I just nodded. I wasn’t ready to make a decision because I was still quite down about Anne and Lisbon. In the weeks that followed, my lieutenants and I would spend long hours discussing how we should react to the various things that might happen as a result of my message to the bishop.
I didn’t tell them I intended to kill Bishop Resende; but I knew it wouldn’t surprise them when I did.
*******
During the uncertain days and weeks that followed, we spent a lot of time talking about both the Lisbon attack and the Moorish raids. We were anxious to know how many men and bottoms we’d lost and if any of the ports we served had fallen to the Moors. We endlessly speculated as to our future in Lisbon and what the Moorish raids meant for the future of the Holy Land and for our company—were they one-off events or did they portend great change?
Mostly, however, we discussed the need to conduct an “intensive search” for the missing relics and how we should do it so word would get out that we were searching and might have them to sell. It was our great and closely held secret that we already had the relics in Cornwall.
What we never did get was any kind of response from the King of Cyprus about the raid or even from his local governor. The French knight serving as the King’s local governor abandoned his castle on the hill behind the city and ran for the safety of Nicosia with his men within an hour of our arrival in the harbour—as soon as he thought it was safe to venture outside his castle’s walls.
We never saw the governor again, and he certainly didn’t find safety with the King and his guards when he reached Nicosia. The new King was still a mere boy and his guardian and courtiers, and thus the King’s guards and the rabble in his army, were living far across the Mediterranean in the bigger and more exciting city of Beirut. At least, the King and his men were living in Beirut the last time we heard. On the other hand, the shipping in Beirut’s harbour was attacked by the Moors so perhaps they moved inland. Oh well, we told each other, it didn’t matter all that much; we’d find out sooner or later.
There had been a time when we would have seen the departure of the governor as an opportunity to buy or seize the governorship and move into the governor’s castle. Not now. Our fortified post was now much stronger than the governor’s castle. We now had three complete curtain walls and their battlements and bastions, and a fourth and similar curtain wall well on its way to completion.
We did, however, make one decision whilst we waited for word to arrive about our losses. We decided to hold the Moors we’d captured in the abandoned governor’s castle whilst we try to trade them for our men and other Christians.
The castle was mostly deserted except for a few servants with nowhere to go. We walked right in and by the end of the day had moved our prisoners into its dungeon. They were fearful of their fates but they needn’t have been—we’d feed and water them to keep them alive so they could be exchanged or ransomed.
******
It wasn’t until almost a week after I returned to Cyprus that one of our galleys came in from Acre and another a few hours later from Beirut. They could have sailed earlier but had their sergeant captains had, quite properly, waited until the coast was clear. We hurried to the quay to get the news.
The news we received was both bad and strangely encouraging. Both Acre and Beirut had been raided by the Moorish fleet and so had some of the ports and villages along the coast. The Moors had been after slaves and prizes to sell, not a fight to the finish or a city to conquer.
The good news was that the Moors had swarmed aboard and taken several of our lightly defended cogs, but had quickly pulled away from attacking our galleys as soon as they realised they would be vigorously defended.
“They were not trained fighting men,” sniffed the sergeant captain of the galley that came in from Beirut. “They were untrained heathen sailors and fishermen looking for unarmed sailors who wouldn’t fight back. They surprised us by sailing into the harbour where we were anchored, I’ll give them that, but they retreated in dismay as soon as our arrows began taking them.”
******
Our losses to the Moorish fleet turned out to be substantial and growing as more and more of our galleys and a number of our cogs did not arrive at their intended destinations—already we know that we’ve lost four of our cogs, three refugee-carrying galleys, and almost two hundred men of which more than one hundred were archers. On top of that, our credibility was damaged because at least two of the missing cogs and three of the galleys had been loaded with passengers, cargo, and merchant order parchments.
On the other hand, there had been some relatively minor offsets. Harold’s galley had taken a prize and the Moors had suffered heavy losses, including the loss of a galley, when they mistook one of our pirate-taking cogs for a two-masted cargo transport. A number of Moorish galleys had surrounded our pirate-taker and grappled it and tried to board it. There were so many galleys involved that they all got away except for the first—but to hear the cog’s captain tell it, and I believed him, the Moors suffered hundreds of dead and wounded from his archers before they were able to cut their grapple lines and withdraw.
Our successes were a small comfort.
“Prizes and cargos be damned; we’ve got to do something to get our men and passengers back,” said Harold for the third or fourth time, “at least those who are still living.”
“Aye. We must; we surely must. But how?” asked Randolph.
“It’s either an exchange of prisoners or a ransom or both,” suggested Yoram once again. “It’s the only way.”
“You’re right,” I said. “We want our men and passengers back so we’ll go with both.”
******
In the weeks that followed, we put out the word in every port we served that we would trade for British and French prisoners and the passengers taken from our galleys and cogs. Our offer had a strange and unexpected effect—one after another, to our great surprise, our port sergeants reported that their custom increased. It also, according to Randolph and Harold, greatly heartened our men whose greatest fear was being abandoned after being captured or injured.
What we didn’t tell anyone was that we had begun planning a great raid for the spring when I returned to Cornwall to sell the relics. We had decided to make an all-out effort to reduce the number of Moorish pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean and take prisoners to trade for our captured men and passengers
Chapter Twenty-Four
We search for the relics and prepare a raid.
We stepped up our training and recruited some additional apprentice archers from among the former slaves and others of our workmen whilst we waited for word to trickle in about our losses to the Moorish fleet. Good food and lots of it had strengthened some of them to the point of having enough strength to push arrows out of a longbow over and over again. And, of course, our arrow works and smiths remained constantly in operation turning out ever more long, bladed pikes, arrows, and longbows. They also began producing grappling irons and longer boarding ladders.
Whilst we waited for word of our losses from the Moorish raids, we inspected our fortress and paid particular attention to the work now being done to surround it with a fourth curtain wall and further strengthen the three inner walls and their crenelated battlements.
We also agreed on the next thing we could do to strengthen it and provide work for the steady stream of arriving refugees and released slaves—we would build a great, long, unfortified wall of stones and timber to enclose the hovels, gardens, and grazing lands of the sizable village of construction workers and artisans which had sprung up next to our fortress. We would either dig a new well for their use or, perhaps, partially reroute the little river serving as the city’s water supply.
Our big question, at least as it related to our fortress on Cyprus, was whether or not it should somehow be connected to the existing city wall of Limassol so that people could safely pass back and forth between our fortress and the city during a siege, perhaps with a tunnel? Or should we
just put in an escape tunnel running from the lower room of the main citadel as we were doing in London?
My answer, after much discussion, was yes, to both. We decided to start by connecting our fortress to the city with a long, narrow, walled path running all the way from our second or third curtain wall to the city wall. It would have strong gates and additional battlements at each of our curtain walls and a narrow gate we’d put into the city wall.
Moreover, we decided to build a small square tower over the middle of the new walled path in the open area between the city wall and the new village wall. The tower would be very much like the gate towers in our curtain walls—it would have “murder holes” in the room above the path and on all sides of it so an enemy could not approach the gates or pass through them. All the gates would, of course, be shut and barred on both sides at night and during times of war.
Cyprus was by far our most important post outside of Cornwall and we wanted it to be able to hold out for a very long time if it came under siege, years if necessary. We even considered digging a walled canal to the sea so we could launch our galleys from inside our village wall during a siege. It turned out not to be a very useful idea; we rejected it.
Yoram was pleased to overflowing when he was told that he could proceed to dig a well inside our fourth curtain wall and build a narrow walled path to the city; and he was absolutely ecstatic when I told him that, when they were complete, he could begin building a very long unfortified wall to enclose both the fortress and our workers’ village and the lands around it.
“Thank you. Thank you. That’s wonderful—it will keep our people in work and food for many years to come.” He was very pleased.
Yoram was very honest and very family oriented. He was always in favour of anything and everything that might make his family and our coin chests safer. I liked him very much.
******
Harold and I finally set off for the Greek coast with five galleys to “search for the relics” three weeks after we arrived in Cyprus. The Moors were long gone and we had a fairly good idea of the losses they’d inflicted on us.
Yoram, Randolph, and quite a crowd of well-wishers were on the quay to see us off. They waved and cheered as we cast off our mooring lines, the rowing drums began to beat, and our galleys began to be rowed out of the Limassol harbour bound for the Greek coast.
This was the first step in our intense efforts to find the “missing” relics. We would use the excuse of delivering passengers and money orders at several ports along the way to make sure everyone knew we were searching for them. Randolph did not go with us. He remained behind on Cyprus to help Yoram prepare our men and equipment for the great raid we intended to carry out when we returned to Cornwall in the spring to sell the relics. It was a secret known in Cyprus only to Yoram and Randolph.
We sailed with five well-supplied galleys packed with enough archers to put two men on every oar. Spirits were high. In our minds, and in those of our well-wishers and men, we were obviously capable of fighting off anyone who tried to stop us from finding the missing relics.
Our archers and sailors were excited. They’d known for over a week that they would be sailing to search along the Greek coast for the missing Orthodox Church relics. More importantly, we had deliberately misled them; they’d been told that there would be significant prize money if they found them. They also knew that many of our other galleys would also be searching for them.
My lieutenants and I, of course, had told our men it was a secret they might soon have more prize money and had cautioned them not to tell the women in the taverns exactly where we would be searching along the Greek coast to recover the relics. And, above all, we warned our men not to borrow against their prize money from the local moneylenders as they might not find them.
As you might imagine, and as we had intended, the news spread rapidly that we would be sailing to the Greek coast with galleys packed with fighting men; that we would be searching for the missing Orthodox relics; and that they were worth huge prize monies to whichever of our crews found them.
Our search was, of course, soon known to every merchant and priest and sailor on Cyprus and the news was quickly carried to all the ports in the Mediterranean.
What the men in our five galleys didn’t know was that they wouldn’t be successful when they went ashore to search—another galley based in another port would “find” them.
The relics were, of course, already safely in Cornwall.
Our crews would have to be content with the extra time they would be given to visit the taverns in each port so they could, quite unknowingly, spread the word of our search and the huge prize monies on offer. Sooner or later the news of our search was bound to reach the princes, and give our offer to sell them great credibility.
******
We reached Athens’s port of Piraeus after stopping at Crete and Rhodes to deliver money orders and passengers, and take on water and supplies. At each stop we had cautioned the men not to tell anyone in the taverns where on the Greek coast we would be stopping to search for the missing relics. They couldn’t, of course, because the relics weren’t there and never had been. But that didn’t stop our men from endlessly speculating and arguing in the taverns and wine bars about where we would search, what we would find, and the size of the prize money.
By the time we reached Piraeus after two days in each port, every merchant and spy in Crete and Rhodes, and every sailor in their harbours, knew the English archers were actively searching for the missing relics—and expected to find them because they knew the various places where the priests had landed to hide them, and how long they’d been gone. It was the galleys of the English archers, after all, that the fleeing priests had chartered.
******
Piraeus was more of the same, in the sense that our archers and sailors were given liberty so they would talk about our search and, in so doing, convince everyone it was real. But spreading the word that we were actively searching was not the only reason we called in here before proceeding up the coast towards Constantinople. We had another purpose for being in Piraeus that only my lieutenants and I knew about—contacting the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church to see if he would like to secretly buy any of the relics “if we find them.”
I couldn’t go to see him myself, of course, because Rome had spies everywhere. Instead, Harold sent his apprentice sergeant on a wandering walk to the Patriarch’s residence to deliver a secret parchment my priestly brother Thomas had scribed. It purported to be from an unnamed English sergeant who would be able to obtain the relics from the archers and sell them to the Orthodox Patriarch “if we find them and you will pay enough.”
The unknown sergeant proposed that, if the relics were found, he would provide a description of each relic and the amount of coins required to ransom it. The payment coins would be exchanged for the relics in the Beirut harbour. The Patriarch’s men would be allowed to inspect the relics before they paid.
Harold and I took no chances. We stayed on the galley and did not go into the city except during daylight, and then only with a large number of heavily armed guards. We primarily went into the city’s great market to buy tools for our men to use in our search for the relics—shovels with long and short handles, hoes, picks, and mattocks.
After negotiations that lasted almost an entire day we ended up buying just about every tool in the market that could be used for digging.
“We need them to take back to Cyprus for use in farming,” Harold assured each merchant as I counted out the coins from my pouch. They inevitably nodded in agreement with a knowing look on their face and offered to have more available within a few days.
******
Our five galleys left the harbour in the middle of the night, two days later, without the rowing drum beating. Of course, we did; we wanted everyone to know we had a big important secret we were trying to hide. Our efforts seemed to have worked; several merchants providing us with supplies and tools had warned Harold that we would be fol
lowed by treasure hunters when we left the harbour to begin our search. More of our galleys were scheduled to arrive in three or four days. Their sergeant captains had been carefully instructed to repeat the tool-buying process and sail for other sites along the coast.
From Piraeus, we rowed our way north along the coast until the next afternoon. That’s when Harold and I began holding up a parchment map as if we were studying it.
“Ah, you’re right, this may be it. This could be where they landed,” I said to Harold loudly enough for some of the men to hear.
“This could be the little creek they put their bow in and drew water whilst they were waiting for the priests to return.”
It was all ox shite, of course. But it was for a good cause. How else could we convince the princes and the Orthodox Church to part with so many of their coins without being blamed for stealing the relics?
“This could be the place, Richard,” Harold shouted over to the sergeant captain of the galley that had come up next to us.
“They landed here and spent one and a half days before they returned,” I shouted over to Richard. “And don’t forget that it was priests, many of them elderly, who were carrying the crates of relics and digging in the ground to hide them. Most were not strong men; they may not have gone very far inland.”
Richard and his men were to go ashore here and search. From where we were standing on the deck of Harold’s galley, we could hear the orders being given to the rowers on Richard’s galley.
Harold’s men watched with keen interest and jealous looks as Richard’s galley nosed into the beach. Richard’s men were enthusiastic and had already picked up their tools and weapons. They were jumping down into the surf and wading ashore as we began rowing north along the coast to the next search site. The hunt for the missing relics had begun.
******
We completed our rendezvous in Piraeus thirteen days later when the last of the galleys finished its search and returned to Piraeus to resupply. Similar to those which had come in earlier, it too had arrived empty handed. By the time it returned, however, a rumour had spread among our men, and thus to everyone in the city and in the harbour, that Harold and I had received a parchment telling us the relics had been found. It seems one of our galleys searching out of Antioch might have found them; or perhaps it was a galley from Latika or Beirut.
Sea Warriors Page 15