The Book of the Lion (12 page)

“Fragments—little pieces, like the Rood of Bromeholme. But the length and breadth are in Jerusalem, hostage.”

A gull hunted in our wake.

 

 

 

 

The next morning I woke with a start.

I did not know where I was. The pallet straw crackled under me, the floor lifting gently, falling.

I had thought I was a boy again, my father out tending the goat, my mother bustling, feeding twigs to the fire. My early childhood had been filled with the bright perfume of stave sap.

On deck I hurried from side to side, drinking in the sunlight. The bright penny of light in the sky was not its ordinary gold—it was blue, like the finest beaten silver. I laughed—the sea was furnished with islands, far-off hills that rose up out of the gentle carpet of the water.

It was as though a hand had set them out, arranged them all for a story lesson, like the sacred plays Father Joseph arranged, the Three Kings traveling from the East to kneel before Our Lord. A distant boat drifted like a gnat in a currentless, glassy patch of sea. Even at the distance I could make out the gauzy brown hand of the net reaching, falling, vanishing into the deep.

The livestock enclosures had been re-pegged and lashed, and Winter Star whinnied at the sight of me, accepting the feedbag eagerly. There is something very pleasing about the sound of a horse chewing, the strong teeth pleasuring in the rich grain, a crunch like footsteps in snow.

I helped the deck hands wash down the wooden planks, mop-ping and scrubbing. I had rarely felt such inexplicable joy, the sun so warm I was sweating through my tunic. The ship was pungent with animal piss, and another, more severe scent, black flux, a fever that struck its victims with astonishing swiftness. The ship's surgeon, a man who looked smaller and less capable than any of the other seamen, emptied a slop bucket and hurried back to his patients.

“Today I am mastering the sword!” I told Hubert when he appeared, yawning and wan.

“You handle it well enough already,” lied Hubert cheerfully.

“I fight like a milkmaid. Get your shield,” I said. “Unless you are sick.” Indeed, there was a glaze of sweat on his face, and he blinked in the morning light.

“I'm sore, skin and bone,” said Hubert, accepting a cup from one of the sailor-servants. He swallowed wine and water, and looked out at the sea. “Are you quite well?” Hubert asked.

Nigel and Wenstan were meeting with Captain Sebastiano near the mast. The captain folded his arms and did not speak. He shrugged, rolled his eyes. He lifted his palms in bewilderment.

Nigel's gestures became sharper. At last he turned away, his mouth twisted, spitting curses. Rannulf pointed to the south. He gestured toward the east, a show of reasonable discourse. Captain Sebastiano gazed up at Heaven, and gave a sigh of apology, unable to make out a word.

“I'll put his head on a pike,” said Nigel. “And all his sailors, too.”

Rannulf said something in a low voice.

The captain wore a thoughtful, inward expression. The storm had left him looking calm but suspicious. He gave an order, and bare feet padded quickly off into the stern.

A sailor arrived with a rolled parchment, tied with gold cord. Knots were untied, and the chart was spread on the deck, the corners anchored with lead weights. Nigel knelt, reached out a hand, but the captain stopped him from touching the wine-blue and beetroot-red shapes, a map of Christendom.

Rannulf knelt, too, both knights following the captain's finger with their eyes. “The east,” said the captain. He indicated a spot in the empty sea. “The ship,” he said.

“I don't understand this,” said Nigel. He glanced at Rannulf. “Do you?”

“It's a chart,” said Rannulf.

I drank in the glory of this map, an angel at each corner, golden wings spread wide. “This is England!” I said.

The two knights looked at me with surprise.

“And here,” I continued. “This city on the hill-this is Jerusalem!”

“The wind,” Nigel confided to me. “The wind blew us farther than we thought.”

“Are we off our course?” I asked.

Nigel smiled. “Let us say that there are bad accidents,” he said. “And good ones. We are much closer than we thought.”

Hubert forced his head into his helmet, and worked his arm through the shield straps. The helmet forced his features into a frown, and made him look like a stranger. The sailors who were healthy enough arranged themselves against the sides of the ship. I hefted my gray steel blade, took a slice out of the air.

Hubert teased the point of his bright sword toward me in the sunlight, and I took a mighty whack at his shield, letting the sword clash loudly against the blue Crusader's cross. And I laid on another stroke, in sport, but determined, too.

Hubert staggered, tossing off a little laugh of unconcern. I hit him again, and he nearly went down.

Sailors called encouragement, clapping. The Frankish knights and their squires smiled noncommittally: so now we shall see how these English fight. I scented the warm horseflesh, the fermenting hay, the tarry cordage, and the sour wine. I smelled the ocean, like sweat and iron. I caught the perfume of fish frying somewhere out of sight, and the humid, soiled bedding of the sick.

Hubert's eyes were a source of light, illuminated from within as he pressed the attack, his shield against mine, pushing. A sharp burst of pain in my bowels crippled me. I hunched over, unable to take a breath.

I twisted, sure someone had knifed me from behind, but there was no one there, and no wound. Nigel parted his lips to speak, and the sky quaked, like a great blue sheet held across us all, unevenly drifting to cover the ship.

I straightened, panting, my hands cold and wet, and managed a laugh of apology. The sword was heavy, the point scraping across the wooden deck.

Hubert hesitated, a question in his eyes.

“Come on!” I cried.

Gingerly, Hubert took a half-step forward. A pig made a guttural sound, and another pig responded. A horse shied within the enclosure, as I took an exuberant whack at Hubert's shield.

And slipped.

I stood at once, but my knees were weak, and hot fluid streamed down my legs. Blood, I thought. I am cut and bleeding!

But the smell was the rank odor of feces and fever, and I stood, wobbling, tracking brown, watery footsteps across the deck.

 

 

 

 

Sweet malmsey wine was pressed to my lips, and a cold cloth wiped my face.

I was burning, tearing at the blankets, unable to draw an easy breath. And the next moment I was icy, frozen through to my liver, my teeth chattering.

Father Joseph used to say that suffering, even squalid illness, was a gift from God. I knew that this fever was sent from Heaven, a reminder that I was the apprentice of a counterfeiter, little better than a thief myself. I was an ordinary young man with no good name, unworthy of the battle for the True Cross.

I slept, a stew of dreams. Other sick men were in this lower deck with me. I could hear them groaning. Their breathing grew slow and thin, and then the rattle began, the dry kernel of life in their throats. One man sat up, exclaimed to Santa Maria, and expired.

The ship's surgeon wrung out the cold cloth, and pressed it to my forehead. “All will be well,” he said, in wooden English, words I knew he was repeating without comprehension.
Alla willa bee.
He was a thin, sweating man, breathless from his rush from one patient to another.

I dreamed I was home, beside the hearth, Elviva laughing as I told her the story of the vixen who spoke to the woodsman. In the warm, happy refuge of the dream I said I had heard it from a cheese-man. Her father chuckled to see Elviva smile, and Otto laughed, saying that no cheese-maker could be believed or trusted.

It was not like a dream. It was like one of those times that had really happened, one of the evenings I longed for, hearth and conversation, mending a bellows or drinking green ale. Rain in the thatch overhead, all well, all safe.

You chop against the oak's grain,
the vixen had advised. There in the firelight I asserted that if a vixen spoke she would say something of much greater interest. She would speak of love.

Now I could see Elviva's green eyes, and I felt a great desire for her.

The monk's wife, they call it, the sort of love-dream that leaves the sleeper with a warm wetness at his crotch. I woke, and already the dream of Elviva was dim, was gone.

 

Rannulf crouched beside me, kneading leather-soap into his gear, polishing, working steadfastly, hour by hour. He worked neat's fat into my shoes, and restitched the hem of my clothes. When I caught his eye he offered a smile with his scarred lips.

“It won't be long,” he said.

How many days and nights had I been so feverish? I parted my lips to ask, and he held a cup of wine to my lips. The fragrant liquor filled my nose, the astonishing sweetness flooded me, and I could not ask.

“I'm sorry,” I rasped.

Rannulf's eye said: for what?

“For being such a useless squire.”

“A squire with a strong arm,” Rannulf replied, “who can read a ship's chart—at what exactly are you useless, Edmund?”

 

Was it morning, I wondered, or early evening?

Golden light flowed through the planks into my close, sweaty darkness. Soon, an inner voice mocked me.

Soon bone, soon dust.

The ship was silent, and it was unmoving.

Even the dying had been taken away. No footstep above on the deck, no laugh, no word.

What a wheedling, thin voice I had! I sounded older than Goodwife Anne, the venerated franklin's widow, who lived in a house of black timber and white clay. My master Otto would always lift his voice when he wished her good morning, and she would quail back, “Good morning to you!” in a voice that was nearly inaudible.

I crept like an old woman. Sunlight streamed into the dank corner, and I blinked as the illumination from the sky fell over me, blinding me. Hands seized me, voices were calling to me.

“Come out,” Hubert was saying, “Edmund, come out and see!”

“Easy with him,” said Nigel.

Hubert half dragged me. “Hurry, Edmund—come look!”

I tottered, Hubert's grip on my arm. The late afternoon sky was bright enough to make me cringe. The rank odor of my own body within its sweat-dark tunic rose around me. I was not alone after all-everyone was silent, leaning over the ship's side, gazing eastward.

I blinked, my vision hammered by the blue sky and sun-gilded sea.

A city of boats, ships, pinnaces, galleys, freight hulks, shore coracles, stretched in every direction. The ships were anchored, and the shore boats darted and skittered. The water was quick-calm, every stern reflecting a scribble of light.

Beyond was the shore. An ocean of tents met the sea, peaks and spires of every color, butter-yellow, steel-blue, the tiny figures of man and knight among the multicolored dwellings.

The murmur of the crowd reached us: the smith-hammers, and armor-menders, the coughing, cursing, order-obedient host, thousands of men. The host surrounded a great castle, with towers and walls of gray stone, nearly lapping up to the sides of the castle, except where a desert of clawed land surrounded the walls.

And beyond it all rose the hills and trees, the slopes and shadows of a kingdom, birds and pasture land, sun-naked trails and cloud-shadowed field. The farthest hills were as stone blue as the evening that rose slowly into the sky from the east. Cooking fires began to wink on, joining the forge coals sending white smoke in rising columns, over the great army.

 

 

 

 

The white sand glittered, gently wind-contoured and unmarred by any hoof. Pebbles glittered, not round, like river stones, but jagged, every shade of autumn gold. When the wind blew across the dunes it whispered, like bare feet running through summer rye.

A week had passed, and I felt strong again. Each breath I drew was sweet. Each sound, whether beast or man, was a cause of fascination, or promise. Even the spill of surf along the sand, white ale suds winking and fading, was a wonder in my eyes.

Hubert toyed with his reins, waiting for me to catch up.

Acre was a fortress city on the edge of the sea. The Holy City of Jerusalem was a day's ride east, but the enemy held all the inland territory. Nigel had explained to me that first we had to win Acre, and then we would have the honor of fighting our way toward the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

“We'll race,” Hubert was saying, “to that little black spot on the beach.”

I shielded my eyes against the noon sun. I could make out three Frankish knights exercising their mounts upon the long slope of the beach, and a galley mast that had washed up overnight, a black, gleaming spindle tangled in rigging. Don't ride far, Nigel had cautioned.

The great wooden siege engine was being repaired, and there would be a show of force early that evening. The siege engines were wooden towers that could be rolled across the ground, all the way to the enemy walls. Men could step from the top of a siege engine onto the enemy battlements. I had been practicing with my broadsword every day. Exercising the horses was not mere sport—Hubert and I had run all the warhorses up and down the beach, each charger wild-eyed and unpredictable after so long at sea.

But my anticipation of battle was a source of unease. True, I wanted the excitement, and yet I also wanted the adventure of battle to arrive and depart quickly. I wanted it to be over.