As we swept through the narrow mouth of the bay and into the harbour, I was standing at the prow of the Santa Maria, an ancient sixty-foot cog with a single square sail that had been my home for the past six weeks. It was also home to forty-seven tired, wet, seasick archers, a dozen crew, and a scattering of the soldiers’ women — all of us crammed as tight as an egg into the little ship so that there was no space anywhere to lie down at full stretch.
I knew every inch of the old Santa Maria — from her sharp beaky prow and leaky clinker-built wooden sides, to the round stem with its long, scarred steering oar tended by her craggy master Joachim — and I was thoroughly sick of her. I could not wait to disembark in Messina and end this stage of a seemingly interminable, tedious and uncomfortable journey.
After a week of feasting, and jesting and resting our tired bodies in Lyons, and many conferences between Robin and King Richard, to which I had not, of course, been privy, Robin’s force had set off again southwards with the rest of the King’s army. King Philip and the French host, which was less than one third the size of Richard’s force, had marched east to take ship with the Genoese merchants in their fine city. The two armies were to rendezvous in Sicily and proceed from there to the Holy Land. Under King Richard’s personal command, his huge force — Englishmen, Welshmen, Normans, as well as Angevins, Poitevins, Gascons and men from Maine and Limoges — had marched south along the valley of the Rhone to Marseilles. We sang as we marched and were cheered by Provencal villagers, who lined the roads to throw flowers at us and watch our great, slow-moving procession. We waited another week at Marseilles, for the King’s ships and yet more knights and men-at-arms to arrive, as a goodly number had travelled via the long route from England by sea. But on the eighth day news reached us, carried by local fishermen, that the grand fleet had been delayed in Portugal. The men-at-arms had run riot in Lisbon, killing Jews, Muslims and Christians and had sacked the city in a three-day orgy of destruction. The word ‘York’ leapt into my mind.
King Richard was furious. The shouting from his royal apartments in Marseilles, the commandeered inn of a local nobleman, could be clearly heard fifty paces down the street. And ever the impatient man, Richard immediately hired, borrowed or bought every ship he could lay his hands on in Marseilles and the neighbouring ports, and dispatched one half of his force, under the command of Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanville, the former Justiciar of England, directly to the Holy Land. Their task was to relieve the Christian forces there, which, we had heard, were engaged in a desperate struggle against the Saracens at the great fortified port of Acre.
The rest of Robin’s army, with myself and forty-eight archers berthed in the Santa Maria, began a leisurely crawl eastwards along the coast, round the gulf of Genoa and down the Italian seaboard. We were deliberately travelling slowly, stopping each evening to weigh anchor in a convenient bay and scare up supplies and fresh water, dawdling and waiting for the main fleet to come round the Spanish peninsula and catch us up. I had suffered terribly at first from seasickness, as had almost all the archers, and the beginning of the voyage had been accompanied by the sound of dozens of big men taking it in turns to retch over the side, when they were not lying moaning and praying in the bottom of the ship. When it rained, we were soaked to the skin, when the sun shone, which was most days, we burnt in the strong unfamiliar Mediterranean light. The food was execrable, casks of salted pork most of which had already gone rotten, mouldy cheese, make-shift bread of flour and water cooked like pancakes on a griddle, sour ale, and wine that tasted salty. And the smell was appalling: the constant stink of unwashed men, of damp salt-rotted clothes, of black and evil bilge water, wafts of rotting fish from the store rooms in the stem, and the occasional whiff from the faeces that streaked the outer sides of the cog where the archers did their latrine business. I soon began to long for the sun to sink, just for the chance to get off the damned ship and stretch my legs on God’s good, clean, dry unmoving land.
Going ashore was dangerous, though. One of our men was murdered by villagers near Livomo: they caught him alone near a farmstead and, being suspicious peasant folk, they accused him of being a thief and beat him to death with sticks and stones. The King would not allow us to take revenge and Robin, unfairly I thought, rebuked me for allowing one of his men to wander off alone.
At Salerno, where we tarried for several days, we finally had good news. The main fleet had reached Marseilles, it had refitted for one week and was now fast approaching Messina. We set out from Salerno with our hearts high, and as the fast spy boats reported sighting the main fleet, cheering burst spontaneously from all our lips. We were united with all our strength, and I assumed that after a quick stop at Messina for fresh food and water we would be heading on to the Holy Land. I hugged myself. I might even, I thought, with God’s good grace, celebrate Mass this Christmas in Jerusalem. As it turned out, I could not have been more wrong.
It took the best part of two days for the whole fleet to disembark at Messina and for King Richard’s quartermasters to allocate accommodation for fifteen thousand men. King Richard was determined to make his presence felt on the island and almost immediately after landing he occupied the monastery of San Salvatore, claiming it as his main headquarters and as the store dump for his vast army. The bewildered Greek monks were removed kindly but firmly by the King’s household knights, and the place began to fill with bundles and boxes and stacks of weapons and the cries of large confident men.
Robin’s troops were allocated a large field to the north of the palace as a campsite, close to the rocky shoreline, where there was a convenient stream for drinking water and washing. We pitched our tents and dried our salt-wet clothes as best we could, spreading them out on bushes and scrubby olive trees; we oiled our weapons, shaved for the first time in weeks, and washed the salt from our long hair. Some of the men wandered down to the old town to buy bread and cheese and olives and fruit, some went in search of women, some killed the time gambling, drinking and sleeping while we all waited for orders. It was the last week in September and a disconcerting rumour had began to circulate among the men: we had missed the sailing season; there was no way our fleet could safely make it across the stormy Mediterranean this side of spring. So there would be no Christmas in Jerusalem this year.
Our camping field began to change overnight — timber was cut and hauled in and the men began throwing up more permanent shelters than our thin canvas tents: huts with walls of woven branches, plastered with mud, roofed with turf or double layers of canvas which had been smeared with oil and wax; lean-to shelters and even small cottages with straw-thatched roofs and wooden plank walls. In less than a week, our field began to look like a village, and the same was happening all over the area to the north of Messina, where along the shore line other contingents of the army were making their temporary homes more weather-proof. Firewood was in short supply, and the men soon had to travel miles up the steep slopes of the mountains to find even a small bundle of sticks to cook their pottage. As the first autumn rain lashed down, the mood in the camp began to change: the shopkeepers in the old town had doubled the price of bread and wine, much to the anger of the men; dried fish now sold for a shilling a pound, an outrageous price; even fresh fish became scarce as so many men were trying their luck with baited lines from the ships in the harbour. There was little to do, although John did organise battle practice at least once a day for his spearmen, the archers set up butts to shoot at and Sir James took his cavalry out each morning for a couple of hours of exercise in the mountains. But most of the time the men were idle and spent the days foraging for food or firewood or gambling in the old town. Three men were flogged on Little John’s orders for brawling in the old town. There were two fatal fights between Robin’s soldiers and local men over dice before the beginning of October. Reports of men being insulted or even robbed by the locals were common.