Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (78 page)

"Sail ho!" the lookout yelled down from the maintopgallant yard. "A caravel coming out of the eye of the wind, fine on the larboard beam."

"Our reconnaissance returns," Hawkwood said. "With what news I wonder?"

The knot of men stood on the poop deck of the
Pontifidad
and awaited the approaching ship calmly. Two days before a small squadron had been sent out to the west to reconnoitre while the fleet beat up round the headland now safely astern.

Admiral Rovero called up to the lookout from the quarterdeck. "How many sail there?"

"Still just the one, sir. She's got a foretopsail carried away and I see braces on her flying loose."

Abeleyn and Hawkwood looked at one another.

"What do you think, Captain?" Abeleyn asked.

Hawkwood rubbed a hand through the peppery tangle of his beard. "I think the squadron may well have found what it was looking for."

"My thoughts also."

Admiral Rovero thumped up the companionway to the poop and saluted his monarch. "Sire, there's no-one to be seen on her deck. It smells bad to me. Permission to beat to quarters."

"Granted, Rovero. Captain Hawkwood, I believe we should signal the allied contingents. Enemy to north-west. Clear for action."

"Aye sir."

O
VER SEVERAL SQUARE
miles of ocean, the fleet came to urgent, scurrying life. Fifty-three great Ships and dozens of smaller carracks and caravels were travelling north-east with the breeze broad on their larboard beam. The solitary caravel, a small vessel gauging no more than a hundred tons, ran headlong before the wind towards their gaping broadsides.

The fleet was in a rough arrowhead formation. The point was formed of Hebrian ships, the largest contingent. The left barb belonged to the Gabrionese, eleven lean, well-manned vessels with crews of superb seamen. The right barb consisted of the Astarans; larger ships, but less experienced crews. And the shank of the arrowhead was made up of the Sea-Merduks. Their vessels were lighter, as were their guns, but they were crowded with arquebusiers and buckler-men.

All told, over thirty thousand men rode the waves this bright spring morning, fifty leagues off the west coast of Hebrion. It was the greatest conglomeration of naval power the world had yet seen, and its assembling had been the patient work of years. Ten days now they had been cruising westwards together, having rendezvoused off the Hebrian coast a fortnight since. All for this one day, this moment in time. This bright spring morning on the swells of the Western Ocean.

The stink of slow-match drifted up to Abeleyn from the gun-deck, along with the sweat of the sailors as they hauled the great guns outboard so that their muzzles protruded from the ship's sides like blunt spikes. Above him, in the tops, soldiers were loading the wicked little two-pounder swivels, ramming loads down the barrels of their arquebuses, hauling up buckets of seawater to fight the inevitable fires that would catch in the sails.

The caravel was less than three cables away now, and careering directly for the flagship. There was no-one at her tiller, but her course was unerring.

"I don't like this. That's a dead ship with a live helm," Rovero said. "Sire, permission to blow her out of the water."

Abeleyn paused in thought, and for a moment could have sworn that the regard of all those hundreds of sailors and soldiers and marines was fastened upon him alone. At last he said: "Granted, Admiral."

The signal-pennants went up, and moments later the massed ordinance of the fleet began to thunder out, awesome as the wrath of God.

The caravel disappeared in a murderous storm of spuming water. Hawkwood saw timbers flying high in the air, a mast lurch and topple enmeshed in rigging. Cannonballs fell short and overshot, but enough were on target to smash the little vessel to kindling. When it reappeared it was a dismasted hulk, low in the water and surrounded by debris. The gulls shrieked overhead as the smoke and roar of the broadsides died away.

"I hope to God we were right," Admiral Rovero murmured.

"Look at her decks!" someone yelled from the masthead.

Men crowded the ship's rail, impatient for the powder-smoke to clear. The knot of officers on the poop were higher up, and thus saw it before the sailors in the waist.

Cockroaches?
Hawkwood thought.
My God.

As the caravel settled, black, shining things were clambering up out of her hatches and taking to the sea, for all the world like some aquatic swarm of beetles. A horrified buzz ran through the ship as the men glimpsed them.

"Back to your stations!" Hawkwood roared. "This is a King's ship, not a pleasure-yacht! Bosun - start that man by the cathead."

The beetle-figures tried to clasp onto the wreckage of the caravel, but it was in its death-throes, circling stern-first down into a foaming grave and sucking most of them down with it. Soon there was nothing left on the surface of the sea but a few bobbing fragments of wreckage.

A yelp of pain as the Bosun brought a knotted rope's end down on some unfortunate's back. The men returned to their battle-stations, but their whispering could be heard like a low surf from the poop.

"They captured our squadron, and obviously are aware of our location," Admiral Rovero said.

Whatever
they
are
, Abeleyn thought. But he nodded in agreement. "That is what we wanted, after all. We cannot cruise indefinitely. The enemy must come to us." He turned to Hawkwood, and lowered his voice. "Captain, the things in that ship. Have you -"

"No sire. We saw nothing like that in the west."

As Hawkwood spoke there was the sudden flap and crack of wilting canvas overhead. They looked up to see the sails go limp as the wind died. For a few moments it was so silent on board that the only noise seemed to be the rasping of the sea past the cutwater. Then that faded too.

The very waves became still. In the space of half a glass the entire fleet was wallowing in a clock-calm, its formation scrambling as the ships began to box the compass. The descent of the stillness was astonishing

"What in the world?" King Abeleyn said. "Captain, this cannot be right."

"It's not natural," Hawkwood told him. There's sorcery at play here - weather-working."

The ship's bell rang out, and seconds later those of the other ships in the fleet followed suit as their quartermasters collected their wits. The sound was somehow desolate in the midst of that vast, dead ocean. Seven bells. It was barely midafternoon. The sea was a vast blue mirror, as even and unruffled as the flawless sky above it. The fleet resembled nothing so much as a chaotic, bristling city somehow set afloat upon the ocean, and for all its teeming might, it was dwarfed into insignificance by the vastness of the element which surrounded it. The gulls had disappeared.

T
HE PRETERNATURAL CALM
lasted into the evening, when a mist began to creep up on the fleet from the west. Faint as spider-silk at first, it swiftly thickened into a deep fog laden with moisture, blotting out the stars, the young moon, even the mast-lanterns of all but neighbouring ships. Into the night the conches blew, arquebuses were fired at stated intervals, and lookouts posted fore and aft shouted their enquiries into the blank grey wall. It was deemed unwise to put off in smallcraft in such a fog, and so the fleet drifted with flaccid sails, and crews spent anxious hours at the rail with long poles, lest they be needed to ward off a collision. All order was lost, and ships of Astarac became entangled with ships of Gabrion, and slim Merduk vessels were thumped and dunted by great Hebrian galleons.

T
HE
K
INGS OF
Hebrion and Astarac, along with Admiral Rovero and Captain Hawkwood met in the Great Cabin of the
Pontifidad
just after eight bells had struck the end of the last dog-watch. King Mark had set out for the flagship to confer with his Royal cousin just after the fog had descended, and had been several hours in a cutter, rowed from ship to ship until he found his goal. His face was pasty and ill-looking despite the motionless sea.

The setting was a magnificent one, the curving, gilded sweep of the stern-windows glittering in the light of overhead lanterns slung in gimbals, and two eighteen-pounder culverins bowsed up snug to their ports forward. The long table that ran athwartships was covered in charts, wineglasses, and a decanter. The liquid within the latter was as level as if it sat upon dry land.

"The men are becoming tired," Hawkwood said. "We've had them at quarters for nigh on six hours - the last watch has missed its turn belowdecks -"

"The enemy is very close, somewhere out in the fog," Rovero said harshly. "They have to be. They'll come at us ere the dawn. The men must remain at their posts."

A momentary silence. They sipped their wine and listened to the melancholy calls of the lookouts, the far-off crack of an arquebus. Hawkwood had never known a crew so quiet - usually there was a hum of talk, a splurge of laughter, ribaldry or profanity to be heard, even as far aft as this - but the ship's company waited on deck in the dew-laden darkness with scarcely a word, their eyes wide as they watched the wall of fog swirl formlessly before them.

"And who - or what - exactly are the enemy?" King Mark asked. "Those things in the caravel were not human, or did not appear so. Nor did they seem to be shifters like those encountered by the captain here on his expedition."

The table looked at Hawkwood. He could only shrug. "I am as much in the dark as anyone sire. It's a fair number of years since that voyage. Who knows what they have been doing there in that time, what travesties they have been hatching?"

A knock on the cabin door, and a marine stepped in. "Lord Murad, sire. Desires an audience." The marine's face was chalky with fear.

Hawkwood and Rovero shared a swift look, but then Murad was with them, bowing prettily to his king. "I hope I see you well, sire." To their surprise his voice shook as he spoke. Water droplets beaded his face.

"You do. How was the haul to the flagship, cousin? The night is as thick as soup."

"My coxswain hailed every ship in turn until we found the
Pontifidad
. He is as hoarse as a crow and I am dew-soaked and salt-crusted. We followed in the wake of King Mark, it seems. Your Majesty, forgive me" - this to Mark of Astarac, who sat watching wordlessly - "Duke Frobishir of Gabrion has also been looking for the flagship, I am told. He must be still out there in the fog. A man could be rowed around all night and finish where he started, it is so thick. But I am forgetting my manners. Admiral Rovero, my compliments - and here of course is my old comrade and shipmate, Captain Hawkwood. It has been a while, Captain, since we exchanged more than a nod at court."

Hawkwood nodded, face closed.

Murad had put on some flesh since returning from his ill-starred voyage to the Western Continent. He would never be plump, but there was a certain sleekness to him now which made his scarred, wedge-shaped face less sinister than it once had been. Neither would he ever be handsome in any conventional sense, but his eyes were deep-set coal-gleams which missed nothing and which gazed often, it was said, on the naked forms of other men's wives. This despite his marriage to the celebrated beauty Lady Jemilla. Hawkwood met those obsidian eyes and felt the mocking challenge within them. The two men were bitter enemies, the mariner's elevation of the past few years seemingly adding an even keener edge to Murad's hatred, but they kept up a civilised enough pretence in front of the King.

Murad's initial discomfiture had fled. "I have brought you a gift, sire, something which I think we may all find intriguing, and, dare I say it, educational. With your permission -" He raised his voice to a shout. "Varian! Have it brought in here!"

There was a commotion in the companionway beyond the stern-cabin, men swearing and bumping. The door opened to admit four burly sailors dragging a large hessian sack which bulged heavily. They dropped it on the deck of the Great Cabin, knuckled their foreheads to the astonished company within, and then left with a strange, hunted haste.

The thing stank, of stagnant seawater, and some other, nameless reek which Hawkwood could not identify, though it seemed hauntingly familiar. The men in the cabin rose to their feet to peer as Murad pulled back the mouth of the sack.

Something black and gleaming lay bundled within.

The nobleman took his poniard and ripped open the hessian with a flourish. Spilling out onto the cabin floor was what seemed at first glance to be a jumbled set of black armour. But the stink that poured out of it set them all to coughing and reaching for handkerchiefs.

"God Almighty," Abeleyn exclaimed.

"Not God, sire," Murad said grimly. "Nothing to do with God at all."

"How did you snare it?" demanded Hawkwood.

"We trolled for it with a net one of the crew had, in the wake of the caravel's sinking. We brought up others - all dead, like this - but threw them back and kept this as the finest specimen." There was surly triumph in Murad's voice.

"At least they drown, then, like normal beasts," Rovero said. "What in the Saint's name is that stuff? It's not metal."