by Paul Kearney
“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 Bardolin sat by one of the fires later in the night. There were thirty men ashore, lying around half a dozen camp-fires 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 watch-towers 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.
He dipped his nub of a quill in the inkwell and began to write his log.
26th day of Endorion, ashore Fort Abeleius, year of the Saint 551—though only a few sennights remain of the old year, and soon we will be into the Saint’s days which denote the turning of the calendar.
The palisade was finished today, and we have begun the task of felling some of the huge trees which stand within its perimeter. Murad’s plan is to lop them a little at a time and use them for construction and firewood. He will never uproot them; I think such trees must have roots running to the core of the earth.
The building work proceeds apace. We have a governor’s residence—the only building with a floor, though it has an old topsail for its back wall. I dine there tonight. Civilization comes to the wilderness.
Hawkwood reread his entry. He was becoming loquacious now that he no longer had to write of winds and courses and sailing arrangements. His log was turning into a journal.
At last we have dry powder, though keeping it so in this climate has tried the wits of every soldier among us. It was Bardolin who suggested sealing the powder-horns with wax. He has become a little odd, our resident mage. Murad regards him as the leader of the colonists, the scientific problem-solver, but also as something of a fraud. Whether this last attitude of his is assumed or not I do not know. Since his peasant lover turned out to be a shifter, Murad has been different—at once less sure of himself and more autocratic. But then who among us was not changed by that weird voyage and its horrors?
I would that Billerand were here, or Julius Albak, my shipmates of old. Our company is the poorer without them, and I am not entirely happy with Velasca as first mate. His navigation leaves a lot to be desired.
“Captain?” a voice said beyond the sailcloth flap that served as Hawkwood’s door.
“Come in, Bardolin.”
The mage entered, stooping. He looked older, Hawkwood thought. His carriage had always been so upright, his face so battered and grizzled that he seemed made out of some enduring stone; but the years were beginning to tell on him now. His forehead shone with sweat, and like everyone else’s his neck and arms were blotched with insect bites. The imp that rode on his shoulder seemed as sprightly as ever, though. It leapt on to the crate which Hawkwood used as a desk and he had gently to pry the inkwell out of its tiny hands.
“What cheer, comrade wizard?” Hawkwood asked the old mage.
Bardolin collapsed on the heap of leaves and seacloak which had been piled into a bed.
“I have been purifying water for the invalids among us. I am tired, Captain.”
Hawkwood produced a rotund bottle from behind his crate and offered it. “Drink?”
They both had a gulp straight from the neck, and spluttered over the good brandy.
“That calms the bones,” Bardolin said appreciatively, and nodded towards the open log. “Writing for posterity?”
“Yes. The habit of a master-mariner’s lifetime, though I am in danger of becoming a chronicler.” Hawkwood shut the heavily bound book and rewrapped it in its oilcloth. “Ready for tomorrow?”
Bardolin rubbed the shadows under his eyes. “I suppose . . . How does it feel to be a lord?”
“I still sweat, the mosquitoes still feed off me. It is not so different.”
Bardolin smiled. “What conceit we have, we men. We throw up a squalid camp like this and name it a colony. We distribute titles amongst ourselves, we lay claim to a country which has existed without us since time’s dawn; we impose our rules upon things we are utterly ignorant of.”
“It is how society is made,” Hawkwood said.
“Yes. How did the Fimbrians feel, do you think, when they came together in their tribes nine centuries ago and made themselves into one people? Was there a shadow of their empire flickering about them, even then? History. Give it a hundred years and it will make heroes and villains out of every one of us—if it remembers us.”
“The world rolls on. It is for us to make what we can of it.”
The old mage stretched. “Of course. And tomorrow we will see a little more of it. Tomorrow the governor sets out to explore this place he has claimed.”
“Would you rather be playing hide-and-seek with the Inceptines back in Abrusio?”
“Yes. Yes, I would. I am afraid, Captain, truly afraid. I am frightened of what we will find here in the west. But curious also. I would not stay behind tomorrow for all the world. It is man’s insufferable curiosity which makes him set sail across unknown seas; it is a more potent force even than greed or ambition—you know that, I think, better than anyone.”
“I’m as ambitious and greedy as the next man.”
“But curiosity drove you here.”
“That, and Murad’s blackmail.”
“Aha! Our noble governor again! He has brought us all into the tangle
of his own machinations. We are flies trembling in his web. Well, even spiders have their predators. He is beginning to realize that, in spite of his bluster and arrogance.”
“Do you hate him then?”
“I hate what he represents: the blind bigotry and pride of his caste. But he is not as bad as some; he is not stupid, nor does he wilfully ignore the truth, no matter what he says.”
“You have too many new ideas, Bardolin, I too find it hard to accommodate some of them. Your hills which spout flames and ash—those I can believe. I have heard men talk of them before. But this smell of magic from the trees and soil; from the land itself. An earth which circles the sun. A moon bombarded by stones from beyond the sky . . . Everyone knows that our world is at the heart of God’s creation, even the Merduks.”
“That is the Church talking.”
“I am no blind son of the Church, you know that.”
“You are a product of its culture.”
Hawkwood threw up his hands. Bardolin exasperated him, but he could not dislike the man. “Drink some more brandy, and stop trying to right the wrongs of society for a while.”
Bardolin laughed, and complied.
T HEY were to venture into the interior again in the morning, and Murad’s dinner was both a social event and a planning conference. He had killed the last of the chickens, as if to prove to the world that he had no fears for the future, and one of the soldiers had shot a tiny deer, no bigger than a lamb, which was the centrepiece of the table. Bardolin examined its bones as if they were the stuff of an augury. Beside the meat courses there was the last of the dried fruit, nuts, pickled olives, and a tiny scrap of Hebrion sea cheese as hard as soap. They drank Candelarian which was as warm as blood in the humid night, and finished with Fimbrian brandy.
