The Heretic Kings (23 page)

“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.

“He cannot keep it up much longer,” Hawkwood said. “I don’t believe he’s had more than an hour’s sleep a night since we left the coast.”

Murad looked less like an officer administering to his men than a ghoul preying on the sick. His lank hair fell in black strings across his face and the flesh had been pared away from nose and cheekbones and temples. His scar now seemed an extravagant curl of tissue, like an extra thin-lipped mouth on the side of his face. Even his fingers were skeletal.

“We have been ashore scarcely a month,” Hawkwood said quietly. “We have buried five shipmates in that time—maybe more back at the fort by now—and the rest of us are close to breaking down. Do you really believe this land can ever be fit for civilized men, Bardolin?”

The mage shut his eyes and turned away. “I’ll tell you after tomorrow.”

T HAT night the dream came to Bardolin again.

But this time it was the woman Kersik who came to him in the night, nude, her skin a flawless bloom of honey. She was incandescently beautiful despite the two rows of nipples that lined her torso from pectoral to navel and the claws which curled at the tips of her fingers. Her eyes blazed like the sun behind leaves.

They made love on the yielding ground beyond the camp. This time Bardolin was atop her, grinding into her firm softness with the vigour of a young man. And all around the straining couple a masque of fantastic figures danced and capered madly, spindle-thin, cackling, with green slits for eyes and hornlike ears. Bardolin could feel their feet, light as leaves, dancing in the hollow of his back as he pushed into the woman below him.

But there was another presence there. He arched his head to see, despite the grip of her hand on the nape of his neck, a tall darkness towering above the frolics.

A shifter in wolf form.

N ONE of them had slept well. Bardolin ached as though someone had been kicking him all night. The company dragged themselves erect, Sergeant Mensurado hauling men to their feet. Kersik looked on like an indulgent parent.

Murad appeared from the trees. He had shaved, the blood on his chin testimony to the effort it had cost him. His straggling hair had been tied back and he had changed into a clean shirt which was nonetheless dotted with mould. He looked almost fresh, despite the sunken glitter of his eyes.

“So we are to see this city of yours today,” he said to Kersik.

The woman seemed amused at some private joke, as she often did. “Why yes, Lord Murad, if your comrades are fit to march.”

“They’re fit. They’re Hebrian soldiers,” Murad drawled, and he turned away from her with such languid contempt that Hawkwood actually found himself admiring him. The woman’s smile took on a fixed quality for a second, and then became pure sunshine again.

They set off after a frugal meal of the inevitable fruit. It was weeks since any of them had tasted meat, and they were becoming nostalgic even at the thought of the ship’s salt pork.

Another day of labour. Though they were tramping a passable road, they still had to take it in turns to carry the two delirious soldiers. Even Murad did his share.

There was more life in the jungle here, if that were possible. Not the squeakings and scurryings of before, but the crash and thump of larger beasts moving off in the vegetation. Kersik appeared oblivious to them, but the company travelled with loaded weapons and drawn swords. They were aware of a subtle change in their surroundings. The trees were smaller, the canopy less dense. Almost the forest here looked like secondary growth, a reclaiming of land once cleared.

To reinforce this opinion they came across the remains of huge stone-built buildings half hidden at the sides of the narrow road. Bardolin wanted to pause and examine them, for they seemed to be liberally dotted with carved writing, but Kersik would not allow it. When he asked her about them she seemed even more reluctant to give out information than she had throughout the journey.

“They are
Undwa-Zantu
,” she said at last, surrendering to Bardolin’s badgering.

“What does that mean?” the mage asked.

“They are
old
, from the earlier time, the first peoples.”

With that one sentence she let loose a torrent of questions from both Bardolin and Hawkwood, but would answer none of them.

“You will learn more when we get to the city,” was all she would say.

T HEY had reached the foot of the mountain to the north of their anchorage. They could see it clearly, even through the canopy overhead. It reared up like a grey wall above the jungle, the forest struggling to maintain itself at its knees but gradually thinning and clearing all the same.