because the words were in a language he did not know. He assumed that it would have been the latter, for that formed the backbone of one of his greatest plaints as Master-at-Arms. He was constantly harping, not merely to Richard but to all the allied kings and leaders and any intermediate commander who would listen, upon the increasing urgency governing the need for clear-cut, crisp, and concise communications.
The Arabs—Henry always thought of them first as Arabs and only afterwards as Saracens, the currently fashionable name for them—had two great advantages, he would point out at every opportunity. First, they were as numerous as the grains of desert sands, drawing their warriors from a vast area that stretched all the way from Arabia, Syria, and the immensity of Babylon and Persia down through Palestine and westward across the Delta of the Nile to embrace Egypt and its neighboring territories across the north of Africa. Reports of Saladin’s fielding a hundred thousand men and more were commonplace. And they were apparently inexhaustible, capable of generating new multitudes of warriors as soon as earlier hosts, having done their duty as they saw it, began to drift away homeward to visit their families and tend to their affairs before returning another day.
The second and greatest advantage that the Arabs enjoyed over the Franks, however, was that they all spoke the same language, and St. Clair found himself marveling constantly at that. No matter whence they came in the Islamic lands, they all spoke, and most of them read, Arabic. There were regional differences, of course, but only in the spoken tongue, and none of those variations prevented fluent communication. The written language, of course, was immutable throughout the Saracen empire. St. Clair despaired at times of ever bringing the importance of that single, staggering fact to the attention of the Frankish leadership. In their eyes, the Saracens were infidels and therefore savages, forever beneath their notice, other than for the need to fight and destroy them. But who cared that they all spoke a single language? How important could that be? They spoke gibberish to civilized, Christian ears.
Henry St. Clair had been moved to fury on many occasions by this arrogant and ignorant indifference. It seemed unimportant to these fools, he often thought in the privacy of his own mind, that their own men often could not speak to each other. And that inability was not merely a matter of gross differences, like Frenchmen being unable to speak with Germans, Englishmen, Danes, or Italians. It was far worse and far more serious than that: a Frenchman from Paris simply could not understand a sailor from Marseille, and few from Marseilles could speak Oc, the language of the Languedoc. It was the same in England and in every other country in Christendom —people from different regions of the same country could seldom understand one another.
Henry grunted in disgust and pushed the thought from his mind. It was an old and pointless train of thought, promising nothing but frustration and ill will. But he allowed his thoughts to return to his long-lost friend Torquil, a Danish mercenary. Although neither of them had ever understood the other’s language, they had enjoyed many adventures together before Torquil eventually fell to a random crossbow bolt in a squalid little scuffle in the foothills of the Alps. Torquil had been a great eater and a renowned scavenger who could find food, it was said, in an empty coffin, and his greatest coup had been the “capture” of a “stray” shoat outside of the besieged city of Le Havre, in one of the several wars between King Henry of England and his rebellious sons. The shoat had still been suckling when Torquil took it, the sow’s milk still trickling from the corner of its mouth, and to this day the smell of roasting pig brought back visions of that night and the succulence of that meat, the first that Henry and his friends had eaten in more than a month. Thinking of that now, and remembering the occasion, he felt the first stirrings of hunger and went looking for his pack, where he had stowed his personal rations: a thick, heavily spiced sausage, several sticks of goat cheese, a jar of olives pickled in brine, and a loaf of still-fresh bread. He ate alone at the galley’s prow and watched the sun set, noting how the temperature dropped swiftly as soon as the light was gone. A short time later, in the gathering dark, he drank some water and lowered himself to the deck, where he rolled himself in a blanket against the vessel’s side, out of the chill of the April evening and out of the way of anyone else who might come up there.
He fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the waves, and when he awoke, still in darkness, he knew instantly that something was different, but it took him several moments to identify what the difference was. First came the silence, deeper and more profound than it had been when he fell asleep, and even as he absorbed that, it was broken by low voices and movement as other men began to stir and rouse themselves; and then the silence unfolded further, becoming the stillness of an absolute lack of motion. Someone had set a burning lantern into a metal bracket on the ship’s bow above his head since he had fallen asleep, and the flame within it burned perfectly, a golden leaf of purest fire surrounded by a lambent halo containing not even a flicker of variation. As he lay looking up at it, with a growing sense of wonder, he realized that the comforting motion of the deck beneath him, the rocking that had lulled him to sleep, had vanished, too. Somewhere behind him, on the rowing deck, there came a loud clatter, followed by a string of oaths and cursing and other, less recognizable sounds that increased in volume and variety as he listened. And finally, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand, he sat up and looked about him, his breast filled with nameless apprehension.
His first instinct was to check the sky for signs of bad weather, but there was nothing threatening to see up there. The entire firmament seemed cloudless, washed in pale rose and violet, and the few stars that remained visible were fading rapidly in the dawn light. He recognized that the light source was behind him, and pulled himself to his feet, facing the east just as the first blazing edge of the sun tipped the farthest rim of the horizon. It was a scene of flawless, staggering beauty, and he remembered that this was Good Friday, the day on which the Blessed Savior had been crucified for the salvation of mankind. All the auspices, it seemed to him at that moment, boded well for the human race that morning. He turned slightly to his left, towards the body of the ship, to see if anyone else had noticed the beauty of the dawn, and was mildly surprised to see that the rail was lined two-deep with men, all of them gazing silently outward. After a moment of smiling and having none of them return his smile, he realized that they were not looking at him or at the rising sun at all, but were gazing fixedly ahead of the ship, southward. Mystified, he followed their gaze and felt his mouth sag open in wonder that he could have looked this way before and failed to see what was now so glaringly obvious.
The surface of the sea was like glass, unbroken by the slightest ripple or hint of movement, and stamped upon its surface everywhere were perfect replicas of the ships that floated motionless above them. Nothing stirred anywhere; not even a passing seabird disturbed the utter perfection of the image. And then someone coughed somewhere at the stern of the ship and the sound marked the end of the reverent silence that had held them all. Men began to talk then, and to move about, and the first tentative stirrings quickly took on purpose and intent.
Sir Henry folded up his blanket and thrust it into his pack, then lodged the pack securely beneath the ship’s rail before making his way back to the stern, where Master Besanceau was conferring with several of his officers. As he neared the rear platform, the ship’s drummer drew himself up to attention and began to beat out a regular, high-pitched rhythm on his tightly stretched drumhead. It was clearly a summons of some kind, and St. Clair surmised that it would be answered by the commanders of the other four galleys of the rear line.
“Have you ever seen the like, Master-at-Arms?”
The speaker, who had come up behind him unnoticed, was a man called Montagnard, one of St. Clair’s own officers, in charge of the hundred men billeted on the galley. He was a strange and taciturn man, Sir Henry thought, who would go for days on end without saying an unnecessary word, and then would suddenly break his silence, speaking fluidly and betraying a varied and convoluted background. Clearly this was one such day.
“The weather, you mean? No, I never have. It is almost uncanny. What is happening, do you know?”
“We are becalmed.”
“Aye, I can see that. But is this a common thing? How long does it last?”
“It’s not uncommon. I’ve experienced it once before, in the Bay of Biscay, when we were trying to beat into La Rochelle and suddenly the wind died and did not blow again for two days. It is a frightening experience, almost a religious one, for there is no rhyme or reason to it. No one ever knows what causes it or how long it will last. It is strange, though, is it not?” He nodded towards where the two Masters were conferring deeply. “It even upsets them, and it takes much to do that. You know what they say about it, don’t you?”
“No, what do they say?”
“God is holding His breath.” Montagnard turned to face Sir Henry now. “And what happens when you hold your breath? You have to release it again, sooner rather than later. Even if you are God. And depending upon the length of time you have been holding it, the gust, when you release it, may be strong.”
“You mean it’s going to storm?”
“Not necessarily, but it might. In the meantime, we are among the few people in the fleet who can move at all. We have our oars. Most of the others must simply sit and wait for the wind to come back. That should please
