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 Sable 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 Sable 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 Sable 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 Sable’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 Sable 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 Sable 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 Sable 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.
They sailed to Rhodes without incident the following day, and found the remainder of their former fleet already there, waiting for them. The reunion was occasion for modest celebration, once they had ascertained that no more than seven vessels of the original two hundred and nineteen—disregarding of course the missing dromons— had been irretrievably lost. Henry St. Clair stood once again at the prow of the King’s galley as they
