The Book of the Lion (10 page)

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 warm, 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.

What an odd sound laughter is! To make it we bare our teeth, and howl like hounds. We sat near a fire of apple wood and balsam, a sweet scented heat that dried our clothes. Hubert danced with a woman of great size. His feet were. nimble, to no particular pattern of the lyre tune. The monkey was released from his cage, and climbed up Hubert's head and shoulders, as a man might shinny up a pier in rising water. I joined in the great general laughter.

 

Later, as we were once again carried out into the darkness, and hurled into a dank mossy corner, my mouth was still paralyzed in a puzzled smile. Not for the first time, I doubted the amusement of the evening, and tried to call out to Hubert.

Hands searched me, for what little silver I had left, found it, took it away. I called for Hubert again, and heard him sigh, and sigh again, as a leather clad foot kicked him, rhythmically and with continuing intensity. Our attackers were laughing.

As I clambered to my feet, I puzzled over what word Hubert had spoken, what proverb he had recited, that gave particular amusement to these violent men.

The other assailants wearied, but a stout man with a black, plush cloak did not abate his fierce attack on Hubert, except, after a while, to alter feet, and kick all the harder with his left foot.
Come away,
the cloaked man's companions called in their own bird-lively tongue.

Or words that carried the same meaning. I could not blame them for regarding us as figures of entertainment, and for finding that the sport was pretty well beaten out of us.

And at last only the man in the sweeping black cloak remained, and he was slowing in his attack, laughing breathlessly.

I half fell down two algae-greased steps, and plunged my head in to the water. Then, feeling strangely clear-headed, I bore down on the man in the black cape just as he collapsed to his knees from effort, breathing hard.

No doubt the great amount of wine I had swallowed encouraged me to fight. I half stumbled into Hubert's attacker. He looked up at me with a sweaty, carefree countenance, a quip on his lips. I pulled him to his feet. I clapped a hand on his shoulders and beamed into his face, like a long lost brother about to plant a kiss on his face.

He sought to run, and I would not let him go. He struggled, shrugged, squirmed, and I kept my grip, face to face with him.

It was a strange, delicious feeling to see fear light a man's eyes, and all because of the strength of my hands. I lifted the man from the ground by the fabric of his cape, a small man, under all his clothes, and a weak man, now that he was tired.

I could not suppress a troubling thought: how easy it would be to take his life.

 

 

 

 

Birds sleep as we do, waking at night to cluck or purr, seeking reassurance. Then they puff their feathers, tuck back within their slumber, trusting that all is well. I watched the sleeping pigeons, wearing the cloak Hubert's attacker had left behind.

It was still night. I sat for a long time while Hubert vomited, held his head in his hands, and moaned. I kept watch along the street and the canal lest the reveling attackers rise up against us again.

Swallows stirred in the eaves, and I took comfort in the consultations the little fowl made, each to each.

“Great misery,” said Hubert.

“If you can't stand,” I said, “I can carry you.”

“Carry me!” he said, as though the thought gave him shame.

Hubert felt along the wall as he walked, stopped to cough and to feel his ribs through his blouse. Each step he was like a man crossing fragile ice. I kept glancing back, expecting to see shadows slipping from arch to corridor, but a night watchman's voice lifted somewhere on another courtyard, and I wondered if some dark, blessed hour had arrived, when no man should stir beyond house or ship.

Hubert paused before a window, the wooden frame open like a door, and took a half step back, and bent low, peering.

“Glass!” he said at last. “Like my father's house in England.”

The window frame was spanned with clear glass, and in the dim moonlight we could see our reflected forms, stooping and peering like dim-witted fools. The pane was lightly stippled, marred with a hint of bubbles, like beer.

No one stirred within, and the silence of the town was nearly perfect, except for our footsteps. When I spied a winesack full beside a sleeping man I lifted the wine and drank it all, every last swallow.

We scurried down an alley between casks and bales, and when a watchman challenged us, I responded, “Sant' Agnese,” pronouncing the ship's name, and the name of our guardian saint, as I had heard the sailors pronounce the words.

The watchman held out a pike, in a cross-body stance, blocking our path. He wore leather armor with exaggerated, high shoulders, and a close-fitting iron helmet. The cross on his chest hung from a chain of gold and some lesser metal, gleaming with pretty menace in the starlight.

Beyond was a forest of ships and galleys tied to the wharf in the darkness. A heavy curtain swept my ankles behind me as I turned—the black, heavy cloak Hubert's attacker had left behind at his flight.

I felt within the cloak, and I slipped out a soft leather purse, lambskin, with a doe-hide drawstring. I pinched a coin in my finger, some foreign silver I did not recognize, but which I knew from its size and weight to be a quarter year's wage for even a Venetian pikeman.

“And a good night to you,” I said.

With a swirl of the cape and a disjointed sensation of both triumph and stealth I strode up and down the wharf, and when another sentry challenged me I challenged him right back, with the name of our ship.

“In Jerusalem was my lover slain,” I sang.
In Jerusalem watz my lemman slayn
.

A happy song, despite the mournful lyrics. I was sleepy, and the ship's deck slippery under my feet.

Strong hands gripped me from behind—stronger than those quick, light-footed Venetians. My own hands were held behind me, chains were brought, and yet again I was carried. I was beginning to enjoy the sensation, lifted along like a battering ram.

 

When I woke again I could not move, and did not want to.

Hubert was chained beside me, a pale face in the dark. “I hear animals,” he said.

Footsteps echoed on the deck above.

“Animals of every sort!” Hubert said.

I would die soon, I knew from the throbbing of my brain. To turn my eyeballs caused darts of green lightning. I rolled to one side. If I called for help no one would hear me, except to stick a spear into me and end my suffering.

“Edmund,” Hubert whispered. “Are you all right?”

I pretended I did not hear him, not out of unkindness, but because my tongue was a dry flake, a fragile thing that would break if I sought to use it.

“I can hear you breathing,” said Hubert, hopefully.

Each bone in my skull was a fragment. “I breathe,” I intoned.

Hubert was right: we were chained in the ark of Noah, a vessel laden with duck and sheep, horse and hen, each creature with a voice, and using it.

Sudden daylight stabbed the dark. I closed my eyes tight. Venetian voices laughed, commented, cautioned, each sailor unnaturally lively. The fine, dry sound of grass rustled somewhere in the hold, and the fragrance of hay. Hooves continued to knock and shuffle overhead. The ship settled, taking on its new weight. Loops of cordage rustled on the decking, and the ship gave a dignified start, moving unmistakably through the water.

And then the ship jerked to a halt, distant voices jabbering, calling. Voices lifted, the churn of the tiller and splash of the sweeps echoing in our confinement.

Captain Sebastiano shouted, cajoled, swore by Saint John and the Sacred Blood. He had a laugh that meant
damn you to hell,
and another that meant
my soul lightens at the sight of you
. Bare feet pattered, a horse somewhere raised a scream of disbelief. A rooster celebrated what must be day, out there in the world of the living. Other creatures made guttural, expressive noises. Bears, I thought—or pigs.