by Paul Kearney
A deeper shadow before him, a shape blacker even than the witch-dark forest. In it two yellow lights burned and blinked in unison. Still, he was not afraid.
I’m dreaming, he told himself, and the merciful thought kept terror at bay.
The lights moved, and he was conscious of a warmth that had nothing to do with the night air. His skin crawled as it approached him, a black sunlight.
The lights were eyes, bright saffron and slitted with black like those of a vast cat. It was standing before him. There was a noise, a low susurration like a continuous growl but in a lower key. He felt the sound with his new skin as much as heard it.
And felt the fur of the thing, as soft as crushed velvet. A sensual, wholly pleasurable sensation which made him want to bury his palms deep in its softness.
The world spun, and the breath had been knocked out of him. He was on the ground, on his back, and two huge paws were on his shoulders. He felt the prickle of whiskers, sharp as needles, the thing’s breath on his face.
It sank down on him as though it meant to mould itself to his body. His hands felt the thickly muscled ribs under the fur and brushed a line of nipples along the taut belly. He thought it groaned, an almost human sound. He was conscious of the throbbing warmth in his crotch, the heat of the thing as it pressed against him there.
And then it had reared up. A scratch of pain somewhere around his hipbone which made him cry out; his breeches were ripped off and it had plunged itself down on him, taking him inside.
A feverish heat and liquid grip of muscle. It pushed his buttocks into the moist humus, its head thrown back and the red mouth open so that he could see the long glint of fangs. He grabbed fistfuls of its fur as his climax came, and thought he screamed.
It was down on him again for a moment, and he could feel the teeth pressed against his neck. Then the crushing weight and heat were raised off him. He found himself sunk deep into the muck of the jungle floor, utterly spent.
He felt a kiss—a human kiss of laughing lips on his own. Then he knew he was alone again, back with his ageing body, the razor-awareness of everything gone. He wept like a struck child.
A ND woke up. Dawn had come, and the camp was stirring awake. The sour reek of old smoke hung heavy in the air.
Hawkwood handed him a waterbottle, looking ten years older in the grey morning, moss in his tawny beard.
“Another day, Bardolin. You look like you’ve had a hard night.”
Bardolin swallowed a gulp of water. His mouth soaked it up and remained as dry as gunpowder. He swallowed more.
“Such a dream I had,” he said. “Such a dream.”
There were black hairs sweat-glued to his palms. He stared at them in curiosity, wondering where they could have come from.
T HE company broke camp in morose silence, the men moving slowly in the gathering heat. They shook out into their accustomed file, some gnawing fruit, others pulling up their breeches, their faces drawn by the chaos of their bowels. More and more of them were succumbing to the inadequacies of their strange diet. The surrounds of the camp stank of ordure. Hollow-eyed, they started off on the day’s journey.
On the afternoon of this, the fourth day, the rain came down with its weary regularity, and they plodded on under it like cattle oblivious to the drover’s stick. Masudi and Cortona, one of the strongest soldiers, were at the front chopping a path blindly with one hand shielding their eyes as though from too-brilliant sunlight. Behind them the rest of the soldiers staggered onwards, their once-bright armour now coral coloured in places, green in others. Their rotting boots sank deep into the leaf litter and muck and they were sometimes obliged to bend over and pull their feet free of the sucking mud with their hands.
Then the two point-men stopped. The heavy vegetation had given way like a breached wall and there was a clearing in front of them, the far side of it misted by the pouring rain.
“Sir!” Cortona shouted above the downpour, and Murad was shoving everyone out of the way to get to the head of the file.
A figure was sitting in the middle of the clearing, cross-legged and head bowed in the wet. As far as they could tell, it was a woman, her dark hair bound up, dressed in leather with bare arms and legs. She did not look up at the gaping explorers, nor did she acknowledge their presence in any way, but they knew she was aware of them. And there were odd flickerings of movement along the edge of the clearing behind her.
The company stood like men stunned, water pouring down their faces and into their open mouths unheeded. At last Murad drew his rapier, ignoring Bardolin’s urgent hiss.
The woman in the clearing looked up, but at the sky above, not at them. For an instant her eyes seemed blank and white in the rain, lacking iris or pupil. Then the rain stopped as swiftly as it always did in this country. Their job done, the clouds began to break up and the sun to filter down.
The woman smiled, as though it were all her handiwork and she was proud of it. Then she looked straight at the crowd of men who stood opposite, swords drawn, arquebuses levelled.
She smiled again, this time showing white, sharp teeth like those of a cat. Her eyes were very dark, her face pointed and delicate. She rose from her sitting position in one sinuous movement that made the breath catch in the throat of every man who watched her. A bare midriff, lines of muscle on either side of the navel. Unshod feet, slender limbs the colour of honey.
“I am Kersik,” she said in Normannic that had a slight burr to it, an old-fashioned slowness. “Greetings and welcome.”
Murad recovered more quickly than any of them, and, aristocratic to his fingertips, he bowed with a flourish of the winking rapier.
“Lord Murad of Galiapeno at your service, lady.” Hawkwood noted wryly that he did not introduce himself as his excellency the governor.
But the woman Kersik looked past him to where Bardolin stood with the imp perched, bedraggled and dripping, on his shoulder.
“And you, brother,” she said. “You are doubly welcome. It is a long time since a Master of Disciplines came to our shores.”
Bardolin merely nodded stiffly. For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes, the battered old wizard and the slim young woman. Bardolin frowned, and she smiled as though in answer, eyes dancing.
There was a pause. The soldiers were drinking the woman in, but she seemed unperturbed by their hungry regard.
“You are bound for the city, I take it,” she said lightly.
Murad and Hawkwood shared a glance, and the scarred nobleman bowed again. “Yes, lady, we are. But we are sadly puzzled as to how to get there.”
“I thought as much. I will take you, then. It’s a journey of many days.”
“You have our thanks.”
“Your men have been eating too much of the wrong kinds of fruit, Lord Murad of Galiapeno,” Kersik said. “They have the air of the flux about them.”
“We are unaccustomed as yet to your country and its ways, lady.”
“Of course you are. Put your men into camp here in the clearing. I’ll fetch them something to calm their stomachs. If they start the journey to Undi in this condition they might not finish it.”
“Undi. Is that the name of your city?” Hawkwood asked. “What language might it be in?”
“In an old, forgotten language, Captain,” the woman said. “This is an old continent. Man has been here a long time.”
“And from whence did you come? I wonder,” Hawkwood muttered, unsettled by being called “Captain.” How had she known?
Kersik glanced at him sharply. She had heard his whispered comment.
“I’ll return ere nightfall,” she said then. And disappeared.
The men blinked. They had seen a tan blur across the clearing, nothing more.
“A witch, by Ramusio’s beard,” Murad growled.
“Not a witch,” Bardolin told him. “A mage. The Dweomer is thick about her. And something else as well.” He rubbed his face as though trying to scrub the weariness from it.
“Sorcery, al
ways sorcery,” Murad said bitterly. “Maybe she has gone to collect a few cohorts of her fellow warlocks. Well, I wonder what they’ll make of Hebrian steel.”
“Steel will do you no good here, Murad,” Bardolin said.
“Maybe. But we have iron bullets for the arquebuses. That may give them pause for thought. Sergeant Mensurado!”
“Sir.”
“We’ll make camp, do as we’re told. But I want the slow-match lit, and every weapon loaded. I want the men ready to repel any attack.”
“Yes, sir.”
A S the light died and the night swooped in once more, the company gathered about three campfires, each big enough to roast an ox over. The soldiers stood watch with powder-smoke from the glowing match eddying about their cuirasses, stamping their feet and whistling to keep awake, or slapping at the incessant probing of the insects.
“Will she come back, do you think?” Hawkwood asked, grimacing as he kneaded his bad shoulder.
Murad shrugged. “Why not ask our resident expert in all things occult?” He nodded at Bardolin.
The mage seemed on the verge of sleep, his imp lying wide-eyed and watchful in his lap. His head jerked, and the silver stubble on his chin glistened in the firelight.
“She’ll be back. And she’ll take us to this city of hers. They want us there, Murad. If they didn’t, we’d be dead by now.”
“I thought they’d prefer us sunk somewhere in the Western Ocean,” Hawkwood said. “Like the caravel’s crew.”
“They did, yes. But now that we’re here, I believe they are interested in us.” Or in me, the thought came, alarming and unwelcome.
“And just who are they, Mage?” Murad demanded. “You speak as though you knew.”
“They are Dweomer-folk of some kind, obviously. Descendants of previous voyagers, perhaps. Or indigenous peoples maybe. But I doubt that, for they speak Normannic. Something has happened here in the west. It has been going on for centuries whilst we’ve been fighting our wars and spreading our faith oblivious to it. Something different. I’m not sure what, not yet.”
“You’re as vague as a fake seer, Bardolin,” said Murad in disgust.
“You want answers; I cannot give them to you. You will have to wait. I’ve a feeling we’ll know more than we ever wanted to before this thing is done.”
They settled into an uncomfortable silence, the three of them. The fires cracked and spat like angry felines, and the jungle raved deliriously to itself, a wall of dark and sound.
“What bright fires,” a voice said. “One might almost think you folk were afraid of the dark.”
Their heads snapped up, and the woman Kersik was standing before them. She carried a small hide bag which stank like rancid sap. The tiny hairs on her thighs were golden in the firelight. As her mouth smiled its corners arced up almost to her ears and her eyes were two light-filled slits.
Murad sprang to his feet and she stepped back, becoming human again. Mensurado was berating the sentries for having let her slip past them unseen.
“You do not need men to keep watch in the night,” she said. “Not now I am here.” She dumped the hide bag on the ground. “That is for those among you whose guts are churning. Eat a few of the leaves. They’ll calm them.”
“What are you, a forest apothecary?” Murad asked.
She regarded him, her head on one side. “I like this one. He has spirit.” And while Murad considered this: “Best you should sleep. We will walk a long way tomorrow.”
T HEY set sentries, though she laughed at them for doing so. She sat cross-legged off at the edge of the firelight as she had been sitting when first they had seen her. Men made the Sign of the Saint when they thought she was not looking. They ate their meagre supper of gleaned fruit, not one of them trusting her enough to try the bag of leaves she had brought. Then they lay down on the wet ground with sword and arquebus close to hand.
Bardolin’s imp could not settle. It would nestle against him in its accustomed sleeping position and then shift uneasily again and squirm out from beside him to take in the camp and the sleeping figures, the watchful sentries.
It nudged him awake some time before the dawn and in the half-sleeping state between unconsciousness and wakefulness he could have sworn that the camp was surrounded by a crowd of figures which stood motionless in the trees. But when he sat up, scraping at his gummed eyelids, they were gone and the Kersik woman was sitting cross-legged, not a particle of weariness in her appearance.
Murad sat with his back to a tree opposite, an arquebus in his hands with its slow-match burnt down almost to the wheel. His eyes were feverish with fatigue. He had watched her all night it seemed. The woman rose and stretched, the muscles rippling under her golden skin.
“Well rested for the travel ahead?” she asked.
The nobleman looked at her through sunken eyes.
“I’m ready for anything,” he said.
THIRTEEN
E IGHTEEN days they travelled through the unchanging jungle. Eighteen days of heat and rain and mosquitoes and leeches and mud and snakes.
Looking back on it, Hawkwood found it remarkable how quickly the men had been worn down. These were hardened campaigners who had seen battle in the dust-choked furnaces of the summer Hebros valleys. On board ship they had seemed swaggering veterans, hard men with rough appetites and constitutions of iron. Here they sickened like kittens.
They buried the first six days after they had met their new guide, the woman Kersik.
Glabrio Feridas, soldier of Hebrion. He had crouched shakily in the jungle to ease his overworked bowels, and it seemed to those who came across his corpse that he had voided all the blood that the mosquitoes and leeches had left in him.
After that, men ate the leaves that Kersik had brought for them. They avoided the fruits she told them to avoid, and they boiled their water every evening in their rusting helmets. There was no more flux, but many of them continued to feel feverish and soon the stronger men were carrying the armour of those who could no longer support its weight.
On the tenth day, Murad was finally prevailed upon by Hawkwood and Bardolin to allow the soldiers to take off the armour and cache it. The men piled it up and covered it with fallen branches and leaves, blazed a dozen trees around it and marched on the lighter by fifty pounds, clad in their leather gambesons.
They made better time after that. Hawkwood calculated they were travelling roughly nor’-nor’-west, and they were covering perhaps four leagues a day.
On the twelfth day Timo Ferenice was the second man to die. A snake had sidled up to his ankle as he stood nodding on sentry duty and bit quickly and efficiently through boot, hose and skin. He had died in convulsions, spraying foamy spittle and calling on God, Ramusio and his mother.
The following day they hit upon a road, or track rather. It was just wide enough for two men to walk abreast, a tunnel of beaten earth and close-packed stones seemingly well cared for, which led them farther to the north. They had bypassed the cluster of lights Murad had seen from the Spinero and were travelling almost parallel to the far-off coast.
All the while they travelled, Kersik strode along easily at the front of the column, frequently pausing to let the gasping men behind her catch up. The land rose almost imperceptibly, and Bardolin hazarded that they were nearing the southern slopes of the great conelike mountain they had sighted on the first day of their landfall.
Their pace should have quickened upon hitting the road, but it seemed to the members of the company that their strength was ebbing. Lack of sleep and poor food were taking their toll, as was the unrelenting heat. By the seventeenth day, the twenty-first out of Fort Abeleius, the soldiers were stumbling along in linen undershirts, their leather gambesons too rotten and mouldering to be of any further use. And medicinal leaves or no, two of them were so far gone in fever they had to be carried in crudely thrown-together litters by their exhausted comrades.
“I believe I have yet to see her sweat,” Hawkwood said to Bardolin as they sat
in camp that night. Kersik was off to one side, her legs folded under her, face serene.
Bardolin had been nodding off. He started awake and caressed the chittering imp. The little creature ate better than any of them, for it happily gorged itself on all manner of crawling things it found in the leaf litter. It was just back from foraging and was contentedly grinning in Bardolin’s lap, its belly as taut as a drum.
“Even wizards sweat,” the old mage said, irritated because he had been on the verge of precious sleep.
“I know. That is why it’s so odd. She doesn’t seem real, somehow.”
Bardolin lay back with a sigh. “None of it seems real. The dreams I have at night seem more real than this waking life.”
“Good dreams?”
“Strange ones, unlike any I have known before. And yet there is an element of familiarity to them too. I keep feeling that everything here I have come across splices together somehow—that if I could but step back from it I would see the pattern in the whole. That inscription on the statue we found—it reminds me of something I once knew. The girl: she is Dweomer-folk, certainly, but there is something unknown at work in her also, something I cannot decipher. It is like trying to read a once-known book in too dim a light.”
“Maybe there will be a brighter light for you once we hit upon this city. Tomorrow, she says, we’ll arrive there. I wish I could say I was looking forward to it, but the discoverer in me has lost some of his relish for our expedition.”
“He has not,” Bardolin said, and he waved a hand to where Murad was doing his nightly rounds of the camp-fires, checking on his men.
