Paul Kearney: Hawkwood's voyage

Now they were back among the Monarchies of God, where men made the Sign of the Saint over their viands and the Blessed Ramusio’s likeness stared down upon every crossroads and market place.

Abrusio was home port for almost half of them, and contained the shipyard where the Grace ’s keel had been laid down thirty years before.

Two things struck the seaward observer about Abrusio: the forest and the mountain.

The forest sprouted out of the glassy bay below the city, a vast tangle of masts and spars and yards, like the limbs of a leafless wood, perfect in their geometry, interconnected with a million rigging lines. Vessels of every nationality, tonnage, rig, complement and calling were anchored in the bay of Abrusio by the hundred, from coastal hoys and yawls with their decks asprawl with nets and shining fish to ocean-going carracks bedecked with proud pennants. And the Navy of Hebrion had its yards here also, so there were tall war-carracks, galleys and galleasses by the score, the wink of breastplate and helmet on quarterdecks and poops, the slow flap of the heavy Royal standards on mainmasts, the pendants of admirals on mizzens.

Two more things about this floating forest, this waterborne city: the noise and the smell. There were hoys offloading their catches, merchantmen at the quays with their hatches open and gangs hauling on tackles to bring forth from their bellies the very life’s blood of trade. Wool from Almark, amber from Forlassen, furs from Fimbria, iron from Astarac, timber from the tall woods of Gabrion, best in the world for the building of ships. The men that worked the vessels of the port and the countless waggons on the wharves set up a rumbling murmur of sound, a clatter, a squeal of trucks, a creak of wood and hemp that carried for half a mile out to sea, the very essence of a living port.

And they stank. Further out to sea on such a still day drifted the smell of unwashed humanity in its tens of thousands, of fish rotting in the burnished sunlight, of offal tossed into the water to be quarrelled over by hordes of gulls, of pitch from the shipyards, ammonia from the tanneries; and underlying it all a heady mixture, like a glimpse of foreign lands, a concoction of spices and new timber, salt air and seaweed, an elixir of the sea.

That was the bay. The mountain, also, was not what it seemed. From afar it looked to be a blend of dust and ochre stone, pyramidal in shape, hazed with blue smoke. Closer inshore an approaching mariner would see that a hill reared up from the teeming waterfront and built upon it, row upon row, street upon narrow, crowded street, was the city itself, the house walls whitewashed and thick with dust, the roofs of faded red clay from the inland tile works of Feramuno. Here and there a church thrust head and lofty shoulders above the throng of humbler dwellings, its spire a spike reaching for blue, unclouded heaven. And here and there was the stone-built massiveness of a prosperous merchant’s house-for Abrusio was a city of merchants as well as of mariners. Indeed, some said that a Hebrian must be one of three things at birth: a mariner, a merchant or a monk.

Towards the summit of the low hill, making it higher than it truly was and giving it the aspect of a steep-sided mountain, was the citadel and palace of the King, Abeleyn IV, monarch of Hebrion and Imerdon, admiral of half a thousand ships.

The dark granite walls of his fortress-palace had been reared up by Fimbrian artificers four centuries before, and over their high walls could be glimpsed the tallest of the King’s cypresses, the jewels of his pleasure gardens. (A fifth of the city’s water consumption, it was rumoured, went on keeping those gardens green.) They had been planted by the King’s forebears when the first Hebrion shrugged off the decaying Fimbrian yoke. They flickered now in the awful heat, and the palace swam like a mirage of the Calmari desert.

Beside the King’s palace and pleasure gardens the monastery of the Inceptine Order shimmered also. So-called because they were the first religious order founded after the visions of the Blessed Ramusio brought light to the darkness of the idol-worshipping west (indeed, some would have folk believe that Ramusio himself founded them), the Inceptines were the religious watchdogs of the Ramusian kingdoms.

Palace and monastery, they frowned down together over the sprawling, stinking, vibrant city of Abrusio. A quarter of a million souls toiled and bargained and revelled beneath them, natives of the greatest port in the known world.

“Sweet God,” Richard Hawkwood had said. “What is happening?”

He had reason to speculate, for over the upper half of Abrusio a black smoke hung in the limpid air, and a worse stink was wafting over the crowded port towards his ship. Burning flesh. The gibbets of the Inceptines were crowded with sticklike shapes and a pall of scorched meat hung sickeningly far out to sea, more greasy and unclean than the foulest odour of the sewers.

“They’re sending heretics to the pyre,” the boatswain said, disgusted and awed. “God’s Ravens are at it again. The Saints preserve us!”

Old Julius, the first mate, an easterner with a face as black as pitch, looked at his captain with wide eyes, his dusky countenance almost grey. Then he bent over the rail and hailed a bumboat close by, packed to the gills with fruit, its pilot a broad hideous fellow who lacked an eye.

“Ho! What’s in the air, friend? We’re back from a month-long cruise down in the Rovers’ kingdoms and our tongues are hanging out for news.”

“What’s in the air? Cannot your nostrils take in the stink of it? Four days it’s been hanging over the city, honest old Abrusio. We’re a haven of sorcerers and unbelievers it seems, every one of them in the pay of the sultans. God’s Ravens are ridding us of them, in their kindness.” He spat over the gunwale into water becoming thick with the detritus of the port. “And I’d watch where you go with that dark face, friend. But wait-you’ve been out a month, you say. Have you heard the news from the east? Surely to God you know?”

“Know what, fellow?” Julius cried out impatiently.

The bumboat was being left behind. Already it was half a cable abaft the port beam. The one-eyed man turned to shout:

“We are lost, my friends! Aekir has fallen!”

T HE port captain was waiting for them as one of Abrusio’s tugs, her crew straining at the oars, towed them to a free wharf. The breeze had failed entirely and the brassy heat beat down unrelentingly on the maze of ships and men and docks, shortening tempers and loosening rigging. And all the while the slick stench of the pyres hung in the air.

Once the dock-hands had moored them to bollards fore and aft, Hawkwood collected his papers and stepped ashore first, reeling as his sea-accustomed legs hit the unyielding stone of the wharf. Julius and Velasca, the boatswain, would see that the offloading was conducted correctly. The men would be paid and no doubt would scatter throughout the city seeking sailors’ pleasures, though they would find little pleasure tonight, Hawkwood thought. The city was busying along at something like its normal, frenetic pace, but it seemed subdued. He could see sullen looks, even open fear on the faces of the dock-hands who stood ready to help with the offloading; and they regarded the Grace ’s crew, at least half of whom were foreigners out of one port or another, with some suspicion. Hawkwood felt the heat, the bustle and the uneasiness working him up into a black mood, which was strange considering that only hours before he had been looking forward to the voyage’s end. He shook hands with Galliardo Ponera, the port captain whom he knew well, and the two fell into step as they wove their way to the port offices.

“Ricardo,” the port captain said hurriedly, “I must tell you-”