‘Oh, so the king will believe you, commoner? Why should he – why should any man?’
‘Because of a letter I was sent to deliver. You know its wording, for Remigius carried the same letter. His was delivered. Mine was not. If you would care to reacquaint yourself with its content, I can have it out in a minute or less.’ I pulled the Moorish amulet from my tunic, and the last drop of blood drained from the commander’s face.
‘And yet if you do one small thing, I will show you mercy.’ D’Otricourt’s jaw clenched furiously and his eyes grew red, but I stared him down. ‘Because you are in my power, Commander. The great Temple itself is in my power. But I will show you the mercy that comes from a human heart and not from your grubby dreams of honour. Lend King Louis his thirty thousand livres and your debt to me is paid off.’
He stood there, and I could feel hatred coming from him like heat from a sun-baked stone. But I could feel his fear, too, and it was stronger. He reached up and scratched the wound in his scalp and his fingernails came away bloody.
‘But I cannot,’ he whined. ‘I am bound, no matter what …’ The fear came into his eyes, and I knew he was trapped, though not by me now. ‘If … if we were already in Acre …’
‘God’s death, man! What is that knight called?’
‘Antoine de Beaubourg.’
‘Brother Antoine! Would you join us, please?’ I called. Joinville and the king were watching us intently. From the other side of the boat, I could see Iselda’s hands clench.
‘Good Brother Antoine. Please go and tell the Sieur de Joinville to fetch an axe. Then you will come back with us, and the commander here, to your ship.’
The knight could not have looked more outraged if I had pinched his buttocks, but one look at his commander’s face and he went still.
‘An axe?’ asked Étienne d’Otricourt, faintly.
‘If we take the money by force, have you broken your oath?’
‘You intend to break open our coffers? Jesus—’
‘—threw the moneylenders from the Temple,’ I said curtly. ‘I am letting you go free, Commander, and letting you save your murderous, venal face into the bargain. The greatest treason of the age, absolved for thirty thousand livres. Do not invoke Christ, sir, for it is plain you cannot recognise Christian charity when it is sitting naked in your lap.’ My voice had sunk to a hiss, and the commander winced, a helpless rodent caught between the butcherbird of prudence and the thorn of outraged piety. As commanders often do, he chose prudence.
‘Go, Antoine. Sir Petrus and I will be waiting in the longboat.’
As I climbed over the rail I managed to wink at Iselda, and she waved, questioningly. But Brother Antoine was crowding me, and I swung down onto the ladder. It was a short row across to the Templar ship, but we might as well have been journeying between the ice floes of the Sea of Darkness for all the good cheer aboard. We had brought two sailors with us, and Joinville had a ship’s axe across his knees. The commander gazed, stone-faced, out to sea. Brother Antoine stared at Joinville and me with undisguised loathing. I grinned back.
‘After you,’ I said, when we were bumping against the tarry hull of the ship. The Templars bit their lips and started up the rope ladder. I let Joinville scramble up in front of me. There were a few Templar knights on deck, most of them seeing to the preparation of their dinner, and when they saw Joinville and his axe a couple of them clapped hands to hilts. But the commander waved them off and stormed into the forecastle where a hatchway led down to the hold. A short, sandy-haired man with a puffy, heavy-lidded face and a huge bunch of keys jingling at his belt sat inside, poring over a ledger.
‘The Marshal of the Temple, Renaud de Vichiers,’ said the commander. ‘Come, Brother Renaud.’
There, in the lamplit gloom, stinking of lamp-black and ratpiss, great chests were arranged carefully so that they would not unbalance the ship.
‘Try that one,’ I told Joinville, pointing at a huge box banded all over with curled and fretted iron.
‘Jolly good,’ said Joinville. He was enjoying himself. Swaggering over to the chest, he rapped on the domed lid with his knuckles, cocked his head and hefted the axe. Then he planted his feet and swung.
‘Wait!’ screeched Marshal Renaud. Joinville pulled his stroke and the blade hit the lid with a dull toc, knocking off a large flake of wood. ‘Christ’s bloody feet, man, I will give you the keys!’
‘Did you not think we were serious?’ asked Joinville, as the marshal searched for a key from the great ring at his belt.
‘This is sacrilege,’ he was muttering, as he found the right one and rattled it in the lock.
‘Of course it is,’ I said. ‘Now hurry up, there’s a good fellow.’
The lid swung open, to reveal a pile of leather bags. ‘Fetch some scales,’ I snapped. There was some scurrying about, and finally the quartermaster lowered a balance beam down through the hatch. We hooked it to a beam overhead and began to weigh out the bags.
Thirty-two thousand, eight hundred and twenty-three livres were lowered down into the longboat by torchlight. The commander had excused himself halfway through the weighing, and we did not see him again, though Marshal Renaud observed us, curiously frog-like, until the last coin was fished out. He wrote us out an elaborate receipt, meticulously and with agonising slowness, and then Joinville and I bowed and left as quickly as we could. I think we were both stifling a fit of giggles as we marched past the unfriendly gaze of Templars at their dinner, and when we were safely in the boat, and crossing the open water between the Templar ship and the king’s, we both burst out laughing.
‘The marshal … The man looked like a toad with its arse down a serpent’s throat!’ Joinville spluttered. ‘How did you do it, Petrus? How in God’s creation did you pull it off ?’
‘My dear Jean, I simply appealed to the commander’s sense of honour,’ I said.
‘I detest that man! Templars and their honour – they are usurers, usurers with crosses on their breasts.’
‘They serve their purpose,’ I said. ‘But now we are done. It is over. What will you do?’
‘The king wants me to go with him to Acre,’ he said. ‘I don’t wish for much more, right this moment, than to see my own country again, but it has been my privilege to win the king’s friendship while we were prisoners, and I don’t want to disappoint His Majesty.’
To myself, I wondered how many lives had been spent avoiding the disappointment of kings, but I kept the thought to myself.
‘And you?’ Joinville was asking. ‘You are coming, aren’t you?’
‘No. Iselda and I have some pressing affairs to put right. Things have come unravelled since I came on this … this adventure. And I’ve been to the Holy Land before, Jean. But I wish you joy.’
‘And joy to you, Black Dog. They will sing songs about us, you know.’
‘God, I hope not. If they ever write songs, or books, about our time in Egypt, I pray that I am left out of them.’
‘The man who saved Guillaume de Sonnac? For shame, sir,’ laughed Joinville.
‘He died two days later,’ I pointed out. ‘No, let the book tell of the eels, and the scorbutus, and … my dear Joinville, who would read such a book anyway? We are alive, with a boat full of Templar gold. What does that feel like, man?’
‘Like strong wine,’ Joinville laughed. ‘Like the dancing girl who catches your eye!’
‘Indeed!’ I cried. ‘You feel it! Then, as my late master used to tell me: pay attention, Jean de Joinville.’
‘I shall, Petrus Blakke Dogge. Thank you. I shall.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
And that, more or less, was the end of the Seventh Crusade. Baybars the Mamluk received the last of the ransom, and in the small hours of the night the king’s brother came aboard. I had tried to sleep, rolled up in one of the carpets next to Iselda. She had grabbed me as soon as I had appeared over the rail, and it seemed that propriety had been given a holiday, for no one cared that we stood there and k
issed for an age, while the Mamluks weighed out the coins again and sent them down to their boat.
‘How did you manage that?’ Iselda asked me, later on, when we had given up on sleep from all the commotion going on around us as men, newly freed, began to come aboard and find their feet, and after the king had sent us a jug of almost decent wine.
‘I said I would destroy him,’ I replied.
‘And he believed you.’
‘Yes. Because I would have. And now I am finished with all of this. For good. We have risen too high, my love, if we can threaten the Commander of the Temple and he fears for his life.’
There was salt pork to eat again, and though the novelty of it was long gone, we made a feast of it. There was bustle all around us, for the king had decided to leave for Acre as soon as his brother was set free.
‘I don’t want to go to Acre,’ I said. ‘Do you?’
‘I would like to see the queen again,’ said Iselda. ‘But what’s in Acre, really?’
‘More of this,’ I said. ‘More Franks, more crusaders. They’ll try and start another war, I expect. We can sit around and watch them unlearn all the lessons this fucking disaster should have taught them. I don’t think I could stand that.’
‘I suppose we could do some trading,’ she offered, dubiously.
‘Do you want to?’
‘No.’
‘Then let’s not, eh?’
‘I love you, Patch,’ she said.
‘I love you too.’
‘There’s one thing we might do … But no,’ she said, peering out at me from under her tresses. I knew that look.
‘What might that be?’ I enquired.
‘I’ve spent a long time talking to Sheikh Nizam,’ she began. ‘You know, I thought you’d gone a bit mooncalf out there in the war, because you really are different. Not in a bad way. But I’ve never heard you talk about God – I mean, not like that. So I wanted to know what he’d done to you.’
‘He didn’t do anything to me!’ I laughed.
‘No, my love. He did. But then he did something to me as well. We talked about my father, and about how they sailed from place to place, for years, just sailing. And it’s very strange, because as he was telling me about the ocean, how it’s so vast … I’ve never seen the ocean, Patch. And he let me see it as an endless plain, always shifting, always restless, and the sailor makes paths, plots them by the stars, and Nizam said that there’s a point when you don’t know where the sea ends and the stars begin, that you aren’t up or down, you’re just held, somehow.’
‘I remember that,’ I murmured.
‘And do you know what he told me? That feeling, of being cupped in the vastness, like hands – when you feel that, what you’re actually feeling is your own heart.’
‘And that’s God,’ I said.
We didn’t say anything for a while. Iselda put her hand in mine. It was a little greasy from the salt pork.
‘Nizam is finding us a boat,’ she said softly. ‘He wanted us to come and stay with him, but …’
‘Oh. At his zãwiya?’
‘I don’t know what that is. In the desert, south of Cairo. Is that where you were?’
‘No, I wasn’t in the desert.’ I told her about the little building in the grove.
‘But then he said, “No, you need to make good.” He’s gone to find us a ship going to Marseille. He said if we would not come to the desert, he would make a floating desert for us. I said that sounded a little strange and he laughed. I told him I wanted to sing – they sing there in the desert, Petroc! Were there singers at your zãwiya?’
I thought about that. ‘I didn’t … No, there were, of course there were! I wasn’t paying attention, you know – I was here.’ I tapped my head.
‘Oh, Patch. But you always listen!’
‘No, I was, I was listening. But to something else.’
‘So shall we go?’
‘What about Dimitri and the money? We have a perfectly good ship …’
‘It’s all business on Dimitri’s cob. I need to get away from that. As for the money, I asked Nizam. A man I’d never met, and I was happy to trust him with everything.’ Iselda paused. A frown wrinkled her brow.
‘So what did he tell you? Where we could hide it?’
‘Oh. No, he said we would know best. It was something else. He told me that money is for nothing more than buying. Meaningless. “What do you say to a child when you’ve given him a penny for being good? Spend it on something you like.” He said we should get rid of it. All of it.’
‘You mean, give it away?’
‘What would be wrong with that? But no, he said there was something we could buy. He didn’t say what. We’ll know, apparently.’
‘I don’t know anything,’ I said, watching the lights flicker on the shore. ‘I’m just happy to be alive.’
‘Then shall we go back to our lives?’
‘Back? Isn’t everything in flames behind us?’
‘Not to the bank. To what we talked about in Lyon before you went away. Those lives – the ones we haven’t lived yet.’
‘You remembered that?’
‘Of course. And you swore me an oath.’
‘So I did. Well, there’s nothing else I’d rather do.’
So when the boat bringing the Comte de Poitiers came alongside, amid the blowing of trumpets and cheering from everyone on board (for no one seemed to have managed to find sleep that night) we were waiting. The king had wept when I told him we were leaving, but then he was weeping at everything. We said we were going back to Venice on our own ship. As many others had already left – the Comte de Soissons and the Comte de Flandres among them – he did not take this amiss.
‘Are you certain you won’t come to the Holy Land, Petrus? The Holy Land …’
‘I have been there already, Your Majesty. I wish you joy of the holy places. But I must attend to my affairs, which are pressing.’
‘Of course, of course. You have my great thanks and my blessings, dear man.’
‘Your Majesty, please remember me to the queen,’ Iselda added. Louis looked vaguely surprised, as if he had forgotten at that moment that he was married.
‘Of course, of course …’ he said, absently. And just then the trumpets skirled again and the face of Count Alphonse appeared above the railing. With a cry, Louis tottered over to him, his black, gold-spangled robes trailing. He looked like a royal phantom: the ghost of his own dead dreams, perhaps.
‘Come on,’ I said, taking Iselda’s hand. ‘Let’s go.’
We clambered down into the galley, and as we stood on the deck looking around for the captain, a large form rose up from the stern.
‘Nizam!’ I shouted. ‘What – did you find us another ship? That was a trick, in all this madness!’
He shrugged, mysteriously. ‘There are secrets known only to the wise …’ he intoned, hollowly, but when he saw us gaping, he dissolved into laughter. ‘Nay,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘The good master is Genoese, and arrived here to find no one to trade with, so I suggested he take us to Marseille. I have been going backwards and forwards on this tub all night, waiting for you to make up your minds. If you had not, I would have gone up there and fetched you myself!’
With some inveigling we persuaded the captain, who felt that time was wasting, to take us across to Iselda’s galley. The watch, grim-faced Venetians, were standing guard with loaded crossbows, muttering at the Genoese sailors, but when they saw Iselda they made her welcome, and someone was sent to rouse Dimitri. He emerged, bandy-legged and bleary-eyed, and when he saw us standing there he let out a bearish snarl and lurched over to embrace us. When he saw Nizam, though, he stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Helmsman?’ he whispered. ‘Are you a ghost?’
‘Not I, Dimitri, though you and I should be by now, eh?’ He bent down and hugged the old man, and I saw that both of them had tears on their cheeks.
‘Petroc! For certain, I thought you were dead!’ he growled at me at la
st, wiping his eyes. ‘And you, my lady!’ He turned a scowl on Iselda. ‘With all the smoke and the drumming, and Turks blowing their horns, could you not have sent word?’
‘I am sorry, dear Dimitri, but I did not have time.’
‘Iselda has been the ruler of Damietta for a few days,’ I explained. ‘She—’
‘Ruler of a few scared Genoese shopkeepers,’ she objected. ‘But we are safe – those who deserve to be, and those who do not.’
‘Dimitri, old friend, do you have the stomach for one more voyage? A long one?’ I asked when we were seated in the tiny cabin belowdecks. Explanations had been made, and many years squeezed into minutes as the two old comrades pieced together each other’s lives since the Cormaran’s crew had last sailed together.
‘To where?’ he asked gruffly.
‘London. I would like you to take this ship to London, and once you are there, place it under the protection of the Earl of Cornwall, who is the king’s brother,’ I said. ‘He knows me. Iselda and I will join you there in …’
‘We will be two months behind you,’ said Iselda. ‘If I cannot go to the desert with Nizam, he will have to conjure it for me on the deck of a Genoese galley.’
‘And then?’ said Dimitri. He did not look very happy with this idea.
‘Then you are free to spend one quarter of the money aboard this ship in any way you would like,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’ said the old warrior, cocking his good ear in our direction. But he’d heard.
‘We are dissolving the company,’ I told him. ‘This is the end. The three of us are the last of Captain de Montalhac’s crew – and Iselda is his daughter and heir. We were never made to be bankers, lads. The world is changing, and men, it seems, wish to be ruled by letters of credit. I say, let others rule, and let others be ruled.’
‘And so do I,’ said Iselda. ‘My father, if he was the man I believe he was, wished us to use this wealth for our freedom, and for the confusion of those who would bind men and women to superstition and tyranny. But it has become our master. So a quarter belongs to you, Dimitri, and a quarter to Nizam.’
The Fools’ Crusade Page 33