The Death of a King

sword, dagger and saddle-bags, filled with a few clothings and all my marks and other different coins I could gather. My lack of baggage proved an asset, for within a week we were battling through the savage winds which lashed the Bay of Biscay into a frenzy, and the master had to jettison all unnecessary cargo. His warnings about the sea-wolves proved to be more than justified. Time and again sails appeared on the horizon but, seeing our strength (it was a convoy of forty ships), none dared draw any nearer. At length the winds dropped and the weather grew warmer as we slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar and came into the Middle Sea. Here, the Bianca huddled close with the rest of the squadron. The master explained that the Moorish corsairs attacked in ships driven by long sweeps manned by slaves. They would follow the convoys, waiting for any hapless ship to be left behind and then swoop down on it, like a falcon to the kill. Two days later, in the middle of the day, three long, narrow vessels appeared over the horizon. They lay low in the water, dark sails flapping whilst their oars slowly dipped in the calm, blue sea. They never attacked, for our escort ships spread as a shield, but they kept close and their drumbeats could be heard clear across the water. The master prayed for good winds, explaining that if we were becalmed then the pirates would attack. The wind, however, never dropped and at night each ship lit beacons to prevent a sudden attack through the darkness. For days the corsairs tracked us like starving wolves would a deer but, when we changed tack for port, they gave up the hunt and vanished the night before we entered Genoa.
    I would have liked to have visited that city, but time was passing and I stayed in the harbour until I secured passage along the coast to the Roman port of Ostia. I ended up bribing a fisherman, who took my money and then insisted on leaving immediately. His boat looked as old as the Middle Sea itself but it served its purpose and within a week I was in Ostia and on to the old Appian Way to Rome.
    Rome might be eternal, but so is its heat, filth, mangy cats and quarrelling nobles. The master of the Bianca had warned me to take care and I took his advice to heart. If the Holy City had forced the Pope himself to flee to Avignon, then it was no place for a lonely, English clerk. I avoided the inns and housed with the Franciscans in their monastery on the Travestere. From its tower, I could see the ruins of the Circus Maximus, as well as the vague outlines of what used to be the Forum. After a few days rest, I crossed the Pons Emilius (or the Ponte Rotte according to the plebs) intent on a little sight-seeing. The brothers kindly left me a guidebook, a bat tered copy of the Mirabilia Orbis Romae, but I was disappointed to find most of the ancient buildings covered in rubble which the city fathers refused to clear. The modern quarter only consisted of spacious villas of the ever-quarrelling barons and the yellow tenements which housed the rest of the city’s thirty thousand population. Due to the heat and filth in our glorious centre of Christendom, I soon gave up sightseeing and turned to the business in hand. A few inquiries amongst the Franciscans sent me to the Via Lata, where I commissioned a common scribe to draw up the names of all monasteries within a sixty-mile radius of Rome. Then my pilgrimage began. I visited every monastery, abbey and convent. Sometimes I was away days but, as the weeks passed, I failed to find any trace of the Inglese I was searching for. Scots, Irish, men from Yorkshire and Devon, were there, but after a few questions I dismissed each of them. The search was gruelling and dangerous. Such men had their reasons for hiding from the world, and time and again I was warned off with threats and curses.
    One of them, Roger Harnett, became friendly with me. He was an exile from England. In actual fact, an outlaw who had been sentenced to permanent exile by the assizes. He was a thief but one with some charm, and he gaily regaled me with his past history. How he had been apprehended in the New Forest and sentenced at the Winchester Assizes. He had been commanded to walk from Winchester gaol to the coast to seek transport abroad. He had walked for days, always keeping to the highway, and safe as long as he never left it or dropped the small cross he was obliged to carry. At Southampton, through a mixture of bribery and cajolery, he secured passage on a