The Second Empire Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hawkwood suggested a break, the nobleman only snarled at him.
    In the shelter of an enormous dead tree they waited out the bruising rain as it began thundering in torrents down from the canopy overhead. The ground they sat on quickly became a sucking mire, and the force of the downpour made it difficult to breathe. Hawkwood bent his chin into his breast to create a space, a pocket of air, and in that second it filled with mosquitoes which he drew in helplessly as he breathed, and spat and coughed out again.
    The deluge finally ended as abruptly as it had begun, and for a few minutes afterwards they sat in the mud and gurgling water which the forest floor had become, sodden, weary, frail with hunger. Murad was barely conscious, and Hawkwood could feel the burning heat of his body as the nobleman leaned against him.
    They laboured to their feet without speaking, staggering like ancients. A coral-bright snake whipped through the puddles at their feet, and with a cry Murad seemed to come alive. He stabbed his new spear at the ground and transfixed the thrashing reptile just behind the head. It twined itself about the spear in its last agony, and Murad smiled.
    “Gentlemen,” he said, “dinner is served.”
    TWO
     
    H APTMAN Hernan Sequero surveyed the squalid extent of his little kingdom and pursed his lips in disapproval. He rap-rap-rapped his knuckles lightly on the hardwood table, ignoring the bead of sweat that was hovering from one eye-brow.
    “It’s not good enough,” he said. “We’ll never be self-sufficient here if these damned people keep on dying. They’re supposed to be blasted magicians, after all. Can’t they magick up something?”
    The men around him cleared their throats, shifted on their feet or looked away. Only one made any attempt to reply, a florid, golden-haired young man with an ensign’s bar at his collar.
    “There are three herbalists amongst the colonists, sir. They’re doing their best, but the plants here are unfamiliar to them. It is a process of trial and error.”
    “And in the meantime the cemetrey becomes our most thriving venture ashore,” Sequero retorted drily. “Very well, one cannot argue with nature I suppose, but it is vexing. When Lord—when his excellency—returns he will not be pleased. Not at all.”
    Again, the uneasy shuffling of feet, brief shared glances.
    There were three men standing about the table besides Sequero, all in the leather harness of the Hebrian soldiery. They were in one of the tall watchtowers which stood at each corner of the palisaded fort. Up here it was possible to catch a breath of air off the ocean, and in fact to see their ship, the
Gabrian Osprey
, as it rode at anchor scarcely half a mile away, the horizon beyond it a far blur of sea and sky at the edge of sight.
    Closer to, the view was less inspiring. Peppering the two acres or so which the palisade enclosed were dozens of rude huts, some little better than piled-up mounds of brush. The only substantial building was the Governor’s residence, a large timbre structure which was half villa and half blockhouse.
    A deep ditch bisected the fort and served the community as a sewer, running off into the jungle. It was bridged in several places with felled trees, and the ground around it was a foul-smelling swamp swarming with mosquitoes. They had dug wells, but these were all brackish, so they continued to take their water from the clear stream Murad had discovered on the first day. One corner of the fort was corralled off and within it resided the surviving horses. Another few days would see it empty. When the last beasts had died they would be salted down and eaten, like the others.
    “Fit for neither man nor beast,” Sequero muttered, brow dark as he thought of the once magnificent creatures he had brought from Hebrion, the cream of his father’s studs. Even the sheep did not do well here. Were it not for the wild pigs and deer which hunting parties brought out of the jungle every few