His hands were agony to him now. Hawkwood staggered out of the way of the crowd coming down the hatch and fell to his side. The salt water scalded his burns. He crawled behind one of the great wooden knees of the ship that supported the deck beams, and there halted. The water was rising fast.
The ship shook with a dull boom and the men below wailed helplessly, realising that their doom was not far off. There was a deafening creaking roar, and then part of the very hull gave way. It burst inwards admitting an explosion of spray. Hawkwood thought he saw a massive black snout in the midst of it for a second.
The water rose at an incredible rate, thundering jn through a breach some eight feet wide. Men were clawing their way back up the hatches they had so lately fought to get down. The ship lurched further to starboard with a moan of overstressed timbers. Hawkwood slid towards the breach and was enveloped in foam. He went under, sucked into a storm of swirling seawater. Fighting to see, he found broken timbers under his nose, and beyond them, darkness. He clutched them with his skinless hands and fought against the push of the water, levering himself over them. Splinters raked his belly, his thighs. Then he was spinning freely in open water, a chaotic turbulence which was sucking him down. He struck out in the opposite direction, knowing that the ship was going down and trying to bring him to the depths with it. Something struck him on the forehead and he lost ground. His lungs felt like two cinder-filled bags about to explode. His torso convulsed with the need to suck in air, water, anything, but he fought against it, kicking upwards. His sight turned red. He bared his teeth, tasted blood in his mouth, but kept struggling.
At last his head burst clear of the water for a second. He exhaled and gulped a cupful of air, then was sucked under again.
Harder this time, the fight against the undertow. His arms and legs slowed. He looked up and saw light above him, but it was too far. His limbs stopped. He drifted slowly downwards, but still would not give up, would not breathe in though his body screamed for him to do so.
Damn you. Damn you!
Something became entangled with his legs. It caught there and spun him around, then began to tug him upwards again. A dark blob against the light, leather straps wrapped around his ankles. He was floating towards the surface feet first. He looked down past his wriggling fingers, down into the depths, and saw there a sight he would never forget.
Scores of men, dozens of other faces turned up to the light, some calm and otherworldly, others still fighting the sea like himself. They were suspended in the clear water below, trapped and dying. And behind them, the awesome dark bulk of the Pontifidad sliding towards the seabed like some tired submarine titan going to her rest. Broken, mastless, but still with one or two lights twinkling. She turned over and the last lights went out. Her black hulk slid soundlessly down into the deeper blackness beyond.
Hawkwood was still rising. He broke the surface and shouted the dead poison from his lungs. He flapped his weary legs free of the thing that had saved him, and found it was a leather-strapped wineskin, half full of air. Grasping it in his arms, he sobbed in great gouts of the cold air knowing only that he was alive, he had escaped. His ship was gone, and her crew had ridden her into the depths, but her captain remained. He felt a moment of overpowering shame.
Wind on his face. The mist was clearing, and the sun was riding up the morning sky. In the east it set light to a wrack of distant cloud and turned it into a tumbled melee of gold and scarlet and palest aquamarine. Hawkwood raised his head. There was a slight swell, and when it lifted him on its crest he saw he was surrounded by a horrible wreckage of bodies and parts of bodies, broken spars, limp cordage. To the west a bank of fog still lay stubbornly upon the water, but it was thinning moment by moment. Through it the ships of the enemy could be seen as a forested crowd of masts, and the early sunlight sparkled off milling hosts of armoured figures on their decks. Larger hulks, low in the water and bearing only the ragged stumps of their lower yards, drifted everywhere in and out of the fog, some burning, others appearing wholly lifeless and inert. And in the brilliant blue vault of the sky above, a flock of the winged creatures was wheeling in a great spiral. Hawkwood watched as it descended, and lit upon a sinking galleon. Faint over the water came a series of shots.
Ships everywhere, looming like islands out of the mist. Hebrian galleons built to his own designs, Astaran carracks, Merduk xebecs, Gabrionese caravels. But all of them were dismasted, ablaze and sinking. The waves were thick with flotsam, the wreckage of the greatest naval armament that history had ever seen. In the space of an hour it had been annihilated.
The Pontifidad had been at the forefront of the fleet, the tip of the arrow, and hence it had gone down some distance from the main body of ships. Hawkwood realised that he was drifting eastwards with the breeze, away from the lingering fog banks and the terrible tangled mass of broken hulks to windward. Where they burned the water was still relatively calm; the weather-working spell was fading last at its core. But here, scarcely half a sea-mile away, the wind was picking up. Hawkwood studied the sky and watched the clouds grow and darken in the west, heralding a storm. They were leaving nothing to chance, it seemed.
Had anyone else escaped from the flagship? Again, the choking sense of shame. Seven hundred men and two kings. Lord God.
But he could not give up. He could not will himself to die. It was the same stubbornness that had kept him going all those years ago in the west. Without conscious volition he found himself scanning the pitching waves for something, anything, that might enable him to hold on to life a few hours longer.
Half a cable away a mass of wood rose and fell slowly on the swell. Deadeyes and the rags of shrouds clung to it still. Hawkwood realised it was what was left of the maintop. He struck out for it, leaving his wineskin, and for half a despairing hour fought the steeping waves with what was left of his strength. When he reached it he had not the strength to pull himself atop it, and so hung there, shivering and listless, his hands become rigid claws which no longer obeyed him. Above his head the clouds thickened, and on the wind he heard the screaming of gulls as they settled down to feast on the bounty of disaster, but he shut his eyes and hung on, no longer caring why.
Agony in his hands. He tried to cry out as they were constricted in a merciless grip, their blisters bursting, the charred skin flaying off. He was hauled out of the water, and fell with a thump to the sodden wood of the maintop wreckage. He lay there, awash, and a scream died in his salt-crusted mouth. 'It's all right, Richard. I have you.'
He opened his eyes and saw only a shadow limned black against the sky.
Six
The Queen's chambers were a shadowed place. Despite the spring warmth of the air outside, there were fires burning in every massive hearth, and the ornate grilles that flanked each window were shut, letting in only a pale, mangled radiance that could barely compete with the blare of the firelight.
The ladies-in-waiting all had an attractive flushed look, and their low-cut gowns afforded an intriguing glimpse of the perspiration that gleamed in the hollows of their collar bones. Corfe tugged at his own tight-fitting collar and dismissed them as they hovered around, curtseying. 'Go on outside and get some air, for God's sake.'
'Sire, we—'
'Go, ladies; I'll square it with your mistress.'
More curtsies, and they whispered out, white hands flapping fan-like at their faces, long skirts hitched up as though they were tiptoeing through puddles. Corfe watched them go appreciatively, then collected himself.
'It's like a Macassian bath house in here!' he called. 'What new fad is this, lady?'
His wife appeared from the inner bedchamber. She had a shawl wrapped about her shoulders and she leaned on an ivory cane.
'Nothing that need concern a loutish peasant up from the provinces for the day,' she retorted, her voice dry and clear.
Corfe took her in his arms as carefully as though she were made of tinsel, and kissed her wrinkled forehead. It was marble-cold.
'Come now. It's Forialon these two sennights past. There are primroses out along the side of the Kingsway. What's with this skulking in front of a fire?'
Odelia turned away. 'So how was your jaunt up the road of memory? I trust Mirren enjoyed it.' She lowered herself into a well-stuffed chair by the fire, her blue-veined hands resting on top of her cane. As she did, a multi-legged, dark, furred ball skittered down the wall, climbed up her arm and nestled in the crook of her neck with a sound like a great cat's purr. A clutch of eyes shone like berries.
'It would do you good to take a jaunt yourself.'
Odelia smiled. Her hair, once shining gold, had thinned and greyed, and her years sat heavily in the lines and folds of her face. Only her eyes seemed unchanged, green as a shallow sea in sunlight, and bright with life.
'I am old, Corfe. Let me be. You cannot fight time as though it were a contending army. I am old, and powerless. What gifts I possessed went into Mirren. I would have made her a boy if I could, but it was beyond me. The male line of Fantyr has come to an end. Mirren will make someone a grand queen one day, but Torunna must have a king to rule, always. We both know that only too well.'
Corfe strode to a shuttered window and pulled back the heavy grilles, letting in the sun, and a cool breeze from off the Kardian in the east. He stared down at the sea of roofs below, the spires of the Papal Palace down by the square. The tower wherein he stood was two hundred feet high, but still he could catch the cacophony of sellers hawking their wares in the marketplace, the rattle of carts moving over cobbles, the braying of mules.
'We made slow going of it for the first few days,' he said lightly. 'It is incredible how quickly nature buries the works of man. The old Western Road has well-nigh disappeared.'
'A very good point. Our job here is to prevent nature burying our works after we are gone.'
'We've been over this,' he said wearily.
'And will go over it again. Speaking of burying things, my time on this goodly earth is running out. I have months left, not years—'
'Don't talk like that, Odelia.'
'And you must start to think of marrying again. It's all very well making these pilgrimages to the past, but the future bears looking at also. You need a male heir. Lord God, Corfe, look at the way the world is turning. Another conflict ripens at long last to bloody fruition, one whose climax could make the Merduk Wars look like a skirmish. The battles may have already begun, off Hebrion, or even before Gaderion. When you take to the field, all that is needed is one stray bullet to lose this war. Without you, this kingdom would be lost. Do not let what you have achieved turn to dust on your death.'
'Oh, it's my death now. A fine conversation for a spring morning.'
'You have sired no bastards - I know that - but I almost wish you had. Even an illegitimate male heir would be better than none.'
'Mirren could rule this kingdom as well as any man, given time,' Corfe said heatedly. Again, Odelia smiled.
'Corfe, the soldier-king, the iron general. Whose sun rises and sets on his only daughter. Do not let your love blind you, my dear. Can you see Mirren leading armies?'
He had no reply for that. She was right, of course. But the simple thought of remarrying ripped open the scars of old wounds deep in his soul. Aurungzeb, Sultan of Ostrabar, had two children by - by his queen, and several more by various concubines it was said. Nasir, the only boy, was almost seventeen now, and Corfe had met him several times on state visits to Aurungabar. Black-haired, with sea-grey eyes - and the dark complexion of a Merduk. A son to be proud of. The girl was a couple of years younger, though she remained cloistered away in the manner of Merduk ladies.
Their mother, too, rarely left the confines of the harem these days. Corfe had not seen her in over sixteen years, but once upon a time, in a different world it seemed, she had been his wife, the love of his life. Yes, that old scar throbbed still. It would heal only when his heart stopped.
'You have a list, no doubt, of eligible successors.'
'Yes. A short one, it must be said. There is a dearth of princesses at present.'
He laughed, throwing his head back like a boy. 'What does the world come to? So who is head of your list? Some pale Hebrian maiden? Or a dark-eyed matron of Astarac?'
'Her name is Aria. She is young, but of excellent lineage, and her father is someone we must needs bind to us with every tie we can at the present time.'