The company stood like men stunned, water pouring down their faces and into their open mouths unheeded. At last Murad drew his rapier, ignoring Bardolin’s urgent hiss.
The woman in the clearing looked up, but at the sky above, not at them. For an instant her eyes seemed blank and white in the rain, lacking iris or pupil. Then the rain stopped as swiftly as it always did in this country. Their job done, the clouds began to break up and the sun to filter down.
The woman smiled, as though it were all her handiwork and she was proud of it. Then she looked straight at the crowd of men who stood opposite, swords drawn, arquebuses levelled.
She smiled again, this time showing white, sharp teeth like those of a cat. Her eyes were very dark, her face pointed and delicate. She rose from her sitting position in one sinuous movement that made the breath catch in the throat of every man who watched her. A bare midriff, lines of muscle on either side of the navel. Unshod feet, slender limbs the colour of honey.
“I am Kersik,” she said in Normannic that had a slight burr to it, an old-fashioned slowness. “Greetings and welcome.”
Murad recovered more quickly than any of them, and, aristocratic to his fingertips, he bowed with a flourish of the winking rapier.
“Lord Murad of Galiapeno at your service, lady.” Hawkwood noted wryly that he did not introduce himself as his excellency the governor.
But the woman Kersik looked past him to where Bardolin stood with the imp perched, bedraggled and dripping, on his shoulder.
“And you, brother,” she said. “You are doubly welcome. It is a long time since a Master of Disciplines came to our shores.”
Bardolin merely nodded stiffly. For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes, the battered old wizard and the slim young woman. Bardolin frowned, and she smiled as though in answer, eyes dancing.
There was a pause. The soldiers were drinking the woman in, but she seemed unperturbed by their hungry regard.
“You are bound for the city, I take it,” she said lightly.
Murad and Hawkwood shared a glance, and the scarred nobleman bowed again. “Yes, lady, we are. But we are sadly puzzled as to how to get there.”
“I thought as much. I will take you, then. It’s a journey of many days.”
“You have our thanks.”
“Your men have been eating too much of the wrong kinds of fruit, Lord Murad of Galiapeno,” Kersik said. “They have the air of the flux about them.”
“We are unaccustomed as yet to your country and its ways, lady.”
“Of course you are. Put your men into camp here in the clearing. I’ll fetch them something to calm their stomachs. If they start the journey to Undi in this condition they might not finish it.”
“Undi. Is that the name of your city?” Hawkwood asked. “What language might it be in?”
“In an old, forgotten language, Captain,” the woman said. “This is an old continent. Man has been here a long time.”
“And from whence did you come? I wonder,” Hawkwood muttered, unsettled by being called “Captain.” How had she known?
Kersik glanced at him sharply. She had heard his whispered comment.
“I’ll return ere nightfall,” she said then. And disappeared.
The men blinked. They had seen a tan blur across the clearing, nothing more.
“A witch, by Ramusio’s beard,” Murad growled.
“Not a witch,” Bardolin told him. “A mage. The Dweomer is thick about her. And something else as well.” He rubbed his face as though trying to scrub the weariness from it.
“Sorcery, always sorcery,” Murad said bitterly. “Maybe she has gone to collect a few cohorts of her fellow warlocks. Well, I wonder what they’ll make of Hebrian steel.”
“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.