Duce Timoteo di Bolgia thanked his private gods that this contract did not call for him and his command to make a fighting landing in Ireland, for if it had, they all would have been slaughtered on the beach like so many helpless sheep. Mercenary companies almost invariably marched from one contract to the next, and consequently precious few of his officers, sergeants, or other ranks had ever been aboard anything more prepossessing than a mule-drawn canal barge or the Neapolitan craft in which they had been towed over to Sicily from the Italian mainland.
As a mercantile-minded Cardinal D’Este might have put it, the goods failed to travel well. Most of Timoteo’s company became ill shortly after leaving Palermo harbor, though a largish proportion had recovered, gained their “sea legs” as it were, by the time the coast of the Caliphate of Granada hove into view on the western horizon. But as the small fleet passed through the Gates of Hercules and breasted the heavier, less predictable seas beyond, if mat di mare took its toll once more, even harder this time, striking down not only the recently recovered victims, but claiming others”who had seemed immune on the relatively placid waters of the inland sea they had just traversed.
There was a spate of recoveries whilst the fleet sat in the calm harbor of Anfa Antiqua, taking on fresh food and water and waiting for the small contingent of Afriquan mercenaries to get themselves, their gear, and their animals aboard the ships that would be joining the fleet. As Timoteo wisely let his officers and men go ashore for a while, recovery was complete by the time the fleet was ready to set sail northwestward for Ireland.
However, as luck would have it, the first of what was to prove a seemingly endless succession of fierce Atlantic Ocean storms struck them only two days out of Anfa Antiqua, and before even this first tempest had run its course, Timoteo had five shiploads of men whose highest present aspiration was to immediately die. And before it was done, before the battered fleet finally reached its Irish destination, some of those men were dead. Most of them had perished of the effects of utter dehydration—being unable to hold even water on their stomachs—some sufferers crept up from the foul ‘tween-decks to be swept overboard by the towering, crashing seas that swept the vessels end to end and necessitated constant, twenty-four-hour use of the pumps by the overworked seamen and the few mercenaries capable of it. Some of them found a dagger thrust perferable to ceaseless, unbearable suffering.
So the proud, justly famous company that had departed Palermo landed on the river quay in Ireland as a sorry-looking, draggle-tailed lot indeed. Many of the wan, cadaverous-looking men were too weak even to crawl up the ladders from the holds and had to be hoisted up and over onto the quay, some dozen or so at the time, in cargo nets. Those who essayed to walk stumbled and swayed on weak and wobbly legs, looking like nothing so much as helpless, hapless inebriates as they sprawled on the slimy stones of the quay. Timoteo, who had for long prided himself on having the best, the hardest-fighting, the most victorious, and the finest-appearing company in the length and breadth of Italy, was appalled at the sight of the filthy, unkempt, emaciated men in their unwholesome rags and tatters, his sole consolation being that the Afriquan mercenaries looked, if anything, far worse.
The horses, on the other hand, had survived the long voyage in fine flesh. Only a single charger had been lost of all the horses belonging to the officers of Timoteo’s company— that of his brother, Roberto—along with a couple of coursers and one saddle mule. No one of the Afriquan contingent’s mounts had died, but some few were in poor flesh and would require nursing ashore before they could be ridden.
Timoteo had not allowed himself to become ill during the whole of the voyage. Lacking his steely self-control, Roberto di Bolgia and Sir Ugo both had succumbed during the spate of fearsome storms, but both were again in fine fettle by the time that the fleet had docked in Ireland. Therefore, it was these three, plus le chevalier, who donned their finest attire, mounted led horses, and accompanied the guard of honor sent down to fetch them by King T^mhas only some hour after the first ship had sailed up the river to the quay and begun to discharge passengers and their gear.
King Tamhas proved to be a tall, slender man with a full head of hair—once raven’s-wing black, but now thickly interspersed by strands of white—a double-spade chin beard, and a thin, drooping mustache, their blackness in distinct contrast to his wan, sallow face and his pale, watery-blue eyes. He had no Italian, of course, and Timoteo owned only a smattering of the guttural, difficult Irish tongue, but it soon developed that this kinglet did speak an archaic dialect of Norman French quite fluently, which fact made for ease of conversation between the monarch and his new-come captain-general. Of conservative tastes, as are many professional soldiers, il Duce di Bolgia silently deplored this pocket king’s taste in clothing. That it was long out of date was something to be more or less expected in this cultural backwater so far from the true center of the civilized world, but that was not the worst of it. The outfit was so garish as to set edge to edge the teeth of any modern man with a sense of the proprieties and an innate eye for the balancing of colors.
The old-fashioned slashed doublet was of umber lined with a glaring, flame-red silk, while the separate slashed sleeves were lined with green silk, but two different shades of the color, one shade to each arm. The slashed breeches were of gold brocade all interwoven with silver threads and trimmed with seed pearls, the lining being of a saffron hue … but not the same saffron hue as either of his stockings. The ankle-high shoes were of an elaborately tooled purplish-crimson leather, with gilded heel and sole edges, which also were set all around with semiprecious gemstones. Among the ten fingers of his monarch’s hands could be counted sixteen jewel-set rings. A ruby-set earring and a tourmaline stud decorated his right ear; he was missing his left ear. More jewels and large pearls depended from links of the solid-gold chain that rested on his shoulders, held in that unnatural drape by bronze brooches of ancient designs, all inlaid with turquoise and mother-of-pearl.
“The warrior lucky enough to capture this bugger,” thought Timoteo, “would not need to wait for a ransom, by God. That chain alone would buy a rich county, and the worth of those rings would keep a man in luxury for life and his heirs thereafter. Only a fabulous fighter or a cocksure fool would display so much wealth about his person.”
After a few minutes of conversation, Timoteo decided he distrusted this Irish kinglet and could easily dislike him as well. For one thing, Tamhas seemed ever unwilling to give a man a look into his eyes, keeping them carefully averted at all times whilst he spoke on any subject at all, a habit which in di Bolgia’s wide experience indicated a man with something he hid, did not tell, or at least failed to tell in full.
The advisers present were an unprepossessing lot, to be very charitable in the phrasing—one tall and lanky, one shifty-eyed like the king with a head too small for his corpulent body and pudgy limbs, one short and ferret-faced and endlessly rubbing his hands together. All three, when introduced, bore the same patronymic as the royal personage and so were surely related to him, dependent on him, and therefore likely to tell him always what they knew he wanted to hear rather than the truth, which made for damned poor advisers.
Moreover, despite their protestations, Timoteo was dead certain that at least one of his advisers had a command of Italian, for when he was translating a remark to his brother— who was experiencing some difficulty with the archaic francese criollo, peppered as it seemed to be with Germanic and Gaelic loan words—and chanced to refer to the fat adviser as il maialesco. that worthy reddened and glared balefully at them both. Immediately, Timoteo switched his translations and asides to the Umbrian peasant dialect. Even born Romans and Neapolitans had trouble understanding that one.
“That king is no irlandais,” remarked le chevalier to Timoteo, Roberto, and Ugo, as they all rode back to the ships. “He’s a Norman. I’ve an uncle who is his spit and image. So far as is known, my grandpere never visited Irlande … so, mayhap his majesty’s grandmere …”
Le chevalier perforce broke off as his mount, stung by a forceful dig in the flank by the dull point of the metal chape of Timoteo’s swordsheath, reared and essayed to bolt. When he had once more brought the beast under control, the captain drew up close beside the French knight and spoke rapidly, in a low voice and in modern French. “Pour I’amour de Dieu, Marc, watch your tongue, if you’d keep it and your head! This is not France, nor yet one of the Italian states, wherein sophisticated humor is enjoyed. Had I allowed you to finish that which you had started and had one of those with us taken it back to this kinglet or, worse, one of those so-called advisers, you could have put us all into a pretty pickle. A few outsized boulders from the bombards up there”—he gestured with a gloved hand at the crenellated walls of the glowering stone riverside fortress—”would put even your galleon on the bottom of this muddy river. Then I’d likely be stuck in this cold, damp, foggy backwater for the rest of my natural life . . . and I m homesick for Italy already, Marc; hell, even those bare, brown Sicilian hills would look good to me, just now! And our just-concluded audience with this monarch has bred in me a vague but gnawing presentiment that this will be an ill-starred contract.”