shield long snatched away by a howling wrench of wind — and waiting at any moment for the ship to founder and a black wall of water to fall on me and drown my pain. But by God’s grace, she did not. And at dawn a weak watery sun rose in the east and I raised my head from its misery and saw that the tempest had miraculously eased. Our brave vessel was scudding along on a brisk westerly wind, still travelling at an alarming speed, but now was shouldering through big green waves with confidence, and causing no more than a fine spray to whip the ship’s sides with each impact. We had lost one man overboard, a sailor who had bravely tried to secure a flapping rope and who had been swept to his doom by a freakishly large burst of seawater but, apart from that poor soul, we were relatively unharmed. We all joined together in a prayer of heartfelt thanksgiving, and I realised that I had been deeply wrong to doubt in God’s grace, even for a moment. I should have known that he would save us: we were setting out to do his good work, to save the cradle of Christianity itself. We rinsed out our mouths with fresh water, stripped our soaking clothes from our bodies, and began to look about for the other ships of the fleet.
Astoundingly, as the clouds cleared overhead and the sea became even calmer, I could see that many of the other ships of the fleet were still afloat, though none were near us. They were scattered over the surface of the moving sea as far as the horizon on all sides, but still swimming bravely. It truly felt as if the hand of God had protected us from the full fury of the Devil. And, best of all, most wonderful of all, on our starboard bow no more than two dozen miles away, I could make out the low grey-green mass of the island of Crete.
We stayed for two days in the old harbour of Heracleon on Crete, recovering our spirits and waiting for the fleet to reassemble. Although we slept on the ships, there was time to visit dry land and bring on board fresh provisions and water — much of our stores had been damaged by water during the storm. I hired a local skiff and visited Robin, Little John and Reuben aboard their ship the Holy Ghost, and learnt that most of our fighting men were well and we had lost no more than a dozen to the storm, none of whom I knew well. One of our fellows, a seemingly steady Yorkshireman, had run mad during the storm and had tried to attack the master of his ship before throwing himself into the sea. But the majority of our force was intact and bobbing snugly in Heracleon harbour. Despite this news, I was heart-sick with worry: twenty-odd ships had disappeared in the storm, among them the richly appointed royal cog carrying Princess Berengaria, Queen Joanna — and my darling Nur.
On the morning of the third day, when it was quite clear that no more ships would join us in Crete, we headed on for Rhodes, which was a good place to gain news, situated as it was on a major sea route. I was racked with guilt: I had loved two women who were not of the Christian faith, a Jew and a Muslim, and I wondered if God, as a punishment for consorting with unbelievers, had decided to take both of them from me. I suspected that I was suffering from a touch of sea fever: I had hardly known Ruth, and to say that I truly loved her was a lie. My worry and guilt over Nur, though, was real enough. I remembered every time we had made love, and tortured myself with those exquisite memories. Why had I been so stupid as to send her into service with the Princess? I should have kept her by my side so that I could protect her, as I had promised to do. That was nonsense, of course, and I knew it — how could I protect her from the sea-borne wrath of God? — but that knowledge did not ease my pain.
We spent ten days in Rhodes, waiting for news of the other ships and because the King fell ill with a mysterious malady that kept him abed for a week vomiting and shuddering with fever. However, looking back I can remember very little about the time there, consumed as I was with worry about Nur. But we did gain some intelligence. Reuben seemed to have made contact with friends of his in the Holy Land, though how, I did not know. It seemed that King Philip was now outside the walls of Acre — along with German and Italian contingents, which had been there some months — and he was preparing to assault the ancient fortified town. In a sort of cruel joke, the besieging Christian army was itself besieged by Saladin’s forces: so there was a Muslim garrison in the stronghold of Acre, surrounded by Christians, who were themselves surrounded by Muslims. The situation did not sound very hopeful for our fellow pilgrims.
Finally we heard news of the ships, and it was mostly bad. Several had been sunk by the storm, and many, many men had drowned, but a few ships had been driven before the tempest. And the Princess’s cog, the noble ship that contained my precious girl and the royal women, had made it — battered and bruised — to Limassol in Cyprus. My heart skipped in my chest, my head spun: Nur lived!
Cyprus was a rich land — like Sicily it abounded with fruit trees, olives, grapes and corn, but it was ruled by an evil tyrant, a upstart called Isaac Comnenus, scion of the ruling house of Byzantium, who was now calling himself the Emperor of Cyprus having seized the island by force a few years back with the help of Greek and Armenian mercenaries. King Richard was incensed because the Emperor had imprisoned some of the men from our ships, which had been beached there after the storm, though not the royal ship, thank the Lord, which was anchored unharmed in a small bay to the west of Limassol. The imprisoned men had been ill-treated, despite their status as holy pilgrims, and the Emperor’s men had seized the Great Seal of England, which had been carried by Sir Roger Malchiel, one of Richard’s most trusted knights, who had drowned when his ship was wrecked on the rocks of Cyprus. The Emperor had invited the royal women to come ashore but, knowing the fate of their fellow pilgrims, imprisonment for ransom, they had refused. The royal ship had two floating consorts, filled with crossbowmen, plus a handful of men-at-arms. When the Emperor had tried to board the three battered ships, his men had been answered with a barrage of crossbow bolts and forced to withdraw. Berengaria was already wildly popular with the men and they would have laid down their lives to protect her from the Tyrant of Cyprus. So it was stalemate: the three ships were too battered to leave the bay and venture into the open sea; and the Emperor could not force the women to come to the land. When the royal ship asked permission to send a party ashore to collect fresh water and provisions, the Emperor flatly refused.
It was a bad mistake on Isaac Comnenus’s part. King Richard was not a man to accept an insult to his sister or his future Queen; so, quite casually, it seemed, he decided that we would take the island of Cyprus by force.
‘He’s gone mad,’ said Will Scarlet, as we shared a huge bowl of fish soup in a sea-front tavern in Rhodes harbour. It was Lent again, and meat had been forbidden to the entire army. ‘We must go to King Philip’s aid at Acre,’ Will continued, ‘and help him to take the city; beat Saladin, then on to Jerusalem. We can’t go off and conquer what is practically a whole country just because its ruler was rude to us. He should go and get his women, bring them safely back here and we’ll all set off for where God intends us to go: the Holy Land.’
I understood his outrage. I was as keen as anyone to reach our destination, but I also knew that Richard was not going to take Cyprus just to avenge a slight. ‘Robin says the island is the key to recovering the Holy Land,’ I replied blowing on a spoonful of the rich, fragrant soup to cool it. I was pleased that the food was good, since I was paying for it. Will had always been poor, but he was even more so now that he had been reduced to the ranks and was living on a common soldier’s wage. What he did not know, and I did, was that he was about to have to get by on even less. Robin had run through the money given to him by King Richard, and was in debt again. Nobody in our division was likely to see wages in the near future, and I did not begrudge Will a bowl of soup: I still had most of the purse of gold that the King had given me.
‘Quite apart from the wealth of the island, which is considerable,’ I continued, ‘and the fact that Isaac has no genuine claim to be its ruler, if we take and hold Cyprus, we have a base from which we can attack anywhere along the coast of Outremer. If we lose at Acre, which is almost our last toehold in the Levant, we can still come back to regroup in Cyprus. Robin thinks that Richard had always planned to take the island, and that this disrespect shown to his women merely gives him a decent excuse to invade.’
‘But it could take months,’ protested Will. ‘If the local lords back the Emperor we could be in for a long hard and costly fight.’
‘Maybe, but Reuben tells me the Cypriot knights do not love Comnenus. With luck, Richard could take the island in one or two battles. If he shows that he’s winning, the local lords will quickly come over to our side.’
Will still looked unhappy, but I was thinking that it might be very satisfying to meet the man who had denied my Nur fresh water and food, who was, as we sat here eating, torturing her with thirst and hunger. We finished the soup in silence.
The coast of Cyprus lay before us like a naked whore: lush, inviting, but only to be won at a price. Below the pretty whitewashed houses of the town of Limassol, which clustered around a large church and winked at us gaily in the spring sunlight, there was a long stretch of yellow beach: fringed with trees, gently rising, smooth, and the perfect place to land shallow boats. Beyond the town were the rich groves of oranges and lemons, stretching away into the distance, and beyond them, field upon field of gnarled olive trees rising up the slope to the mass of low
