The Second Empire

THREE

“What is it?” Hawkwood asked, waking to find Bardolin standing listening to the night-time jungle.

“Something-some noise far off, towards the coast. Almost I thought it was a cannon firing.”

Hawkwood was wide awake in an instant and on his feet beside the wizard. “I knew we were close, but I didn’t think-”

“Hush! There it is again.”

This time they both heard it. “That’s a cannon all right,” Hawkwood breathed. “One of my culverins. Perhaps they brought them ashore. God’s blood, Bardolin, it can’t be more than a few miles away. We’re almost home.”

“Home,” Bardolin repeated thoughtfully. “But why are they firing cannon in the middle of the night, Hawkwood? Tell me that. I don’t think it means good news.”

They both sat down by the fire again. On the other side of the flames Murad lay like a corpse, mouth open, his face rippled with scar tissue.

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Hawkwood said. “A few more miles, and it’s finished. We’ll board the Osprey and get the hell out of this stinking country. Breathe clean air again, feel the wind on our faces. Think of that, Bardolin. Think of it.”

The far-off gunfire continued for perhaps an hour, including one well-spaced salvo that sounded exactly like a ship’s broadside. After that there was silence again, but by that time Hawkwood had set up his primitive compass and taken a bearing on the sound so that in the morning they could march straight towards it. Then he fell asleep, exhausted.

Bardolin remained awake. They had long since given up the keeping of any kind of sentry, but as the weeks had drawn on he had found himself needing less and less sleep.

Their journey had been incredibly hard-indeed, it had come close to killing them. They had been transformed by it into matt-haired, sunken-eyed fanatics, whose only mission in life was to keep walking, who revered Hawkwood’s home-made compass as though it were the holiest relic, who scrabbled for every scrap of anything resembling food and wolfed it down like animals. All the patina of civilisation had been scraped away by day after day of back-breaking toil, and the filth and heat of the rainforest. Many times, they had decided they could go no further, and had become resigned to the idea of death-even inured to it. But odd things had saved them at those critical moments. The discovery of a stream of pure water, finding a freshly killed forest deer, or a medicinal herb which Hawkwood had recognised from his travells in Macassar. Somehow they had lurched from one lucky windfall to another, all the time keeping to the bearing that Hawkwood set for them every morning. And they were going to survive. Bardolin knew that-he had for a long time. But now he also knew why.

When the darkest hour of each night came upon him he lay alone by the fire and fought the disease that was working in him, but each time it progressed a little farther before it receded again.

It came upon him once more this night. It felt like a blest breath of cold air stealing over him, a chill invigouration which flooded strength into his wasted frame. And then his sight changed, so that he was beginning to see things he normally could not. Murad’s heart beating like a bright, trapped bird in his chest. The veins of blood which nestled in his fore-arms pulsing like threads of liquid light.

Bardolin felt his very bones begin to creak, as if they were desperately trying to burst into some new configuration. His tongue circled up and down his teeth, and they had become different; the inside of his mouth felt as hot as an oven, and he had to open it and pant for air. When he did, his tongue lolled out over his lower lip and the sweat rolled off it.

He raised his hands to his eyes and found that his palms had become black and rough. Joints clicked and reclicked. His hearing grew so acute it was almost unbearable, and yet madly fascinating. He could hear and see a whole universe of life twittering in the rainforest around him.

This was it, the most seductive time. When the change felt like a welcome relief, the chance to metamorphosize into something bigger, better, in which life could be tasted so much more keenly and all his old man’s aches and weak-nesses could be forgotten.

At one instant he writhed there, perfectly suspended between the desire to let the change have its way and his own stubborn refusal to give in. Then he had beaten it again, and lay there as weak as a newborn kitten, the jungle a black wall about him.

“Bravo,” the voice said. “I have never seen anyone fight the black disease with such pugnacious determination before. You have my admiration, Bardolin. Even if your struggle is misguided, and futile in the end.”

Bardolin raised his exhausted face. “I have not seen you in a while, Aruan. Been busy?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. You heard the gunfire. You can guess what it means. The ship is intact, though-of that I made sure. My only worry was that the survivors would sail away before you reach the coast tomorrow, so I have whistled up a landward wind which will keep them anchored if they do not want to be run aground.”

“How very thoughtful.”

“I think of everything. Do you imagine you would have made it this far without my help? Though that mariner of yours is certainly ingenious-and indomitable. I like him. He reminds me of myself when I was young. You are lucky in your friends, Bardolin. I never was.”

“My heart bleeds for you.”

Aruan leaned over the fire so that the flames carved a molten mask out of his features. “It will, one day. I will leave you now. Keep fighting it if you will, Bardolin, but you harm yourself by doing so. I believe I will summon someone who may be able to clarify your thinking. There. It is done. Fare well. When I see you again you shall have the wide ocean under you.” And he disappeared.

Bardolin drank thirstily from the wooden water bottle, sucking at the neck until it was empty. When he felt the cool fingers massage his knotted neck he closed his eyes and sighed.

“Griella, what did he do to you?”

The girl leaned and kissed his cheek from behind. “He gave me life, what else?”

“No-one can raise the dead. Only God can do that.”

The girl knelt before him. She was perhaps fifteen years old and possessed of a heavy helmet of bronze-coloured hair which shone rich as gold in the firelight. Her features were elfin, fine, and she hardly reached Bardolin’s breastbone when standing straight.

She was a werewolf, and she had died months ago-before they had even set foot on the Western Continent. What monstrous wizardry had raised her from the ranks of the dead, Bardolin could not imagine and preferred not to guess at. She had appeared several times during their awful journey back from Undabane, and each time her coming had been a comfort and a torment to him-as Aruan had no doubt meant it to be. For Bardolin had come to love her on their westward voyage, though that love filled him with twisted guilt.

“If you only let it happen, Bardolin, I could be with you always,” she said. “We have the same nature now, and it is not such a bad thing, the black change. He is not a good man, I know, but he is not evil, either, and most of the time he speaks the truth.”

“Oh Griella!” Bardolin groaned. She was the same and not the same. An instinct told him she was some consummate simulacrum, a created thing, like the imps Bardolin had grown as familiars. But that did not make her face any less dear to him.

“He says I can be your apprentice, once you accept your lot. You told me once, Bardolin, that shifters cannot also become mages. Well, you were wrong. How about that? I can be your pupil. You will teach me magic, and I will teach you of the black change.”

Bardolin’s gaze strayed to where Murad lay in twitching sleep across the fire.

“What about him?” he asked.

She looked confused, then almost frightened. “I remember things. Bad things. There was a fire. Murad did things… no, I can’t see it.” She raised a hand to her face, let it drop, pawed at her mouth, her eyes suddenly empty. In the next moment, she had winked out of sight with the same preternatural swiftness as Aruan.

“Child, child,” Bardolin said mournfully. She was indeed some form of familiar, a creature brought to life through the Dweomer. And he felt a furious rage at Aruan for such a perversion. The games he played, with people’s lives and the very forces of nature. No man could do such things and be wholly sane.

In the morning Hawkwood and Bardolin told Murad of the gunfire in the night. He seemed neither surprised nor overjoyed by the news. Instead he sat thoughtfully, picking at the scar which distorted one side of his head.

“When the firing ended it meant that the fort has either beaten off the attack or has been overrun,” Hawkwood said.

No-one commented. They were all thinking of the fantastic creatures which had butchered their comrades in Undi. A massed assault by such travesties would be hard for any group of men to withstand, especially since they could only be permanently slain by the touch of iron.

“Let’s go,” Murad said, rising like some emaciated scarecrow. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

By midmorning they had glimpsed a line of high ground rising off to their right, broken heights jutting through the emerald jungle like decaying teeth. Hawkwood stopped to study it and then called to the others.

“Look, you know what that is? It’s Circle Ridge: Heyeran Spinero. My God, we’ve only a mile or two to go!”

It was almost three months since they had set out, and they were finally back at that stretch of coastline they had explored in the first days of the landing. They went more cautiously now. After all this time, they were almost reluctant to admit any hope into their hearts.

They found the first body close by the clear stream from which the settlement drew its water. A middle-aged woman by her dress, though she had been so badly mauled it was hard to tell. Ants and beetles were already at work upon the carcase in their thousands, and it stank in the morning heat.

Even Murad seemed somewhat shaken. The three men did not look at one another, but continued on their way. Here was the slope they had toiled up on the first day-now a churned-up mire. Things had been discarded in the mud. A powder-horn, a scrap of leather gambeson, a rent piece of linen shirt. And under the bushes at the side of the clearing, two more bodies. These also were civilians. One was headless. Their intestines were coiled like greasy, fly-spotted ropes in the grass.

They trudged down the slope with their hearts hammering in their breasts, and finally the rainforest rolled back and they were stumbling over hewn tree-stumps, cleared space. Before them, the sagging and skewed posts of the stockade stood deserted, and there was a stink of burning in the air, the reek of corruption. Beyond the clearing, they could glimpse the sea through the trees.

“Hello!” Murad shouted, his voice cracking with strain. “Anyone about?”

The gates of the stockade had been smashed flat. A litter of bodies was scattered here, an arquebus trodden into the mud. Blood stood in puddles with a cloud of midges above every one.

“Lord God,” Hawkwood said. Murad covered his eyes.

Fort Abeleius was a charnel-house. The Governor’s residence had burnt to the ground and was still smouldering. Remnants and wreckage from other huts and buildings were scattered about in broken, splintered piles. And there were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, scores of them.

Bardolin turned aside and vomited.

Hawkwood was holding the back of his hand to his nose. “I must see if the ship, survived. I pray to God-”

He took off at a run, stumbling over corpses, leaping broken lumber, and disappeared in the direction of the beach beyond the clearing.

Murad was turning over the bodies like a ghoul prowling a graveyard, nodding to himself, making a study of the whole ghastly spectacle.

“The stockade was overrun from the north first,” he said. “That split our people in two. Some made a stand by the gate, but most I think fell back to the Governor’s residence…” He shambled over that way himself, and picked his way through the burnt ruins of the place that he was to have administered his colony from.

“Here’s Sequero. I know him by the badge on his tunic. Yes, they all crammed in here’-he kicked aside a charred bone-‘and when they had held out for a while, some fool’s match set light to the thatch, or perhaps the powder took light. They might have held out through the night otherwise. It was quick. All so quick. Every one of them. Lord God.”

Murad sank to his knees amid the wreckage and the burnt bodies and set the heels of his hands in his eyes. “We are in hell, Bardolin. We have found it here on earth.”

Bardolin knew better, but said nothing. He felt enough of a turncoat already. There had been over a hundred and forty people here in the fort. Aruan had said the ship would survive. Who manned it now?

“Let’s go down to the sea,” he said to Murad, taking the nobleman by the elbow. “Perhaps the ship is still there.”

Murad came with him in a kind of grieved daze. Together they picked their way across the desolation, gagging on the smell of the dead, and then plunged into the forest once more. But there was that salt tang to the air, and the rush of waves breaking somewhere ahead, a sound from a previous world.

The white blaze of the beach blinded them, and the horizon-wide sea seemed too vast to take in all at once. They had become used to the fetid confines of the rainforest, and it was pure exhilaration to be able to see a horizon again, a huge arc of blue sky. A wind blew off the sea into their hot faces. A landward wind, just as Aruan had promised.

“Glory be!” Bardolin breathed.

The Gabrian Osprey stood at anchor perhaps half a mile from the shore. She looked intact, and wholly deserted-until Bardolin glimpsed some movement on her forecastle. A man waving. And then he caught sight of the head bobbing in the waves halfway to the ship. Hawkwood was swimming out to her, pausing in his stroke every so often to wave to whatever crew remained and shout himself hoarse. Bardolin and Murad watched until he reached the carrack and clung to the wales on her side, too weak to pull himself up the tumble-home. A group of men appeared at the ship’s rail. Some were sailors, a couple wore the leather vests of soldiers. They hauled Hawkwood up the ship’s side, and Bardolin saw one of them embrace his captain.

Murad had sunk down upon the sand. “Well, mage,” he said in something resembling his old manner. “At least one of us is happy. It is time to leave, I think. We have outstayed our welcome in this country. Thus ends New Hebrion.”

But Bardolin knew that this was not the end of something. Whatever it was, it had only just begun.