Was she fair-haired and blue-eyed? I wanted to shout. Was she tall and strongly built? Surely she must have been; suffering terribly, exhausted from prolonged seasickness, our poor dead woman had been carried off the ship that had brought her so far, only to succumb to death once she was back on dry land. Had she fallen into the water? Had her body lain somewhere in the complex system of river estuaries here at Lynn, to be dislodged and swept far inland with the flood? Oh, it must be so! At last we would be able to establish who she was, even if not her name, and we could go back to Lord Gilbert and-
Thomas Gournay, after another pause to assemble his recollections, was speaking. ‘Like I say, they were cloaked and hooded most of the time, both of them, lady and maid,’ he said slowly. ‘Muffled up with veils and scarves, too, like the other passengers. But I noticed the way the maid moved – she was nimble, and quick on her feet. She wasn’t very tall, and I remember thinking that people like her seem to do better on a rolling deck than tall folk.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Shows how much I know, when the poor lass ended up being sick all the way home.’
She wasn’t very tall. Oh, no …
‘Do you remember anything else?’ Jack asked, although I could tell from his expression that he was as disappointed as I was. ‘Was she fair and light-eyed, like a northern woman?’
‘No, oh, no,’ Thomas Gournay said, shattering the last of my hopes. ‘I reckon she was probably a Spaniard, or some such. She was dark as they come.’
Something was niggling at me, and I couldn’t seem to pick it out from the tangle of my thoughts. It was something to do with what the mate of The Good Shepherd had just told us. As Jack led the way up into the settlement and towards our lodging for the night, I almost had it. But then abruptly the rain began again, and the problem of trying to keep at least a bit of me dry in the downpour drove everything else from my mind.
NINE
Rollo was on the run. He had almost been caught, and the knife wound on his left upper arm, inflicted as he slipped from his would-be captor’s grasp, was bleeding, throbbing with pain. That had been late yesterday, and he had spent a sleepless night down among the stinking alleyways that wound their way behind the quays along the Golden Horn. Before dawn this morning, in an attempt to change his appearance, he had crept through a tunnel lined with unspeakable filth and eventually emerged into a tiny square, off which was a wash house where the women of the neighbourhood did their laundry. He had stripped, sluiced off the dirt and then rummaged through his pack and found a reasonably clean faded tunic to put on, winding a length of cloth around his head.
He had hardly dared look at the cut on his arm. He had bathed it thoroughly, then filled it with several drops of lavender oil. Lassair had given him the oil. He pictured her as he treated his wound. Strangely, he could not see her as clearly as he usually did. It was almost as if she stood behind a veil of mist.
As the day broke, he gathered his strength. The chase was about to begin again, and his pursuers must not be permitted to catch him.
He was skilled at trailing people, and at observing men but not allowing them to realize it. Had he not been, he would already be dead; or, perhaps, worse than dead. It was said that there were dark, dank dungeons below the emperor’s palace, where his gaolers had honed their talent for extracting the truth out of reluctant prisoners. Nobody held out for long, for the promise of ending the agony outweighed just about everything.
The men following Rollo were good, but he was better. He had noticed a particular man who appeared in his vicinity a little too frequently for coincidence, and, once his suspicion was aroused, swiftly he saw other tell-tale signs. A man, unremarkable to the casual eye, who, having observed Rollo for some time, slipped away like a shadow. To make his report to whoever had sent him? Another man, less professional, had noticed that Rollo had seen him and instantly fled.
Then Rollo had been faced with the terrible decision: Do I run and demonstrate that their interest in me is justified; or do I continue about my business, in the hope that they will realize I am no threat?
He had inclined to the latter. He was no threat to Alexius Comnenus; he had attempted to speak to someone who had the emperor’s ear for no more sinister purpose than an honest and open exchange of information. Rollo had seen much in the lands under the power of the Seljuk Turks, storing his observations in his well-trained mind. He had tried to seek out Alexius to lay them before him, asking in exchange that the emperor hint at his next course of action and how it would affect the lords of the west: would he, as King William believed, appeal to Rome for the arms and the men to help him in the great mission to repel the Turks from Constantinople and drive them out of Eastern Christendom?
Rollo had his own view of what would happen if Alexius did so. He had witnessed a vision, if that was what it was; a scene from hell that still haunted him. He had seen not a well-drilled professional army, focused and tightly disciplined, but a great mass of ordinary people, men, women and children, hungry, barefoot, sickening, dying, but driven on by the faith that burned within them.
It was something that Rollo prayed would never come about.
The irony was that if he could only have managed to speak to the emperor, he was prepared to pass on the crucial discovery he had made in the south; the discovery which might have prompted Alexius to act sooner rather than later, and perhaps avoid the scenario of Rollo’s vision.
He had found out that the Seljuk Turks were not the invulnerable force the outside world believed them to be. Their conversion to Islam in 1071 had filled them with the fierce zeal of all new converts, and they had been unstoppable, meeting little resistance as they persecuted Christians, desecrated churches and overran city after city, culminating in the biggest prize of alclass="underline" Jerusalem. But back then they had been led by an extraordinary man. Nizam al-Mulk had been Malik Shah’s vizier, but it was he who had held power, and it was said that his assassination the previous year had been at the hands of a man in the pay of the sultan, who had tired at last of his underling’s supremacy over him. Not that Malik Shah had enjoyed his liberation for long; he had been murdered later that year, killed, many believed, by someone loyal to the dead vizier.
With both vizier and sultan gone, a desperate struggle had begun between the men competing for the throne, and they were forced to fend off local men, grown too powerful already and intent only on increasing their kingdoms. The new sultan, Mahmud, had a fist of iron, but even he seemed unable to bring all the disparate, quarrelsome elements into a whole.
Rollo’s conclusion was that the power of the Seljuks was gravely weakened. If a strike against them could be made soon, before Mahmud had a chance to organize himself, it might meet with success.
This was what Rollo had been prepared to share with Alexius Comnenus. But he hadn’t had the chance. He didn’t know why the officials he saw had become suspicious of him, and he was unlikely ever to find out. At first they had seemed welcoming enough, treating him courteously, speaking openly of the emperor’s views, more than willing to listen to what Rollo had to say. It was likely that men like him were not unusual; in those troubled times, surely many men came to Alexius with intelligence to barter.
One of the officials had been called away. Perhaps whoever had summoned him had told him that Rollo wasn’t to be trusted.
They had gone on being polite and interested, and it was only Rollo’s well-developed instincts – and equally well-developed sense of self-preservation – that had alerted him. He had nerved himself to go on chatting, desperate not to reveal that he knew they no longer trusted him. Then, eventually, he had made his excuses and left.