The Book of the Lion

by Michael Cadnum

  I was a little surprised that, only a few hours out of town, we were already military in provision and manner, even Hubert accepting a cup of wine from Wenstan with what he must have thought was a manly nod of the head. The dog accepted a morsel of cheese from my fingers, and Hubert gave him a healthy chunk of salted beef.

  As we continued south, perhaps an hour before sunset, two great brown mastiffs rushed through the brambles on the verge of the road, and seized our dog companion by the flank and throat. Within a moment our hound was ripped in two, blood flying, the two attacking monsters gobbling and growling as they tore our dog to pieces.

  Nigel whipped out his broadsword, leaned out of his saddle and sliced off a mastiff’s head. Rannulf accepted his lance from Miles, balanced it, squared his shoulders, and ran down the second offending dog. The lance skewered the brute’s haunch, and the great mastiff hung on the point of the lance as Rannulf lifted the kicking body clear of the road, shook his weapon, and let the body fall.

  Field men ran calling out, armed with ax and staff, but when they saw the Crusader star and Rannulf’s lance they fell silent.

  Nigel and Wenstan headed along the high way again, Nigel without a second glance at what had happened. The knight gossiped about whose maidenhead had been lost under what hayloft. He said that a poacher had been hanged by this oak up ahead, for stealing a flitch of venison, already dressed. Or perhaps not that oak, he said, but another similar tree, back a mile or so.

  I let Winter Star pace more slowly, so I might overhear what Rannulf and his man were saying. To my delight, the horse obeyed my touch at once.

  “Balance, my lord,” I heard Miles say. Balaunce. “Of course, in the case of a man, unhorsing is all that matters. Knock him, nick him.”

  Rannulf spoke at last. “Still, it was a pity the point was so wide of the heart.”

  Before we drifted to sleep, Hubert whispered from his pallet, “Did you see how angry Rannulf was, when he saw those dragons hurting our dog?”

  I considered this. “He acted with due haste,” I said.

  “So if you or I were attacked, he would come to our aid,” said Hubert.

  I said that this was undoubtedly true. But privately I was not certain. I could easily imagine Rannulf watching bears consume either one of us, out of interest in the way the beasts used their claws.

  When I closed my eyes I saw my master’s hand, spiked to the anvil. I saw the startled eyes of our dog companion, and the spreading blood of the suddenly headless mastiff.

  They say that a lion sleeps with his eyes open. Despite my fatigue, Saint Mark sent me watchfulness that night, and I kept waking to hear the slow, steady breathing of my companions.

  The next morning I could scarcely stand, crippled by a day of riding, and my injured foot was aching again. I hid my discomfort, although Sir Nigel rode beside me later that morning, and said, “I’ve known fighting men to start the day with three flagons of the strongest cider, to ease the road-ache.”

  “They have my pity, my lord,” I said.

  Sir Nigel gave a laugh. “I bet a Flemish penny you would fall off yesterday. Rannulf collected on the wager last night.”

  Sometimes, even armed as we were, we traveled in a tight phalanx, Nigel at the point, sometimes standing upright in his stirrups as he rode, his gaze sweeping the forest. At times like this I dared not meet Hubert’s eye, but I could sense him, tense, one hand on the pommel of his sword.

  Even knights were sometimes attacked by the bandits and madmen who lived in the woods.

  chapter TEN

  Innkeeper and ferryman alike greeted us with forced smiles and hollow heartiness.

  Crusaders often slept in inns and forded rivers without lightening their purses, since their quest was sacred, and even the burliest wine seller had no means to enforce his fee. But Nigel paid with pennies, quartered and halved after the custom of our countryside, and the metal was always the soundest quality. Maiden and matron poured us all an extra measure of beer, and kept the tapers burning until the last of us had lurched off to our pallet in the warmest corner of the inn.

  If I could be my lady’s hound, no hare could hide.

  Day by day, we heard all the verses of this lay as Miles sang them. We traveled south. Rain fell, the sun broke through, the wind was cold, then swung from the west and blew warm, sometimes all within an afternoon. Rivers overflowed their banks in places, and a fire had erased the shambles, the butcher’s district, in one town we passed through, aproned men standing disconsolate, the smell of charred beef in the air.

  Far from needing encouragement from me, it was Hubert who delighted at the sight of a flock of sheep fording a river, swimming like a vast, tufted rug. He was the one who brought a smile from the ferryman, and when he bid a mason good morning, the broad, swarthy man, powdered with sandstone, told us all that the shire bridge had been washed away, but that the ford not four miles east was no deeper than a laugh.

  As we approached London the road grew populated with castle stewards and wine merchants, barrels of wine rumbling over the wagon tracks in the road, and barrels of money, too, under guard, spearmen and ox handlers alike wearing black Exchequer’s armor. Oxen and dray horses labored shoulder to shoulder, wheels sending forth scythes of mud as the drovers lashed the straining beasts.

  Sometimes we would pass a lady with her attendants, side-saddle, as her gentle horse picked its way through the mountains of mud, but for the most part this was a world of men, figures clotted with black mud and chalk clay, gray loam and black topsoil. God’s universe was suffering a second Flood, and was transformed to mud.

  “More mire,” was all Hubert would say as we struggled to a hill crest and gazed at the rain-bronzed acres ahead. Priest and dairymaid climbed stiles, slathered with muck, hesitated, and descended to the mire, slogging through the deep, wet world.

  In my heart I was alive with excitement, each starling’s chuckle an adventure to me. I was far from the place I knew, so far that I was in a foreign land already, although we were still in England. I affected the manner of a war-wise traveler, but inside I was ablaze with curiosity.

  Waking each morning was less painful to my frame now, and climbing into the saddle each time hurt less and less. After a few days I did have trouble recalling any field that was not so sodden it mirrored sky—dry dirt was distant memory. But this was a further sign that I was embarked on a high adventure. My clothes were so damp they chafed my skin, but I didn’t mind. A few mornings I drank deep of Nigel’s wine, and by the time we hurried toward the thatch and timber of London, knight and man among us were indistinguishable because of the skin-deep dirt.

  The first carta mundi I had ever seen was rolled out on my master Otto’s counting table, a king’s clerk showing off a prize purchase, a map of the world, as rare as a mermaid’s tooth. On this map London was a stand of spires and flags on a hill overlooking all of England, which lay around it in an irregular but pleasing shape, like a pie. London was at the center of the kingdom of England, and all that was beyond the pie’s crust was mapmaker’s fancy, a ship like a beetle, and off to one side a sea dragon with a head like a hen.

  And so the real, actual city was at first a little bit of a disappointment.

  At a distance in the morning sun, the great city looked like any other town that had grown beyond its walls. A smelter, or an alchemist, was melting some light metal—tin, I thought by the smell, and a walker trod around and around, treading his master’s chalky earth into a powder that could be oven-fired into mortar. A wheelwright rolled one of his wares ahead of us, splashing in the gutter down the middle of the street, but it was only as we entered the town, and continued to enter it, in the shadows of the high, thatched roofs, that I was able to believe I was really in London at last.

  “A mighty town!” breathed Hubert. A mickle toun.

  Full of people speaking a tongue I scarcely understood, wearing hats of a fashion new to me, full and floppy, dyed rich colors, beet black, carrot gold. A great town tha
t was noisy, and rich with smells. Infants wailed, and pleasure women sang. The smell of ordure and incense flavored each breath. And we all fell silent as we passed the one-hundred-year-old Conqueror’s tower, where, legend had it, the wall mortar had been mixed with the blood of bears.

  Indeed, I felt some shame at my road-grime. The grand streets teemed with the king’s subjects bargaining for viands in market stalls. Fowl of all descriptions, squabs, capons, drakes, and mud hens hung plucked and roasted. Among wine shops along the river we jostled franklins and beggars; beyond the roofs we heard the sounds of the river man’s call.

  Nigel kept to horseback, so all could see he was a knight-at-arms and let us by unhindered, although at times Hubert called out, “Crusading men, let us pass!”

  What was missing from the populace, I thought, was the casual presence of armed men, knights and their squires, lords and their attendants. All men of mettle had left for the Crusade, except for the few like us who hurried to join them. And some of the men who remained looked at us from the shadows of tavern eaves with neither smile nor shame, leaning on their staffs.

  Nigel did not have to bargain long with the landlord of the inn we reached at last, and the washerwomen he hired were waiting for us, by luck or prearrangement.

  I expected Nigel to throw himself exhausted on a bunk, but he was off at once with Wenstan, stopping me on the stair to say, “An outward tide’s at dawn!” as though this was both good and meaningful news.

  Hubert and I hurried to thrust on dry clothing and dash out into the street. I went without arms, only a belt around my waist, but Hubert wore his sword, a weapon that often came close to tripping him. We shouldered past women with baskets of oysters and great fish and small. Boys only a few years younger than ourselves tossed a ball, and scurried to retrieve it among the groaning wheels of carts. Every human creature I saw seemed alive with the thrill of living in this town, except for those tall, un-smiling men I had remarked before, armed with hand-pike or quarterstaff, eyeing women as they bustled past.

  Over all the streets hung an odor, not human or animal, not wood smoke, a taste of river, huge and deep, like the flavor of a whelk on the tongue.

  And the river spread before us at last, dotted with gigs and skiffs, the small craft the river men use for harvesting shellfish. There were other boats on it, too, sea-stained ships pulling up the river with the help of long sweeps, wooden oars that gave the ships the look of waterbugs gliding on long legs. We climbed down the bank and waded in the current, river mud tickling through our toes.

  On the way back to the inn, a dray horse stood, head hanging in the street. A burly man with a bald head wielded a quarterstaff, striking the horse on its broad back. Each blow sent a shiver down the animal’s flesh, but the horse took a long, rib-expanding breath, and let it out, enduring. I had seen many such beatings in my life, and so, no doubt, had Hubert.

  But something about the bald man’s grin of concentration as he belabored the horse stiffened Hubert.

  Hubert told the man to cease.

  The bald man did stop, but only to stand with an exaggerated stance of incomprehension. “Ceese!” he echoed, mocking Hubert’s voice.

  I stepped before the man, and put a hand lightly on his chest.

  “Take your friend the pup and lose yourself,” he said, smelling of beer and sweat. It took me a moment to make sense of what he said.

  To punctuate our conversation, he lifted the staff and struck the horse on the back so hard the horse shuddered, and only a quick lurch of its hindquarters kept it from falling. A small throng had gathered, grinning, nudging, but most of the citizens had places to go, and I tried to restrain Hubert by saying, jokingly, “This man will be tired soon.”

  “Take his staff from him, and break it,” said Hubert.

  But the man understood enough of our English to level his staff at me, feint, and thrust it hard into my belly.

  I gasped, not badly hurt, but certainly surprised. I was slow in grabbing at the staff, because the drover danced away from me, like a wrestler at a summer fair. He braced himself, staff held across his body in the way of peasants when they fight.

  “Leave be, leave be,” said a short, bent man. He coughed, the dry hack of a fuller, one of those laborers who knead starch and salts into wool. Such men breathe years of sheep-chaff, and their insides grow soft and furry.

  “We just delivered some two hundred ells of wool bound for Flanders,” said the fuller. “And happy to have it off our hands, we stop by for a sip of drink, and now the horse decides he has a willful nature.” This, at least, was what I understood him to be saying.

  “We’re crusading squires from Nottingham,” I said, keeping my answer short, because the bald man was brandishing the staff and rising to his toes, shifting one way and another, staring at Hubert like the champion man-and-dray-horse beater of London, no challenger declined.

  Hubert’s sword was a flash, just as the staff whipped downward. A sharp, heart-stopping crack, and the drover’s staff was cut in two.

  I expected Hubert to be astonished at what I took to be a fluke, slicing a quarterstaff as thick as his arm. But Hubert moved quickly, tripped the man, put one foot in the drover’s chest, and the point of the broadsword at his throat.

  “Don’t kill him!” cried the fuller. “He’s got a new wife and a new little baby—”

  This was no common weapon, the blade in Hubert’s hand. The length and span of it reflected roof peaks and the sky. Hubert did not acknowledge the sound of my voice until I tugged his sleeve, like a man in jest, and said, “Let him live just this once, good Hubert.”

  I put my arm around the fuller, and said that if he applied at the White Hart inn my lord, Sir Nigel, would pay for the staff, and reward the fuller’s patience for not seeking the attention of a magistrate. The fuller might have worked out a retort to this, but he bent over, hands on his knees, racked with coughing.

  I took Hubert by the arm. I dragged him stumbling and protesting, down along the dockside, among coils of brown rope and barrels of wine. One or two of the barrels had sprung leaks, or had been purposefully gimletted so a sneak thief could suck his fill. Rats scampered among purple puddles and a customs man in a red cloak called to us, “Out, out,” without rising from his stool.

  We could not find the way.

  As I straddled the gutter trickling down the center of the street, I was tall enough to see over the heads and shoulders of the passing Londoners. We walked without talking, until we stood at the edge of a broad field.

  A reeve sat on a swaybacked horse, nodding and gesturing to two peasants. Rooks filled a leaf-bare chestnut tree, and the road ahead was a footpath.

  We retraced our steps, and walked purposefully, looking neither to the right nor the left, past a tavern of pleasure women with more clothes around their hips and ankles, all swirls and ribbons, than on their chests and shoulders. We marched all the way to a flat deserted place, timber piled pink and fresh among weeds, keels set up on wooden braces. A shirtless man in the warm late afternoon sun plied an adze, white curls of wood falling to the ground.

  “We’ve lost our way just a bit, good boatwright,” I said. “Could you please direct us to—”

  The man shook his head and uttered something in a language more obscure and guttural than any I had ever heard.

  He laughed at our crestfallen expression, not unkindly, a man red and gold from sun. “No English,” he said, as though the thought of speaking like one of us gave him wholehearted amusement. “Norge,” he said, touching his chest with his thumb. “Norwayan. Ha!”

  We were lost.

  chapter ELEVEN

  Hubert told Sir Nigel everything we had done when we returned, after many winding alleys, to the inn.

  “It is really a blessing that we arrived when we did,” concluded Hubert, “to help the horse in its distress.”

  Sir Nigel set his wine cup down and looked into it as though a toad peered up at him from the interior.

  “Bu
t it’s all right now, my lord,” added Hubert. “And I doubt that the horse will be beaten any time again soon.”

  Sir Nigel looked at Hubert without any expression on his face, and then he looked at me.

  I opened my mouth, but just as quickly I shut it again. The oak beams in the ceiling creaked.

  “I can’t blame you, Hubert,” Nigel said, “for nearly slaughtering a drover on your first afternoon in London. After all, you had an idle hour, why not kill a man?”

  Hubert and I did not speak.

  “We’ll be leaving before dawn tomorrow,” Nigel said, “and in your absence the inn has taken on more travelers than it can hold. But there’s a perfectly good place for you to sleep:”

  Wenstan led us down toward the river, and out along a planked wharf. It was early evening, and the smell of frying fish mingled with the carrion-stench of a tannery. Wenstan clambered up a rope ladder and looked back, expectantly.

  I hesitated.

  I had never been on a ship before, nor any boat—not even so much as a floating log.

  Wenstan beckoned.

  A spiderweb of rigging swept upward into the dark. The rope ladder was knotted and spliced, and I slipped and fumbled my way up, and onto the deck. Even in this slack river current the ship rose and fell creaking under our feet. Hubert gazed at the mast and rigging wide-eyed, and I put out a hand to steady myself, clinging to a rope that stretched across the growing dark.

  An explosion of furious language met me, and I released the rope. A sailor hurried from some perch in the ship’s upper recesses and tested the rope I had deigned to set my hand upon. He gave it a tug, observing its effect on the mast. The sailor continued to scold, a stream of words more foreign to me than any London chatter.