The Book of the Lion (5 page)

Alan's steed gave a shake of his bridle, black leather with fittings of polished copper.

“Your master would be grateful,” said Alan, “in weeks to come, if we sheared off the hand of this walker-in-the-night, and let him bleed out on this very spot.”

“My lord, it may be as you say,” said Hubert. “But Sir Nigel believes that both of us are under his protection, and would see the least harm to any one of his men to be an assault upon his own body.”

Alan laughed, letting us watch him count us with his eyes, and count the dozen figures of his own men.

Hoofbeats approached. A heavy horse flung mud. A leather and iron armored figure approached. This horseman carried a war helmet by his side, a square bucket with eye slits and a socket for a plume. This upside-down helmet swung heavily, plumeless, a great dent in its side.

Our newcomer was yet another man I had not seen before, soiled with house smoke, bearded, with a startling sneer across his face. In addition to a war helmet, he bore a hunting lance—not as long and heavy as a tournament lance, but fit to run down boar or bear. Or, indeed, an armored man.

This stranger pulled up, and did not speak, letting his mount crop grass while he took in the sight of us, his teeth gleaming, lance upright in the sun. His horse lifted its tail and manured the earth with bright, steaming turds.

Alan straightened in his saddle, and the Exchequer's men drew together into a cluster.

“Save your steel for the Pagan,” Alan said with a thin laugh, pronouncing it
Paynim.
“All of you—when you fight side by side with this counterfeiter's apprentice.”

 

 

 

 

The wind blew cold, white clouds casting shadows over wood and field. Cows turned their backsides to it. The breeze brought tears to my eyes.

The ride back was not long enough—I wished I could forestall my return for many hours. As I rode behind Hubert I could feel the tense strength of his small frame. The horse tossed and pranced, turning his head to gaze at the two of us, showing the white of his eye.

Hubert struggled, scolding the mount in a quiet voice, and this caused the animal to kick his hind hooves so that I had to hang on to Hubert to keep from tumbling into the road. “Three days I've been riding Winter Star,” said Hubert. “Look how he tries to turn his head around and bite me!”

It was true that Winter Star was trying to snake his muzzle around, baring his strong yellow teeth. What I feared more than the warhorse was the glance of the knight who rode with us, the bearded fighting man with the scarred mouth.

“Who is he?” I asked, softly, directly into Hubert's ear.

“He is Rannulf,” said Hubert.

I knew the name.

When we reached the courtyard of the hall, Wenstan watched while Hubert tended Winter Star. Rannulf remained on horseback and watched for a while, and then when I glanced back he had vanished.

With Rannulf's disappearance, Wenstan whistled a minstrel tune under his breath, a pretty tale, the story of a man who felt love for a woman he could never see, who lived behind a wall. “The white thread and the red thread,” sang Wenstan. He did not stutter when he sang.

Winter Star grew calm under the stroke of Hubert's comb. I tried to make my question sound casual. “I thought Christians were forbidden to speak to a man like Rannulf.”

Hubert jumped back as the horse swung its head around to eye the two of us. The air rang with the sound of chain mail under the fettler's hammer, blacksmith's smoke drifting over the courtyard. “No one talks to him. And Wenstan says we should not speak
of
him,” said Hubert.

“He killed five men in the famous tourney of Josselin, didn't he?” I persisted. Tournaments had been condemned by the church. Father Joseph, who preferred homilies on Mary feeling the Babe leap within her womb, had said that such mock battles were an offense to Heaven.

“Wenstan says six knights were killed that day,” said Hubert. “A game-fight that became a battle. Rannulf has been ordered on Crusade by the priests, but he has not yet decided to go. Wenstan says he cares nothing for his soul.”

To have no regard for one's soul was like caring nothing for one's mother—it was impossible to imagine a man so callous or wicked. But some knights had a reputation for beating women senseless, stabbing drunks, running down eyeless beggars, all to expend their idle energy. My master Otto had said this was why the Crusade was required, not merely to free Jerusalem from the Saladin's armies, but to send fighting men far from the marketplace.

“Sir Nigel lets him share the roof with us—” Hubert fell silent as Wenstan approached, singing softly about the red lily and the white.

Wenstan wrapped my foot in yellow linen, cross-binding it so I could stand and stride with ease, but all the while I wanted to ask about this knight who defied the power of the Church. The sword Wenstan brought out from the dark interior of a side room was long and tarnished, with a grip of cured cowhide. He extended the pommel in my direction, and I hesitated.

Wenstan nodded impatiently.

Still, my hand held back.

“If you look like a squire,” said Wenstan, with difficulty, “if you look fighting-able, you may win our lord Nigel's heart.”

I had never held a sword, and I was surprised at how well it fit my hand. And yet, when I gave a cut at the empty air, I felt the strangeness of the weight, my body out of balance. Wenstan gave me a smile and shook his head.

Someday, I swore to myself, I'd use a sword to whisk an Infidel's blade from his fist, chop off the hand, the arm, and the head. With Nigel, Rannulf, all of them, looking on amazed.

 

Winter Star grew stoical at my touch, as I dabbed tree tar onto a cut on her knee, caused, Hubert said, by the horse running through the woods. “The horse was hoping I'd be brained by a branch. Which I was, nearly.” He had me feel a bruise like a dove's egg at the crown of his skull.

I sat at a stone wheel, working the pedal myself, grinding sparks from my age-gray sword. The housemen accepted my presence among them, as I took my time, happy to have my hands at work. I mended a girth-strap, to sling under a horse's belly, as I understood it, and hold the saddle where it belonged. I reworked a new buckle for a hasp for one of the pleasure-women's ivory lockets.

The household brought me metal work, ivory crosses dangling by a frail link, tinker's pots cracked after only the second boiling. All the servants save Wenstan were to travel to other masters once Sir Nigel left on Crusade. Only a few would remain to husband the place in its emptiness and keep beggars and outlaws from taking roost.

It was understood by all that to leave for Crusade was to travel to one's death—few Crusaders expected to return. There was sadness as well as eagerness to make things right in the air all afternoon, into the evening. The word was about that a moneyer's apprentice and a hammerman was available, no work too fine. I blushed to mend the love lockets of the brazen ladies, keeping my hands alive so my thoughts could sleep. The cook's carving knife needed a new rivet, a medallion of Our Lady needed a hook-and-hook, an easy way to attach a necklace, and strong, if the work is well wrought.

Late in the day, when it was almost too dark to mend the bucket handle in my hands, Hubert leaned into the smith's shop and said, “Sir Nigel sends for you.”

 

 

 

 

Nigel sat at his table, paring a green apple.

At his elbow was a document, walnut ink letters on parchment.

“This fruit should have been cider months ago,” Nigel said, handing me half the fruit, peeled entirely of its skin.

I sat and took a bite of the mealy flesh.

“Alan de Roche, the Exchequer's man, has changed his mind,” said Nigel, giving a nod toward the paper on the table. “It seems Alan suspects there is a hidden trove of silver unaccounted for in your master Otto's household. Dig and pry as they may, Alan is surprised at your master's cunning. If Rannulf had not found you this morning, you would be in chains again, with hot coals being applied to your privy parts.”

“It was a blessing that Sir Rannulf discovered me,” I said.

“A blessing?” He picked a fleck of apple skin from his tongue with some delicacy. “Perhaps. But it was no accident.”

“Then I owe you my continuing thanks,” I said, my voice trembling.

The fire spat and sighed in the hearth.

“Indeed you do. The law is a knot. You are mine, now, breath and bone. If I want you.”

“I am your servant,” I offered.

He laughed. “Don't be so sure you could master Hubert in a fight,” he said. “Small creatures can have great strength.”

“Like a spider, my lord,” I said.

“Or a cutpurse,” said Sir Nigel.

The night was cold, even in the hall.

“Do you see what's missing? Scan this writing, Edmund, and tell me what's not here.”

How deliberate writing is! How insistently it races across the page, and just as demandingly takes up again, top to bottom, bristling with command.

“Even a cat could see what is not there, my lord,” I heard myself say. “The letter has no seal.”

Nigel smiled. “It's a warrant without the king's seal. The king is in Italy, or Crete, or in Acre itself by now, Heaven willing. Alan thinks he can winkle you into his tong-and-coal confessional, where you'll tell him anything he wants to know.”

“You'll keep me to spite the Exchequer's man?” I asked hopefully. “And keep Hubert, too,” I asked, equally hopeful. “Do you need two squires?”

“God's blood,” said Nigel, almost a happy prayer. Every Christian was warned against swearing by Jesus's limbs, and His face and His bodily fluids. And yet, I wondered—who could know more about the stripes and spear stabs of Our Lord than a knight-at-arms?

“I like you, Edmund, because you have a lively glance, a fair appearance, and a strong arm.” He smiled. “Besides, a man can use two of everything,” said Nigel.

That night the hall did not sleep. Dozens of candles burned bright, the perfume of beeswax in the air. Tanner's wax was rubbed into straps, spear points filed to a shining point. Wenstan gave commands, and the shadows of servants flowed across the straw-covered floor. Sir Nigel sat in a corner, reading and conferring with a man-of-law, writing down instructions, and,, most important, creating a will.

“Shouldn't you and I write down our wills?” said Hubert.

“I own nothing,” I said. Only my bones and my blood, I did not add.

Hubert had trouble folding all of his belongings into the way-pack, and I helped him. “This is a sprig of rue from my mother's garden,” he said. “I promised to bury it near the Holy City. And here is a pendant my father gave me, in the shape of the Holy Cross. You see the little glass window—I'm to put a stone from the Holy City inside, and bring it back.”

 

I left the courtyard gate in the darkness, and passed the midden, curs snapping and growling over kitchen bones. I emptied a bucket of slops, urine and solid waste, onto the steaming heap.

From a distance the hall was a stern place, its roof squared off, glints of firelight through the window slits. And tonight this countryside was even more bleak, only a few stars in the sky behind a caul of cloud. A north wind, I thought, with a promise of more rain.

I glanced around, alive to the fact I was being watched. But there was no one, only the hedge mice scurrying, and the great oaks, lifting branches toward the night sky.

I found myself wishing my mother and my father could see me as I was now, among Crusaders. Or that Elviva could see me.

But it was true—I did hear a step. And another, someone close.

I spun, and Rannulf had me by the arm. Startled, I dropped the slop bucket.

“I owe you thanks, my lord,” I said, when I could speak.

Most knights shaved their beards, and kept their heads round-cropped. Rannulf had a short, dark beard, and his hair was a tangle. The night was too thick for me to see the color of his eyes, but they caught the dim light and reflected it.

He thrust a heavy iron object into my hands. My hands searched the cold iron of his helmet, and found the grievous dent.

A blacksmith's maul in one hand, the other holding an iron-smith's tool, I plied my might against the stubborn dent. A small crowd could not keep itself from gathering, as word got around that although it was near midnight I was working to reshape the helm of Sir Rannulf.

Rannulf's eyes were pearl gray, and he folded his arms and watched me, leaning against the workshop bench. Few veteran swordsmen did not have a healed gouge or lopped finger on the shield side of their bodies. The scar above Rannulf's mouth gave him a permanent sneering look, but his gaze was not unfriendly.

The iron had been fire-forged, and as I labored I was aware of the absurdity of my attempt. The blow that had caved in this strong helmet had been a master-stroke, delivered by a battle-ax or a mace. How could I, not even an apprentice at arms, begin to equal the force of such a blow?

Rannulf watched without a word. As I hammered sweat seeped into my eyes. My grip grew numb. My ears, blow by blow, went half deaf, the only sound the ringing of my hammer on the peen, a long steel chisel with a round knob instead of a blade. Work as I might, I accomplished nothing.

You're not equal to this, staver's son, said a sour voice in my heart.

Rannulf met my eyes. He made no sound, but his eyes flickered from me, to the helmet, and back.