Crowner's Crusade (8 page)

‘We've already lost our horses, now we've no chance of saving our armour either,' lamented William de L'Etang, peering back at where the galley was bucking and rolling in the surf at the end of rope tethers. Several score of drenched shipmen and rowers were milling about the beach, being harangued by the captain and his mate.

‘We've got our lives and our swords, rusty though they'll be after this soaking,' cried Richard heartily. ‘Now we need fire, food and shelter, for which I will more than amply repay with the church I vowed to build on this blessed isle!'

T
he promised church was never built on Lokrum, but the generous – many would say profligate – Richard Coeur de Lion gave a large donation towards the rebuilding of the cathedral in Ragusa itself. He had been persuaded by the city fathers that the money would be better spent that way and his only condition was that as long as the sanction of the Pope was obtained to this amendment of his vow, a small part of it must be used to renovate the dilapidated priory on the island. The four hermetic monks there had given them food and shelter in the hours after the shipwreck.

The king's generosity was not universally welcomed.

‘Though I love him dearly,' grumbled John de Wolfe, ‘I must acknowledge that he can be overly free with other people's money.'

He was standing with Baldwin, William and Brother Anselm some three days after their shipwreck. They were once again at the rail of yet another vessel, staring out at bleak mountains a few miles away, the further peaks now dusted with the first snows of winter. The knight from Bethune looked quizzically at de Wolfe, as even the mildest of criticism of their sovereign was a novelty coming from the doggedly faithful man from Devonshire.

‘What do you mean, John – “other people's money”? Legally, he owns everything in his kingdom.'

De Wolfe shrugged. ‘I know that, but the chancellor and the
Curia Regis
seized every spare penny to fund the Crusade. Not only in England, but Normandy and Aquitaine as well. They squeezed the merchants and taxed the common people until they howled and then bled the Church as dry as a bone, taking their gold plates and chalices and their wool and corn.'

‘And all in God's great cause!' retorted Anselm, defensively. ‘To recover Jerusalem from the grip of the infidel Saracens.'

John sighed and wished he had kept his mouth shut. ‘Well, we failed in that didn't we? But what I mean is that all that money was scraped together to equip and feed a great army and pay for a fleet of ships to transport them to Palestine. It was not for lavishing on a new cathedral in some obscure foreign city.'

William de L'Etang slapped his friend on the back. ‘But, John, it's typical of our lord and master! Fierce and even cruel at one moment, then hearty and boisterous at the next, throwing gold around as if it grew on trees. It's what makes him what he is and we all love him for it.'

Anselm nodded his agreement, but partly sided with de Wolfe. ‘Yet I admit he is sometimes too impulsive and often fails to think of the consequences. Look at how yesterday he went with the Templars to the Treasury in Ragusa and borrowed thousands of Venetian ducats against a Templar promissory note. Chancellor Longchamp will have a stroke when all these bills come home to roost.'

John held his tongue, but William threw in a half-jocular comment. ‘And what did he do with some of that new money? Spent it on three expensive jewelled rings for himself!'

Baldwin came to Richard's defence over this apparent extravagance. ‘Our lord is a great king, ruling lands that stretch from the Pyrenees almost to Scotland. He needs the appurtenances of a king, such as these ostentatious jewels, to display his power and influence in the world!'

‘Well, I wish he had used his power and influence to get us a better vessel than this,' grumbled de Wolfe, looking down the deck to where Gwyn was contentedly fishing over the side, his ever-unruly hair blowing in the wind.

‘There's little wrong with the
Medusa
, John,' remarked Robert de Turnham, who had joined the group from his place up on the aftercastle. ‘She's getting along quite well with this new southerly wind behind her.'

The
Medusa
was an ordinary merchant ship called a ‘cog', which was much smaller than the more bulky
Franche Nef
. With a single mast and square sail, she was a maid-of-all-work similar to hundreds of others in the Mediterranean – though virtually all of those were now laid up for the winter. Only the generosity of the Lionheart to the bishop and city council of Ragusa had persuaded this shipmaster to venture up the coast of Dalmatia in December.

The violent
bora
had subsided as quickly as it had arisen and after two nights in Ragusa, with blissful sleep in the guest house of the monastery, the travellers were sent on their way towards Zara, about a hundred and sixty miles up the coast, well into Hungarian territory.

‘With this wind, we should reach Zara the day after tomorrow,' prophesied the High Admiral. ‘The route lies behind the many islands that line this coast, so we should be protected from any westerly storms. Pray God we don't suffer another
bora.
' He crossed himself virtuously as he spoke.

At the king's council held earlier that day, it was agreed that they would buy horses in Zara and make the long ride to the court of King Bela, who had a grand palace in Estergom on the Danube. There Richard would trade on his kinship with Bela's queen, to seek hospitality and advice on how best to return to Normandy and England. Though most of the knights had only a hazy idea of the geography of Central Europe, both Richard and Baldwin knew enough to debate possible routes.

‘Either we aim for Saxony and the undoubted welcome of Henry the Lion,' declared the king. ‘Or perhaps we could ride north to reach the Baltic and take ship to the German Ocean.'

Baldwin was dubious about the latter plan. ‘It would mean riding many hundreds of miles across turbulent territory. The Polish lands are in turmoil and we would not be welcome amongst them, even as returning Crusaders.'

Robert de Turnham had been equally pessimistic about the idea. ‘Sire, as you have discovered from our recent experiences of sea voyaging, we would be much too late in the season for safety. To attempt such a long journey across the northern waters in the depth of winter would be foolhardy in the extreme.'

The meeting broke up with a decision to wait until they reached the Hungarian capital, to hear what their opinion would be.

The king had a cubbyhole to himself on this vessel, too small to be called a cabin, just a large box built under the poop. The rest of them squeezed into other spaces under the aftercastle and the forecastle, sharing the deck boards with the dozen crew. None of these spoke a single word of any language they could recognize, other than the shipmaster who could manage a little Latin. The mattresses from the galley had been lost, along with their armour and most of their possessions, so new palliasses were provided in Ragusa, along with a change of clothing.

‘We'll arrive home like beggars,' muttered Gwyn, as they huddled under cloaks on the slowly rolling deck. ‘No spoils of war on this trip, that's for sure.'

John de Wolfe told him what had been said at the council as they lay on the thin straw bags that were their beds, and Gwyn wanted to know more. ‘Who's this King Bela, then?'

‘A powerful ruler and one of the richest in Europe, thanks to the minerals and salt in his country. Thankfully, he's no friend of Henry, the Holy Roman Emperor, whom we're trying to avoid.'

The Cornishman digested this and probed again. ‘But I heard that he's related to our king. Is that true?'

John turned over with a grunt to relieve the pressure of his hip on the deck boards. ‘By marriages, at least. Bela's wife is Margaret of France, who was the widow of Richard's older brother, Henry the Young King who died years ago.'

Gwyn chuckled into his cloak. ‘I know of her all right! It was common knowledge that she was William Marshal's mistress.'

He was talking about the Marshal of England, a great warrior and tourney champion.

‘Better not voice that about too loudly when we get to Hungary,' advised de Wolfe. ‘She is also sister-in-law of Philip of France, which is a point not in our favour!'

Gwyn clucked his disgust with all these imperial entanglements. ‘These royal folk are like rabbits in a box, mating with someone different every five minutes! I'm not sure I want to go to Hungary!'

Perhaps God was listening once again.

Though the Lionheart had bribed the shipmaster to carry on sailing through the first night, the second was spent on shore, as they needed food and water. In addition, the helpful southerly wind had freshened markedly during the day and the motion of the
Medusa
became far too lively for much sleep to be had on deck.

They stopped in a bay on the mainland side of the island of Zirje, though the captain informed de Turnham in his halting Latin, that he had wanted to land on the opposite mainland.

‘It seems that the wind and the currents made it too difficult to cross the strait,' Robert explained to the other knights. ‘He is also worried that tomorrow might bring a worsening of the wind, though, thank St Christopher, there seems no sign of that damned
bora
, which could take us back to Ragusa or even beyond.'

The cold, grey dawn showed them that the shipmaster was right. Once they left the shelter of Zirje, they were hit by a blustery half-gale, which took them towards the north-west, in spite of the crew's efforts to get them back into the narrow channels between the mainland and the offshore islands of Kornat and Pasman.

The cog was far more seaworthy than the galley, but it was hopeless at sailing more than a few points off the wind. By mid-afternoon, the shipmaster admitted that they had no chance now of getting back into the archipelago that lay outside Zara.

As they raced on out into the open sea before the relentless south wind, Richard's admiral, who was best at understanding the captain's garbled speech, relayed the bad news. ‘He says there is no hope of getting to Zara, unless you wish to wait for days to get back to it after this gale stops.'

The Lionheart rapidly lost his recent good mood in his frustration at being repeatedly thwarted from getting back to his Norman dominions. After a string of choice oaths, he demanded to know where they were going now.

‘The shipmaster says that there is another port called Pola further up the Adriatic, on the peninsula of Istria opposite Venice. It is still within the Kingdom of Hungary and in fact, would be nearer King Bela's capital than Zara.'

Slightly appeased, the king grunted a demand to know how long it would take to get there.

‘If this wind holds, we should be there this time tomorrow,' replied de Turnham. He decided it would be wiser not to repeat that the captain had added ‘If the vessel doesn't founder on the way!'

The rest of that day and the night were yet another miserable time for the weary travellers. The wind grew progressively stronger and as it was dead astern, the
Medusa
pitched rather than rolled, its blunt bow dipping into the waves, then hauling itself up to point at the sky. Big rollers coming up behind them in the narrowing funnel of the Adriatic constantly threatened to ‘poop' the vessel. Poor Baldwin of Bethune had a return of his sickness and spent all his time hunched over the scuppers, retching until nothing came up except a trace of bile. At dawn, the cog still raced on, the gale not abating in the slightest, though its direction backed slightly so that it came from the south-east, which was even worse for them.

‘If this keeps up, we'll land in Venice, not Hungary,' said de Turnham, as he squatted in the shelter of the aftercastle with the others. ‘Though the master has just admitted to me that he has no idea where we are at the moment, only that we are being driven northwards – which any ten-year-old deck boy could have told me!'

‘So how are we going to find this Pola place?' demanded de Wolfe.

The admiral shrugged. ‘It's in the hands of God and his angels – the shipmaster doesn't know! He's used to hugging the coastline and going ashore every night, so the open sea is a mystery to him.'

Even though the crew had lashed up the sail closely to its yard, the
Medusa
was careering along under a bare pole from the pressure of the wind on its blunt stern and the relentless progress of the rollers that endlessly see-sawed the hull.

Once again, few slept for more than a hour or two that night and Gwyn, with his fisherman's senses, sat up in the early hours and listened for a moment. He knew from de Wolfe's breathing that he too was awake and touched him on his shoulder. ‘The wind has dropped a little, but I can smell land!'

Growling, John struggled to a sitting position and sniffed, but smelt nothing but the unwashed bodies around him.

‘And I can hear something, too,' grunted Gwyn. ‘It sounds like surf on a beach.'

At that moment, there were shouts from the crew on watch and simultaneously, the pitching of the cog ceased and was replaced by a rapid careering motion as the hull was seized by breaking waves and hurled towards the land.

Pandemonium broke out as sleepers awoke and the rest leaped to their feet as the ship was driven on to a muddy shore in the darkness. It heeled over slightly and as it came to rest, the door to the king's cuddy banged open and a stentorian voice overcame even the sound of the gale.

‘Jesus and Mary, don't tell me it's another shipwreck!'

A
t the first light of dawn, John de Wolfe stood with Gwyn on a stretch of coarse grass above a muddy shore. He had a momentary sensation of all this having happened before, but then realized that instead of a pebbled beach below a wooded hill in Ragusa Bay, they were stranded on the edge of an apparently limitless marsh, which stretched inland for miles. In the far distance, the jagged peaks of snow-covered mountains lined the northern horizon, whilst nearby, gullies and runnels of brown water meandered between reeds and bullrushes.