The Missing Treasure Read online

  Publisher’s note:

  This is another great book in the exciting and action packed medieval saga of The Company of Archers about the life of a man who rises to be the captain of a company of archers in medieval England. The first book is The Archers. This book and all the others are immediately available on Kindle. A complete collection of all of the first six books in the saga is available as The Archers Story.

  Similarly, the next four books in the saga, including this one, are available as a collection in The Archers Story: Part Two. You can easily find the two collections and the individual books by searching Amazon for Martin Archer books.

  A Company of Archers book

  The Missing Treasure

  Chapter One

  The strange state of things.

  “What do you mean all the gold and coins are missing?”

  “It’s true, I tell you. I was just there. They’re gone. The room is empty—the chests are gone.”

  ’—“” XXX He hadn’t been running but he was literally out of breath from the shock of seeing what he had seen in the windowless room next to the emperor’s sleeping chamber—nothing, absolutely nothing. It was empty.

  “My God. Are you sure? What will Alexios do now?”

  “I don’t care about him. What will happen to us when we tell him? We’re the ones in danger and there’s no half way about it.”

  The men were cousins and both of them are supporters of the son of the empire’s previous ruler, the man who had been blinded and replaced as emperor by his brother who had recently fled in the night on a galley provided by the English archers. It was the son who had promised the crusaders much of the gold in the Byzantine Empire’s treasury if they would help him get his blind father back on the throne.

  The two Greeks were beside themselves with worry and rightly so. The emperor disappeared from great empire’s capitol city of Constantinople weeks ago, right after the crusaders came to the city’s walls from their camp across the inlet and began their attack. He’d somehow escaped from the city with all the gold and jewels in the treasury.

  Everyone in the city knew within hours that the emperor had run and that many of the empire’s leaders had either gone with him or they’d run themselves when they found out he was gone; what they and the blind man’s young son and new co-emperor wouldn’t know for a few more minutes is that the fleeing emperor had totally emptied the treasury before he left. He’d taken the empire’s entire treasury of coins gold, and jewels with him into exile.

  We English knew exactly what happened to the emperor and his courtiers, of course we do; it was our galleys that were paid handsomely to carry them to safety. And we know something else; the emperor and his courtiers only think they got away with the gold and coins and such from the treasury and have it safely hidden away where only they know where to find it. In fact, the emperor and his men only think they have the gold and coins hidden; they don’t—we took them to Cornwall.

  ******

  Initially the crusaders had merely been camping across the waterway from Constantinople’s walls and demanding that the old emperor be restored to the throne. They knew he was blind and old and they thought he was rich because the emperor, and only the emperor, controls the treasury of the great and rich and far flung Byzantine empire. The crusaders expected, quite reasonably under the circumstances, that the blind and newly restored emperor would be dependent on his son Alexios. It was the son who had promised to pay the crusaders a huge portion of the gold in the empire’s treasury for their assistance in restoring his father to the throne.

  The amount of gold and coins promised to the crusaders was a sum so large that the crusaders had abandoned their vows to fight to liberate Jerusalem from the Saracens and, instead, had gone to Constantinople on Venetian ships to help restore the old emperor to the throne. They did so despite the pleas and excommunication threats of the Pope who wanted them to go to the Holy Land and reclaim Jerusalem from Saladin and his Saracens.

  Indeed, Thomas, the brother of the archers’ captain and now the Bishop of Cornwall, had traveled on an English galley to deliver the Pope’s message—and been betrayed and captured by the Venetians when he tried to deliver it. That’s when the fighting between the Englishmen of the Company of Archers and the Venetians started once again—when Captain William and his English archers responded to Thomas’s capture by attacking and capturing the ships the Venetians were using to transport and supply their crusader allies.

  Basically, the English archers, who were sometimes calling themselves Marines because they fought on both land and sea, began killing Venetians and taking their ships—and continued to do so until Thomas was released at the “request” of the increasingly desperate and hungry crusaders.

  Of course the crusaders demanded that Thomas be released—they knew the English and feared they’d be stranded without any transports to carry them home and sold into slavery. That’s what William, the archers’ captain and Thomas’s brother, had promised would happen to the crusaders and their Venetian allies if his Thomas was not immediately released. He meant it and they knew it.

  ******

  It all came about, the missing gold that is, when the then-current Greek emperor of the Byzantines, also confusingly named Alexios, had led his army out of the city to fight the outnumbered crusaders, perhaps in hopes they would turn and run and go back to their homes or off to Jerusalem as the Pope had been demanding.

  The crusaders didn’t run; they were willing to fight if that’s what it would take to get the old emperor restored and themselves paid all of the gold that his son had promised them for their assistance in restoring him.

  When the crusaders didn’t run, the emperor and his generals remembered what had happened the last time his army had come out to fight—when his army had marched out to confront a much smaller force of English archers and been slaughtered by their longbows and their newfangled long pikes with hooks and blades.

  As soon as he realized that there would actually be fighting, and particularly when he realized that he himself might be among those killed by the crusaders, the emperor led his army back inside Constantinople’s walls—and ran away that very night with the gold and coins in his treasury. He left on a galley manned, of all things, by the English archers. The English were, everyone knew, quite reliable if they made their mark on a contract. That’s why, of course, so many people paid such high prices for their services.

  Many of the emperor’s highest ranking courtiers also hired galleys crewed by William’s English archers and escaped—each of them thinking that he and he alone had gotten away with the treasury’s gold coins and bars. None of them had, of course, not even the emperor—although they probably don’t know it yet because each thought he’d gotten the gold and coins and carefully hidden them away.

  In fact, they’d all been gulled by the former serf who become the captain of the English archers, even the emperor himself. The emperor and his courtiers had each stolen and carefully hidden chests of rocks; the treasure itself had been taken by the Englishmen and ended up in Cornwall at the archers’ base at Restormel Castle.

  ******

  At first after the emperor and his courtiers fled everything proceeded as the crusaders and their Venetian allies had demanded—their demands had been fully met. The blind old man had been restored to the throne the day after the emperor and his courtiers had run away on the English galleys with their sealed chests full of rocks that they thought were full of gold and coins.

  Then nothing happened, at least nothing good happened so far as the crusaders and Venetians were concerned. They weren’t paid the gold coins and other valuables they’d been promised, and the restored emperor’s son, the one who had made the agreement to pay
the crusaders if his father was restored, was not even allowed to the enter the city to help the blind old man govern.

  After a few days of waiting in vain for the gold they’d been promised, the restless and increasingly hungry crusaders demanded that the blind emperor’s son, the one who’d made his mark on the contract with them, be allowed to return to the city and named co-emperor “to help his father meet his obligations.” To back up their demand the leaders of the crusaders readied their men to move once again against the city in the event their demand for the gold and coins they were owed was not met.

  And once again the city’s remaining decision makers both confounded and disappointed the crusaders and Venetians who had been looking for an excuse to sack the city—they agreed to the appointment of the son as a co-emperor. He immediately entered the city and joined his father on the throne.

  Alexios, the son of the restored emperor and now co-emperor, was not stupid. He knew how weak the city’s defenses had become from the years of corruption and neglect, and he also knew the strength of the crusaders and what would happen if they weren’t paid—so the very first thing he did was send two of his most reliable men, cousins he met during his years of exile, to the treasury room to fetch the gold and pay the crusaders.

  The two Greeks who had responded to the new co-emperor’s orders to fetch the gold from the emperor’s treasure room and deliver it to the crusaders hadn’t been fools when they agreed to support the son of the emperor—they were ambitious and they were smart; they knew that the young Alexios would be the power behind the throne because his father was old and sick and blind.

  They also know that the son had promised much of the gold in the treasury to the crusaders if they would help him get his father out of prison and restore him to the throne. The promise had not been made, the two Greeks knew, because the son loved his father and wanted to see him back in his rightful place; it had been made so the son could inherit the throne from him.

  It was a difficult, but not impossible, position that the two Greeks were in. They had been, and still were, among the son’s most dedicated and loyal supporters—and rightly so; they were ambitious men and they hoped to get their hands on some of the gold for themselves. If they didn’t, they planned to console themselves by being powerful officials in the son’s empire and enriching themselves over time.

  But where had all the gold gone and what should they do now? And who was to be the messenger who told the emperor’s waiting son, the new co-emperor, that it is missing? and what will the crusaders do when they find out there is no gold in the treasury to pay them? The choices of the two men were very basic—should they stay and risk the wrath of the crusaders and the hot tempered and conniving new co-emperor or should they run and try to save themselves?

  ******

  The son’s two courtiers were not the only ones with big troubles and significant decisions to make. The summer of 1203 was a difficult time for all the people living in one of the world’s richest and largest cities—Constantinople, the glittering and cosmopolitan seat of the Greek Orthodox Church and the capitol city of the great and far flung Byzantine empire.

  Constantinople had been the capitol of the large and powerful Byzantine Empire and the seat of its emperor for almost a thousand years, ever since the division of the old Roman Empire into its western half centered in religiously Catholic Christian Rome and its Pope and its eastern half centered in religiously Orthodox Christian Constantinople and its Patriarch.

  Much of the current trouble actually had its roots in something that had happened twenty years earlier. That’s when the Orthodox Church and the recently restored blind emperor had encouraged the city’s Greek-speaking residents to rise up and massacre the city’s so-called “Latins”—those who looked to the Pope and the Latin speaking church in Rome for guidance instead of to the Orthodox Patriarch and Greek speaking church in Constantinople.

  The “Latins,” of course, being primarily the Venetians who had come to dominate the Orthodox empire’s trade and finance. Throughout the empire the Venetians and other “Latins” who weren’t killed by the irate Greeks and their subjects were sold to the Moors as slaves to help pay for the troubles they’d caused.

  Elimination of the “Latins” throughout the empire should have settled things and been the end of the problems between the Orthodox Catholic Greeks and the Roman Catholic non-Greeks. But that turned out not to be the end of the conflict for several reasons.

  First, the Venetians were nothing if not great merchants and traders. And so, for that matter, were their traditional competitors, the Genoans and Pisans. The Venetians, in particular, had memories of the great profits they had reaped from the empire and fought over with the Genoans and Pisans and others before the empire’s Greeks and other orthodox Christians got fed up with their behavior and threw them all out.

  The potential profits were just too much to ignore—so slowly but surely the “Latins” returned to Constantinople and the other cities in its great empire. Even the Venetians began returning despite their great hatred of the Greeks and desire for revenge.

  So twenty years later the priests and followers of both Christian religious organizations were once again living together inside the walls of the empire’s biggest city and once again they were divided on what they considered to be very significant issues such as how one makes the sign of the cross and which priests are to receive the coins that the faithful pay to get relief from their sins.

  On the other hand, the Venetians were still seriously pissed about what had happened twenty years earlier. They wanted revenge, and no one more so than the Doge, the elderly ruler of Venice, who had only been able to grind his teeth in dismay when his people in far away Constantinople were massacred and enslaved twenty years earlier.

  Venice is a maritime nation with a great navy and many ships. Twenty years ago, when the Venetians and the other “Latins” were massacred, Venice didn’t have an army that its ruler could send in to protect them or revenge their deaths. It still didn’t—but now it had the crusaders.

  ******

  Constantinople itself and the empire everyone wanted to rule and exploit were ancient. The city was consecrated in its present form by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the year 330AD. Constantine’s heirs, or at least the men claiming to be his heirs, have ruled it and adhered to the beliefs of the Orthodox Christian Church ever since.

  Constantinople today has everything—it’s the rich, large, and powerful capitol of a massive and far flung empire of states and nations extending far out beyond its massive walls. The city’s primarily Greek-speaking population is huge, five or six times that of London’s—somewhere around one hundred and fifty thousand despite losing as many as fifty thousand people a few years earlier in the fighting when the “Latins” were massacred.

  Even more important to the Greeks and everyone else who lives in the city—Constantinople is safe and secure from the threat of invasion and attack. It’s safe and secure because it is built on a peninsula extending out into the Sea of Marmara and therefore protected on three sides by a great natural moat of water that comes right up to the city walls; on the fourth side it is protected by two huge and moated curtain walls with periodic defense towers.

  Many invaders have tried to conquer the city and its empire over the centuries since Constantine established it almost nine hundred years earlier; all have broken against the city’s walls and failed. The city itself has been policed and defended under the leadership of the emperor’s four thousand or so personal guards, the Varangians, for the past three hundred years or more.

  The Varangians are the most dependable mercenaries of the day—loyal mercenaries from over sea—mainly Scandinavians including Norsemen displaced by the Anglo Saxons in Britain and Anglo Saxons displaced by the Normans. Collectively they were known as the ax bearers and they have a fearsome reputation.

  We English archers, of course, have had our own problems with the city’s imperial and religious leaders. A
couple of years ago some of the emperor’s courtiers kidnapped some of our archers and held them for ransom. Then last year the Venetians grabbed my priestly brother Thomas when he tried to deliver a papal letter to the crusaders after the Venetians had carried them to Constantinople so they could besiege the city.

  Fortunately, both times we were able to satisfactorily resolve our differences by acting like intelligent and reasonable men and adopting reasonable policies—we started killing the bastards, blockading the city, and taking their galleys and transports until they set our men free.

  Today, of course, we have no complaints even though soon or later the city will probably fall to the crusaders and there will be no more coins to earned by carrying refugees away to safety—we’re on our way to Cornwall with both the refugee coins we’d already collected and the crates of gold coins and bars from the Byzantine treasury. It’s been a very good year.

  Chapter Two

  We return to Cornwall

  I returned to Cornwall from Constantinople early this afternoon to a warm and tumultuous welcome from my family—Helen and her two sisters who I’d already taken as wives and their howling infants, my brother Thomas, and my son George. They all came to the river landing to greet us and so did many others.

  Someone must have seen Harold’s galley rowing its way up the river for they were all hurrying down the castle path towards us as Harold’s sailors threw the mooring lines to the waiting hands of the men rapidly assembling around the little floating wharf tied to the trees on the side of the river.

  As I rushed ashore to hug and kiss my family I quickly counted and breathed a sigh of relief without really realizing it. All three of the infant girls, Helen’s two and Anne’s one made it through the winter. I was relieved; I remember how sad Tori had been when she lost her little one last year.

  Babies are such a scare and a joy and a dread aren’t they? Now I understand why Helen’s mother had pressed her owner to send Helen’s sisters to me as well—so they could care for one another and keep me away from tavern girls and prostitutes who might pox me.