by Dave Duncan
He stared at me in silence for a long minute, his face expressionless. Then, “Is shipwreck the best comfort you can offer, Baron Durwin? Tell me some positives you foresee.”
“I wish I could just pour good news out for you, sire, like ale from a barrel, but my skill does not work that way. I admit that I have one sure prophecy to give you, but it is not without its own shadows. I know where you will celebrate Christmas—feasting in a great hall with music and good cheer.”
He smiled then, but his smile was wary. “Who hosts this wondrous Yuletide banquet, and where?”
“It is a mighty castle, sire, Dürnstein by name.”
He frowned. “Sounds German. Whose arms does it bear?”
I braced myself for trouble. “The banner it flies shows one white bar between two red.”
I had never seen those arms in real life, but it had not been hard to find someone aboard who could identify them for me, and Richard certainly knew.
“Leopold?” he roared. “The duke of Austria? That avaricious, pretentious, opportunistic weasel, who tried to claim a major share of the booty in the relief of Acre?” And whose banner had ended in the moat, thrown there by Richard’s own men, or so I had heard. “You would have me fall into his greedy, grasping little hands?”
“Not by my choice, Lord King!”
Richard slumped back on his chair. “Besides, his liege is the German Emperor. I am so far above Leopold’s rank that Henry will undoubtedly demand that Leopold turn me over to him, as the laws of chivalry require. And you tell me that Henry is in league with Philip!”
Here I must tread with care. “But did you not just describe Leopold as greedy, my liege? To King Philip you are a hated foe, to be butchered. To the Germans you will be a very valuable hostage.”
Richard knew what I was thinking, and did not like it, but he nodded. “And of course you assume that the king of England can surely outbid the king of France?”
He took up the wine flask and offered me more until he saw that I had not touched what I already had. For a few minutes we listened to the creaking and splashing of the ship. Then—“There is another possibility,” he said, “and that is Hungary. It has a seaport on the eastern coast of the Adriatic sea, and King Bela’s wife, Margaret, who is King Philip’s half-sister, is also the widow of my late brother Henry. I am on good terms with Bela, and he detests Duke Leopold, so I am sure he would aid me, and his lands abut Saxony in the north. And Saxony is also possible! My sister Matilda was married to Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. She died three years ago, but that Henry would give me safe passage to the Baltic. I could sail to England from there. You follow?”
I said yes, but in fact I had not the slightest idea about all this geography he was throwing at me. In the end it did not matter, so I have never bothered to investigate it.
“So there we are, Latter-day Merlin. If ever a king of England needed a prophet to guide him, it is I. You have never failed me yet, so I must trust you now. Can you find the admiral for me?”
I found de Turnham for him, and he found the captain, who called out the watch. The sailors went aloft to do whatever it was that the sails required. Then the helmsman turned the ship, and soon we were running eastward, before the wind. I found a sheltered corner and went to sleep.
Driven by westerlies, we returned to Corfu much faster than we had left it. As we were entered the harbor, which was strangely empty now, with so many vessels taken out of service for the winter, I saw the king up on the aft castle, conferring with de Turnham. He was pointing and I could tell he was indicating a group of three galleys, rocking at anchor.
Galleys are faster than sailing ships, but their low freeboard cannot tolerate high winds and rough water. They could not carry our horses, nor even all the king’s companions. To venture out to sea in them now, near the end of November, was insanely risky, but men can be bribed to do anything, and the Lionheart never skimped when he wanted something.
He sold off the horses. He made sure that the men he was leaving behind were supplied with money to pay their fare homeward in the spring. I was not asked if I wanted to stay or continue, I was simply told I would be in the king’s boat. I felt it my duty to obey, although I admit I was heartily sick of the hardship. I was the oldest man in the party, and felt it.
We were well into December when we left Corfu for the second time. In the first two days we made excellent progress, but then the weather changed. A wicked storm began to churn the sea, making the rowers’ work impossible. The galley had a sail, but it could do little except run before the wind, and as the tempest rose, we began to ship water. I remembered that I had foreseen a shipwreck.
The Adriatic Sea, as I now learned, is a northward-pointing arm of the Middle Sea, between Italy on the west and the Balkan lands on the east. Venice is at the north end, on the Italian side, although it is an independent state, and likes to think it rules the Adriatic. That claim is increasingly being challenged by the city of Ragusa, on the opposite side, but farther south, and it was toward Ragusa that we ran.
The other two galleys made it safely into the fine harbor there. The king’s did not. Night was falling, the surf was fearsome, and we were up to our knees in icy water. Ahead of us was a rocky shore. We were all praying, but no man was louder than King Richard, and he swore a great oath that he would build a church worth 100,000 Venetian ducats if he were spared. Not all of us made it safely to shore, but he did.
The galley grounded in a gully between two great rocks. Waves rolled past us, then surged back, and the trick was to ride the surf inward and find something to hang onto to resist the backwash. I managed the first part, and then felt myself being swept seaward again. Someone caught my arm and held me until it was safe to struggle landward once more. I did not see who it was, but he must have been as strong as a bull. I still suspect that it was Richard himself, although he just laughed when I asked him later.
“You did warn me about a shipwreck, Merlin. You were right again!”
No. The shipwreck I had foreseen had not contained rocks. There was another still to come.
We scrambled into the woods in search of shelter. Two sailors were missing and three others had broken bones, but that was a small price to pay for such a landfall. Most of us had escaped with scrapes and bruises. Either our luck held or Richard’s donation was accepted with a bonus, for we discovered a small priory. The monks greeted us fulsomely, although we outnumbered them many times over. They lit fires, prepared food, and generally could not have been kinder. Nor did the prior object when I asked him if I might chant over the casualties. It was fortunate that months of war duty had taught me the spells for healing wounds so well that I knew them by heart.
Morning brought a penance of aching bruises and a bright sunny day to mock our ordeal. We had eaten all the food on the island, and anxiously awaited information about the other two galleys. Boats were reported approaching from Ragusa, so it was a fair guess that at least some of our companions had survived. I and others had been billeted in the scriptorium, which reminded me that I had not written to Lovise since we left Acre, almost two months ago. How long a letter would take to go from Ragusa to Oxford in midwinter I could not guess, but the shipwreck had been a reminder of mortality, so I asked one of the monks if I might buy a piece of vellum to write a brief letter. He pointed to a box and told me to help myself to anything in it that would serve.
I chose the most worthless scrap I could find. It had originally been quality goat skin, but it had been written on and scraped clean for reuse at least twice. Peering at the shadowy remains of letters, I decided that the earlier texts had been written in either Arabic or Hebrew. Only a genuine miser could grudge me this, so I found a quill and some ink and sat down to write to my dearest. A scriptorium, by definition, must have light, and large windows on a breezy winter morning mean that a scribe must spend more time blowing on his hands and chafing them than he does writing, but I scribbled away in a frenzy of loneliness and homesickness. When I had
reached the bottom of the page, I signed it and sprinkled sand on it.
Then I read over what I had written, which was not at all what I had thought I was writing. I had not addressed it to my wife, and I had not signed my own name to it. The writing bore little resemblance to my usual hand. After staring at it in bewilderment for some time, I decided that the ghost of Myrddin Wyllt was directing me, and I must continue to trust in its benevolence.
A little later that morning, I found a chance to sidle up to the king and hand him the little scroll. “I think this must have slipped out of your portfolio, sire. It looks as if it may be important—some day.”
He frowned, read it over, and lost color. “Where did you get this?”
“I, um, not sure where it came from. All I can say is—keep it safe.”
He stared at me for a moment and then made the sign of the cross.
It was to be a long time yet before I learned what had happened to Lars, but this would be a good place to summarize his adventures. The two queens had a relatively uneventful voyage from Acre to Italy, disembarking in Naples, and then traveling by land to Rome. There they were made welcome by old Pope Celestine, and they were content to remain until in Rome they learned where Richard was and what he was doing. They would have received the latest news, which was that Queen Eleanor and Justiciar Coutances were managing to hold England together. Lord John had not yet managed to seize the crown, although he was poised to do so the moment word of his brother’s death arrived.
Nor had King Philip annexed Richard’s domains in France, but he had warrants out for his arrest in virtually every port from Spain to the Hungarian border. No one knew where the Lionheart was, or even when he had left Acre, if he even had.
Lars had no desire to waste months doing nothing in Rome. He offered to carry letters for the two queens, and they obtained a passport for him from the Pope. While his king and father were struggling to go anywhere, Lars made travel look easy. He managed to buy passage on one of the last boats to sail from Ostia, and landed in Marseilles. No one was much interested in a twenty-year-old minstrel, and anyone who thought to impress him as sailor or foot soldier was easily deflected by the papal passport.
He purchased a couple of horses and set out for Aquitaine. There he located Otto of Saxony, one of King Richard’s many nephews, who was running the duchy in his uncle’s absence. After that, Lars traveled royally, with an armed escort, all the way to Dieppe and the tricky crossing to England. Even there the sun shone on him—literally this time—and he played his gittern and sang to the sailors. He stepped ashore that same evening, refreshed and happy to be back in a country where people spoke his mother tongue and knew how ale ought to be brewed.
He reported to Queen Eleanor in Winchester, and then rode home to Oxford, where he found his mother chopping herbs in the dispensary. He claimed later that this was the first time he had ever seen her weep.
By then all Christendom knew that the Lionheart had left the Holy Land, but nobody knew where he was. His brother, of course, was already insisting that he must have drowned.
Which he very nearly did in our second shipwreck.
Ragusa was a bustling, thriving city, a port that served as a market place for Muslims, Christians, both Catholic and Orthodox, and even for folk from as far away as Barcelona and Damascus. After our wreck on Lokra, any sensible voyager would have settled down there for the winter and resumed his travels in the spring, but the Lionheart had an empire to lose and dared not tarry.
Ragusa was also awash with money, home to both banks of its own and representatives of the great Venetian and Tuscan houses. Because the king of England had unlimited credit, in two days he somehow formalized his impetuous donation of a church and arranged for the remaining two galleys to continue the voyage. How much he paid their owners for that death-defying contract I never learned. The two galleys could not carry us all, so he again provided some men with money to find their own way home. After a special mass in the cathedral, he herded the rest of us aboard, and off we went.
I assumed, although I hated the thought, that he had accepted my vision of him as a Yuletide guest of Duke Leopold, and was therefore heading to Austrian territory. I did not ask him, and nobody else seemed to know his intentions. He might have hoped to sneak all the way across Austria in disguise to seek the safety of Saxony and the Baltic, or he might have been on his way to Venice, which could have agreed to smuggle him across Europe disguised as merchant. I doubted that, because everyone knew that if you tried to buy a Venetian’s mother, he wouldn’t agree until he had asked around to see if he could get a better offer. Possibly Richard’s hopes were still set on King Bela of Hungary. All of these prospective destinations were located at the northern end of the Adriatic.
Whatever his aim, the weather made the final decision. A storm blew up and the galleys were helpless, shipping water and driven helter-skelter by the wind. Waterlogged, they ran aground in the surf and at once began to break up. We had to wade and swim ashore in rain and darkness. I was struck on the head by a floating oar and almost drowned. I swallowed so much seawater that I had to be held upside down to drain. My memories of the rest of that night are fuzzy indeed.
We had made landfall, if the term can be stretched to serve, somewhere in the armpit of the Adriatic. The coast was low and marshy, but when morning came, one of the sailors could testify that we were not far from Aquileia, and that there was a monastery there.
I managed to walk some of the way and was carried the rest. I remember little of our visit, mostly just lying on a very hard, narrow bed in the sanitarium, and croaking to an angry monk that I did not want to be treated with leeches, thank you. It was a cold and narrow room, very dark because the shutters were closed against the storm. They rattled and whistled. A dying monk on one side of me never stopped croaking psalms in a mixture of Latin and a patois so garbled that only angels could have understood it. On the other hand lay one of our former oarsmen, writhing in pain. In my feverish condition, I simultaneously wished that Lars was there and thanked God that he wasn’t.
Our stay there was brief, just long enough for Richard to acquire horses and less conspicuous clothing. He was facing a journey of weeks through country that was itself as hostile as its inhabitants and the current winter weather. His following had shrunk to around twenty, even if I was included—I, who counted as much less than one. He came in person to see how I fared, looming over my cot in the gloom like a red-bearded pine tree.
“Are you well enough to travel, Baron?”
The thought of standing up was terrifying, but I said, “When, Lord King?”
“Right now, and you are addressing the merchant Hugo, returning from pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”
“You are still my liege, Master Hugo—if you could just give me a hand up.” My head alone weighed more than a horse. He hauled me upright without trouble and steadied me as my wits flitted around like a flock of bats. Then he lowered me back down again.
“Your fever is worse than mine,” he growled. “Stay here and live.”
He turned away. I was too relieved to argue, but just then that accursed monk with the leeches appeared beside my cot again and I raged at him to go and do something anatomically impossible—German is a good language for cursing. The Lionheart whirled around and came back. “You can speak their tongue?”
I said, “No, Lord King!” but he didn’t believe me. In no time I was dressed, outside, and being hoisted onto a horse.
In Roman times, Aquileia had been one of the world’s great cities, but Attila and his Huns sacked it in 452, and the monastery was about all that remained. In as much as anyone held overall authority in that area, it was probably Duke Leopold, although others might dispute that. The monks could converse in Latin, and Richard and most of his company understood it, but they were at sea in the dialect of German that the local people spoke.
In truth I could not speak German either, but I had spent all my life working with documents written in what in
England we called the Old Tongue, and some of those incantations, like the Myrddin Wyllt, dated back almost to the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. The Old Tongue and Old German had so many similar words that I could recognize much of what the locals said, likely much better than I could have understood the imperial nobility or even city-dwelling commoners.
And Fate or the Good Lord had put me in the next bed to that delirious monk with the psalms. He had a repertoire of four, which he sang in a mixture or Latin and German, and I knew three of them, so after a couple of days I could have sung along with him, had I been capable of singing anything. In short, I had picked up a working vocabulary. My grammar was hopeless, but given enough time, I could understand and make myself understood. In the next couple of weeks, I was to become almost proficient.
And so began what must surely be the worst journey that any king of England ever endured, and was certainly mine. Fortunately, my memories of it are very patchy. The sight of the great icy mountains ahead scared me so much that I closed my eyes. I did not ride, I just sat on the saddle and shivered, letting my mount go wherever the others went.
The sailors remained at the monastery, probably intending to make their way south to Venice. I knew all the rest of us, of course, those who had survived the latest shipwreck, although four of the Knights Templar who had joined us at Cyprus tended to keep very much to themselves. Some who had left Acre with us, almost two months ago now, had parted at Corfu or Rugosa. Some had drowned. More were to die shortly.
There were no roads, only trails and forest paths, plus cold and drizzly rain. That first night we came to a town below a big castle on a hill. King Henry had rid England of private strongholds, but I have often wondered if there is a single hill in the rest of Christendom that lacks a castle or the remains of one. We invaded the inn, a tiny cottage, which we overwhelmed. I found a corner not too far from the fire where I could sit on the floor, lean back in the angle, and doze. I refused food, drank what they called beer, and wakened only when people tripped over my feet. I think I was really hoping I would die soon, or that they would all just go away in the morning and leave me behind by mistake.
