by Paul Kearney
As he left the shade of the cypresses the punishing sunlight bore down on him, and he saw the cluster of secretaries gather round their monarch like flies feeding off a corpse. The image was an unlucky one, and Murad banished it from his mind. He would have his ships, and his men, and he would have his city in the west.
He had not told the King that there was a log accompanying the rutter which detailed that voyage to the west of a century ago, and he was glad that he had kept the knowledge to himself. If the King had read the tattered pages he would most likely have found nothing. Murad himself had had a hard time deciphering the scrawled writing and stained parchment of the document, and the entries were hard to find—but they were there.
They referred to the very first expedition to the west, three centuries before the master of the Faulcon had made his ill-fated voyage. It was a venture that had ended, as far as Murad could make out, in slaughter and madness.
But that had been a long time ago. Such things became garbled and fantastic with every passing year. There would be nothing in the west that Hebrian arquebuses and pikes could not face down.
Time enough to worry about such things when the fabled Western Continent was looming off his bow with its secrets, its dangers and its unknown riches. It would be too late then for anyone to turn back.
FIVE
R ICHARD Hawkwood opened the ornate grille that enclosed the balcony and stood naked, sipping his wine. There was no breeze. It was unheard of for the Hebrian trade to fail so early in the year. He could look down the steep, teeming roofs to the harbour and see the Outer Roads crowded with caravels and carracks, galeots and luggers, all harbour-bound by lack of wind. The only seamen doing a good trade were the masters of oar-powered galleys and galleasses, the swift dispatch runners of the crown who would sometimes condescend to transport compact cargoes for a small fortune.
He could see the Grace in the inner yards, still being refitted. Seaworms had riddled her hull in the voyage to the Malacars and she was having her outer planking replaced. Somewhat further out was his other ship, a tall carrack named the Gabrian Osprey. She had crawled in two days ago, labouring under sweeps, and was now at anchor waiting for a free berth. Her crew were being kept under hatches until Hawkwood could devise some way of slipping them past the Inceptines. A longboat perhaps, at night. Or he could hire a smack to stand off and let them swim out to it. No, that would never do.
He rubbed his forehead wearily. His torso shone with sweat and the stink of the pyres seemed to grease it like some foul second skin. He closed the grille as a woman’s voice said: “Richard, are you coming back to bed?”
“A moment.”
But she had risen, a sheet draped about her shoulders, and was padding over the cool marble floor toward him. Her arms encircled him from behind and he felt the heat of her through the crumpled linen.
“My poor captain who has so much to occupy his mind. Are you thinking of Julius?”
“No.” Julius Albak’s body had been retrieved and burnt by the Inceptines. There was no family to speak of, save the seagoing one that was Richard’s crew. A dozen of them were in chains in the catacombs awaiting a hearing. No, Julius Albak had gone to the long rest at last. There was nothing more to be done about that.
The woman’s hand drifted down to caress his manhood but he was unresponsive.
“I’m not in the mood, Jem.”
“I noticed. Usually when you return from a voyage we never even make it as far as the bed.”
“I have a lot on my mind. I’m sorry.”
She left him and went back to the bed and the tall decanter that stood beside it. The room was quite cool, thick-walled, faced with marble and white-painted plaster. The ceiling rose up far beyond Hawkwood’s head to be lost in a maze of arches and buttresses of dark cedar. The enclosed balcony stretched along the whole of one wall, and the bed occupied another. There were elegant chairs, a dressing table, hangings heavy with gilt. Over all were thrown a pretty tumble of women’s clothes and head-dresses. High in a corner a tiny monkey stared down from a golden cage with wide, unblinking eyes. Richard had brought it to her from far Calmar half a dozen years ago.
The sound of the city drifted in as a distant surf of noise. This far up the hill one was removed from the narrow filth of the streets, the shocking heat, the stinking open sewers, the noisy vitality of Abrusio. This was how the nobility lived.
“Have you seen your wife yet?” Jemilla asked him tartly, and he winced.
“No. You know I haven’t.”
“You’ve been back three days, Richard. Shouldn’t you pay her a visit, at least for form’s sake?”
He turned to look at her. Whereas his body was burnt a deep brown by sun and wind and seaspray, hers was as white as alabaster, which made the heavy mane of dark hair all the more striking. Her eyes were as black and bright as pitch bubbles on a tropic-heated deck, wonderfully mobile brows arching over them like two black birds rising and falling in tune with her moods. She was a passionate, almost a savage lover, and he often came away from her covered with scratches and bites. And yet he had seen her on her way to the palace in a barouche, hair coiled on her head, robes stiff with brocade, a linen ruff encircling her face making it seem that of a porcelain doll.
She had other lovers: noble, or humble like himself. He could not expect her to be faithful, she always protested, when he was away two-thirds of the year. But she was careful. A virtuous noble widow she appeared to be, and was believed to be by most people at court, but the servants knew differently, as did Hawkwood. He had procured a misbirth for her not two years ago—at her insistence. An oldwife in the lower city had done it in a cramped little back room. She would never tell him if the child had been his or not. Perhaps she did not know herself. He thought about it sometimes.
“My wife understands that I have many things to clear up when I finish a voyage,” he said coldly.
She laughed, water rippling in a silver ewer, and reached out a slender hand. “Oh, don’t be so stiff and proper, Richard. Come here to me. You look like a mahogany statue.”
He joined her on the bed.
“It is Julius and your crew, I know. I have tried, Richard. There is nothing anyone can do, perhaps not even Abeleyn himself. He is not happy about it either.”
“He discusses policy with you, then, as you lie together.”
She flushed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Only that you should be more careful, Jem. I’ve been back three days, but already I know who the King’s new bedfellow is.”
One eyebrow soared up her forehead disdainfully. “Rumour and truth have a large gap between them.”
“The King does not like his lovers to bruit his affairs in public. He has made a policy of bachelorhood. If you are not careful you may wake up one morning aboard a Merduk slave transport.”
“Do you presume to tell me how to regulate my affairs, Captain? I suppose your voyaging from one louse-ridden port to another makes you qualified to discuss the doings at court.”
He turned away. She loved throwing his humble birth in his face. Perhaps it gave their lovemaking an added spice for her. And yet they were as close as lovers ever got. Sometimes they argued as though they were married.
He finished his wine and stood up. “I must go. You are right. I should visit Estrella.”
“No!” She pulled him back down on the bed, eyes blazing. He had to smile. For all her bedhopping, she was still jealous if he went to someone else.
“Stay, Richard. We have things to talk about.”
“Such as?”
“Well . . . news. Don’t you wish to catch up on what has happened since you left?”
“I know what has been happening, and so does my crew.”
“Oh, that silly edict. Everyone knows that the Prelate put Abeleyn up to it. The King is not the sort to think up a thing like that, though his father was. No, Abeleyn is more one of your sort. A soldier’s man, the sailor’s darling. He and the Prelate have had a
contretemps, and all Abrusio is on the side of the King, except those whose wits are addled by religion, may God forgive me.” She made the Sign of the Saint against her bare breasts. For some reason Hawkwood found the gesture arousing.
“The Prelate is on his way to the Synod in Charibon, and do you know, the moment he was out of the city gates the burnings lessened? Two days ago they were consuming forty unfortunates every afternoon. Today six were sent to the pyre. Abeleyn has his officers accompanying the Inceptines on their rounds and the lists go straight to him. Just as well. My maid was becoming hysterical. She’s from Nalbeni.”
Hawkwood stroked her smooth thigh. “I know.”
“And Golophin. Some say he has organized a kind of underground escape route for the Dweomer-folk of the city. He’s never at court any more. The King went in person to the old bird’s tower to seek him out, but the door was barred! To the King! Abeleyn’s father would have had the place razed to the ground, but not our young monarch. He’s biding his time.”
Hawkwood’s fingers were caressing the curly hair at the crux of her legs, but she appeared not to notice.
“And the streets are a terror at night. There are shifters abroad, seeking revenge for the execution of their kinfolk. Only last night one of them slaughtered a dozen of the city patrol and then slipped away . . .” She moaned as Hawkwood’s fingers worked on her.
“Murad has been stalking around the palace with a smug grin on his face. I don’t like him . . . Oh, Richard!”
She lay back on the bed with her legs asprawl and began to touch herself where he had been touching her. Hawkwood watched her with the fascination of the mouse eyeing the cat.
“Is this not better than the rump of some cabin boy?” she asked.
Hawkwood became very still, and she smiled teasingly. “Oh come on, Richard. I know what pressures are on you seamen on a long voyage, with never a woman aboard to relieve your . . . stress. Everyone knows what you get up to. In the hold, perhaps, in a dark corner with the rats skipping round you? Does the boy squeal, Richard, as you take him? My fine Captain, were you even taken yourself by some hairy master’s mate when you first began your voyaging?”
As she saw his face flood with anger she laughed her tinkling laugh and worked ever more busily on herself.
“Will you deny it to my face? Will you say it’s not true? I can read it in your eyes, Richard. Is that why you have been unable to please me on this return? Are you pining after some smooth-chinned boy with lice in his hair?”
He set his hand about her white throat. His skin looked as dark as leather against hers. As his fingers tightened, hers became busier. Her back arched slightly.
“Am I not enough for you?” she moaned. “Or am I too much for you?”
With one swift movement he spun her on her stomach. The blood of fury and shame and arousal was beating a rigid tattoo in his every vein. He set his weight atop her, crushing her into the bed. She cried out, flailing behind her with her arms. He caught the thin wrists and imprisoned them.
She screamed into the pillow and bit the linen fiercely as he forced inside her. It did not take long. He withdrew, feeling sickened and exultant at the same time.
She rolled on to her back. Her body was mottled with the rush of blood. Her wrists were red. She bruised so easily, he thought. He could not meet her eyes.
“Poor Richard. So easily goaded, so easily outraged.” She extended a hand and pulled him down beside her.
He was baffled, confused. “Why do you say such things?”
She stroked his face. “You are an odd mix, my love. Sometimes as unapproachable as a closed oak door, sometimes all your nerves in the open, to be played on like the strings of a lute.”
“I’m sorry, Jem.”
“Oh, don’t be absurd, Richard. Don’t you know that you never do anything unless I want you to?”
E LSEWHERE in Abrusio, the day passed and the soldiers did not come. The girl Griella, who had been a beast, dressed herself in some of Bardolin’s cast-off robes and sat at his table looking absurdly young and vulnerable.
They sipped cellar-cool water and ate bread with olives and a bowl of pistachios, which she loved. The imp stirred restlessly and watched them from its jar; it was almost recovered from its ordeal of the night before.
Why had they not come? Bardolin did not know; but instead of relieving him, their non-appearance made him more uneasy and this was compounded by the face of the slim young girl sitting across the table from him, swinging her bare feet as she ate.
She had a peasant face, which was to say it was browned and freckled by hours and days out in the sun. Her hair was cut short and it gave back a bronze tint to the sunlight, as though some smith had hammered it out on his anvil that morning. Her eyes were as brown as the neck of a thrush and her skin where the ingrained dust had been washed off had a tawny bloom. She was not more than fifteen years old.
Bardolin had helped her wash the clotted blood from her hands and mouth.
After lunch they sat by the great window in the wall of Bardolin’s tower that looked out to the west, down over the city to the sea and the crowded harbour with its tangle of masts. Out on the horizon ships were becalmed by the fallen trade. Their boats were hauling them in, oarstroke by agonizing oarstroke under the torrid examination of the sun.
“Can you see them?” Griella asked him. “I’ve heard that wizards can look further than any other men, can even watch the flames that flicker in the bosoms of the stars.”
“I could cast a farseeing cantrip. With my own eyes I would not be much good to you, I am afraid.”
She digested this. “When I am a beast, I can see the light of men’s hearts in their breasts. I can see the heat of their eyes and bowels in the dark, and I can smell the fear that comes out of them. But I cannot see their faces, whether they are afraid or brave, surprised or astonished. They are no longer men then. That is the way the beast thinks when I am inside it instead of it being inside me.” She looked at her fingers, clean now, the nails bitten down to the quick.
“I can feel their life give out under my hands, and it is a joyous thing. It does not matter whether they are my enemies or not.”
“Not everyone is your enemy, child.”
“Oh, I know. But I do not know of anyone who is my friend. Except you, of course.” She smiled so brightly at him that he felt both touched and disturbed.
“Why did they not come?” she asked. “You said they would try to take you away today.”
“I don’t know.” He would have liked to send the imp out into the city to nose around, but he doubted if it were up to that yet. And with Griella here, he did not like to go out himself. Though he had barely admitted it even to himself, he knew he would not let her slaughter any more men, even those who were taking the pair of them to their deaths. If the soldiers came he would smite her with a spell of unconsciousness. They might even leave her alone, believing her to be just another street urchin. If she changed into her beast form again, she would surely be killed.
“No, don’t touch that.”
She was tapping the imp’s jar and exchanging grins with the little creature.
“Why not? I think it likes me.”
“Nothing must disturb it when it is rejuvenating, else it might metamorphose into something different to what it should be.”
“I don’t understand. Explain.”
“The liquid in the jar is Ur-blood, a thaumaturgical fluid. It is the basis for many experiments, and is difficult to create. But once it has been made, it is . . . malleable. I can adjust it to the needs of the moment. At the moment it is a balm for the tiredness of the imp, like wet plaster being pasted over the cracks in the façade of a house. The imp was grown out of Ur-blood, helped along by various spells and the power of my own mind.”
“Can you grow me one? What a pet it would make!”
Bardolin smiled. “They take months to grow, and the procedure is exhausting, consuming some of the essence of the caster himself. If
the imp dies, some of me dies also. There are quicker ways of breeding familiars, but they are abhorrent and the creatures thus engendered, called homunculi, are wayward and difficult to control. And their appetites are foul.”
“I thought that a true mage would be able to whistle up anything he pleased in a trice.”
“The Dweomer is not like that. It extracts a price for every gift it gives. Nothing is had for nothing.”
“You sound like a philosopher, one of those old men who hold forth in Speakers’ Square.”
“There is a philosophy, or rather a law, to the Dweomer. When I was an apprentice I did not learn a single cantrip for the first eight months, though my powers had already manifested themselves. I was put to learning the ethics of spellweaving.”
“Ethics!” She seemed annoyed. “I partake of this Dweomer also, do I not?”
“Yes. Shape-shifting is one of the Seven Disciplines, though perhaps the least understood.”
She brightened. “Could I become a mage, then?”
“To be a mage you must master four of the Seven, and shape-shifters are rarely able to master any discipline other than shifting. There was a debate in the Guild some years ago which contended that shifting was not a discipline at all but a deviancy, a disease as the common folk believe. The motion failed. You and I both have magic in our blood, child.”
“The black disease, they call it, or sometimes just ‘The Change’, Griella said quietly. Her eyes were huge and dark.
“Yes, but despite the superstitions it is not infectious. And it can be controlled, made into a true discipline.”
She shook her head. Her eyes had filled with tears.
“Nothing can control it,” she whispered.
He set a hand on her shoulder. “I can help you control it, if you’ll let me.”
She buried her head in his barrel-like chest.
Someone hammered on the door downstairs.
Her head snapped up. “They’re here! They’ve come for you!”