Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (68 page)

"What do you want of me, lady?" Corfe asked wearily.

"I have spoken to the Pontiff of you, Corfe. He also thinks highly of you. He tells me you have no family, no roots now that the Holy City is no more."

Corfe bent his head. "Perhaps."

She rose from her chair and came over to him. Her hands encircled his face, the fingertips just touching his cheekbones. He could smell the lavender her dress had been stored in, the more subtle perfume that rose off her skin. The brilliant eyes held his.

"There is pain in you, a rawness that may never scab over entirely," she said in a low voice. "It is this that drives you on. You are a man without peace, Corfe, without hope of peace. Was it Aekir?"

"My wife," he said, his voice half strangled in his throat. "She died."

The fingertips brushed his face as lightly as a bee nuzzling a flower. Her eyes seemed enormous: viridian orbs with utter black at their core.

"I will help you," she said.

"Why?"

She leaned down. Her face seemed almost to glow. Her breath stirred his forelock.

"Because I am only a woman, and I need a soldier to do my killing for me." Her voice was as low as the bass note of a lute, dark as heather honey. Her lips brushed his temple and the hair on the back of his neck rose like the pelt of a cat caught in a thunderstorm. They remained like that for an endless second, breathing each other's breath.

Then she straightened, releasing him.

"I will procure a command for you," she said, suddenly brisk. "A flying column. You will take it wherever I wish to send it. You will do whatever it is I want you to do. In return -" She hesitated and her smile made her seem much younger. "In return, I will protect you, and I will see that the intrigues of the court do not hamstring your every move."

Corfe looked up at her from his stool. He was not tall; even had he been standing their eyes would just have been level with each other.

"I still don't understand."

"You will. One day you will. Go to the court chamberlain. Tell him you have need of funds; if he objects, tell him to come to me. Procure for yourself a more fitting wardrobe."

"What of the King?" Corfe asked.

"The King will do as he is told." she snapped, and he saw the iron in her, the hidden strength. "That is all, Colonel. You may go."

Corfe was bewildered. As he stood up she did not move away at once and he brushed against her. Then she turned away from him.

He bowed to her slender backbone, and left the chamber without another word.

I
T WAS A
featureless, windswept land. Flat salt marshes spread out for miles in every direction but the sea. The only sounds were the piping of marsh birds and the hissing of the wind in the reeds. Off to the north-west the Hebros Mountains loomed, their knees already pale with snow.

The longboats were ferrying the last of the stores from the ship. The soldiers had lit fires on the firmer of the reed islands and were busy constructing shelters to keep out the searching wind. Abeleyn stood by one of the fires and stared out at the skewed hulk of the beached carrack. Dietl was beside him, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and pain. They had sealed his stump with boiling pitch, but the agony of seeing his ship in such a pass seemed to have affected him more than the loss of his hand.

"When I come into my kingdom again, you shall have the best carrack in the state fleet, Captain," Abeleyn told him gently.

Dietl shook his head. "Never was there such a ship. She broke my heart, faithful to the last."

They had heaved the guns overboard as the ship took on more and more water, then the heavier of the stores and finally the fresh water casks. The carrack had grounded upon a sandbar with the sea swirling around her hatches, and there had settled, canting to one side as the tide went out. It was a narrow bar, and as the supporting water withdrew her back had broken with an agonized screeching and groaning that seemed almost sentient.

Abeleyn clapped Dietl on his good shoulder and walked away from the fire. "Orsini!"

"Yes, sire." Sergeant Orsini was immediately on hand. He was the only soldier of any rank remaining with Abeleyn's company: the officers had gone down fighting in the two
nefs
.

"What have we got, Sergeant? How many and how much?"

Orsini blinked, his mind turning it over.

"Some sixty soldiers, sire, maybe a dozen of your own household attendants, and the remaining crew of the carrack numbers near thirty. But of that total, maybe twenty are wounded. There's two or three won't last out the night."

"Horses?" Abeleyn asked tersely.

"Drowned in the hold, most of 'em, sire, or shot through with splinters in the battle. We managed to get out your own gelding and three mules. It's all there is."

"Stores?"

Orsini looked at the mounds of waterlogged sacks, crates and casks that were piling up on the little island and its neighbours, half hidden in the yellow reed beds.

"Not much, sire, not for a hundred men. Supplies for a week if we're easy on 'em. Ten days at a pinch."

"Thank you, Sergeant. You'll have a guard rota set up, of course."

"Yes, sire. Nearly every man salvaged his arquebus, though the powder'll take a while to dry."

"Good work, Orsini. That's all."

The sergeant went back to his work. Abeleyn's mouth tightened as he watched the parties of soaked, bloodied and exhausted men setting up their makeshift camp on the soggy reed islands. They had fought a battle, struggled to bring a dying ship to shore, and now they would have to scrabble for survival on this remote coast. He had heard not a word of dissension or complaint. It humbled him.

He knew that they had beached somewhere south of the Habrir river; technically they were in Hebrion, the river marking the border between the kingdom and its attached duchy. This was a desolate portion of Abeleyn's dominions though, an extensive marshland which reached far inland and was crossed by only one or two causeway-raised Royal roads. There would be villages within a day's march, but no town of any significance for fifteen leagues - and that the city of Pontifidad, back to the north-east. Abrusio was over fifty leagues away, and to get to it overland they would have to cross the lower passes of the Hebros, where the mountains that were the backbone of Hebrion plunged precipitously into the sea.

A swoop of wings, and he turned to find Golophin's gyrfalcon perched on a thick reed behind him.

"Where have you been?" he asked shortly.

"The bird or I, sire? The bird has been resting, and well-earned the rest has been. I have been busy, though."

"Well?"

"Rovero and Mercado are ours, thank the Blessed Saints."

Abeleyn muttered a quiet prayer of thanks himself. "Then I can do it."

"Yes. There are other ramifications, though -"

"Talking to birds again, sire?" a woman's voice said. Golophin's familiar took off at once, leaving a barred feather circling in the air behind it.

The lady Jemilla was dressed in a long, fur-trimmed mantle of wool the colour of a cooling ember. She had let her thick mane of ebony hair tumble down about her face, emphasizing the paleness of her skin, and her lips were rouged. Of her pregnancy, some three months gone, there was as yet no visible sign.

Abeleyn's temper flickered a moment, but he mastered it. "You look well, lady."

"Last time you saw me, sire, I was prostrate, retching and green in the face. I should hope that I look well now, by contrast if nothing else." She came closer.

"I trust my men have made you comfortable?"

"Oh, yes," she replied, smiling. "They are such gallants at heart, your soldiers. They have built me a lovely shelter of canvas and driftwood, with a fire to warm it. I feel like the Queen of the Beachcombers."

"And the - the child?"

One hand went immediately to her still-flat belly. "Yet within me, as far as I can tell. My maid was convinced that the seasickness would put paid to it, but the child seems to be a fighter. As a king's child should be."

She was verging on insolence and Abeleyn knew it, but he had ignored her lately and the last few days must have been hard on her. So he merely bowed slightly in acknowledgement, not quite trusting himself to retort with civility.

Her voice changed; it lost its hard edge. "Sire, I apologize if I disturbed you in your... meditations. It is only that I have missed your company of late. My maid has set a skillet of wine on the fire to heat. Will you not join me in a glass?"

There were a million and one things he should be doing, and he was with child himself to hear Golophin's news; but the offer of hot wine was tempting, as was the other, unspoken offer in her eyes. Abeleyn was exhausted to the marrow. The thought of relaxing for a little while decided him. His men could do without him for an hour.

"Very well," he said, and he took the slim hand she extended and let himself be led away.

From its perch on a nearby bulrush, the gyrfalcon watched with cold, unblinking eyes.

H
ER SHELTER WAS
cosy indeed, if a timber-framed canvas hut could be cosy. She had salvaged a couple of chests and some cloaks from the wreck; these did duty as furnishings.

She dismissed the maid and hauled off Abeleyn's bloody, salt-cracked boots with her own hands, tipping a trickle of water out of each; then she ladled out a pewter tankard of the steaming wine. Abeleyn sat and watched the flames of the fire turn from pale transparency to solid saffron as the day darkened. So short, the daylight hours at this time of year. A reminder that this was not the campaigning season, not the proper season for war.

The wine was good. He could almost feel it coursing through his veins and warming his chilled flesh. He recalled Jemilla's maid and ordered her to take the rest of it to the tents of the wounded. He saw Jemilla's lips thin as he did, and smiled to himself. The lady had her own ideas of worthy and unworthy, expendable and indispensable.

"Are you hurt, sire?" she asked. "Your doublet is bespattered with gore."

"Other men's, not mine," Abeleyn told her, sipping his wine.

"It was magnificent - all the soldiers say so. A battle worthy of Myrnius Kuln himself. Of course, I only heard it. Consuella and I were crouched in the stink of the lower hold under sacks; hardly a good post to observe the ebb and flow, the glory of it."

"It was a skirmish, no more," Abeleyn said. "I was careless to think we would get away so easily from Perigraine."

"The corsairs were in league with the other kings, then?" she asked, shocked.

"Yes, lady. I am a heretic. They want me dead - it is that simple. Using corsairs to kidnap or assassinate me rather than national troops was merely to utilize a certain discretion."

"Discretion!"

"Diplomacy has always been a mixture of cunning, courtesy and murder."

She placed a hand on her stomach, seemingly unaware of the gesture. "What of King Mark and King Lofantyr? Were attempts made on their lives?"

"I don't know. Possibly. In any case, when they arrive home they will face men of power who intend to take advantage of the situation. As I will."

"It is rumoured that Abrusio is in the control of the Church and the nobles," Jemilla said.

"Is it? Rumours are unreliable things."

"Are we still travelling to Abrusio, sire?"

"Of course. Where else?"

"I - I had thought -" She collected herself, squaring her shoulders like a woman determined to face bad news. "Are you to be married, sire?"

Abeleyn rubbed his eyes with one hand. "One day I hope to be, yes."

"To the sister of King Mark of Astarac?"

"More rumours?"

"It was the talk of Vol Ephrir when we left."

Abeleyn stared at her. "That rumour happens to be true, yes."

She dropped her eyes. There were also rumours that the lady Jemilla had had a lowborn lover ere Abeleyn had taken her into his bed. She was not sure if the King had heard them.

"Then what of... what of the child I bear?" she asked pitifully.

Abeleyn knew his mistress to be one of the most calculating and accomplished women of his court, the widow of one of his father's best generals; but with his death, she was unrelated to any of the great families of Hebrion. That was one reason why he had allowed himself to be seduced by her: she was alone in this world, and did not belong to any of the power blocs which wrangled in the shadow of the Hebrian throne. She rose or fell on Abeleyn's whim. He could call in Orsini and have her run through here and now, and no one would raise a hand to defend her.

"The child will be looked after," he said. "If it happens to be a boy, and shows promise, then the lad will never lack for anything, I swear to you."

Her eyes were fixed on his, black stabs of colour in her ivory-pale face. Her hand alighted upon his knee.

"Thank you, sire. I have never been blessed with a child before. I hope only that he will grow up to serve you."