The Second Empire

TEN

It was spring when they first sighted the Hebros Mountains on the horizon, and Hawkwood bent his head at the tiller and let the tears come silently for a while. Around him others of the crew were more vocal, loudly thanking God for their deliverance, or sobbing like children. Even Murad was not unmoved. He actually shook Hawkwood’s hand. “You are a master-mariner indeed, Captain, to make such a landfall.”

Hebrion loomed up steadily out of the dawn haze, the mountains tinted pink as the sun took them. They had weathered North Cape five days ago, beat before a passing storm in the Gulf of Hebrion, and were now sailing up Abrusio’s huge trefoil-shaped bay with a perfect south-west breeze on the larboard quarter. They had been away almost eight months, and the brave Osprey was sinking under them at last, every able-bodied man taking a shift at the pumps. But the water was almost over the orlop and Bardolin had had to be rechained in the master’s cabin or he would have drowned in the bilge.

Fair winds almost all the way, and apart from the one squall which had almost sunk them they had had a swift passage, and the accuracy of their landfall was indeed nothing short of miraculous. Hawkwood was burnt dark as mahogany by the sun, and he stood at the tiller in rags, his beard and unkempt hair frosted by salt and sea wind, his eyes two blue flashes startling in so swarthy a face. With the aid of his cross-staff, the accumulated lore of a lifetime at sea and a string of good luck, he had brought the Osprey home at last after one of the longest voyages of recorded history. And surely one of the most disastrous.

The seventeen survivors of the expedition at liberty stood on deck and stared as the carrack wheeled smoothly round to north-north-east and the familiar shoreline slid past on the larboard side. There was still snow on the Hebros, but only a light dusting of it, and the sun was warm on their naked backs-not the punishing hothouse heat of the west, but a refreshing spring warmth. They could see Abrusio’s heights rising up out of the haze ahead, and one of the soldiers cried out, pointing at the little flotilla of fishing yawls off the port beam as though they were some marvell.

Abrusio. They saw now the ruined expanses of the Lower City, the devastation of the docks, and the frantic rebuilding work that was going on there, thousands of men at work on miles of scaffolding. Hawkwood and Murad looked at one another. They had missed a war or some great natural disaster in their time away, it seemed. What other surprises were waiting for them in the old port-city?

“Back topsails!” Hawkwood cried as the Osprey slid through the sparsely populated wharves, all of which seemed damaged in some way or other. The Inner Roads were almost deserted of vessels, though the Hebrian naval yards were crammed full of warships, most of which were under repair.

“Stand ready with the bow-line there!”

The carrack slowed as the sails were backed and spilled their wind. Half a dozen men stood at the beakhead, ready to leap ashore with the heavy mooring ropes and make them fast to the bollards there. A small crowd had gathered on the quayside. Men were shading their eyes and pointing at the battered ship, some arguing with each other and shaking their heads. Hawkwood smiled. There was a slight jar as the Osprey came up against the rope buffers at the lip of the wharves.

“Tie her off lads. We’re home.”

Men leapt overboard and made the ship fast. Then they embraced each other, laughing, weeping, jumping up and down like a crowd of bronzed ragamuffins gone mad.

“Your Excellency,” Hawkwood said with heavy irony, “I have brought you home.”

The nobleman stared at him, and smiled. “Excellency no more. My title expired with the colony, as did yours, master Hawkwood. You will die a commoner after all.”

Hawkwood spat over the carrack’s side. “I can live with that. Now get your aristocratic backside off my ship.”

Nothing in Murad’s eyes. No shared comradeship, no sense of achievement, nothing. He turned away without another word and walked off the ship. The Osprey was so low in the water that one no longer had much of a climb down from the ship’s rail to the wharf. Murad continued walking, a grotesque, tatterdemalion figure which drew a battery of stares from the crowd that was gathering. None of them dared accost him, though, despite their consuming curiosity. The last Hawkwood saw of him he was negotiating the burnt expanse of what had been the Lower City, his face set towards the heights whereon Hebrion’s Royal palace loomed up out of the dawn haze.

Done with him at last, Hawkwood thought, and thanked God for it-for a whole host of things.

“Is that the Gabrian Osprey? Is that really her?” someone shouted out from the buzzing throng on the wharf.

“Aye, it’s her. Come home from the edge of the world.”

“Ricardo! Ricardo Hawkwood! Glory be to God!”

A short, dark man in rich but soiled garments of blue and yellow pushed through the crowd. He wore the chain of a port captain. “Richard! Ha, ha, ha! I don’t believe it. Back from a watery grave.”

Hawkwood climbed over the ship’s rail, and staggered as the unmoving stone of the wharf met his feet. It seemed to be gently rising and falling under him.

“Galliardo,” he said with a smile, and the short man clasped his hand and shook it as though he meant to wring it off. There were tears in his eyes.

“I had a mass said for you these six months past. Oh God, Richard, what has happened to you?”

The press of bodies about Hawkwood was almost unbearable. Half the dock workers in the area seemed to have gathered about the Osprey to look and wonder and hear her storey. Hawkwood blinked away his joy at landfall and tried to make himself think.

“Did you find it, Richard?” Galliardo was babbling. “Is there indeed a continent out in the west?”

“Yes, yes there is, and it can rot there as far as I’m concerned. Listen, Galliardo, she’s about to sink at her moorings. Every seam in her has sprung. I need men to man her pumps and caulkers to stop her holes, and I need them now.”

“You shall have them. There’s not a mariner or carpenter in the city would not give his arm to have the privilege of working on her.”

“And there’s another thing.” Hawkwood lowered his voice. “I have a… a cargo I need offloaded with some discretion. It has to go to the Upper City, to the palace.”

Galliardo’s eyes were shining with cupidity. “Ah, Richard, I knew it. You’ve made your fortune out there in the west. A million in gold, I’ll bet it is.”

“No, no-nothing like that. It’s a…a rare beast, brought back for the King’s entertainment.”

“And worth a fortune, I’ll wager.”

Hawkwood gave up. “Yes, Galliardo. It’s priceless.”

Then the port captain’s face grew sombre. “You don’t know what happened here in Abrusio. You haven’t heard, have you?”

“No,” Hawkwood said wearily. “Listen, you can tell me over a flagon of beer.”

Galliardo laid a hand on his arm. “Richard, I have to tell you. Your wife Estrella, she is dead.”

That brought him up short. Slender, carping little Estrella. He’d hardly thought about her in half a year.

“How?” he asked. No grief there, only a kind of puzzled pity.

“In the fires, when they torched the Lower City. During the war. They say fifty thousand died at that time. It was hell on earth.”

“No,” Hawkwood said. “I have seen hell on earth, and it is not here. Now get me a gang of caulkers, Galliardo, before the Osprey settles where she lies.”

“I’ll have them here in half a glass, don’t worry. Listen, join me in the Dolphin as soon as you can. I keep a back room there, since the house went.”

“Yours too? Lord, Galliardo, has no-one any good news for me?”

“Precious little, my friend. But tidings of your return will be a tonic for the whole port. Now come-let me buy you that beer.”

“I must fetch my log and rutter first.”

Hawkwood reboarded the carrack and made his way along the familiar companionway to the stern cabin. Bardolin sprawled there, a filthy mass of sores and scars, his eyes dull gleams in a tangle of beard and hair. Blood crusted his chains, and he stank like a cage in a zoo.

“Home at last, eh Captain?” he whispered.

“I’ll be back soon, Bardolin, with some helpers. We’ll get you to Golophin by tonight. He lodges in the palace, doesn’t he?”

Bardolin stirred. “No, don’t take me to the palace. Golophin has a tower in the foothills. It’s where he carries out his researches. That’s where you must take me. I know the way; it’s where I served most of my apprenticeship.”

“If you say so.”

“Thank you, Captain, for everything. At one time all I wished for was death. I have had time to think. I begin to see now that there may be some value in living after all.”

“That’s the spirit. Hang on here, Bardolin. I’ll be back soon.”

Hawkwood tentatively laid a hand on the chained man’s shoulder, then left.

“You have a worthy friend there, Bardolin,” Griella said. She materialised before him like a ghost.

“Yes. He is a good man, Richard Hawkwood.”

“And he was right. It is worth going on. Life is worth living.”

“I know. I can see that.”

“And the disease you live with-it is not an affliction, either. Do you see that?”

Bardolin lifted his head and stared at her. “I believe I do, Griella. Perhaps your master has a point.”

“You are my master now, Bardolin,” she said, and kissed him on his cracked lips.

Murad’s town house had survived the war intact but for a few shot-holes in the thick masonry of the walls. When the heavy door was finally opened under his furious knocking the gatekeeper took one look at him and slammed it shut in his face. Murad broke into a paroxysm of rage, hammering on the door and screaming at the top of his lungs. At last the postern door opened to one side, and two stout kitchen lads came out cracking their knuckles. “No beggars, and no madmen allowed at this house. Listen you-”

Murad left them both groaning and semi-conscious in the street and strode through the open postern, pushing aside sundry servants and bellowing for his steward. The kitchen staff scattered like a flock of geese before a fox, the women yelling that there was a maniac loose in the house. When the steward finally arrived, a cleaver in his hand, Murad pinioned him and stared into his eyes. “Do you know me, Glarus of Garmidalan? Your father is a gamekeeper on my estates. Your mother was my father’s housekeeper for twenty years.”

“Holy God,” Glarus faltered. And he fell to his knees. “Forgive me, lord. We thought you were long dead. And you have… you have changed so-”

Murad’s febrile strength seemed to gutter out. He sagged against the heavy kitchen table, releasing the man. The cleaver clanged to the floor. “I am home now. Run me a bath, and have my valet sent to me. And that wench there”-he pointed to a cowering girl with flour on her hands-“have her sent at once to the master bed-room. I want wine and bread and cheese and roasted chicken. And apples. And I want them there within half a glass. And a message sent to the palace, requesting an audience. Do you hear me?”

“Half a glass?” Glarus asked timidly. Murad laughed.

“I am become a naval creature after all. Ten minutes will do, Glarus. God’s blood, it is good to be home!”

Two hours later, he was admiring himself in the full-length mirror of the master bed-room, and the weeping kitchen maid was being led away with a blanket about her shoulders. His beard and hair had been neatly trimmed and he wore a doublet of black velvet edged with silver lace. It hung on him like a sack, and he had to don breeches instead of hose, for his legs were too thin to be revealed without ridicule. He supposed he would put weight on, eventually. He was hungry, but the food he had eaten had made him sick.

His valet helped him slide the baldric of his rapier over his shoulder, and then he sipped wine and watched the stranger in the mirror preen himself. He had never been a handsome man, though there had always been something about him which the fair sex had found not unattractive. But now he was an emaciated, scarred scarecrow with a brown face in which a lipless mouth curled in a perpetual sneer. Governor of New Hebrion. His Excellency. Discoverer of the New World.

“The carriage is ready in the court-yard, my lord,” Glarus ventured from the door.

“I’ll be there in a moment.”

It was barely midmorning. Only a few hours ago he had been a beggar on a sinking ship with the scum of the earth for company. Now he was a lord again, with servants at his beck and call, a carriage waiting, a king ready to receive him. Some part of the world had been put back to rights at least. Some natural order restored.

He went down to the carriage and stared about himself avidly as it negotiated the narrow cobbled streets on the way to the palace. Not too much evidence of destruction in this part of the city, at least. It was good of Abeleyn to see him so promptly, but then the monarch was probably afire with curiosity. Important that Murad’s own version of events in the west was the first the King heard. So much was open to misinterpretation.

Glarus had told Murad of the war, the ruin of the city and the King’s illness while he had pounded his seed into the rump of the whimpering maid. A lot had been happening, seemingly, while he and his companions had been trekking through that endless jungle and eating beetles in order to survive. Murad could not help but feel that the world he had come back to had become an alien place. But the Sequeros were destroyed, as were the Carreras. That meant that he, Lord Murad of Galiapeno, was now almost certainly closest by blood to the throne itself. It was an ill wind which blew nobody any good. He smiled to himself. War was good for something after all.

The King received him in the palace gardens, amid the chittering of cicadas and the rustling of cypresses. A year before, Murad had sat here with him and first proposed the expedition to the west. It was no longer the same world. They were no longer the same men of that summer morning.

The King had aged in a year. His dark hair was brindled with grey and he bore scars on his face even as Murad did. He was taller than he had been, Murad was convinced, and he walked with an awkward gait, the legacy of the wounds he had suffered in the storming of the city. He smiled as his kinsman approached, though the lean nobleman had not missed the initial shock on his face, quickly mastered.

“Cousin, it is good to see you.”

They embraced, then each held the other at arm’s length and studied the other man’s face.

“It’s a hard journey you’ve been on,” Abeleyn said.

“I might say the same of you, sire.”

The King nodded. “I expected word from you sooner. Did you find it, Murad, your Western Continent?”

Murad sat down beside the King on the stone bench that stood sun-warmed in the garden. “Yes, I found it.”

“And was it worth the trip?”

For a second, Murad could not speak. Pictures in his mind. The great cone of Undabane rising out of the jungle. The slaughter of his men there. The jungle journey. The pitiful wreck of Fort Abeleius. Bardolin howling in the hold of the ship in nights of wind. He shut his eyes.

“The expedition was a failure, sire. We were lucky to escape with our lives, those of us who did. It was-it was a nightmare.”

“Tell me.”

And he did. Everything from the moment of weighing anchor in Abrusio harbour all those months ago through to mooring the ship again that very morning. He told Abeleyn virtually everything; but he did not mention Griella, or what Bardolin had become. And Hawkwood’s part in the tale was kept to a minimum. The survivors had pulled through thanks to the determination and courage of Lord Murad of Galiapeno, who had never despaired, even in the blackest of moments.

The birds sang their homage to the morning, and Murad could smell juniper and lavender on the breeze. His storey seemed like some cautionary tale told around a sailor’s fireside, not something which could actually have happened. It was a bad dream which at last he had woken from, and he was in the sunlit reality of his own world again.

“Join me for lunch,” the King said at last when Murad was done. “I also have a tale to tell, though no doubt you’ve heard a part of it already.”

The King rose with an audible creaking of wood, and the pair of them left the garden together, the birds singing their hearts out all around them.

The message was brought to Golophin in the palace by a breathless boy straight from the waterfront. He had eluded every footman and guard and was bursting with news. The Gabrian Osprey had returned at last, and her captain was having some precious form of supercargo sent to his tower in the hills. It would be there around midafternoon. Captain Hawkwood would like to meet with him this evening, if it was convenient, and discuss the shipment. The whole dockside was in a high state of excitement. The surviving crew members of the Osprey were being feted in every tavern that still existed in the Lower City, and they were telling tales of strange lands, stranger beasts, and rivers of gold!”

Golophin gave the boy a silver crown for his pains and halted in his tracks. He had an idea he knew what Hawkwood’s cargo was. He snapped to an eavesdropping palace attendant that he wanted his mule saddled up at once, and then repaired to his apartments in the palace to gather some books and herbs that he thought he might need.

Isolla found him there, packing with calm haste.

“Something has come up,” he explained. “I must leave for my tower at once. I may be gone a few days.”

“But haven’t you heard the news? Some lord who went off to find the Western Continent has come back. He’s to be the star of a levee this afternoon.”

“I had heard,” Golophin said with a smile. “Lord Murad is known to me. But a friend of mine is… is in trouble. I am the only one who can help him.”

“He must be a close friend,” Isolla said, obviously curious. She had not thought Golophin close to anyone except perhaps the King himself.

“He was a pupil of mine for a time.”

A pageboy knocked and poked his head around the door. “The mule is saddled and ready, sir.”

“Thank you.” Golophin slung his packed leather bag over one thin shoulder, clapped his broad-brimmed hat on his pate, and kissed Isolla hurriedly. “Watch over the King while I’m away, lady.”

“Yes, of course. But Golophin-”

And he was gone. Isolla could have stamped her foot with frustration and curiosity. Then again, why not indulge herself? Much though she liked Golophin, she sometimes found his air of world-weary superiority infuriating.

She would miss the levee and the explorer’s tales, but something told her that Golophin’s urgent errand was tied into the arrivall of this ship from the west.

Isolla strode off to her chambers. She needed to change into clothes more suitable for riding.