There was silence for a time. Gideon ahead of them was fast becoming a shadow draped in a fading world. All around them quiet hung like a wall.
Jourdain dug his chin into his cloak; something was bothering him. ‘You say that a law must come from within . . . each man will feel such a law differently . . . What I wonder, then, is how faith can remain the same when all men follow different rules.’
‘Faith is a living thing, Jourdain, that moves and weaves in the soul and so is never the same from man to man. It is not
always held by habit and cannot be fixed by a rule.’
Jourdain pulled a frown over his features. ‘I can see that, Etienne, that faith alters from man to man . . . but it seems to me that if a man does not know what harbour he is making for, no wind is the right wind. When there is no law to follow, faith becomes disordered. Perhaps because of it God shall not continue to have faith in us.’
Etienne could hear an old longing that seemed to him ill placed in the tone of that youthful voice.
How could the boy think differently, he asked himself, when he was like a speck in the wind that knows nothing of its destination or the reason for its movement?
‘Why should our faith remain in the same position, Jourdain? When the ground has moved from beneath us, and we have no rule, it is natural that our faith shall lose its place until it finds a handhold to balance itself and return to where it once stood. In my estimation it shall take time for that inner voice to replace the outer one, and when it does it will lend us a footfall when the world is in confusion and there are no rules left to us.’ Etienne gave a weary smile. ‘God’s faith in his children, on the other hand, is a thing solid and steadfast and needs no floor upon which to rest. At least, that is what we must hope.’
Etienne saw something then that made him pause, and his animal paused also, unsure of its master’s desire.
There was a whistle from Delgado behind the group, who, confronted by the sudden and unexpected standstill, pulled the reins in time to prevent a collision
‘Hey!’ he said.
But there was something to Etienne’s silence and strange pause that made all men look in the direction of his gaze.
The trees moved against the breeze-blown snow. Shadows stirred the darkness and something else besides the tree limbs above and to the left of their track. Etienne urged his horse past Jourdain and Gideon to a place almost disguised by trees and dimness. He let go the reins, retrieved the knife from his boot and reached for the sword over his shoulder. Everything was still, save the sleet falling about the ears.
The men followed, quiet and watchful.
Etienne stretched the long blade in the air until it touched something.
There were a dozen that he could see, perhaps more, swinging from the trees, naked, like limbs without leaves, or so they had at first looked to him. Wisps of snow fell over them. In the gloom what was seen most clearly were the crosses . . .
Painted over the pale flesh of the breasts in blood.
25
BODIES
Darkling they went under the lonely night through the shadow and through the empty dwellings and unsubstantial realms of Hades.
Virgil, Aenid
Etienne stirred a foot with his sword, dangling as though it were decoration, and sniffed the air around it. ‘Fresh killed,’ he said. ‘Today.’ He fidgeted his horse forward, Jourdain followed him. He motioned for Gideon and Delgado to bring up the rear. With Jourdain close behind, Etienne surveyed the darkening thicket, the tangled, matted mass of vines and brambles and trees and snow coming down. He listened to that unnatural quiet, wherein he heard the snapping of twigs under the hoofs of the horses and the straining of the jaw in the ears – listening, straining to listen. Then it came.
From out of the trees, no more than shapes.
‘Desperte ferre!’ he heard from the Catalan and there was no time to call out ‘Beauseant’, only to fend off a shadow that, bearing down at him on one side, made him push with an out-throw of strength that sucked the breath from his lungs. He turned around and raised the sword as the figure came up. ‘I will fight!’ he shouted, letting it fall through the head and to the breastbone. As the body collapsed Etienne undertook to tug the weapon free but he was struck by a blow to the shoulder and, having lost his balance, was forced to follow his weapon – stuck as it was in the body of his enemy – downward from his horse and into the darkness. He landed on the hilt awkwardly, driving it into his side and the blade into the ground at the other end.
Here on the ground he found himself battered and pounded by the legs of the broad-bodied horses. Hot liquid blinded him, he wiped it away – blood – and still he saw nothing. The horses panted, their neighing was all passion. Crouching between blows, Etienne reached out to the hilt and pulled. The stubborn weapon would not come. Now something fell over him and he was thrown away from the body with his sword stuck in it and down upon his face. In that space above he could hear the grunts and cries and blows muffled by the bulk of what had laid itself over him, and realised with a certain equanimity that he was not only being crushed but drowned also, since his mouth and nose took up more snow-turned-mud than air.
He pulled up, coughing, and reached with a free hand, panting, groaning, spitting, and fumbled behind him. Something grabbed his hair and pushed his face down into the mud again. In his ears the activity of the horses grew dull. Stars began to lift upwards into the dome of his mind. The weight on his back would force him to rest a while, sheltered from the noise and the blood.
In the day of evil he will protect me in the secret of his Tabernacle. I thank thee, oh Lord! I thank thee!
Of a sudden he was lighter.
He felt a pulling at his belt and found that he was heaved half sitting half lying on his side, vomiting mud next to the weight that had fettered him, now stabbed in the back of the neck. His saviour had been, from what he could make of it, Jourdain, who was moving over the killing field of carcasses that had been cut down and were fallen all around. Etienne wiped the bloody dirt from his eyes. The horses were moved away, he could hear their grunts. He looked with his hands for the corpse wearing his sword; when he found it he gave a heave that caused his hurts to burst into a thousand darted lights that coursed through his head. He pulled with all his strength – since this must surely be the last time he would do so before he died – and it came away; he stood, dizzy, soaked in the other man’s blood, more blood dripping from his hand and his nose.
The Norman was at his work of killing a dark figure that threw itself down screaming. Etienne could not make out Delgado, but he could hear the Catalan laughing to his right and a hint of movement and a groan, then he heard a shout of ‘Again!’; it was Jourdain.
Sleet and night all around.
He heard a call, ‘Etienne!’ And it struck him as he stood twisting and turning with his blade extended outward into black. At that moment the sky dropped its stars and he tasted blood on his lips. That was when the pain swelled through him like a sunrise, to a place beyond him so that his eyes rolled upward and he was gone out of his head.
26
THE ENGLISH GALLEY
There gloom the dark, broad seas.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’
Ireland, December 1307
The Eagle made good journey under oars, rounding the north coast of Ireland and heading upwards of the north channel towards Scotland one month after their departure from Portugal. For the most part the journey had been without incident. The gold had been secreted into the bilges and used as ballast and, though she lay low in the water, the breezes had been strong in her sail and the old galley had cut through the rising and falling of the vast grey expanse as if it were short work.
Marcus at the foredeck looked outward to the horizon of land touching the lip of the sea, now reddening and purpling in deference to a setting sun.
These days Marcus had no words. He looked at the ground or the sky, or even the sea, and saw nothing of his soul, nor
did he wish to see it, since to see his soul was to recognise that in that dwelling he would find nothing but a vast emptiness, a place heartless and doomed.
A chill breeze rose upward to the lateen sail. This breeze did not bring to him the smell of jasmine; it did not bring the farms and orchards, the stables and granaries of the Christian kingdom. It brought him nothing of the struggles of his Order and victories fought for the greatness of the Lord and the grave of His Holy Son. It was a foreign breeze, full of misgivings.
He was roused from his concerns by the gong. The sail was flapping. He turned around and saw Roger de Flor calling out to the overseer to pick up the pace and for the steer master to steer two points away from the island.
The great gong sounded again. Wood groaned and the slaves grunted in response as the oars hit the water in time to the mounting beat. The hull creaked and the cordage strained as one hundred and fifty slaves pulled and fell forward, pulled and fell forward, bones and muscles stretching. The wind brought forth the smell of their stale sweat and urine. Marcus made his way over the catwalk to the poop where stood Roger de Flor, contented and singing to himself, holding one tiller and calling out to his steersman at the other.
He was crinkling his disordered face and baring his teeth in a smile by the light of the setting sun when Marcus asked, ‘What?’
‘Two things,’ the other man said. ‘There is a squall coming towards us, south-south-west, see its scurrying feet?’
Marcus followed the line of Roger’s eyes to the stern and saw the sea churning and boiling as if in it a million fish were competing for space.
‘It is a bad business, that wind,’ Roger said, whistling and smiling.
‘And the other thing?’ Marcus asked, impatient.
‘An English galley. She will not leave off without toll,’ he said, and turned to command his men to prepare to drop sail.
‘What toll?’ came Marcus’s irritated reply.
‘That would be this galley and every man upon her!’
As the sail was hauled in, the squall struck. Marcus took hold of a railing as the Eagle surged and pulled and tilted and water curled over the bulwarks.
‘This wind will oppose the swells that come from the north!’ Roger shouted. ‘It shall build us a steep sea! Those fools . . .’ He pointed behind them at the vague shape of a galley whose sails caught the waning light and made pearls of them. ‘They are coming to ram us so near to land in this treacherous sea!’ He laughed as if this were a most pleasant day. ‘We will let them come.’
There was a twitch at the corner of Marcus’s mouth that sent a shiver over his face. ‘We must outrun them!’ he said, tight with anger now. ‘Think of our cargo and our charge!’
‘See that weather?’ Roger pointed to a dark cloud over the seaward skyline. It stretched to the south with its long, ragged streamers, red and angry. ‘This old galley is weighed down, Marcus!’ Roger said. ‘She would be hard-pressed to outrun a dying mule! That other ship has half our draught . . . there is nothing for us to do but entice it to its doom upon the rocks. We shall take to our heels and see if they follow.’
‘But shall we escape the rocks ourselves?’
‘That is between God and his ocean!’
At that Roger drove the galley into a strait between the island and the mainland.
It was night when the English galley approached with the fierce wind in her sails. The lightning caught its image like a ghost ship with illuminated oar banks and a ruffle of foam under her belly.
The Eagle kept ahead through the mighty work of the slaves on the sweeps. They worked the galley between the forces of wind, tide and swell, which made her shake and pitch, grabbing at the water with a creaking of timbers and a dropping of her nose into the foam.
The wind veered sharply to the west. The current, on the other hand, sought to take the bow of the Eagle towards land, and her beam on to the steep seas.
‘Pull her up!’ shouted Roger, flinging himself onto the tiller as the galley was swept up by the thrashing water. ‘Pull her up!’
Around, above, beneath them there erupted a storm of sound, a thunderous roar, as the Eagle heeled sideways. Oarsmen were flung over one another, escaping the churning waters only through being shackled to the deck. Cordage flew in the air and coiled around the bodies of sailors who fell to the bulwarks or over the side. Beneath them the boards creaked and groaned and water lapped at their heels.
Roger’s work brought the galley under control and lazily she returned. He made a yell to the slave-master to unshackle what slaves had survived and to put them to their oars.
Marcus felt the tremble of this moving world of wood beneath his feet as a perilous thing, held together by hope and a prayer. He looked for a handhold and wiped his eyes of spray. Out in the turmoil of elements he saw the English galley being turned around by its nose, leaving her pitching, with her broadside exposed to the Eagle’s ram.
Roger de Flor saw it also. ‘Speed up the drums!’ he shouted to the overseer and he in turn called instructions to the bow. The wind strengthened and spears of rain cut into the eyes. ‘Get those oars moving! Ready the bowsmen!’
But at that moment St Elmo’s fire lit the night and the men saw a rising mountain of sea that seemed to Marcus’s untrained eye to have swept around the island and cut into the seas from the south. A moment later white water broke over the English galley and there was heard a great crack, a tearing asunder of heaven and earth, as it was gathered up and tossed with a snapping of her mast into the vast world of white foam that travelled a path towards them.
Roger cried out instructions but they were lost. ‘The tiller is gone!’ was the last thing he said, for at that moment a wall of black water full of splintered mast, cordage and enemy galley came hurtling towards the Eagle. Marcus made a grab for the rails and lost his footing, falling into a tangle of ropes and oars and mast and boom. The slaves gave out a wild chorus of yells and the world shook as a shudder was sent running down the length of the Eagle’s spine.
The last thought Marcus had was for the gold, broken up and scattered into the unknown depths, and then his mind closed over and he fell into a black chasm
27
MADNESS
Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Saadi, Sufi poet
The Eagle lay some distance from the beach. A part of her was sitting up half-visible out of the water with the tide going out around her like liquid glass. Roger was sat upon the beach surveying the dark bay as first light made a silhouette of her broken shape.
He and the grand commander, together with his ship’s captain and a small number of men, had survived the quarrel with the English ship. Now the sea was spent. The only evidence of her temper were the dead horses, dead men, split wood, barrels and torn sails that lay strewn over the beach. Only one animal had managed to swim ashore and it now stood shivering and twitching its ears, looking this way and that with a wild eye as if wary of further evils.
Roger had, for a time, observed the grand commander standing before the calm waves, staring and staring as if such a concentrated effort would undo all that had passed. The man stood without a movement except a regular shaking of the head, a spasm of the face and a vacant look in the eye. Roger decided he had to take matters into his own hands and he sent Andrew to find wood for a fire. When the old knight returned and a good fire was made, the slaves and what was left of his men sat before it shivering and Roger de Flor too sat down, like a dog guarding his flock.
He was watching Marcus with a keen eye, wondering what the man was up to, when, perhaps feeling himself observed, the commander began making his way to him, shaking from cold. When he was standing over him in the thinning darkness Marcus gave him a smile made of twitches and ticks.
‘The Eagle is full of sea,’ he said, patting his sides.
Roger de Flor, with arms crossed over bent knees, wiped his face of salt and with his own shiver nodded. ‘It is likely
to be so.’ There was a wry smile.
‘And the gold? It shall not be drowned.’ He bent his body down until his face was thrust at Roger’s disfigured one, until they breathed together that air between them. ‘It shall not!’ His lips moved in a tremble as if he were asleep and worried by a dream. With an effort noted and observed by the mercenary, he whispered more potent than a scream, for his eyes bulged and the veins stood out at his temples, ‘A moment ago an eagle flew above the galley . . . moreover, see that sky? As calm as a summer’s day! It is an omen!’
Roger stared into the cold blue face of that man, stooped and half smiling with veined, troubled eyes, and realised two things. He realised, firstly, what he had known in Cyprus, and then at Atouguia, where he had observed the man’s friendship with the gold: that Marcus, upon taking charge of it, had leant his soul upon its salvation and was, therefore, unwilling to let the gold rest. He understood it. To lose a fortune was one thing, but the plain fact that this Templar was perched on the threshold of a new thing was Roger’s second realisation: namely, that such a quandary laid upon the shoulders of this man had accomplished in him a loss of his wits.
The strangeness of the situation in which Roger found himself, between the madness of that eye and the madness of this ill-fated quest, pinched at his scarred temples and he mumbled, ‘So? What omen is it then? Good or bad?’
Marcus turned an alert and sudden ear to him as if such mumblings were to be regarded as a sign of quarrel. In this way they remained a moment, mistrusting one another until, with a jerk of the head, Marcus straightened his back. ‘Bad! Bad! It means that I shall not let it drown here, not in this impious sea!’ He let this rush out of him like a roar. ‘Not in it! Because I do not know what is there, beyond that reef !’ He pointed to it. ‘In that darkness! In that deep darkness where the waves shall pound it and the seagrass shall grow over it. I shall not bear it, and furthermore, the gold shall not bear it! It shall not be drowned! It shall not!’ He looked up to see all men regarding him with stares. ‘Gather the slaves . . . they can swim to it . . . they shall bring it back, handful by handful if it comes to that. Even if it takes a year!’ He stopped from lack of breath.
The Seal Page 18