Bardolin tugged her on, leaving the sailors staring after the pair. One man hurriedly made the Sign of the Saint.
They laboured up the precarious gangplank, which seemed designed for the agility of apes rather than that of men. Once on deck, Bardolin raised a hand to the furious mustachioed man and shouted in his best sergeant of arquebusiers voice:
“Ho there, Captain! Might we have a word with you?”
The man yanked his water-pipe out of his mouth as though it had bitten him and glared at the pair.
“Who in the name of the Prophet’s Arse are you?”
“Someone who is to take ship with you in a short while. May we speak to you?”
The man’s eyes rolled in his head. “A warlock I shouldn’t wonder, and his doxy with him too. Sweet Saints, what a trip this is promising to be!”
He turned away from the quarterdeck rail, muttering to himself. Bardolin and Griella looked at one another, and then clambered up towards him, feeling two dozen baleful stares on their backs as they went. It was like intruding on the territory of some alien, primitive tribe.
The quarterdeck was littered with coiled ropes and light spars of timber. Everywhere lines of the running rigging came down to be hitched about fiferails. A brass bell glittered, painfully bright in the sun, and the huge tiller that steered the ship from the half-deck below had been unshipped and lay to one side. The man was leaning on the taffrail and puffing on his gurgling pipe. His eyes were slits of suspicion.
“Well, what do you want? We’re outfitting for a blue-water voyage and we’re short of men. I have things to do, and passing the time of day with landsmen is not one of them.”
“I am Bardolin of Carreirida and this is my ward, Griella Tabard. We have been told we are to be passengers on one of the vessels of Ricardo Hawkwood, and we wanted to see them and ask for advice on preparing for the coming voyage.”
The man looked as though he were about to give a sneering answer, but something in Bardolin’s eye stopped him.
“You’ve been a soldier,” he said instead. “I can see the helm scar. You don’t look like a wizard.” He paused, staring into the glass-sided bubble of his pipe for a second, then grudgingly said: “I am Billerand, first mate of the Osprey, so don’t call me captain, not yet at least. Richard is up in the city wrestling with the provisioners and moneylenders. I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
The imp squirmed in Bardolin’s bosom, making Billerand gape.
“Might we talk below?” Bardolin asked. “There are many sets of ears up here.”
“All right.”
The mate led them down a companionway in the deck and they blinked in the gloom, startling after the harsh brightness of the day. It was close down here; the heat seemed to hang like a tangible thing in their throats. They could smell the wood of the ship, the pitch that caulked the seams, soft and bitter-smelling, and the faint stink of the bilge, like filth and water left to lie stagnant in a warm place. They could hear, too, the thumps and shouts of men off in the ship’s hold. It sounded like a fight going on in the adjacent room of a large house, muffled but somehow very near.
They went through a door, stepping over a high storm sill, and found themselves in the Master’s cabin. One side of it was taken up by the long stern windows. They could look out and see the harbour sunlit and framed by the curving lines of the interior bulkheads, like a backlit painting of sharp brilliance. There were two small culverins on either side of the cabin, lashed up tight against their closed gunports. Billerand sat down behind the table that ran athwartships, the scene of the harbour behind him.
“Is that a familiar you have there?” he asked, pointing to the wriggling movement in the breast of Bardolin’s robe.
“Aye, an imp.”
The mate’s face seemed to lighten somewhat. “They’re lucky things to have on a ship, imps. They keep the rats down. The men will be pleased with that at least. Let him out, if you please.”
Bardolin let the imp crawl out of the neck of his robe. The tiny creature blinked its eyes, its ears moving and quivering on either side of its head. Bardolin could feel its fear and fascination.
Billerand’s fierce face relaxed into a smile. “Here, little one. See what I have for you?” He produced a small quid of tobacco from a neck pouch and held it out. The imp looked at Bardolin, and then leapt on to the table and sniffed at the tobacco. It took it delicately in one minute, clawed hand and then began to gnaw on it like a squirrel working at a nut. Billerand scratched it gently behind the ear and his smile widened into a grin.
“As I said, the hands will be pleased.” He leaned back again. “What would you have me tell you then, Bardolin of Carreirida?”
“What do you know of this voyage we are to undertake?”
“Very little. Only that it is to the west. The Brenn Isles, maybe. And we are not taking cargo, only passengers and some Hebrian soldiery. We’ll be packed in these two ships tighter than a couple on their honeymoon night.”
“And the nature of the other passengers, besides the soldiers?”
“Dweomer-folk, like yourself. The hands do not know it yet, and I’d as soon leave it that way for the moment.”
“Do you know who is sponsoring the voyage?”
“There is talk of a nobleman, and even of a Royal warrant. Richard has yet to brief his officers.”
“What kind of a man is this Hawkwood?”
“A good seaman, even a great one. He has redesigned his ships according to his own lights, despite the grumbling of the older hands. They’ll make less leeway than any vessel in this port, I’ll promise you. And they’re drier than any other ships of their class. I’ve been in this carrack in a tearing gale off the Malacar Straits with a lee shore a scant league away and a south-easter roaring in off the starboard quarter, but she weathered it. Many another ship, under many another captain, would have been driven on to the shoals and broken.”
“Is he a Hebrian native?”
“No, and neither are most of his crews. Nay, our Richard is Gabrionese, one of the mariner race, though he has made his home in Abrusio these twenty years, ever since his marriage to one of the Calochins.”
“Is he a . . . pious man?”
Billerand roared with laughter, and a spit of fluid sparked out of the brim of his pipe. The imp jumped, afraid, but he soothed it with the caress of one callused hand.
“Easy, little fellow, it’s all right. No, wizard, he is not particularly pious. Do you think he’d take your sort as supercargo if he was? Why, I’ve seen him make a sacrifice to Ran the god of storms to placate the tribesmen among the crew. If the Inceptines had heard of that he’d have been burnt flesh a long time ago. You need not fear; he loves the Ravens even less than the next man. They had Julius Albak, the first mate before me and a damned good shipmate, shot in front of our eyes and then they hauled half the crew of the Grace off to the catacombs to await the pyre—but our Richard got them back, God knows how.”
“Which lands do your seamen come from?” Bardolin asked with interest, perching on a seachest that rested against the forward bulkhead.
Billerand sucked a moment on his gurgling pipe.
“What are these questions in aid of, wizard? You wouldn’t be a spy of the Inceptines yourself, would you?”
“Far from it.” Bardolin’s face changed, going as white as marble, but his eyes flashed. “A friend of mine they burned today, sailor, a boy who was like a son to me. They have wrecked my home and the researches of thirty years. I am about to be exiled because of them. I have no love for the Ravens.”
Billerand nodded. “I believe you. And I’ll tell you that our crews are from every kingdom and sultanate in Normannia. We’ve men from Nalbeni and Ridawan, Kashdan and Ibnir. Men of Gabrion who sailed under Richard’s father; Northmen from far Hardalen, and even one from the jungles of Punt, though he don’t speak much on account of the Merduks cutting out his tongue. We have tribesmen from the Cimbrics captured by the Torunnans and sold as slaves. They were oarsmen in a Macassian galley which we took last year. Richard is their headman now. They have blue faces, with the tattooing.
“Myself, I’m from Narbosk, the Fimbrian electorate that broke off from the empire and went its own way back in my great-grandfather’s time. I’ve served my stint in the Fimbrian tercios, but it’s a boring life fighting the same battles on the Gaderian river every year. I tired of it, and took to the sea. Which army did you serve with?”
“The Hebrian. I was a sword-and-buckler man, and later an arquebusier. We fought the Fimbrians at Himerio, and they trounced us up and down. They pulled out of Imerdon, though, and thus it now belongs to the Hebrian crown.”
“Ah, the Fimbrians,” Billerand said, his eyes shining. Abruptly he reached under the table and produced a wide-bottomed bottle of dark glass. “Have a taste of Nabuksina with me, in memory of battling Fimbrians,” he said, his smile baring teeth as square and yellow as those of a horse.
They shared the fiery Fimbrian root spirit, slugging in turn from the bottle. The imp watched, grinning from ear to long, pointed ear, the tobacco a bulge in one cheek. Griella stirred restlessly. She was bored with this talk of battles and armies. When Bardolin noticed he wiped his mouth on his sleeve, as he had not done in years, and held up a hand when the bottle was proffered to him again.
“Some other time, perhaps, my friend. I have other questions for you.”
“Question away,” Billerand said expansively, curling one end of his luxurious moustache on a finger.
“Why are the soldiers taking ship with us? Is that usual?”
Billerand belched. “If a king’s warrant is involved, why then yes.”
“How many are coming?”
“We’ve been told to provision for fifty—a demi-tercio.”
“That’s a lot of fighting men for two vessels such as these.”
“Indeed. Perhaps they’re to keep the Dweomer-folk from magicking us when we’ve put to sea. We’ve to provide berths for half a dozen nags, too, both mares and stallions, so the nobles don’t wear out their boots when we make landfall.”