Martyr's Fire (20 page)

He smiled at the result he had hoped to achieve. Thomas’s face had darkened with sudden concern.

“Look about you,” the deck hand waved. “The castle at the prow”—his voice became smug—“the fighting tower at the front is how I should explain it proper for you land people, lets us fire arrows and such from above at any raiders who draw close.”

He then waved at their destination on the cog, ahead of them by some fifty feet and several dozen tons of wool piled in orderly stacks of bales. “The sterncastle—the tower at the rear—is for important guests.”

The deck hand sighed. “A bed and privacy. What gold can’t buy!”

Then he remembered he had superiority because of his knowledge and immediately began lecturing again. “We’ve got oars—we call them sweeps—should the gales be too rough or should we need to outrun pirates. You might be asked to man one then.”

Now, Thomas said or did nothing to stop the flow of words he barely heard.

Dangerous gales and pirate attacks. What folly had brought him here? The words of an old man who had betrayed him. And some vague references in his secret books. Such madness to begin the journey, let alone hope in its success.

Yet what else was there to do? The reward on his head had been increased, and with the Priests of the Holy Grail slowly controlling town after
town, there soon would be no place safe left for him in northern England. Unless he chose to live the uncertain life of an outlaw, and his contest for life and freedom against that wily Robin Hood had shown how dangerous that might be.

The deck hand interrupted his thoughts. “Here you are. The sterncastle. My advice is that you tie the dog inside. There’ll be enough grumbles about a dog enjoying the shelter denied us crew without his presence outside as a daily reminder.”

Thomas nodded.

The deck hand hesitated, an indication he knew he should not ask. But his curiosity was too strong. “Our destination is Lisbon. Do you intend to go beyond Portugal?”

The scowl he received from Thomas was answer enough.

I’m fortunate we depart before you hear about the gold offered for my head. The less you know the better
.

The deck hand stumbled back awkwardly to make room for Thomas to enter the dank and dark sterncastle.

Most certainly the Druid spies will someday discover I escaped England on the
Dragon’s Eye,
and eager will be the sailors to impart that information for the slightest amount of gold. They cannot know my destination is that of the Last Crusaders. Jerusalem. The Holy City
.

If the deck hand believes this to be luxury
, Thomas thought with a sour grin,
then he and all the crew have my sympathy
.

As if in agreement at the squalor of the dark and cramped quarters, hardly more than walls and a low roof, the puppy beneath his arm whined.

“You like it no more than I?”

Thomas set Beast on the rough wooden floor. He shivered, then crawled beneath the crude bed.

“They told us two weeks to Lisbon if the weather is favorable,” Thomas told his now-unseen companion. “And crossed themselves when I asked how long if the weather wasn’t.”

Another answering whine.

Thomas smiled. A week earlier, Beast had first growled fearlessly as Thomas entered the cave after his absence of several days, caused, of course, by the time spent captive among the outlaws led by Robin Hood. The fearless growls had then changed to yips of total joy as the puppy had recognized Thomas.

Thomas had responded to the barking and jumping with equal joy, something that had surprised him greatly. True, he had not intended to leave the dog to die slowly in the cave, and indeed, he had worried upon his capture that the puppy would die the slow lingering death of starvation. But Thomas did not want to be burdened with concern for anything except his goal of winning Magnus. And, until that joy at their reunion had so surprised him, he had intended to leave the puppy somewhere with peasants. Instead, he had spent two days in the cave, poring through the ancient
pages of knowledge or staring in thought at the natural rock chimney that allowed sunlight to enter, uncaring of the aches that still battered his every move because of the fierce fight with Robin Hood.

Those two days he had puzzled his next move. Yes, Magnus seemed out of reach. But almost before he had learned to run, the quest for Magnus had been instilled in him by his mother, who disguised herself as his childhood nurse.

Without Magnus to pursue, what else had he in life?

So, despite the near impossibility of his task, he could not let it go.

And at the end of the second day in the cave, Thomas realized the only chance of victory, no matter how slim, would be in trusting Gervaise one more time and uncovering the reason the books had been hidden. The only clues he had were vague references to the Last Crusade, written in the page margins of two of the books. And simply because they were too similar to what was in the book given him by Hawkwood during their midnight discussion before the betrayal, he had realized he could not ignore what it meant.

A sudden wave nearly pitched him against the far wall of his quarters. He recovered his balance, but realized the wave was a brutal reminder of the obstacles ahead. Had he chosen correctly the direction for his search? Or was the old man’s book merely bait? To be wrong meant a year wasted, one more year for the Priests of the Holy Grail to add strength to their hold over the area around Magnus.

“Strive to do your best here on earth,”
Thomas heard the patient voice echo in his mind,
“yet in all your pursuit, remember and take heart that it is only the first step toward something much greater.”

At that thought, Thomas’s eyes watered. Gentle and kind Gervaise, the calm speaker of that lesson, now too, like his mother, Sarah, had surely passed from this life, and all in effort for Thomas to save Magnus.

God rest their souls
. Thomas finished his prayer with a sudden determination to continue his quest, if only because of the sacrifices others had made.
And God be here on these cold gray waters with mine
.

Thomas opened his eyes. He had little hope of returning to England, let alone any victory over the Druids who held Magnus.

Shortly after dawn on the third morning, Thomas wanted to die.

“Carry your own bucket out,” the sailor snarled into Thomas’s cramped quarters. Thomas sat hunched over his knees on the edge of his bed. “We’ve no time for soft-headed fools around here.”

The sailor half-dropped and half-threw the empty bucket in Thomas’s direction, then slammed the door in departure.

Thomas could not even lift his head to protest.

A small part of his mind realized that the deck hand had been right about bringing Beast aboard. For two days, food had been brought to his quarters. For two days, each visitor bearing that food—except for a small, dirty cook’s assistant who had stooped to let the puppy lick his hands—had grumbled about wasting it and valuable space on a useless dog.

The larger part of his mind, however, thought nothing about Beast or the obvious resentment among the crew.

Thomas truly wanted to die.

The cog, as promised by the first deck hand, rode the rough seas with no more danger of sinking than if it had been a cork. However, like a cork, it tossed and bobbed on top of the long swells of water as the winds slowly took the cog south through the English Channel and into the vast North Atlantic Ocean.

Only once had Thomas been able to stagger to the door of his quarters to look out upon those waves, green-gray and hardly any different in color than the bleak sky. The waves had seemed like small mountains, bearing
down on the vessel without mercy, lifting it high, then throwing it down again, only to be repeated by the next rushing surge of tons of water.

That sight had propelled him back into the quarters again, where he had fallen to his knees and emptied what little remained of the contents of his stomach into a bucket there for that purpose.

It did not help that the food offered with such little grace consisted of biscuits, salted herring, and weak mead. Merely the smell of the food within the bucket was often enough to make Thomas heave again into the smaller bucket, also meant to serve as a portable latrine.

Beast seemed oblivious to the sea. Indeed, he seemed to delight in the pitches and rolls of the ship, and bounded around the small quarters with enthusiasm.

“Traitor,” Thomas muttered to the puppy as he now attacked the food. “Is it no wonder you grow like a weed, taking my portion with such greed.”

The puppy did not bother to look up.

A vicious wave slammed the side of the cog and knocked Thomas a foot sideways.

He groaned at the nausea that overwhelmed him and prepared for the now-familiar tightening and release of his stomach. His ribs racked with renewed pain as he leaned over the slop bucket and violently threw up.

The cold wind bit the skin of his face and throat and provided Thomas a slight measure of relief as he lurched from his quarters at the rear of the ship.

Below him, in the belly midship, was the crude tentlike roof of cloth that sheltered the crew from the wind and inevitable rain. Men moved in and out of the shelter, all intent on their various duties.

Thomas carried the slop bucket to the side of the ship and braced his legs to empty it over the side. He was so weak that it took all his energy and concentration to keep his balance and not follow the contents overboard.

He turned back to retrace the few steps to his quarters. And nearly stumbled into the large sailor who blocked his path.

“By the beard of old Neptune,” the sailor said with a nasty grin, “you would favor us all by becoming food for the fish.”

Thomas saw something cold in the man’s eyes, and beyond the man’s shoulder, he noticed two other sailors entering his quarters in his absence. He understood the implications immediately.

“I had feared pirates at sea,” Thomas said. He had to swallow twice to find the strength to continue and was angry at the weakness it showed so clearly. “But I did not expect them aboard this vessel.”

The sailor leaned forward, his eyes yellow above a dirty beard. “Pirates? Hardly. We saw the color of your gold and know the ship’s captain charged too little by far for us to bear the insult of living so poorly while a dog lives so well.”

Thomas sucked in lungs full of cold air, hoping to draw from it a clearness that would rid him of his nausea.

“Rate of passage is the captain’s realm,” he finally said.

The sailor took Thomas’s hesitation as fear, and laughed. “Not when the captain sleeps off a night’s worth of wine!”

There was a loud yelp from the quarters, then a muffled curse. The other two sailors backed out. One held his hand in pain. The other held the puppy by the scruff of his neck.

“No signs of coin anywhere,” the sailor with the puppy said. He dangled the puppy carelessly and ignored its yelps of pain.

The other sailor grimaced and squeezed his bleeding hand. “That monster took a fair chunk from my thumb.”