Part 38 (1/2)

TWENTY-FIVE.

T HE north-easter stayed with them, as steady and as welcome as the Hebrian trade. Hawkwood could feel the constant thrumming of its power on the s.h.i.+p as though it were acting on the marrow of his very bones. The Osprey was alive, afloat, running before the wind. His mind relaxed and wandered off to that other place once more.

H E was a boy again, at sea for the first time on the clumsy caravel which had been the first Hawkwood-owned s.h.i.+p. His father was there, shouting obscenities at the straining seamen, and the white spray was coming aboard in packets as the vessel ran before the wind on the peridot-green swells of the Levangore. If he looked aft he could see the pale, dust-coloured coast of Gabrion with the darker rises of forests among the inland hills; and to larboard were the first islands of the Malacar Archipelago, floating like insubstantial ghosts in the haze of heat that had settled on the horizon.

Up and down, up and down the bow of the caravel went, the green waves like s.h.i.+mmering walls looming up and retreating again, the gulls screeching and calling and dropping guano over the deck, the rigging straining and creaking in time to the working timbers of the s.h.i.+p, and the blessed wind they had harnessed bellying out the booming and flapping sails.

This, he had thought, is the sea. And he had never questioned his right to be on it; rather he had welcomed his craft as a man would his wife.H AWKWOOD could not move. He was drenched in sweat and as immobile as a marble caryatid.

There was an unfamiliar smell in his nostrils. Burning.

A vast shudder as the s.h.i.+ps came together, their hulls crunching and colliding.

”Fire!” Hawkwood yelled, and along the deck the men whipped the smoking slow-match across the touch-holes of the guns. Like a rippling thunder they exploded in sequence, leaping back on their carriages like startled bulls. There was an enormous noise, unlike any other. Louder than a storm-surf striking a rocky sh.o.r.e or a tempest in the heights of the Hebros. The whole starboard side of the s.h.i.+p disappeared in smoke and fire. Only men's screams and the shrieking of the blasted timbers carried above the roar.

The corsairs fired their own broadside, the muzzles of their culverins touching the very side of the carrack. They elevated the muzzles so the shot plunged upwards through the deck. The air exploded, became full of jagged shards of wood which ripped men apart, flung them clear across the deck or tossed them overboard like gutted fish. Hawkwood clambered on to the starboard quarterdeck rail and raised the heavy cutla.s.s above his head. ”Now, lads, at them. Boarding parties away!”

And then he leapt on to the crowded slaughterhouse of the enemy s.h.i.+p.

”R ICHARD!' she cried as he pushed into her, expending himself, driving her backbone into the stuffed softness of the bed. The sweat dripped off his face to land on her collar-bone and trickled between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Jemilla grinned fiercely up at him, her body answering his, struggling against him. The sweat was a slick glue between them so their skins sucked and slid as they moved together and apart, like a s.h.i.+p breasting a heavy swell, the keel burying itself in each wave.

B UT the heat. His body was on fire, lying in a pool of liquid metal, every movement a torment, every pore oozing his life's fluid. The heat squeezed the water out of him until he was as dry and withered as the salted fish they had barrelled in the hold. If he moved he would crackle and creak and break apart into fragments as fine and desiccated as ash.

”Richard.”

He opened his eyes.

Bardolin smiled. ”So you have returned from your voyaging at last.”

The s.h.i.+p moved about him, a lulling presence. He sensed that the wind was fine and steady on the quarter, a fresh breeze pus.h.i.+ng them ever westwards. In the almost-quiet he heard the s.h.i.+p's bell struck three times, and the noise was incredibly comforting, like hearing the sound of a familiar voice.

He turned his face to one side and immediately the pain began, a molten glow that was centred deep in his right shoulder. He groaned involuntarily.

”Easy.” The mage's strong fingers steadied his head, grasping his chin.

”The fire,” he croaked.

”We got it under control. The s.h.i.+p is safe, Captain, and we are making good progress.”

”Help me sit up.”

”No. You-””Help me up!”

The pain came and went in sobbing waves, but he blinked and ground his teeth until it was a bearable presence, something he could live with.

Their surroundings were unfamiliar to him. A small cabin, with a culverin squatting against one wall.

”Where is this?”

”The gundeck. The carpenter rigged up some part.i.tions for you. You needed the peace.”

So. He recognized it now, but it was strangely silent, as though the deck were almost deserted. He could hear many feet thumping above his head, and voices murmuring.

”The fire. The stern cabin-”

”More or less patched up. Chips has been working like a man possessed. We have no new gla.s.s for the stern windows though, so they must be shuttered most of the time.”

”The log. Bardolin, did the log survive?”

The mage looked grim. ”No. It went in the fire, as did most of your charts and the old rutter.”

”Griella?”

”She is at peace. I was wrong ever to bring her on this voyage, and yet she saved our lives, I think.

Murad's, anyway. It is hard to know. A hard thing to have done.”

”She loved him.” It could have been question or statement.

”In her own way, yes. But no good would have come of it. They would have destroyed each other in the end and it is better, perhaps, that it has come about this way.” The mage's arm, unexpectedly strong, steadied Hawkwood as he swayed. ”Be careful, Captain. We don't want anything springing its seams again.”

”Ortelius,” Hawkwood was saying, ignoring him. ”I can't believe it.”

”Yes, who would have? An Inceptine cleric also a werewolf! That raises many questions, Captain, both for us on board s.h.i.+p and for the great and the good back home. I have this feeling that we have overlooked something, in our pride and our wisdom. There is something deep down in our society which we had not thought to find. Something abominable.”

”Mateo, ere he changed, said his master was high in a society. I don't think he meant the one we know.”

”We may find some answers in the west, I suppose. I do not see this as a voyage of discovery any longer, Captain, or an attempt at colonization. It is more of an armed reconnaissance. Murad concurs.”

”The west. You think-?”

”That it is inhabited? Yes, but by what manner of men or beasts or both I know not.”

Hawkwood swung his legs off the hanging cot. He could manage the pain now. It came and went like a tide. His right arm was strapped tightly to the side of his chest, unbalancing him.

”How bad is this?””The thing bit your collar-bone clean through, and mangled the ends of the bone. I have been cleaning the wound, removing the splinters. A couple of the oldwives have sat with me and kept wound-sickness at bay. It smells sweet enough and I think we have brought it off, but you will have a terrible scar and a lump, and your right arm will never be as strong again.”

But I'm alive, Hawkwood thought. That is something. And my s.h.i.+p is afloat; that is something more.

He was wearing only a clout of linen about his loins and his legs seemed oddly pale to him, the feet a long distance away. He stared at them absently, and then a jet of fear thrilled him.

”Bardolin, the beast bit me. Does that mean I have its disease? Will I change?”

”The black disease is not contagious in the way people think. It is not carried in a bite.”

”But Ortelius made a werewolf of Mateo.”

”Yes. That intrigues me, I must admit. Fear not, Captain, whatever arcane and b.l.o.o.d.y initiation turned the s.h.i.+p's boy into a s.h.i.+fter was not practised on you. Men do not catch lycanthropy from a bite, no matter what the superst.i.tions say. Gregory confirms it, and my old master, Golophin, believed it also.