by Paul Kearney
A monstrous bird of some sort. Its wings were like those of a bat, only more leathery. They hugged the tree trunk: there were claws at the end of the skeletal frame. It was hard to be precisely sure as to where they began and the skin of the tree itself ended, so good was the beast’s camouflage, but the thing was big. Its wrinkled, featherless and hairless body was as tall as a man’s, and the span of the wings must have been three fathoms or more. The long neck supported a skull-like head, eyes surprisingly small, both set to the front of the face like an owl, and a wicked, black beak between them.
The eyes blinked slowly. They were yellow, slitted. The creature did not appear alarmed at the sight of the party, but regarded them with grave interest; almost, they might have said, with intelligence.
Bardolin stepped forward, and with his right hand he inscribed a little glimmer on the air. The creature stared at him, unafraid, seemingly intrigued.
There was a loud crack, a spurt of flame and billow of smoke.
“Hold your fire, God-damn you!” Murad cried.
The bird thing detached itself from the tree and seemed to fall backwards. It flipped in mid-fall with incredible speed and grace, then the great wings opened and flapped twice in huge whooshes of air which staggered the smoke and blew the plastered hair off Hawkwood’s brow. The wings boomed and cracked like sails. The thing wheeled up into the canopy, and then was a shape against the blue sky beyond, dwindling to a speck and disappearing.
“Who fired?” Murad demanded. “Whose weapon was that?” He was quivering with rage. A soldier whose arquebus was leaking smoke quailed visibly as Murad advanced on him.
Sergeant Mensurado stepped between them.
“My fault, sir. I told the men to keep their wheel-locks back, the match burning. Glabrio here, he tripped, sir. Must have been the sight of that monster. It won’t happen again. I’ll see to him myself when we get back.”
Murad glared at his sergeant, but at last only nodded. “See that you do, Mensurado. A pity the fool missed, since he had to fire a shot. I’d like to have had a closer look at that.”
Several of the soldiers were making the Sign of the Saint discreetly. They did not seem to share their commander’s wish.
“What was it, Bardolin?” Murad asked the wizard. “Any ideas?”
The old mage’s face was unusually troubled.
“I’ve never seen anything remotely like it, except perhaps in the pages of a bestiary. It was a warped, unnatural thing. Did you see its eyes? There was a mind behind them, Murad. And it stank of Dweomer.”
“It was a magical creature, then?” Hawkwood said.
“Yes. More than that, a created creature: not fashioned by the hand of God, but by the sorcery of men. But the power it would take to bring such a thing into the world, and then give it permanence . . . it is staggering. I had not thought that any mage living could have such power. It would kill me, were I to attempt a similar thing.”
“What did you make glow in the air?” Murad demanded.
“A glyph. Feralism is one of my disciplines. I was trying to read the heart of the beast.”
“And could you?”
“No . . . No, I could not.”
“Blast that whoreson idiot and his itchy trigger finger!”
“No, it was not that. I could not read the thing’s heart because it was not truly a beast.”
“What is this you’re saying, Mage?”
“I am not sure. What I think I am saying is that there was humanity there, in the beast. A soul, if you will.”
Murad and Hawkwood regarded the wizard in silence. The imp looked around and then cautiously took its fingers from out of its ears. It hated loud noises.
Murad realized that the soldiers were crowded around, listening. His face hardened.
“We’ll move on. We can discuss this later. Sergeant Mensurado, lead off and make sure the men have their wheels uncocked. I want no more discharges, or we will have Ensign di Souza evacuating the camp behind us.”
That raised a nervous laugh. The men shook out into file again, and set off. Bardolin trudged along wordlessly, the frown lines biting deep between his brows.
T HE ground continued to rise. It seemed that they were on the slopes of a hill or small mountain. It was hard going for all of them, because the black sand-like stuff of the forest floor sank under their boots. It was as if they were walking up the side of an enormous dune, their feet slipping back a yard for every yard advanced. “What is this stuff?” Murad asked. He slapped a sucking insect off his scarred cheek, grimacing.
“Ash, I think,” Hawkwood said. “There has been a great burning here. The stuff must be half a fathom deep.”
There were boulders, black and almost glassy in places. The trees were slowly splitting them apart and shifting them down-slope. And such trees! Nowhere in the world, Hawkwood thought, even in Gabrion, could there be trees like these, straight as lances, hard as bronze. A shipwright might fashion a mainmast from a single trunk, or a vessel’s keel from two. But the labour—the work of hewing down these forest giants. In this heat, it would kill a man.
A gasping, endless time in which they put down their heads and forgot everything but the next step in front of them. Several of the soldiers paused in their travails to vomit, their eyes popping. Murad gave them permission to take off their helmets and loosen their cuirasses, but they gave the impression that they were slowly being boiled alive inside the heavy armour.
At last there was a clear light ahead, an open space. The trees ended. There was a short stretch of bare rock and ash and gravel before them, and then nothing but blue, unclouded heaven.
They bent over to grasp their knees, their guts churning, the sunlight making them blink and scowl. Several of the soldiers collapsed on to their backs and lay there like bright, immobilized beetles, unable to do anything but suck in lungfuls of steaming air.
When Hawkwood finally straightened, the sight before them made him cry out in wonder.
They were above the jungle and on top of this world, it seemed. They had reached the summit of what proved to be a razor-backed ridge which was circular in shape, an eerily perfect symmetry.
Hawkwood could see for uncounted leagues in all directions. If he turned round he could see the Western Ocean stretching off to the horizon. There was the Osprey riding at anchor, distant as a child’s toy. A line of white surf up and down the coast marked the reefs, and there was a series of little, conical islands off to the north, eight leagues away perhaps.
Inland, to the west, the jungle rolled in an endless viridian carpet, lurid, garish, secretive. Its mass was broken by more formations identical to the one upon which they stood: circles of bare rock amid the greenery, barren as gravestones, unnatural-looking. They pocked the forest like crusted sores, and beyond them, far off and almost invisible in the heat shimmer and haze, were high mountains as blue as woodsmoke.
To the north and west was something else. Clouds were building up there, tall thunderheads and anvils and horsetails of angry vapour, grey and heavy in the underbelly. A shadow dominated that horizon, rearing up and up until its head was lost in the cloud. A mountain, a perfect cone. It was taller than any of the granite giants in the Hebros. Fifteen thousand feet, maybe, though it was hard to tell with its summit lost in billowing vapour.
“Craters,” Bardolin said, appearing beside him.
“What?”
“Saffarac of Cartigella, a friend of mine, once had a viewing device, an oracular constructed of two finely ground lenses mounted in a tube of leather. He was hoping to find evidence for his theory that the earth moved around the sun, not the other way round. He looked at the moon, the nearest body in heaven, and he saw there formations like these. Craters. He postulated two causes: one, fiery rock had erupted out of the moon in a series of vast explosions—”
“Like gunpowder, you mean?”
“Yes. Or two, they were caused by vast stones falling to the surface, like the one that fell in Fulk some ten years back. Bi
g as a horse it was, and glowing red when it hit the ground. You see them on clear nights, streaks of light falling to earth. Dying stars giving out their last breath in a streak of light and beauty.”
“And that’s what made this landscape?” Murad said, coming up behind them.
“It is one theory.”
“I have heard that in the southern latitudes there are mountains such as this one,” Hawkwood volunteered. “Some of them leak smoke and sulphurous gases.”
“Mariners’ stories,” Murad sneered. “You are not in some Abrusian pothouse trying to impress the lowly, Hawkwood.”
Hawkwood said nothing. His gaze did not shift from the panorama before them.
“Not fifty years ago a man might be burnt at the stake for daring to venture that the world was round, and not flat like a buckler,” Bardolin said mildly. “And yet now, even in Charibon, they accept that we are spinning on a sphere, as Terenius of Orfor suggests.”
“I do not care what shape the world is, so long as my feet can bear me across it,” Murad snapped.
They looked down into the bowl which their ridge contained. It was perfectly round, a circle of jungle. They stood at a height of some three thousand feet, Hawkwood estimated, but the air did not seem any less dense.
“Heyeran Spinero,” Murad said. “Circle Ridge. I will put it on the map. This is as far as we will go today. It looks like rain is coming in from the north, and I wish to be back at the camp before dark.”
None of them mentioned it, but they were all thinking of the monstrous bird which had studied them so nonchalantly. The thought of a night spent away from the rest of their comrades in a forest populated by such things was not tolerable.
Mensurado’s croak attracted their attention. The sergeant was pointing down at the land below.
“What is it, Sergeant?” Murad asked harshly. He seemed to be fighting off exhaustion with bile alone.
Mensurado could only point and whisper, his parade-ground bellow hoarsened out of existence. “There, sir, to the right of that weird hill, just above its flank. You see?”
They peered whilst the rest of the soldiers sat listlessly, slugging the last of their water and mopping their faces.
“Sweet Blessed Saint!” Murad said softly. “Do you see it, gentlemen?”
A space in the jungle, a tiny clearing wherein a patch of beaten earth could be glimpsed.
“A road, or track,” Bardolin said, sketching out a far-seeing cantrip to aid his tired eyes.
“Hawkwood, get out that contraption of yours and take its bearing,” the nobleman said peremptorily.
Frowning, Hawkwood did as he was told, filling the bowl with some of his own drinking water. He studied it, then looked up, gauging, and said: “West-nor’-west of here. I’d put it at fifteen leagues. It’s a broad road, to be seen at that distance.”
“That, gentlemen, is our destination,” Murad said. “Once we have ourselves organized, I am taking an expedition into the interior. You will both accompany me, naturally. We will make for that road, and see if we can’t meet up with whoever built it.”
Sergeant Mensurado was as motionless as a block of wood. Murad turned on him.
“The fewer folk who hear of this the better, for now. You understand me, Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Rouse the men. It’s time we were getting back.”
“Yes, sir.”
In minutes they were off again, downhill this time, trudging in the hollows their feet had made on the way up. Hawkwood and Bardolin remained behind for a few minutes, watching the gathering clouds about the shoulders of the great mountain to the north.
“I’ll kill him before we leave this land,” Hawkwood said. “He will goad me one time too often.”
“It is his way,” Bardolin said. “He knows no other. He looks to you and me for answers, and hates the necessity for it. He is as lost as any of us.”
“Lost! Is that how you see us?”
“We are on a dark continent which those who were here before us did not mean us to see. There is Dweomer here, everywhere, and there is such a teeming life. I have never felt anything like it. Power, Hawkwood, the power to create warped grotesqueries such as that winged creature. I did not say so before because I was not sure, but I am now. That bird was once a man like you or me. There was the remnant of a man’s mind in the beast’s skull. Not as it is in a shifter, but different. Permanent. There is someone or something in this land who is committing monstrous deeds, things which offend the very fabric of nature’s laws. Murad may be eager to meet them, but I am not, if only because I can to some extent understand the motive behind the act. Power allied to irresponsibility. It is the most dangerous thing in the world, the most seductive of temptations. It is evil, pure and simple.”
They followed off after the last of the soldiers without another word, the jungle creatures calling out mockingly all around them.
ELEVEN
I T rained on the way back, as Murad had predicted, and, like everything else in this land, the rain was strange. The sky clouded over in minutes, and the dimness beneath the tops of the trees became a twilight they stumbled through half-blind, eyes fixed on the man in front. There was a roaring noise above, and they looked up in time to catch the first drops cascading down from the ceiling of vegetation.
The roar intensified until they could hardly hear each other’s voices. The rain was torrential, maniac, awesome. It was as warm as bath water and thick as wine. The canopy broke most of its force and it tumbled in waterfalls down the trunks of the trees, creating rivers which gurgled around their boots, battering plants to the forest floor and submerging them in mud and slime. The company huddled in the shelter of one of the forest leviathans whilst their dimly lit world became a storm of smashing rain, a blinding, water-choked quagmire.
They glimpsed the dark shapes of little twisting animals fall to earth, washed off their perches higher in the trees. The rain coming down the tree boles became a soup of bark and insects, pouring down the necks of the soldiers’ armour, soaking the arquebuses and waterlogging the powder-horns beyond hope of drying.
An hour or more they crouched there and watched the storming elements in fear and bewilderment. And then the rain stopped. Within the space of a dozen heartbeats, the roaring thunder of it faded, the torrents dwindled and the light grew.
They stood, blinking, tipping water out of gun barrels and helmets, wiping their faces. The forest came to life again. The birds and other unknown fauna took up their endless chorus once more. The water about their feet soaked into the spongy soil and disappeared, and the last of the rain dripped in streams from the leaves of the great trees, lit up like tumbling gems by the sunlight above. The jungle stank and steamed.
Murad shook his lank hair from his face, wrinkling his nose. “The place stinks worse than a tannery in high summer. Bardolin, you’re our resident expert on the world. Was that rain normal for here, do you think?”
The wizard shrugged, dripping.
“In Macassar they have sudden rains like that, but they come in the rainy season only,” Hawkwood volunteered.
“We’ve arrived here in the midst of the rainy season then?”
“I don’t know,” the mariner said wearily. “I’ve heard merchants of Calmar say that to the south of Punt there are jungles where it rains like this every day, and there is no winter, no summer; no seasons at all. It never changes from one month to the next.”
“God save us,” one of the soldiers muttered.
“That is ridiculous,” Murad snapped. “Every country in the world has its seasons; it must have. What is a world without spring, or winter? When would one harvest crops, or sow seeds? When will you cease spinning your travellers’ tales with me, Hawkwood?”
Hawkwood’s face darkened, but he said nothing.
They moved on without further talk, and had it not been for Hawkwood’s compass they would never have got their bearings again, for the little stream which they had followed t
hat morning had become one of many muddy rivulets. They retraced their course like mariners at sea, by compass bearing alone, and by the time they heard the voices of the men back at the makeshift camp there was a transparency, a frailty to the light in the sky which suggested that sundown was very near.
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.
