Ships from the West (14 page)

Golophin finally let slip the leash on his temper.
‘You can and you will!’
A cold light blazed in his eyes. They burned like white flames and the fury in them made Isolla retreat a step. ‘By Ramusio’s beard, I thought you had better sense. Do you think you can give a cheery little speech to the nobles and then expect to trip lightly away? This kingdom is about to enter a dark age that none of us can imagine, and the storm of its wings is almost upon us. I have no more time to sit here and wrangle with stiff-necked fools and silly little girls.
You will both do as I say.’

The light in his eyes faded. In a more human voice he said, ‘Hawkwood, a word with you outside.’

The mage and the mariner left the shocked Queen behind and stood outside her door. Hawkwood watched Golophin warily, and the old wizard grinned.

‘What do you think? Did I put the fear of God into her?’

‘You old bastard! And into me too.’

‘Good. The eyes were a nice touch, I think. Listen Richard, you must get her down to that damned ship by mid-afternoon at the latest. Your vessel is called the
Seahare,
and is berthed in the Royal yards at the very foot of Admiral’s Tower. Do not ask how I purloined her; I would blush to tell you. But she is yours, and all the paperwork is …’ He grinned again. ‘Irrelevant. Everything is ready or almost so. They’re lading her with extra stores but she’s a flyer, not a fighter - so they tell me - and if I start sending marines aboard it’ll arouse suspicion. The current captain is on shore leave, no doubt dipping his wick in some bawdy house. I have spoken to the harbour master, and you are expected, but your passengers are anonymous nobles, no more.’

‘Nobles? So who are the others?’ Hawkwood asked.

‘I’m not yet sure there will be others. That is what I am going to find out now. Just get Isolla down to that ship. And -and look after her, Richard. Quite apart from being Queen, she’s a fine woman.’

‘I know. Listen Golophin, I haven’t thanked you—’

‘Don’t bother. I need you as much as you needed me. Now I must be gone.’ Golophin gripped his arm. ‘I will see you again, Captain, of that you may be sure.’

Then he was off, striding down the passageway like a much younger man, albeit one who looked as though he had not eaten in a month.

A flurry of packing - and Hawkwood conscripted into the process by dark little Brienne, Isolla’s Astaran maid, who had been with her since childhood. Isolla white-faced and silent, still believing Golophin’s rage to be genuine. And then a subterranean journey, the little trio hurrying and stumbling by torchlight, weighed down with bags and even a small trunk. From the palace to Admiral’s Tower was the better part of half a league, and the first third of the way was a steep-stepped descent of dripping stone, the Queen leading the way with a guttering torch, Hawkwood and Brienne following, unable to see their own feet for the burdens they carried. Hawkwood stepped once on the wriggling softness of a rat, and stumbled. At once, Isolla’s strong hand was at his elbow, helping him to his feet. The Queen’s face was invisible under a hooded cloak but she was as tall as a man, and up to the burden. Hawkwood found himself admiring her quick, sure gait, and the slender fingers which held aloft the torch. Her perfume drifted back to him as they laboured along, an essence of lavender, like the scent of the Hebros foothills in summer.

At last they came to a door which Isolla unlocked and left open behind them, and stepped out into the lower yards of the tower. All about them was the tumult of the wharves, the screaming gulls. Sea smells of rotting fish and tar and wood and salt. A forest of masts rose up into a clear sky before them, and the sunlight was dazzling, blinding after their underground journey. They stood blinking, momentarily bewildered by the spectacle. It was Hawkwood who collected his wits first, and led them to their vessel where it floated at its moorings in the midst of a crowd of others.

The
Seahare
was a lateen-rigged xebec of some three hundred tons, a fast dispatch-runner of the Hebrian navy with a crew of sixty. Three-masted, she could run up both lateen and square-rigged yards depending on the wind. She was a sharp-beaked ship with an overhanging counter and a narrow keel, but she was nonetheless wide in the beam to enhance her stability as a sail platform. Her decks were turtle-built so that any seas which came aboard might run off into the scuppers at once, and above the decks were gratings which ran from the centre line to the ship’s rail so that her crew might work dry-shod whilst the water ran off below them. As Golophin had said, she was built for speed, not warfare, and though she had a pair of twelve-pound bow-chasers her broadside amounted to half a dozen light sakers, more to counter a last-minute boarding than to facilitate any real sea battle. Hawkwood’s arrival was greeted with unfriendly stares, but as soon as the ladies were below he began shouting out a series of orders which showed that he knew his business. The first mate, a Merduk named Arhuz, was a small, compact man, dark as a seal. He had sailed with Julius Albak thirty years before, and like all of the other sailors he knew of Richard Hawkwood and his great voyage, as a man remembers the nursery rhymes learned as a child. Once the knowledge of the new captain’s identity had spread about the ship the men set to work with a will. It was not every day they were to be skippered by a legend.

A great deal of stores had still to be taken on board, and the main hatch was gaping dark and wide as the men hauled on tackles from the yardarms to lower casks and sacks into the hold. Others were trundling more casks from the vast storerooms under the tower, whilst yet more were coiling away spare cables and hauling aboard reluctant goats and cages of chickens. It looked like chaos, but it was a controlled chaos, and Hawkwood was satisfied that they would complete their victualling in time for the evening tide.

The Royal yards had not yet been engulfed by the panicked disorder that was enveloping the rest of the waterfront, but that disorder was audible beyond the massive walls which separated them from the Inner Roads. Fear was rank in the air, and all the while men looked over their shoulder at the approaching storm which was towering in the west, and swallowing up ever more of the sky as it thundered eastwards. Hawkwood needed no charts in this part of the world; he knew all the coasts around Abrusio as well as the features of his own face, and that face grew grave as he considered what it would be like to beat out of the Inner Roads under a strong westerly. Handy as the xebec might be at dealing with a beam wind, she would have to win some leeway once they made it into the gulf, or that wind might just push them headlong on to the unforgiving coast of Hebrion. But they would have the ebbing flow of the tide beneath the keel, to draw them out of the bay and into the wider gulf beyond. He hoped that would be enough.

Through the years, Hawkwood had taken ships uncounted out of this port into the green waters of the gulf, and then beyond, to Macassar of the Corsairs, to Gabrion which had spawned him and of which he remembered almost nothing now. To the coasts of hot Calmar and the jungles of savage Punt. But all those memories faded into a merry silence beside the one voyage which had made his name. The one that had broken him. No good had come of it that he could see, least of all to himself. But he knew that it would always be irrevocably linked to him - among mariners at least. He had earned a place in history; more importantly, perhaps, he had won a hard-bought right to stand tall in the ranks of the mariners of yore. But he took no pride in it. He knew that it counted for nothing. Men did things because they had to do them, or because they seemed the only thing to do at the time. And afterwards they were lauded as heroes. It was the way the world worked. He knew that now.

But this woman below, she mattered. She mattered to the world, of course - it was important that she survive. But most of all she mattered to him. And he dared not delve deeper into that knowledge, for fear his middle age might come laughing back at him. It was enough that she was here.

For a while Richard Hawkwood, standing there on the quarterdeck of another man’s ship with doom approaching out of the west, watched the sailors ready his vessel for sea, and knew that she was below, and was inexplicably happy.

A commotion down on the wharves. Two riders had galloped through the gate and come to a rearing halt before the xebec, scattering mariners and panicking the gulls. A man and a woman dismounted, tawny with dust, and without ceremony or introduction they ran up the gangplank hand in hand, leaving their foam-streaked and blowing mounts standing. Hawkwood, jolted out of his reverie, shouted for the master-at-arms and met them at the rail.

‘What the hell is this? This is a king’s ship. You can’t—’

The woman threw back her richly embroidered hood and smiled at him. ‘Hello, Richard. It has been a long time’

It was Jemilla.

PART TWO

The soldier-king

But I’ve said goodbye to Galahad, And am no more the Knight of dreams and show: For lust and senseless hatred make me glad, And my killed friends are with me where I go …

Siegfried Sassoon

Nine

Gaderion had begun life as a timber-built blockhouse on a stream-girt spur of the Thurian mountains. The Fimbrians had stationed troops there to police the passage of the Torrin Gap and levy tolls on the caravans that passed through from west to east, or east to west. When their empire fell apart the station was abandoned, and the only relic left of their presence was the fine road which they had constructed to speed the passage of their armies.

The Torunnans had built a series of staging posts in the gap, and around these had grown up a straggling network of taverns and livery stables which catered for travellers. But these had withered away over the years, first of all in the retrenchment which had followed the crisis of the Merduk Wars, and then in the years after the Schism, when trade between Torunna and Almark had all but died out.

More recently, a Merduk army had begun work on a fortress in the gap, before suffering defeat in the Battle of Berrona. King Corfe, in the years following Armagedir, had had the entire region surveyed, and at the point where the road was pinched in a narrow valley between the buttresses of the two mountain chains, he had had a hilltop spur levelled, and on its summit had constructed a large fortress complex which in size at least would come to rival long-lost Ormann Dyke. In the subsequent years the defences had been extended for almost half a league, to command the entire pass, and Gaderion now consisted of three separate fortifications, all connected by massive curtain walls.

To the south-east was the donjon on its steep spur of black rock. This was a squat citadel with walls fully fifty feet thick to withstand siege guns. There was a spring within its perimeter, and below it bomb proofs had been hewn out of the living gutiock to house a fair-sized army, and enough supplies to sustain them for at least a year. Here also were the administrative offices of the garrison, and the living quarters of the commanding officer. In the midst of these was a taller feature, a blunt spike of rock which at one time in the youth of the world had been a plug of molten lava within the walls of a volcano. The walls had worn away, leaving this ominous fist of basalt standing alone. There had been a pagan altar on its summit when Corfe’s engineers had first surveyed it. Now it had been partially hollowed out with immense, costly, dangerous labour, and provided a last-ditch refuge within the donjon itself, and a lofty look-out which gave a bird’s-eye view of the entire Torrin river valley and the mountains on either side. Light guns had been sited in embrasures in its impregnable sides, and they commanded every approach. Men called this ominous-looking tower of stone the Spike.

The donjon and the Spike loomed over this flat-floored valley, which was perhaps three quarters of a mile wide. The soil here was fertile and dark, watered by the chill stream which hundreds of miles to the south and east grew into the Torrin river, and the soldiers of the garrison tended plots of land in the shadow of the fortress despite the mountain-swift growing season and the killer frosts of the winter. There were currently twenty-eight thousand men stationed at Gaderion. Many of them had wives who lived nearby, and a scattering of stone and log houses dotted the valley east of the walls. Officially, this was frowned upon, but in fact it was discreetly tolerated, else the separation between the men and their families would have been well-nigh unsupportable.

Square in the middle of the valley was a low, circular knoll some fifty feet high, and on this had been built the second of Gaderion’s fortresses. The redoubt was a simple square structure with triangular casemates at each corner to catch any foes who reached the walls in a deadly crossfire. The North Road ran through it under the arches of two heavily defended gates, and before these gates were two redans which each mounted a battery of guns. Within the walls were housed the stables of the Royal couriers who kept Gaderion in touch with the larger world, and it was here also that the main sortie force of the fortress was billeted: some eight thousand men, half of them cavalry.

The last of Gaderion’s fortresses was the Eyrie. This had been tacked on like a swallow’s nest to the steep cliffs of the Candorwir, the mountain whose peak overlooked the valley on its western side. The stone of Candorwir had been hollowed out to accommodate three thousand men and fifty great guns, and the only way they could be reached was by a dizzy single-track mule path which had been blasted out of the very flank of the mountain. The guns of the Eyrie and the donjon formed a perfect crossfire which transformed the floor of the Torrin valley into a veritable killing ground in which each feature had been mapped and ranged. The gunners of Gaderion could, if they wished, shoot accurately at these features in the dark, for each gun had a log board noting the traverse and elevation of specified points on the approach to the walls.