Standard of Honor (48 page)

Twenty-one men had been lost. That much Henry knew beyond doubt, having overheard a report on casualties being delivered to someone he assumed to be Besanceau on the stern deck while his injuries were being treated. He had assumed that the missing men were his own, landsmen like him and unused to being
afloat, whereas the ship's crew might reasonably be expected to survive a storm at sea. And besides, he recalled now that the galley held a complement of fifteen crew members only. But if that were true and all the missing men were his, then that meant they had lost one-fifth of their shipboard complement without their ever having had an opportunity to strike a single blow against the enemy. That thought depressed him, and he turned himself, very slightly and with great difficulty, to look back over his shoulder to where another man leaned against the side of the prow, gazing outward.

“Hey,” Henry grunted, drawing the man's attention. “What can you see out there?”

The fellow scanned him from head to foot, then looked back over the side. “Nothing,” he growled. “An empty ocean. Not a ship in sight anywhere, except one wreck, close enough to see, turned upside down and dragging its mast. Must have air trapped inside, keeping it afloat …” He turned back, his head bent, and looked at Henry from beneath heavy black brows. “How do you feel? Better than you look, I hope. You're trussed like a stuffed swan. Who are you, anyway?”

Henry eased himself back around to face forward again, hoping to find some comfort. “Name's St. Clair,” he gasped, catching his breath and almost wheezing with the effort of moving. “They tell me I've broken some ribs, and I … aah! … I believe them. Come up here where I can see you, will you?”

The other man crossed to where he could lean an elbow on the rail and look down at Henry, nodding in
sympathy. “Broken ribs are not likable. Broke two of my own last year, in Cyprus. Slipped on a greasy plank, carrying a sack, and fell against a pole on the ground. Took me months to get better. I'm called Bluethumb. I'm one of the rowers.” He held up an almost purple thumb, and Henry could not tell if the discoloration was a birthmark or the result of an old injury, but before he could ask, Bluethumb said, “St. Clair, eh? The Master-at-Arms? That St. Clair?”

“Aye, that one. Can you help me up to where I can see, just for a moment? I can't move on my own—too tightly trussed, as you said.”

“Let's see, then.” The man called Bluethumb bent his knees and squatted, taking Henry beneath the shoulders, then lifted him smoothly with a strong thrust of his thighs. Henry sucked in his breath sharply, but felt surprisingly little pain, and then lost all awareness of anything else as he stared at the emptiness of the waters all around them. The only thing to be seen in any direction was the wreck Bluethumb had described.

“My thanks,” he said eventually. “You may sit me down again.”

When he was back in his makeshift seat, propped up by the ropes, he allowed himself, for a brief moment, to wonder what might have happened to his son, but there was little to be gained in doing that, and so he sucked in a deep breath, then expelled it forcibly before speaking again to Bluethumb. “What about the King, is he well?”

One eyebrow rose as though the man were surprised to hear the question asked. “Of course he's
well. Why would he not be? He could walk on water, that one. Tied himself to the stern rail and fought the tiller with the helmsman throughout the storm. No wonder his people look at him the way they do. The man's like a god.”

“Aye,” Henry said with a nod. “He can be magnificent at times, far more so than ordinary men … So what will we do now, do you know?”

Bluethumb grinned and held the discolored digit up again. “I told you, I'm a rower. They don't ask me for advice. They tell me where to go, and when, and how fast. And I'd better get back.”

He straightened up to leave but Henry stopped him with a wave of his hand. “If you would, should you see Sir Robert de Sablé back there, please give him my respects and tell him where I am and that I should like to speak with him when he can find a moment.”

The rower cocked his head. “Me? Walk up and talk to de Sablé, just like that? He'd have me thrown overboard.”

“No, he would not. Mention my name as you approach—Sir Henry St. Clair—and tell him I asked you, sent you to him. Here, let me—” He began to fumble for his scrip, but the oarsman snapped a hand at him.

“I don't want your money, Master-at-Arms. I'll tell him what you said, and fare ye well.” He left without another word.

Sir Henry flexed his back muscles cautiously and tried to find some comfort against the piles of hard rope. He had not yet permitted himself to think about
the significance of the emptiness out there beyond the ship's walls, but now he began attempting to visualize the cataclysmic power of the storm they had survived, and to wonder how many ships might have sunk completely, simply vanishing beneath the waves and taking their crews and passengers with them. He discovered very quickly that he had no stomach for such wonderings, and no means whereby he could control his imagination's sickening leaps and lurches, and so he was happy when de Sablé's voice distracted him.

“Well, Master St. Clair. Are you badly injured? I saw you being attended to on the stern deck but had no time right then even to cross the deck and find out what was wrong with you.”

“There's nothing wrong with me, Sir Robert. Nothing serious, I mean. A bang on the head and a few cracked ribs … I am pleased to see you looking so well. And I heard the King served as helmsman in the storm.”

“Throughout it.” Sir Robert brought his hands together, squeezing them in the way Richard himself frequently did. He was grinning broadly now and shaking his head in admiration. “He rode out the tempest with the aplomb of a veteran seafarer who has seen everything that Neptune has to throw at him. It truly was remarkable. I would not have believed it had I not been there to witness it in person. The King tied himself to a thwart and manned the tiller with the helmsman for hours on end. Certainly, had he not done so, we might have been in even sorer straits than we were. I thought we were all dead men when the
soldiers' quarters started to break up beneath the pounding of the waves— Did you know about that?”

“Yes, I heard it being reported. Twenty-one men lost.”

“Aye, they were washed overboard when the superstructure holding them began to give way and tilted outboard. We yawed, torn off center by the sagging weight of the falling structure, and came as close as ever we could to turning broadside to the waves. It was only Richard's ferocious strength, combined with the helmsman's skill, that saved us. I had been thrown into the scuppers by a wave and I lay there and watched him fight to bring the bows back into line.” He looked about him to be sure that no one else was listening, and when he was sure they were not being overheard, he added, “You and I, Henry, should both fall to our knees this day and give thanks for our King, and forgiveness for all the flaws we so often find in him.”

“Amen,” Sir Henry said, nodding.

De Sablé had moved to the bow rail, where Henry could look up at him without having to twist his body. He glanced away, towards the horizon, then uttered a snort, part grunt, part bitter laugh.

“That weather … My friend, that was something undreamed of, something from our nightmares. I have never encountered anything like that. That was a storm to keep the most adventurous and intrepid mariners safe at home, on land, forever.”

Henry could hear commands being shouted at his back, followed by the clatter of running feet and the
creaking of stiff ropes above and behind his head, the rhythmic grunts of men pulling in unison on both sides of the deck and the squeal of ropes running through blocks.

“We're preparing to increase speed,” de Sablé explained, “hoisting the sail so we can go in search of others.”

“What others?” Henry asked, recalling the empty seas around them. “How many men and ships did we lose, do you know?”

“We lost them all, Henry.” De Sablé waved expansively towards the horizon. “They are all gone, scattered on the wind like ashes. It's going to take days to gather them all together again.”

Henry's eyes widened. “To gather them—? You mean we'll find them again? They are not all destroyed?”

Now it was de Sablé's face that registered surprise. “Destroyed? Great God, no, they are not destroyed. We may have lost a few of them, to collisions and calamities, but that is only to be expected when you have so many ships at such close quarters in stormy conditions. There's one drifting close by that you can see, dismasted and capsized, but the others have merely been scattered and blown before the wind and tides. They are ships, Henry, built by men who know and love and hate the sea in equal measures. They are designed to weather storms and outlast them, even storms as large and violent as that one was. They'll find the closest land to wherever they may be, and then they will begin to reassemble.”

Henry was mildly flummoxed, trying to visualize the scene that, if de Sablé was correct, had to be unfolding beyond the horizon. “Where is the nearest land?”

“From where we are right now?” Sir Robert shrugged. “At this point, your guess would be as valid as mine. But I will be able to answer you easily as soon as we have discovered where we are right now. We have been blown off course. That much is certain. But how far, and in what direction, is what we must now attempt to discover.”

He held up an open palm to forestall Henry's next question. “We are in the Ionian Sea, and we were sailing east by south from Sicily towards Crete when the storm struck. That was two days ago. We know that the coast of Africa lies on our starboard side at this moment, because we are headed eastward, directly towards the rising sun, but we do not know how far away it is. But by the same reckoning, we know that the coast of Greece and its islands lies ahead of us, so we will continue south and east on our present course until we sight land. With good fortune, that will be Crete, but then again, it might be any of a chain of islands, all of which will serve us equally well, since from any one of them we can be in Crete within days.” He hesitated, and then gave a tentative half smile. “Of course, we might have been blown backward altogether and the next land we sight could be Sicily again. Only time will tell. In the meantime, we have our sharpest-eyed crewman up on the cross spar, squinting in all directions. He'll sight land soon, and the moment that he does, our fortunes will improve.”

Sir Henry nodded. “Thank you for that. I often think there can be nothing worse than lacking information on which to base a decision. And speaking of information, may I ask if you know which ship my son was on? I have been thinking he must be dead, and to hear you say otherwise is an enormous relief.”

“I can tell you it was one of the four Templar vessels, and all four of them were placed in the second line, directly behind the King's three dromons. Where they may be now is anyone's guess. And now I must return to my post. Are you comfortable? Is there anything I can provide for you?”

Sir Henry shook his head and thanked the Fleet Master graciously, then eased himself gently back against the ropes and closed his eyes, feeling the coolness of a gentle breeze ruffling his hair and lulling him to sleep, while around him the sounds of shipboard activity regained their normal levels. The last clear thought that crossed his mind before he dozed off was the notion that the King would not be pleased if anything untoward had happened to any of his three great dromons, for among them they carried his greatest treasures: his war chest, his sister, and his future Queen.

THE MASTHEAD LOOKOUT
spotted the first stray within hours of their setting out, hull down on the horizon to the south of them, and de Sablé issued orders immediately to intercept it. It was a heavy-bellied cargo carrier and it wallowed about like an old sow, but ungainly as it might have been, it had survived the storm in good
order and it changed its own heading as soon as it became aware of the galley bearing down on it. Within an hour of that, they found another ship, and then another, until they had gathered more than a score of followers by the end of the day. Some of the vessels had fared much better than others, and there were a few that were in dangerous condition, but de Sablé kept them together throughout the night and there were no further alarums.

The following day, because their presence and bulk had become substantial, they attracted many more survivors, and their numbers swelled to three score and more. Three days after that, they sighted land directly ahead on their easterly course, and they arrived in Crete that afternoon. They numbered more than a hundred vessels by that time, including seven of the eight remaining galleys, and as they approached their anchorage at the foot of Mount Ida, the masthead lookouts were reporting more ships approaching from all around with every minute that passed. But no one, anywhere, could provide any information on the whereabouts of the three dromons.

Richard expressed grave concern, and Sir Henry had no doubt that it was genuine, but he found himself wondering cynically whether the monarch might be more concerned about the loss of his treasure chests than he was about his wife and sister, and he was still wondering about that when Richard dispatched all eight of his recovered galleys that same evening, four to search the Greek coastal islands to the northwest
and the north, while the other four swept on east, towards Cyprus.

Sir Henry was relieved to be able to leave the ship and go ashore in Crete, for the simple reason that he could then lie down and stretch himself out in a wellstrung cot, to the great benefit of his aching chest muscles. He lay abed for three days after that, giving his body time to recuperate, once again at the insistence of Richard's physician, until word came to him from Richard that they would be leaving the next morning for the island of Rhodes, where a large number of their missing vessels had made landfall. Knowing his time abed had done him good, he felt sufficiently recovered to rise and move about, and he walked as far as the harbor, a distance of close to half a mile, before he felt the first twinge of pain.