The White Cross (22 page)
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.
‘Do you not see it, man? We either have to take ’er on together as a fleet, or run three ways at once and pray to Christ that two of us can find the speed to shake ’er off. Porco Madonna! We stand no chance against that bugger on our own!’
By then the other vessel’s massive size was obvious, with turbaned figures in her waist and on her castles visible to give her scale. But none of us that day, the shipmaster included, had credited our leader with a quarter of the courage he possessed. Ignoring the profanity, Archbisop Baldwin raised his head to look around him at the sailors, at knights and squires awaiting his instruction, and gave a gentle smile. ‘I do believe King Saul may have suggested something similar to David,’ he said, ‘when that young optimist stood up to face Goliath with nothing but a pebble in a leather sling.
‘Never place a limit on the power of God!’ His voice, restored to sermon pitch, reached all on deck. ‘Our Blessed Saviour has brought us here to crush the infidel, my friends, for His own greater glory,’ the old archbishop cried. ‘So let us do so in His name. We are in God’s hands now!’
CHAPTER FIVE
A hundred bare feet thudded on the larchwood boards. Red-capped sailors ran in all directions, scaling ladders, reefing canvas to the master’s bellowed orders, cursing in Italian. Galèriers struck oars. Knights and squires collided, locking weapons, jostling for places at the rails.
‘Here, Sir Garon. Here my lord!’ Jos panted up with my new shield, my sword, my arbalest, my cocking belt and two sac-quivers stuffed with quarrels. ‘I guessed the bow?’ he said just as it slipped from his sweating fingers to clatter down between us on the deck.
Before I could retrieve it, the shayan opened fire. We heard the chok and whistle of the mangonels. Then something no bigger than a flying fist hurtled past our heads to splash into the water.
‘Grenades! Look out on deck!’ a voice cried harshly through a hailer. As two more missiles plummeted into the sea, I knew where I had heard the name before. A sailor in our first week out from port had warned of Sarsen bottle-bombs made out of clay to look like pomegranates, and called ‘Granadas’ or ‘grenades’ after the place in Moorish Spain best known for growing those strange fruit. Another struck the belfry of our forward castle even as the thought passed through my mind. Struck, shattered and ignited! With a sound like gusting wind, a blossom of dazzling blue and yellow flame exploded where it landed.
Fire flooded the forecastle, splashing onto clothing and bare limbs. Dripping through the hatches onto the naked oarsmen. Burning, even on the metal surface of the bell. A squealing rat, its fur on fire, lay writhing on the deck. Men shrieked and thrashed, danced in the flames’ embrace. Flesh hissed and shrivelled. Others ran to aid them, stamping on the fires which lapped the upper deck before they could consume the mangonel that armed it – efforts which, if anything, made matters worse. For nothing, as we all had heard, could quench Greek fire, but camels’ piss or…
Vinegar! I suddenly recalled the raw taste of the wine I’d spat onto the deck that morning, a vintage now so acid that few of the company could stomach it. ‘Wine! Fetch wine!’ I heard my own voice, and then Jos’s, shouting wildly. I thrust my squire toward the forward hatch. ‘Now, now! As much as they can find. The wine will…’
‘Put it out, Sir Garry?’ Jos hazarded
‘Yes, God willing, so it will.’
And so it did. In less time than I could have hoped, a tun of sour Bordeaux was hauled onto the deck and broached, its contents slopped in buckets hand-to-hand to quench the fire in clouds of evil smelling steam.
We were too late to help one wretched human torch, who in his agony leapt from the rail to flounder screaming in the burning water, before his own weight dragged him down. But through the steam the mangonel appeared unscathed. The mangonel was saved.
By then the ships were closing, and the bombardiers lost range. As it bore down on us with single-minded purpose, the Saracen shayan looked more like a devouring monster than any kind of ship, with double banks of oars for fins, a wrinkled skin of canvas sagging from its prow – and above, what else but the great gaping head of an infuriated dragon!
‘Christ’s plague, the bugger’s moving! They can move its head!’
Behind the shield he held for me, my squire’s blue eyes grew rounder. ‘Next thing they’ll have it belching fire,’ he breathed, as unbelievably the segmented serpent neck dipped forward.
Somewhere behind it in the vessel’s prow a turban moved.
A red spark gleamed.
Then with a mighty roar, a jet of living yellow flame shot from the dragon’s mouth – to prove Jos right and set the water blazing in its path!
For me the time was past for horror or surprise. The fire, the wine, the screams, the sulphurous smoke had brought me up to a killing pitch. Then when I heard the shrill whinny of an excited horse from somewhere down below, I knew it instantly, and felt a surge of pride to think of Raoul straining in his sling to join the action. With taut nerves and tauter bowstrings, we waited only for the order to loose bolts. I needed action too. My target was the man directing the fire-breathing creature – and I could see his gore already sprinkling its painted head. I needed blood!
Archbishop Baldwin standing close behind, was looking in the same direction. ‘What is it underneath that man,’ he called up to the master in the smoking prow, ‘I mean the platform he is perched on?’
‘Yer Grace, we must change course or we’re roast meat!’
‘When we’re opposed, Saint Gregory instructs us to regard it as a test of faith. Is it some kind of a receptacle, the platform? A reservoir perhaps for feu grégeois?’
‘Most likely ’tis, yer Grace. They use a pump and siphon, so they say, to spray out the petra’olea an’ naptha an’ whatever else they ’ave in there. But mark me Sir, they’ll ram us on this course. We must, we ’ave to…’
‘Of what construction is it, would you say, this reservoir?’
‘Iron for sure under the timber cladding. But yer Grace you must allow…’
‘And would I be correct in thinking that the liquid it contains is volatile, combustible, a mixture that is likely to explode on impact?’
‘’Tis ’ow they use it in grenades Sir, an’ why they seldom move it but by water.’
‘So if we were to strike this metal reservoir a heavy blow? Say with a sling-stone or ballista bolt, fired broadside at the closest range? Could the effect be that of a grenade of many times the size and power? To blow the Philistine apart?’
I saw the master stare at the old man in silence. And whether in his heart he thought the risk was justified or no, he acted with the swiftest resolution. In the bare time it took to shout the order, he had our steersmen hauling on the rudder, and the larboard side galèriers increasing strokes to help bring round our prow.