The Leopard Sword (15 page)

 

 

Blanche stopped me on the stairs, just before the cellar door. “My lady means to extend her wishes for a safe journey,” she said, slightly out of breath.

Heavyhearted, it was all I could do to murmur thanks.

“And she wishes you might remember her, good Hubert, if I may say so on her behalf.” I was surprised at the sudden sincerity in this proud servant's voice. “She offers you this locket, if it please you.”

I closed my hand around a small object on a slender chain.

I did not see Galena when we left the envoy's house, although I looked back several times to gaze up at the many shuttered windows.

When we reached the gates of Rome and bid farewell, Fulke took off his cap and gave a bow to each of us as we passed. I brought up the rear, and my horse nearly took fright at the all-but-silent creak of the city gate. The nervous gelding pissed a great gush and trembled, wild-eyed, at the sight of a gate man smiling and scratching his face.

Fulke made a flourish with his cap and an elaborate bow. His lips were scabbed from the street fight, and one eye was swollen.

“God be with you, herald,” I said, keeping my voice steady.

“Sit your horse squarely, if you can, squire,” said Fulke, offering a touch of friendly insult to take the edge off my sorrow—and, perhaps, his.

 

 

As we rode, I examined the
tressour
I had received from Blanche, a silver-framed locket holding a honey-bright slip of hair.

Edmund studied it respectfully, and gave it back. “You won her favor,” he said simply.

“Perhaps she gives out bits of her hair broadcast, like a sower spreading seed.” I did not mean this at all, but was trying to spare my friend's feelings. I marveled at my own good fortune. Certainly Edmund was tall enough and well favored enough to have won Galena's attention.

He smiled. “I don't think she does.”

 

 

 

At first I paid no heed to the hunting party as it approached.

Sir Luke put a hand on his sword and turned in his saddle. “Those are the Orsini and the Neri,” he said. “And other cousins and friends of our guest Tomasso.”

The hunting party grew closer, with gleaming spurs, the hooded falcons cocking their blind heads, listening. The brush beaters flicked the air with their leather flails, and a few hares dangled from a huntsman's knot, bloodied where the falcons had seized them. Other coneys had been shot down by an archer, scored through with holes. The hunters looked much like English barons out on a fine day, and yet the sheen of their horses, the cut of the plumes in the caps, all looked both foreign and handsome.

Sir Luke was garbed in an indigo-blue mantle, with brass-studded leather shoes, a man of wealth dressed simply for a journey. The rest of us were unmistakably King Richard's men, down to the leopard insignia on our breasts. None of us carried lances, but we all wore broadswords. There were six of us—Sir Luke had joined our usual foursome, and an ostler attended us, to take the horses back to Rome when we had embarked.

“Proud-looking men, aren't they?” said Nigel.There were a dozen of them, not counting the beaters.

“There's only one archer,” said Rannulf. “He must be very skilled.”

Many of the hunters wore swords, too, heavily armed for a day running down rabbits. No doubt they had decided to try for a variety of quarries—hope for Englishmen, but settle for field hares if necessary. The archer, a slim, clean-shaven man, slipped an iron-tipped arrow from his quiver, testing the point with his thumb.

The bowman made a fine sport of discussing with his companions which of us he would unhorse first, nodding and chuckling.

Rannulf turned off the road and rose challengingly in his saddle. Edmund joined him—a squire always shadowed his master. I could tell by the defensive set of my friend's shoulders that he did not like the odds.

One of the hunters called out words I could make out only after a moment.
“La donna Galena,”
he cried mockingly, making rude, rutting gestures with his fist.

I kicked my mount and would have bounded across the field toward these laughing hunters—but Nigel seized my bridle.

The hunters mocked us, jeered, and made every variety of coarse gesture, but Nigel restored me to reason by his cheerful example, he and Rannulf guarding our retreat all the way to the shore.

We boarded a weather-blackened cog, a stout, single-masted ship.The vessel smelled of manure and hay, but all the horses had disembarked weeks ago, in the Holy Land. The sailors were busy scrubbing the last traces of horse from the hold, and a carpet was put down in a cabin for Sir Luke, one of the wine-red tapestries taken in battle from the Saracens.

The
Saint Susanna
was loaded now with drink, newly built casks seeping black wine. Sir Nigel said, with a laugh, that he might be able to ride out another storm if he turned his belly into a wineskin. Sir Rannulf strode about the deck, as though eyeing the various vantage points from which he would kill boarders. The ship was outfitted with oriflammes—long, tapered banners that danced and fluttered in the wind.And to my surprise and pleasure, our ship also flew a leopard banner, a blue field displaying the warlike cat.

When the vessel was under sail, knifing through the rising mountains of water, Edmund and I climbed like veterans up and down the deck, trying to reassure ourselves that this ship was safe, that our return home was blessed, that it was only a matter of time before we set foot in the kingdom of our birth.

We had as much red Lombard wine as we could drink, and when the ship stopped to take on a fresh supply of ducks and suckling pigs, we dined as well as any lord. We supped each night with the captain, an Englishman from Whitby. John Hawkmoor knew the stories of the virgin martyrs by heart, and told us these tales during the long, cold evenings. Even Sir Rannulf took an interest in these legends of piteous martyrs.

 

 

 

Throughout the winter there were days when the ship made no headway, the small rain drifting down.

Sir Nigel began to bleed from his gums, and some nights he drank as much as he could hold, and more, until he spewed red wine and I had to help him to his berth. Sir Rannulf had sores on his lips, and paced the deck with a mood caused by what a surgeon would have recognized as
melas-khole,
an excess of black bile.

Edmund and I kept our spirits, practicing sword work on sunny afternoons, one hand clinging to rigging to help our balance, pretending to be mortally wounded, falling, rising, time and again. Laughing, forgetting all the real agony we had seen.

I believed that we were approaching safety, all danger done. Soon I would see my parents and my sister Mary, and wake to hear the familiar street songs of home.

Later I would marvel at my folly.

I had seen a winking point of light in the darkness, but now that I had my friend's attention, the light was gone.

“I don't see anything,” said Edmund, “but mouse-gray water and rat-gray sky.”

Edmund and I had speculated that we were close to our homeland, but the last approach to the shore was reputed to be the most frustrating part of any voyage, the winds contrary and the seas rough. The sailors had ceased to estimate our position on the coast, but their manner was quicker than ever, their eyes alight.

It was about the hour of sunset, although the actual
sol
himself had been a well-guarded secret, somewhere beyond the overcast for days.

“There it is!” I cried.

I had seen this furtive point of light fixed along the horizon—not bobbing or moving along like one of the shore craft we had seen all winter. Steady—not like a watchman's beacon, wavering with his steps.

Each sailor shook his head, or offered mysterious counsel: “Best wait and see, my lords,” or “I don't think I see it, Squire Hubert.”

I knew why.

They were wisely afraid that now we had come this far, some great menace would lift up out of the waves. And drown us all.

Sir Nigel said it could be a candle set on some old shipwreck, to keep sailors from running into it. Sir Rannulf, preferring a violent view of events, said a vessel must have caught fire.

 

 

 

Edmund asked our captain when he appeared, stiff-legged with the cold.

“It's the Southampton Lamp,” said Captain Hawkmoor without looking to see for himself.

We were unwilling to ask further, too excited.

The captain leaned forward, as though confiding a secret in his flat, unemotional way. “The lamp is a big lantern.”
A bigge lanthorn.
“Set out each night to mark the harbor.”

We were afraid to look at each other.

“God help you, squires,” said John. “It's England!”

We sailed up the brown river toward London the next afternoon, aided by the incoming tide.

Edmund and I waved at field men carrying wooden shovels and shepherd's crooks in the early spring afternoon.The men waved back, and children scurried along the riverbank, calling just as children everywhere at the passing of a ship. When I lifted my hand to salute a boy, he took a long moment before lifting his arm in return, and I wondered how we must all look to the very young.

“I see a tree full of rooks!” cried Edmund.

I saw it too, a great leafless oak crowded with a hundred black, squabbling, laughing birds. In no other land had I seen any fowl so eager to congregate as our common farmland rooks.The scent of mud and livestock, pigs and cattle, lightened our hearts. Sir Nigel clung to the salt-stiffened rigging to see out beyond the sedge and reeds.

“I spy Englishwomen!” said Sir Nigel. Goose girls in white aprons, dairywomen chasing hens with butter paddles. I wondered what Galena was doing just then—perhaps listening to some new, golden-voiced traveler, being won over by his charms.

When the wind was not sufficient, the captain ordered out two great sweeps, long spruce-wood oars, that sailors manned, two to an oar.The
Saint Susanna
proceeded up the river, and river men sculling along made way for us with open smiles, pleased, I thought, to see the faded leopard banner at our mast.

In late afternoon three horsemen in black leather rode beside the river, less than a stone's throw away.

“What ship is that?” called the lead man, every bit of metal he wore, from spurs to finger rings, shining. Customs officials always queried a ship from foreign parts, and these men looked like Exchequer's men, required to collect port fees and taxes.

John Hawkmoor identified our ship, and added,“She carries Lombard wine and a dispatch from the royal envoy in Rome.”

The three duty collectors put their heads together, and the lead man called out, “What men are you?”

Sir Nigel had been listening to this with an easy smile, but now he turned to Sir Rannulf and muttered something in a low voice.

John Hawkmoor called out, identifying Sir Luke, Sir Nigel, and Sir Rannulf.“And two squires, with a shipload of able men, by Our Lady's grace.”

“What squires have you?” asked the leather-voiced horse-man.

Sir Nigel put a hand on John's sleeve. Sir Nigel himself called out, “The Crusading squires Hubert of Bakewell and Edmund Strongarm.”

The three men consulted, then they turned their pale, clean faces toward us. As carefully as we had shaved, peering into our polished metal mirrors, and as thoroughly as we had washed our fustian blouses and our wool mantels, I realized we looked travel-stained and shabby compared with these city men.

When the horsemen observed Edmund standing in the stern, the lead man pointed, nodding, commenting to his companions. My friend had thrown a hood over his head at the sound of his name and bent over slightly, a big man trying to grow small.

The lead man's question rang out, “Is Edmund of Nottingham the moneyer's apprentice among you?”

Sir Nigel hissed, “Say nothing, any of you.”

Sir Luke was the only one of us who looked like he had just stepped from a castle keep, the salt flecks brushed from his long blue cloak. He climbed so high on the freeboard rail that Sir Nigel seized his sleeve to keep him from toppling.

He sang out, “God keep King Richard!”

“King Richard and Prince John!” came the response from the riverbank.

“Not the very words,” said Nigel, “that we wanted to hear.”

“It will be dark by the time we dock in London,” said John Hawkmoor, “with Our Lady's help.”

“Darkness is no man's friend,” said Sir Rannulf. “It helps us, and it helps them.”

“But my lords,” I could not keep myself from saying, “we're home, nearly, and our fighting is done.”

Never had I felt less like helping Sir Nigel buckle on a sword. All the fighting I had seen, with lance and halberd, shield and dagger, seemed to me at that moment worse than pointless. Men writhed, bled, and died, for little reason.Valor was spent in butchering the innocent or unlucky.

“We are King Richard's men,” said Sir Nigel with a smile that meant,
How can I explain it more clearly than that?
Then he added, “King Richard did not trust his brother. Why should we?”

“If I face further punishment,” said Edmund, “I do not wish any of your blood to be spilled.” His voice was steady, but he had a distant, frightened look in his eye.

Sir Nigel laughed. “Do you think we have fought together and braved these foul seas to see you captured by the Exchequer's men?”