“Damned paperwork follows me everywhere. You know, Murad, I almost wish I were coming with you, leaving the cares of a kingdom behind. I remember my voyage on the Blithe Spirit when I was a prince, a snotty-nosed youngster full of himself. The first time I felt the blow of a rope’s end I wanted the boatswain hung, drawn and quartered.” He took a gulp of wine. “Those were the days, following the coast round to the easternmost of the Hebrionese, and then across the Fimbrian Gulf to Narbosk. There is something about the sea that is in our blood, we Hebrians. Maybe we do not have veritable saltwater running in our veins like the Gabrionese, but the tilt of a deck under our feet is always in the manner of a homecoming.”
He stared into his wine.
“I will see this land the greatest seapower on the earth ere I die, Murad—if I am spared, and if grasping clerics do not finish me before my time.”
“Your reign will be a long and glorious one, Majesty. People will look back on it in later years and wonder what men were like who lived then, what giants they were.”
The king looked up and laughed, seeming like a boy as he threw back his head. “I put on my breeches one leg at a time the same as everyone else, kinsman. No, it is the glow of history, the mist of the intervening years that confers glory on a man. It may be that I will be remembered solely because the Holy City fell in my reign, and my troops stayed home chasing witches instead of joining the defence of the west. Posterity is a fickle thing. Look at my father.”
Murad said nothing. Bleyn II had been a tyrannical ruler and a fanatically pious man. It was rumoured that the current purge had been first suggested by him a dozen years before, but the old Mage Golophin had talked him out of it. Now the Inceptines were portraying him as the ideal of a saintly king, and his son was described in a hundred pulpits as a wild young man, good-hearted but wayward and totally lacking in respect for the representatives of the Blessed Saint on earth. Relations between crown and Church did not seem destined to improve.
And yet the navy and the army worshipped Abeleyn, and in the pikes of the soldiers and the culverins of the ships rested the power behind the throne. So the Inceptines trod warily, and hastened to bring their own swords, the Knights Militant, into the city.
“I have heard that none of the Aekir garrison escaped,” Murad said sombrely, following his own train of thought. “Thirty-five thousand men.”
“You heard wrong,” the King told him. “Sibastion Lejer brought almost ten thousand men out of the city and is fighting a rearguard action on the Searil road.”
Murad wanted to ask his king how he knew, how news travelled so swiftly over seven hundred leagues, but stopped himself. Golophin would have his ways and means. But if Golophin was avoiding Abeleyn . . .
“Duty calls,” Abeleyn said. “I must meet another delegation from the guilds this afternoon. Thanks to you, Murad, I may have a crumb of comfort for the Thaumaturgists’ Guild. Golophin may even begin talking to me again. Just as well. There is the Conclave of Kings to prepare for in a month’s time.”
“Is it still going ahead?” Murad asked, surprised.
“Now more than ever. Lofantyr of Torunn will be shrieking for more troops, of course, and Skarpathin of Finnmark will be convinced that the next blow is to fall upon him. I foresee a trying time, especially as the Synod meets a short while before, so we will have their worthy resolutions to debate also. I tell you, Murad, you are lucky in only having to worry about a hazardous voyage into the unknown. The shoals between palaces are more difficult to navigate.”
Murad rose, and bowed deeply. “With your permission I will leave you to your navigating, Majesty.”
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.