Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (2 page)

The skipper made himself move forward.

There was water underfoot, sloshing about with the heave of the ship. It looked as though a following sea had swamped the windows; at the forward end of the cabin was a tangle of clothing, weapons, charts, and a small brassbound chest, much battered. But the dead man sat upright in his chair with his back to the stern windows and the brown skin stretched tight as parchment over the lines of his skull. His hands were shrunken claws. The rats had gnawed him. His chair was fixed in wooden runners to the deck, and he was tied into the chair by line after line of sodden cordage. It looked as though he had bound himself; the arms were free. A tattered scrap of paper was clenched in one decaying fist.

"Jakob, what is this we see?"

"I know not, Captain. There has been devilry at work in this ship. This man was the master - see the charts? - and there is a broken cross-staff here too. But what happened to him that he did this?"

"There is no explaining it - not yet. We must go below. See if you can find a lantern here, or a candle. I must have a look at her hold."

"The hold?" The old man sounded doubtful.

"Yes, Jakob. We must see how fast she is making water, and what her cargo is."

The light left the windows and the motion of the ship grew easier as the men on deck put her before the wind. Jakob and his captain gave a last look at the dead master and his skull face, and left. Neither told the other what he was thinking: the dead man had ended his tenure of the world with his face distorted by terror.

B
RIGHT SUNLIGHT AGAIN,
the clean spray of the sea. The other boarders were busy with the lifts and braces, moving yards far heavier than they were used to. The skipper barked a few orders. They would need canvas and fresh cordage. The mainmast shrouds were ripped to shreds on the port side; a wonder she had not rolled out the mast.

"No storm ever did this to a ship," Jakob said, and ran his horny hands along the ship's rail. The wood was torn, punctured. Bitten, the skipper thought, and he felt a cold worm of fear coil in his stomach.

But he shut his face to Jakob's look of enquiry.

"We are mariners, not philosophers. Our task is to make the ship swim. Now are you coming with me or shall I ask one of the youngsters?"

They had sailed the Hebrionese coast for more than two-score years together, weathered more storms than they could remember, hauled in a million fish. Jakob nodded mutely, anger burning away his fear.

The tarpaulins over the hatchways were flapping and torn.

It was dark there, in the very bowels of the ship, and they lowered themselves down with care. One of the others had found and lit a lantern. It was passed down into the dark and by its beam they found themselves surrounded by crates, casks and sacks. There was a musty smell in the air, and again the faint stink of corruption. They could hear the swirl and gurgle of water deeper in the hold, the rolling rumble of loose cargo, the creak of the ship's overworked hull. The stink of the bilge, usually overpowering in a large ship, had been overwhelmed by incoming seawater.

They made their slow way along an avenue between the cargo, the lantern beam swinging shadows in chaotic directions. They found the remains of rats half eaten, but none alive. And there was no sign of the crew. The master in his cabin above might have been piloting the ship alone and unaided until his death.

Another hatch, and a companion ladder leading down, deep into utter blackness. The ship creaked and groaned under their feet. They could no longer hear the voices of their shipmates above, in that other world of salt air and spray. There was only this hole opening on nothingness, and beyond the wooden walls that surrounded them nothing but the drowning sea.

"Water down there, deep enough too," Jakob said, lowering the lantern through the hatch. "I see it moving, but there's no spume. If it's a leak, it's slow."

They paused, peering down into a place neither of them wanted to see. But they were mariners, as the skipper had said, and no man bred to the sea could stand idle and watch a ship die.

The skipper made as if to start down, but Jakob stopped him with an odd smile and went first, the breath rattling audibly in his throat. The skipper saw the light break and splinter on multifaceted water, things bobbing in it, a splash amid the chiaroscuro of shadow and flame.

"Bodies here." Jakob's voice came up, distorted, far away.

"I think I've found the crew. Oh sweet God, his blessed Saints -"

There was a snarling, and Jakob screamed. The lantern went out and in the blackness something thrashed the water into a fury. The skipper glimpsed the yellow gleam of an eye, like a ravening fire far off on a pitch-dark night. His lips formed Jakob's name but no sound came out; his tongue had turned to sand. He backed away and bumped into the sharp corner of a crate.
Run
, some part of his mind shrieked at him, but his marrow had become like granite within his very bones.

Then the thing was swarming up the companion towards him, and he had not even the time to mouth a prayer before it was rending his flesh, and the yellow eyes were witness to his soul's flight.

Part One

The
F
ALL
of
A
EKIR

One

Y
EAR OF THE
S
AINT
551

T
HE
C
ITY OF
God was burning...

Long plumes of fire sailed up from the streets like windcoiled banners, detaching to consume themselves and become lost in the grim thunderheads of impenetrable smoke that lowered above the flames. For miles along the Ostian river the city burned and the buildings crumbled, their collapse lost in the all-encompassing roar of the fire. Even the continuing noise of battle by the western gates, where the rearguard was still fighting, was swallowed up by the bellowing inferno.

The cathedral of Carcasson, greatest in the world, stood stark and black against the flames, a solitary sentinel horned with steeples, nippled with domes. The massive granite shrugged off the heat but the lead on the roof was melting in rivulets and the timber beams were blazing all along their length. The bodies of priests littered the steps; the Blessed Ramusio gazed down sorrowfully with a horde of the lesser saints in attendance, their eyes cracking open, the bronze staffs they held buckling in the inferno. Here and there a gargoyle, outlined in scarlet, grinned malevolently down.

The palace of the High Pontiff was full of looting troops.

The Merduks had ripped down tapestries, hacked apart relics for the precious stones that adorned them, and now they were drinking wine out of the Holy Vessels whilst they waited their turn with captured women. Truly, Ahrimuz had been good to them today.

Further westwards within the city, the streets were clogged with fleeing people and the troops who had been stationed here to guard them. Hundreds were trampled underfoot in the panic, children abandoned, the old and slow kicked aside. More than once a collapsing house would bury a score of them in a fury of blazing masonry, but the rest would spare hardly a glance. Westwards they forged, west towards the gates still held by Ramusian troops, the last remnant of John Mogen's Torunnans, once the most feared soldiers in all the west. These were a desperate rabble now, their valour bled away by the siege and the six assaults which had preceded the last. And John Mogen was dead. Even now, the Merduks were crucifying his body above the eastern gate where he had fallen, cursing them to the last.

The Merduks poured through the city like a tide of cockroaches, glinting and barbed in the light of the fires, their faces shining, sword arms bloody to the elbows. It had been a long siege and a good fight, and at last the greatest city of the west was theirs for the taking. Shahr Baraz had promised to let them loose once the city had fallen and they were intent on plunder. It was not they who were burning the city, but the retreating western troops. Sibastion Lejer, lieutenant of Mogen, had sworn to let not one building fall intact into the hands of the heathens and he and a remnant of men still under orders were methodically burning the palaces and arsenals, the storehouses and pleasure theatres and churches of Aekir, and slaughtering anyone, Merduk or Ramusian, who tried to stop them.

C
ORFE WATCHED THE
tall curtains of flame shift against the darkened sky. The smoke of the burning had brought about a premature twilight, the end of a long day for the defenders of Aekir; for many thousands, the last day.

He was on a flat rooftop, apart from the maelstrom of screaming people below. The sound of them carried up in a solid wave. Fear, anger, desperation. It was as though Aekir itself were screaming, the tormented city in the midst of its death throes, the fire incinerating its vitals. The smoke stung Corfe's eyes and he wiped them clear. He could feel ashes settling on his brow like a black snow.

A tatterdemalion figure, no longer the dapper ensign, he was scorched, ragged and bloodied. He had cast aside his half-armour in the flight from the walls, and wore only his doublet and the heavy sabre that was the mark of Mogen's men. He was short, lithe, deep-eyed. In his gaze alternated murder and despair.

His wife was somewhere down there, enjoying the attentions of the Merduks or trampled underfoot in some cobbled alley, or a burnt corpse in the wreck of a house.

He wiped his eyes again. Damn smoke.

"
Aekir cannot fall
," Mogen had told them. "
It is impregnable, and the men on its walls are the best soldiers in the world. But that is not all. It is the Holy City of God, first home of the Blessed Ramusio. It cannot fall."
And they had cheered.

A quarter of a million Merduks had proved otherwise.

The soldier in him wondered briefly how many of the garrison had or would escape. Mogen's bodyguards had fought to the death after he had gone down, and that had started the flight. Thirty-five thousand men had garrisoned Aekir. If a tenth of them made it through to the Ormann line they would be lucky.

"
I can't leave you, Corfe. You are my life. My place is here
." So she had said with that heartbreakingly lopsided smile of hers, the hair as dark as a raven's feather across her face. And he, fool, fool, fool, had listened to her, and to John Mogen.

Impossible to find her. Their home, such as it was, had been in the shadow of the eastern bastion, the first place to fall. He had tried to get through three times before giving up. No man lived there now who did not worship Ahrimuz, and the women who survived were already being rounded up. Handmaidens of Ahrimuz they would become, inmates of the Merduk field brothels.

Damned stupid bitch. He had told her a hundred times to move, to get out before the siege lines began to cut the city off.

He looked out to the west. The crowds pulsed that way like sluggish blood in the arteries of a felled giant. It was rumoured that the Ormann road was still open all the way to the River Searil, where the Torunnans had built their second fortified line in twenty years. The Merduks had left that one slim way out deliberately, it was said, to tempt the garrison into evacuation. The population would be choking it up for twenty leagues. Corfe had seen it before, in the score of battles that had followed after the Merduks had first crossed the Jafrar Mountains.