In minutes they were off again, downhill this time, trudging in the hollows their feet had made on the way up. Hawkwood and Bardolin remained behind for a few minutes, watching the gathering clouds about the shoulders of the great mountain to the north.
“I’ll kill him before we leave this land,” Hawkwood said. “He will goad me one time too often.”
“It is his way,” Bardolin said. “He knows no other. He looks to you and me for answers, and hates the necessity for it. He is as lost as any of us.”
“Lost! Is that how you see us?”
“We are on a dark continent which those who were here before us did not mean us to see. There is Dweomer here, everywhere, and there is such a teeming life. I have never felt anything like it. Power, Hawkwood, the power to create warped grotesqueries such as that winged creature. I did not say so before because I was not sure, but I am now. That bird was once a man like you or me. There was the remnant of a man’s mind in the beast’s skull. Not as it is in a shifter, but different. Permanent. There is someone or something in this land who is committing monstrous deeds, things which offend the very fabric of nature’s laws. Murad may be eager to meet them, but I am not, if only because I can to some extent understand the motive behind the act. Power allied to irresponsibility. It is the most dangerous thing in the world, the most seductive of temptations. It is evil, pure and simple.”
They followed off after the last of the soldiers without another word, the jungle creatures calling out mockingly all around them.
I T rained on the way back, as Murad had predicted, and, like everything else in this land, the rain was strange. The sky clouded over in minutes, and the dimness beneath the tops of the trees became a twilight they stumbled through half-blind, eyes fixed on the man in front. There was a roaring noise above, and they looked up in time to catch the first drops cascading down from the ceiling of vegetation.
The roar intensified until they could hardly hear each other’s voices. The rain was torrential, maniac, awesome. It was as warm as bath water and thick as wine. The canopy broke most of its force and it tumbled in waterfalls down the trunks of the trees, creating rivers which gurgled around their boots, battering plants to the forest floor and submerging them in mud and slime. The company huddled in the shelter of one of the forest leviathans whilst their dimly lit world became a storm of smashing rain, a blinding, water-choked quagmire.
They glimpsed the dark shapes of little twisting animals fall to earth, washed off their perches higher in the trees. The rain coming down the tree boles became a soup of bark and insects, pouring down the necks of the soldiers’ armour, soaking the arquebuses and waterlogging the powder-horns beyond hope of drying.
An hour or more they crouched there and watched the storming elements in fear and bewilderment. And then the rain stopped. Within the space of a dozen heartbeats, the roaring thunder of it faded, the torrents dwindled and the light grew.
They stood, blinking, tipping water out of gun barrels and helmets, wiping their faces. The forest came to life again. The birds and other unknown fauna took up their endless chorus once more. The water about their feet soaked into the spongy soil and disappeared, and the last of the rain dripped in streams from the leaves of the great trees, lit up like tumbling gems by the sunlight above. The jungle stank and steamed.
Murad shook his lank hair from his face, wrinkling his nose. “The place stinks worse than a tannery in high summer. Bardolin, you’re our resident expert on the world. Was that rain normal for here, do you think?”
The wizard shrugged, dripping.
“In Macassar they have sudden rains like that, but they come in the rainy season only,” Hawkwood volunteered.
“We’ve arrived here in the midst of the rainy season then?”
“I don’t know,” the mariner said wearily. “I’ve heard merchants of Calmar say that to the south of Punt there are jungles where it rains like this every day, and there is no winter, no summer; no seasons at all. It never changes from one month to the next.”
“God save us,” one of the soldiers muttered.
“That is ridiculous,” Murad snapped. “Every country in the world has its seasons; it must have. What is a world without spring, or winter? When would one harvest crops, or sow seeds? When will you cease spinning your travellers’ tales with me, Hawkwood?”
Hawkwood’s face darkened, but he said nothing.
They moved on without further talk, and had it not been for Hawkwood’s compass they would never have got their bearings again, for the little stream which they had followed that morning had become one of many muddy rivulets. They retraced their course like mariners at sea, by compass bearing alone, and by the time they heard the voices of the men back at the makeshift camp there was a transparency, a frailty to the light in the sky which suggested that sundown was very near.
The camp was a shambles. Murad stood with his fists resting on his lean hips and surveyed it with skull-like intensity. The stream which had run through it had overflowed its soggy banks and the men were sucking through a veritable swamp of mud and decaying vegetation, steam rising like fog from the saturated earth. They had chopped down a score of saplings and tried to fashion a rude palisade, but the wood would not stand up in the soft soil; the stakes sagged and wobbled like rotten teeth.
Ensign di Souza forced his way over to his superior, his boots heavy with mud.
“Sir, I mean your excellency—the rain. It washed out the camp. We managed to keep some of the powder dry . . .” He tailed off.
“Move off to one side, away from the stream,” Murad barked. “Get the men to it at once. There’s not much light left.”
A new shape in the gathering gloom and Ensign Sequero, di Souza’s more aristocratic fellow officer, appeared, amazingly clean and tidy, having just come from the ship.
“What are you doing ashore, Ensign?” Murad asked. He looked like a man being slowly bent into some quivering new shape, the tension in him a palpable thing. The soldiers went to their work with a will; they knew Murad’s displeasure was a thing to avoid.
“Your excellency,” Sequero said with a smile, hovering just below insolence. “The passengers are wondering when they’ll be let ashore, and there is the livestock also. The horses especially need a run on dry land, and fresh fodder.”
“They will have to wait,” Murad said with dangerous quietness. “Now get you back to the ship, Ensign.”
Even as he spoke, the light died. It grew dark so quickly that some of the soldiers and sailors stared around fearfully, making the Sign of the Saint at their breasts. A twilight measured in moments followed by pitch blackness, a weight of dark which was broken only by the spatters of stars visible through gaps in the canopy overhead.
“Sweet Ramusio!” someone said. “What a country.”
No one spoke for a few minutes. The men stood frozen as the jungle disappeared into the night and became one with it. The noises of the forest changed tone, but did not decrease their volume one whit. The company was in the midst of an invisible bedlam.
“Strike a light, someone, for God’s sake,” Murad’s voice cracked, and the stillness in the camp was broken. Men fumbling in the dark, the sucking squelch of feet in mud. A rattle of sparks.
“The tinder’s soaked through . . .”
“Use any dry powder you have, then,” Hawkwood’s voice said.
A sulphuric flare in the night, like a far-off eruption.
“Burn a couple of the stakes. They’re the only things which are near-dry.”
For perhaps the space of half an hour, the inhabitants of the crown’s new colony in the west huddled about a single soldier who was striving to create fire. They might have been men at the dawn of the world, crouched in the terrifying and unknowable dark, their eyes craving the light to see what was coming at them out of the night.
The flames caught at last. They saw themselves; a circle of faces around a tiny fire. The jungle towered off on all sides, the night creatures laughing and croaking at their fear. They were in an alien world, as lost and alone as forgotten children.
H AWKWOOD and Bardolin sat by one of the fires later in the night. There were thirty men ashore, lying around half a dozen camp-fires which spat and hissed in the surrounding mud. A dozen men stood guard with halberd and sword whilst a few others were methodically and cautiously turning a pile of gunpowder off to one side, trying to dry it out without blowing themselves to kingdom come. The arquebuses were useless for the moment.
“We don’t belong here,” Hawkwood said quietly, chucking Bardolin’s imp under the chin so that it gurgled and grinned at him, its eyes two little lamps in the firelight.
“Maybe the first Fimbrians to venture east of the Malvennors said the same thing,” Bardolin replied. “New countries, unexplored lands, are always strange at first.”
“No, Bardolin, it’s more than that and you know it. This country’s very nature is different. Inimical. Alien. Murad thought he could wade ashore and start building his own kingdom here, but it won’t be that way.”
“You wrong him there,” the mage said. “After what happened on the ship, I think he knew better than to expect it to be easy. He is feeling his way, but he is hidebound by the conventions of his class and his training. He is thinking like a soldier, a nobleman.”
“Are we commoners so much more flexible in our thinking, then?” Hawkwood asked, grinning weakly.
“Maybe. We do not have so much at stake.”
“I have a ship—I had two ships. My life is gambled on this throw also,” Hawkwood reminded him.
“And I have no other home; this continent is the only place in the world, perhaps, where I and my like can be free of prejudice, make a new beginning,” Bardolin retorted. “That, at least, was the theory.”
“And yet tonight you were too tired even to conjure up a glimmer of werelight. What kind of omen is that for your new beginning?”
The wizard was silent, listening to the jungle noises.
“What is out there, Bardolin?” Hawkwood persisted. “What manner of men or beasts have claimed this place before us?”
The old mage poked at the fire, then slapped his cheek suddenly, wincing. He peeled an engorged, many-legged thing from his face, eyed it with mild curiosity for a second and then threw it into the flames.
“As I said, there is Dweomer here, more than I have ever sensed in any other place,” he said. “The land we saw before us today is thick with it.”
“Was that truly a road? Are we to stumble across another civilization here?”
“I think so. I think something exists on this continent which we in the Ramusian west have never even guessed at. I keep thinking of Ortelius, our stowaway Inceptine and werewolf. He was charged with making sure your ships never made it this far, that much is clear. Perhaps he had a fellow on your other vessel, the one that was lost. In any case, his mission was entrusted to him by someone in this land, this strange country upon which we have made landfall. And there is Dweomer running through it all, the work of mages. Hawkwood, I do not think we will leave this continent alive, any of us.”
The mariner stared at him across the fire. “Rather soon to be making such predictions of doom, isn’t it?” he managed at last.
“Soothsaying is one of the Seven Disciplines, but it is not one of mine, along with weather-working and the Black Change. Yet I feel we have no future here. I know it, and for all Murad’s claims and posturings, I think he knows it too.”