LXXII

I was losing the sense of cold now, and a kind of sleep enfolded me. I was no longer afraid, and still I floated on. I passed out again, and remained in a kind of stupor, falling in and out of consciousness, a half-world or threshold which must have persisted for some time. In that sort of state, you begin to lose the person you are – or were – and I was not sorry to lose myself completely; it seemed an encumbrance.

‘Bertold! Bertold!’

Who was that?

I opened my eyes and a man’s face filled my vision – young, distraught, exhausted, deathly pale, at the end of his tether. I was surprised to find it was this man who was shaking me and shouting a name.

‘Thank God,’ he cried, ‘you are still alive’.

I looked beyond and around him and saw an endless vista of cold, dark sea, punctuated by an occasional lump of rock. I looked down and saw that we two were crudely fastened, by the boy’s golden cloak, to a spar big enough to cling to but not to sustain our weight. One or two pieces of wood were floating nearby along with other cumbersome, bobbing objects, which I saw were bodies; the dead coming back to us for company.

I could not feel my own body any more, but I found there was something thick and familiar around me, pliable and ice-cold, helping me float. Very slowly, like an old mill-wheel in a slack stream, my brain turned. Ah yes. It was my sheepskin coat, which they had all mocked me for when I came aboard, the courtiers and the pretty girls. And I remembered who I was and how I came to be here.

I was Bertold, the account-keeper of Haimo Labouchère, the King’s butcher of Rouen, on an errand to collect debts before their owners could run away to England. My companion was Geoffrey de l’Aigle, son of the powerful Comte of Vexin and Earl of Lincoln, one of Duke Henry’s generals in Normandy. And we were in the sea, about two miles off Barfleur, our vessel – the fastest and newest and safest in Christendom – having struck a rock and sunk in ten minutes, leaving just the two of us from a total of more than three hundred people on board.

Just at that moment, I saw Geoffrey’s head fall forward into the water. He had spent what little strength he had trying to save me. I found a new reserve of energy and redoubled my efforts to keep Geoffrey awake, telling him jokes, making him sing, repeating old stories, telling him how I got into all this, even the bits about Juliana’s revenge. His response was sluggish.

‘You have to try harder, Geoffrey. You must have told jokes in your father’s hall. What gave the sieve a hernia?’

But his head fell forward on his chest, until I beat him on the shoulder.

‘Wake up, you silly bugger. Geoffrey!’ I cried, resorting to the same tactics he had employed, slapping him on the cheeks, pulling him up in the water.

He opened his eyes, it seemed with an enormous effort, the lids heavy as portcullises.

I stopped, it was kinder to let him die. And then all at once, he said:

‘Fish supper.’

I thought about it for a while. That was not what gave the sieve a hernia. I must say that my own responses were beginning to slow right down again.

‘When we get home,’ I told him, humouring the poor boy.

‘We are,’ he said, and gave me the most beautiful smile. Then his hands lost their grip on the spar and he started to sink.

‘Geoffrey,’ I cried. ‘Geoffrey!’

‘You will tell him, won’t you?’ he said. ‘My father …’

‘I will tell him.’

He tried to smile, and then he just started to slip away into the water, sliding through my arms. He was the son of a powerful count and I was a bastard, working as a book-keeper for a butcher, but I wept as though he had been my own brother.

With all my remaining strength, I hung on to him and tried to haul him back, but I was too weak and the sea was too hungry. He was dead; I let go and he sank like a sword. I wept until I could weep no more and I had salted the whole sea. I wept more for him than for all the dead people I had sailed with who now lay scattered over the deep, and I thought of the wickedness of Juliana who had killed so many people in her pursuit of revenge.

‘Happy now?’ I called.

I was not altogether surprised to receive a distant answering cry; anything was possible, it seemed to me, in this night of madness. My state of exhaustion and shock made me ready to admit anything natural or supernatural, a hulk or cog from Barfleur or the imp Merle in a foggy cloud.

‘Happy now?’

Something struck me on the head – a floating spar, a cask lifted by a wave – and I must have passed out for some moments. It was good there where I was and I hung on to it … until I woke from comfortable oblivion to the cheerless light of dawn and the outrageous smell of salt water, which hits you like a brick when it means to kill you. I was still in the water, but with someone slapping my face. It crossed my mind that this was like being born again, something I didn’t want to be doing..

‘Wake up, wake up,’ someone was shouting in a funny voice.

My God, I was being born again. It was true, I felt like crying. Slowly I took in the scene around me.

The sea was full of bodies again. Currents, which had scattered the dead, had now twirled them back again in some kind of contredanse macabre. It was a ghastly sight for the fishermen who had appeared out of the morning mist, crossing themselves and making exclamations of horror and pity.

‘Poor souls!’

‘Oh my God!’

‘Christ have mercy!’

They had seen me as a floating corpse among all the other dead, this one in an old sheepskin coat – and then someone noticed a faint movement. It made them realise that maybe I was still alive, and with rough attentiveness, they lifted me up as though I were a halibut and put me in the bottom of a smack, along with five crabs – maybe one was my old friend from the Quillleboeuf rock – a lobster and ten pilchards and a load of mackerel. And that is how I came, shivering uncontrollably, once more to Barfleur.