But just then, between Venice, Cyprus, the Pope and the Accaioulo, we had gold.
Sabraham used some of the gold to buy informers within the brigands, so that we might work out any plots against the legate. He was thorough, and he trusted no one. Even me. Later, as you will hear, he shared some information with me, when he had no choice.
Ah, Chaucer. You know Sabraham, eh?
Later, in June, I heard that there had been a mysterious riot among the Gascons, and three men had died – with crossbow shafts in their heads. An odd sort of riot; Sabraham’s sort.
We left the lagoon, and loaded the ships, and I relaxed.
After all, we only had to fight the Saracens.
After a day at sea, it became clear to me that our hosts, the Venetians, had very different goals than the Pope, the legate, or the king. This didn’t surprise me unduly; I was a professional soldier, and I was aware that employers were often at odds with their own soldiers over strategy – but having Nerio in the next hammock on board the Saint Niccolò gave me direct access to his Florentine perspective on the Venetians and the Genoese, the Pope and the French. He knew more of Venetian policy than Ser Matteo Corner, who commanded our magnificent galley. Every night, whether we were in one of the small ports of the Adriatic or nestled stern first on a beach cooking on the hard-packed gravel, we’d debate the possible targets of the crusade.
Miles Stapleton assumed we’d go directly from the rendezvous at Rhodes to assault Jaffa, the port for Jerusalem. He described this one night, and Fra Peter laughed aloud. He was sitting on a folding stool, checking the leather straps on his harness and rubbing oil into them to protect them against the salt air.
‘Jaffa isn’t so much a port as an open beach,’ he said. ‘It’s unprotected in bad weather.’
Miles nodded. ‘Ah, but God will provide us good weather. And it is the closest port to Jerusalem.’
Fra Peter shook his head. ‘We need a good port where we can take water and food; a port that can be defended from the Egyptian fleet.’
One of the French Hospitallers looked up from his own armour. ‘Acre?’ he asked.
The older men debated Acre and Tyre, both ports that had been held by Christians, almost within living memory. Acre had fallen almost eighty years before, to the Mamluks. Tyre had been lost through infighting and sheer foolishness.
I had never even seen a map of the Holy Land. I suppose that I thought of the world as a vast plate with Jerusalem at its centre, and I assumed that, like any great city, it would be easy to reach.
Fra Peter scratched his chin and went back to his leather. But another night, in a waterfront taverna on Corfu, he sat tapping his teeth with his thumb, clearly impatient at my poor geography. He took the hulls of pistachios for cities and used wine to draw coastlines.
‘Look,’ he said, as much to me as to Miles or Lord Grey. We were all shockingly ignorant of the Levant. ‘This is Anatolia, which juts like a sore thumb out of Asia. Two hundred years ago it was all in the hands of the Greeks and many Greeks live there yet. Here’s Greece and Romania … here’s Venice.’ He drew the coastlines in broad sweeps. ‘Under Anatolia’s thumb, the coast of Syria runs almost straight south.’ He placed pistachios. ‘Here is Venice, up in the armpit of the Adriatic. Here’s old Athens, out at the end of Greece. Here’s Constantinople, where Asia and Europe meet. The Dardanelles, the Pontic Sea, the Bosporus, the Euxine, which is ruled by Genoa and the Bulgarians, these days. Here to the south of the Dardanelles are a mess of Greek islands, some held by the schismatic Greeks, some by the Genoese, and a few by our Order – Lesvos, Chios, Rhodos. South on the coast of Asia-Syria is Tyre. South of Tyre is Acre. South of Acre is the open beach of Jaffa near Jerusalem.’ Fra Peter clicked down the last city, and a silence fell.