“Yes.”
“Why do you choose us as your men? To your kind we are savages and unbelievers.”
“Because you are all I have got,” Corfe said truthfully. “I don’t take you because I want to, but because I have to. But if you will take service under me, then I swear I will speak for you in everything as though I were speaking for myself.”
The hulking savage considered this a moment.
“Then I am your man.” And Marsch touched his fist to his forehead in the salute of his people.
Others in the square saw the gesture. Men began to struggle to their feet and repeat it.
“If we break faith with you,” Marsch said, “then may the seas rise up and drown us, may the green hills open up and swallow us, may the stars of heaven fall on us and crush us out of life for ever.”
It was the old, wild oath of the tribes, the pagan pledge of fealty. Corfe blinked, and said:
“By the same oath, I bind myself to keep faith with you.”
The men in the square were all on their feet now, repeating Marsch’s oath in their own tongue.
Corfe heard them out. He had the oddest feeling that this was the beginning of something he could not yet grasp: something momentous that would affect the remaining course of his life.
The feeling passed, and he was facing five hundred men standing manacled in the rain.
He turned to the young ensign, who was open-mouthed. “Strike the chains from these men.”
“Sir, I—”
“Do it!”
The ensign paled, saluted quickly, and ran off to get the keys. Ebro looked entirely at a loss.
“Ensign,” Corfe snapped, and his aide came to attention. “You will find a warm billet for these men. If there are no military quarters available, you will procure a private warehouse. I want them out of the rain.”
“Yes, sir.”
Corfe addressed Marsch once more. “When did you last eat?”
The giant shrugged again. “Two, three days ago. Sir.”
“Ensign Ebro, you will also procure rations for five hundred from the city stores, on my authority. If anyone questions you, refer them to—to the Queen Dowager. She will endorse my orders.”
“Yes, sir. Sir, I—”
“Go. I want no more time wasted.”
Ebro sped off without another word. Torunnan guards were already walking through the crowd of tribesmen unlocking their ankle chains. The arquebusiers had lit their match and were holding their firearms at the ready. As the tribesmen were freed, they trooped over to stand behind Marsch.
This is my command, Corfe thought.
They were starved, half naked, weaponless, without armour or equipment; and Corfe knew he could not hope to obtain anything for them through the regular military channels. They were on their own. But they were his men.
PART TWO THE WESTERN CONTINENT
T HE air was different, somehow heavy. It trickled down their throats and through the interstices in their armour and lodged there, a solid, unyielding presence. It ballooned their lungs and crimsoned their faces. It brought the sweat winking out in glassy beads on their foreheads. It made the soldiers pause to tug at the neck of their cuirasses as though they were trying to loosen a constricting collar.
The white sand clung to their boots. They screwed up their eyes against its brightness and slogged onwards. In a few steps, the boom of the surf out on the reef became distant, separate. The sun faded as the jungle enfolded them, and the heat became a wetter, danker thing.
The Western Continent.
Sand gave way to leaf mulch underfoot. They slashed aside creepers and the lower boughs of the trees, sharp palm fronds, huge ferns.
The noise of the sea, their universe for so long, faded away. It was as if they had entered some different kingdom, a place which had nothing to do with anything they had known before. It was a twilit world enshadowed by the canopy of the immense trees which soared up on all sides. Naked root systems like the tangled limbs of corpses on a battlefield tripped them up and plucked at their feet. Tree trunks two fathoms in diameter had discs of fungi embedded in their flanks. A bewildering tangle of living things, the very atmosphere full of buzzing, biting mites so that they drew them into their mouths when they breathed. And the stink of decay and damp and mould, overpowering, all-pervading.
They stumbled across a stream which must have had its outlet on the beach. Here the vegetation was less frenetic and they could make a path of sorts, slashing with cutlass and poniard.
When they halted to rest and catch their breath—so hard to do that here, so hard to draw the thick air into greedy lungs—they could hear the sound of this new world all around them. Screeches and wails and twitterings and warblings and hoots of human-sounding laughter off in the trees. A symphony of invisible, utterly unknown life cackling away to itself, indifferent to their presence or intentions.
Several of the soldiers made the Sign of the Saint. There were things moving far up in the canopy, where the world had light and colour and perhaps a breeze. Half-glimpsed leaping shadows and flutterings.
“The whole place is alive,” Hawkwood muttered.
They had found a tiny clearing wherein the stream burbled happily to itself, clear as crystal in a shaft of sunlight which had somehow contrived to survive to the forest floor.
“This will do,” Murad said, wiping sweat from his face. “Sergeant Mensurado, the flag.”
Mensurado stepped forward, his face half hidden in the shade of his casque, and stabbed the flagpole he had been bearing into the humus by the stream.
Murad produced a scroll from his belt pouch and unrolled it carefully as Mensurado’s bark brought the file of soldiers to attention.
“ ‘In this year of the Blessed Saint five hundred and fifty-one, on this the twenty-first day of Endorion, I, Lord Murad of Galiapeno do hereby claim this land on behalf of our noble and gracious sovereign, King Abeleyn the Fourth of Hebrion and Imerdon. From this moment on it shall be known as—’ ” he looked up at the cackling jungle, the towering trees—“as New Hebrion. And henceforth as is my right, I assume the titles of viceroy and governor of this, the westernmost of the possessions of the Hebriate crown.’ ”
“Sergeant, the salute.”
Mensurado’s parade-ground bellow put the jungle cacophony to shame.
“Present your pieces! Ready your pieces! Fire!”
A thunderous volley of shots went off as one. The clearing was filled with toiling grey smoke which hung like cotton in the airless space.
The forest had gone entirely silent.
The men stood looking up at the crowded vegetation, the huge absence of sound. Instinctively, everyone stepped closer together.
A crashing of undergrowth, and Ensign di Souza appeared, scarlet face and yellow hair above his cuirass, with a pair of sailors and Bardolin the mage labouring in his wake. The wizard’s imp rode on his shoulder, agog.
“Sir, we heard shooting,” he panted.
“We have seen off the enemy,” Murad drawled. He loosened the drawstrings on the Hebrian flag and it fell open, a limp gold and crimson rag.
“Report, Ensign,” he said sharply, waving powder-smoke from in front of his face.
“The second wave of boats are ashore, and the mariners are off-loading the water casks as we speak. Sequero asks your permission, sir, to get the surviving horses ashore and start hunting up fodder for them.”
“Permission denied,” Murad said crisply. “The horses are not a priority here. We must secure a campsite for the landing party first, and investigate the surrounding area. Who knows what may be lurking in this devil’s brush about us?”
Several of the soldiers glanced round uneasily, until Mensurado, with shouts and kicks, got them to reloading their arquebuses.