Chapter Three
The Captain woke slowly, exquisitely comfortable. He lay naked upon silk sheets in a great canopied bed with the soft sunlight so characteristic of the Mediterranean Sea filtering in through mullioned windows. Sun shimmered on the intricately tight-woven tapestries that lined and cheered the dark stone walls, sun glowed rich on the crafted hardwood of the heavy bed, sun gleamed bright upon the tangled sheets that surrounded him. His eyes could not yet adjust to the brightness. Blinking sleepily, he rolled over on his back and gazed up at the canopy, which would not quite focus in his vision.
Faintly he heard the sounds of the sea outside, waves rhythmic upon the beach. Those great waters—which for so many years had been his home and yet which the day before, he remembered v
