A fun scene to write

I want to let my Canadian friends and readers know that we are all sending you our hopes and prayers that the horrific fires will soon be under control and people can return to their homes. Sadly, many will have no homes to return to.
May 5, 1191 was the day of one of Richard’s most dramatic rescues. For five days, his wife and betrothed had been trapped on a ship off the coast of Cyprus, desperately fending off the enticements and then the threats by the Cypriot despot, Isaac Comnenus, who wanted to get them ashore to hold them as hostages. Knowing he could take them by force, they’d stalled for time by promising to come ashore the next day. This is how one of the chroniclers
who’d accompanied Richard on crusade describes it:
“While the queens were burning with gnawing anxiety, God sent them prompt help. On that same Sunday, while they were gloomily discussing and bewailing their situation to each other and gazing out across the sea, two ships appeared in the distance among the foaming peaks of the rolling waves, sailing rapidly toward them, tossing about like little crows. The queens were still doubtful as to what this was when they caught sight of some other ships following them. An enormous number of ships were heading directly toward the port at great speed…They were overjoyed, the more so because help is all the more welcome to those who have despaired of it.”
The author of the Itinerarium and the second major crusader chronicler, Ambroise, were clearly writers at heart, for their chronicles are much more lively and colorful than the usual staid, dry accounts we get from medieval monks. I enjoyed writing my Cypriot scenes, for the chroniclers showed Joanna to be her mother’s daughter in the way she matched wits with Isaac, finding excuses to avoid leaving their ship. And at the risk of a little immodesty, I think my account is even more dramatic than those found in the Itinerarium and Ambroise:
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“It happened with such suddenness that men were not sure at first if they could trust their senses. There was nothing to the west but sea and sky and those two ships tacking against the wind. And then the horizon was filled with sails, stretching as far as the eye could see. A moment of stunned disbelief gave way almost at once to pandemonium, and for the rest of their lives, there would be men who vowed they’d never experienced an emotion as over-whelming as the joy of deliverance on a May Sunday off the coast of Cyprus.
“The sharp-eyed sailors spotted it first. ‘The Sea-Cleaver! The king’s galley!’ But Richard’s women needed to see it for themselves, scarcely breathing until it came into focus, looking like a Norse long-ship, its hull as red as the sunset, its sails catching the wind, and streaming from its masthead the banner emblazed with the royal lion of England. “
* * *
Lionheart may be the most visual book I’ve ever written. It was certainly the one in which I had the most detailed contemporary sources to draw upon, chronicles written by men who were eye-witnesses to the events I was writing about. For a writer, it doesn’t get any better than that.