Lorenzo and Theobold were the last on board, following the great mass of Kereveld’s equipment. The men swore nervously as the two servants clambered over them. The boat was now so low in the water that each sudden movement threatened to tip it over.
“What have you got in all those cases?” Florin asked Kereveld as Lorenzo squeezed in by his side.
“Oh, bits and bobs. You know, tools of the trade.”
“Right then,” the coxswain interrupted them. “When I say ‘one’ lift your oars and swing the blades back. When I say ‘two’ cut ’em into the water. And when I say ‘three’, pull. Got that?”
A chorus of jibes and curses greeted his instruction, but the sailor just smiled.
“Good. Right then, one!”
“Two!”
The oars splashed into the water in a ragged volley.
“Three!”
And the boat lurched forward.
“Not bad for choir boys,” the coxswain joked. “Now let’s try again shall we? One!”
Slowly, but with increasing speed, the boat began to make its way towards the mouth of the river. By now other boats had left the flotilla, some of them full of men, others low with luggage. The heads and shoulders of the expedition’s six mules peered calmly over the gunwale of one, whilst another was slewing this way and that beneath the weight of the dwarfs and their cannon.
Florin’s own men were boisterous with nerves, good tinder for the arguments which flared up as one man splashed his fellows with a missed oar stroke, or when another slipped and rocked the boat.
Then the sluggish breeze changed and they caught the first ripe whiff of the jungle. It was enough to silence them. Like cattle that have smelled a wolf they quietened, their eyes wide and alert as they searched the looming coastline.
Before long they had drawn level with the first of the overhanging boughs, its fingers reaching out for them from the banks of the river. Long ropy tendrils trailed down from them into the muddy water, still in the sultry, unmoving air.
A mosquito landed on Florin’s knuckle and began to drink.
“I wish we hadn’t come,” Lorenzo murmured. Florin just grunted as he flicked the mosquito away. Three more took its place.
They drew to a halt, the coxswain slowing the beat of their oars so that they held their position against the current. Gradually the rest of the long boats, all of which had now been launched from the distant trio of the ships, caught up with them.
Florin saw the familiar gleam of Orbrant’s shaved head in the last boat, and the white flash of van Delft’s moustaches in the one preceding it. The commander was lying back against the stern of his boat, lounging as low and as comfortably as if he were a passenger in a Marienburg gondola.
“Right,” the coxswain said firmly as the twelve boats drew into a neat line, bobbing up and down on the muddy river like so many ugly ducklings “Let’s get on with it. One!”
“Two!”
“Three!”
“I wonder how we’ll know where these ruins are?” Florin pondered as the boat went forward. “Will they be right on the river, do you think?”
“Ruins!” Lorenzo spat as though the word were a profanity. “Who cares if we find them or not? How many ruins do you know that have treasure in them?”
“They were abandoned,” Florin told him, doubtfully. “The inhabitants wouldn’t have had time to take their treasure.”
“Everybody has time to take treasure.”
Although the thought had occurred to Florin, he didn’t think it wise to admit as much in front of the lads.
“It’s a bit late to be worrying about that now,” he said, conscious of the effect his friend’s complaints might have on the men. It didn’t help that there was a lot of truth in what he said. After all, what kind of men would just run off and leave their treasure behind?
One of the mercenaries, a short, barrel-chested northerner called Bertrand, seemed to share his concerns.
“Perhaps there’ll be no gold,” he told Lorenzo with a shrug. “But if you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined up.”
To Florin’s relief a murmur of agreement rippled through the men.
“A joke I can take,” Lorenzo lied. “But I wonder how funny it will seem when we return with empty pockets. There’s not a man on this world who’d abandon his treasure. His children, perhaps. His wife, certainly. But his purse? Never!”
Kereveld, who had been rummaging carefully through a wide leather satchel, pulled out a small, mildewed book and waved it at Lorenzo, as if to admonish him.
“You’re right about that,” he told him, carefully opening the book. “But you don’t have to worry. The things that built this city weren’t men. They were the ancients. Great and terrible beings of unimaginable power. To them gold was just the same as stone, or lead. And when their doom came upon them, they no longer had use for either.”
The boat fell silent as the men thought about that. Amidst the narrowing banks of the river and the cacophony of screeches and calls that followed their progress, the wizard’s words hadn’t been as comforting as he’d wished.
Sensing this Kereveld looked up.
“So, there will be gold for you. Take my word on it.”
Lorenzo, who never trusted anybody’s word on anything, opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut as Florin kicked him.
“What’s that book you’ve got there?”
“An old logbook. The sole survivor of another expedition sold it to a merchant in Swamptown, who sold it to a captain, who was wise enough to sell it to the college,” Kereveld told him. “It was a real find. There’s even a map in it for us to follow. We’re not the first humans to make this trip, you see. That’s how I know there’ll be loot for your men.”
“What happened to the first expedition?”
“The book doesn’t really say. I suppose they were all killed off, one way or another.”
Once more silence descended upon the boat, broken only by the riffling of parchment pages and the thoughtful splash of the oars.
“Well,” Lorenzo decided at length, “that’s a great comfort.” The men’s nervous laughter drifted through the mist that covered the water. It floated up to the distant canopy, and disappeared into the choking undergrowth of the shore. And there, amongst the darkness of matted vines and rotting trees, it reached the ears of the creatures that had been following the boats since the river mouth. They froze at the sound of laughter, these things, their faces void of any emotion as they listened to the alien sound of the invaders. Only after the last of the boats had passed did they twitch back into life, chameleonic skins rippling as they scurried away to carry their strange tidings to their masters.
Hours passed, punctuated only by the splashing of the oars and the cries and shrieks of the jungle’s invisible denizens.
The sun reached its glorious zenith, its burning light stronger here than on any other place in the world. It scorched away the last curtains of mist that had clouded the expedition’s path.
Perhaps the new brightness was why Kereveld sounded so certain, his voice full of confidence as he directed the coxswain out of the main river and into a smaller tributary.
The wizard’s eyes constantly flickered between the mildewed logbook and the serpentine twists of the river. From time to time he’d pull a large, brass-bound compass from his pocket and gaze at it with the concentration of a fortune-teller with a crystal ball.
Whatever he saw there, apart from the swinging pointer, he kept to himself. But it set him muttering distractedly, and gnawing the tips of his moustaches with an uncertainty that Lorenzo didn’t like one little bit.
He struggled with the urge to complain as the banks of the tributary closed in around them, and the claustrophobic heat of the air grew heavier. They were making their way deeper into the jungle’s heart.
The day wore on, and the sun disappeared from the narrow strip of sky above. From behind them a cry rang out from the tail end of their straggling fleet, g
rowing louder as it echoed its way up the line from one coxswain’s throat to the next.
“Sir,” their own coxswain said, passing the message on to Kereveld. “The commander says we’re to stop and prepare to camp for the night.”
“Yes, yes,” Kereveld muttered, glancing up from a series of scrawled sketches and glancing worriedly at his compass. “Anywhere you like.”
The sailor looked at the impenetrable thicket that grew up out of the water on either side. Then he looked at Florin.
“We’ll give it another half an hour,” he declared. “If it’s still like this we’ll have to just tie up and sleep in the boats.”
But, far from thinning out, the jungle seemed to grow thicker. By the time the boats finally glided to a halt there wasn’t even a glimpse of soil, just an endless pincushion of bamboo stalks that grew straight up from the sludge of the river bottom.
Night closed in, and with it, swarms of flies midges and plump, greedy mosquitoes. Florin passed around the pot of the lotion they’d bought in Swamptown, but it did little good. The insects, made devious by hunger, avoided the toxic-tasting skin of their arms and faces and delved up into cuffs, or down into collars, or just waited until the sweat of the hot tropical night washed away the repellent.
They certainly ate better than their prey, who had nothing to munch their way through but hard bread and small beer.
Florin, scratched and shifted, his back already cramped with pain. He knew that he would never be able to sleep tonight. He wondered if he should organise a watch, and was still wondering when the rocking of the boat and the quiet drone of his comrades’ voices lulled him into a deep sleep.
The next day they lost their first man.
He was called Moritzio Benetti, and he’d been one of Castavelli’s men for a dozen of his twenty-eight years. Florin had been awoken by the cries of his captain in the warm fog of dawn.
“What is it?” he asked Lorenzo, blinking and stretching painfully.
“The Tileans have lost a man,” Lorenzo told him, his voice low and unhappy.
“Lost him? How do you mean, lost him? Where could he have gone?”
“That seems to be the question.”
The sound of the Tileans’ calls drifted through the mist with a new intensity.
“I don’t see where he can have gone. There’s nothing to. stand on, for a start. Unless he swam away…” Florin let the sentence trail off, knowing how ridiculous that suggestion was.
There was a lull in the Tileans’ calls for their lost comrade, and for a moment Florin thought that he could hear a man weeping.
Beside him Kereveld grunted into wakefulness, and crammed his hat down onto the tangled mess of his hair.
“Lost a man, hey?” he asked after a moment. “Well, it’s only to be expected. Let’s get on.”
Fourteen pairs of eyes turned on him coldly, but the wizard, unmoved, had already returned to the study of his book.
After an hour’s rowing they came to another fork in the river. After some hesitation, Kereveld directed them first to the left before changing his mind and choosing the right.
“Lorenzo,” Florin said, his voice level with a careful insouciance he’d perfected over a thousand card tables in happier times. “Let’s keep an eye on the route we take. When we return we can try and give old Kereveld here a break.”
Lorenzo’s face wrinkled up into a smile, and for a moment he seemed on the verge of patting his master on the head as though he was a usually stupid child who has just had a bright idea.
“Good idea, boss. In fact, I’ve been doing just that since we set off.”
“Good man,” Florin told him, and settled back to watch a troop of tiny monkeys that were following the boats curiously.
“Must ask Graznikov if they’re any relation,” he mused, earning a dutiful chuckle from his men.
“That’s funny,” said Kereveld, to nobody in particular. “I could have sworn we should be going east now.”
“What does it matter, as long as we’re all happy?” Lorenzo asked him sarcastically.
“Yes, you’re right,” the wizard sighed as he gazed upwards at the first glint of the sun above the canopy. “Sometimes I feel like the great Heiermat himself.”
He must be putting it on, Florin thought.
He must be.
“It’s there. I don’t believe it? It’s really there!”
The boat rocked wildly as Kereveld leapt to his feet, the bony digit of his forefinger outstretched as he pointed excitedly into the jungle.
“What is?” Florin asked, following the wizard’s gaze anxiously. The last time the old man had waved his hands in this way the sky had been split asunder with a meteor shower.
This time, though, there was no such spectacular denouement.
This time, there appeared to be nothing.
“Look, can’t you see it?” Kereveld turned on him, impatience edging his excitement.
Florin, shielding his eyes against the glare of sunlight on the water, peered forward into the wide lake that had opened up before them. Its surface lay as still as glass apart from the ripples the expedition’s oars made, a great horseshoe of brackish water perhaps a quarter of a mile across.
Here and there lilies floated upon its surface, the sunlight so bright on the great leaves that they glowed emerald green. Florin had been busy watching the frogs and dragonflies chasing each other across the archipelagoes they made when the wizard had started yelling and windmilling his arms around.
“I can’t see anything,” Florin grumbled, his eyes now flitting over the walls of the surrounding jungle. If ever there was such a thing as uniform chaos it was here. Every mile of it was the same green, insect-riven tangle, and yet every foot contained combinations of life that were as unique as any snowflake.
The wizard, his face flushed with the heat and the relief, glared down at the mercenary.
“Look straight ahead. Can’t you see that rock? The one that’s shaped like an eagle’s head? That’s what we’ve been looking for.”
Now that it had been pointed out Florin realised that he could see what the wizard had described. Although it was as tall as one of the Lady’s cathedral spires the great fang of rock was dwarfed by the great snarl of trees that stood behind it.
The great stone had also been humbled by undergrowth. Although grey patches still showed here and there, countless strains of moss and lichen and climbing vines had coloured it the same thousand shades of green as its surroundings.
At the very top of it a stand of palms waved, like a battle flag planted on the enemy’s ramparts.
“You think that looks like an eagle’s head?” Florin asked doubtfully, but Kereveld waved the question away with a grunt.
“It looks more like a crested griffon’s head, which is what I was looking for.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
“Because you fellows are too ignorant to know what a crested griffon looks like. But anyway, come on coxswain. Head towards the rock.”
“Aye, sir,” the boatman said, and called out a new tune for the oarsmen to follow. As the boat slowly turned and glided towards their destination Kereveld smiled to himself, then took off his hat to wipe the sweat from his brow.
“Thank Sigmar for that,” he confided in Florin, who was still trying not to be offended by being called ignorant. “I was sure that we were lost.”
“Really?” the Bretonnian replied. “And what would we have done then?”
“The gods alone know,” Kereveld said happily, settling back as the other boats in their flotilla arrowed towards the rock. “To be honest I was never really sure that this logbook was genuine until now.”
“Didn’t you know?”
“No, of course not. One never knows with these old grimoires. And by then, of course, it’s usually too late.”
Florin looked at Lorenzo who gave him a “told you so” look.
“This was your idea,” he reminded him, thinking back to their flight from
Mordicio’s henchmen.
“Oh, so you knew,” Kereveld said, surprise lilting his voice. “I didn’t think that van Delft wanted anybody to know. He said you’d all be too superstitious to sign up to an expedition organised by my college.”
“Your college,” Florin repeated flatly, more of a statement than a question.
“Yes, the college of the heavens. Oh, I admit we’ve had a few disasters in the past, but still. That’s wasn’t going to stop me.”
“Everyone needs gold, I suppose,” Florin said carefully, aware that the hum of conversation had died amongst his listening men as they plied their oars.
“Gold? Oh no, we’re not here for gold,” Kereveld’s interest in the conversation died as suddenly as it began. He was now busily holding the ancient logbook up against the tree-line and squinting first at the picture and then at the tower of rock.
Florin gently took a hold of his shoulder.
“So, if we’re not here for gold, what are we here for?”
“Heiermat’s last theorem,” Kereveld turned to him; his face clouded with confusion. “Do you mean to tell me that you didn’t know?”
God cursed moron, van Delft thought savagely as he strode around the perimeter. All he had had to do was to keep his mouth shut.
He paused as a gang of Kislevites threw some bushels of debris over what had once been a rampart. It had become so overgrown that it was now useless: nothing more than a demarcation point between the camp to be cleared and the towering heights of the jungle beyond.
The men returned to their work and the commander resumed his furious pacing, silently cursing that fool of a wizard as he ploughed around the circuit for a second time.
The only thing that had saved the expedition had been the fact that his damned book had been right. The eagle-headed rock had stood over the remains of a human campsite. Broken amphorae had been found, their wine-stained shards held stubbornly within knots of ground vines. There had been boats, too, their rotten hulls as dank and maggot-ridden as ship’s biscuits. They’d been left with the expedition’s own boats by the shore of the lake, a twilit place where mud and reeds gave way to fallen leaves and sharp-bladed elephant grass.
[Florin & Lorenzo 01] - The Burning Shore Page 13