The Book of the Lion (21 page)

“Enough patience!” called Sir Nigel.

 

The enemy riders turned about. They checked their line, smiling, talking to each other. They trotted in our direction.

Nigel gave a laugh of amazement. “Not afraid, are they?”

They began to ride harder, and as they gained momentum Winter Star lifted his head, shivering, laying back his ears.

 

 

 

 

Their warhorses shouldered into us.

Once again Winter Star shuddered, blows striking him as I leaned, working hard with the hammer.

This time when the attack broke off, Rannulf kicked his horse into action, and I followed. It is a squire's duty to keep his knight fit in appearance as well as deed, so I tugged at Rannulf's chain mail where it hitched up behind, and wiped horse foam from his sleeve.

 

King Richard's horse was nicked in a dozen places, and the king was freckled with blood.

“If we don't take the offensive,” said Rannulf, breathing heavily through his helmet slits, “we will have to yield the ground.”

“Hold the men back,” said Richard, as his personal guard helped lift off his helmet. A dozen hands arranged the bridle, straightened the skirt of blue wool that hung behind the king, wiping a gobbet of pink flesh from his shield. The king's face was aglow. “We are waiting for his reinforcements to get within striking distance.”

Rannulf's face was barely visible behind the cross slit of his helmet. The sunlight fell into the dark interior, and a flesh-bright cross illuminated his eyes. “My lord king, it's impossible to keep the men in place.”

“They will stay as they are,” said King Richard.

It was Sir Nigel who first broke the line.

He was the first to charge after the horsemen, after their next attack, cutting about him with his sword. For an instant his lone figure, with Hubert in pursuit, were the only Christians on the battle-churned field.

At first the pagan horsemen spurred their mounts all the harder, hearing Nigel's battle yell. But it became clear to even the most fight-worn heathen that a sole knight and his squire were all that harried them. The enemy turned, scimitars clashing with Nigel, his sword flashing in the sunlight.

With a roar, up and down the line, our knights broke rank, a lunging wave of horse and man. Bowmen were in the way, and what remained of the cheveux-de-frix impeded our attack.

We swept forward, the king riding hard through the turmoil, holding his blade high. Making the best of a bad surprise, he led us in our charge. For a long moment we were a thing of beauty again, the horses neck and neck, lances at the ready, knights braced for impact.

The Saracen army collapsed. Scarlet-garbed captains called out orders, and noble pagans struck hard at us, secretaries and pages scurrying away from the battle as though that had been the plan all along, a panic so well executed there was little confusion. Even the slain toppled as though by prearrangement, a limb severed, a head lopped, a herd purchased for slaughter.

I buried my hammer in the skull of a horse, and wrenched, unable to free the weapon. With one hand I raised my shield, while my other hand lost its grip, the handle of my weapon slimy with red. I seized a Saracen by the headcloth, and grappled with him, trying to take his sword. The crescent blade arced and wheeled, and Winter Star crumpled under me.

My opponent cut at me, and missed. Pike thrusts from a dozen English soldiers bloodied him, and he dropped.

Winter Star was on his feet again, his entrails dragging.

I pried my hammer from the red mire that covered the ground. I clutched at Winter Star's bridle, and he fell forward, lurching, sprawling heavily to his side.

 

 

 

 

Some dawns as a boy I would stay snug under a hairy wool blanket while my mother pumped the bellows at the hearth, the room filling with the fragrance of oakwood smoke. I lay quiet those crisp mornings, rain soothing the thatch overhead.

Now I felt suffocated. I could not imagine cold. I could not imagine, except as a faded image, green moss, or long mornings of small rain, the breath of man and beast bright in the winter light. Surely, I thought, I will close my eyes—and Winter Star will be whole again.

But he was no longer trembling, pawing the air with one hoof. He was not breathing.

A rough quiet fell, squires calling the names of their masters, a loud voice in a language I did not recognize demanding attention far at the edge of the field.

I knelt, holding Winter Star's bridle.

Father Joseph once told a miracle story, a wife who was turned into a pillar of salt. It did not sound like such a misfortune to m now. I wished I could turn into a mineral at that moment, some stone that could feel no sorrow.

I wept, and then I left Winter Star, flies thick around his wounds.

So many knights and squires were missing it was hard to feel concerned for Hubert and Nigel. In my search of the stunned battlefield I was offered wine from a Turkish goblet, a thing of beauty, sweet to the hand. I was offered captured silk, a bright bolt of orange cloth. One pikeman, his head bound in bloody linen, called me sire.

His accent reminded me of home, and he told me he was Osbert, a flock-puller from Copmanthorp. “And as strong a pair of hands you'll never see, my lord. Or as good a wine as this.”

The wine was sweet. I paused, took a breath, and drank hard.

“Thank you, Osbert,” I said. “But I am no lord or knight.”

Osbert unwrapped a pigeon's egg, amazingly white and intact in the midst of this carnage, and an emir's finger—he swore that's what it was—both of which I declined with thanks.

I handed him back the sack of wine, and spat a goat hair from my tongue. An English squire put a Saracen headdress over his own cropped scalp, and looked to us to confirm his pride of ownership.

 

Rannulf was carrying an armload of scimitars, Saracen spurs and bridle bits dangling. His helmet was gone, and when I told him I would find it he gasped, “No more need for it today.”

“Come with me to find Sir Nigel and Hubert, my lord.”

“Nigel?” he asked, as though he could scarcely recall the man. “The man has always wanted this.” Rannulf was bleeding from the nose. He sniffed, like someone with a wet cold in the head.

“Surely the two of them can avoid trouble,” I said with a confidence I did not quite feel.

“Trouble,” said Rannulf, the way a scholar savors an idea. “Avoid it or not, Nigel will be pleased.”

“Are you hurt, my lord?”

Rannulf laughed. It was a silent lift and fall of his shoulders, and it kept him from doing more than shaking his head.

I felt a tingle of annoyance with Rannulf's exhaustion. I gave a waterboy a carnelian ring I had tugged from a pagan finger, in exchange for sitting with Sir Rannulf and waving flies away from his face with a scarf.

 

Not all horses had died as peacefully as Winter Star. Some lay with their legs sticking up toward the sky, bellies already swelling in the late-day heat. Others stood shaking, black with blood, half flayed. Many more horses had died than men.

The corpses of the Infidel were strewn, hacked and thick with a breed of fly I had not seen before, an emerald-bright insect in great swarms. Nearly all the dead men were heathen, although word was that a great Frankish knight called James of Avesnes was dead with fifteen Saracens cut to pieces around him.

King Richard had established a column of foot soldiers, and a picket of sharpened staves. The king's voice was clear, ordering the archers and crossbowmen into place.

The Saracen army had withdrawn, a line of men and heaped war-stuff far to the south.

Our own baggage train was scattered. A hooper stood among the remains of a smashed wine barrel. He reminded me of my father, sorting the barrel staves into whole pieces, which could be salvaged, and broken ones, fit for kindling. The sweet decay of red wine filled the air.

Wensten was remarkably unsullied, his tunic pale as a priest's surplice, except for a drying splotch of blood on his chest. He probed the growing pile of battle trophies with a carefree air, a man at a fair with a fat purse.

He wasn't wounded himself, he explained. Turkish raiders attacked the baggage train during the battle, and Wenstan drove off the attackers with his sword.

“No need for concern,” Wenstan said, his eyes searching the field. A knight of Sir Nigel's status would be held for ransom, unless he died in the thick of fight. Even a squire would be worth bartering for.

Strong feeling swept me, a feeling for Winter Star too strong to be called simple sorrow, and I took a hard moment to steady myself. The hawk and spit of a carter was loud across the field.

Wenstan loaned me his horse, not a charger, and yet not a mere cob, either, a horse with sensible eyes and a soft mouth. “The Saracen will not respect you if you approach on foot,” he said. Wenstan himself straddled a dray horse, a huge, flat-hoofed animal, who clopped along behind me to Wenstan's quiet urging.

 

We could not find them.

 

 

 

 

Fox scat is rich with hair, buck spoor with half-digested leaves——otherwise, it is all the same to me. Even so, I had little trouble following the hoofprints of a dozen horses. Wenstan pointed out the large hoofprints of our English horseshoes, and the smaller prints of the Saracan mounts.

Sunset approached, birds chorusing in the gray-green shrubs that grace the Holy Land. I called out their names, and there was no answer.

 

Blood told an incomplete tale, a small pond of it, already black and curling at the edges. A spear had broken, the shaft lying on the ground. I slipped from my horse, and hunted through the dry grass.

“You see, there was a fight,” said Wenstan. “And the two of them made meat of at least one horseman.”

The sound of a carrion bird distracted us, a croak far across the plain.

A pair of wings took to the air.

I could not keep my limbs from trembling, as though all through the battle some power had stored up in me, and now it could escape my body.

We came upon Sir Nigel and Hubert far from the battlefield. Nigel was sitting with his bare arms in his lap, a palsy in his hands, shivering with a sweaty chill.

Hubert leaped to his feet, sword in hand, before he recognized us.

Hubert told the story fast and with spirit, a good chase, a noble fight, mortal wounds for every pagan who wanted one. Sir Nigel had fallen from his horse as the charger stumbled.

Wenstan knelt before his master. As they conferred, head to head, Nigel leaned into his manservant's shoulder with a sigh. “I wanted hostages,” Nigel said in a ragged voice. “For silver.”

Strong feeling for Sir Nigel made my voice husky. I said, “Hubert, I thought you were food for the birds.”

“They tasted us—we needed salt,” said my friend.

 

I doubted that Nigel would survive the journey back to camp.

I led the dray horse, Nigel astride, cradling his shattered arms.

He denied that he was in pain. “I saw a miller once who got caught under the grindstone, arm and thigh,” said Nigel. “And he felt no more pain than a wooden angel, until they took to move him.”

 

A brace of Saracen warriors worked the rubble along the battlefield, searching like harvesters for the faces of friends among the slain. At the sight of us, a few of the men took to their mounts, ready to fight or to flee, and I observed this activity with enough concern to make me wish we were somewhere far away. But one of the leaders lifted a hand and spoke to his men, and I recognized the warrior who had watered his horse at the stream—it seemed so long ago.

But the Saracen made no sign of recognition, and I told myself I was mistaken. This was surely some other man—there were so many of the enemy, and I was not able to tell one from another.

 

 

 

 

The sea wind was cool.

The beach was crowded, sick and wounded on cots, on crutches, coils of cordage and kegs of pork just arrived, stacked along the sand.

Somewhere down the beach, Wenstan's voice was lifted in song, “Now His body with scourges beat, and His blood so wide out-let.” He had begged leave from Sir Nigel to stay in the Holy Land as a servant to Father Urbino, and now I rarely saw the happy manservant, but only heard him, his songs more and more holy, almost always about Jesus' wounds.

A dark Genoese ship lay within bow shot, her keel on the sandy bottom. Sailors called, joking with old friends, and new passengers were floated on board, or helped out to the ship by their companions.

Sir Nigel, his arms in splints, strode into the foam. “Foolish to look so sad, Edmund,” he called with a laugh. “You'll be home by winter, or I'm a Mussulman.”

He would not let us see the tears in his eyes as he leaned into the easy waves.

“In Heaven's hands,” he called.

Only when he was hoisted into the ship by several other men did Sir Nigel turn his face back to us again. He no longer had the fever that had made us despair of him, all those nights. Rannulf had said his bones would heal when he found himself in a place with beef and bread that were not alive with bugs.

It was a bitter surrender for Sir Nigel—he would never see the inside of Jerusalem. And for the rest of the army, who would fight unaccompanied by Sir Nigel, the Holy City seemed much farther away. Hubert's duty was with Nigel, and he had to depart with his lord.