The Heretic Kings

NINETEEN

“What a pretty picture a burning city makes,” Sastro di Carrera said, leaning on the iron balcony rail of the Royal palace. Abrusio spread out beyond his perch in a sea of buildings, ending almost two miles away downhill in the confusion of ships and buildings and docks which butted on to the true sea, the Western Ocean which girdled the known edges of the world. It was twilight, not because the day was near its long winter sleep, but because of the towers of smoke that shrouded the sun. Sastro’s face was lit by the radiance of the burning, and he could hear it as a far thunder, the mutterings of the banished elder gods.

“May God forgive us,” Presbyter Quirion said beside him, making the Sign of the Saint across his breastplate. Unlike Sastro, who was immaculately tailored, Quirion was grimed and filthy. He had lately come from the inferno below, in which men were fighting and dying by the thousand, their collective screaming drowned out by the hungry roar of the holocaust, the tearing rattles of volley-fire.

“ ‘And now,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘is Hell come to earth, and in the ashes of its burning will totter all the schemes of greedy men. The Beast, in coming, will tread the cinders of their dreams.’ ”

“What in the world are you talking about, Quirion?” Sastro asked.

“I was quoting an old text which foretells the end of the world we know and the beginning of another.”

“The end of the Hibrusid world, at any rate,” Sastro said with satisfaction. “And think of the prime building land the fire will clear for us. It will be worth a fortune.”

Quirion looked at his aristocratic companion with un-concealed contempt. “You are not King yet, my lord Carrera.”

“I will be. Nothing will stop me or you now, Presbyter. Abrusio will be ours very soon.”

“If there’s anything left of it.”

“The important parts will be left,” Sastro said, grinning. “What a blessed thing a wind is, to blow the flames out to sea and take with it those heretical traitors and rebel peasants in the Lower City who defy us. God’s hand at work, Quirion. Surely you can see that?”

“I do not like to ask God to intervene on my behalf; it smacks of hubris to assume that the Creator of the universe will think me, out of all His creations, worthy of attention. I merely try to further what I believe to be His divine will. In this instance, I needed two hundred barrels of pitch to set the Lower City alight.”

“A practical kind of faith you Knights profess,” Sastro said, raising his scented handkerchief to his face so that his mouth was concealed.

“I find it answers well enough.”

The handkerchief was tucked back inside a snowy sleeve. “So how goes the fighting then, my practical Presbyter?”

Quirion rasped a palm over the stubble on his scalp. “Severe enough at times. Your retainers have been acquitting themselves well since I stiffened their tercios with contingents of Knights. The trained Hebrian troops are better, of course, but they are distracted by Freiss’s men in their rear. He has three or four hundred arquebusiers holed up in the western arm of the Lower City cheek by jowl with the Arsenal, and they have had to tie up almost a thousand troops to keep him bottled in his bolthole.”

“What of the navy? There was a lot of activity in the Inner Roads this morning.”

“They were merely warping their ships off the docks; by now the fire will have swept down to the water’s edge. They tried a few ranging shots at the palace this afternoon, but the distance is too far. We have a boom across the Great Harbour covered by the forts on the moles; it should suffice to keep the navy at bay, and their guns out of range of the Upper City. Abrusio was built to be defended from a seaborne attack as well as from a landward one. That works in our favour. And the confined nature of the battlefield means that our disadvantages in numbers are not so apparent.”

“How far has the fire advanced?”

“As far as the Crown Wharves in the Inner Roads. It should almost be licking at the walls of the Arsenal itself. Mercado has had to set aside over three thousand men as firefighters, and another dozen tercios are overseeing the evacuation of the Lower City’s population. He is as hamstrung as a bull caught half over a gate.”

“His concern for the little people is laudable, but it will prove his undoing,” Sastro said.

“The little people are fighting side by side with the city garrison, Lord Carrera,” Quirion reminded him. “The population of the Upper City has remained neutral, but I would not place much faith in the nobles.”

“Oh, they’ll bend with the wind, as they always do. There’s not a great house in Hebrion-even the Sequeros-who will tangle with us now. And the Merchants’ Guild is being rapidly won over also. Gold is a marvellous comforter, I find, and the concessions that a future king can grant.”

“Yes. .”

The steady roar of the flames mixed with furious exchanges of arquebus fire made a collective wailing which at a distance seemed like Abrusio herself crying out in agony because of the inferno gnawing at her bowels. Warfare on this scale had not been seen west of the Cimbrics for twenty years, but now the Five Monarchies were being ripped apart by internal dissension and religious struggle: civil war in everything but name.

There were rumours that Astarac was going the way of Hebrion, the nobles fighting to depose the heretic King Mark and elect one of their own to the throne, helped, of course, by the Inceptine Order and the Knights Militant. And Torunna, as well as being menaced by the vast Merduk army which had lately been stalled at Ormann Dyke, had uprisings of its own to contend with. And Almark’s king was dying-perhaps dead already-and was said to be intent on leaving his kingdom to the Church.

Quirion sighed. He was at heart a pious man, and a profoundly conservative one. Deeply convinced though he was that the Church was in the right and had to snuff out heresy wherever it took root-even were it to sprout in the palaces of kings-he did not like to see what he considered to be the natural order of things so disrupted and torn apart. Sastro now. . he relished any anarchy which might further his own ambitions, but the Presbyter of the Knights in Abrusio would rather have been fighting heathens on the eastern frontiers than slaughtering folk who, at the end of the day, believed in the same God as he.

It was a feeling he kept to himself and scourged himself for at every opportunity, flying as it did in the face of the directives issued by the Pontiff in Charibon, God’s direct representative on earth. He was here to obey orders which in the last analysis were equivalent to the will of God. There could be no shirking of such a burden.

The fire hurtled through the narrow streets of Lower Abrusio like a wave, a bright tsunami which exploded the wooden buildings of this part of the city into kindling and ate out the interiors and the supporting wooden beams of those structures which were composed of yellow Hebrian stone until they toppled also. A dozen massed batteries of heavy culverins could not have bettered the destructive work, and the efforts of the soldiers-turned-firefighters in General Mercado’s command to stem the onset of the flames seemed pointless, drops of maniac effort swamped in a sea of fire.

They were busy demolishing a wide avenue of houses southwest of the front of the conflagration, hoping thereby to form a firebreak which would starve the flames of sustenance. Engineers had laid charges at the cornerstones of all the buildings and were busy detonating them in a series of explosions which blasted the smoke into concentric rings, like the ripples of a stone-pocked lake.

While this went on, the fighting continued, the streets clogged with frantic, murderous scrums of armoured men who were being rained with cinders and burning timbers. Here and there companies and demi-tercios of arquebusiers had space to form up in lines and the opposing forces fired and reloaded and fired again only yards away from each other, the formations melting away under the withering barrage like solder in a furnace, to be replaced by reinforcements from their rear until one side broke and ran.

Wherever the regular Hebrian troops made a stand, the retainers of the Carreras and the Knights Militant who were with them could make no headway, though the Knights, their heavy armour some protection against bullets at all but the closest ranges, would form wedges of flesh and steel which would try to spear through the enemy lines by brute force. But they were not numerous enough. The firing lines opened to let them through after discharging a volley at point-blank range and those of the Knights who remained on their feet were swamped by scores of sword-and-buckler men to the rear.

And yet there was more to the battle than the mere contest between fighting men. Often in the middle of the carnage the combatants would cease their warring and as a body would seek shelter from the approaching holocaust. Men feared being burnt alive more than any other death, and would run into the enemy lines and be cut down quickly rather than remain to be consumed by the flames in their irresistible advance.

And civilians were there in the midst of the battling tercios and companies and demi-platoons. They fled their houses as the flames approached and died by the hundred as they ran through deadly crossfires or were caught by toppling buildings. Had anyone been in Abrusio who had also been at Aekir, he would have found the former more horrifying, for in Aekir men had been intent only on escape, on evading the enemy and the fire. Here they fought in the midst of the blaze, grappling with each other whilst the flames licked at their heads. Streets which were aflame from top to bottom but which were strategically valuable were defended to the last. The soldiers of Hebrion knew that by opposing the Knights they were labelling themselves heretics, the retainers of an excommunicate king, and that if they were captured, the pyre awaited them anyway. So no quarter was asked or given. The battle was more bitter than any struggle against the heathen, for the Merduks would at least take prisoners, intending them to swell the ranks of their slaves.

Golophin stood on the topmost column of Admiral’s Tower, a walled platform which housed the iron framework of the signal beacon. With him was General Mercado, his half-silver face alight with the sliding crimson reflections of the burning city. On the stairs below a knot of aides was collected, ready to take orders out to the various bodies of soldiery about the Lower City.

A wall of flame hid the heights of Abrusio Hill, hid even the peaks of the Hebros beyond-a curtain whose topmost fringe dissolved into anvils and thunderheads of toiling smoke.

They started by burning books, Golophin thought. Then it was people, now it is the cities of the kingdoms themselves. They will consume the world ere they are done. And they do it in the name of God.

“I would curse them, but I have no Dweomer left,” he said to Mercado. “All I had, I used to divert the fire from the waterfronts. I am as dry as a desert stone, General.”

Mercado nodded. “Your work is appreciated, Golophin. You saved a score of the fleet’s biggest ships.”

“Much good they’re doing us at the moment. When is Rovero to assault the boom?”

“Tonight. He will send in fireships to cover his gunboats, and the troopships last. With luck, by tomorrow he will be bombarding the Upper City.”

“Bombarding our own city,” Golophin said bitterly. His eyes had sunk so far into his head that they were mere glints which were answering the bloody light of the fire. His face was skull-like below the bald scalp. He had over-extended himself in his efforts to save the ships of the fleet, more than two dozen of which had been in dock when the flames had begun licking round the wharves. As it was, six of them had been destroyed and could be seen burning, alight from truck to waterline, black silhouettes of phantom ships surrounded by saffron light, their guns going off in chaotic sequence. Six great carracks with almost a thousand men on board, men who had been cut off from escape and had leaped into the waters of the Inner Roads to drown like rats. Sailors did not swim. It seemed ridiculous, farcical. Their bodies, some ablaze, floated in the Inner Roads by the hundred. Hundreds more were living yet, clinging to spare topmasts or anything else they had had the presence of mind to fling overboard as the flames came ravening towards their vessels. No one could get near them: the fires had cut them off from land.

An unbearably bright flash, and seconds later the enormous boom of an explosion. The powder magazine of one carrack had gone up and the ship, hundreds of tons of wood and metal, had erupted into the air and was raining its dismembered fragments down on the waters of the harbour, starting fires on the other ships which had managed to put off from the blazing wharves in time to avoid its fate.

“If hell were a creation of man, it would be very like that picture below us,” Golophin said, awed by the spectacle.

“God has certainly no hand in it,” Mercado said.

An aide came with a grubby parchment message. Mercado read it through, his lips muttering the words.

“Freiss’s men have attempted to stage a break-out. The fire is finally at the walls of the Arsenal. He is dead, and most of his traitors with him.”

“The Arsenal?” Golophin asked. “What of the stores within it? My God, General-the powder and ammunition!”

“We’ve shifted maybe a quarter of it, but we cannot get at the rest. First Freiss and then the fires have cut it off.”

“And if the fire detonates the powder stores?”

“The main stores are thirty feet below ground in stone cellars. They have pipes in them which let out to the harbour. If the worst comes to the worst I can order the pipes opened and the powder magazines flooded. They would take half the city with them when they went up. Don’t worry, Golophin-I won’t let that happen. But it will mean destroying our powder and ammunition reserves, leaving only the naval stores here in the tower.”

“Do it,” Golophin said grimly. “Abrusio is hurt badly enough as it is. We must preserve something of her for Abeleyn to reclaim.”

“Agreed.” Mercado called an aide and began dictating the necessary orders.

“Rovero has taken a squadron to Pendero’s Landing,” the General went on when the aide had left. “Two carracks, some caravels and a trio of nefs in which are three thousand marines and arquebusiers of the garrison. He is going to try and convince the King that a land assault over the city walls will be more effective than attempting to carry the Great Harbour. If we can break the boom tonight, then in a couple of days we will be assaulting from both land and sea and another squadron can give supporting fire to the overland force if they attack the walls near the coast. That is Abeleyn’s best bet, in my opinion. They have us pinned down here, by the fire itself and the guns they can bring to bear on us from Abrusio Hill. Also they are thin on the ground, and will be hard put to it to see off two attacks at once.”

“Whatever seems best,” Golophin said. “I am no general or admiral. I’ll keep Abeleyn informed, though.”

“Can that bird of yours bear a burden, Golophin?”

“A light one, perhaps. What is it?”

Mercado produced a heavily sealed scroll from his doublet. The galley-prow emblem of Astarac could be clearly seen, melted into the crimson wax which fastened it shut.

“This came today by special courier from Cartigella. It bears King Mark’s personal seal and therefore can be opened only by another monarch. I think it may be urgent.”

Golophin took the scroll. He itched to open it himself. “Good news, let us hope.”

“I doubt it. Rumours have been coming in for days of an attempted coup in Cartigella, and of fighting through the streets of the city itself.”

“The world goes mad,” Golophin said quietly, stuffing the scroll into a pocket of his over-large robe.

“The world we knew is no more,” Mercado said crisply. “Nothing will ever bring it back again now. If we are to fashion a new one, then we must build it on blood and gunpowder. And on faith.”

“No,” Golophin snapped. “Faith can have nothing to do with it. If we rear up something new, then let it be built upon reason and keep the clerics and the Pontiffs out of it. They have meddled for far too long: that is what this war of ours is about.”

“A man must believe in something, Golophin.”

“Then let him believe in himself, and leave God out of it!”

In that winter of war and slaughter there were still a few kingdoms untouched by the chaos which was sweeping across Normannia. In Alstadt, capital of mighty Almark on the icy shores of the Hardic Sea, the trade and business of the city went on much as usual, with one difference: the banners of the Royal palace were at half-mast and wheeled traffic had been barred from the streets surrounding the palace. Alstadt was a sprawling, disorganized city, the youngest of the Ramusian capitals. It was unwalled save for the citadel which held the arsenals and the palace itself. Almark was a wide kingdom, a land of open steppes and rolling hills which extended from the Tulmian Gulf in the west to the River Saeroth which marked its border with Finnmark in the east. And to the south the kingdom extended to the snowy Narian Hills and the Sea of Tor, on whose shores nestled the monastery-city of Charibon. It was for this reason that Almark maintained a small garrison in Charibon to supplement the Knights Militant usually based there. Almark was a staunch ally of the Church which Charibon and its inhabitants represented, and its ailing monarch, Haukir VII, had always been a faithful son of that Church.

But Haukir was on his deathbed and he had no heir to succeed him, only a clutch of dissolute sister-sons whom the Almarkan people would not have trusted with the running of a baker’s shop, let alone the mightiest kingdom north of the Malvennors and the Cimbrics. So the banners flew at half-mast, and the streets around the palace were quiet but for the screams of the scavenging gulls which swooped inland from the grey Hardic. And the dying King lay breathing his last surrounded by his counsellors and the Inceptine Prelate of the kingdom, Marat, who would oversee his departure from the world and close his tired eyes when his spirit fled.

The bedchamber of the King was dark and stuffy, full of the reek of old flesh. The King lay in the middle of the canopied bed like a castaway thrown up on a pale-sanded shore, one voyage ended and another about to begin. The Prelate, whom some said was his natural brother on the father’s side, wiped the spittle which coursed in a line from one corner of Haukir’s mouth into his slush-white beard. Some said it had been the fever, caught whilst journeying back from the Conclave of Kings in Vol Ephrir. Some said in whispers it was a stroke brought on by the King’s outrage at the heresy of his fellow monarchs. Whatever had caused it, he lay withered and immobile in that wasteland of fine linen, his breath a stertorous whistle in his throat.

The King waved his hand at the assembled lawyers and courtiers and clerics, dismissing them from the room until all who remained were Prelate Marat, the Privy Minister and an inkwell- and parchment-laden Royal clerk, who looked distinctly uneasy at being alone in such august company.

The seagulls shrieked outside, and the hum of the living city was far off and distant, another world heard through a mirror. Haukir beckoned them closer.

“My end is here at last,” he croaked in a poor mockery of his bellowing voice. “And I am not afraid. I go to meet He who made me, and the company of the living Saints, with the Blessed Ramusio at their head. But there is something I must do ere I leave this world. I must provide for the future welfare of my kingdom, and must ensure that it endures within the protection of the One True Faith after I am gone. Almark must remain firm in this era of heresy and war. I wish to alter my will. .”

He closed his eyes and swallowed painfully. The clerk was nudged by the Privy Minister and hurriedly dipped his quill in the inkwell which dangled from one buttonhole.

“The main provisions I made prior to this date I set aside. Only the secondary provisions of my previous will shall be honoured. I name Prelate Marat, Privy Minister Erland and-” He stopped and glared at the clerk. “What’s your name, man?”

“F-Finnson of Glebir, if it please your majesty.”

“And Finnson of Glebir as my witnesses on this fifteenth day of Forgist, in the year of the Blessed Saint five hundred and fifty-one.”

The ragged breathing began to quicken. The King coughed up a mass of phlegm which Marat wiped away as tenderly as a nurse.

“Having no heirs of my blood which I consider suitable for bearing the burden of this crown, and seeing around me the world at this time falling ever farther into anarchy and heresy, I hereby leave the Almarkan crown to the stewardship of the Holy Church. I name my revered confessor, Prelate Marat, as regent of the realm until the High Pontiff, His Holiness Himerius of Hebrion, may see fit to make his own provisions for the ruling of the kingdom. As I entrust my soul to God, so I entrust my country to the bosom of God’s representatives on earth, and I trust they will watch over Almark as the Blessed Saint watches over my pilgrim spirit as it makes its way into the glories of heaven. .”

Haukir’s head seemed to sink heavily into the pillow. Sweat shone over his face and his lips were blue.

“Shrive me of my sins, Marat. Send me on my way,” he whispered, and as the Prelate gave him the final blessing the Privy Minister turned to the scribbling clerk and hissed in an undertone: “Did you get all that?”

The clerk nodded, still scribbling. Marat ended his blessing and then paused.

“Goodnight, brother,” he said softly. He closed the staring eyes and laid the hands over the silent chest.

“The King is dead,” he said.

“Are you sure?” the Privy Minister asked.

“Of course I’m sure! I’ve seen dead men before! Now get that fool to make a copy of the revised will. I want other copies of it made and posted in the market place. And set out the black flags. You know what to do.”

The Privy Minister stared at the cleric for a second, some indefinable tension fizzling in the air between them. Then he got down on one knee and kissed the Prelate’s ring. “I salute the new regent of Almark.”

“And send me a courier, and another clerk. I must get a dispatch off to Charibon at once.”

“The snows-” the Privy Minister began.

“Damn the snows, just do as you’re told. And get this inky-fingered idiot out of here. I will meet the nobles and the garrison commander in the audience chamber in one hour.”

“As you wish,” the Privy Minister said tonelessly.

They exited, and the Prelate was left alone with the dead King. Already he could hear the murmuring in the chambers below which the appearance of the pair had produced among the notables gathered there.

Marat bent his head and prayed in silence for a second, the gulls still calling in their savage forlornness beyond the shuttered windows of the chamber. Then he rose, went to one of the windows and opened the shutters so that the keen sea air might rush in and freshen the death-smelling room.

Alstadt: broad, crude, thriving port-capital of the north. It opened out before him misted in drizzle, hazed by woodsmoke fires, alive with humanity in its tens of thousands. And beyond it, the wide kingdom of Almark with its horse-rich plains, its armies of cuirassiers. Himerius would be pleased: things could not have worked out better. And others would be pleased also.

Marat turned from the cold window to gaze down on the corpse of the King, and his eyes shone with a saffron light that had nothing human in it at all.