The ship bucked. The horses, including Winter Star, screamed. But they were in an enclosure, a timber and canvas stable just beyond the mast, and the more fearful of them lashed out with a hind hoof at anyone who tried to approach.
I was surprised when Rannulf spoke further to me. “It will profit God nothing,” said the knight, “if you drown.”
Seas towered, mountains that fumed and spumed before they collapsed over our heads. Sebastiano Nero barked orders and laughed. His laugh was more genuinely good-humored than Nigel’s.
The sky was blue, and the sun winked and peered over the massifs of sea, and even at sunset, when the sky was evening calm, stars standing forth out of the dark, the vessel plunged and shook so that no one but the saltiest sailor was able to walk from the stern to the prow without clutching at the man-ropes.
Rannulf and Nigel gathered dignity about them, and stayed within, in a berth packed with straw and dry, soft wool blankets. Hubert and I were stowed in a less spacious, darker quarter of the ship, and while Hubert sought to view the crashing waters from various vantage points, high and low, I sought the ship’s side.
I spent hours there. I suffered what the sailors called dolento di mare, although others argued dolente del oceane, or even dol’ di mar, until my seasickness became a cheerful point of dispute among seagoing scholars. No one could agree on what to call the disjecta from my belly, either, although vomito was the word I most easily recognized. One Genoan giant with blue trousers called out something every time I hung my head over the side, and coughed up my empty belly: The English youth is singing.
If I heaved and brought forth nothing but an agonizing belch, the Genoan would comment. If I slipped and fell down as I barked forth empty air this gave rise to comment, too.
Day by day I felt more seaworthy.
I could close my eyes without feeling that I was plummeting, and I scented fish frying on a coal brazier without convulsing. Stars swung wide and the moon joined them in a nightly dance, but the sight began to seem a pleasure to me, as did the coursing movement of the ship, only two fingers of planking between my listening ear and the quickness of the ocean.
One noontime the giant Genoan laughed as I took Wenstan’s wine sack in my hands, and drank deeply. Like any man of sense, Wenstan knew that water was rich with disease of every nation, but sweet Loire wine carried no fever. I drank as much as was seemly, and thanked Wenstan. I let the giant laugh. I joined him, laughing.
I would surprise this big man.
I walked to where he stood, this giant binding the end of a rope with a yellow, bristling twine. I took the rope from his hands in a sudden gesture, and I was near to making a market loop, a dairyman’s favorite, one I had seen at market day every week of my life. You tie a noose, toss it over the dumb head of your prize cow, and lead her where you will.
The Genoan said something, good-humored and challenging.
A hand pressed my elbow. “We need this sailor alive and well, Edmund,” said Hubert.
“I was only going to show him how we splice a knot in England.” Around a bully’s head, I did not add.
“Everyone is watching,” whispered Hubert.
Indeed, from every point on the ship, from tiller to Saint Agnes, sailors looked up from their work.
With a smile the Genoan took the rope from my hands, whipped the twine around the rope end, and presented it to me. He worked a small dagger from his belt, sawed briefly at the rope, and left it in my hands.
I felt myself blush, bested by his fierce good-humor.
Our last remaining chicken, the white rooster, crowed time and again. The cook had hung his cage on the mast, perhaps so his last day among the living could be a pleasure.
It was another warm day, seabirds eyeing us from above, the smell of a shore in the wind, fishnets and shellfish and cattle, although the land was far away, a brown wrinkle above the sea. Miles was singing the song about the gander who caught his neck in milady’s bower.
The lookout called from above, announcing a barca. There was usually an hour, or even half a day, between the lookout’s cry and the actual approach of a ship full of silks or cloves, lumbering heavy laden from the fabled east.
But this time I caught the scent, man-sweat and wet timber, within minutes. I stood in time to watch Hubert climb the rigging. Rannulf stepped from the shade and spat over the side of the ship, into the sea. The sailors made a show of demonstrating no great interest in this floating building that bore down on us, two great brass-tipped horns protruding from its prow.
But none of us spoke, unless to put on an affection of ease, the Genoan taking a commanding interest in lashing a sweep to a pin.
Our Venetian captain sent a man to the mast to shake down a blue-and-white Crusader banner, but even so the galley backed oars and came around. A line of turbaned, bearded men gazed down at us, with a show of smiles. The cloths on their heads were brilliant colors, a dyer’s pride, plum scarlet, peacock blue. The swords at their hips were crescents, like the early moon, and the sun flashed from the steel.
The oars on the far side of the ship splashed, and the shadow of the galley darkened our deck and took the gentle wind from our sails.
“Infidels,” said Nigel, in a low voice. He made the sign of the cross. “Not a single man of them a Christian.”
I did not have the habit, as most men-at-arms did, of keeping my broadsword where I could quickly fasten it around my waist. I stood naked of arms, and felt cold.
“They will board us,” I said, in a husky voice.
“A Venezia,” cried Sebastiano in answer to a question. I had never heard him use this taut, courteous tone before.
A turbaned man leaned over the side of the galley, his shadow falling over us. He was dressed in trousers, fluttering sea-blue silk, and had a wide belt with a buckle of bronze. He stretched an arm.
“Cavaliere,” cried our captain, hitching his belt. “Inglese.”
Two or three of the men in dazzling turbans gestured, and their own captain chuckled.
“They admire the redness of your hair,” Sir Nigel told Miles. “Like sunrise. Or a sunset.”
“Do you speak Mussulman, my lord?” asked Miles in a raspy voice.
“They are speaking a sort of Venetian, which anyone can understand. Look—they are admiring you, Edmund,” said Nigel. “They say you look every inch a fighting man.”
chapter FIFTEEN
“Why didn’t they board and kill us all?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t want to wet their swords with the likes of us:‘ Sir Nigel laughed. ”That ship was out of Constantinople. Those men are friendly to the Venetians, and sometimes help Christians reach the Holy Land.”
“They betray their own Infidel brothers?” I asked.
“It is strange,” admitted Nigel. “There is no understanding what men raised under the sun will do. Perhaps heat makes them all half mad.”
A sailor kneeling in the prow dropped a sink line, and called out, “quat’ bracci.” The line made a whisper as it was reeled in. After a short silence, the plumb-knob splashed and the line sank again.
Every time the cry was nearly the same—four fathoms, or three.
Nigel and Rannulf ate the rooster, roasted on a spit, while the rest of us ate the first salt meat we had tasted on this voyage. It was a pink-fleshed smoke-flavored pork the sailors ate with relish. I thought it a good dish, but tar-flavored, like wine that has been stored in greenwood barrels.
Our ship bumped some submerged object, a floating cask or log. In recent hours we had encountered much debris, charred beef bones, hen coops, tun-staves. But this was an unusually large drift-bole, and it bumped and gently battered the keel as we sailed on over it, and bobbed up in our moonlit wake.
From afar Venice was like an army of pitched tents and glorious pennons in the late sun, floating on smoke.
We could not approach the waters of the city itself, because the sea was crowded with warships and pinnaces, rowboats, fisher-boats, boats appoin
ted with gold and thick dark carpets, and salt-stained barges. Some of the ships were heavy in the water, and gave off the perfumes of peppercorn and clove, guarded by men in red or yellow trousers, carrying spears with brilliant crescent-moon blades.
“Not one of those spearmen is worth a serf’s wage,” said Rannulf.
I was surprised and flattered at his quiet word, leaning with me over the glittering surface of the tide. “They look dangerous to me,” I allowed.
“Looking dangerous is everything to the warriors of the East,” said Rannulf.
I couldn’t keep myself from asking. “What would your plan of attack be, in a fight with one of those spearmen?”
Rannulf’s scarred lips twisted into a smile. “What would you recommend, Edmund?”
I could not meet his gaze for a moment, aware that this was more than an idle question. “I’d let the spearman make the first move, seize the shaft, and try to take it away from him.”
He shook with silent humor.
“I’d take the spear in my hands,” I insisted, “and break it over my knee.”
He laughed aloud, and I felt rebuffed.
“I don’t mock you, Edmund,” said Rannulf. “I hope to see you break many a heathen spear, and before too many weeks.”
Nigel returned from a brief visit on the docks. He spent a moment huddling with Rannulf and Wenstan. Hubert perched in the rigging, and when the meeting broke up he bounded along the deck to my place beside the horse enclosure.
“The fighting is already underway!” said Hubert. “Christians and Mussulmen have begun fighting in the Holy Land!”
I was bitter with disappointment at this news. I was gathering up the leather feed bags, the horses having eaten, and placing the bags in a leather-hinged trunk.
“The Christian knights are laying siege to the great castle-town of Acre,” said Hubert. “But King Richard is not yet there.”
You are too late, the gulls sang.
Too late, too late.
chapter SIXTEEN
Morning was hot.
The sea gave off an odor like shellfish soup, the sailors sweating heavily. The gray, weather-mottled sails were furled, oars drawn up, and there was nothing to do but wait for the customs officials to climb aboard.
Venice was a riot of red plumes and brass pier-knobs, gold flags and messengers in purple stockings. All of it beyond reach. A squealing, spinning music from above descended upon us. Swallows, small, dark birds, spiraled and lofted into the sky.
Hurry, their cries said to my ears. The Crusade is almost done.
We paced, impatient, as the long day grew hotter. Hubert convinced me that Richard was tarrying in Sicily, on the Greek islands. We would reach Acre before the king, and surely the fighting would not end before Richard drew sword.
When the official vessel, a sleek, black oar-driven craft, reached our ship, the men did not board at once. Even though this was a ship of Italian sailors, there was something wrong with our captain’s papers, the red seals and the yellow ribbons on the documents the wrong color, or illegible. Sebastiano laughed angrily, swept his arm at the sky, at the sea, at all of our expectant faces.
A black kidskin sack was pressed into the hand of one of the men in the boat, with a show of apology, and a gesture of Sant’ Agnese in the prow.
Each official gave the sack a toss, opened it, peered within. They looked around at the green harbor water, and the hundreds of ships, each waiting for a customs visit. A shrug. A long discussion about documents and Englishmen, knights and fools. There was no hurry—we could all stay like this while the Crusade was fought out to a conclusion far, far away.
All aboard the Sant’ Agnese had to stand in a line while a Venetian surgeon’s apprentice examined our gums and the whites of our eyes, as though we were nanny goats at a market.
Sebastiano kept up a running commentary, how brave we were, that Acre was under siege, time was running through our fingers. The head customs official reminded me of Alan, the Exchequer’s man. The pale Venetian stood, one hand on his hip, looking me up and down, and made a joke to one of his companions. They chuckled, added a quip of their own, and there was much laughter.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
“Something lewd, I fear, Edmund,” and Sir Nigel with good humor. “This is a city of great vice.”
The city is a rambling, sea-moss-encrusted place, surrounded on all sides by water. I had never seen a more dismal town.
If a man chose to walk off down one street to exercise his legs, he soon came to the end of the city, and stood at the edge of nothing but salt water. After so long aboard ship, I needed soil, and trees, and fields, and all I could find was bustling marketplace, and steps leading up, steps leading down, canals and water all around.
“Somewhere in the city,” said Hubert, “are the bones of Saint Mark.”
For some time I had the fervent hope that I could worship before these relics. But I lost my way. The marketplace was full of bins of yellow fruit called limones, a fruit smaller than a hen’s egg, with a thick yellow skin and large, uneven pores, like a tanner’s nose. One bite of the flesh of this fruit brings tears to the eyes. Caged yellow birds sang, the sweetest music I had ever heard, and the small birds pecked crumbs when I poked my fingers through the bars of their prisons. The bread for sale was white, with a good brown crust, but full of empty gaps and bubbles.
Fine ale was not to be had, unless in the taverns where Bremen town sailors sat and sang songs no one else knew. Wine they had, sound wine, unmixed with water, and other, inferior vintages polluted with herbs. Many times I had seen wine merchants pilloried in my boyhood, for selling wine doctored with gum and resin. Here the Tuscan red wine was adulterated without fear of punishment. Women could be rented by the hour in the inns overlooking the large canal. The women I saw were like plucked chickens, all flesh and breast, with paint on their cheeks and around their eyes.
Not that I took displeasure in the sight of them. I did envy Nigel when I saw the knight with two such companions, making way up a stone staircase. Rannulf perched in a corner of the tavern, tossing a pair of dice in his hand. He was listening to a squat, merry man in russet stockings. Miles sat beside him, his face flushed, his eyes gleaming.
Rannulf listened to the man in russet stockings, turned to ask Miles something. Miles did not have to respond. Rannulf reached across the table, and popped the two dice into the jolly fellow’s mouth. Rannulf and his squire stood and left the tavern, looking with an indifferent glance up and down the canal, before marching back in the direction of the ship. Miles was a bright-colored shadow, almost too cheerful to be the companion to such a lean, dark-eyed man.
I felt a stab of envy, that most powerful of sins. Miles shared Rannulf’s insights and his moods, as I could not. And as I watched Rannulf straightened with a quiet laugh at something Miles had said.
“Have you ever played a dicing game?” asked Hubert, as the man with the russet stockings grinned at us through the window, giving his moist dice a toss.
The gambler stepped into the street, welcoming us, good Englishmen, travelers from the far sea. Or so I caught his meaning. He would play for no money at all. He was just learning his trade, a fledgling gambler. He would pay us, if we would but come inside.
Hubert and I found another wine shop, on another street. We bought two great goatskin sacks of red wine, sacks with the legs still sticking out. Each mouthful of wine tickled the tongue with a few more hairs of the billygoat, but the wine was dark and unnaturally sweet, seeping through the sack seams like tar.
When we had drunk our fill of this liquor, we flung the empty goatskins into the canal, and pissed upon them, Heh, heh, heh, cried Hubert, an excellent imitation of Captain Sebastiano. We found a tavern with a monkey in a golden cage, and a dog trained to walk on its hind legs, and watched as the small animal obediently and with eager eyes, stepped lightly from table to table, accepting morsels and applause. By then we had tasted some of the tavern’s negus, a war
m, spice-flavored cup I drank straight off and called for another.
Hubert stood and declared for all to hear, “This dog is a slave to our amusement,” a remark that caused great laughter.
Hubert climbed onto a chair. “While brave men and godly men are dying outside Acre, we are bedeviled!”
Again, great cheer.
But when Hubert gathered the small, white-fleeced dog into his arms, the outcry was deafening. Even out on the narrow street the crowd of shouting men flowed after us, the bright eyes of the dog peering from Hubert’s arms.
The night was warm, and lanterns pierced the dark from windows high above. The city was a poor place for a flight or fight. Cornered under a window with red curtains, Hubert held the dog to his chest, like a babe in arms, and he called, “Get me my sword, Edmund!”
His sword, and mine, were aboard the Sant’ Agnese, and we had no defense but my two fists. I called for Hubert, but the thick air slowed my voice, deafened us all. I felt no fear. Something about the thick, humid evening made me feel that I could explain Hubert’s character in eloquent Venetian.
Before I could swing my fists, the throng had us.
We were dumped into the canal, and by the same hands, pulled out again, patted and caressed, and guided back to the tavern. Laughter, hearty voices. I spat a mouthful of water that tasted like over-salty parsnip soup. Like most people, I could not swim, and a plunge in water gave me no pleasure.
The dog yipped, and walked on his hind legs, beseeching our attention, but the tavern keeper threw a market hitch over its neck, and led the pet away.
Hubert and I sat dripping onto the floor, the water that pattered from our clothing gleaming in the candlelight. The innkeeper plied us with warm cups of spiced wine, rolls of cinnamon and tiny wooden stars of cloves floating at the bottom of each cup, a summer’s-wages worth of spices.
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