The last thought Marcus had was for the gold, broken up and scattered into the unknown depths, and then his mind closed over and he fell into a black chasm
27
MADNESS
Deep in the sea are riches beyond compare. But if you seek safety, it is on the shore.
Saadi, Sufi poet
The Eagle lay some distance from the beach. A part of her was sitting up half-visible out of the water with the tide going out around her like liquid glass. Roger was sat upon the beach surveying the dark bay as first light made a silhouette of her broken shape.
He and the grand commander, together with his ship’s captain and a small number of men, had survived the quarrel with the English ship. Now the sea was spent. The only evidence of her temper were the dead horses, dead men, split wood, barrels and torn sails that lay strewn over the beach. Only one animal had managed to swim ashore and it now stood shivering and twitching its ears, looking this way and that with a wild eye as if wary of further evils.
Roger had, for a time, observed the grand commander standing before the calm waves, staring and staring as if such a concentrated effort would undo all that had passed. The man stood without a movement except a regular shaking of the head, a spasm of the face and a vacant look in the eye. Roger decided he had to take matters into his own hands and he sent Andrew to find wood for a fire. When the old knight returned and a good fire was made, the slaves and what was left of his men sat before it shivering and Roger de Flor too sat down, like a dog guarding his flock.
He was watching Marcus with a keen eye, wondering what the man was up to, when, perhaps feeling himself observed, the commander began making his way to him, shaking from cold. When he was standing over him in the thinning darkness Marcus gave him a smile made of twitches and ticks.
‘The Eagle is full of sea,’ he said, patting his sides.
Roger de Flor, with arms crossed over bent knees, wiped his face of salt and with his own shiver nodded. ‘It is likely to be so.’ There was a wry smile.
‘And the gold? It shall not be drowned.’ He bent his body down until his face was thrust at Roger’s disfigured one, until they breathed together that air between them. ‘It shall not!’ His lips moved in a tremble as if he were asleep and worried by a dream. With an effort noted and observed by the mercenary, he whispered more potent than a scream, for his eyes bulged and the veins stood out at his temples, ‘A moment ago an eagle flew above the galley . . . moreover, see that sky? As calm as a summer’s day! It is an omen!’
Roger stared into the cold blue face of that man, stooped and half smiling with veined, troubled eyes, and realised two things. He realised, firstly, what he had known in Cyprus, and then at Atouguia, where he had observed the man’s friendship with the gold: that Marcus, upon taking charge of it, had leant his soul upon its salvation and was, therefore, unwilling to let the gold rest. He understood it. To lose a fortune was one thing, but the plain fact that this Templar was perched on the threshold of a new thing was Roger’s second realisation: namely, that such a quandary laid upon the shoulders of this man had accomplished in him a loss of his wits.
The strangeness of the situation in which Roger found himself, between the madness of that eye and the madness of this ill-fated quest, pinched at his scarred temples and he mumbled, ‘So? What omen is it then? Good or bad?’
Marcus turned an alert and sudden ear to him as if such mumblings were to be regarded as a sign of quarrel. In this way they remained a moment, mistrusting one another until, with a jerk of the head, Marcus straightened his back. ‘Bad! Bad! It means that I shall not let it drown here, not in this impious sea!’ He let this rush out of him like a roar. ‘Not in it! Because I do not know what is there, beyond that reef !’ He pointed to it. ‘In that darkness! In that deep darkness where the waves shall pound it and the seagrass shall grow over it. I shall not bear it, and furthermore, the gold shall not bear it! It shall not be drowned! It shall not!’ He looked up to see all men regarding him with stares. ‘Gather the slaves . . . they can swim to it . . . they shall bring it back, handful by handful if it comes to that. Even if it takes a year!’ He stopped from lack of breath.
‘Listen to me,’ came Roger de Flor’s mild voice. ‘We are lucky to live, you and I and these men, we have no choice except to leave it drown. It lies in those depths beyond the reef. It is deep there and no man, not even the divers of Greece, would wish to go down into that unknown blackness to find it. God has laid it to rest. What we must do now is find a village and horses –’
‘My orders,’ Marcus said slowly, patiently, ‘were to take the gold to Scotland, not to the bottom of the sea!’