The Book of the Lion (7 page)

“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 that 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.

 

 

 

 

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.

“But 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.

 

Hubert and I crept down a short wooden ladder, and peered into a dark space, so shallow a dog could not have stood on his four legs.

“This is wonderful!” said Hubert, excitedly. “I knew Sir Nigel would find us a noble ship!”

The ship rose on the river current, stayed up for a long time, so long it was easy to forget it had ever ascended. And then it descended, down, all the way down into some nerve-chilling abyss in the river. The ship drew away from the dock, and halted with a jolt when it reached the extent of its mooring. It swung sideways, and dug hard against the wharf.

The boat's uneasiness could not continue, I thought, and must be the result of some temporary disturbance in the river. But as the ship shied and shook, timbers grunting, I began to feel the stirrings of a sensation very much like fear.

People did not look upon hills and mountains as anything but waste, dangerous and without light, a domain of the thousand-year-old spirits who were anything but human. The sea was even worse. It was an abyss, a void that no man looked upon with joy except for those unlucky enough to be sailors.

I was cold, and I felt the stirrings of nausea. The ship shuddered out from under me and rose to take me up again. People went forth on ships to die.

I did not sleep.

 

 

 

 

Our ship nosed out into the river while a mist was thin on the water, the sun just rising.

The river was crowded along the banks with laystalls, latrines that emptied into the lapping water. Dung boats poured their still-steaming loads into the current, the scent of human soil lost in the odor of fires and the rising vapor of ditches that emptied into the current. Other ships were rolling out into the river, too, and in the cold vapor of morning the ships sounded horns, like hunters, the brassy notes mingling with the sound of birds on either bank.

I kept glancing in Rannulf's direction, but the knight was hidden in a dark robe and cowl. Only two long oars were needed to propel the ship forward, following the tide toward the open sea, and the sailors who manned the oars rowed with spirit, calling to each other with an easygoing cheer.

The horses were lashed together, and hobbled with rawhide tethers. Shadow, Hubert's mount, was as gentle as a maiden, and all the other horses, including Nigel's and Rannulf's stout chargers, accepted shipboard life with some degree of patience. Winter Star was the only animal that required a blindfold before he would stop whinnying and plunging, and even then he was quiet only when I stood beside him and spoke in a gentle voice.

I told him that all was well, and I told him that our ship was manned with seamen of the most skilled variety. I rattled on and on, and as long as I kept talking Winter Star was erect, like the statue of a horse, except that now and then he had to put forth a hoof to check his balance.

As soon as I left his side, and crept to the bucket, and poured a scoop of fresh water over my head, Winter Star would snort. Shivers ran up and down under his skin, his muscles twitching.

“Are you well?” asked Sir Nigel.

“I have never felt better,” I answered, because grumbling is the Devil's Paternoster. “How long, my lord, before we see land again?”

“I do believe we're still on the river, Edmund,” he said.

“Of course, my lord. I meant—when we set forth on the sea—”

“It's been known to take a month to cross the channel,” he said.