“But the love of love, the greatest love, m’lads, is the love of a drunkard for the understandin’ man who fills ’is cup to overflow. There’s love, m’lads….”’
Hoddie’s choking, snorting up the dust too hard to take it further.
But here we are already at the manor gate – and Bruno barking, hackles all on end. The gate’s open and unguarded. Through the arch the gleam of harness, horses in a group.
God save us! have we been invaded? Has Count John sent his ruffians to take the manor into Mortain lands?
Bruno’s yelping, someone’s hit him with a stone.
It is for me to go and see, it has to be. ‘Hayward! Hayward, bring the ladder!’
One horseman’s turning through the arch towards us... Is it? I can’t see...
It is! That plaguey man again, Sir Hugh! And must I? Do I have to face him?
Oh Lord, MUST I?
CHAPTER FOUR
You have to be exhausted to sleep in stifling heat on rocks which jab you through your bed-roll, while whining insects work in relays to sting you anywhere that isn’t covered by your clothing. And if our camp above the seaport of Marseille gave us a good view of its harbour, it offered little else. You couldn’t drive a tent peg into its stony soil. Or dig latrines. Or find fresh water anywhere nearby. So when the morning after our arrival a bishop’s chaplain came to tell us that King Richard’s fleet had been delayed, he wasn’t happily received.
‘D’ye mean to say they’ve gorn an’ lost a hundred ships?’ John Hideman asked in disbelief. ‘To leave us up here to feed the shimmeroys until they think where they mislaid ’em?’
‘Word is our troops went on a drunken rampage when the fleet put into Lisbon, and mostly ended in the gaol.’
The chaplain frowned at us beneath a hat shaped like a chafing dish that served to shield his tonsure from the sun. ‘The King of Portugal has sent to ask King Richard for redress before he’ll let ’em out. But our King shouted that he’d see them all in hell before he’d lift a finger – called ’em witless shitheads, scurvy ship rats – told the Portugese to do a thing with his king’s missive which I can’t in decency repeat, and went so red whiles he was shouting it they thought his veins ’ud bust.’
‘Not overpleased then,’ Jos vouchsafed.
And it was left to me to discover that Archbishop Baldwin was already busy hiring vessels for our crossing from the merchants of the port. If all went well, the chaplain said, they’d be equipped within a sennight to carry us directly from Marseille to the Christian port of Tyre in Palestine.
The orders were for knights to take just one mount and two sumpters each onto the transports. So two days later, at a horse fair in the city suburbs by the Roman aqueduct, I traded the old hinny with the ponies for a couple of strong mules – and took the larger of them down to the port next morning, to carry back the purchases I’d still to make.
Jos came along to lead the mule. John stayed to mind the other with Raoul, with Bert to brood our padlocked coffer like a hen on chicks, sitting on its cover with a spear in one hand and a dagger in the other. ‘If any care to try the lock, they’ll very soon learn how a stuck pig feels,’ he said without the glimmer of a smile.’
The city, even at that early hour, was thronged with crucesignati, housewives and street urchins, and every kind of merchant conversing in a harsh patois that we could barely follow. The shops and stalls that lined its cobbled ways were busy selling anything that could be worn, consumed or used to ease your life or shorten someone else’s. To our distaste we saw black Moors and Moslem Saracens amongst the traders. But when we asked how they could deal within a Christian port, were told that wars were the affair of soldiers. Not of honest men with businesses to run.
I’d brought enough to buy myself an only-slightly-dented steel pot helm with a slit visor, and a linkmail hauberk second-hand – and that was was just the start. In a street full of ironmongers and armourers I acted like a child among the sweetmeats, and bought a baselard, a crossgrained buckler, nearly new, and a fine-balanced shortsword with curved quillons and a fantastically engraved Toledo blade – the kind of sword I’d wanted all my life. For the men I found three gambesons of quilted buckram, kettle hats (of a new type the trader called
‘chapel-de-fer’
) and three well-seasoned shields. In a street market further down the hill we purchased twenty ells of Spanish sailcloth, with all the cords, waxed thread and needles that we’d need for tenting.
Then I left Jos with the loaded mule to kick their heels beside a horse trough at the foot of the church steps, and paid five silver pennies to have a mass said for the soul of Alberic. I set a candle for him in the church before a statue of the Magdalene, and watched it flame and splutter into life – and pictured Albie stomping on his bandy legs through hosts of angels, determined to be unimpressed by anything they had to show him in the realm of Heaven.
‘’Tis all very fine I dessay, an’ lor’ forbid I’d ever say what’s false,’ I could hear him patiently explain. ‘But not bein’ funny, I’ve seen sights back over Sellin’ton Strand an’ otherwheres in Sussex as valiant as anything in this ’ere Perridise – an’ blamed if I don’t think so.’
From the Church of the Magdalene, we followed the steep streets down to the water to see if we could find where our sea transports lay. In lock-ups set against the harbour wall and numbered to match galleys moored along the quays, shaved-headed convicts of every faith and colour waited to serve out their sentence on the rowing benches. On the stone flags before them, mongers sold roast capons, vegetables of every sort, and more tubs for live fish or stalls for dead ones than I’d ever seen or could imagine.
The harbour taverns overflowed. Beggars and cut-purses, stevedores and harlots all plied their trades amongst the crowds. A tightrope walker balanced on a hemp line strung between two stacks of barrels. A bear danced upright to some sailors’ shanty tooted on a flute, while an enterprising whore contrived to take in three men all at once, and then a rampant jackass. A thing involving too much careful management to be at all exciting. (Or so I said to Jos, with one hand casually depressing my raised tunic.)
‘My Guillemette ’ud take ’em slippy as ye like,’ he boasted, as the men with heavy frowns of concentration, fed in the donkey inch by careful inch. ‘Those three – bear an’ donkey, tightrope man, four stevedores, an’ a couple of bench slaves to make up the round dozen – easy.’
Among the red and white-crossed soldiers shouting lewd advice at the performers, we happened on a man from Caen in Normandie, who told us that King Richard had already left Marseille with all his retinue. The news in port, he said, was that the German Emperor had died by accident before he was halfway to Palestine – and that King Richard, hearing that the German croisade was confounded, had sworn he’d wait no longer for his fleet, and sailed straightway for Genoa in ten rented galleys. With fifteen more to follow as soon as they could be equipped. Marseille, he said, was never short of galleys, or ship-owners ready to supply them.
Larger vessels jostled with flotillas of sardine boats stalled like cattle all along the quays. Sleek taride galleys with banked oars and pointed metal rambades at the prow, lay side by side with broad-beamed merchantmen – with esseneques and dromonds for the freight – each vessel brightly painted in the colours of its owner.
It was not until the order came to strike camp three weeks later that we knew which ships we’d sail on. In a dock by the Templar’s wharf which stank of sewage, four merchantmen had been refitted for Ranulf de Glanville, Bishop Hubert Walter and their troops, to voyage in convoy with our own archbishop’s flagship galley for the port of Tyre.
The cost of passage on the tarida for myself, my horse and squire was eight silver shillings, with six marks more to pay for places on a dromond for the others and the mules. By then I judged it safest to divide some of the silver between the four of us, in wallets tied beneath our tunics. Or wrapped in rags and wadded into body-pouches sewn into their linings. Although before we sailed, I’d had to part with three marks more from my own share, to pay for all the damage caused by Raoul when we came to embark him.
At our first attempt to lead him up the ramp into the galley’s hull port behind Sir Ralph of Stopham’s destrier, Raoul put his head down, planted all four hooves as wide apart as he could place them on the slatted boards – refused to budge, as obstinate as a stone donkey. The second time we tried, I rode him to it at a canter. But that was a mistake as well, because the moment that he heard the hollow sound of metal shoe on wood, he tossed his head and rolled his eyes dementedly. Plunging. Rearing. Squealing like a weaner, before clattering back down onto the wharf on his way to kicking in a wine keg and toppling three sides of salted pork into the harbour.
The third time, we tried it in reverse with John on one flank of the trembling horse and Jos the other. I was at the head (which is to say the sharp end), risking life and limb to force him slowly backwards step by step. Until we found ourselves, all four of us including Raoul, cast violently onto our knees. Then when we had to let him up, the maddened horse crabbed, white-eyed, slap into a stack of wicker crates – to send a cloud of feathers and a dozen squawking chickens down the quay.
John Hideman volunteered to try him blindfold for the fourth attempt, with sacking bound across his eyes and more spread on the boards to soften the effect of his big hooves.
‘I’d be a fool to say that I know everythin’ of horses,’ he admitted as he tied the blindfold. ‘But chances are he’ll trot up like a lamb, if he can’t use his eyes an’ ears to tell him where he’s at.
‘En’t that the truth of it old feller?’ he crooned into the rigid muscles of Raoul’s neck – talking quietly, coaxing the big horse slowly up the ramp.
His voice was higher and a good bit louder though, by the time that he’d been bitten in the shoulder, trodden over and farted at explosively in Raoul’s fourth and final bid for freedom.
‘I think you’d best run up to see if they’ve a winch on board, John,’ I told him as I gingerly removed the blindfold. ‘Or else our friend’s croisade will likely end as…’
‘Horse meat tough as boot leather,’ Jos helpfully supplied.
‘Unless you’d let me have a try to help the old bugger to see reason?’ he asked when John had disappeared inside the ship. And when without much hope of a result I said he might, he wheeled the sweating stallion round to face the ramp, handing the reins to Bertram in exchange for his long pikestaff.
‘Let go when I say “Now”,’ he said, with one hand lifting Raoul’s black tail, and with the other carefully alligning the blunt end of the pike with the horse’s pouting arsehole.
‘NOW!’ he cried and rammed the pike shaft home.
John Hideman told me afterwards that from inside the hold he heard the shrill sound of an animal in pain – or very much surprised – then saw poor Raoul come thundering down the larboard gangway, to wedge himself tight as a bottle-cork into its furthest stable. But when he asked Jos later how by the Son of Mary he’d achieved it, my squire had turned from wiping the wet pikestaff on Raoul’s blindfold, to tell him with blue eyes as clear and innocent as summer sky: ‘Just had a quiet word in the old sort’s ear. He knows I speak his language.’
It would be funny still if I could think of it without the knowledge of what happened to them later, Raoul and Jos.
But now the voyage – the time that I’ve looked forward most to calling back. With all the horses loaded, with the tarida’s port caulked and sealed, we cast off from our moorings after Vespers on the twenty-sixth day of the month of August.
Archbishop Baldwin blessed us in the undertaking while we all knelt on the deck, invoking the protection of Saint Drausius and Nicholas, the patron saints of sailors, and calling at the last on Christ’s own Sepulchre to save us and protect us.
‘Sanctum Sepulchrum adjuva!’ he cried from the poop above us, looking like a saint himself with both arms raised to the red crosses painted on our sails. Our
amens
rumbled raggedly across the deck as Marseille faded back into the haze. But Baldwin’s words sang loudly in our hearts. It was the moment we were born for.
That’s what we all believed.
Beyond the harbour-mouth, long herringbones of oars propelled our fleet into the open sea. Baldwin’s decision to follow Count Henri of Toulouse, and sail as he had done by the direct route south of Crete, involved some element of risk. Without putting into port along the way, we’d need a fair wind and stout oarsmen both, to get to Tyre before our wine turned sour and maggots ate their way through our supplies – and even in the summer, fierce gales called gulphs
could capsize a shallow-draughted vessel. Pirates ranged the Middle Sea in galleys which moved faster than a horse could gallop. A monstrous beast, the Melar, with whole trees growing from its back, was said to haunt the Barbary Coast and gobble ships for sport. Mermaids with fishes’ tails and women’s breasts could lure us onto rocks – and if we reached the coast of Outremer unscathed, we could expect to be attacked by Moslem warships, belching some kind of wildfire that only vinegar could quench.
In fact the voyage was nothing near so perilous. Or not until we sighted land. By Tierce each day the tar which sealed the deck seams was hot enough to scorch bare flesh, the space beneath the poop where we were meant to sleep too stuffy to be borne. So most nights, clad in nothing more than body linen, we’d carry our bed-rolls up to the open deck to let the timbers of the tarida creak us to sleep. Or else distract ourselves from thoughts of Fisty Flora by seeking out the Wain and Dragon from the multitude of stars that lit the vaults above and danced reflected in the waves – above us and below us, as if our little wooden world had left the sea to sail amongst them.