Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (110 page)

He dropped his head again and continued to work on the rude crutch he was fashioning from a broken oar, then paused. His dirk still had some of Murad's blood on it. He wiped the cold-running perspiration from his face.

Jemilla was right perhaps. The world had indeed run mad, or else those unseen powers which fashioned its courses were possessed of a bitter humour. Well, this particular race was almost run.

For a moment the light of the fire was a broken dazzle in Hawkwood's remaining eye. He had been loved by a queen, only to lose her almost as soon as he found her. And Murad was dead at last. Oddly, he could take no joy in the nobleman's end. There had been something in his dying eyes which inspired not triumph, but pity. A baffled surprise perhaps. Hawkwood had seen that look in the faces of many dying men. No doubt he would one day wear it himself.

"I know nothing of this part of the world," Bleyn said. Whither shall we go now?"

"North," Hawkwood told him, fighting himself upright and trying out the crutch for size. His breath came in raw, ragged gasps. "We are in the country of friends; for now, at any rate. We must stay ahead of the Himerians and get to Torunn."

"And what then?"

Hawkwood hobbled unsteadily over to him. "Then it'll be time to get drunk." He clapped the boy on the shoulder, unbalancing himself, and Bleyn helped him keep his feet.

"We'll need horses and a cart, then. You won't get far on that."

Jemilla watched them as they stood together beyond the firelight, so alike, and yet so different. Father and son. She wiped her eyes angrily, covertly. That knowledge would remain sealed in her heart until the day she died.

"Bleyn is now the rightful king of Hebrion," she said aloud, and the sailors about the fire looked at her. "He is the last of the Hibrusid Royal house, whether born on the wrong side of the blanket or no. You all now owe him your allegiance, and must aid him in any way you can."

"Mother -" Bleyn began.

"Do not forget that, any of you. When we get to Torunn his heritage will be made public. The wizard Golophin already knows of it. That is why we were told to take ship with you."

"So the rumours were true," Arhuz said. "He is Abeleyn's son."

"The rumours were true. He is all that is left of the Hebrian nobility."

Hawkwood nudged Bleyn, who stood wordless and uncertain. "I beg leave for leaning on the Royal shoulder, Majesty. Do you think you could stir the Royal legs and go hunt us up some more firewood?" And both Bleyn and the mariners about the fire laughed, though Jemilla's thin face darkened. The boy left Hawkwood and went out into the moonlit darkness on his errand, while the mariner stumped back to the fire.

"Jemilla," he said sharply, and she glared at him, ready for argument. But Hawkwood only smiled gently at her, his eyes fever-bright.

"He'll make a good king."

T
HE NEXT MORNING
the early sunlight rose over the world to reveal bars of smoke rising up from the south-western horizon. The nearest was scarcely ten miles away. The castaways climbed out of their blankets, shivering, and stamped their feet, staring at the besmirched sky. There was little talk, and less to eat, and so they started off at once, hoping to come across some friendly village or farm that would speed them in their journey.

Villages and farms they found in plenty, but they were all deserted. The inhabitants of the surrounding countryside had seen the smoke on the air also, and had decided not to await its coming. Bleyn and Arhuz ranged far ahead of the rest of them and procured food in plenty, and extra blankets for the chill nights, but all manner of steed and vehicle had left with their fleeing owners, and so they must needs limp along on foot, their faces always set towards the north, and Hawkwood the slowest of them all, the dressing on his eye weeping a thin continual stream of yellow fluid.

Four days they proceeded in this manner, sleeping in empty farmhouses at night and starting their daily marches before dawn. On the fifth day, however, they finally caught up with the streams of other refugees heading north and joined a straggling column of the dispossessed that choked the road for as far as the eye could see. The crutch-wielding Hawkwood was found space on the back of a laden waggon, and Jemilla joined him, for the mariner's fever had risen inexorably over the past few days, and she kept him well wrapped and wiped the sweat and the pus from his burning face.

The days were becoming warmer as late spring edged into an early summer, and the crowds of people that choked the roads sent up a lofty cloud of dust that hung in the air to match the palls of smoke behind them. Talking to the fleeing Torunnans, Bleyn learned that Rone had fallen after a bitter assault, and its defenders had been massacred to a man. The ships docked in the harbour had been burned and the land about laid waste. The Torunnan commander, Melf, and Admiral Berza of the fleet were both dead, but their stand had bought time for the general population to get away from the jubilant Perigrainians and Candelarians persuing them. But ordered companies of disciplined men will always make better time than mobs of panicked civilians, and the enemy were gaining. What would happen when the Himerian forces caught up with the refugees no one would speculate upon, though many of them had lived through the Merduk wars and had seen it all before.
Where is the King?
they asked.
Where is the army? Can they all be up in Gaderion or have they given any thought to the south at all?
And they trudged along the dusty roads in their tens of thousands, holding their children in their arms, and hauling hand-carts piled high with their possessions, or urging along slow-moving ox-waggons with a frantic cracking of whips.

"H
ELP ME GET
him off the waggon," Jemilla told her son, and together the two of them lifted the delirious Hawkwood from the bed of the overburdened vehicle as it trundled forward relentlessly in the heat and the dust. The mariner jerked and kicked in their arms and mumbled incoherently. The heat of his body could be felt even through the sodden blanket in which he was wrapped.

The other sailors had long deserted them, even Arhuz, becoming lost in the trudging crowds and teeming roadsides. So it was with some difficulty that Jemilla and Bleyn carried their mumbling burden off the road and through the ranks of refugees, until they were clear of the exodus and could lay the mariner down on a grassy bank not far from the eaves of a green-tipped beech wood. Jemilla laid her palm on his hot brow and thought she could almost feel the poison boiling within his skull.

"His wound has gone bad," she said. "I don't know what we can do." She took the mariner's hand and his brown fingers clenched about her slender pale ones, crushing the blood out of them. But she said no word.

Bleyn knuckled his eyes, looking very young and lost. "Will he die, mother?"

"Yes. Yes, he will. We will stay with him." And then Jemilla shocked her son by bowing her head and weeping silently, the tears coursing down her pale, proud face. He had never in his short life seen his mother cry. And she clung to this man as though he were dear to her, although during the voyage she had treated him haughtily, as a noblewoman would any commoner.

"Who was he?" Bleyn asked her, amazed.

She dried her eyes quickly. "He was the greatest mariner of the age. He made a voyage which has passed already into legend, though small reward he received for it, for he was of low blood. He was a good man, and I - I loved him once. I think perhaps he loved me, back in the years when the world was a sane place." The tears came again, though her face remained unchanged. More than anything she wanted to tell Bleyn who this man really was, but she could not. He must never know, not if he were to make his claim to Hebrion with any conviction.

Even to herself, Jemilla's reasoning seemed hollow. The Five Kingdoms were gone, their last hope, Torunna, falling to pieces in front of her eyes. There would soon be no room in the world for herself and her son and the old order of things. But she had come too far to relinquish hope now. She remained silent.

The day passed around them unnoticed as they sat on the grass, a trio of lost people to one side of a great concourse of the lost and the fearful and the fleeing.

H
E REMEMBERED THE
light of the sun on the warm waters of the Levangore, the green light through the waves, the white beaches of the Malacars. He saw again the empty horizon of the west, and out of it the violent emerald jewel of the Western Continent arising, a whole new world. He smelled salt, and felt the deck tilt under his feet, and smiled because he was where he should be; on his ship, with a fair wind on the quarter and the whole wide world awaiting him.

Hawkwood's eye opened, and he gripped Jemilla's hand until the bones creaked under his strong fingers.

"Clew up, clew up, there," he whispered in a cracked, dry voice. "Billerand, set courses and topsails. Steer due west with the wind on the quarter."

Then he sighed, and the pressure of his fingers relaxed. The light faded from his eye.

Richard Hawkwood's long voyaging was over.

Twenty-One

A
RUAN WOKE OUT
of sleep with the knowledge that something had changed in the black hours of the night, some balance had shifted. He was a master of Soothsaying, as he was of every other Discipline, but this feeling had nothing to do with the Dweomer. It was more akin to an old man's aches before a storm.

He rose and called for his valet and was quickly washed and robed in the austere splendour of the Pontifical apartments, for he resided there now, though Himerius and not he was Pontiff in the eyes of the world. He looked out of the high window upon the cloisters of Charibon below and saw that the dawn had not yet come and the last hours of the night still hung heavy above the horns of the cathedral and the library of St. Garaso.

He clenched and unclenched one blue-veined fist and stared at it darkly. He had over-tired himself in his travels, bending the wills and raising the hearts of men up and down the length of the continent. But now Rone had fallen and Southern Torunna was being invaded with little resistance, while at Gaderion, Bardolin had laid the curtain wall in ruins and the Torunnans there were besieged within their three great fortresses, relief column and all. Hebrion and Astarac and Almark and Perigraine were conquered, their peoples his to command, their nobility extinguished. Only Fimbria now stood alone and aloof from the convulsions of the world, for the Electorates had sent no word since the departure of their embassy months before. Well, they would be dealt with in time.

But still he was afflicted by a restless uneasiness. He felt that he had overlooked some piece of his opponent's upon the gaming board of war, and it troubled him.

A
S DAWN FINALLY
broke open the sky in bands of scarlet behind the white peaks of the Cimbrics, King Corfe Cear-Inaf brought his army down from the foothills to the shores of the Sea of Tor, and where the land levelled out into the first wolds of the Torian Plains, he set his men into line of battle, a scant four miles from the outskirts of Charibon itself. It was the eleventh day of Enderialon in the Year of the Saint 567, and it was thirty-one days since he had set out from Torunn.

The army he led was a good deal smaller than that which had taken ship on the Torrin River those weeks before. Many had died in the unforgiving mountains, and over two thousand men, Fimbrians and Torunnans and tribesmen, had been detached while still high up in the foothills, their mission to destroy the Himerian transports docked at the eastern shore of the Sea of Tor, and thus cut the supply lines of the army which was entrenched in the Thurian Line and before Gaderion.

So it was with less than twenty-two thousand troops that Corfe descended from the high places to give battle to the forces of the Second Empire before the very gates of their capital. It was still dark as he set his men into line, and despite their depleted numbers their ranks stretched for over two and a half miles.

He rested his right flank on the shore of the Sea itself, and there three thousand Torunnan arquebusiers were placed in four ranks, each half a mile long. To their left was the main body of the Orphans, eight thousand Fimbrian pikemen under Marshal Kyne, with a thousand more arquebusiers mingled in their files. The pike phalanx bristled nine ranks deep and had a frontage of a thousand yards. Next to them stood another three thousand arquebusiers, and out on the far left was the main body of the Cathedraller cavalry, four thousand heavy horsemen in four ranks, armed with lance and sabre and matchlock pistols, their lacquered armour gleaming red as blood in the morning light. Comillan had been newly made their commander, their previous leader having died in the snows. Hidden in their midst were three batteries of horse-artillery and their teams, awaiting the signal to unlimber and begin firing.

Behind this first wave, and closer to the left of the line than its centre, rode the Torunnan King himself at the head of his five-hundred strong bodyguard. He kept back with him a mixed formation of some two thousand Fimbrians and Torunnans to act as a general reserve, and also to bolster the open flank. For off on that flank, on the higher ground leading down to Charibon, the Citadel of the Knights squatted, a grey low-built fortress around which were the tents and baggage of a small army. As the Torunnans advanced towards Charibon proper, they would have this fortress and encampment in their left rear. Not only that, but the fast-riding Cathedraller scouts who had been scouring the land about the army for days had only yesterday reported seeing a large body of infantry bivouacked some fifteen miles to the west of Charibon, square upon the Narian Road. They had not drawn close enough to the force to ascertain its nationality, but there was little doubt that it consisted of more levies on their way to swell the ranks of the Empire. And so Corfe had hurried his men through the night, to attack Charibon before this fresh army came up.