Hawkwood s Voyage: Book One of The Monarchies of God

by Paul Kearney

  “Come now, Captain, think about what is being offered you. The lives of your crew, a chance to make history, to join the ranks of the great in this world. The riches of a new world beyond the bend of the seas.”

  “What concessions can I expect, always assuming that this venture works out as you have planned it?”

  Murad watched him for a moment, gauging.

  “The man who sails me to my governorship can expect certain prerequisites. Monopolies, Captain. If you wish, the only ships which sail from our new colony will be constructed in your yards. A modest tariff on incoming and outgoing cargoes will finance whatever ambitions you have. There may”—and here Murad could not stop himself from sneering—“even be a title in it for you. Think of passing that down to your sons.”

  Estrella was barren. There would never be any sons for Hawkwood. He wondered if Murad somehow knew that, and felt like flinging his glass in the sneering aristocrat’s face.

  Yet again the agonized question: had it been his child that Jemilla had aborted?

  Hawkwood stood up. He felt soiled and filthy. He wanted a living deck under his feet, a sea wind in his hair.

  “I will think over your proposition.”

  Murad looked surprised, then shrugged. “As you will. But do not take too long, Captain. I must know by tomorrow morning if your men are to be spared their ordeal.”

  “I will think over your proposition,” Hawkwood repeated. He tossed some small, greasy coins on the table and then walked away, losing himself in the lifestream of the port. He was going to find some stinking pothouse and drink himself into oblivion, and in the morning he would send word to this aristocratic serpent accepting his offer.

  “T HAT, lord, was the Street of the Silversmiths. Already our men have recovered half a ton of the metal, melted by the heat of the burning. It is the only thing which survived.”

  The horses of the entourage picked their way gingerly in between the broken masonry, the charred wood—some beams still had tiny flames licking at them—and the scattered bricks. The corpses had been hauled from their path and the way cleared a little, but Shahr Baraz could see objects which seemed to be thick lengths of burnt logs inside the ruins on either side. Bodies, immolated until they were nothing but the stumps of torsos. They had been so thoroughly burned that they presented no threat of disease. The reek of ash and smoke was the only smell in the air. Shahr Baraz nodded approvingly. The clean-up crews had done their work well.

  For as far as the eye could see the desolation extended. The shells of buildings towered in abject ruin, burnt black, gutted, half fallen. Their remains were as bare as gravestones, the foundations buried in rubble, like black crags standing in the breakers of a grey sea. Aekir had become a ghostly place. Already it seemed like a monument, the ruin of a long-dead civilization.

  Jaffan was jovially pointing out other landmarks gleaned from books and maps. Even the more stolid of his staff, Shahr Baraz thought, seemed a bit drunk, as though the victory were a potent spirit still singing in the blood five days after the event. The enormity of the thing they had achieved had been slow in sinking home in the aftermath of reorganization and the crushing of the last resistance. Now, as they rode unhindered through what had been the greatest and holiest city of the unbelievers in the world, they were at last savouring the taste of triumph.

  For Shahr Baraz, the triumph had a bitter aftertaste. Aekir had been burned to the ground. The day after the city’s fall, he had been forced to order its evacuation by all troops and let the fires burn themselves out. The huge walls still stood, as did the more robust buildings, including the palaces of the High Pontiff, the cathedral and other public buildings. But the poor brick of much of the city had collapsed in the intense heat of the burning and vast expanses of the space within the walls were levelled plains of dust, rubble and ash.

  The rubble and the ash had cost his army almost fifty thousand men to win.

  Three leagues to the east of the city, the female prisoners covered almost nine acres. A good proportion of those would remain with the army. His men had earned them. And trundling back to Orkhan was a train of waggons two leagues long; the spoils of Aekir sent back to the Sultan Aurungzeb. The richest city in the world should have yielded more in the way of plunder, but most of it had gone up in smoke ere his troops were able to come to it. The men were restless as a result. Well, that restlessness would be put to good use.

  Aekir was a shell. It would require the labour of several lifetimes to rebuild it, but Shahr Baraz did not doubt that it would be done. Aurungzeb wanted Aekir to be his capital some day. Aurungabar he had said he would rename it, but he had been drunk at the time.

  A cat darted out of a cleft between the stones and sped across the street, startling the lead horses. The staff officers fought the excited animals into submission. Shahr Baraz’s own mount laid back his ears, but the old general talked to him softly and he remained quiet. The young men were too impatient with horses these days. They treated them like tools instead of companions. He would have a word with the cavalry-quartermaster when they returned to camp.

  Jaffan had regained his composure. He was pointing out something else. . . ah, yes. The spires of Carcasson. They loomed through the smoke haze like the horns of some huge, crouching beast. What would they do with that place? Baraz wondered. It was his own ambition to found a university in Aekir before he died, and Carcasson—what a library it would make! And in the centre, where the Ramusians had worshipped their idols, would be the prayer mats of Ahrimuz.

  Baraz’s thoughts darkened. The retreating Torunnans had fired the library of Gadorian Hagus as they retreated. Two hundred thousand books and scrolls, some of them dating back into the dim history before the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. All of them had been lost. Horb, Shahr Baraz’s secretary, had been in tears at the news.

  John Mogen would not have done that. He would have known that the Merduks would have preserved the library and would have left it intact behind him. But this Lejer fellow, he was a barbarian. He deserved the fate which awaited him.

  They were riding to view his crucifixion.

  The cavalcade turned left, into the afternoon sun. The buildings, or their remnants, receded on either side and all of a sudden there was a space before them, a square fully a sixth of a league wide. This was the Square of Victories, built by the Fimbrian Elector Myrnius Kuln himself. It was the largest square in the world, and drawn up in it to meet their general were a hundred and twenty thousand Merduk troops in full battle array.

  The cavalcade halted before that sea of faces. Rank on rank of soldiers with their pikes held upright in salute, the slow-match of the Hraibadar arquebusiers drifting in blue streamers down the breeze, the drawn tulwars of the Subadars and Jefadars and Imrahins catching the faint sunlight in serried glitters. The cavalry was there, regiment by regiment, the tall headdresses of the horses nodding and waving, their riders stock-still. Beyond them the elephants stood in long lines, so fantastically caparisoned so as to seem like animals out of some fabled bestiary. In the towers that perched on their broad backs their crews swayed as the beasts shifted from foot to foot; they did not like the feel of the grit underfoot. Notoriously footsore creatures, elephants. Dozens had been crippled by caltrops in the last assault.

  Shahr Baraz’s staff took up their places behind him in a momentary stillness. The old Khedive was helmetless and the wind swayed the long white hair of his topknot, the two ends of his drooping moustache. His face seemed hardly lined despite his age, and his eyes were almost invisible within their slits. He sat his steed as easily as a young man, in black and gold lacquered armour, his scimitar sheathed at one thigh. His horse, a tall grey gelding, bore a black chamfron and a tall yellow crest, and its tail was bound up with white ribbons.

  Shahr Baraz tightened his knees, and his mount started forward into the square at an easy canter.

  There was a murmur of sound from the assembled army. As the old Khedive approached the centre of the square it swelle
d into a roar. The army was cheering him, three sides of the gargantuan space erupting as the thousands upon thousands of throats joined in an air-shaking storm of noise. Then it began to form words, a phrase repeated over and over again:

  “Hor-la Kadhar, Hor-la Khadar!”

  Glory to God they were chanting, thanking their creator for this moment of triumph, this spectacle of their greatness. And their cheers were directed at Shahr Baraz on his horse near the heart of their formations. Glory to God for this evidence of His love for them, this victory of victories.

  “Hor-la Kadhar,” Shahr Baraz whispered, his eyes stinging with tears that he would not let fall. He whipped out his scimitar so that it was a white flash in the sunlight, and the cheering redoubled. They would hear it for leagues, he thought. They would hear the Merduk army giving praise to the One True God, and they would tremble, those unbelievers, knowing at last that the time of the Saint had ended and the time of the Prophet was beginning.

  Shahr Baraz sheathed his scimitar. The blood was racing through him like a spring tide, making him young again. The gelding caught his mood and began to dance beneath him. The pair continued on their way to the scaffold that had been set up in the square where the statue of Myrnius Kuln stood looking on with granite eyes, as he had looked on for six centuries in this city he had founded. The Khedive’s staff caught up with him, their silk surcoats flapping like banners, the battle fanions streaming like brightly coloured serpents above their heads.

  The cheering abated like a retreating gale, became a murmur again and then a silence, so that the hooves of the Khedive’s entourage were loud on the flagged surface of the square.

  When Shahr Baraz reached the scaffold he halted and donned his war-helm. It was black with a long neck guard and full cheekpieces that made the wearer’s face into a mask. Set atop it was a representation of a crescent moon, a curving horn two feet across encased in silver. It was the badge of the Baraz clan.

  At the foot of the scaffold Sibastion Lejer stood in tattered rags, a hooded Merduk soldier on either side of him. His dark eyes glowed with hatred.

  The last stand of the Torunnans had ended a few leagues outside the city, on a low hillock beside the Searil road. There the remnants of John Mogen’s once great army had turned at bay, to be annihilated by the massed Merduk forces. Only a handful had survived the last savage hand-to-hand struggle, and these, having refused service in the Merduk army, were already on their way eastwards in chains so that the people of Ostrabar might have a look at the soldiers who had defied them for sixty years, since the crossing of the Jafrar Mountains and the first battles between Merduk and Ramusian.

  But Lejer—for him a different fate was reserved.

  It would be good for the army to watch his death. He had baulked them of a fortune in loot, and left them masters of a dead city. Now they would see their general make him pay for it, and know that he shared their anger.

  Shahr Baraz spoke, his voice hollowed by the tall-crested helm.

  “I had thought to have you killed by the elephants, like the criminal you are,” he told Lejer matter-of-factly. “You destroyed the jewel of the world out of sheer malice. My people would have made the Aekir you knew into an even more wondrous place, a fit capital for the greatest of the Seven Sultans.

  “And yet this I could have forgiven, it being the act of a desperate mind in its greatest extremity. It may be that had your men been knocking on the gates of Orkhan, my own city, I would have burned it rather than see unbelievers trample the prayer mats in the Temple of Ahrimuz.

  “And your conduct in the last fight was admirable. You Torunnans will be long remembered by us as the noblest enemy we ever had, and in John Mogen I had a worthy adversary. I would that he had survived, so that we might speak of the future together. The Prophet tells us that all men take different roads to the same place. For men such as us the roads lead to a soldier’s death. We have that in common.

  “But you destroyed one thing that cannot be replaced. You took the wisdom of the past ages, the voices of great men, the accumulated knowledge of centuries, and you wantonly burned it, removing it for ever from the earth and ensuring that your people and mine could never enjoy it again. For that you have earned death, and you will die like the traitor to later generations that you are. You will be crucified. Have you anything to say, Sibastion Lejer?”

  The man in rags straightened to his full height.

  “Only this, Merduk. You will never conquer the west. There are too many men there who love their freedom and their faith. Your God is but a shadow cast by ours, and in the end the Blessed Saint will prevail. Kill me and have done with it. I weary of your philosophizing.”

  Shahr Baraz nodded, and gestured to the hooded soldiers. Lejer was forced on to his back and his rags torn away. Other Merduks came, also hooded, bearing mallets and iron spikes. The Torunnan’s arms were stretched out across a stout beam of wood and the spikes poised over his wrists.

  The kettledrums of the elephants began a low, thunderous roll.

  The spikes were hammered in, blood jetting bright in the sunshine. Then Lejer was hauled to his feet, attached to the heavy beam.

  A pair of ropes snaked down and were swiftly tied to the two ends of the beam. Men behind the scaffold began to haul, and Lejer was hoisted up on to it. For the first time his mouth opened in a scream, but it was drowned out by the roar of the kettledrums.

  They fastened him to the scaffold, the hooded men clambering up after him. Finally they hammered a last spike through both his ankles before climbing down.

  The drums stopped. Lejer’s eyes were wide and white in his filthy face. A ribbon of blood trickled down over his chin where he was biting through his lower lip, but he made no sound. Shahr Baraz nodded approvingly, then twitched his reins and began his stately progress back across the square. His aides and staff officers streamed after him.

  “What now, Khedive?” Jaffan, his adjutant, asked.

  “I want the men redeployed, Jaffan, as soon as is practicable. We must start planning our next move. You will send the quartermaster-general to me after lunch and we will discuss a new supply route.”

  “We are advancing on the Searil, then?” Jaffan asked, his eyes shining.

  “Yes. It will take time, of course; time to reorganize and to consolidate, but we are advancing on the Searil. May Ahrimuz continue to bless our arms as he has done in this place. I will call an indaba of general officers this evening to discuss things in detail.”

  “Yes, Khedive!”

  “Oh, and Jaffan—”

  “Khedive?”

  “Make sure that Lejer is dead within the hour. With all his faults, he is a brave man. I do not like to see brave men hanging on gibbets.”

  SEVEN

  F URTHER west, along the Searil road.

  The rain was falling steadily, mourning perhaps the fall of the City of God. The Thurians were hidden behind its diffuse, livid veil; the moisture beaded the air in a mother-of-pearl dimness so all Corfe could see were shapes moving off on every side, occasionally becoming darker and clearer as they staggered nearer then, wraithlike, fading again.

  His boots sank calf-deep in the clutching mud, and water rolled down his face as though it were the sweat of his toil. He was tired, chilled to the marrow, numb as a stone.

  The fleeing hordes had been passing this way for days. They had scoured a scar across the very face of the earth, a long snake of churned mud almost a third of a league wide obscuring the original slim track that had been the route west. The rain was filling up the broken soil, turning it into something near liquid glue. Along it bodies lay partly submerged every few yards: the ranks were beginning to thin. Folk who had fled Aekir with nothing more than the tunics on their backs were shivering and shuddering as they trudged towards the dubious sanctuary of the Torunnan lines. The very old and the very young were the first to falter; most of the bodies Corfe had passed were those of children and the elderly.

  Here and there was the angular
shape of a cart askew, sinking in the mud, the carcass of a mule or a pair of oxen sprawled between its shafts. People had already been at the flesh, stripping the bodies clean so that bones glinted palely in the unending rain.

  There was shouting away in the rain mist. A fight up ahead by the sound of it. Corfe heard an old man’s voice cry out in pain, the sound of blows. He did not quicken his pace, but slogged wearily along. He had seen a score of such encounters since Aekir; they were as unremarkable as the falling rain.

  But suddenly he was in the midst of it. An elderly man, his clothes black with mud and his face hideously scarred, came blundering out of the mist with one hand stretched before him as though feeling his way through the damp air. His other hand clutched something at his breast. There were half a dozen shapes in pursuit, snarling and shouting to one another.

  The old man tripped and fell full length in the mud. For a second he lay as if struck down; then he began moving feebly. As he lifted his head Corfe saw that his eyes had been gouged out. They were dark, scabbed pits filled with mud and rain.

  The pursuers became more visible, a rag-tag crowd of wild-eyed men. They carried cudgels and poniards. One bore a pike with a broken shaft. He poked the old man with the splintered end.

  “Come on, grandfather, let us have the pretty bauble and perhaps we will let you live. It’s little good to you anyway. You’ll never see it glitter no more.”

  The old man tried to struggle to his knees, but the mud held him fast. His breath was coming in hoarse whines.

  “I beg you, my sons,” he bleated, “in the name of the Blessed Saint, let me be.” Corfe could see now that dangling from a chain around his wizened neck was the A-shaped symbol of the praying hands, the badge of a Ramusian cleric. It was smeared with mud, but the yellow gleam of gold and precious stones could be made out through the filth.

  “Have it your own way then, you God-damned Raven.”

  The men closed in on the prone figure like vultures moving in on a carcass. The old man’s body began jerking up and down as they tried to wrest the chain off his neck.