“We’ve six feet of water in the hold and it’s still gaining on us. She’ll settle in a watch or two; the breach the ram made is too big to plug.”
Abeleyn nodded. “Very well. Get back below and do what you can. I’ll set a course for the Hebrian coast. We might just make it.”
Suddenly Dietl was there, staggering like a drunk man but upright. Abeleyn helped him keep his feet.
“Set a course for the Habrir river. West-sou’-west. We’ll be there in half a watch. She’ll bring us to shore, by God. She’s not done yet, and neither am I.”
“Take him below,” Abeleyn said to the carpenter as the master’s eyes rolled back in his head. Burian threw Dietl over his shoulder as though he were a sack, and disappeared down the companionway to his task of keeping the ship afloat.
“Sire,” a voice said. Sergeant Orsini, looking like some bloody harbinger of war.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“The nefs, sire—the bloody bastards sank them both.”
“What?” Abeleyn ran to the starboard rail. Up to the north he made out the smoke and cloud of the other action. He could see two galleasses and two burning hulks, one unrecognizable, the other definitely one of the wide-bellied nefs of his retinue. As he watched, a globe of flame rose from it and seconds later the boom of the explosion drifted down the wind.
“They’re lost then,” he said. The weariness and grief were slipping into place now. The battle joy had faded. Three hundred of his best men gone. Even if the carrack had been undamaged, they would take hours to beat up to windwards and look for survivors, and the two galleasses that remained would find her easy prey. It was time for flight. The monarch in Abeleyn accepted that, but the soldier loathed it.
“Someone will pay for this,” he said, his voice low and calm. But the tone of it set the hair crawling on Orsini’s head. Then the King turned back to the task in hand.
“Come,” he said in a more human voice. “We have a ship to get to shore.”
FIVE
B ROTHER Columbar coughed again and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his habit. “Saint’s blood, Albrec, to think you’ve been thirteen years down in these warrens. How can you bear it?”
Albrec ignored him and raised the dip higher so that it illuminated the rough stone of the wall. Columbar was an Antillian like himself, clad in brown. His usual station was with Brother Philip in the herb gardens, but a cold had laid him low this past week and he was on lighter duties in the scriptorium. He had come down here two days ago, hunting old manuscript or parchment that might serve as blotting for the scribes above. And had found the precious document which had been consuming most of Albrec’s time ever since.
“There have been shelves here at one time,” Albrec said, running his fingers across the deep grooves in the wall. “And the stonework is rough, as though built in haste or without regard for appearances.”
“Who’s going to see it down here?” Columbar asked. He had a pendulous nose that was red and dripping and his tonsure had left him with black feathers of hair about his ears and little else. He was a man of the soil, he was proud of saying, a farmer’s son from the little duchy of Touron. He could grow anything given the right plot, and thus had ended up in Charibon producing thyme and mint and parsley for the table of the Vicar-General and the poultices of the infirmary. Albrec had a suspicion that he was unable to read anything beyond a few well-worn phrases of the Clerical Catechism and his own name, but that was not uncommon among the lesser orders of the Church.
“And where’s the gap where you found it?” Albrec asked.
“Here—no, over here, with the mortar crumbling. A wonder the library hasn’t tumbled to the ground if the foundations are in this state.”
“We’re far below the library’s foundations,” Albrec said absently, poking into the crevice like a rabbit enlarging a burrow. “These chambers have been hewn from solid rock; those buttresses were left standing while the rest was cleared away. The place is all of a piece. So why do we have mortared blocks here?”
“It was the Fimbrians built Charibon, like they built everything else,” Columbar said, as if to prove that he was not entirely ignorant.
“Yes. And it was a secular fortress at first. These catacombs were most probably used for the stores of the garrison.”
“I wish you would not call them catacombs, Albrec. They’re grim enough as it is.” Columbar’s breath was a pale fog about his face as he spoke.
Albrec straightened. “What was that?”
“What? I heard nothing.”
They paused to listen in the little sanctuary of light maintained by the dip.
To call the chambers they were in catacombs was not such a bad description. The place was low, the roof uneven, the floor, walls and roof sculpted out of raw granite by some unimaginable labour of the long-ago empire. One stairway led down here from the lower levels of the library above, also hewn out of the living gutrock. Charibon had been built on the bones of the mountains, it was said.
These subterranean chambers seemed to have been used to house the accumulated junk of several centuries. Old furniture, mouldering drapes and tapestries, even the rusted remains of weapons and armour, quietly decayed in the dark peace. Few of the inhabitants of the monastery-city came down here; there were two levels of rooms above them and then the stolid magnificence of the Library of St. Garaso. The bottom levels of the monastery had not been fully explored since the days of the emperors; there might even be levels below the one on which the two men now stood.
“If you hate the dark so much, I’m blessed if I know what you were doing down here in the first place,” Albrec whispered, his head still cocked to listen.
“When Monsignor Gambio wants something you find it quick, no matter where you have to look,” Columbar said in the same low tone. “There wasn’t a scrap of blotting left in the whole scriptorium, and he told me not to poke my scarlet proboscis back round the door until I had found some.”
Albrec smiled. Monsignor Gambio was a Finnmarkan, a crusty, bearded old man who looked as though he would have been more at home on the deck of a longship than in the calm industry of a scriptorium. But he had been one of the finest scribes Charibon possessed until the lengthening years had made crooked mockeries of his hands.
“I should be grateful you put scholarly curiosity over the needs of the moment,” Albrec said.
“I suffered for it, believe me.”
“There! There it is again. Do you hear it?”
They paused again to listen. Somewhere off in the cluttered darkness there was a crash, the sound of things striking the stone floor, a clink of metal. Then they heard someone cursing in a low, irritated and very unclerical manner.
“Avila,” Albrec said with relief. He cupped a hand about his mouth. “Avila! We’re over here, by the north wall!”
“And which way is north in this lightless pit? I swear, Albrec . . .”
A light came into view, flickering and bobbing over the piles of rubbish. Gradually it neared their own until Brother Avila stood before them, his face smeared with dust, his black Inceptine habit grimed with mould.
“This had better be good, Albrec. I’m supposed to be face-down in the Penitential Chapel, as I was all yesterday. Never throw a roll at the Vicar-General if you’ve buttered it first. Hello, Columbar. Still running errands for Gambio?”
Avila was tall, slim and fair-haired, an aristocrat to his fingertips. Naturally, he was an Inceptine, and if he refrained from flinging too many more bread rolls he could be assured of a high place in the order ere he died. He was the best friend, perhaps the only one, that Albrec had ever known.