Very soon after this the galley left the marble quay of Tortosa upon a prosperous voyage through blue water.  Jehane, her son Fulke of Anjou, and the other persons named, were in a great green pavilion on the poop.  But she saw nothing, and knew nothing, of Cogia ibn Hassan ibn Alnouk or of Bohadin son of Falmy of Balsora.

CHAPTER XVI

THE CHAPTER CALLED CHALUZ

When King Richard said, without any confirmatory oath, that he should hang Adhemar of Limoges and the Count of Saint-Pol, all who heard him believed it.  The Abbot Milo believed it for one.  Figuratively, you can see his hands up as you read him.  ’To hang two knights of such eminent degree and parts,’ he writes, ’were surely a great scandal in any Christian king.  Not that the punishment were undeserved or the executioner insufficient, God knoweth!  But very often true policy points out the wisdom of the mean; and this is its deliberative, that to hang a bad man when another vengeance is open—­such as burning in his castle, killing on his walls, or stabbing by apparent mistake for a common person—­to hang him, I say, suggests to the yet unhanged a way of treating his betters.  There are more ways of killing a dog than choking him with butter; and so it is with lords and other rebels against kings.  In this particular case King Richard only thought to follow his great father (whom at this time he much resembled):  what in the end he did was very different from any act of that monarch’s that I ever heard tell of, to remember which makes me weep tears of blood.  But so he fully purposed at that time, being in his hottest temper of Yea.’

He said Yea to the hanging of Saint-Pol and Limoges, and made ready a host which must infallibly crush Chaluz were it twenty times prepared.  But he said Nay to the sacrifice of Jehane on Lebanon, and to that end increased his arms to overawe all the kingdoms of the South which had sanctioned it.  Vanguard, battle and rear, he mustered fifteen thousand men.  Des Barres led the van, English bowmen, Norman knights.  Battle was his, all arms from Anjou, Poictou, and Touraine.  Rearguard the Earl of Leicester took, his viceroy in Aquitaine.  When the garrison of Chaluz saw the forested spears on the northern heights, the great engines piled against the sky-line, the train of followers, pennons of the knights, Dragon of England, Leopards of Anjou, the single Lion of Normandy, the wise among them were for instant surrender.

‘Here is an empery come out against us!’ cried Adhemar.  ’If I was not right when I told you that I knew King Richard.’

‘The filched empery of a thief,’ said Saint-Pol.  ’Honesty is ours.  I fight for my lady Berengere, the glory of two realms, my sovereign mistress till I die.’

‘Vastly well,’ returned the other; ’but I do not fight for this lady, but for a gold table with gold dolls sitting at it.’  Such also was the reflection of Achard, castellan of Chaluz, looking ruefully at his crazy walls.