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 care
fully 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.
It isn’t hard to see myself stargazing. How could it be when it is what I’m doing now?
Khadija told me once that she believed each mortal had their own star, which shone the moment they were born and darkened with their final breath.
Maybe I saw her star one breathless night from the poop deck of the tarida? But if I did, it isn’t in this sky.
In the early mornings, when the air was cool at sea and Jos had gone below to see to Raoul, I liked to climb into the narrow space beside the mangon catapult above the galley’s rambade. To perch up on the cordage, barefoot and grimy-soled, and feel the salt spray in my face. To watch the oar blades slice the water, listen to their creak and thump, and wonder with each league we put between us and Marseille if I would ever come this way again.
The galèriers who rowed the tarida were all of them convicted felons culled from gaols in Burgundy and Aragon, shackled to their benches and branded in the armpit with their terms of servitude. ‘For better a repentant Christian to transport us,’ Archbishop Baldwin ruled, ‘than a disciple of the camel-driver, Mahomet.’
Below the rowing benches, the stabularia in the hold where Raoul was stalled were set in a long row in line along the keel. Even with the hatches open their foetid atmosphere was near unbreatheable. It tasted foul and stung your eyes and burned the skin inside your nose – and Jos, who brought his food and water and worked to massage Raoul’s slack muscles, proclaimed it to be dense enough to cut up into cheese. And as for my poor destrier, they’d hung him from a canvas ‘cinta’ slung beneath his belly with his four hooves barely brushing the esparto bedding of his stall. I hated seeing him suspended, suffocated, dull-eyed with misery, and am ashamed to think how little time I spent with him as a result.
Horses cannot vomit. But if their slings spared them some of the worst effects of sea-sickness, we human freight were left to cope as best we might with decks which even on a calm day rolled and pitched beneath our feet.
One morning as I passed Archbishop Baldwin sitting in the shade beneath his awning on the poop, I was surprised to be addressed. ‘Sir Knight, I have a riddle for you.’
The old man’s face in contrast to his sooty hood was sickly greenish-white. A bucket at his side contained what I supposed to be his breakfast. ‘Tell me the difference if you can between a jellyfish and an archbishop,’ he asked me as I straightened from my bow.
I shook my head to own shamefacedly that I had no idea.
‘No please, ’tis very simple. The difference is that only one of them has too much sense to trust himself to any element but that which he was born to.’ He looked at me with red-rimmed eyes and heaved a sigh. ‘Regrettably, it is the jellyfish,’ he said.
Many men were sick as dogs. But Jos and I soon gained our sea legs, and even the archbishop was on his feet within a week. We had been told that, with sails set and a good breeze astern, our passage by the southern route might be completed in three weeks or less – and the wind was in our favour. Most days it filled the triangular lateen sails flapping from our mainmast and the mizzen. Slower in the water under oars and often lagging far behind, the bulbous dromonds in our little fleet could hoist a third sail if they chose. Which meant that when the wind was strong they could be near enough to hail.
Jos always said that he could tell which one of them held Guillemette, and whether she was sitting fore or aft, by its tilt in the water. Although in truth we never saw a face we knew in any other vessel.
On the evening of our twentieth day at sea, with our ship’s biscuit hard as stone, our water putrid, wine turned to vinegar, our men and horses dysenteric, we sighted land at last. ‘There she is lads, can’t ye smell her?’ Our Genoese shipmaster took up the pilot’s cry.
All we could see at first was a pale line to separate the sea from sky, and long before we caught a whiff of anything but tar and horse piss, our attention was called elsewhere.
‘Sail! Sail out to larboard bow!’ – appearing as a simplified child’s chalking of a single sail, divided as the craft approached into a triple row of lateens. A flash of foam showed either side of an immensely high-beaked prow, with something brightly coloured flapping round it. I stared transfixed.
‘WHAT SHIP ARE YOU?’ Our master bawled the challenge through a hailer in the harsh Levantine French that navigators use. ‘A bireme, but no heathen crescent – could be a merchantman from Venice, or a Pisano out of Tyre, yer Grace,’ he called to the archbishop, who was shinning down the poop deck ladder with a surprising turn of speed.
‘But he doesn’t think so,’ I heard the old man mutter as he hurried past.
‘I’ve seen the like before of that there swaggin’ round ’er belly.’ A hush on deck as the strange vessel drove towards us enabled all to hear. ‘’T’will be soaked in camels’ piss and vinegar, to stop the hull from catching, d’ye see?’ the shipmaster told Baldwin when he joined him in the bow.
An’ if she’s carrying the fire, yer Grace, she’d ’ave to be Byzantine, or…’
‘Fire?’ I saw the old man fumble for the silver crucifix he wore around his neck. ‘Do you mean feu grégeois? Is that her armament, my son? The thing they call Greek fire?’
‘…or else she’d have to be a Sarsen fireship. Diavolo, ’tis all we need!’ The master’s weatherbeaten face was grave. ‘There’s none as know how wildfire’s made, excepting Sarsens and Byzantines. But it sinks more vessels in these waters, take my word, than any other weapon in creation.’
He hawked and spat over the side to emphasise the point.
‘Then would it be advisable to challenge her again,’ Baldwin suggested, cross in hand, ‘before we come within her range?’
‘WHAT – SHIP – ARE – YOU?’ Amplified by the storm-hailer, the master’s challenge must have reached the other.
‘WHAT SHIP? WHERE ARE YOU BOUND?’
But all the answer that came back across the water was the rattling sound of ratchets from its towering castles, as unseen hands winched down the slings of the ship’s mangonels to load them ready for attack.
‘She’s Sarsen, never doubt it. A shayan,’ the shipmaster confirmed. ‘Two hundred oar if she’s a dozen.’
‘Could we outrun her?’
‘Not a hope in Hades, seein’ how this old tub’s freighted.’
‘Then if we cannot run, as servants of The Lord we must engage her. I suggest you signal for the dromonds to make for port, Master – and then do all that’s needful to turn our vessel in her path.’
‘But the Sarsen has the fire! She’ll scorch us quicker than a feather in a furnace. Aye, and overtake the others too, yer Grace, to serve ’em each a measure of the same!’
Forgetful for the moment of his status, I saw the master seize hold of the archbishop’s thin arm and squeeze it ’til he winced.
The White Cross Page 16