The Book of the Lion (9 page)

“Be strong, Edmund!” said Hubert softly into my ear.

Not a single sailor looked upward with any concern, each seaman with some task that took all his attention, stowing ration sacks, untying or tying knots, clinging to the tiller, calmly busy.

Our captain was named Sebastiano Nero, a short, heavyset man with a bronze laugh. He folded his arms, and looked up at the sky.

The walls of water clapped together overhead, and the white, rushing suds of brine swept me off my feet. Two sailors seized me, patted my back, but another wave fell forward, and only the strong arms of the sailors kept me from floating like a cork up and over the scuppers.

Rannulf was at my side as I sprawled, soaked through. He took my arm in a steel grip. “Take this sennit rope,” he said. “Tie yourself around the waist.” He looped the rope and knotted it as he spoke. I felt grateful beyond words.

The ship bucked. The horses, including Winter Star, screamed. But they were in an enclosure, a timber and canvas stable just beyond the mast, and the more fearful of them lashed out with a hind hoof at anyone who tried to approach.

I was surprised when Rannulf spoke further to me. “It will profit God nothing,” said the knight, “if you drown.”

Seas towered, mountains that fumed and spumed before they collapsed over our heads. Sebastiano Nero barked orders and laughed. His laugh was more genuinely good-humored than Nigel's.

The sky was blue, and the sun winked and peered over the massifs of sea, and even at sunset, when the sky was evening calm, stars standing forth out of the dark, the vessel plunged and shook so that no one but the saltiest sailor was able to walk from the stern to the prow without clutching at the man-ropes.

Rannulf and Nigel gathered dignity about them, and stayed within, in a berth packed with straw and dry, soft wool blankets. Hubert and I were stowed in a less spacious, darker quarter of the ship, and while Hubert sought to view the crashing waters from various vantage points, high and low, I sought the ship's side.

I spent hours there. I suffered what the sailors called
dolento di mare,
although others argued
dolente del oceane,
or even
dol' di mar
, until my seasickness became a cheerful point of dispute among seagoing scholars. No one could agree on what to call the
disjecta
from my belly, either, although
vomito
was the word I most easily recognized. One Genoan giant with blue trousers called out something every time I hung my head over the side, and coughed up my empty belly: The English youth is singing.

If I heaved and brought forth nothing but an agonizing belch, the Genoan would comment. If I slipped and fell down as I barked forth empty air this gave rise to comment, too.

 

Day by day I felt more seaworthy.

I could close my eyes without feeling that I was plummeting, and I scented fish frying on a coal brazier without convulsing. Stars swung wide and the moon joined them in a nightly dance, but the sight began to seem a pleasure to me, as did the coursing movement of the ship, only two fingers of planking between my listening ear and the quickness of the ocean.

One noontime the giant Genoan laughed as I took Wenstan's wine sack in my hands, and drank deeply. Like any man of sense, Wenstan knew that water was rich with disease of every nation, but sweet Loire wine carried no fever. I drank as much as was seemly, and thanked Wenstan. I let the giant laugh. I joined him, laughing.

I would surprise this big man.

I walked to where he stood, this giant binding the end of a rope with a yellow, bristling twine. I took the rope from his hands in a sudden gesture, and I was near to making a market loop, a dairyman's favorite, one I had seen at market day every week of my life. You tie a noose, toss it over the dumb head of your prize cow, and lead her where you will.

The Genoan said something, good-humored and challenging.

A hand pressed my elbow. “We need this sailor alive and well, Edmund,” said Hubert.

“I was only going to show him how we splice a knot in England.” Around a bully's head, I did not add.

“Everyone is watching,” whispered Hubert.

Indeed, from every point on the ship, from tiller to Saint Agnes, sailors looked up from their work.

With a smile the Genoan took the rope from my hands, whipped the twine around the rope end, and presented it to me. He worked a small dagger from his belt, sawed briefly at the rope, and left it in my hands.

I felt myself blush, bested by his fierce good-humor.

 

Our last remaining chicken, the white rooster, crowed time and again. The cook had hung his cage on the mast, perhaps so his last day among the living could be a pleasure.

It was another warm day, seabirds eyeing us from above, the smell of a shore in the wind, fishnets and shellfish and cattle, although the land was far away, a brown wrinkle above the sea. Miles was singing the song about the gander who caught his neck in milady's bower.

The lookout called from above, announcing a
barca.
There was usually an hour, or even half a day, between the lookout's cry and the actual approach of a ship full of silks or cloves, lumbering heavy laden from the fabled east.

But this time I caught the scent, man-sweat and wet timber, within minutes. I stood in time to watch Hubert climb the rigging. Rannulf stepped from the shade and spat over the side of the ship, into the sea. The sailors made a show of demonstrating no great interest in this floating building that bore down on us, two great brass-tipped horns protruding from its prow.

But none of us spoke, unless to put on an affection of ease, the Genoan taking a commanding interest in lashing a sweep to a pin.

Our Venetian captain sent a man to the mast to shake down a blue-and-white Crusader banner, but even so the galley backed oars and came around. A line of turbaned, bearded men gazed down at us, with a show of smiles. The cloths on their heads were brilliant colors, a dyer's pride, plum scarlet, peacock blue. The swords at their hips were crescents, like the early moon, and the sun flashed from the steel.

The oars on the far side of the ship splashed, and the shadow of the galley darkened our deck and took the gentle wind from our sails.

“Infidels,” said Nigel, in a low voice. He made the sign of the cross. “Not a single man of them a Christian.”

I did not have the habit, as most men-at-arms did, of keeping my broadsword where I could quickly fasten it around my waist. I stood naked of arms, and felt cold.

“They will board us,” I said, in a husky voice.

“A
Venezia,”
cried Sebastiano in answer to a question. I had never heard him use this taut, courteous tone before.

A turbaned man leaned over the side of the galley, his shadow falling over us. He was dressed in trousers, fluttering sea-blue silk, and had a wide belt with a buckle of bronze. He stretched an arm.

“Cavaliere,”
cried our captain, hitching his belt.
“Inglese.”

Two or three of the men in dazzling turbans gestured, and their own captain chuckled.

“They admire the redness of your hair,” Sir Nigel told Miles. “Like sunrise. Or a sunset.”

“Do you speak Mussulman, my lord?” asked Miles in a raspy voice.

“They are speaking a sort of Venetian, which anyone can understand. Look—they are admiring you, Edmund,” said Nigel. “They say you look every inch a fighting man.”

 

 

 

 

“Why didn't they board and kill us all?” I asked.

“They wouldn't want to wet their swords with the likes of us:‘ Sir Nigel laughed. ”That ship was out of Constantinople. Those men are friendly to the Venetians, and sometimes help Christians reach the Holy Land.”

“They betray their own Infidel brothers?” I asked.

“It is strange,” admitted Nigel. “There is no understanding what men raised under the sun will do. Perhaps heat makes them all half mad.”

 

A sailor kneeling in the prow dropped a sink line, and called out, “
quat' bracci.
” The line made a whisper as it was reeled in. After a short silence, the plumb-knob splashed and the line sank again.

Every time the cry was nearly the same—four fathoms, or three.

Nigel and Rannulf ate the rooster, roasted on a spit, while the rest of us ate the first salt meat we had tasted on this voyage. It was a pink-fleshed smoke-flavored pork the sailors ate with relish. I thought it a good dish, but tar-flavored, like wine that has been stored in greenwood barrels.

Our ship bumped some submerged object, a floating cask or log. In recent hours we had encountered much debris, charred beef bones, hen coops, tun-staves. But this was an unusually large drift-bole, and it bumped and gently battered the keel as we sailed on over it, and bobbed up in our moonlit wake.

From afar Venice was like an army of pitched tents and glorious pennons in the late sun, floating on smoke.

We could not approach the waters of the city itself, because the sea was crowded with warships and pinnaces, rowboats, fisher-boats, boats appointed with gold and thick dark carpets, and salt-stained barges. Some of the ships were heavy in the water, and gave off the perfumes of peppercorn and clove, guarded by men in red or yellow trousers, carrying spears with brilliant crescent-moon blades.

“Not one of those spearmen is worth a serf's wage,” said Rannulf.

I was surprised and flattered at his quiet word, leaning with me over the glittering surface of the tide. “They look dangerous to me,” I allowed.

“Looking dangerous is everything to the warriors of the East,” said Rannulf.

I couldn't keep myself from asking. “What would your plan of attack be, in a fight with one of those spearmen?”

Rannulf's scarred lips twisted into a smile. “What would you recommend, Edmund?”

I could not meet his gaze for a moment, aware that this was more than an idle question. “I'd let the spearman make the first move, seize the shaft, and try to take it away from him.”

He shook with silent humor.

“I'd take the spear in my hands,” I insisted, “and break it over my knee.”

He laughed aloud, and I felt rebuffed.

“I don't mock you, Edmund,” said Rannulf. “I hope to see you break many a heathen spear, and before too many weeks.”

Nigel returned from a brief visit on the docks. He spent a moment huddling with Rannulf and Wenstan. Hubert perched in the rigging, and when the meeting broke up he bounded along the deck to my place beside the horse enclosure.

“The fighting is already underway!” said Hubert. “Christians and Mussulmen have begun fighting in the Holy Land!”

I was bitter with disappointment at this news. I was gathering up the leather feed bags, the horses having eaten, and placing the bags in a leather-hinged trunk.

“The Christian knights are laying siege to the great castle-town of Acre,” said Hubert. “But King Richard is not yet there.”

You are too late, the gulls sang.

 

 

 

 

Morning was hot.

The sea gave off an odor like shellfish soup, the sailors sweating heavily. The gray, weather-mottled sails were furled, oars drawn up, and there was nothing to do but wait for the customs officials to climb aboard.

Venice was a riot of red plumes and brass pier-knobs, gold flags and messengers in purple stockings. All of it beyond reach. A squealing, spinning music from above descended upon us. Swallows, small, dark birds, spiraled and lofted into the sky.

Hurry,
their cries said to my ears.
The Crusade is almost done.

We paced, impatient, as the long day grew hotter. Hubert convinced me that Richard was tarrying in Sicily, on the Greek islands. We would reach Acre before the king, and surely the fighting would not end before Richard drew sword.

When the official vessel, a sleek, black oar-driven craft, reached our ship, the men did not board at once. Even though this was a ship of Italian sailors, there was something wrong with our captain's papers, the red seals and the yellow ribbons on the documents the wrong color, or illegible. Sebastiano laughed angrily, swept his arm at the sky, at the sea, at all of our expectant faces.

A black kidskin sack was pressed into the hand of one of the men in the boat, with a show of apology, and a gesture of Sant' Agnese in the prow.

Each official gave the sack a toss, opened it, peered within. They looked around at the green harbor water, and the hundreds of ships, each waiting for a customs visit. A shrug. A long discussion about documents and Englishmen, knights and fools. There was no hurry—we could all stay like this while the Crusade was fought out to a conclusion far, far away.

All aboard the
Sant' Agnese
had to stand in a line while a Venetian surgeon's apprentice examined our gums and the whites of our eyes, as though we were nanny goats at a market.

Sebastiano kept up a running commentary, how brave we were, that Acre was under siege, time was running through our fingers. The head customs official reminded me of Alan, the Exchequer's man. The pale Venetian stood, one hand on his hip, looking me up and down, and made a joke to one of his companions. They chuckled, added a quip of their own, and there was much laughter.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“Something lewd, I fear, Edmund,” and Sir Nigel with good humor. “This is a city of great vice.”

 

The city is a rambling, sea-moss-encrusted place, surrounded on all sides by water. I had never seen a more dismal town.