‘A ship on land, buried near a river,’ Blackstock pondered the riddle posed by the map, ‘but out of the swing of the sea.’
‘What was that, master?’ Stonecrop called.
‘Nothing.’ Blackstock grinned to himself. There’d be time enough, he reflected, to inform Stonecrop and the rest of the crew.
He moved as the ship swayed, buffeted by the powerful north-easterly wind which raised curtains of misty salt-edged spray. Blackstock looked up once again at the raven’s nest on the mast, then around at the men slopping water from the bulwarks. He strained as he always did to hear the music of the ship. Never mind the storm; it was the ship that mattered! Blackstock had been well taught by the skilled privateers who prowled the Narrow Seas between Dover and Calais, as well as the trade routes to the wine city of Bordeaux and further south to the ports of Spain, or even — as he could do now, if he struck north-east — the frozen ports of the Baltic. Andit de Bodleck, master and captain of The Soul in Limbo, out of Brabant, had been his principal mentor. Yes, Andit had been the best teacher, despite being captured by two royal cogs of Edward I of England, his ship sunk and the life strangled out of him on a gallows overlooking Goodwin Sands on the eve of Reek Sunday. Blackstock had heard how Bodleck had refused the ministrations of the local parson; the privateer was a self-professed pagan who made offerings to an eerie war goddess called Nenetania.
‘Strange old life,’ Blackstock mused aloud.
‘What is, master?’
This time Blackstock thought it tactful to reply. ‘How few people, Stonecrop,’ he shouted back above the creak of the ship, ‘truly believe in priests; they’d rather be thrashed than make their confessions to them.’
Blackstock peered towards the prow. At least five of his crew were former clerics who’d committed some crime and were now dressed in serge leggings and leather jerkins, hair and beard matted, their tonsures long gone. He wondered how many of them, if captured, would plead benefit of clergy. Would Hubert do that? But of course, such dangerous living was going to end once they found that treasure ship and the precious hoard it contained. At first Hubert had been sceptical, but Blackstock had insisted that if a high-ranking Hanseatic merchant like Paulents and Sir Walter Castledene, merchant prince and knight, believed in it, there must be some truth to the story. Then, by mere chance, Hubert had been hunting a goldsmith out of Bishop’s Lynn, a collector of books and manuscripts. The man had killed a priest in a tavern brawl and been put to the horn as ultegatum — beyond the law. Hubert had eventually tracked the felon down and captured him in the small village of East Stoke on the River Trent near Newark in Nottinghamshire. He had bound the man’s hands, tied his legs beneath his horse and begun the journey back to Bishop’s Lynn. On the way the two men struck up a friendship. Hubert talked about a great treasure ship buried somewhere in Suffolk, and to his astonishment the goldsmith said he’d heard similar rumours and legends. He offered Hubert a manuscript on condition that he cut his bonds and let him go, and eventually Hubert agreed. They slipped by night into Bishop’s Lynn and the goldsmith returned stealthily to his house. They’d broken down the boards, forced the shutters, snapped the sheriff’s seals and opened a coffer of manuscripts. The goldsmith had collected other possessions then left. In a tavern the following morning, he’d handed a piece of parchment over to Hubert, who quickly realised that this extract from an English chronicle did indeed refer to a treasure hoard buried somewhere in Suffolk. He released the goldsmith, though much good it did the fellow, as he was later taken by the sheriff’s comitatus and hanged out of hand. Meanwhile Hubert used the manuscript to reflect on the Cloister Map and eventually concluded it would lead them exactly to where the treasure hoard was buried.
Blackstock had kept such information, as well as the map, to himself. He’d not even shared it with the villainous Canterbury merchant Sir Rauf Decontet, one of his manucaptors, who’d advanced some of the money for him to buy The Waxman and who still took a share of whatever plunder he seized. Blackstock licked his lips. In fact he’d kept a lot back from Decontet. One day he and Hubert would settle their final account with that miserly rogue. Most importantly, the two brothers had made a compact that once they had the treasure there’d be no more hunting by land and sea. They would quietly disappear and re-emerge in some other town, perhaps some other country, as prosperous wool merchants. No more filthy bilges, dirty taverns, vermin-infested alehouses; no more water or wine from clay-lined tubs or hard bread alive with weevils or sea biscuit which stank of rat urine.
‘Land, land to the west!’
Blackstock whirled around. He could make out the faint outlines of cliffs and hills before the mist closed again. He smiled and fingered the charm, a gargoyle, an imp with one leg crossed over the other, nailed to the mast. Soon they would make landfall.
‘Master! Master!’
Blackstock stared up as the horn wailed the alarm from the raven’s nest above him.
‘What do you see?’ he called.
The ship felt silent. No slap of bare feet against the sea-salted deck; no timber creaking or waves crashing. Some demon cloaked in the mist seemed to trail its fingers along Blackstock’s flesh.
‘What is it?’ he bellowed.
‘Ship to the north-east, an armed cog.’
‘What device?’
‘I cannot see.’
‘Damnation to you!’ Blackstock shouted back.
Stonecrop needed no second bidding. Ram’s horn already to his lips, he blew three wailing blasts and the crew scrambled for weapons: bows, quivers, long pikes, swords, daggers and shields, whilst small pots of burning charcoal were brought up from below. Those who had them donned helmets, hauberks and other pieces of armour. Blackstock hurried up into the prow and stared through the mist boiling above the grim grey sea. Some distance away, sails billowing, a war cog was using the easterly wind to bear down on them. It was a ship very like his own, though slightly bigger, with raised stern and jutting poop. Again the horn wailed from the raven’s nest.
‘Master, south-east another ship.’
Blackstock could hardly believe it. He went down the slippery steps from the prow and slithered across the deck, pushing and shoving his crew aside, up into the stern where the rudder men fought to keep the ship on a straight course. By the face of Lucca! Blackstock tried to quell his surge of fear. Another ship was heading out of the mist like an arrow. A cog of war, surely? Merchantmen would not be so bold. A king’s ship perhaps, but why now, on a freezing October day? They were here deliberately, they’d come to trap him! They must have left the mouth of the Thames and stood far out to sea, knowing the planned time and date of his landfall at Orwell. He had been betrayed!
Blackstock screamed at Stonecrop to bring his war belt. He strapped this on and gazed wildly around. Never in his worst nightmare had he envisaged this, being trapped by two cogs of war, fully armed, against the English coast! The east wind was against him; it would be futile to try and slip between his opponents. He could run for land, beach his ship on the rocks, but what then? This had all been well plotted. The local sheriff and his comitatus would be waiting. Blackstock realised he had no choice but to fight.
‘Master!’ the lookout shouted. ‘The first one to the north is The Segreant; its pennant shows a green griffin rampant.’
Blackstock clawed his face. Paulents! That powerful merchant of the Hanseatic league had decided to take his revenge.
‘And the other?’ Blackstock shouted back, though he already knew the answer.
‘The Caltrop,’ the lookout shouted back. ‘It flies the silver wyvern.’
Blackstock staggered to the taffrail and held it; staring down at the swelling sea, he felt sick. Von Paulents the German and Castledene the Canterbury merchant, the Kentish knight with fingers in every pie cooked in England, had plotted to trap him.