The jongleur's hand dropped on Hugh's mail-clad shoulder.
"Nay, you are unjust," he said, with smiling eyes. "I forget not, and I rejoice with you that our course is eastward again. Bethink you, too, it is better to go as we go, with an army of friends, than to enter Byzantium alone, and mayhap dare the anger of the Emperor unaided."
"So I have thought," Hugh acquiesced. "It puts my mind at ease. And yet—" he swept one arm around the compass of the horizon, embracing the hundreds of bobbing ships—"great as is our force, we go against the mightiest lord in the world, if all we hear be true."
"Ay, the struggle will be worth while—and the glory will be all the more for the victors. We ride with the best knights that ever entered lists, but I wish I could be as sure of those who intrigue above our heads as I am of our good lord, Villehardouin."
"How say you?"
Matteo looked over his shoulder. Barring the helmsman at the unwieldy rudder and Ralph beside them, none else occupied the poop.
"Hast watched this rat, Comnenus?" asked the jongleur.
Hugh shook his head. Of a truth, he had steered a course wide of the Cæsar and his daughter.
"Then heed my advice and attend him in future. By Our Lady of Tortosa, Hugh, I have seen that which interested me! He is high in the confidence of the Doge; he sits at meat one night in three with Boniface; he is always by the side of Alexius; never a council is held without his presence. Heart and soul he seems to work in the interest of the Angeloi. And he is the heir of the Comnenoi! Ay, this Emperor Isaac, father of the Young Alexius, whom we go to restore, cast out and slew the last Comnenian Emperor, Andronicus, he who befriended your father. It is a sorry mess, Hugh."
"Mayhap, but he says that he is weary of exile, and he hopes that by aiding the Angeloi they will restore his estates and permit him to end his days in peace."