Paul Kearney: Ships from the West

'Who was he?' he asked her, amazed.

She dried her eyes quickly. 'He was the greatest mariner of the age. He made a voyage which has passed already into legend, though small reward he received for it, for he was of low blood. He was a good man, and I – I loved him once. I think perhaps he loved me, back in the years when the world was a sane place.' The tears came again, though her face remained unchanged. More than anything she wanted to tell Bleyn who this man really was, but she could not. He must never know, not if he were to make his claim to Hebrion with any conviction.

Even to herself, Jemilla's reasoning seemed hollow. The Five Kingdoms were gone, their last hope, Torunna, falling to pieces in front of her eyes. There would soon be no room in the world for herself and her son and the old order of things. But she had come too far to relinquish hope now. She re shy;mained silent.

The day passed around them unnoticed as they sat on the grass, a trio of lost people to one side of a great concourse of the lost and the fearful and the fleeing. Hawkwood's eye opened once ere the end, and he gripped Jemilla's hand until the bones creaked under his strong fingers.

'Clew up, clew up there,' he whispered in a cracked dry voice. 'Billerand, set courses and topsails. Steer due west with the wind on the quarter.'

Then he sighed, and the pressure of his fingers relaxed. The light faded from his eye. Richard Hawkwood's long voyaging was over.

Aruan woke out of sleep with the knowledge that something had changed in the black hours of the night, some balance had shifted. He was a master of soothsaying as he was of every other Discipline, but this feeling had nothing to do with the Dweomer. It was more akin to an old man's aches before a storm.

He rose and called for his valet and was quickly washed and robed in the austere splendour of the Pontifical apart shy;ments, for he resided there now though Himerius and not he was Pontiff in the eyes of the world. He looked out of the high window upon the cloisters of Charibon below and saw that the dawn had not yet come and the last hours of the night still hung heavy above the horns of the cathedral and the Library of St Garaso.

He clenched and unclenched one blue-veined fist and stared at it darkly. He had overtired himself in his travels, bending the wills and raising the hearts of men up and down the length of the continent. But now Rone had fallen and southern Torunna was being invaded with little resistance, while at Gaderion Bardolin had laid the curtain wall in ruins and the Torunnans there were besieged within their three great fortresses, relief column and all. Hebrion and Astarac and Almark and Perigraine were conquered, their peoples his to command, their nobility extinguished. Only Fimbria now stood alone and aloof from the convulsions of the world, for the Electorates had sent no word since the departure of their embassy months before. Well, they would be dealt with in time.

But still he was afflicted by a restless uneasiness. He felt that he had overlooked some piece of his opponent's upon the gaming board of war, and it troubled him.

As dawn finally broke open the sky in bands of scarlet behind the white peaks of the Cimbrics, King Corfe Cear-Inaf brought his army down from the foothills to the shores of the Sea of Tor, and where the land levelled out into the first wolds of the Torian Plains, he set his men into line of battle, a scant four miles from the outskirts of Charibon itself. It was the eleventh day of Enderialon in the Year of the Saint 567, and it was thirty-one days since he had set out from Torunn.

The army he led was a good deal smaller than that which had taken ship on the Torrin river those weeks before. Many had died in the unforgiving mountains, and over two thous shy;and men, Fimbrians and Torunnans and tribesmen, had been detached while still high up in the foothills, their mission to destroy the Himerian transports docked at the eastern shore of the Sea of Tor, and thus cut the supply lines of the army which was entrenched in the Thurian Line and before Gaderion.

So it was with less than twenty-two thousand troops that Corfe descended from the high places to give battle to the forces of the Second Empire before the very gates of their capital. It was still dark as he set his men into line, and despite their depleted numbers their ranks stretched for over two and a half miles.

He rested his right flank on the shore of the sea itself, and there three thousand Torunnan arquebusiers were placed in four ranks, each half a mile long. To their left was the main body of the Orphans, eight thousand Fimbrian pikemen under Marshal Kyne, with a thousand more arquebusiers mingled in their files. The pike phalanx bristled nine ranks deep and had a frontage of a thousand yards. Next to them stood another three thousand arquebusiers, and out on the far left was the main body of the Cathedraller cavalry, four thousand heavy horsemen in four ranks, armed with lance and sabre and matchlock pistols, their lacquered armour gleaming red as blood in the morning light. Comillan had been newly made their commander, for their previous leader had died in the snows. Hidden in their midst were three batteries of horse shy;artillery and their teams, awaiting the signal to unlimber and begin firing.

Behind this first wave, and closer to the left of the line than its centre, rode the Torunnan King himself at the head of his five-hundred-strong Bodyguard. He kept back with him a mixed formation of some two thousand Fimbrians and Tor shy;unnans to act as a general reserve, and also to bolster the open flank. For off on that flank, on the higher ground leading down to Charibon, the citadel of the Knights squatted, a grey low-built fortress around which were the tents and baggage of a small army. As the Torunnans advanced towards Charibon proper, they would have this fortress and encampment in their left rear. Not only that, but the fast-riding Cathedraller scouts which had been scouring the land about the army for days had only yesterday reported seeing a large body of infantry bivouacked some fifteen miles to the west of Char shy;ibon, square upon the Narian Road. They had not drawn close enough to this force to ascertain its nationality, but there was little doubt that it consisted of more levies on their way to swell the ranks of the Empire. And so Corfe had hurried his men through the night, to attack Charibon before this fresh army came up.

He had no illusions about the slimness of the thread from which his men's survival hung, and he knew that even if they were victorious before the monastery-city, there was little hope of their ever returning to Torunna. But this was the head of the snake here before him, and if it were destroyed, the west might yet rise again and throw off the yoke. That chance was worth the sacrifice of this army. And as for his own life, he knew that it had been twisted beyond hope of happiness, and he would be content to lay it down here.

Ahead of the Torunnans and Fimbrians as they formed up on the plain more tent encampments sprawled amid a web of gravel roads, and beyond them the tricorne tower of the Cathedral of the Saint loomed tall and stark, matched in height by the Library of Saint Garaso and the Pontiff's Palace close by, all connected by the Long Cloisters. That was the heart of Charibon, and of the Second Empire itself. Those buildings must all be laid in ruin and their inhabitants des shy;troyed if the head of this snake were to be cut off.

Albrec had passionately disagreed when Corfe had told him of his intentions back in Torunn, but Albrec was not a soldier, and he was not here, staring at the vast factory of war that Charibon had become. Corfe would rather a thousand books burn than he needlessly lose a single one of his men, and he would see the history of ages go up in smoke rather than let one scion of Aruan's evil brood escape. This he had impressed upon his officers and his men in a council of war held up in the hills, though Golophin, who had attended, had said nothing.