They looked despondently around at the miles of empty marshland, until one of the Templars spotted thin smoke rising from behind a small mound about a mile to the east.
‘We’ll try there first, if we can make the natives understand a single word,’ commanded the king. ‘Philip, have you any notion of what tongue they would speak here?’
The clerk considered this problem. ‘I would think that west of here, it would be some dialect of the north of Italy. But we must be in or certainly near Carinthia and the lands of the Archbishop of Salzburg, so the Germanic languages would prevail.’
‘And we speak none of them?’ replied Richard, sardonically. ‘But no doubt money speaks all tongues, given in sufficient quantity!’
Before they set off to walk in search of a habitation, the six Templar knights who still had their surcoats with the distinctive red crosses, reluctantly discarded them. Of the eighteen men, a dozen still had their swords, the rest having lost them in the confusion of two shipwrecks. John still had his under his long grey mantle and Gwyn had kept his battered weapon slung in its scabbard across his broad back.
The king’s remark about money opening mouths, led to another ceremony before they moved off the head of the beach. The small treasure chest was opened and Richard directed William to distribute much of the remaining coinage amongst the company.
‘We cannot lug this heavy box across Europe,’ he announced. ‘And it is very likely that we shall be split up at some stage, so I am giving each man sufficient for his sustenance, keeping the remainder for horses and whatever situations may arise.’
Each of the knights received a handful of silver lira which they stuffed into the scrips on their belts, Gwyn and the Templar sergeant being given the same. The rest was distributed for safe keeping between the king’s inner circle of clerk, chaplain, admiral, Baldwin, William and de Wolfe. As well as the silver coins from Lucca, there were some heavy gold bezants, the more valuable coins from Constantinople. Richard kept many of these for himself, but included a few in the dole to his closest retainers. He secreted his slim coronial circlet and his Great Seal into a wide pocket inside his cloak, then the empty chest was thrown into the nearest gully, stuffed with the discarded Templar garments.
The small band of fugitives then set off across the marshes — it was December the tenth, two months and a day since they had slipped away from Acre.
The smoke came from a miserable hamlet built slightly above the flood level of the plain. Too small to be called a village, the dozen huts thatched with reeds contained a frightened handful of peasants, none of whom could speak or understand anything the travellers said. Terrified by the arrival of almost a score of large foreigners, all that could be gained from the headman was the word ‘Aquileia’, accompanied by vigorous pointing north-eastwards.
At least there was a track leading away from the hamlet, better than the endless stumbling through reeds and jumping across ditches that they had endured coming from the beach. Within a couple more hours, they had covered about six miles and arrived at a dilapidated town built amongst the crumbling ruins of what had been a vast settlement. There were still columns and walls that marked it as the ancient Roman metropolis, though an odd feature for such a modest town was a large and much more recent basilica with a tall bell tower. What was of more interest to the king’s party was the sight of a small priory adjacent to the basilica, built of old red bricks salvaged from the Roman ruins.
Brother Anselm went inside and found someone with whom he could speak Latin and soon, with the stimulus of some of the royal silver, they were being fed in the refectory that catered for the dozen monks. The rich merchant ‘Hugo’ and his ‘steward’ Baldwin, offered the prior a fictitious account of their pilgrimage to Ephesus and the more honest account of their latest shipwreck. They learned that the basilica was the seat of the Patriarch of Aquileia, who was currently in Venice, having been chased out again by the Counts of Gorz, vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor.
The prior informed them that the nearest large town was Gorizia, where Count Englebert III was one of the Advocates, his brother-in-law Meinhart II being the other, residing in the more northerly town of Udine, up towards the edge of the Alps.
The next problem was horses and John de Wolfe and Gwyn volunteered to go with one of the monks to scour the little town for steeds. Though John was unable to either read or write any language, over years of campaigning he had picked up a rudimentary knowledge of dog-Latin, so was able to stumble through some basic words to do with horses. To find enough of them for sale in a place this size was asking a great deal, but they were fortunate in that it was a market day and amongst the goats, sheep and skinny cattle being sold, they found ten horses and four ponies. The monk arranged for the animals to be brought to the priory, where the king grandly dispensed his silver to pay for the overpriced steeds, in spite of the muted protests of his clerk at yet another example of the royal extravagance. It was now about noon, according to the position of the watery sun seen between the scudding clouds.
‘How far is this place called Gorizia? Can we ride there before darkness falls?’ demanded the Lionheart, who spoke excellent Latin, though he had never bothered to learn a word of the native language of his English kingdom.
He was assured that if they set off at once, they should cover the nineteen miles by time the winter dusk set in, as the remains of the old Roman road was straight and still in fair condition.
The next problem was conveying eighteen bodies on only fourteen horses. The senior Templar, Sir Gerald de Clare, wryly observed that four of his fellow knights could demonstrate the original full title of their Order — The Poor Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon — and ride two to a horse to emphasize their poverty. The Great Seal of the Templars actually depicted two knights squeezed on to the back of a single beast.
They set off, with four of the larger horses carrying a pair of the thinnest knights. None of the mounts had saddles, only a blanket and a simple bridle, but all the riders were very experienced and they had little trouble in keeping up a steady pace on the flat, straight track, where much of the old Roman paving was still in place.
‘Thank God for a horse under my legs, instead of a heaving ship,’ de Wolfe exclaimed, as he rode alongside Gwyn. Their steeds were skinny, but seemed healthy, as were the mountain ponies ridden by the clerk, chaplain and a couple of the Templars. The king naturally had the best of the beasts and rode proudly at their head, as if he was riding to battle at the head of his army.
As they rode, John could not help comparing this journey with riding through the leafy lanes of his native Devon. Though there was a large area of tide-marsh along the estuary of the River Exe, its green turf was nothing like this vast expanse of greyish-brown reeds and dead grass. There were certainly no snow-covered peaks standing on the horizon like jagged teeth — at home, he would have seen the rolling heaths of distant Dartmoor, with their curious granite tors heaped up on the skyline. Having been away for so much of his adult life, he was never homesick as such — with Matilda as a wife, home was a place to be avoided. But as he grew older, he found that the places of his childhood and youth crept more often into his consciousness. As he rode across this dreary marshland, he saw in his mind the manor of Stoke-in-Teignhead where he was born, in its little dell a short distance from the River Teign. The sea cliffs were a mile away, as was the sandy harbour of Teignmouth. He could see again his parents and his brother and sister — and unbidden, the face of the beautiful Hilda came to him, the daughter of the reeve at their other manor at Holcombe, just up the coast.