[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore

by Robert Earl - (ebook by Undead)

  “You are truly a man of resource,” Florin nodded, impressed.

  “Yes,” Ali nodded modestly and lifted the corner of the blanket, which covered his wares. As well as the fat barrels of powder there were two square boxes huddled within the handcart. The merchant lifted the lid of one to reveal three rows of iron spheres nestling in the deep straw packing.

  They were the size of ripe pineapples, but they were black and smooth and almost featureless. The only flaws in their round perfection were the white fuses that grew like pigtails from the top of each of them.

  “Look,” said Ali, lifting one up with the air of a conjuror that has just pulled a rabbit from a cynic’s empty hat. “Bombas! All the way from Cathay, where they use them to hunt dragons.”

  “Then they’re probably full of damp,” Orbrant muttered.

  Florin, who by now was deep in the flow of the poetry of the marketplace, turned on him.

  “For shame, sergeant,” he scolded. “Our friend here would never sell poor quality goods. I just wish that we could afford to buy them.”

  “Sorry sir,” Orbrant said.

  “But you can afford them,” Ali smiled happily. “For you I will make a gift of a whole box. My wife doesn’t know of these treasures, so I will take my loss from the forty you will pay me for the powder.”

  “My men will weep when I tell them how poor we have become,” Florin complained, drawing the negotiations to an end.

  “They will weep more if they go into the jungle unarmed,” Ali observed, helpfully. “Although not for very long.”

  “No doubt. Well then, friend Ali, perhaps you can show me how to use these bombas whilst my sergeant here scrapes together the last of our gold.”

  “My pleasure,” Ali beamed delightedly. He should have known that things were never this easy. “But I fear that we can’t light one of these fuses here or we will damage the buildings hereabouts.”

  “We’ll use the old well behind the barracks. The water’s too foetid to use.”

  “Alas, the water would extinguish the fuse.”

  “We’ll drop it into the bucket.”

  “But the bucket would be destroyed.”

  “No matter,” Florin decided. “Come, my friend, let’s light one of these up.”

  So saying he selected one of the bombs and led Ali unhappily away to the well. Of course the bomb might work, he told himself. It wasn’t as if he actually knew that it wouldn’t.

  If only his customers would save his wares until the day of battle, he reflected as they approached the well. That way they would avoid so much disappointment.

  Long term disappointment, at least.

  “Here we go,” Florin said, tossing the weight of the bomb he’d chosen from hand to hand and peering into the well. The bucket was gently rotting away, suspended on its rusted chain perhaps four feet beneath the crumbling wall that surrounded it. An easy enough target to drop the bomb into.

  “I wonder, my old friend, do you have a tinder box?”

  “Use one of these instead,” Ali said, handing over a small ivory box of sulphur matches. “They’re safer than a shower of sparks.”

  “Of course,” Florin nodded and took the box. Resting the bomb on the edge of the well he struck one of the matches and then, shielding the flame from the sultry dampness of the breeze, he bent down to light the fuse.

  It burst into life with an impressive hiss. The white twine of its length blackened beneath the bright star of a flame that worked its way steadily downward.

  Holding the thing as delicately as if the iron of its body were as fragile as eggshell, Florin leaned over the side of the well and dropped the charge into the bucket.

  “Let us stand back a little way,” Ali advised, and the two of them drew back. They waited in breathless anticipation as the distant hiss of the fuse spluttered and died.

  They waited a little longer.

  Ali felt a trickle of sweat run down his spine and swallowed nervously.

  “Perhaps the fuse was loose…” he began to explain when, with absolutely no warning, the bomb exploded.

  The power of the explosion was concentrated and reinforced by the confines of the well. Unable to escape in any other direction the fire roared upwards, a volcano of destruction that threw a great gout of shrapnel and shattered brick high into the air.

  “It worked,” Ali gasped, but Florin was too impressed to hear the relief in his voice. Even now, after the first impact of the explosion, smoke was still vomiting up out of the well’s charred mouth. With a grin of delight Florin walked cautiously towards it, the cries and rushing feet of his men unheard beneath the ringing in is ears.

  “Friend Ali,” Florin shouted over his own deafness. “I can see why your word is so valued.”

  The merchant had the presence of mind to snap shut the surprised gape of his jaw as he hastened to Florin’s side.

  “Perhaps you would like to buy the rest of the bombs?” he began innocently, the patter of falling debris unnoticed around him.

  “No, one box will be enough,” Florin said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “But…”

  “Come, my sergeant will pay you the balance.”

  The merchant cursed himself. If he’d have known that any of those damned things actually worked…

  “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear—” he tried again, but Florin merely smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “You did. Ah, here’s Sergeant Orbrant. And a score of my men. Look at how sharp their halberds are, friend Ali.”

  “Yes indeed.” The merchant nodded miserably as Orbrant handed him a purse that was five hundred per cent pure profit. He stowed it within his shirt and, cursing his men to get a move on, trailed out of the compound like a broken man.

  Even the thought that the rest of the bombas were probably as useless as the first two he’d tried didn’t lend him much cheer. That one explosion should have been enough to double his price.

  He was still sulking two days later when, waved off by a desultory rabble of whores, peddlers, beggars and pick pockets, van Delft’s expedition were rounded up and herded back into their ships. Although their destination was supposed to be a secret the whole town knew where they were going.

  They were going to the southern jungle.

  Oblivion.

  “What a waste,” Ali muttered later that night, his thoughts haunted by images of the expedition’s coins and armour mouldering away between cleanly picked bones.

  “Yes,” his wife surprised him by agreeing. Her own thoughts full of the bronzed young men that were carrying that wealth into the doom of a Lustrian jungle. “What a waste.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Florin wasn’t the only one wondering why his company had been transferred to the Hippogriff. Lorenzo had assumed that it was to avoid further trouble with the Kislevites. Lundorf, with whose company the Bretonnians had been rotated, suggested that it was a sort of promotion.

  Only van Delft really knew, of course. But the commander had remained as tight lipped as always about his reasons, and Florin, who was always happier away from the commander’s penetrating blue gaze, hadn’t pressed him.

  He was beginning to wish that he had sought an answer though. The uncertainty was one of the thoughts that had kept him awake tonight, his hopes and fears for the future combining to drive him out of the claustrophobic confines of his cabin.

  Now he stood on the deck, leaning over the warm wood of the guard-rail and peering out over a phosphorescent ocean. The shore lay in a black line along the distant horizon, the tangled mass of the jungle blurred by mist. Despite the late hour the heat remained constant, almost as if the pale light of the fattening moon, Mannslieb was somehow warming the night air.

  Florin gazed at its pockmarked face, and then beyond into the stars that lay above it. They glittered unblinkingly in the black void of space, gazing hungrily down like predatory eyes.

  The Bretonnian found himself scanning the heavens for the familiar constellations of h
is home. When he realised that there were none he was seized with a strange certainty that somewhere, beneath the northern skies where they still burned, there was another Florin d’Artaud.

  This other Florin d’Artaud might be drinking ale, or playing cards, or rolling around a bed bought with either love or gold. He would be safe from the horrors that awaited in the darkness of the Lustrian shore.

  A meteor hissed across the void above and the real Florin used the gods’ fire to wish his alter ego luck.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” a voice commented from the shadows, and he started with a thrill of superstitious fear. Then the speaker stepped out into the moonlight, his stooped form dispelling Florin’s unease.

  “Yes,” he said as his pulse slowed back down. “Very beautiful. But very strange. I can’t see the Mill, or the Griffin. Or even the Lady’s Veil.”

  “But you can see the Serpent. Look up there, see the bright star to the left of the pinnace?”

  Florin followed the wizard’s finger and nodded.

  “That’s the eye. Beneath it you can see the two fangs, those trails of smaller stars.”

  “So you can,” Florin nodded happily as his imagination joined the dots. “And its body spirals over into the horizon.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m Florin d’Artaud, by the way,” he held out his hand and the wizard took it, his grip cool and dry.

  “Yes, van Delft mentioned you. And I’m Bartolomi Kereveld.”

  The two men shook hands, and Florin found himself studying the creases and wrinkles that lined the old man’s face. He was searching for a trace of the evil Orbrant had spoken of. All he found were the beginnings of a wry smile.

  “Don’t worry,” Kereveld said, his voice gently mocking. “You won’t see any horns.”

  Florin snorted, embarrassed that he had been so transparent.

  “I never thanked you for driving away that daemon,” he rapidly changed the subject.

  “Daemon?”

  “Yes, the sea monster.”

  “Oh that,” Kereveld’s voice quavered with the effort of appearing modest. “It was nothing. Just a simple meteor storm. Any one of my brethren could have cast a similar version.”

  “Yet it seemed to impress the daemon.”

  “Pshaw,” the wizard waved away the compliment. “It was no daemon. Just a serpentia megalothon. Quite a natural creature, I assure you. Although it was a prize specimen.”

  “Yes,” Florin remarked dryly and cast his gaze back to the shore. It seemed to be waiting for them, brooding with the menace of a beast hidden in ambush. “I bet we’ll find plenty of prize specimens in there, too, of one sort or another.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Kereveld nodded humourlessly. “Let’s hope so.”

  Florin couldn’t help hoping for quite the opposite. Although in that, as in many things, he was destined to be disappointed.

  “Are you sure I can’t persuade you?” van Delft asked, although he was already sure that he knew what the answer would be.

  “Dead sure,” Captain-Owner Gorth said, and spat towards the distant mouth of the river. It was massive, a great hungry maw that opened up out of the green mass of the jungle to vomit its muddy waters far, far out to sea. Even with his ships anchored here, half a mile off that treacherous coast, Gorth couldn’t see anything through the silt-laden water.

  “I’m damned if I’ll risk my girls in that puddle.”

  Van Delft had a sudden, fleeting image of his own two girls. Women, really, but no less sweet to him for that. They’d be sitting in the morning room of their house in Marienburg now, sewing or gossiping while they waited for him to bring back their dowries.

  Quite why he should have to risk life and limb so that he could bribe worthless young men to marry them he didn’t quite know. But then, he’d never tried to understand the elegant world which they seemed to so much enjoy.

  “All right,” he sighed, his attention snapping back to the task in hand. “We agreed that you’d wait for us at sea. No reason why you should change your mind now.”

  Gorth nodded, satisfied, and thrust his thumbs into the rope belt that disappeared beneath the bulge of his stomach. He’d become rich from knowing when to take chances, and when not to. And risking the hulls of his ships in unknown shallows was definitely an example of when not to.

  Still, there was no point being mean-spirited. Apart from anything else he quite liked van Delft. Even though he did stink of aristo, there was no pretension about him, and he had an honest ruthlessness that reminded Gorth of himself.

  “Tell you what, though, Colonel…”

  “Commander.”

  “Aye, commander, I’ll lend you some of my lads to see your boats to the shore. Wouldn’t want to lose any more of you whilst your still in my care, so to speak.”

  “Very decent of you,” van Delft thanked him. “Perhaps you could ask them to help us get them into the water the right way up?”

  Gorth sniggered happily. Like every other sailor in the flotilla he’d been enjoying watching the mercenaries struggle and curse with their long boats. One of them had already slipped its ropes and upended itself in the water. It bobbed up and down as it rode the gentle swell out to sea like a great wooden tortoise.

  “Manolis!” Gorth bellowed, making his bosun jump. “Don’t just sit there. Get those damned boats into the water the right way up.”

  “Aye, captain.” Manolis saluted and began to chivvy his men into action. Some of them took charge of lowering the long boats into the sea, whilst others stripped off and dived into the water. A pair of them swam off to round up the escapee, their long, powerful strokes chopping into the sea like axe strokes. Others, laughing with pleasure at the coolness of the water after the scorching heat of the sun, were treading water and waiting to climb into the descending long boats.

  Further down the deck Florin let the sailors take over the task with relief. Lorenzo stood sweating beside him, his palms stinging from a rope that had slipped through his hands.

  “Well, boss,” he said, rubbing his palms together and looking past the heaving backs of the sailors and into the greenery beyond. “Looks like things are going to get interesting.”

  “Looks that way,” Florin said doubtfully. Now that they were close enough to see the jungle in detail he was beginning to realise how wrong his ideas about it had been.

  Even during their stay at Swamptown he’d continued to think of it as more or less a forest. He knew that there would be bigger trees though, and that the heat would be stifling. He also knew that there would be strange plants and animals lurking in this new world, perhaps reptilian brothers of the bears and wolves that inhabited the forests of Bretonnia.

  In short he had expected the jungle to be recognisable.

  It wasn’t.

  There was nothing at all recognisable about the impenetrable green mass that now lay waiting for them upon that alien shore. No mere collection of trees and wildlife this, no shaded domain of bear and boar. Instead its huge form towered above the waves like the bulk of a single monstrous animal. The hollows between its limbs were choked with vines and darkness, the air above it misted with its hot breath.

  And, although it seemed poised with the breathless anticipation of a predator in ambush, it was far from silent, this great beast. The whisper of humid winds in the undergrowth, the cries of hunters and the screams of the hunted, the low, constant throb of countless insects; these and a thousand other sounds combined to whisper an entreaty, or perhaps a terrible threat, to the men who would soon be offering themselves to its hungry heart.

  “Monsieur d’Artaud,” a voice called behind him, and Florin turned to see Kereveld struggling through the ranks of the dwarfs who were waiting on the other end of the deck. The wizard towered above their steel-helmed heads, the great blunt cone of his hat making him seen even more of a giant as he rudely elbowed his way forward. He remained oblivious to their angry stares, as he bumbled along with no more than an occasional, “E
xcuse me.”

  Following in his wake came his servant, sweating and wheezing beneath a great haversack and a dangling collection of water bottles and map cases.

  “Good day to you, Menheer Kereveld,” Florin greeted him. “Let me introduce you to my manservant Lorenzo.”

  “A pleasure,” the wizard waved away his hand and turned back to Florin. “The Colonel tells me that I’m to travel with you down the river. You’re quite the warrior, by all accounts.”

  “Just as you say,” Florin decided, his chest swelling at the flattery. “In fact it will be an honour.”

  A miserable sigh wracked Lorenzo upon hearing that dirty word.

  “I do have a few more bits and pieces to take with us, though. I wonder if your man would be so good as to help Theobold here?”

  Florin looked at Lorenzo, who nodded and followed the exhausted Theobold back through the milling throng of the crowd.

  “Come on then,” an impatient voice called from over the side. “Let’s be having you. Who’s first?”

  “That will be us,” Kereveld decided, despite Thorgrimm’s raised hand, and led the way to the waiting sailor. With barely a pause he hiked up the hem of his robe and clambered awkwardly over the gunwale, the pale sticks of his calves flashing in the sunlight.

  “First squad,” Florin called out to his men as he followed this spindly charge. “Follow me.”

  He checked his pack, and vaulted over ship’s side, climbing down the cargo net that drooped into the dangerously rocking long boat. Below him the coxswain waited, holding the boat close to the high wooden wall of the ship’s side.

  “Make your way along to the prow, sir,” he said, pointing to the narrow ledge upon which Kereveld was already shifting uncomfortably. “Right then, who’s next? Come on, come on.”

  Florin was content to leave the loading of the boat to the coxswain. Barefoot and clothed in nothing but a red bandanna and a pair of filthy breeches, the sailor was the only man who seemed happy on the dangerously pitching deck. He chivvied the mercenaries into their places, encouraging them with a constant stream of profanities and orders as they stowed their kit and unlimbered the oars.