The Leopard Sword (10 page)

These were scavengers, cutting corpses of their purses, buckles, rings—and if a body was still coughing, a quick in-and-out quieted all complaint. I cursed a shawled figure, swung a fist and missed, and she raised a high, sharp cry.

Several shadows that had been watching from a copse of stunted pines left their hiding and hurried down the sandy beach armed with cudgels and staves. I had studied sword work with scarred sergeants, the best fighters my father could afford. I am not easily frightened by an attack, but unarmed as I was now, I took a few blows on my forearms before I began to fight successfully with my fists.

My attacker was a farmer, judging by his beige-cloth apron and tunic, and although his cap was cut in a style I did not recognize, I saw in him a harvester's strength, broad feet, heavy forearms. Such men have long ago mastered the downward stroke, splitting the ox skull with a single blow. I avoided his heavy swings, bloodied his face, knocked him down, and kicked him until he was still. Then I dealt with his fellow farmers, joined by Edmund, who was also unarmed but lost no time in snatching a truncheon, breaking it over a head, and driving another assailant into the sand.

Sir Rannulf's opponent leaped at him with a knife. It is one of the earliest lessons in combat, how to knock aside a thrust and step inside your opponent's guard. Sir Rannulf half killed the farmer with a blow to his face, and seized the knife from his stunned grasp. The knight knelt over his attacker and, taking a swine butcher's care, cut his throat.

 

 

All the scavengers fled, bleeding, staggering, except Rannulf 's dying man, the dark red spreading in the sand around him.

When several new figures stood on a ridge, observing us from a height, we gathered together. One of the hooded men was on horseback, and all of them carried staffs.We had no weapons, and our company was small: a few coughing, spewing sailors, some half-dazed Frankish squires, and the four of us.

“We must live to see Rome,” rasped Sir Nigel.

Rannulf retrieved the knife from the dead man's throat, and Edmund dug a scrap of timber from the foam, a piece of flotsam from the
Santa Croce.
The ship was broken-backed beyond the surf, a dark, fragile husk. Edmund brandished the improvised club, took a swipe at the air, and then motioned to the far-off men,
Come on.

I had to love Edmund's spirit. I wrapped a length of wet cordage around my fist. My friend and I would not die easily. The figures on the ridge fanned out, the horsemen directing them, hoods and mantles billowing in the wind. They were calling as they approached, a foreign curse or battle cry.

Only when they were close enough for us to see their eyes did we notice the crosses dangling around their necks, and the wine sack held aloft. The unarmed men slowed as they approached.

“Sheathe your weapons, men,” said Sir Nigel with something like humor.

Edmund let the wooden club fall and sank to his knees, exhausted.

 

 

 

The hearth fire danced in the center of the hall.

We drank spiced wine, the hot drink doing little to dissolve the lingering cold in my feet, my joints, along the long muscles of my back. I huddled in a coarse blanket as holy brothers, members of a devout order, set wooden platters with slabs of bread and cheese before us.The other survivors were warmly attended as well, one or two of them close to death.

“I pray to every saint,” said Sir Nigel,“that I never set foot on a ship as long as I live.”

I considered before I spoke. “Will you not return to England?”

“We have been spared for a high purpose,” Nigel said, ignoring the question.

“If Heaven desires that we travel by sea—” I continued.

“Then, yes, I'll hire myself out as a helmsman,” snapped Sir Nigel, with a welcome hint of his old spirit.

There is warm hospitality in the company of such monks. My father and I had stayed in an inn run by an abbey—the Mitre and Sword—when we traveled to Derby. We had some casual friends among the clergy, who saved their best ale for us—or so they led us to believe—in a pitcher on the top shelf.

But because such people have devoted their lives to Our Lord, they offer all travelers the same benevolent care. I think there is something impersonal in the mercy of someone who does not know my name, but this is no doubt because of the smallness of my own soul, when matched with those who serve God. I was grateful that night to hear the rain spitting on the fire from the smoke hole in the roof.

I used my Latin to ask one of the brothers how far we were from Rome, and he said we were less than ten leagues from that city.

“Ten leagues!” I exclaimed, repeating the news to Sir Nigel.

“How far is that?” asked Sir Nigel.

I was momentarily crestfallen at my own ignorance. “It can't be far.”

“Far or long,” said Nigel, “we'll find King Richard's ambassador to Rome, and make ourselves useful to him.”

The Crusade had not changed Nigel the way woad dye turns raw wool to blue. But some new stitchery was present in the fabric of his character, a new quiet. I hoped this meant that Sir Nigel foresaw a long, safe life ahead, and not that he expected to die soon and desired a conscience full of grace.

“We are poor now, all of us,” said Sir Rannulf, cutting off another slice of brown bread, and offering it around before taking a bite himself. Perhaps Rannulf had changed recently, too, I thought, although I could not measure his moods and silences so easily. Certainly he had been a friend to me in my illness, but I was not sure I could trust a man who cut a throat as unemotionally as he sliced a loaf.

“The treasure will wash up on the shore,” I said.

“No iron floats, nor any gold,” said Edmund solemnly.

All of our armor, our silver—my thimble, Edmund's cup. In my gratitude at being alive, I had not felt the loss until now.

“Surely we'll find something,” I said.

“We're as wealthy as a gang of tomcats,” said Sir Nigel, with a matter-of-fact good humor. “No more, and no less.” Poverty was not a shameful condition—some chose that state, seeking to work in almshouses among the ill, or to travel on endless pilgrimage to holy places. But for a pair of squires looking to establish themselves as knights, our loss was devastating.

I left the smoky hall and its candlelight, and walked out into the sheltered corridor, the rain visible through a row of arches. I blinked angry tears, and I made no move to hide them when Edmund joined me, looking at the dark rainfall.

“Sir Nigel,” I said, “has an honorable name, even if he is as poor as a billy goat.What do we have?”

Edmund had been born to a man who carved barrel staves, a man for whom three or four silver pennies a year would have been remarkable bounty. Poverty suited him—he had his strength and his good sense. My father had money, but the sort of wealth that winds up invested in contracts with dyers and warehouses. He had borrowed against shiploads of woven wool bound for Brugge and paid for my gauntlets and my sword, both he and my mother drinking watered wine to afford a son who might someday be knighted.

“It's all lost,” said Edmund, with a calm seriousness.

“This is not the way to spread joy, Edmund. ‘It's all lost,'” I intoned, sounding exactly like him.

“We have our lives,” he said huskily.

He was right, of course.

He added, “I shall miss my hammer.”

At once, I felt ashamed. I had been pitying myself for the loss of my imagined future, and my friend had suffered a painful loss, the hammer Rannulf had given him.

I prayed silently to Saint Michael that two squires not be forgotten. And I continued to believe that some portion of our treasure might be recovered.

I slept badly, dreaming of leather purses unseamed and spilling, gold-framed brooches blistered with sea life, fish nosing the long, keen blades of swords.

 

 

 

The beach was wide and nearly empty of life in the dawn.

The
Santa Croce
was reduced to a few ribs and the stump of a mast, so far off from the shore that I was astonished we could have struggled to safety.

The sand was cluttered with rope and pegs, broken kegs, wrecked casks, the angle of a doorjamb, a bundle of headless arrow shafts—and naked corpses, pale in the sea foam. A few scavenger folk scampered up the beach at our approach, and watched as we hauled the human remains, fish-gnawed, cold, and stiff, up to the dry slope.

We stumbled over rolls of cordage, broken wooden hogsheads for ale, butt ends from wine barrels, but nothing gold, nothing silver, and no weapons.When Rannulf braved the gray seas in a boat, a pair of strong-armed monks to row, he searched the far-off hull, clinging like a crab. He held up his few finds—a mail mitten, leather legging, a shield—but cast them down again.

At last he returned to shore with the air of a man who had done everything he could.

The scavengers watched from a ridge. One of them raised a defiant weapon, a club—or was it a sword? There were more of them now.These were not the shabby figures of the day before, but bulky, hooded field men, expert treasure seekers.

The scavengers rose and retreated as I ran toward them. But some of them looked back, beckoning with brazen cheers.

Rannulf seized me from behind and threw me to the sand.

“They have our swords!” I protested.

Rannulf shook his head, breathing hard.

“And they have our silver!” I said.

“What little they have,” he said, “let them keep.”

I turned my face into the sea wind, and it was a long time before I spoke again.

We carried staffs, and we needed them.

The farmland we traveled through was clean-swept by the recent rains. Puddles gleamed under the sky, and heavy-jowled dogs were loosed on us by distant peasants. Rannulf drove the beasts away with ease, stabbing the animals harmlessly but painfully with the end of his strong staff, digging into each cur's snarl until no dog was fierce enough to do more than bark canine oaths after us.

We were dressed now in the simple rough-woven wool of pilgrims, with cowls and full sleeves. Even a duke or royal steward on a pilgrimage to Rome wore such a costume, and there was honor in simplicity. Still, I regretted not resembling a knight's squire—I cut a certain figure when I wear a weapon.

A group of armed men watched us at a crossroads, wearing swords and light shields, the sort called targets, round and easy to carry.These youths were unhelmeted and tanned by the sun. They commented on us as we passed, words of no meaning to my ears but perfectly understandable nonetheless—assertions regarding our character, our parentage, our fighting spirit.

Sir Rannulf marched ahead, his pilgrim garb failing to disguise his determined stride or the way he carried the staff like a weapon.

A stone bounded beside us, followed by a laugh from behind.

“Five of them, all armed, one with a two-handed sword,” said Nigel, as though he was seriously contemplating our chances.

Another stone hummed past, white, the size of a robin's egg. It barely missed Edmund's head.

I plucked the missile from the road.

“What will you do with that?” asked Nigel.

“I can hit a magpie at fifty paces,” I asserted.

“And hurt it,” Edmund asked, “or merely startle the bird out of its feathers?”

“And stop it dead,” I said.

This was an exaggeration. I used to visit my father's shepherds, and magpies were a grievous nuisance to lambs. Sometimes, I had been told, they pecked out a young animal's eyes—many shepherds used slings to protect their herds.The sound of a leather sling whirring was enough to send the crafty black-and-white fowl into the trees and safety. Although I never mastered the sling, I had hit a few of the birds, throwing bare-handed.

I think I stunned one, in years of trying.

“I'll hit one of those churls between the eyes,” I asserted. A churl was a field man of little rank.

“I doubt you can,” said Sir Nigel.

I threw wide of the loudest mischief maker, and he hurled the stone back so hard it whistled. Edmund and I made a desultory game of finding appropriate stones on the road, tossing them in our hands, and, when a stone was the right size and heft, throwing it at our ragtag opponents. At last I came close, making the tallest one duck.

Rannulf wandered back to join in the sport, and he succeeded, on his second try, in striking a rotund youth in the belly. The young man called out something equivalent to
It didn't hurt a bit,
but with this easy success Rannulf became less interested in the game.

“There's no honor in bruising villeins,” he explained, striding on ahead of us again.

A villein was a peasant whose entire laboring life was owned by a lord. Many knights held such folk to be little better than livestock, but it was not the first time that I had wondered at Rannulf's dry nature. Edmund and I had speculated on his dislike for women, and his leathery manner toward people in general.

Edmund had wondered if the cruel scar across Rannulf's mouth—giving him a permanent, silent snarl—had made Rannulf bitter toward humanity, to protect himself from having his overtures of friendliness rebuffed. I disagreed with my friend. I believed simply that some folk are bitter and dangerous, and that—despite his occasional kindness—Rannulf was one of them.

The taunts of the field men followed us, and became a sort of rude companionship, until we left them far behind. The farmland was bare and flat under the clear sky. Tall straight trees aimed in green rows toward Heaven. Short stone towers overlooked harvest stubble. Green pines, with rounded tops like oaks, shaded the road. There were kind souls along the road—a woman who gave us cups of warm, foaming cow's milk, a plowman who broke off handfuls of golden bread. Children skipped to the edge of the way and offered us curious smiles.