Bleyn blew in like a gale, reeking of horse and sweat and warm leather. He embraced his mother, and she kissed him on the lips. 'What is it this time?'
'Ships - a million ships - well a great fleet at any rate. They passed by Grios Point this morning. Bevan tells me that Murad is aboard, with the retainers he took to Abrusio last month. What's afoot, Mother? What great events are sailing us by this time?' Bleyn collapsed on to a nearby couch, shedding dust and horsehair over its antique velvet.
'He is Lord Murad to you, Bleyn,' Jemilla said tartly. 'Even a son must not be too familiar when his father is of the high nobility.'
'He's not my father.' An automatic snap of petulance. Jemilla leaned forward wearily, lowering her voice in turn. 'To the world he is. Now, these ships—'
'But we know better, Mother. Why pretend?'
'If you want to keep your head on your shoulders, then to you he must be Father also. Prate to your friends all you want - I have them watched. But in front of strangers, you will swallow this pill with a smile. Understand me now, Bleyn. I am tired explaining.'
'I am tired pretending. I am seventeen, Mother - a man in my own right.'
'When you cease pretending, this man you have suddenly become will no longer have a life to be tired of, I promise you. Abeleyn will not tolerate a cuckoo - not yet - for all that that Astaran whore has a womb as barren as a salted field.'
'I don't understand. Surely even a bastard heir is better than no heir at all.'
'It comes of the Civil War. He wants everything absolutely clear. A legitimate king's heir, with whom no one can quibble. He is not yet fifty, and she is younger. And they have that sorcerer Golophin weaving his spells, coaxing his seed into her year by year.'
'And all for nothing.'
'Yes. Be patient, Bleyn. He will come to his senses in the end and realise, as you say, that a bastard is better than nothing.' Jemilla smiled as she said this, and her smile was not altogether pleasant. She saw how it wounded him. Well and good - it was something he would have to get used to.
She ruffled his dust-caked hair. 'What is this about a fleet of ships then?'
He was sullen, slow to answer, but she could see the curiosity burning away the sulk.
'The whole battle fleet, Bevan says. What's going on, Mother? What war have we missed?'
Now it was she who paused. 'I - I don't know.'
'You must know. He tells you everything.'
'He does not. I know little more than you do. All the households have been turned out, and there has been a Grand Alliance signed, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the First Empire. Hebrion, Astarac—'
'—Gabrion, Torunna and the Sea-Merduks. Yes Mother, that has been old news for months now. So the Himerians are finally invading - is that it? But they have no fleet worth speaking of. And Bevan said our ships are westbound. What's out there but empty ocean?'
'What indeed? A host of rumours and legends, perhaps. A myth about to be made flesh.'
'And now you talk in riddles again. Cannot you ever give me a straight answer?'
'Hold your tongue', Jemilla snapped. 'You're barely seventeen summers old in the way of the world, and you think you can bandy words with me and belittle your - your father? Whelp.'
He subsided, glowering.
In a softer tone she went on, 'There are legends of a land out in the uttermost west, a new world that remains undiscovered and uninhabited. They are the stuff of children's bedtime stories here in Hebrion, and have been for centuries. But what if the children's tales were true - what if there was indeed a vast, unknown continent out there in the west - and what if I told you that Hebrian ships had already been there, Hebrian feet had trodden those uncharted strands?'
‘I would say, bravo for Hebrian enterprise, but what has this to do with the armada I saw this morning?'
'There's been talk at court, Bleyn, and even here I have caught the gist of it. Hebrion is about to face the threat of invasion, it would seem.'
'So it is the Himerians!'
'No. It is something else. Something from the west.'
'The west? Why - aha - you mean there really is some new empire out beyond the sea? Mother, this is amazing news! How can you sit there so calm? What marvellous times we live in!' Bleyn leapt up and began striding back and forth across the chamber, slapping the palms of his hands together in his excitement. His mother watched him dourly. Still a boy, with a boy's enthusiasms, and a boy's ignorance. She had thought to have done better. Perhaps if his father had truly been Abeleyn - or Murad - he would have been different, but this pup was the progeny of one Richard Hawkwood, a man Jemilla might once, ironically enough, have actually loved the only man she might once have loved - but a commoner, and thus useless to her life and her ambitions. Still, she thought, one must work with the tools one is given. And he is my son, after all. I am his mother. And I do love him - there is no gainsaying that.
'Not an empire,' she corrected him. 'Or at least, not yet. Whatever it is that has arisen out there, it seems to have been connected to events here, in Normannia, for untold centuries. How, I am not sure, but the Himerians are part of it, and the Second Empire somehow within its control.'
'You are very vague, Mother,' said Bleyn with some circumspection.
'It is all I know. Few men anywhere know more except Lord Murad, and the King, and Golophin his wizard.'
And Richard Hawkwood. The thought came unbidden to her. He too would know everything, having captained that unhappy voyage all those years ago. The greatest feat of maritime navigation in history, it was said, but the Crown had clamped down on all mention of it in subsequent years. The initial interest - nay, hysteria - had faded within a year. No log books were ever published, no survivor ever hawked his story in street-sold handbills. It was as though it had never happened.
Her husband it was who had seen to that. Murad forgot nothing, forgave nothing. The man was obsessed with ruining Richard Hawkwood - why, Jemilla could not fathom. Something had happened to them out there in the west, something horrible. It was as if Murad were trying to expunge it from his soul. And if he could not, then he would bury every reminder of it he could.
If he ever found out that Bleyn were actually the mariner's son . . . Jemilla's face grew cold at the thought.
So Hawkwood had gained nothing from his great voyage, once the initial run of banquets and audiences had run their course. It had been a nine-day wonder, quickly forgotten. Even the King, she thought, had been happy to have it that way. What had happened out there, to destroy their expedition and so blight their lives?
And what was coming from that terrible place now that warranted such preparations? Alliances, ship-building programmes, fortification projects: in the last five years Hebrion and her allies had been preparing for a vast struggle with the unknown. And now, it had begun. She could sense it as surely as if it were some noisome reek brought on the back of the wind.
Bleyn was watching her. 'How can you sit here like this, Mother - so uninterested? You're a woman, I know - but not like any other—'
'You know so many then?'
'I know other noblewomen. You are a hawk amongst pigeons.'
She laughed. Perhaps he was not so much of a boy as she had thought. 'I keep my place, Bleyn, as I must. Lord Murad is not a man to cross lightly, as you know, and he prefers that you and I stay away from court. The King prefers it that way also. We are a skeleton long hidden in the back of a closet. We must be patient, is all.'
'I am a man now. I can sit a horse as well as any trooper, and I'm the best fencer in all of Galiapeno. I should be out there on those ships, or at least commanding a tercio in the city garrison. My blood demands it. It would demand it even were I Murad's son and not the King's.'
'Yes, it would.'
'What kind of education do you think I get out here in the country? I know nothing of court or of the other nobility—'
"That's enough, Bleyn. I can only counsel patience. Your time will come.'
Bleyn's voice rose. 'It will come when at last I am a doddering greybeard and my youth has been poured out on the stones of this damned backwater!' He stormed out of the chamber, his shoulder thumping the door frame as he went. The dust of his passage hung in the air after him. Jemilla could smell it. Dust. All that was left of sixteen years of her life. She had aimed high once - too high - and this semi-imprisonment had been her punishment, Murad her jailer. She was lucky to be alive. But Bleyn was right. It was time to chance another cast perhaps, before sixteen more years passed in the arid dust and sunlight of this damned backwater.
Two
The first primroses were out, and new bracken was curling up in gothic-green shoots through the massed needles of the pinewoods. That smell in the wind - of pine resin and new grass and growing things; a clean sharpness from which the chill was finally departing, to be replaced by something new.
The horses had caught the flavour of the air and were prancing and nipping at each other like colts. The two riders ahead of the main party let them have their heads, and were soon galloping full tilt along the flank of one of the great upland fells which formed this part of the world. When their mounts were blowing and steaming, they reined them in again, and continued at an amble.