Estrella cleared her throat. “Domna Ponera was also saying today that your ships are being outfitted for a new voyage in great haste, and that all the port is buzzing with talk of the issue of a Royal warrant.”

Hawkwood silently cursed Domna Ponera. Galliardo’s wife was a huge woman with a moist moustache and the appetite of a goat for both food and information. As wife to the port captain she was in a fine position to acquire the latter, and her mine of information obtained her invitations to households where ordinarily she would not have been countenanced. Hawkwood knew that Galliardo had upbraided her many times for being too free with her tongue, but he was as much to blame. He could not, he had once told Hawkwood with a sigh, keep his tongue from wagging in the marriage bed, and he so loved the marriage bed. Hawkwood preferred not to dwell on that. His friend was an admirable fellow in many respects, but his unbridled lust for his enormous wife was inexplicable.

It was Domna Ponera who took the bribes, and then bullied her husband into carrying out her promises. A convenient berth, a vacant warehouse, an extra gang of longshoremen, or an eye turned aside for a special cargo. There were many ways a port captain might be of service to the high and the low of Abrusio; but though it made Galliardo rich, it did not make him happy, even if it did make his wife gratifyingly agile in the afore-mentioned bed. Sometimes though, Hawkwood thought that Galliardo would give it all up to be master of a swift caravel again, plying the trade-routes of the Five Seas and raising a riot in every port he put into to wet his throat.

As for Domna Ponera’s Royal warrant, Hawkwood had already seen it. The scarred nobleman, Murad of Galiapeno, was in possession of it, and had sent the victualling documents to Hawkwood as soon as he had received Richard’s agreement on the proposed voyage. Hence his visits to the catacombs this morning. Some other poor devils had gone to the pyre today, but not Hawkwood’s crew. There was that to be thankful for.

“Do you know anything about this warrant?” Estrella asked him. She was trembling. She probably hated the silences even more than he did.

“Yes,” he said heavily at last. “I know about it.”

“Perhaps you would be so good as to tell your wife then, before she hears about it from someone else.”

“Estrella, I would have told you today in any case. The commission is for my ships. I have been hired to undertake a voyage by the nobility, and ultimately by the King himself.”

“Where to? What is the cargo?”

“There is no cargo as such. I am carrying . . . passengers. I cannot tell you where, because I am not yet entirely sure myself.” He hoped she would recognize the element of truth in that statement.

“You do not know how long it is to be for, then?”

“No, lady, I do not.” Then he added, out of some belated sense of decency, “But it is likely to be a long time.”

“I see.”

She was trembling again and he could see the tears coming. Why did she cry? He had never worked it out. They took little pleasure in each other’s company, in bed or at board, and yet she always hated to see him go. He could not decipher it.

“You would not have told me—not until you had to,” she said, her voice breaking.

He stood up and padded barefoot out to the balcony. “I knew you would not like it.”

“Does it matter greatly to you what I like and do not like?”

He did not reply, but stared out at the crescent of the teeming harbour and its forest of masts and, further out, the blue of the horizon where it met the sky in the uttermost west. What lay out there? A new land ready for the taking, or nothing but the rim of the earth as the old sailors had believed, where the Western Ocean tipped away eternally into the gulf wherein circled the very stars?

He heard the swish of her heavy robe as she left the room behind him, the gulp of breath as she swallowed a sob. For a second he hated himself. It might have been different had she borne him a son—but then he could imagine the scenes when first the father took the son to sea with him. No, they were too far apart from each other ever to find some middle ground.

And did it matter? It had been a political marriage, though the Hawkwoods had done better out of it than the Calochins. Estrella’s dowry had bought the Osprey. He forgot that sometimes.

I’d as lief have the ship, he thought, without the wife.

He was the last of his line; after Richard Hawkwood the name would disappear. The last chance to perpetuate it had died with the abortion he had procured for Jemilla, unless by chance there was a whore in some port who had borne his progeny in a moment of carelessness.

He wiped his eyes. The dry heat had baked the bathwater out of his hair and now he stank of roses. He would go down to the yards and see how the outfitting was coming along. He would regain the smell of cordage and salt and sweat that was his proper scent, and he would ready his ships for the voyage ahead.

EIGHT

D OWN near the Guilds’ Quarter of the city the streets were quieter than at the rowdy waterfront. Here the merchants rented or owned the stoutest warehouses for the most expensive of their commodities. It was a district of clean alleyways and bland shopfronts, with privately hired guards at most corners and the odd, cramped little tavern where men of business might meet in peace without being disturbed by the drunken antics of paid-off sailors or off-duty marines.

Most of the guilds of Abrusio owned property here, from the humble Potters’ Guild to the mighty Guild of Shipmasters. The Thaumaturgists’ Guild owned towers and mansions further up the hillside, near the courts as befitted their role. But those towers were closed now, by order of the Prelate of Abrusio, and Golophin the Mage, Adviser to King Abeleyn of Hebrion, was waiting patiently in a tiny tavern tucked behind one of the warehouses built of stone that was for the storage of ship timber. His wide-brimmed hat was pulled down to shade his eyes, though the lights were low in the place, as if to encourage conspiracy. He smoked a long pipe of pale clay whilst a flagon of barley beer grew ever warmer on the table in front of him.

The door of the inn opened and three men entered, all cloaked despite the closeness of the night. They ordered ale, and two took theirs to a table on the other side of the inn while the third sat down opposite Golophin. He threw back his hood and raised his flagon to the old wizard, grinning.

“Well met, my friend.”

Golophin’s narrow, lined face cracked into a smile. “You might order me another beer, lad. This one is as flat as an old crone’s tit.”

A fresh flagon came, and Golophin drank from its moisture-beaded pewter gratefully.

“The landlord seems singularly incurious about the nature of his customers,” King Abeleyn of Hebrion said.

“It is his business. This will not be the first whispered discussion he will have seen in his tavern. In places such as this the commerce of Abrusio is directed and misdirected.”

Abeleyn raised one dark eyebrow. “So? And not in the court or the throne room then?”

“There as well, of course, sire,” said Golophin with mock sincerity.

“I do not see why you could not have made your way into the palace invisibly or suchlike. This trysting in corners smacks of fear, Golophin. I don’t like it.”

“It is for the best, sire. It may seem to complicate things, but in fact it keeps life a lot simpler. Our friend the Prelate may be out of the city, but he has spies aplenty to do his watching for him. It were best you were not seen in my company while this current purge lasts.”

“It is you he aims at, Golophin.”

“Oh, I know. He wants my hide nailed to a tree, to halt what he sees as the Guild’s meddling in the affairs of state. He would rather the clergy did the meddling. The Prelate has a whole host of issues he means to address, sire, and this edict he badgered you into signing is one way of getting to the heart of several of them.”