Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (34 page)

There on the high ground to their right, where they had been promised the Nalbenic cavalry would support them, they saw instead a steady unbroken line of five thousand grim Torunnan arquebusiers. And behind them in silent rank on rank were the dread figures of the red horsemen who had wreaked such havoc at the North More, their lances stark against the sky, their armour glinting like freshly spilled blood.

The Merduk advance died. The men of the
Minhraib
had been fighting since dawn. They had acquitted themselves well and they knew it, but nearly forty thousand of their number lay dead behind them, and thousands more were scattered and leaderless over the field. The unexpected sight of these fresh Torunnan forces unnerved them. Where had the Nalbeni disappeared to? They had been promised that their counterattack would be supported on the Torunnan left.

As if in answer, a lone horseman came galloping out of the ranks of the scarlet riders. He brought his horse to within three hundred yards of the
Minhraib
host and there halted. In his hand he bore a horsetail standard which was surmounted by the likeness of a galley prow. It was the standard of a Nalbenic general. He stabbed the thing into the ground contemptuously, his destrier prancing and snorting, and as he did the cavalry on the hill behind him began to sing some weird, unearthly chant, a barbaric battle-paean, a song of victory. Then the horseman wheeled and cantered back the way he had come.

The song was taken up by the ranks of the Torunnan arquebusiers, and in their throats it became something else, a word which they were repeating as though it had some kind of indefinable power. Five thousand voices roared it out over and over again.

Corfe.

T
HE GUNFIRE DIED,
and a tide of silence rolled over the tortured face of the hills. The winter afternoon was edging into a snow-flecked twilight. Two armies lay barely a league from one another, and between them sprawled the gutted wreck of what had once been a mighty encampment, the land about it littered with the dead. Two armies so badly mauled that as if by common agreement they ignored each other, and the shattered men which made them up strove to light fires and snatch some sleep upon the hard ground, hardly caring if the sun should ever rise on them again.

A single battered mule cart came trundling off the battlefield bearing a cloak-wrapped bundle. Besides its driver, four men on foot accompanied it. The four paused, doffed their helms and let it trundle into the Torunnan camp below, the wheels cracking the frozen snow like a salute of gunshots, whilst they stood amid the stiffened contortions of the dead and the first stars glimmered into life above their heads.

Corfe, Andruw, Marsch, Formio.

"Menin must have died defending him to the end," Andruw said. "That old bugger. He died well."

"He knew this day would be his last," Corfe said. "He told me so. He was a good man."

The foursome picked their way across the battlefield. There were other figures moving in the night, both Torunnan and Merduk. Men looking for lost comrades, brothers searching for the bodies of brothers. An unspoken truce reigned here as former enemies looked into the faces of the dead together.

Corfe halted and stared out at the falling darkness of the world. He was weary, more weary than he had ever been in his life before.

"How are your men, Formic?" he asked the Fimbrian.

"We lost only two hundred. Those
Ferinai
of theirs - they are soldiers indeed. I have never seen cavalry charge pikes like that, uphill, under artillery fire. Of course, they could not hope to break us, but they were willing enough."

"Nip and tuck, all the way," Andruw said. "Another quarter of an hour here or there, and we would have lost."

"We won, then?" Corfe asked the night air. "This is victory? Our King and all our nobility dead, a third of the men we brought out of Torunn lying stark upon the field? If this is victory, then it's too rich a dish for me."

"We survived," Marsch told him laconically. "That is a victory of sorts."

Corfe smiled. "I suppose so."

"What now?" Andruw asked. They looked at their general. Corfe stared up at the stars. They were winking bright and clean, untouchable, uncaring. The world went on. Life continued, even with so much death hedging it around.

"We still have a queen," he said at last. "And a country worth fighting for..."

His words sounded hollow, even to himself. He seemed to feel the fragile paper of Menin's final order crinkling in the breast of his armour. Torunna's last army, what was left of it, was his to command. That was something. These men - these friends here with him - that was something too.

"Let's get back to camp," he said. "God knows, there's enough to do."

Epilogue

T
HE DREGS OF
the winter gale blew themselves out in the white-chopped turmoil of the Gulf of Hebrion. Over the Western Ocean the sun rose in a bloodshot, storm-racked glory of cloud, and at once the western sky seemed to catch fire from it, and the horizon kindled, brightening into saffron and green and blue, a majesty of morning.

And out of the west a ship came breasting the foam-tipped swells, scattering spindrift in rainbows of spray. Her sails were in tatters, her rigging flying free, and she bore the marks of storm and tempest all about her yards and hull, but she coursed on nevertheless, her wake straight as the flight of an arrow, her beakhead pointed towards the heart of Abrusio's harbour. The faded letters on her bow labelled her the
Gabrian Osprey
, and at her tiller there stood a gaunt man with a salt-grey beard, his clothes in rags, his skin burnt brown as mahogany by a foreign sun.

Richard Hawkwood had come home at last.

The
S
ECOND
E
MPIRE

Prologue

T
HE MAKESHIFT TILLER
bucked under their hands, bruising ribs. Hawkwood gripped it tighter to his battered chest along with the others, teeth set, his mind a flare of foul curses - a helpless fury that damned the wind, the ship, the sea itself, and the vast, uncaring world upon which they raced in mad career.

The wind backed a point - he could feel it spike into his right ear, heavy with chill rain. He unclenched his jaws long enough to shriek forward over the lashing gale.

"Brace the yards - it's backing round. Brace round that mainyard, God rot you!"

Other men appeared on the wave-swept deck, tottering out of their hiding places and staggering across the plunging waist of the carrack. They were in rags, some looking as though they might once have been soldiers, with the wreck of military uniforms still flapping around their torsos. They were clumsy and torpid in the bitter soaking spindrift, and looked as though they belonged in a sick-bed rather than on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

From the depths of the pitching vessel a terrible growling roar echoed up, rising above the thrumming cacophony of the wind and the raging waves and the groaning rigging. It sounded like some huge, caged beast venting its viciousness upon the world. The men on deck paused in their manipulation of the sodden rigging, and some made the Sign of the Saint. For a second, sheer terror shone through the exhaustion that dulled their eyes. Then they went back to their work.

The men at the stern felt the heavings of the tiller ease a trifle as the yards were braced round to meet the changing wind. They had it abaft the larboard beam now, and the carrack was powering forward like a horse breasting deep snow. She was sailing under a reefed mainsail, no more. All the rest of her canvas billowed in strips from the yards, and where the mizzen-topmast had once been was only a splintered stump with the rags of shrouds flapping about it in black skeins.

Not so very far now
, Hawkwood thought, and he turned to his three companions.

"She'll go easier now the wind's on the quarter." He had to shout to be heard over the storm. "But keep her thus. If it strengthens we'll have to run before it and be damned to navigation."

One of the men at the helm with him was a tall, lean, white-faced fellow with a terrible scar that distorted one side of his forehead and temple. The remnants of riding leathers clung to his back.

"We were damned long ago, Hawkwood, and our enterprise with us. Better to give it up now and let her sink with that abomination chained in the hold."

"He's my friend, Murad," Hawkwood spat at him. "And we are almost home."

"Almost home indeed - what will you do with him when we get there, make a watchdog of him?"

"He saved our lives before now -"

"Only because he's in league with those monsters from the west."

"- And his master, Golophin, will be able to cure him."

"We should throw him overboard."

"You do, and you can pilot this damned ship yourself, and see how far you get with her."

The two glared at one another with naked hatred, before Hawkwood turned and leant his weight against the trembling tiller with the others once more, keeping the carrack on her easterly. Pointing her towards home.

And in the hold below their feet, the beast howled in chorus with the storm.

26th Day of Miderialon, Year of the Saint 552.

Wind NNW, Backing. Heavy Gale. Course SSE under reefed Mainsail, running before the wind. Three feet of water in the well, pumps barely keeping pace with it.

Hawkwood paused. He had his knees braced against the heavy fixed table in the middle of the stern-cabin and the inkwell was curled up in his left fist, but even so he had to strain to remain in his seat. A heavy following sea, and the carrack was cranky for lack of ballast, the water in her hold moving with every pitch. At least with a stern wind they did not feel the lack of the mizzen so much.

As the ship's movement grew less violent, he resumed his writing.

Of the two hundred and sixty-six souls who left Abrusio harbour some seven and a half months ago, only eighteen remain. Poor Garolvo was washed overboard in the Middle Watch, may God have mercy on his soul.

Hawkwood paused a moment, shaking his head at the pity of it. To have survived the massacre in the west, all that horror, merely to be drowned when home waters were almost in sight.

We have been at sea almost three months, and by dead-reckoning I estimate our easting to be some fifteen hundred leagues, though we have travelled half as far as that again to the north. But the southerlies have failed us now, and we are being driven off our course once more. By cross-staff reckoning, our latitude is approximately that of Gabrion. The wind must keep backing round if it is to enable us to make landfall somewhere in Normannia itself. Our lives are in the Hand of God.

"The Hand of God," Hawkwood said quietly. Seawater dripped out of his beard onto the battered log and he blotted it hurriedly. The cabin was sloshing ankle-deep as was every other compartment in the ship. They had all forgotten long ago what it was like to be dry or have a full belly, and several of them had loose and rotting teeth, oozing scars which had healed ten years before; the symptoms of scurvy.

How had it come to this? What had so wrecked their proud and well-manned little flotilla? But he knew the answer, of course; knew it only too well. It kept him awake through the graveyard watch though his exhausted body craved oblivion. It growled and roared in the hold of his poor
Osprey
. It raved in the midnight spasms of Murad's nightmares.

He stoppered up the inkwell and folded the log away in its layers of oilskin. On the table before him was a flaccid wineskin, which he slung round his neck. Then he sloshed and staggered across the pitching cabin to the door in the far bulkhead and stepped over the storm-sill into the companionway beyond. It was dark here, as it was throughout every compartment in the ship. They had few candles left and only a precious pint or two of oil for the storm-lanterns. One of these hung swinging on a hook in the companionway, and Hawkwood took it and made his way forward to where a hatch in the deck led down into the hold. He hesitated there with the ship pitching and groaning around him and the seawater coursing round his ankles, then cursed aloud, and began to work the hatch-cover free. He lifted it off a yawning hole and gingerly lowered himself down the ladder there, into the blackness below.