Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (77 page)

The camp was a shambles. Murad stood with his fists resting on his lean hips and surveyed it with skull-like intensity. The stream which had run through it had overflowed its soggy banks and the men were sucking through a veritable swamp of mud and decaying vegetation, steam rising like fog from the saturated earth. They had chopped down a score of saplings and tried to fashion a rude palisade, but the wood would not stand up in the soft soil; the stakes sagged and wobbled like rotten teeth.

Ensign di Souza forced his way over to his superior, his boots heavy with mud.

"Sir, I mean your Excellency - the rain. It washed out the camp. We managed to keep some of the powder dry..." He tailed off.

"Move off to one side, away from the stream," Murad barked. "Get the men to it at once. There's not much light left."

A new shape in the gathering gloom and Ensign Sequero, di Souza's more aristocratic fellow officer, appeared, amazingly clean and tidy, having just come from the ship.

"What are you doing ashore, Ensign?" Murad asked. He looked like a man being slowly bent into some quivering new shape, the tension in him a palpable thing. The soldiers went to their work with a will; they knew Murad's displeasure was a thing to avoid.

"Your Excellency," Sequero said with a smile, hovering just below insolence. "The passengers are wondering when they'll be let ashore, and there is the livestock also. The horses especially need a run on dry land, and fresh fodder."

"They will have to wait," Murad said with dangerous quietness. "Now get you back to the ship, Ensign."

Even as he spoke, the light died. It grew dark so quickly that some of the soldiers and sailors stared around fearfully, making the Sign of the Saint at their breasts. A twilight measured in moments followed by pitch blackness, a weight of dark which was broken only by the spatters of stars visible through gaps in the canopy overhead.

"Sweet Ramusio!" someone said. "What a country."

No one spoke for a few minutes. The men stood frozen as the jungle disappeared into the night and became one with it. The noises of the forest changed tone, but did not decrease their volume one whit. The company was in the midst of an invisible bedlam.

"Strike a light, someone, for God's sake," Murad's voice cracked, and the stillness in the camp was broken. Men fumbling in the dark, the sucking squelch of feet in mud. A rattle of sparks. "The tinder's soaked through..."

"Use any dry powder you have, then," Hawkwood's voice said. A sulphuric flare in the night, like a far-off eruption.

"Burn a couple of the stakes. They're the only things which are near-dry."

For perhaps the space of half an hour, the inhabitants of the crown's new colony in the west huddled about a single soldier who was striving to create fire. They might have been men at the dawn of the world, crouched in the terrifying and unknowable dark, their eyes craving the light to see what was coming at them out of the night.

The flames caught at last. They saw themselves; a circle of faces around a tiny fire. The jungle towered off on all sides, the night creatures laughing and croaking at their fear. They were in an alien world, as lost and alone as forgotten children.

H
AWKWOOD AND
B
ARDOLIN
sat by one of the fires later in the night. There were thirty men ashore, lying around half a dozen campfires which spat and hissed in the surrounding mud. A dozen men stood guard with halberd and sword whilst a few others were methodically and cautiously turning a pile of gunpowder off to one side, trying to dry it out without blowing themselves to kingdom come. The arquebuses were useless for the moment.

"We don't belong here," Hawkwood said quietly, chucking Bardolin's imp under the chin so that it gurgled and grinned at him, its eyes two little lamps in the firelight.

"Maybe the first Fimbrians to venture east of the Malvennors said the same thing," Bardolin replied. "New countries, unexplored lands, are always strange at first."

"No, Bardolin, it's more than that and you know it. This country's very nature is different. Inimical. Alien. Murad thought he could wade ashore and start building his own kingdom here, but it won't be that way."

"You wrong him there," the mage said. "After what happened on the ship, I think he knew better than to expect it to be easy. He is feeling his way, but he is hidebound by the conventions of his class and his training. He is thinking like a soldier, a nobleman."

"Are we commoners so much more flexible in our thinking, then?" Hawkwood asked, grinning weakly.

"Maybe. We do not have so much at stake."

"I have a ship - I had two ships. My life is gambled on this throw also," Hawkwood reminded him.

"And I have no other home; this continent is the only place in the world, perhaps, where I and my like can be free of prejudice, make a new beginning," Bardolin retorted. "That, at least, was the theory."

"And yet tonight you were too tired even to conjure up a glimmer of werelight. What kind of omen is that for your new beginning?"

The wizard was silent, listening to the jungle noises.

"What is out there, Bardolin?" Hawkwood persisted. "What manner of men or beasts have claimed this place before us?"

The old mage poked at the fire, then slapped his cheek suddenly, wincing. He peeled an engorged, many-legged thing from his face, eyed it with mild curiosity for a second and then threw it into the flames.

"As I said, there is Dweomer here, more than I have ever sensed in any other place," he said. "The land we saw before us today is thick with it."

"Was that truly a road? Are we to stumble across another civilization here?"

"I think so. I think something exists on this continent which we in the Ramusian west have never even guessed at. I keep thinking of Ortelius, our stowaway Inceptine and werewolf. He was charged with making sure your ships never made it this far, that much is clear. Perhaps he had a fellow on your other vessel, the one that was lost. In any case, his mission was entrusted to him by someone in this land, this strange country upon which we have made landfall. And there is Dweomer running through it all, the work of mages. Hawkwood, I do not think we will leave this continent alive, any of us."

The mariner stared at him across the fire. "Rather soon to be making such predictions of doom, isn't it?" he managed at last.

"Soothsaying is one of the Seven Disciplines, but it is not one of mine, along with weather-working and the Black Change. Yet I feel we have no future here. I know it, and for all Murad's claims and posturings, I think he knows it too."

I
T WAS A
clammy, muddy campsite that presented itself to the shore party with the dawn, but Murad began issuing orders immediately and the soldiers were harangued out of their torpor by Sergeant Mensurado. Nothing had happened during the night, though few of them had slept. Hawkwood for one had missed the lulling rock of his ship beneath him, the waves lapping at the hull. His
Osprey
now seemed to him to be the most secure place in the world.

They staggered down to the brightness of the beach, the heat already being flung at their faces from its reflected glare. The carrack rode at anchor beyond the reef, an incredibly comforting sight for soldier and sailor alike.

Breakfast was ship's biscuit and wood-hard salt pork, eaten cold on the beach. All manner of fruit was hanging within easy reach, but Murad had forbidden anyone to touch the stuff so they ate as if they were still at sea.

Throughout the morning the longboats plied the passage of the reef and brought across stores and equipment. The surviving horses were too weak to swim ashore behind the boats so they were trussed up and lowered into the larger of the vessels like carcasses. Released on dry land for the first time in months, they stood like emaciated caricatures of the fine animals they had once been and Sequero put half a dozen men to finding fodder for them.

The water casks were replenished by Hawkwood's sailors and towed back out to the carrack in bobbing skeins. Another party led by Hawkwood himself rowed out to that part of the reef upon which the wreck of the
Grace of God
rested.

The surf was too rough for them to go close, but they could see a desiccated body wedged in the timbers of the beakhead, unrecognizable, the seabirds and the elements having done their work too well.

Further up the coast there was more wreckage, fragments mostly. The caravel had been shattered by its impact on the reef as if by an explosion. Hawkwood's crew found the shredded remnants of another corpse a mile to the north and some threads of clothing, but nothing more. The caravel's crew and passengers had perished to a man, it seemed.

The passengers aboard the carrack were rowed ashore at last, over eighty of them. They stood on the beach of this new land like folk cast adrift. Which in a way was what they were.

Back in Hebrion it was winter, and the old year was almost over. There would be snow thick upon the Hebros, the winter storms thrashing the swells of the Fimbrian Gulf and the Hebrian Sea. Here the heat was relentless and choking, a miasma of humid jungle stink hanging in their throats like a fog. It sapped their strength, weighed them down like chainmail. And yet the work did not cease, the orders continued to be issued, the activity went on without let-up.

They moved in off the beach a quarter of a mile, perhaps, abandoning the campsite of the night before. Murad set soldiers, civilians and sailors alike to clearing a space between the trunks of the huge trees. Many of the younger trees were felled, and the would-be colonists burned off what vegetation they could, slashing and uprooting that which was too wet to catch fire. They erected shelters of wood and canvas and thatched leaves, and built a palisade as high as a man's head, loopholed for firearms and with crude wooden watchtowers at each corner.

Almost every afternoon the work was halted by the titanic, thunderous rainstorms which came and went like the rage of a petulant god. Some of the colonists fell sick almost at once - the older ones, mostly, and one squalling toddler. Two died raving in fever, the rigours of the voyage and this new land too much for them. Thus the fledgling colony acquired a cemetery within its first week.

T
HEY NAMED THE
settlement Fort Abeleius after their young king. One hundred and fifty-seven souls lived within its perimeter, for Murad would allow none of the colonists to forge off on their own in search of suitable plots of land. For the moment, Hebrion's newest colony was nothing more than an armed camp, ready to repel attack at short notice. No one knew who the attackers might be, or even what they might be, but there were no complaints. The story of the warped bird had spread quickly, and no one was keen to venture into the jungle alone.

Titles were distributed like sweetmeats. Sequero became a
haptman
, military commander of the colony, now that Murad was governor. In reality, Murad still commanded the soldiers personally, but it amused him to see Sequero lording it over his subordinate, di Souza.

Hawkwood became head of the Merchants' Guild, which as yet did not exist, but true to his word Murad had procured monopolies for him and he had them in writing, heavy with seals and ribbons, the signature at the bottom none other than that of Abeleyn himself. They were beginning to grow mould with the damp heat, and he had to keep them tightly wrapped in oilskin packets.

And Hawkwood was ennobled. Plain Richard Hawkwood had become Lord Hawkwood, albeit lord of nothing and nowhere. But it was a hereditary title. Hawkwood had ennobled his family for ever, if he managed to return to Hebrion and raise a family. Old Johann, his rascally father, would have been uproariously delighted, but to Hawkwood it seemed an empty gesture, meaningless in the midst of this steaming jungle.

He sat in his crude hut sorting through what documents he had brought from the ship. Velasca was on the carrack with a skeleton crew. The vessel had been rewatered and they had also taken on board several hundredweight of coconuts, one of the few fruits growing here which Hawkwood recognized.

His original ship's log was gone, lost in the fire which had come close to destroying his ship, and with it the ancient rutter of Tyrenius Cobrian, the only other record of a voyage into the west. Hawkwood had started a new log, of course, but flipping through it he realized with a cold start that there was no sure way he could ever find his way back to Fort Abeleius or this anchorage were he to undertake a second voyage in the wake of the first. The storm which had driven them off course had upset his calculations, and the loss of the log had made things worse for he could not remember every change of course and tack since then. The best he might do was to hit upon the Western Continent at the approximate latitude his cross-staff told him this was and then cruise up and down until he rediscovered the place.

He thought of telling Murad, but decided against it. The scarred nobleman was like a spring being compressed too tightly these days, more haughty and savage than ever. It would do no good.

It was dimming outside, and Hawkwood immediately struck himself a light, a precious candle from their dwindling store. Scarcely had he done so when the dark came, a settling of deep shadow which at some indefinable point became true night.