by Paul Kearney
He stepped forward. “Are there any among you who can speak for the rest, in Normannic?”
The men muttered amongst themselves, and finally one rose and shuffled to the fore, his chains clinking.
“I speak your tongue, Torunnan.”
He was huge, with hands as wide as dinner plates and the scars of old lashings about his limbs. His tawny beard fell on to his chest but two bright blue eyes glinted out of the brutish face and met Corfe’s stare squarely.
“What’s your name?” Corfe asked him.
“I am called the Eagle in my own tongue. You would say my name was Marsch.”
“Can you speak for your fellows, Marsch?”
The slave shrugged his massive shoulders. “Perhaps.”
“Do you know why you were taken from the galleys?”
“No.”
“Then I will tell you. And you will translate what I say to your comrades, without misinterpretation. Is that clear?”
Marsch glared at him, but he was obviously curious. “All right.”
“All right, sir,” Ebro hissed at him, but Corfe held up a hand. He pitched his voice to carry across the square.
“You are no longer slaves of the Torunnan state,” he called out. “From this moment on you are free men.” That caused a stir, when Marsch had translated it, a lifting of the apathy. But there was no lessening of the mistrust in the eyes which were fixed on him. Corfe ground on.
“But that does not yet mean that you are free to do as you please. I am Corfe. From this moment on you will obey me as you would one of your own chieftains, for it is I who have procured your freedom. You are tribesmen of the Cimbrics. You were once warriors, and now you have the chance to be so again, but only under my command.”
Marsch’s deep voice was following Corfe’s in the guttural language of the mountain tribes. His eyes never left Corfe’s face.
“I need soldiers, and you are what I have been given. You are not to fight your own peoples, but are to battle Torunnans and Merduks. I give you my word on that. Serve me faithfully, and you will have honour and employment. Betray me, and you will be killed out of hand. I do not care which God you worship or which tongue you speak as long as you fight for me. Obey my orders, and I will see that you are treated like warriors. Any who do not choose to do so can go back to the galleys.”
Marsch finished translating, and the square was filled with low talk.
“Sir,” Ebro said urgently, “no one gave you authority to free these men.”
“They are my men,” Corfe growled. “I will not be a general of slaves.”
Marsch had heard the exchange. He clinked forward until he was towering over Corfe.
“You mean what you say, Torunnan?”
“I would not have said it otherwise.”
“And you will give us our freedom, in exchange for our swords?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you choose us as your men? To your kind we are savages and unbelievers.”
“Because you are all I have got,” Corfe said truthfully. “I don’t take you because I want to, but because I have to. But if you will take service under me, then I swear I will speak for you in everything as though I were speaking for myself.”
The hulking savage considered this a moment.
“Then I am your man.” And Marsch touched his fist to his forehead in the salute of his people.
Others in the square saw the gesture. Men began to struggle to their feet and repeat it.
“If we break faith with you,” Marsch said, “then may the seas rise up and drown us, may the green hills open up and swallow us, may the stars of heaven fall on us and crush us out of life for ever.”
It was the old, wild oath of the tribes, the pagan pledge of fealty. Corfe blinked, and said:
“By the same oath, I bind myself to keep faith with you.”
The men in the square were all on their feet now, repeating Marsch’s oath in their own tongue.
Corfe heard them out. He had the oddest feeling that this was the beginning of something he could not yet grasp: something momentous that would affect the remaining course of his life.
The feeling passed, and he was facing five hundred men standing manacled in the rain.
He turned to the young ensign, who was open-mouthed. “Strike the chains from these men.”
“Sir, I—”
“Do it!”
The ensign paled, saluted quickly, and ran off to get the keys. Ebro looked entirely at a loss.
“Ensign,” Corfe snapped, and his aide came to attention. “You will find a warm billet for these men. If there are no military quarters available, you will procure a private warehouse. I want them out of the rain.”
“Yes, sir.”
Corfe addressed Marsch once more. “When did you last eat?”
The giant shrugged again. “Two, three days ago. Sir.”
“Ensign Ebro, you will also procure rations for five hundred from the city stores, on my authority. If anyone questions you, refer them to—to the Queen Dowager. She will endorse my orders.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, I—”
“Go. I want no more time wasted.”
Ebro sped off without another word. Torunnan guards were already walking through the crowd of tribesmen unlocking their ankle chains. The arquebusiers had lit their match and were holding their firearms at the ready. As the tribesmen were freed, they trooped over to stand behind Marsch.
This is my command, Corfe thought.
They were starved, half naked, weaponless, without armour or equipment; and Corfe knew he could not hope to obtain anything for them through the regular military channels. They were on their own. But they were his men.
PART TWO
THE WESTERN CONTINENT
TEN
T HE air was different, somehow heavy. It trickled down their throats and through the interstices in their armour and lodged there, a solid, unyielding presence. It ballooned their lungs and crimsoned their faces. It brought the sweat winking out in glassy beads on their foreheads. It made the soldiers pause to tug at the neck of their cuirasses as though they were trying to loosen a constricting collar.
The white sand clung to their boots. They screwed up their eyes against its brightness and slogged onwards. In a few steps, the boom of the surf out on the reef became distant, separate. The sun faded as the jungle enfolded them, and the heat became a wetter, danker thing.
The Western Continent.
Sand gave way to leaf mulch underfoot. They slashed aside creepers and the lower boughs of the trees, sharp palm fronds, huge ferns.
The noise of the sea, their universe for so long, faded away. It was as if they had entered some different kingdom, a place which had nothing to do with anything they had known before. It was a twilit world enshadowed by the canopy of the immense trees which soared up on all sides. Naked root systems like the tangled limbs of corpses on a battlefield tripped them up and plucked at their feet. Tree trunks two fathoms in diameter had discs of fungi embedded in their flanks. A bewildering tangle of living things, the very atmosphere full of buzzing, biting mites so that they drew them into their mouths when they breathed. And the stink of decay and damp and mould, overpowering, all-pervading.
They stumbled across a stream which must have had its outlet on the beach. Here the vegetation was less frenetic and they could make a path of sorts, slashing with cutlass and poniard.
When they halted to rest and catch their breath—so hard to do that here, so hard to draw the thick air into greedy lungs—they could hear the sound of this new world all around them. Screeches and wails and twitterings and warblings and hoots of human-sounding laughter off in the trees. A symphony of invisible, utterly unknown life cackling away to itself, indifferent to their presence or intentions.
Several of the soldiers made the Sign of the Saint. There were things moving far up in the canopy, where the world had light and colour and perhaps a breeze. Half-glimpsed leaping shadows and flutterings.
“The whole place is alive,” Hawkwood muttered.
They had found a tiny clearing wherein the stream burbled happily to itself, clear as crystal in a shaft of sunlight which had somehow contrived to survive to the forest floor.
“This will do,” Murad said, wiping sweat from his face. “Sergeant Mensurado, the flag.”
Mensurado stepped forward, his face half hidden in the shade of his casque, and stabbed the flagpole he had been bearing into the humus by the stream.
Murad produced a scroll from his belt pouch and unrolled it carefully as Mensurado’s bark brought the file of soldiers to attention.
“ ‘In this year of the Blessed Saint five hundred and fifty-one, on this the twenty-first day of Endorion, I, Lord Murad of Galiapeno do hereby claim this land on behalf of our noble and gracious sovereign, King Abeleyn the Fourth of Hebrion and Imerdon. From this moment on it shall be known as—’ ” he looked up at the cackling jungle, the towering trees—“as New Hebrion. And henceforth as is my right, I assume the titles of viceroy and governor of this, the westernmost of the possessions of the Hebriate crown.’ ”
“Sergeant, the salute.”
Mensurado’s parade-ground bellow put the jungle cacophony to shame.
“Present your pieces! Ready your pieces! Fire!”
A thunderous volley of shots went off as one. The clearing was filled with toiling grey smoke which hung like cotton in the airless space.
The forest had gone entirely silent.
The men stood looking up at the crowded vegetation, the huge absence of sound. Instinctively, everyone stepped closer together.
A crashing of undergrowth, and Ensign di Souza appeared, scarlet face and yellow hair above his cuirass, with a pair of sailors and Bardolin the mage labouring in his wake. The wizard’s imp rode on his shoulder, agog.
“Sir, we heard shooting,” he panted.
“We have seen off the enemy,” Murad drawled. He loosened the drawstrings on the Hebrian flag and it fell open, a limp gold and crimson rag.
“Report, Ensign,” he said sharply, waving powder-smoke from in front of his face.
“The second wave of boats are ashore, and the mariners are off-loading the water casks as we speak. Sequero asks your permission, sir, to get the surviving horses ashore and start hunting up fodder for them.”
“Permission denied,” Murad said crisply. “The horses are not a priority here. We must secure a campsite for the landing party first, and investigate the surrounding area. Who knows what may be lurking in this devil’s brush about us?”
Several of the soldiers glanced round uneasily, until Mensurado, with shouts and kicks, got them to reloading their arquebuses.
Murad considered the little clearing. The forest noises had started up again. Already they were becoming used to them, a background irritation, not a thing to fear.
“We’ll throw up a camp here,” he said. “It’s as good a place as any, and we’ll have fresh water. Captain Hawkwood, your men can refill their water casks here also.”
Hawkwood looked at the knee-deep stream, already muddied by the boots of the soldiers, and said nothing.
Bardolin joined him. The old wizard mopped his streaming face with his sleeve and gestured at the surrounding jungle.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before? Such trees!”
Hawkwood shook his head. “I’ve been to Macassar, the jungles inland from the Malacars, after ivory and hides and river-gold, but this is different. This has never been cleared; it is the original forest, a country where man has never made a mark. These trees might have stood here since the Creation.”
“Dreaming their strange dreams,” Bardolin said absently, caressing his imp with one hand. “There is power in this place, Hawkwood. Dweomer, and something else. Something to do with the very nature of the land, perhaps. It has not yet noticed us, I think, but it will, in its slow way.”
“We’ve always said the place might be inhabited.”
“I am not talking about inhabitants, I am talking about the land itself. Normannia has been scoured and gouged and raped for too long; we own it now. We are its blood. But here the land belongs only to itself.”
“I never took you for a mystic, Bardolin,” Hawkwood said with some irritation. His injured shoulder was paining him.
“Nor am I one.” The mage seemed to come awake. He smiled. “Maybe I’m just getting old.”
“Old! You’re more hale than I am.”
Two seamen appeared: Mihal and Masudi, one bearing a wooden box.
“Velasca wants to know if he can let the men have a run ashore, sir,” Masudi said, his black face gleaming.
“Not yet. This isn’t a blasted pleasure trip. Tell him to concentrate on getting the ship rewatered.”
“Aye, sir,” Masudi said. “Here’s the box you wanted from the cabin.”
“Put it down.”
Murad joined them. “I’m taking a party on a reconnaissance of the area. I want you two to come with us. Maybe you can sniff out things for us, Mage. And Hawkwood, you said—”
“I have it here,” Hawkwood interrupted him.
He bent to open the box at his feet. Inside was a brass bowl and an iron sliver which had been pasted on to a wafer of cork. Hawkwood filled the bowl from the stream. Some of the soldiers crowded round to look and he barked angrily: “Stand aside! I can’t have any metal around when I do this. Give me some space.”
The men retreated as he set the iron to bob on the water. He crouched for a long minute staring at it, and then said to Murad: “The stream heads off to nor’-nor’-west. If we followed it—and it’s the easiest passage—then we’d be coming back east-southeast.”
He poured the water off, put everything back in the box and straightened.
“A portable compass,” Bardolin said. “So simple! But then the principle remains the same. I should have realized.”
“We’ll move out and follow the line of the stream,” Murad said. He turned to di Souza. “We’ll fire three shots if there’s any trouble. When you hear them, pack up and get back to the ship. Do not try to come after us, Ensign. We’ll make our own way. The same procedure follows if anything occurs here while we’re gone. But I intend to return well before dark anyway.”
Di Souza saluted.
T HE party set out: Murad, Hawkwood, Bardolin and ten of the soldiers.
They tramped through the stream, as it was the path of least resistance, and it seemed to them that they were travelling through a green tunnel lit by some radiance far above. It was dusk down here, with occasional shafts of bright sun lancing through gaps in the canopy to provide a dazzling contrast to the pervading gloom.
They ducked under hanging limbs, skirted sprawling roots as thick as a man’s thigh which lolled in the water like torpid animals come to drink. They slashed aside hanging veils of moss and creeper, and staggered hurriedly away from the sudden brilliance of gem-bright snakes which slithered through the mulch of the forest floor, intent on their own business.
It grew hotter. The noise of the sea died away, the fading of a once-vivid memory. They were in a raucous cathedral whose columns were the titanic bulk of the great trees, whose roof sparkled with distant light and movement, the mocking cries of weird birdlife.
The ground rose under their feet and stones began to rear up out of the earth like the bones of the land come poking through its decaying hide. Their progress grew more laboured, the soldiers with their heads down and arquebuses on their shoulders puffing like fractured bellows. A cloud of tiny, iridescent birds swept through the company like airborne jewels. They flickered one way and then another, turning in unison like a shoal of twisting fish, their fleetness almost derisory. A few of the soldiers batted at them half-heartedly with gunstock and sword but they whispered away again in a spray of lapis lazuli and amethyst before swooping into the canopy overhead.
The stream disappeared into a tangle of boulders and bush, and the forest closed in on them completely. The ground was ri
sing more steeply now, making every step an effort. The men scooped up handfuls and helmetfuls of the water, gulping it down and sluicing their faces. It was as warm as a wet nurse’s milk, and hardly seemed to moisten their mouths. Murad led them onwards, hacking with a seaman’s cutlass at the barrier of vegetation ahead, his feet slipping and turning on the mossy stones, boots squelching in mud.
They came across ants the size of a man’s little finger which carried bright green leaves like the mainsail of a schooner on their backs. They found beetles busily winking in the earth, their wingcases as broad as an apple, horns adorning their armoured heads. Wattle-necked lizards regarded them silently from overhead branches, the colours of their skin pulsing from emerald through to turquoise.
They took a new bearing from the source of the stream and headed north-west this time, as the way seemed easiest on that course. Murad detailed one of the soldiers to blaze a tree every twenty yards, so thick was the undergrowth. They stumbled onwards in the wake of the gaunt nobleman as though he were some kind of demented prophet leading them to paradise, and Sergeant Mensurado, his voice hoarsened to a croak with overuse, hurried the stragglers along with shoves and blows and venomous whispers.
The jungle began to open out a fraction. The trees were more widely spaced and the ground between them was littered with rocks, some as long as a ship’s culverin. The ground changed texture and became dark and gritty, almost like black sand. It filled their boots and rasped between their toes.
Then Murad stopped dead in his tracks.
Hawkwood and Bardolin were farther back in the file. He called them forward in a low hiss.
“What?” Hawkwood asked.
Murad pointed, his eyes not moving from whatever drew them.
Up in the tree, maybe forty feet off the ground. The canopy was broken there, bright with dappled sunlight. Hawkwood squinted in the unaccustomed glare.
“Holy God,” Bardolin said beside him.
Then Hawkwood saw it too.
It stood on a huge level branch, and had flattened itself against the trunk which spawned its perch. It was almost the same shade as the butternut-coloured tree bark, which was why Hawkwood had not seen it at first. But then the head turned, and the movement caught his eye.
