The Book of the Lion (3 page)

 

As I was led back down the corridor of the castle, a man stood in our way, hand on his hips, feet spread, barring our passage.

He wore a sword, the iron knob of the pommel gleaming brightly.

“Ah, Sir Nigel,” said the sheriff, approaching behind us. “Here you see our young man with the strength of four of the king's men. Or was it five?”

I had never seen this knight before, although I knew most other knights of the local countryside by reputation. Sir Nigel was shorter than I, although this was not unusual—I am considered tall. He had steel gray hair cut very short, like many men who go helmeted much of the time, and the whites of his eyes were faintly yellow. There was a jaundiced cast about his skin. He wore a tunic similar to mine, and if anything his was more begrimed, but with house soil, not with blood.

“This hammerman says he can ride a horse,” said the sheriff.

Sir Nigel put his hand on my face, peeled down my lower lip, and felt along my eyebrow to the faint scar I have there, where a billy goat caught me as a boy.

“God can be cruel,” said Nigel. “Killing my beloved squire in an accident, and leaving none to carry my shield but a liar.”

“Let us keep him, then,” said the sheriff. “I'll have the surgeon stand by with a poultice, something to catch the blood when the wrist is handless.”

“They tell me you are called Edmund, and that you'll do anything to save your own skin,” said Nigel. His tunic was soiled with duck fat and goose, a wine stain down by the hem. Like any man of quality, he kept a good table.

“Indeed, my lord, anything. Even serve God,” I said.

“My choice is not so limited,” he said. “There is one other youth seeking a Crusade,” said Nigel. “Son of a wool merchant from the west—a man with glass windows in his house, and two chimneys.” Glazed windows were very rare, except in chapels and churches. “This young man can fight, battle-ax or two-handed sword. I'll choose from the two, the winner between you and Hubert.”

The knight's eyes narrowed to a laugh, and I knew my dreams were thin.

I would never manage to best a merchant's son at a game I had never played, sword to sword. And this knight, accustomed to measuring an opponent, could look into my heart.

“Be quick,” said the sheriff in a low voice to the two of us. “Before the Exchequer's man has a change of heart.”

 

 

 

 

Sir Nigel walked with a slight stiffness in his stride through the evening shadows. He made his way before me through the narrow streets, past timber and clay dwellings.

Householders lingering in the streets nodded respectfully as he passed, and many gave me a glance, too. Many a sweet-faced young woman gave me a feeling look. None of them were Elviva, however, and I saw in the eyes of my neighbors the sympathy they would feel for a wretch climbing the scaffold, into the noose.

We made our way through the bakers' quarter, men who went to bed early so they could rise and knead their dough into bread by morning. We left the city gates, the guards there saluting us with cheer. The late winter fields were green, the trees bare and bronze in the setting sun. Sir Nigel and I approached a walled living-stead beyond the town.

The knight pushed open a large wooden gate studded with bronze points. We paused in a small, clay-paved courtyard before a house of blue stone. I had seen this place from the road, one of the few stone dwellings in the countryside. It had belonged to Sir Roger, an old knight, war weary from a Crusade long past. The old knight had died of a flux, bleeding from his guts, some six months past. This was the new tenant of Roger's hall.

Horses nickered from the stables at the sound of the knight's voice. We stopped in the door yard.

“Take a stance,” he said in London speech.

I understood what he was saying,
tan a strythe.
My heart was beating fast as I planted my feet, held my head at an angle, jaw set, as I had seen knights do on tournament day.

Nigel walked around me, a man studying a bullock he had led from market. I knew what was coming, but it was still a shock when he charged into me and knocked me flat.

I jumped to my feet.

“Try again,” he said.

I was down at once as he struck me with only one fist, swung backhand, a blow I had seen coming. He did not offer me a hand to help me up, nor did I expect or deserve one.

“Your master Otto was a thief,” he said at last.

“No, my lord, he was an honest coiner.”

The knight gave a laugh, but there was sadness in the sound. “Again,” he said.

This time he barely touched me, a quick stab of his open hand, below my ribs. I gasped, swore to myself I would not go down, and fell.

I was on my feet in an instant—shocked at myself, ashamed. I was in angry tears.

“You won't defame my master Otto,” I heard myself say. “Or his good wife.”

The knight laughed. “I'll do all of that, Edmund. Ride the wife to market, and you looking on, if it pleases me. I'm making a mistake, I am afraid before the saints. I'm making a terrible mistake to let a thief's apprentice sit at my table. But it is a blunder I am making with my eyes open.”

I hated him.

 

The knight showed me into a great hall with oak beams in the ceiling, and a graceful figure I took to be a pleasure-woman offered him a cup.

Straw was thick all over the floor, and servants appeared through the hearth smoke, unbuckling Nigel's sword. Beyond, a large fireplace gave off cheerful firelight, with the oblong shapes of hams and haunches festooned over the oakwood smoke. Nigel sat with a sigh and nodded that I should join him. I took a long look around, hoping for—and fearing—a sight of this Fighting Hubert.

The bench Nigel indicated for me was a well-planed piece of oak, better than any my master had possessed. Knights were renowned for their enjoyment of manly appetites, women, food and drink. I had been living in the household of a minter, however, and while we had enjoyed nothing like the finery of the sheriff, we had drake for midday meal, and the whitest bread.

The table knife was decent silver, wood-handled, and heavy. I longed to tell Elviva where I was. This knight watched every move I made as I accepted a warm bread trencher with a slab of beef from a broad-shouldered manservant.

“Wenstan,” said Nigel to his man. “Edmund here thinks he can better Hubert in combat. And Edmund here has carried neither sword nor buckler in his life.”

“Hubert?” said Wenstan, as though the idea stunned him. “Oh, I don‘t—” He stuttered over his words. “I don't think that would be a fair contest at all, my lord.”

“We'll see tomorrow,” said Nigel, as though it mattered nothing to him, either way. “But we can't have Edmund riding forth naked to have his head stuck onto a pike, can we?”

Naked, to men-at-arms, means unarmored. A messenger, even an archer, however well-appointed, was naked in the eyes of an armored man.

The cup Wenstan served me was heartwarming red wine. “Oh, my lord, we'll have Edmund caparisoned like a Templar,” said Wenstan. In conversation, anyone of much greater quality than oneself was addressed as
my lord,
even, if the case arose,
my lord king, my lord pope.
I noted that Wenstan did not refer to me as “Master Edmund,” or “squire.”

I was still in my blood-dyed burnet, cloth of quality, but I was alive to the fact that the serving man wore the best sort of brass buckle on his belt, and a knife with a buck-horn handle.

“Hubert is out riding,” Nigel said. “Running down a vixen, I would guess. He has new chain mail and a barely used saddle. He's getting used to the feel of the leather.”

I chewed and worked hard to swallow the suddenly flavorless meat in my mouth. I was sorry when Wenstan left us alone.

“I would have left to join our king on the Holy Crusade long before this,” Nigel was saying, “but sick as I was, I could not stand up or leave my bed.”

“It grieves me, my lord, to hear it,” I said.

Nigel swallowed wine and considered me. He said, “A hammer killed my squire.”

This could only be a poor omen, or an ugly coincidence. Before I could think of how to ask after this misfortune, he added, “It was a stonemason's mallet, dropped from the chapel of Saint Bartholomew, not five weeks past. Knocked out his brains and all his senses. He died.”

It did seem unnecessary to add that a youth with neither brains nor senses could not live, but I expressed myself as my master had taught me. I said I was sorry to hear of my lord's loss.

“I will not refer to him again,” said the knight. “It pains me.”

“As it pleases you, my lord.”

“I had a dream,” said the knight, “and after waking, I told it to the lord sheriff over wine yesterday. I dreamed the man who killed my squire rose from the dead and came to see me, offering his service. I spent hours wondering how such a thing could come to pass.”

I kept my eyes downcast.

“I killed the mason for his bad luck,” said Nigel. “Climbed up the scaffold, cut his throat, and paid the master mason a bag of silver pennies for the loss. Real silver,” he said pointedly, “with old King Henry's face stamped in them.”

I kept my mouth shut, scratching flea bites on my legs.

“You'll need beef to give you strength,” said Nigel. “Perhaps you aren't a bad youth, in your heart. I was a muscular lad like you once, and with no more sense than a duck. I have killed three men in my life, Edmund. One by accident, only my second tournament, braining a knight from Poitou with the flat of my sword. One a yeoman goose thief I ran down and skewered—” Nigel stabbed the wooden trencher-board with his knife—“through the spleen, so he bled bright red. And just recently this star-cursed mason's apprentice.”

A trip to the Holy Land to fight for the True Cross absolved a sinner of even the worst crimes in the eyes of Heaven. Still, I was surprised that such a seasoned warrior had not taken many more lives.

“Before I die,” he was saying, his eyes bright, “I pray to serve Our Lord in one great battle.”

“God wills it,” I said in a soft voice, unthinkingly echoing the Crusader's cry.

Nigel slapped the table, laughing, his eyes keen. This knight's gaze had a powerful charm—I could not help liking him now. “Maybe you have a counterfeiter's heart, and a Christian's liver.”

The liver, I knew, was the seat of courage, but I was not braver nor more cowardly than any other man.

“I have every penny ever paid to me here in this house,” the knight continued, giving a leather pouch of silver at his side a squeeze. “Ready to give to serve the saints.”

The touch of the silver at his side seemed to set him dreaming, as the feel of money will. No doubt a true squire would have said something wise and worldly, but the wine had made me stupid.

He peered at me. “You're weary!”

“Never, my lord.”

I trailed behind Sir Nigel, my attention caught by a distant sound.

Perhaps that step rustling the floor straw in the distance was Hubert, back from the hunt.

How long would it take Hubert to beat me into the mud with his sword?

 

 

 

 

“You'll sleep here,” said the knight.

I thanked him. This soft blanket and feather-padded bedroll would be undeserved luxury.

“I'm awake and about well before dawn,” the knight was saying. He caught his breath and took a step back.

I blinked around through the candlelight, to see what could have startled this man-at-arms.

A spider fingered upward along the wall above my bedding.

Sir Nigel seized a stool. He took a back swing, about to flatten the tiny trespasser against the stone.

“If I may, my lord,” I said. I reached out, and the black, glittering thing hurried away from my touch. But I was persistent, and trapped it, cupping it in my palm.

The spider was busy in the folds and wrinkles of my cupped hands. I hurried through the hearth smoke and let the many-legged creature free outdoors, into the night.

When I returned to my bedding I found clothing folded neatly, and a belt with the best brass buckles, and shoes of the sort swordsmen wear, studded with iron. But there was no weapon, not even a short sword.

I lay still while, in the far recesses of the hall, Wenstan snuffed out the few flickering candles and collected the stubs. I thought I heard the sound of lust at work, a pleasure-coupling somewhere in the dark. I put my hand to my throat, feeling the place where Hubert's blade would sever my voice and wind.

At an early hour, some nameless time after midnight, when the huge dark chamber of the hearth was a single glowing spark of red, I left my bed. If there was a night guard I could not see him. Someone snored. A male voice muttered something in a dream. All sound of rut and pleasure was quiet.

Step by step I took myself across the hall. I held my breath, all around me wine-soaked sleepers.

Nigel lay flat on his back, hands at his side, looking like the effigy of a knight on a tomb except that he was naked, his sleeping face youthful in the dim light. A posset cup gleamed dully on the floor, a marriage of wine and honey some men keep beside them in the night.

Perhaps I hoped some burly man servant, some sleepless wench, would accost me. I felt a pair of eyes on me, but when I turned there was no one.

My new clothing fit me well enough, although the shoes were a little large, and stiff, creaking with every step. It was all new, sleeve and collar, and I wondered at the knight's generosity, endowing a fledgling like myself.