Robert Lyndon: Imperial Fire

Vallon riddled his ears. The screams of men being burned alive carried from the hull of the paddle-wheeler. He looked around at the carnage on his own deck and saw Lucas. He held out his hands and both men fell wordless into each other’s arms, tears mingling on their sooty and blood-spattered faces.

Vallon broke the clinch and stood holding Lucas at arm’s length. ‘You called me “Father”.’

‘Look to the fires,’ Gorka shouted.

A dozen flames had taken hold and would probably have devoured the ship if it hadn’t been sheathed in hides. When the last blaze had been extinguished, Vallon looked at the paddle-wheeler blazing in their wake.

‘God keep you, Wulfstan. You gave yourself a funeral any Viking would have been proud of.’

He turned with heavy heart to count his other casualties. The toll robbed him of any satisfaction in his victory. Seventeen dead. He looked around, still fuddled by the explosion.

‘Where’s Wayland?’

‘Over here,’ Aiken called.

Wayland sat propped against the port side, holding his upper arm. A dart from a repeating crossbow was lodged in it.

Vallon breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Thank God it’s not worse.’

Hero looked up. ‘It’s poisoned.’

Vallon didn’t take it in. ‘Poison? What poison?’

Wayland’s grin was a rictus. ‘The fatal kind.’ He removed his hand to show viscous black blood leaking from the wound.

From a state of fogged consciousness Vallon was hurled into a reality too stark to bear. ‘Can’t you do anything? What about water? Try bleeding him. Keep him moving.’ He reached down to lift Wayland to his feet.

‘Don’t,’ Wayland said

‘Where does it afflict you?’

Wayland’s breath came in rapid gasps. ‘It feels like an icy hand is squeezing my heart.’

‘No,’ Vallon cried. ‘You’re not going to die.’ He dropped to his knees and clasped Wayland to his chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hero said. ‘There’s nothing I can do.’

Vallon watched Wayland die by degrees, the blood draining from his face and his eyes dulling over. Close as he was, Vallon couldn’t make out Wayland’s words except the last — ‘Syth’, delivered on an expiring note of love, guilt and sorrow.

His head arched back and his body convulsed before relaxing into death.

Hero stood wet-eyed but composed and pronounced the Te Deum . Lucas sobbed openly and the other Outlanders looked on bereft. Vallon cradled Wayland’s head against his chest and raised grief-sodden eyes.

‘Leave me alone with him.’

He rocked Wayland’s corpse as if lulling a child to sleep. ‘Not you, Wayland. Everybody else, but not you. You shone like the sun, with a light I thought could never be extinguished. On our first journey I came to look on you as a son, so talented and so contrary. And then you found my real son and on the day he called me father you slip into the void. Oh Wayland. What will I tell Syth?’

The surviving Outlanders committed the bodies of their comrades to the sea where it turned from muddy yellow to clear blue. The sun’s dying rays spread like a golden fan over the receding coast. After the last rites, Vallon stood alone at the rail. He unsheathed his sword for the last time, looked at it for a few moments, then hurled it end over end. It disappeared into the ocean with hardly a splash.

The last of the Outlanders stood on the foredeck. Vallon hobbled over.

Hero held out a compass. ‘Do you recognise this?’

‘Oh yes. The south-pointing mysterious direction-finder that made me turn in my tracks when we met all those years ago. If I’d known then where it would lead me, I would have ridden on.’

‘It doesn’t dictate fate,’ Hero said. ‘All it does is show directions. You have to decide which one to take.’

Vallon screwed a knuckle into his eye. ‘Wayland has shown us the way. South, then west. Back home.’

‘This breeze is carrying us east,’ Lucas said.

‘What lies out there?’ Gorka asked.

‘If we continue east, we’ll come to Korea,’ Aiken said. ‘Beyond that is an island called Nippon. “The land where the sun rises”.’

‘Sir.’

Vallon turned. Everyone turned. Qiuylue had come on deck dressed as Vallon had first seen her, wearing a gown decorated with cranes and pines — symbols of longevity and fidelity. She had made up her face and arranged her hair in the conch style.

She walked towards the stern. Nobody else moved.

‘Qiuylue?’

She turned at the stern rail, faced him, brought her hands together and bowed.

‘Someone stop her!’ Vallon shouted.

The nearest man was still feet away when she gathered the folds of her gown, stepped onto the transom, spread her arms like a bird taking flight and jumped.