where the pale sun was sinking beneath the waves. 'Be a while yet before we get the sign, they'll not risk crossing open water till it's good and dark. So you'd best settle down and get some sleep. It'll be the last chance you'll have to close your eyes tonight. Once you're on the move, your head will think your eyelids have been hacked off.'
Another man grasped his shirt and whispered, 'They will come tonight, you're sure of this?'
'God's bollocks, those sons of bitches had better be here. I I'm not hanging around with you lot on board, that I can promise you.'
The man's eyes narrowed with anxiety. 'But if something happens to prevent —'
'They'll be here,' the captain said firmly, as if he was trying to pacify a child. 'They'll have had watchers posted ever since we sighted land. They'll not risk leaving us here longer than they have to.'
He edged away and strode rapidly towards the bow, as if trying to put as much distance as possible between him and his unwelcome cargo.
The men made pretence at closing their eyes, but Faramond knew they could no more sleep than he could. It was not just the stiffness of their bodies, the hard boards and the cold keeping them awake; God knows they were used to worse than that. No, what would not let them rest was the fear of what might happen in the next few hours, days and weeks. They'd had plenty of time to think during the voyage, and imagine too — imagine just what could happen to a man trapped in a foreign land among his mortal enemies. Approach the wrong person or betray yourself by the wrong word and death would be the least of your troubles.
It was not for nothing that King John of Anjou was known far and wide as the worst of the Devil's brood. Rumour abounded in France that John had ordered Hubert de Burgh to castrate his sixteen-year-old nephew, Arthur, the rightful heir to Anjou, and to gouge out his eyes as the lad lay chained and starving to death in John's dungeon at Falaise. And when Hubert had refused, John had brought the boy to his castle at Rouen and kept him imprisoned there. One night at Easter, when John was drunk after dinner, he had slain his nephew with his own hand and, tying a weighty stone to the corpse, had cast it into the River Seine. If a man could so cruelly plot the murder of his own kin, the exquisite torture he might devise for a French spy, before death mercifully released the victim, was beyond any normal man's imagination.
And Faramond and his companions would be depending for their very lives on strangers whose loyalty was at best dubious, for hadn't they already betrayed their own king? A man who might have been on your side yesterday could just as easily betray you tomorrow. Some men change their allegiances swifter than birds in flight change direction.
Yet, as Faramond had tried so hard to convince his beloved wife, this was a just war, a noble cause to depose a wicked tyrant. Even the Pope had denounced him. Any man who rid the world of King John, an enemy of God and the Holy Mother Church, would be assured of the papal blessing. Of course, the Pontiff had not said as much in so many words, but his meaning was clear to all, and thus it followed that any man who helped to depose this tyrant would be blessed by God Himself.
Faramond had repeated these arguments to himself as he lay awake on the tossing ship, retching over and over again. God was on their side. And now, sick with fear at what the coming hours would hold, he tried to remind himself of that again, but he knew all the tricks of rhetoric and he could not convince himself this was God's work as easily as he could persuade others. All he could think of, as he sat shivering on that deck, was capture, humiliation, torture and then . . .
St Julian and all the saints, I beseech you protect me. He patted at the front of his tunic, feeling for the small silver reliquary containing a tiny fragment of the bone of St Julian of Brioude pinned beneath a piece of polished rock crystal. His wife had sold all the jewels she owned to buy the relic, so desperate was she to keep her husband