The Strangled Queen (The Accursed Kings, Book 2) by Druon Maurice

Author:Druon, Maurice [Druon, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

Chasing Cardinals

HUGUES DE BOUVILLE, GUCCIO and their escort took ship next day at dawn. Busy with their preparations, they had slept little, and it was with the melancholy disquiet which follows upon too short a night that, leaning side by side upon the rail of the sterncastle, they watched Naples, Vesuvius and the islands receding. Fleets of white sails were leaving the shore for the day’s fishing. Then they were upon the high seas. The Mediterranean was superbly calm; there was only gentle breeze enough to give the ship way. Guccio, who had not embarked without a certain alarm, since he remembered his detestable crossing of the Channel the year before, was delighted not to feel seasick; and it needed no more than twenty-four hours for him to become proud of his own valour, and to compare himself in some sort with Messire Marco Polo, the Venetian sailor, whose voyages to the country of the Great Khan were beginning to be known and read pretty well throughout the world. Guccio came and went from forecastle to sterncastle, learning nautical terms and imagining himself an adventurer, while the head of the mission was still regretting the wonderful city from which he had had to drag himself away.

Messire de Bouville recovered some of his vitality only five days later when they disembarked at Aigues-Mortes.

This port, from which Saint Louis had once set sail upon a crusade, and whose building had been finished only under Philip the Fair, was France once more.

‘Come on,’ said the fat man, doing his best to throw off his nostalgia, ‘we must now set about our urgent tasks.’

The weather was sharp and cloudy, and Naples already seemed no more than the memory of a dream.

Forty-eight hours later they came to Avignon. The journey on horseback, with twelve equerries and the servants of the escort, had been no sinecure, particularly for Guccio, who dared not for an instant risk letting the iron-bound chests containing the gold delivered by the Bardi of Naples out of his sight.

Messire de Bouville had caught a chill. He spent his time cursing a country which no longer seemed to him his own, and in which the slightest shower seemed to be personally directed against himself.

Their arrival, upon the second evening, amid great gusts of mistral, was a sad disappointment, since there was not a single cardinal in Avignon. And this was most odd in a city where a conclave was, in principle, supposed to be in session! No one could give the envoys of the King of France any information, no one knew anything, no one wished to know anything. It was only by going to the garrison of Villeneuve, which was at the end of the bridge upon the other bank of the Rhône, that at ten o’clock at night Bouville learnt from an officer, sulky at having been awakened, that the conclave had returned to Carpentras.

‘This captain of archers,’ said Bouville to Guccio, ‘is not very forthcoming towards those who come in the King’s name.

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