Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (17 page)

On another wharf a beast transport had her square hull doors open wide, letting out a stench of animal excrement as the frightened cattle within were prodded and cursed down the ramps, scattering dung and straw as they went.

Bardolin and Griella paused to watch a Royal dispatch-runner, a lateen-rigged galleass, come sweeping into the harbour like some precisely rhythmed sea insect, the oars soaring up and out of the water at the same moment and the crew backing the mizzen to heave her to within yards of a free berth. These were the famous deepwater berths of Abrusio, hollowed out by the Fimbrians in past centuries using forced Hebrian labour. Abrusio could accommodate a thousand fully rigged ships at her wharves, it was said, and still have space for more.

Here were boxes of fish and sea squid shining in the hard sunlight, sacks of pepper from Punt or Ridawan, gleaming piles of marmorill tusks from the jungles of Macassar and stumbling, chained lines of slaves bought from the Rovenan corsairs to work the estates of the Hebrian nobility.

Sailors, fishermen, marines, merchants, vintners and longshoremen. They worked without pause in the unrelenting heat with the sweat shining on their faces and limbs - unable, it seemed, to communicate in anything less than a bellow. Bardolin and Griella found themselves holding hands in the crush to avoid being separated, for all the world like father and daughter. The heat glued their palms together with slick perspiration, and inside Bardolin's robe the imp whimpered with the noise and the smells and the jostling press of it.

They stopped half a dozen times to ask for the Hawkwood vessels, but each time were regarded pityingly, like imbeciles abroad by mistake, and then the throng pushed them along again. Finally they found themselves inside the tall, stone-built harbour offices, and there were told by a harried clerk to go to the twenty-sixth outfitting berth and ask for the
Grace of God
or the
Gabrian Osprey
, Ricardo Hawkwood, Master. They would find them easily, they were told. A ship-rigged caravel of one hundred tons, and a low-fo'c'sled carrack twice that tonnage with a mouldy looking bird for a figurehead.

They left the place only slightly less bewildered than when they had entered. This was a different world, down here by the water's edge. This was the world of the sea, with its own rules, laws, and even language. They felt like travellers in a foreign country as they pushed past ship after ship, wharf after wharf, and passed men of every land and faith and colour as they went. Since the easing of the edict in the wake of the Prelate of Abrusio's departure for the Charibon Synod, foreign ships had been putting into Abrusio without let-up. It was as though they were trying to make up for the time they had lost - or would lose again once the Prelate returned and foreigners were once more hauled off their ships and into the catacombs by the hundred.

"There," Bardolin said at last. "I think that's them. See the bird figurehead? It's a sea osprey from the Levangore. One knows from the speckles on its breast."

They stood before a wide stone dock dotted with mooring bollards and littered with guano. Snug in the berth behind the dock were two ships, their bowsprits projecting out over Bardolin's head and their masts tall, rope-tangled edifices towering up into the blue sky.

There were men everywhere it seemed, clinging to every piece of rigging and every rail. Some were out on the hulls on stages, painting the sea-battered wood with what looked like white lead. Others were knotting and splicing furiously in the shrouds. A gang of them were heaving on the windlass, and Bardolin saw that they were replacing a topmast. He knew little of ships, but he knew it was unusual, not to say revolutionary, to have masts in several pieces instead of one long, massive yard. This Hawkwood seemed to take his calling seriously.

Yet more men were on the dock, hauling on tackles attached to the mainyard, lifting net-wrapped bundles of casks and crates up over the ships' sides and on to the decks. On the decks themselves the hatches were wide open and gaping to receive the dangling goods, and Bardolin was astonished to see sheep, goats and cages of chickens go up in the air along with the wine barrels and boxes of salt meat and ship's biscuit. He noted with approval a huge sack of lemons being loaded also. It was thought by many that they combated the killer disease of scurvy, though many others believed the condition was caused by the unsanitary conditions aboard any ship.

"Who are we to talk to?" Griella asked wide-eyed. Her grip on the wizard's hand had not relaxed one whit.

Bardolin pointed to a burly, ornately mustachioed figure on the larger of the two ships. He was standing at the back - the quarterdeck? - and shouting furiously at a group of men down in the waist of the ship. He had a long, eastern water-pipe in one hand and he shook it at the men as though it were a weapon. His hair was cut so short that the sunlight made his scalp gleam through the bristle.

"I would say he is in charge," Bardolin decided.

"Is he this Hawkwood man?"

"I don't know, child. We'll have to ask."

He and Griella made their tortuous way through the piled provisions and cordage and timber on the wharf to where a gangway with raised planks for steps had been thrown down from the waist of the larger ship. Some of the sailors stopped to stare at the hard-faced, soldierly looking man and the shining-haired girl on his arm. There was an appreciative whistle and ribald chatter in a language even Bardolin did not recognize; but the meaning and the gesture that accompanied it were obvious.

Griella spun round on the obscenely capering seamen. With the sunlight in her eyes it seemed they had a yellow glow, and the lips drew back from her white teeth in a snarl.

Bardolin tugged her on, leaving the sailors staring after the pair. One man hurriedly made the Sign of the Saint.

They laboured up the precarious gangplank, which seemed designed for the agility of apes rather than that of men. Once on deck, Bardolin raised a hand to the furious mustachioed man and shouted in his best sergeant of arquebusiers voice:

"Ho there, Captain! Might we have a word with you?"

The man yanked his water-pipe out of his mouth as though it had bitten him and glared at the pair.

"Who in the name of the Prophet's Arse are
you
?"

"Someone who is to take ship with you in a short while. May we speak to you?"

The man's eyes rolled in his head. "A warlock I shouldn't wonder, and his doxy with him too. Sweet Saints, what a trip this is promising to be!"

He turned away from the quarterdeck rail, muttering to himself. Bardolin and Griella looked at one another, and then clambered up towards him, feeling two dozen baleful stares on their backs as they went. It was like intruding on the territory of some alien, primitive tribe.

The quarterdeck was littered with coiled ropes and light spars of timber. Everywhere lines of the running rigging came down to be hitched about fiferails. A brass bell glittered, painfully bright in the sun, and the huge tiller that steered the ship from the half-deck below had been unshipped and lay to one side. The man was leaning on the taffrail and puffing on his gurgling pipe. His eyes were slits of suspicion.

"Well, what do you want? We're outfitting for a blue-water voyage and we're short of men. I have things to do, and passing the time of day with landsmen is not one of them."

"I am Bardolin of Carreirida and this is my ward, Griella Tabard. We have been told we are to be passengers on one of the vessels of Ricardo Hawkwood, and we wanted to see them and ask for advice on preparing for the coming voyage."

The man looked as though he were about to give a sneering answer, but something in Bardolin's eye stopped him.

"You've been a soldier," he said instead. "I can see the helm scar. You don't look like a wizard." He paused, staring into the glass-sided bubble of his pipe for a second, then grudgingly said: "I am Billerand, first mate of the
Osprey
, so don't call me captain, not yet at least. Richard is up in the city wrestling with the provisioners and moneylenders. I don't know when he'll be back."

The imp squirmed in Bardolin's bosom, making Billerand gape.

"Might we talk below?" Bardolin asked. "There are many sets of ears up here."

"All right."

The mate led them down a companionway in the deck and they blinked in the gloom, startling after the harsh brightness of the day. It was close down here; the heat seemed to hang like a tangible thing in their throats. They could smell the wood of the ship, the pitch that caulked the seams, soft and bitter-smelling, and the faint stink of the bilge, like filth and water left to lie stagnant in a warm place. They could hear, too, the thumps and shouts of men off in the ship's hold. It sounded like a fight going on in the adjacent room of a large house, muffled but somehow very near.

They went through a door, stepping over a high storm sill, and found themselves in the Master's cabin. One side of it was taken up by the long stern windows. They could look out and see the harbour sunlit and framed by the curving lines of the interior bulkheads, like a backlit painting of sharp brilliance.

There were two small culverins on either side of the cabin, lashed up tight against their closed gunports. Billerand sat down behind the table that ran athwartships, the scene of the harbour behind him.

"Is that a familiar you have there?" he asked, pointing to the wriggling movement in the breast of Bardolin's robe.

"Aye, an imp."

The mate's face seemed to lighten somewhat. "They're lucky things to have on a ship, imps. They keep the rats down. The men will be pleased with that at least. Let him out, if you please."

Bardolin let the imp crawl out of the neck of his robe. The tiny creature blinked its eyes, its ears moving and quivering on either side of its head. Bardolin could feel its fear and fascination.

Billerand's fierce face relaxed into a smile. "Here, little one. See what I have for you?" He produced a small quid of tobacco from a neck pouch and held it out. The imp looked at Bardolin, and then leapt on to the table and sniffed at the tobacco. It took it delicately in one minute, clawed hand and then began to gnaw on it like a squirrel working at a nut. Billerand scratched it gently behind the ear and his smile widened into a grin.

"As I said, the hands will be pleased." He leaned back again. "What would you have me tell you then, Bardolin of Carreirida?"

"What do you know of this voyage we are to undertake?"

"Very little. Only that it is to the west. The Brenn Isles, maybe. And we are not taking cargo, only passengers and some Hebrian soldiery. We'll be packed in these two ships tighter than a couple on their honeymoon night."

"And the nature of the other passengers, besides the soldiers?"

"Dweomer-folk, like yourself. The hands do not know it yet, and I'd as soon leave it that way for the moment."

"Do you know who is sponsoring the voyage?"

"There is talk of a nobleman, and even of a Royal warrant. Richard has yet to brief his officers."

"What kind of a man is this Hawkwood?"

"A good seaman, even a great one. He has redesigned his ships according to his own lights, despite the grumbling of the older hands. They'll make less leeway than any vessel in this port, I'll promise you. And they're drier than any other ships of their class. I've been in this carrack in a tearing gale off the Malacar Straits with a lee shore a scant league away and a south-easter roaring in off the starboard quarter, but she weathered it. Many another ship, under many another captain, would have been driven on to the shoals and broken."

"Is he a Hebrian native?"

"No, and neither are most of his crews. Nay, our Richard is Gabrionese, one of the mariner race, though he has made his home in Abrusio these twenty years, ever since his marriage to one of the Calochins."

"Is he a... pious man?"

Billerand roared with laughter, and a spit of fluid sparked out of the brim of his pipe. The imp jumped, afraid, but he soothed it with the caress of one callused hand.

"Easy, little fellow, it's all right. No, wizard, he is not particularly pious. Do you think he'd take your sort as supercargo if he was? Why, I've seen him make a sacrifice to Ran the god of storms to placate the tribesmen among the crew. If the Inceptines had heard of that he'd have been burnt flesh a long time ago. You need not fear; he loves the Ravens even less than the next man. They had Julius Albak, the first mate before me and a damned good shipmate, shot in front of our eyes and then they hauled half the crew of the
Grace
off to the catacombs to await the pyre - but our Richard got them back, God knows how."

"Which lands do your seamen come from?" Bardolin asked with interest, perching on a seachest that rested against the forward bulkhead.

Billerand sucked a moment on his gurgling pipe.

"What are these questions in aid of, wizard? You wouldn't be a spy of the Inceptines yourself, would you?"

"Far from it." Bardolin's face changed, going as white as marble, but his eyes flashed. "A friend of mine they burned today, sailor, a boy who was like a son to me. They have wrecked my home and the researches of thirty years. I am about to be exiled because of them. I have no love for the Ravens."

Billerand nodded. "I believe you. And I'll tell you that our crews are from every kingdom and sultanate in Normannia. We've men from Nalbeni and Ridawan, Kashdan and Ibnir. Men of Gabrion who sailed under Richard's father; Northmen from far Hardalen, and even one from the jungles of Punt, though he don't speak much on account of the Merduks cutting out his tongue. We have tribesmen from the Cimbrics captured by the Torunnans and sold as slaves. They were oarsmen in a Macassian galley which we took last year. Richard is their headman now. They have blue faces, with the tattooing.