The Book of the Lion (8 page)

A month of this!

“But God willing not so long for us,” said Sir Nigel with a laugh.

“A channel, my lord,” I had to ask, “between what land and what other land?”

But he seemed to not hear me. I thought he looked pale himself, and he took only a sip of Crete-wine and water, when Wenstan offered it. Nigel joined Rannulf, the two of them standing, hooded like priests.

Hubert was everywhere, upside down to watch the foam flow, halfway up the mast to see a gull diving time and again in the water, cheering when the bird flew off, a fish living gold in its beak.

By daylight I was hanging my head over the side of the ship, staring down into my own shadow. I vomited several times, like a sneeze, emptying what little I had in my belly into the eddies of the ship's wake. And after that I emptied nothing, and vomited with the pointlessness of a dog who will not stop barking.

I prayed in my weakness, not unlike the offering of a dying man to Heaven. I begged the aid of Our Lord Jesu, from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness. I wished for a rosary, with its gaudy beads, but instead closed my eyes and opened my heart to Heaven.

Holy mass is not celebrated on board any ship, as a rule, lest an errant wave or a cursing sailor violate the worship. But I would have benefited from some divine solace that day. The smell of breakfast cheese froze me, wrenched my innards, and, I am afraid, made my skin turn the very color of death.

The air changed. The light brightened, the haze turning the color of egg white. No one moved.

The sailors hushed. Nigel and Rannulf looked upward.

With a flutter of soft thunder a sail fell open, shrugged and struggled like a living thing, and bellied out with wind.

Alive, the ship coursed, the spray freshening our faces. Hubert leaned as far out as he could, and Miles sang a song about kissing his lady's bed with his keel. The wind did much to clear the fog, but a fine rain began to fall, and this gray low cloud stayed just close enough to keep us from seeing landmarks, as though the sky were a huge tent that we traveled within.

But eventually even an ignorant landsman like myself could tell that the ship was soaring skyward one moment and falling down into the trough the next, and I did not have to be told that we had left the river.

We had reached the channel, and every misery I had suffered was now multiplied. Winter Star was reeling, trying to rear up, and as carefree as the sailors were, they stayed well away from the stallion's hooves. I crawled back to my place at Winter Star's side, and with a bow and a smile a sailor provided me with a four-legged stool. The seaman gave me a long, kind-hearted, utterly foreign discourse on the nature of sea and wind.

Rannulf and Nigel stood silent, faces hidden in the dark hoods, but Wenstan spoke with the helmsman, a grinning, bearded fellow, who from time to time would lever the tiller out of the water and look back at it, water dripping off the broad steering oar. Sometimes a crook of seaweed was tangled there, and the helmsman would shake it free.

“Who are these men?” I asked Sir Nigel, declining a taste from his goatskin of wine.

“These are Cornishmen,” said Nigel.

“Are they taking us all the way to Jerusalem?” I asked. I knew that the Holy City was so far away that people who journeyed there returned, if they came home at all, white-haired and wasted.

Nigel chuckled. “They are taking us to Normandy.”

This news meant very little to me. The second, and finest, map of the world I had ever studied had been spread out on Father Joseph's table. I had stopped by that afternoon to deliver a just-repaired chalice. Father Joseph saw the look in my eye, and explained, saying, “This is a true map of Earth under Heaven.”

“Where is London?” I had asked.

As usual, Father Joseph punctuated his speech with a belch. Most men I know are troubled with wind, being fond of windy foods, cabbage and red meat. He said, “London is an unimportant place, Edmund, a speck of stone and humanity, compared with the Holy City.”

All of England was a little crumb off to the west of a mighty hill. On the summit stood a castle, with towers from which grew fruit trees. “Jerusalem,” explained Father Joseph reverently, “is the center of the world.”

 

Perhaps it was the sin of envy I experienced, watching Hubert rabbiting from stem to stern. Envy is sorrow at the prosperity of others, and Hubert prospered in his great health. But I did not wish him sorrow, and took no joy when he slipped on the wet deck and had to sit down for a while, blinking thoughtfully at the small rain that drifted down.

Just when I thought I could not endure another moment, the lookout gave a cry.

The actual words meant little to me, but I understood.

“Land,” I whispered to Winter Star. The horse pricked up his ears, shook his head. “So soon!”

But it was merely a scow awash with flounders, so full of the silver-bright, still-flapping fish, that the squat vessel could not swing out of our way. Long poles were used to fend off the fishing boat.

 

My first sight of Normandy was the following dawn.

When the ridge of white sand appeared above the leaden water I took little notice, fearing another disappointment. But Winter Star snorted at the scent of fields, and the sailors worked the sweeps, the long oars, out through the oarlocks, and shortened the sail.

I did not want to give myself over to happiness. Not yet.

At last I saw footprints stitching the beach, clear, definite shapes, and saw a fisherman spreading his net. A peasant stood in the sunlight and emptied his bladder, an amber arc of blessed human piss.

 

 

 

 

We sat around a table at an inn and the landlord served a platter of young lamb, gold roasted, plaice in jelly, and stewed figs made with honey and cinnamon. A carver served out the food, ladled it onto trenchers of wheat bread. One taste of lamb brought tears to my eyes.

A riverman had spied a ghost, a woman who had been raped and cut to pieces by traveling knights. She was said to haunt the reeds along the river.

“Foolish people!” Hubert was saying. “The saints steadfastly protect a Christian from such ghosts.”

“Do knights in this countryside ride about rutting and murdering?” I asked.

“Of course they do!” said Nigel. “God's lips, any knight would, except for fear of Hell. That's why the lord pope has seen the wisdom in sending so many fighting men to the Holy Land. That and, of course, the great need of us there.”

“A ghost is but a demon,” said Hubert. “However its disguise, I'll spit on it, even if it carries its head like a bucket.”

But the next day, on board our new vessel, we all studiously ignored the banks of the river, lest one of the aproned, matronly figures prove to be headless. Nor did we look up when a bird slipped from tree to tree calling an unfamiliar song,
No return, no return.

Behind hedge and cattle trough a devil might be hiding. Wenstan and Miles disagreed on a song about a woman in a citadel who grew her hair long, so any passing knight could climb up the long tresses and join her in corporeal delight. Miles contended that the hair in question was her privy hair, while Wenstan said this was the most irritating example of twisting a jolly song into something sinful. “It was the hair of her head,” stammered Wenstan. “Her head hair!”

One evening a cow swam across the river, and the rivermen slowed the ship so it wouldn't collide with the surging, lowing head. I could only wonder that the cow could have wandered so far from her usual pasture, and her companions. Now that it was feeding time the beast was near lost, and Hubert and I stood in the stern of the river ship and watched the cow for a long time, until she disappeared along the bank, her bell ringing softly in the willows.

 

We made our way through forest and farm when we had left the river behind.

When we found no inn, Wenstan and Miles drove tall camp pegs into the soil, long wooden spears, with a shape like a nail-head at one end, and erected a great, sail-gray tent. The thick canvas bellied and fluttered until willing hands caught the ropes and helped to tie it down.

In the midst of strange country, a bull across a stream gazing at us, a few hammer blows, a few quick knots, and the sky, the foreign landscape, was hidden by canvas. I told Wenstan how magnificent our tent was, and he said, after preparing his tongue to utter the words, “Good Edmund, when you see the tents of Our Lord's army, you'll think this dull.”

I had heard of monstrous men in far-off lands, men whose faces and brains were in their chests, who had no heads, and the race of humans called unipeds, who bounded along the ground on one massive leg.

In our whispered speculation Hubert and I agreed that to meet one man-monster would be a disturbing sight, but an army of them would strike terror.

Each evening Hubert and I would practice sword work, Nigel looking on, calling, “Stance, watch your stance!” or “With a will, Edmund!” I learned how to hold my sword in the high ward, over my head, and the low ward, angled down by my knees. Nigel taught me to look at armor with a squire's eye, how to help a knight dismount with a strong and willing shoulder, and how to assist with a war lance, dusting the grip with resin powder.

Some farms had been blight-blasted and abandoned, house and granary burned to the ground. Others flourished. The vineyards sent forth yellow-green shoots, and the wheat fields were bare except for shivering, bright new life. Church bells reached us sounding oddly sour, the music of the call to prayer made bitter by our growing distance from home.

I slept well at night. We ate the hen's eggs and pullets Wenstan bargained for in nearby farms. We consumed goat and jellied eels, wine by the pottlefull, sheep's milk, and pies of swan's necks and goose livers, steaming hot.

The road was long, and the river was longer, and as the days and weeks went by each one of us grew lean and brown. We rarely rode our war mounts on these long, journeying days, but kept to cobs purchased for the trip, mild animals, bred for burden, destined for the poor man's table.

Some breezy, rain-spattered days we traveled by cattle barge along a river, magpies stalking the vineyards. Other days we traveled by cart-rutted path, always waking well before dawn and settling for the night while the sun was still high in the sky.

It was clear that the gray, stooped men Wenstan bargained with for cheese and bread were afraid of us. They would not meet Hubert's eye, or mine.

 

“Is Saladin a monster, too?” I was asking.

“A monster?” echoed Nigel. He gave his horse an absent-minded pat, waving away a wasp. The wasp persisted, and Nigel leaned from side to side, cursing, dodging the insect.

We rode in a long line, and the horses had been nervous, their ears twitching. I shook out a sword-cloth from my pack, and snapped it at the wasp. Perhaps it was a lucky blow—the tiny creature vanished.

 

“You know how I hate such pests,” said Nigel, gratefully.

“The pagan lord,” I persisted. “Is he a terrible demon, like his men, or is he built like us, with arms, and legs, and—all the other parts?”

“The pagans we call Mussulmen. I know little about them, I am pleased to say. They have taken the Holy City from the Christians, but I am certain, Edmund, that they look in great measure as we do.”

 

A dozen questions swarmed in me. Did these heathens fight with swords? Did they invoke the Devil, and did the Devil ride with them?

 

Some pigs were eating the carcass of a dray horse beside the road. Two young sows ran off at our approach, but the largest, a brown and pink matron sow stayed, snout deep in the ribs of a nearly fleshless skeleton.

Hubert threw a stone the size of a grouse egg, small and smooth, and it struck the pig squarely on its right ham. The pig did not look up, but it did argue a little, making a sound like Sir Nigel talking in his sleep.

Rannulf accepted the lance from his squire, swung it easily up and down to check the balance.

Nigel cried out, “I can smell it!”

“We all nose this poor horse, my lord,” I said.

Nigel lifted his hand. “No, Edmund—I smell the sea!”

 

 

 

 

The ship was called
Sant' Agnese.

It was a holy ship. Even coiling a rope preparing for the voyage, the sailors made the sign of the Cross, so that, as Wenstan explained, a demon could not get wound up in the circles of cordage.

“This is not a ship,” breathed Hubert. “This is a castle!”

Indeed, the Cornish boat that had carried us across the channel now seemed like an oyster-catcher's wherry, compared to this floating cathedral. Dockers carried casks of honey, sacks of wheat and millet flour, bales of kidskin leather, barrels of wine from the Rhone vineyards. As the ship took on cargo, we feasted on roasted curlew, purchased under the sky, still hot from the spit. Provender for the voyage was brought in cages, ducks, thrusting necks through the wooden staves of the crates, hens squawking, and a single rooster in a cage by himself, crowing.

Dozens of men manned the sweeps, and we surged away from the dock, overlooked by an image of the blessed Saint Agnes, set upright at the prow. The beloved saint held a lamb in her arms, and looked down upon us with patient love.

One hour out of port the sail filled with wind and the bottom of the sea fell out from under us. The ship dropped straight down for a long time, a wall of water growing higher on all sides. The sunlight vanished, and the shade of the sea was chill.