It was gone. The night was silent, the utter silence of the unquiet forest. Looking up, Hawkwood could see the stars shining in between the limbs of the trees.

He waited for the beast to return and finish him, but it did not. The night had become as peaceful as if the carnage had been imagined, a fever dream vivid on waking. He sat up cautiously, heard a groan nearby and struggled drunkenly to his feet.

Nothing was working. His mind was immobilized in shock, barely able to instruct the body which harboured it. He staggered out on to the roadway and the first thing he saw was the mocking sight of Masudi’s head planted on the paving like a fallen fruit, dark and shining.

Hawkwood gagged and threw up a thin soup of scalding bile. Other things lay on the road, but he did not care to look at them. He heard the groan again and tottered over to its source.

Bardolin, moving feebly in a pool of Masudi’s blood.

Hawkwood bent down to the mage and slapped the old man’s face, hard. As if he were somehow to blame for the night’s slaughter.

Bardolin opened his eyes.

“Captain.”

Hawkwood could not speak, and he was shaking as though bitterly cold. He tried to help Bardolin up and slipped in the slick blood so that they were both lying in it like twins spat forth from some ruptured womb.

They lay there. Hawkwood felt that he had somehow lived through the end of the world. He could not be alive; he was in some manner of subtle hell.

Bardolin sat up rubbing his face, then fell back again. It took some minutes before finally they were both on their feet, looking like two intoxicated revellers who had splashed through a slaughterhouse. Bardolin saw Masudi’s severed head and gaped.

“What is happening?”

But still Hawkwood could not speak. He dragged Bardolin away from the scene of the fighting, up the roadway to where the confining wall of the volcano reared up into the night cleft by its wedge of stars.

A S he walked, Hawkwood’s strength returned and he was able to support the rubber-legged Bardolin. The mage was totally bewildered and did not seem to know where he was. He rambled on about pyramids and sea crossings and had philosophical arguments with himself about the Dweomer, reiterating its Seven Disciplines again and again until Hawkwood paused and shook him violently. That quietened him, but he seemed no less confused.

They reached the gorge which led outside the confining circle of the volcano’s crater. In the darkness it was like the entrance to a primitive tomb, a megalithic burial place. It was unguarded, deserted. In fact, the entire circle of the city was dead and lightless, as though everything they had seen there had been delusion, the hallucinations of tired minds.

The pair stumbled through the cleft like sleepwalkers, tripping and rebounding off stone. They did not speak to one another, not even when they had finally come through to the other side and found themselves outside the hollow cone of Undabane with the barren slopes of the volcano stretching away below them in the moonlight, and beyond them the midnight sea of the jungle.

A shade rose out of the rocks before them and crunched through the tufa and ash until it was close enough to touch.

Murad.

Raw flesh glimmered over his naked torso, and sluggish blood welled from his wounds, black as tar. He was half bald where something had ripped his scalp from forehead to ear.

“Murad?” Hawkwood managed to ask. He could not believe that this human flotsam was the man he knew and detested.

“The very same. So they let you loose, did they? The mariner and the mage.”

“We escaped,” Hawkwood said, but knew that was a lie as the words passed his lips. The three of them stood as if they had not a care in the world, as if there were not a kingdom of monsters within the hollow mountain thirsting after their blood.

“They let us go,” Murad said, his sneer still intact at least. “Or you, at any rate. Me I’m not so sure about. I may merely have been fortunate. How is the mage, anyway?”

“Alive.”

“Alive.” Suddenly Murad sagged. He had to squat down on his knees. “They killed them all,” he whispered, “every last one. And such gold! Such . . . blood.”

Hawkwood dragged him upright. “Come. We can’t stay here. We’ve a long road ahead of us.”

“We’re walking dead men, Captain.”

“No—we’re alive. We were meant to stay alive, I believe, and at some point I want to find out why. Now take Bardolin’s other arm. Take it, Murad.”

The nobleman did as he was told. Together, the three of them stumbled down the slopes of the mountain, the ash burning in their wounds like salt.

By the time the dawn came lightening the sky they were almost at its foot, and the unchanging jungle whooped and wailed with weary familiarity before them. They plunged into it once more, becoming lost to the world of the dreaming trees, the shadowed twilight of the forest.

The hidden beast watched them as they disappeared, three wrecked pilgrims pursuing some cracked vision known only to themselves. Then it rose up out of its hiding place and followed them, as silent as a breath of air.

PART THREE

THE WARS OF THE FAITH

. . . Whensoever he made any ostyng, or inroad, into the enemies Countries, he killed manne, woman and child, and spoiled, wasted and burned, by the grounde, all that he might; leaving nothing of the enemies in saffetie, which he could possible waste or consume . . .

Chronicle of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 1570

SEVENTEEN

C HARIBON was a prisoner of winter.

The heavy snows had come at last, in a series of blizzards which roared down out of the heights of the Cimbric Mountains and engulfed the monastery-city in a storm of white. On the Narian Hills the snow drifted fathoms deep, burying roads and villages, isolating whole towns. The fishing boats which normally plied the Sea of Tor had been beached long since, and the margins of the sea itself were frozen for half a league from the shore, the ice thick enough to bear a marching army.

In Charibon a small army of labourers fought to keep the cloisters clear of snow. They were assisted by hundreds of novices who shovelled and dug until they were pink-cheeked and steaming, and yet had the energy for snowball fights and skating and other horseplay afterwards. Unlike the poor folk of the surrounding countryside, they did not have to worry whether they would have enough food to see them through the winter. It was one of the bonuses of the religious life, at least as Charibon’s clerics lived it.

The monastery-city went about its business regardless of the weather, its rituals as changeless and predictable as the seasons themselves. In the scriptoria and refectories the fires were lit, fed with the wood which had been chopped and piled through the summer and autumn. Salted and smoked meat made more of an appearance at table, as did the contents of the vast root cellars. Enterprising ice fishermen hacked holes in the frozen sea to provide the Pontiff and Vicar-General’s tables with fresh fish every now and again, but in the main Charibon was like a hibernating bear, living off what it had stored away throughout the preceding months and grumbling softly in its sleep. Except for the odd Pontifical courier determined (or well-paid) enough to brave the drifts and the blizzards, the city was cut off from the rest of Normannia, and would remain so for several weeks until the temperature dropped further and hardened the snow, making it into a crackling white highway for mule-drawn sledges.

The wolves came down out of the mountains, as they always did, and at night their melancholy moans could be heard echoing about the cathedral and the cloisters. In the worst of the weather they would sometimes even prowl the streets of Charibon itself, making it dangerous to walk them alone at night, and contingents of the Almarkan troops which garrisoned Charibon would periodically patrol the city to clear the beasts from its thoroughfares.