“Yours too? Lord, Galliardo, has no-one any good news for me?”
“Precious little, my friend. But tidings of your return will be a tonic for the whole port. Now come—let me buy you that beer.”
“I must fetch my log and rutter first.”
Hawkwood reboarded the carrack and made his way along the familiar companionway to the stern cabin. Bardolin sprawled there, a filthy mass of sores and scars, his eyes dull gleams in a tangle of beard and hair. Blood crusted his chains, and he stank like a cage in a zoo.
“Home at last, eh Captain?” he whispered.
“I’ll be back soon, Bardolin, with some helpers. We’ll get you to Golophin by tonight. He lodges in the palace, doesn’t he?”
Bardolin stirred. “No, don’t take me to the palace. Golophin has a tower in the foothills. It’s where he carries out his researches. That’s where you must take me. I know the way; it’s where I served most of my apprenticeship.”
“If you say so.”
“Thank you, Captain, for everything. At one time all I wished for was death. I have had time to think. I begin to see now that there may be some value in living after all.”
“That’s the spirit. Hang on here, Bardolin. I’ll be back soon.”
Hawkwood tentatively laid a hand on the chained man’s shoulder, then left.
“You have a worthy friend there, Bardolin,” Griella said. She materialised before him like a ghost.
“Yes. He is a good man, Richard Hawkwood.”
“And he was right. It is worth going on. Life is worth living.”
“I know. I can see that.”
“And the disease you live with—it is not an affliction, either. Do you see that?”
Bardolin lifted his head and stared at her. “I believe I do, Griella. Perhaps your master has a point.”
“You are my master now, Bardolin,” she said, and kissed him on his cracked lips.
M URAD’S town house had survived the war intact but for a few shot-holes in the thick masonry of the walls. When the heavy door was finally opened under his furious knocking the gatekeeper took one look at him and slammed it shut in his face. Murad broke into a paroxysm of rage, hammering on the door and screaming at the top of his lungs. At last the postern door opened to one side, and two stout kitchen lads came out cracking their knuckles. “No beggars, and no madmen allowed at this house. Listen you—”
Murad left them both groaning and semi-conscious in the street and strode through the open postern, pushing aside sundry servants and bellowing for his steward. The kitchen staff scattered like a flock of geese before a fox, the women yelling that there was a maniac loose in the house. When the steward finally arrived, a cleaver in his hand, Murad pinioned him and stared into his eyes. “Do you know me, Glarus of Garmidalan? Your father is a gamekeeper on my estates. Your mother was my father’s housekeeper for twenty years.”
“Holy God,” Glarus faltered. And he fell to his knees. “Forgive me, lord. We thought you were long dead. And you have… you have changed so—”
Murad’s febrile strength seemed to gutter out. He sagged against the heavy kitchen table, releasing the man. The cleaver clanged to the floor. “I am home now. Run me a bath, and have my valet sent to me. And that wench there”—he pointed to a cowering girl with flour on her hands—“have her sent at once to the master bed-room. I want wine and bread and cheese and roasted chicken. And apples. And I want them there within half a glass. And a message sent to the palace, requesting an audience. Do you hear me?”
“Half a glass?” Glarus asked timidly. Murad laughed.
“I am become a naval creature after all. Ten minutes will do, Glarus. God’s blood, it is good to be home!”
T WO hours later, he was admiring himself in the full-length mirror of the master bed-room, and the weeping kitchen maid was being led away with a blanket about her shoulders. His beard and hair had been neatly trimmed and he wore a doublet of black velvet edged with silver lace. It hung on him like a sack, and he had to don breeches instead of hose, for his legs were too thin to be revealed without ridicule. He supposed he would put weight on, eventually. He was hungry, but the food he had eaten had made him sick.
His valet helped him slide the baldric of his rapier over his shoulder, and then he sipped wine and watched the stranger in the mirror preen himself. He had never been a handsome man, though there had always been something about him which the fair sex had found not unattractive. But now he was an emaciated, scarred scarecrow with a brown face in which a lipless mouth curled in a perpetual sneer. Governor of New Hebrion. His Excellency. Discoverer of the New World.
“The carriage is ready in the court-yard, my lord,” Glarus ventured from the door.
“I’ll be there in a moment.”
It was barely midmorning. Only a few hours ago he had been a beggar on a sinking ship with the scum of the earth for company. Now he was a lord again, with servants at his beck and call, a carriage waiting, a king ready to receive him. Some part of the world had been put back to rights at least. Some natural order restored.
He went down to the carriage and stared about himself avidly as it negotiated the narrow cobbled streets on the way to the palace. Not too much evidence of destruction in this part of the city, at least. It was good of Abeleyn to see him so promptly, but then the monarch was probably afire with curiosity. Important that Murad’s own version of events in the west was the first the King heard. So much was open to misinterpretation.
Glarus had told Murad of the war, the ruin of the city and the King’s illness while he had pounded his seed into the rump of the whimpering maid. A lot had been happening, seemingly, while he and his companions had been trekking through that endless jungle and eating beetles in order to survive. Murad could not help but feel that the world he had come back to had become an alien place. But the Sequeros were destroyed, as were the Carreras. That meant that he, Lord Murad of Galiapeno, was now almost certainly closest by blood to the throne itself. It was an ill wind which blew nobody any good. He smiled to himself. War was good for something after all.
The King received him in the palace gardens, amid the chittering of cicadas and the rustling of cypresses. A year before, Murad had sat here with him and first proposed the expedition to the west. It was no longer the same world. They were no longer the same men of that summer morning.
The King had aged in a year. His dark hair was brindled with grey and he bore scars on his face even as Murad did. He was taller than he had been, Murad was convinced, and he walked with an awkward gait, the legacy of the wounds he had suffered in the storming of the city. He smiled as his kinsman approached, though the lean nobleman had not missed the initial shock on his face, quickly mastered.
“Cousin, it is good to see you.”
They embraced, then each held the other at arm’s length and studied the other man’s face.
“It’s a hard journey you’ve been on,” Abeleyn said.
“I might say the same of you, sire.”
The King nodded. “I expected word from you sooner. Did you find it, Murad, your Western Continent?”
Murad sat down beside the King on the stone bench that stood sun-warmed in the garden. “Yes, I found it.”
“And was it worth the trip?”
For a second, Murad could not speak. Pictures in his mind. The great cone of Undabane rising out of the jungle. The slaughter of his men there. The jungle journey. The pitiful wreck of Fort Abeleius. Bardolin howling in the hold of the ship in nights of wind. He shut his eyes.
“The expedition was a failure, sire. We were lucky to escape with our lives, those of us who did. It was—it was a nightmare.”
“Tell me.”
And he did. Everything from the moment of weighing anchor in Abrusio harbour all those months ago through to mooring the ship again that very morning. He told Abeleyn virtually everything; but he did not mention Griella, or what Bardolin had become. And Hawkwood’s part in the tale was kept to a minimum. The survivors had pulled through thanks to the determination and courage of Lord Murad of Galiapeno, who had never despaired, even in the blackest of moments.