A line of white surf up and down the coast marked the reefs, and there was a series of little, conical islands off to the north, eight leagues away perhaps.

Inland, to the west, the jungle rolled in an endless viridian carpet, lurid, garish, secretive. Its mass was broken by more formations identical to the one upon which they stood: circles of bare rock amid the greenery, barren as gravestones, unnatural-looking. They pocked the forest like crusted sores, and beyond them, far off and almost invisible in the heat shimmer and haze, were high mountains as blue as woodsmoke.

To the north and west was something else. Clouds were building up there, tall thunderheads and anvils and horsetails of angry vapour, grey and heavy in the underbelly. A shadow dominated that horizon, rearing up and up until its head was lost in the cloud. A mountain, a perfect cone. It was taller than any of the granite giants in the Hebros. Fifteen thousand feet, maybe, though it was hard to tell with its summit lost in billowing vapour.

“Craters,” Bardolin said, appearing beside him.

“What?”

“Saffarac of Cartigella, a friend of mine, once had a viewing device, an oracular constructed of two finely ground lenses mounted in a tube of leather. He was hoping to find evidence for his theory that the earth moved around the sun, not the other way round. He looked at the moon, the nearest body in heaven, and he saw there formations like these. Craters. He postulated two causes: one, fiery rock had erupted out of the moon in a series of vast explosions-”

“Like gunpowder, you mean?”

“Yes. Or two, they were caused by vast stones falling to the surface, like the one that fell in Fulk some ten years back. Big as a horse it was, and glowing red when it hit the ground. You see them on clear nights, streaks of light falling to earth. Dying stars giving out their last breath in a streak of light and beauty.”

“And that’s what made this landscape?” Murad said, coming up behind them.

“It is one theory.”

“I have heard that in the southern latitudes there are mountains such as this one,” Hawkwood volunteered. “Some of them leak smoke and sulphurous gases.”

“Mariners’ stories,” Murad sneered. “You are not in some Abrusian pothouse trying to impress the lowly, Hawkwood.”

Hawkwood said nothing. His gaze did not shift from the panorama before them.

“Not fifty years ago a man might be burnt at the stake for daring to venture that the world was round, and not flat like a buckler,” Bardolin said mildly. “And yet now, even in Charibon, they accept that we are spinning on a sphere, as Terenius of Orfor suggests.”

“I do not care what shape the world is, so long as my feet can bear me across it,” Murad snapped.

They looked down into the bowl which their ridge contained. It was perfectly round, a circle of jungle. They stood at a height of some three thousand feet, Hawkwood estimated, but the air did not seem any less dense.

“Heyeran Spinero,” Murad said. “Circle Ridge. I will put it on the map. This is as far as we will go today. It looks like rain is coming in from the north, and I wish to be back at the camp before dark.”

None of them mentioned it, but they were all thinking of the monstrous bird which had studied them so nonchalantly. The thought of a night spent away from the rest of their comrades in a forest populated by such things was not tolerable.

Mensurado’s croak attracted their attention. The sergeant was pointing down at the land below.

“What is it, Sergeant?” Murad asked harshly. He seemed to be fighting off exhaustion with bile alone.

Mensurado could only point and whisper, his parade-ground bellow hoarsened out of existence. “There, sir, to the right of that weird hill, just above its flank. You see?”

They peered whilst the rest of the soldiers sat listlessly, slugging the last of their water and mopping their faces.

“Sweet Blessed Saint!” Murad said softly. “Do you see it, gentlemen?”

A space in the jungle, a tiny clearing wherein a patch of beaten earth could be glimpsed.

“A road, or track,” Bardolin said, sketching out a far-seeing cantrip to aid his tired eyes.

“Hawkwood, get out that contraption of yours and take its bearing,” the nobleman said peremptorily.

Frowning, Hawkwood did as he was told, filling the bowl with some of his own drinking water. He studied it, then looked up, gauging, and said: “West-nor’-west of here. I’d put it at fifteen leagues. It’s a broad road, to be seen at that distance.”

“That, gentlemen, is our destination,” Murad said. “Once we have ourselves organized, I am taking an expedition into the interior. You will both accompany me, naturally. We will make for that road, and see if we can’t meet up with whoever built it.”

Sergeant Mensurado was as motionless as a block of wood. Murad turned on him.

“The fewer folk who hear of this the better, for now. You understand me, Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Rouse the men. It’s time we were getting back.”

“Yes, sir.”

In minutes they were off again, downhill this time, trudging in the hollows their feet had made on the way up. Hawkwood and Bardolin remained behind for a few minutes, watching the gathering clouds about the shoulders of the great mountain to the north.

“I’ll kill him before we leave this land,” Hawkwood said. “He will goad me one time too often.”

“It is his way,” Bardolin said. “He knows no other. He looks to you and me for answers, and hates the necessity for it. He is as lost as any of us.”

“Lost! Is that how you see us?”

“We are on a dark continent which those who were here before us did not mean us to see. There is Dweomer here, everywhere, and there is such a teeming life. I have never felt anything like it. Power, Hawkwood, the power to create warped grotesqueries such as that winged creature. I did not say so before because I was not sure, but I am now. That bird was once a man like you or me. There was the remnant of a man’s mind in the beast’s skull. Not as it is in a shifter, but different. Permanent. There is someone or something in this land who is committing monstrous deeds, things which offend the very fabric of nature’s laws. Murad may be eager to meet them, but I am not, if only because I can to some extent understand the motive behind the act. Power allied to irresponsibility. It is the most dangerous thing in the world, the most seductive of temptations. It is evil, pure and simple.”

They followed off after the last of the soldiers without another word, the jungle creatures calling out mockingly all around them.