Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (81 page)

"They tolerate these things - they do not appreciate them," Aruan said. "And they are men like any other, fearful of what the future may bring. Our friend Briannon is in fact the same Briannon who is Elector of Neyr, and should the Fimbrians ever set aside their internal differences and decide to raise up an emperor again, then he will be the man clad in imperial purple. He is not here for the exercise. I believe they will sign the new treaty. We will have Fimbrian Pike within our ranks yet, I promise you. Not for a while, perhaps, but once Hebrion and Astarac fall, they will see which way the wind is blowing."

"They don't like us," Bardolin said. "They would prefer to serve under King Corfe - a fighting man."

"They would prefer to serve under no-one but themselves. However, their rank and file will obey orders - it's what they're good at, after all." Aruan smiled. "My dear Bardolin, you have been very promiscuous in your comings and goings of late. I sometimes regret letting you into the mysteries of the Eighth Discipline. Do I detect a note of sympathy for this soldier-king?"

Bardolin met Aruan's hawkish gaze without flinching. "He's the greatest general of the age. The Fimbrian rank and file may obey their orders in the main, but over the past fifteen years thousands of them have flocked to his banner
. The Orphans
, they call themselves, and they are fanatics. I've met them in the field, and they are a fearsome thing to contend against."

"Ah, the Torrin Gap battle," Aruan mused. "But that was a small affair - and almost ten years ago. We have our own brand of fanatics now, Bardolin, and they laugh at pikes no matter who wields them. Children?
Am I not right
?"

At this the monks who stood in the shadows raised their heads, and as their cowls slipped back there were revealed the slavering muzzles of beasts. These opened their maws and howled and yammered, and then crawled forward to fawn at the feet of Aruan, their yellow eyes bright as the flickering flames of the braziers.

Five

T
HE SOUND CAME
first, a noise like the massed thudding of a thousand heartbeats. The ship's company roused itself from the exhausted torpor into which it had fallen and stood on deck, staring fearfully into the fog. Their officers were no wiser. King Abeleyn stood on the poop in a golden swirling soup gilded by the huge stern lanterns of the
Pontifidad
. Along the gangways of the waist, marines were replenishing their slow-match, which had burned down to stubs, and all about the forecastle, waist and quarterdeck the gun-crews wiped their faces, spat on their hands and exchanged wordless looks. The beating noise was all around, and growing louder as they stood. Dawn would come in an hour, but something else was coming first.

Admiral Rovero had ordered the swivel-men to remain in the tops, though up there they were on self-contained little islands adrift in an impenetrable grey sea. There was confused shouting from above now, within the fog, and the sudden, shattering bark of the wicked little swivel-guns firing in a formless barrage. Pieces of rope and shards of timber fell to the deck, shot off the yards.

"It's begun," Abeleyn said.

"Sergeant Miro!" Rovero bellowed. "Take a section up the shrouds and see what's going on up there." And in a lower tone. "You, master-at-arms - go get Captain Hawkwood."

The firing intensified. Miro and his men abandoned their arquebuses and took to the shrouds, disappearing into the fog. All along the packed decks of the ship the crew looked upwards in fearful wonder as the fog began to spin in wild eddies and the shouting turned to screaming. A warm rain began to fall on their faces and a wordles cry went up from the decks as they realised it was raining blood. Then one, two, three - half a dozen bodies were falling down out of the fog, smashing off spars, bouncing from ropes, and thumping in scarlet ruin amid their shipmates below, or splashing overboard into the black sea. The volleyed gunfire sputtered out into a staccato confusion of single shots. Men on the spar-decks ducked and dodged as even more dreadful debris rained down from the invisible tops: limbs, entrails, heads, warm spatters of blood. And all the while over the gunfire and the wails of the dying, that drumbeat-murmur overhead.

Ashen faced and panting, Hawkwood joined Abeleyn and Mark on the poop.

"What in Hell's going on?"

No-one answered him. The firing from the tops had all but died, but the shrieking went on, and now men were appearing out of the fog overhead, pouring down the rigging, sliding down backstays so swiftly as to burn the flesh from their hands. It was Abeleyn who first snapped out of the dreamlike paralysis that seemed to have seized all the men on deck.

"Marines there - fire a volley into the tops. Ensign Gerrolvo, get a grip of your men, for God's sake! All hands, all hands prepare for boarding! Sergeant-at-arms, issue cutlasses."

The spell was broken. Given orders to carry out that made sense of the nightmare, the men responded with alacrity. A ragged salvo of arquebus fire was directed towards the swirling mists into which the masts disappeared ten feet above everyone's heads, and the rest of the mariners raced to the arms barrels to seize close-combat weapons, since it was clear the great guns were useless against whatever was attacking the ship.

On the poop beside Abeleyn, Hawkwood drew his own cutlass and fought the sickening panic that was rising up his throat like a cloud. Almost he mentioned Bardolin's visitation to the Hebrian King, but then bit back his words.
You're all dead men
. It was probably too late now anyway.

Admiral Rovero was in the waist, thrusting men to their stations, kicking aside the mutilated corpses which littered the deck. He grasped one mad-eyed marine whose arm looked as though it had been chewed short at the wrist. The man stood grasping his stump and watching the arteries spurt as if they belonged to someone else.

"Miro, you got up to the maintop, didn't you? What in the name of God is happening up there?"

"Demons," Miro said wildly. "Yellow-eyed fiends. They have wings, admiral. There's no-one left alive up there."

The man was in deep shock. Rovero shook him angrily, baffled. "Get below to the sickbay. You there - Grode - help him down the hatch. Stand to your weapons, you whoresons. Remember who you are!"

All around them in the wall of mist it was possible to see the red darting flashes of small-arms fire, and seconds later to hear the muted crackle of distant volleys through a far surf of shouting - the other ships of the fleet were enduring a similar assault.

A knot of bodyguards, Hebrian and Astaran, joined Abeleyn, Mark and Hawkwood at the taffrail with drawn swords. They were in half-armour with open helms, glaring about in bewildered determination. Something swooped out of the fog above them, was lit up saffron as it wheeled into the light of the stern-lanterns, and smashed full-tilt into their ranks. The men were sent sprawling like skittles. One was knocked over the ship's rail and splashed into the sea below without a sound. His armour would sink him like a stone. Hawkwood, in the midst of the tumbling, chaotic flailing of arms and legs and impotently swinging blades glimpsed a winged shape, featherless as a snake - wickedly swiping claws, a long bald tail like that of a monstrous rat - and then it was gone again, the fog spinning circles in the draughts stirred by its wingbeats.

All the length of the ship, men were fighting off this attack from above. Scores, hundreds of the creatures where diving down out of the fog, raking mariners and marines to shreds with their wicked talons, and then disappearing again. The masters-at-arms were manning the quarterdeck swivels and indiscriminately blasting the air with wicked showers of metal. Ropes and lines sliced apart by shrapnel came hissing down on the struggling men below; falling blocks and tackle cracking open skulls and adding to the mayhem. Hawkwood saw what must have been the main topgallant yard - thirty feet of stout wood frapped with iron - come searing down like a comet trailing all its attendant rigging and tackle. It speared through the deck and disappeared below, dragging with it two gunners who had been caught up with its lines. The splintered wood of the deck tore their bodies to pieces as they were yanked through it.

"They're breaking up the ship from the masts down," he cried. "We must get men back up into the tops or they'll cripple her."

He ran forward towards the quarterdeck-ladder. Behind him, the two Kings were helping their heavily armoured bodyguards to their feet. Another one of the winged creatures swept low and Hawkwood swiped at it with his iron cutlass, hacking off one of the great talons. It crashed full into the taffrail in a stinking flap of beating bone and leathery wings. The six-foot stern-lantern above it shuddered at the impact, tottered, and fell to the deck in an explosion of flame, burning oil spraying everywhere. King Mark of Astarac was engulfed and transformed into a blazing torch, the bodyguards beside him likewise drenched, roasting inside their armour. Some threw themselves overboard. The King tried to bat out the flames but they rushed hungrily up his body, blackening his skin, withering his hair away, melting his clothes. Dazed, and on fire himself, Hawkwood saw Astarac's monarch rip the flesh from his own face in his agony. Abeleyn was trying to smother the blaze with his cloak, but it caught too. One of the Hebrian bodyguards pulled his King away and lay on his body, smiting the flames which had caught in his sleeves and hair. Hawkwood rolled across the deck and beat to death the burning droplets on his own clothing. "Fire party!" he shouted. "Fire party aft!" The skin peeled off the back of his hands in perfect sheets and he stared at them, transfixed.

The stern of the ship was ablaze, the fire igniting the pitch in the deck-seams and catching in the tarred rigging of the mizzen backstays. When the heat reached the second stern-lantern, it exploded, spraying fiery oil as far as the quarterdeck. As the inferno took hold, it touched off the poop culverins and they detonated one after another, rearing back on their burning carriages. The spare powder charges stored beside them went up with a sound like a series of thunderous broadsides and blew great jagged holes in the superstructure of the
Pontifidad
, the massive timbers that formed the skeleton and ribs of the ship tossed like twigs into the air along with fragments of burning men. The ship groaned like a maimed beast and there was a great tearing crack as the mizzen gave way and toppled over, tearing free the shrouds and stays and crashing into ruin down the ship's larboard side. The great vessel began to list.

Hawkwood had been blasted clear of the burning poop by the powder-explosions. They had rendered him deaf, and thus the scene aboard was a surreal, soundless nightmare; a dream which seemed to be happening to someone else. He picked himself up out of a tangle of broken timber and piled cordage. All around him, men were fighting the fire with pitiful chains of buckets, or slashing and shooting at the swooping shadows overhead, or dragging their wounded comrades clear of the flames. There was utter confusion, but it had not yet bled into panic. That was something.

The King. Where was he?

Rovero, one side of his face a burnt bubbled ruin, had grabbed his arm and was shouting something, but Hawkwood could not make it out. He ducked as another one of the winged monstrosities dived low, and felt the wrench as Rovero was lifted free of the deck. He seized the admiral's hand, but toppled backwards as it came free. Rovero's decapitated torso tumbled like a rag across the deck. Hawkwood stared in horror.

Men were lifted struggling into the air and dropped with torn throats. A sergeant of marines was grappling fifteen feet off the deck, digging his fingers into his attacker's eyes while the bald wings flapped furiously about him. Sailors caught the hanging tails of their tormentors and dragged them down whilst their comrades hacked them to pieces. But there were hundreds of the beasts. They fastened like flies on the dead and the living alike, wreaking carnage with no thought of their own preservation.

Hawkwood experienced no fear, just a dazed series of decisions in his mind. He grabbed a steel marlin-spike from a fife-rail and stabbed with all his strength one of the winged creatures that was perched on the shattered deck, feeding off a shrieking marine. The beast reared backwards on top of him, the wings beating in a paroxysm of agony. He crawled out from under and knelt upon it, pinning the wings. A human face spat up at him, but the eyes were yellow as a cat's and it's fangs were as long as his fingers. Disgust and rage overmastered him. He punched the face with his raw fists until his knuckles cracked and broke, and the beast's glaring eyes were burst from their sockets.

There - there was Abeleyn. His bodyguards were dead or dying all around him and the King of Hebrion fought on alone, a curtain of flame behind him. Hawkwood staggered aft, no real notion of what he was to do in his mind, only a knowledge that he must get to the King, whatever happened.

A silent explosion staggered him - he felt the blast of hot air scorching his skin. He lurched to his feet. Some sounds were coming back, all overlaid with a shrill hissing that filled his head. The ship's wheel was on fire, and the binnacle. The chain of buckets had disappeared.

There was no order left now on board. Men were fighting their own private battles for survival and wielding anything that came to hand to beat off the enemy. No time to reload arquebuses; the marines were swinging them like clubs. Over the formless storm in his ears Hawkwood heard some shouting in despair, and saw them pointing. He turned.

Crawling over the ship's rails were hordes of the beetle-like warriors which had gone down in the caravel. Their pincers made short work of the boarding-netting and their spiked feet propelled them over the side with preternatural speed. Hawkwood peered over the ship's rail and saw that a mass of smallcraft was clustered there, and grapnels were being tossed aboard by the score. The
Pontifidad
gave a lurch to starboard which sent him sliding across the packed deck. A squirming mass of humanity went with him, men sliding off their feet and rolling in the remains of their shipmates. One sailor was pitched from the mainhatch square onto a baulk of broken timber that transfixed him. He writhed there in astonishment, grasping the bloody stave that now protruded from his belly, wound round with blue innards.