I left the smoky hall and its candlelight, and walked out into the sheltered corridor, the rain visible through a row of arches. I blinked angry tears, and I made no move to hide them when Edmund joined me, looking at the dark rainfall.
“Sir Nigel,” I said, “has an honorable name, even if he is as poor as a billy goat.What do we have?”
Edmund had been born to a man who carved barrel staves, a man for whom three or four silver pennies a year would have been remarkable bounty. Poverty suited him—he had his strength and his good sense. My father had money, but the sort of wealth that winds up invested in contracts with dyers and warehouses. He had borrowed against shiploads of woven wool bound for Brugge and paid for my gauntlets and my sword, both he and my mother drinking watered wine to afford a son who might someday be knighted.
“It’s all lost,” said Edmund, with a calm seriousness.
“This is not the way to spread joy, Edmund. ‘It’s all lost,’” I intoned, sounding exactly like him.
“We have our lives,” he said huskily.
He was right, of course.
He added, “I shall miss my hammer.”
At once, I felt ashamed. I had been pitying myself for the loss of my imagined future, and my friend had suffered a painful loss, the hammer Rannulf had given him.
I prayed silently to Saint Michael that two squires not be forgotten. And I continued to believe that some portion of our treasure might be recovered.
I slept badly, dreaming of leather purses unseamed and spilling, gold-framed brooches blistered with sea life, fish nosing the long, keen blades of swords.
The beach was wide and nearly empty of life in the dawn.
The Santa Croce was reduced to a few ribs and the stump of a mast, so far off from the shore that I was astonished we could have struggled to safety.
The sand was cluttered with rope and pegs, broken kegs, wrecked casks, the angle of a doorjamb, a bundle of headless arrow shafts—and naked corpses, pale in the sea foam. A few scavenger folk scampered up the beach at our approach, and watched as we hauled the human remains, fish-gnawed, cold, and stiff, up to the dry slope.
We stumbled over rolls of cordage, broken wooden hogsheads for ale, butt ends from wine barrels, but nothing gold, nothing silver, and no weapons.When Rannulf braved the gray seas in a boat, a pair of strong-armed monks to row, he searched the far-off hull, clinging like a crab. He held up his few finds—a mail mitten, leather legging, a shield—but cast them down again.
At last he returned to shore with the air of a man who had done everything he could.
The scavengers watched from a ridge. One of them raised a defiant weapon, a club—or was it a sword? There were more of them now.These were not the shabby figures of the day before, but bulky, hooded field men, expert treasure seekers.
The scavengers rose and retreated as I ran toward them. But some of them looked back, beckoning with brazen cheers.
Rannulf seized me from behind and threw me to the sand.
“They have our swords!” I protested.
Rannulf shook his head, breathing hard.
“And they have our silver!” I said.
“What little they have,” he said, “let them keep.”
I turned my face into the sea wind, and it was a long time before I spoke again.
TWENTY-THREE
We carried staffs, and we needed them.
The farmland we traveled through was clean-swept by the recent rains. Puddles gleamed under the sky, and heavy-jowled dogs were loosed on us by distant peasants. Rannulf drove the beasts away with ease, stabbing the animals harmlessly but painfully with the end of his strong staff, digging into each cur’s snarl until no dog was fierce enough to do more than bark canine oaths after us.
We were dressed now in the simple rough-woven wool of pilgrims, with cowls and full sleeves. Even a duke or royal steward on a pilgrimage to Rome wore such a costume, and there was honor in simplicity. Still, I regretted not resembling a knight’s squire—I cut a certain figure when I wear a weapon.
A group of armed men watched us at a crossroads, wearing swords and light shields, the sort called targets, round and easy to carry.These youths were unhelmeted and tanned by the sun. They commented on us as we passed, words of no meaning to my ears but perfectly understandable nonetheless—assertions regarding our character, our parentage, our fighting spirit.
Sir Rannulf marched ahead, his pilgrim garb failing to disguise his determined stride or the way he carried the staff like a weapon.
A stone bounded beside us, followed by a laugh from behind.
“Five of them, all armed, one with a two-handed sword,” said Nigel, as though he was seriously contemplating our chances.
Another stone hummed past, white, the size of a robin’s egg. It barely missed Edmund’s head.
I plucked the missile from the road.
“What will you do with that?” asked Nigel.
“I can hit a magpie at fifty paces,” I asserted.
“And hurt it,” Edmund asked, “or merely startle the bird out of its feathers?”
“And stop it dead,” I said.
This was an exaggeration. I used to visit my father’s shepherds, and magpies were a grievous nuisance to lambs. Sometimes, I had been told, they pecked out a young animal’s eyes—many shepherds used slings to protect their herds.The sound of a leather sling whirring was enough to send the crafty black-and-white fowl into the trees and safety. Although I never mastered the sling, I had hit a few of the birds, throwing bare-handed.
I think I stunned one, in years of trying.
“I’ll hit one of those churls between the eyes,” I asserted. A churl was a field man of little rank.
“I doubt you can,” said Sir Nigel.
I threw wide of the loudest mischief maker, and he hurled the stone back so hard it whistled. Edmund and I made a desultory game of finding appropriate stones on the road, tossing them in our hands, and, when a stone was the right size and heft, throwing it at our ragtag opponents. At last I came close, making the tallest one duck.
Rannulf wandered back to join in the sport, and he succeeded, on his second try, in striking a rotund youth in the belly. The young man called out something equivalent to It didn’t hurt a bit, but with this easy success Rannulf became less interested in the game.
“There’s no honor in bruising villeins,” he explained, striding on ahead of us again.
A villein was a peasant whose entire laboring life was owned by a lord. Many knights held such folk to be little better than livestock, but it was not the first time that I had wondered at Rannulf’s dry nature. Edmund and I had speculated on his dislike for women, and his leathery manner toward people in general.
Edmund had wondered if the cruel scar across Rannulf’s mouth—giving him a permanent, silent snarl—had made Rannulf bitter toward humanity, to protect himself from having his overtures of friendliness rebuffed. I disagreed with my friend. I believed simply that some folk are bitter and dangerous, and that—despite his occasional kindness—Rannulf was one of them.
The taunts of the field men followed us, and became a sort of rude companionship, until we left them far behind. The farmland was bare and flat under the clear sky. Tall straight trees aimed in green rows toward Heaven. Short stone towers overlooked harvest stubble. Green pines, with rounded tops like oaks, shaded the road. There were kind souls along the road—a woman who gave us cups of warm, foaming cow’s milk, a plowman who broke off handfuls of golden bread. Children skipped to the edge of the way and offered us curious smiles.
When we reached a paved high road, Sir Nigel noted that the wide paving stones were scored by the passage of carts. “Many heavy wagons, is my guess,” he said, “over many years.”
Father Giles had visited Rome, and said it was scarred with evidence of the empire-building pagans who had lived there. “Iron-wheeled chariots,” I suggested.
The domes of time-pocked buildings approached us along the road.“These are the
burial sites,” I hazarded, recalling what I could of Father Giles’s accounts, “of famous Roman knights.”
“They buried their men-at-arms in temples?” queried Edmund.
“Like any people of good sense,” said Nigel,“the Caesars, no doubt, were a ghost-respecting lot.”
Before Edmund and I could absorb this, Rannulf’s voice reached us, calling with an uncharacteristic emotion.
“Look!”
It was the first time I had heard the knight sound so excited.
The shoulders of monuments, the belfries of sacred places clustered in the distance behind city walls. Bells sounded, the music softened by the miles we had yet to travel, and the tumult of a great city pattered and rang through the sunlight.
TWENTY-FOUR
“It would take ten thousand men to storm these walls,” said Rannulf, wonder in his voice.
The red clay-stone walls rose above us, and a city gate studded with iron. The gate had closed before us at our approach.
“And then you would have a street battle,” Rannulf continued to muse.“Nearly always a pikeman’s fight, not a knight’s.”
“We will enter like lambs,” said Sir Nigel.
I made the sign of the cross, in part to show my earnestness as a Christian knight, and partly to steady my will. Guards armed with halberds and broad-brimmed helmets looked down at us from the top of the wall. Knights rarely engaged personally in an initial parley—announcements of name and rank were generally made through a chief squire. This saved a knight any hint of disrespect or insult while his identity and intentions were established.
“We are Crusaders,” I called upward, “just returned, with news of King Richard of the English and King Philip of the Franks.”
Two armored heads looked down at me, with no sign of understanding.
I spoke in English, in Latin, and in Norman-Frankish. I was about to invent a language on the spot, half gesture and half shipboard Genoan, when I heard one of the guards say, among other words, Crociato, conferring with his fellows.
“Si!” I exclaimed. “And these others—they are Crusaders, too.” One of the helmeted heads climbed up onto a battlement, to afford himself a better view of us. At the same time I heard a muted sound, the noise of a mechanism being cranked by hand, slowly but with a certain urgency.
I knew this sound well, and so did my companions. It was a crossbow being cocked.
“Don’t cease talking,” murmured Sir Nigel. “Soothing speech calms horses, hounds, and nervous sentries.”
I said that we were honored to stand before this great city, and looked forward to seeing its many holy sites. I had the impression this guard knew exactly what I was saying—perhaps all visitors before the gates delivered similar sentiments. The speech he offered in return struck me at first as little more than polite-sounding noise. As he continued, however, I recognized that the language was enough like Latin for me to glean some meaning.
He believed us, he said, when we said that we were Crusaders. He was honored to see such noble cavalieri. “Inglese?” he inquired at last.
“Yes, every one of us,” I said.
He reached down and produced the crossbow, painted blue and red along its stock, and decorated with yellow stars. A quarrel—a crossbow bolt—was ready-cocked. I had no doubt that a quarrel fired at such close range would pass right through me, and end up buried in the ground.
Edmund stepped before me, and said, looking upward, “No quarrel has the force to go through two men.”
“Corragio,” said the bowman with a laugh.
A carter approached the gate from the road behind us with a load of charcoal. He called up to the battlement, but the guard explained that no one could pass for the moment. The sight of a guard leveling a crossbow caused no evident concern or surprise. Several other tradesmen arrived with heavily laden cobs, stout-legged horses. We all had to wait.
The barrier opened at last, nearly silent on its massive hinges.
A figure before us gave a bow—a young man with a striped tunic with a gold-colored belt. Every trade had its livery: the baker his cap, the brewer his long leather apron. I took this man to be a herald. He wore a finely wrought gipser purse and a silver-chased sheathe with a well-wrought hilt, and introduced himself as Fulke Mowbray, herald to King Richard’s envoy in Rome. He gracefully motioned us inside the gate.
“Stay close to me,” said the herald.“The Holy City is ripe with cutthroats.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Just inside the city walls was a great church, and a vineyard. A few rows of pear trees offered shade from the afternoon sun. I was not surprised that church clerks would want grapes for wine, or pears for perry, a pleasing drink.
But I was surprised at the shabbiness of the city, weeds and broken stones everywhere. We marched through flocks of sheep driven by shepherds armed with short swords and cudgels. Geese flocked along the broad, paved street.
Nevertheless, it was the grandest city I had ever seen. Father Giles had drawn sketches on my tabela, and described to me the magnificence of the Colosseum. But nothing prepared me for the sight of it, ghost-gray and gigantic. Edmund and I exchanged glances of wonderment and delight. The arches and barrel vaults that supported the great monument thrilled me. By comparison, the grandest church in Nottingham, and the richest oak-timbered hall of my father or his fellow merchants, were like the playhouses of little boys.
Sir Nigel, too, was flushed with excitement as we passed through the vast late-afternoon shadow of this place.And yet I continued to be surprised at how worn this holy site was. Much of the marble facing of the monuments had been stripped away, leaving holes where it had been attached. Men and women in rags crouched in the entranceways and corridors, and as they caught my glance they called out in tones of no great respect.
I was stunned further at the ruin of what I took to be the great Roman Forum, a place Father Giles had described to my family, my sister and both my parents all as rapt as I was to hear of this crossroads of an empire. Either a brutal army had swept through this civic core, or the rubble was all so much older than I could imagine. Oxen lowed in a make-shift pen, among fallen columns. Men in coarse-spun aprons fed lengths of marble into a kiln.
“They are turning chunks of pagan temples into lime, for stone mortar,” explained Sir Nigel.
“Is it wise,” I found myself asking, “to consume the famous ruins?”
“I think God takes no great offense,” replied Sir Nigel.
Men in livery—fine, flowing silks—eyed us as we passed, swords cocked jauntily at their hips. They put their heads together and laughed, and I knew how shabby we looked, like prisoners or mendicant paupers, not at all like men-at-arms. And women would not give us a second glance— well-formed, graceful women, enjoying the music of the fountains as they talked, ignoring us.
I hated our worn shoes, our monk-woven garments. I wanted to sing out that we were Crusaders, but I knew my carefully tutored Latin would sound stiff. Merchants and tradesmen took a moment to eye us. They were clad in bright clothing, the finest examples of the dyer’s art. They turned back to their fruit stalls or their gossip, speaking a fluid, rapid tongue.
Our guards were heavy men, too fat for active battle, or thin and wide-eyed, youths pressed into service. At the corner of a narrow street the herald knocked at a studded oak door. A servant opened it and bowed courteously.
We were left alone in an outer chamber. Sir Nigel and Sir Rannulf consulted each other. An army of masons, they agreed, could not construct such a town, the existence of which, Sir Nigel asserted, was itself testimony to the glory of Our Lord.
Edmund and I stood shoulder to shoulder.This Holy City was a cold place, I thought, and I shivered.
We were taken into a room lit by tapers, fine candles, long and slender, that did not smoke and sputter as they burned.
There stood a man in a richly dyed scarlet mantle. The dancing candle shadows half hid him, but I could make out a short sword, with a red jasper decorating
its hilt. He had fair eyebrows, nearly white eyelashes, and the thick muscular neck of a fighting man. Fulke the herald watched from the shadows.
The nobleman introduced himself as Luke de Warrene, a knight of the royal household, and steward to King Richard’s ambassador to Rome. He spoke in clear London English.
I gave the most flowery introduction I could manage, announcing the worshipful Crusaders Sir Nigel of Nottingham and Sir Rannulf of Josselin, and the squire-at-arms Edward Strongarm. “I am Hubert de Bakewell,” I concluded, conscious of my own name’s lack of poetry.
Sir Luke considered our names silently for a moment, like a man afraid of ill tidings. “How can I believe, my good squire, that you have set foot in the Holy Land?”
“My lord,” I protested, “we are men of honor.”
“Travelers have told many tales in recent weeks,” said Sir Luke. “Or perhaps they aren’t mere rumors. We hear that King Richard is imprisoned in Sicily, that he took a quarrel in the neck outside Acre, that he is buried on the shore there. How can I believe that you four know anything of Crusading?”
I could not hide my anger, but Sir Nigel gave my arm a squeeze. “You’re doing surpassingly well, Hubert,” he whispered.
Perhaps this emboldened me. I said, “And how can we trust you, my lord, to deserve an account of our travels?”
Sir Nigel hissed through his teeth.
“If you will,” I was quick to add, “permit me to ask.”
The mantle-clad man approached me.
He wore a brooch, and at the sight of it I was plunged into silence.
It was an enamel insignia, a leopard with his right paw upraised. While some called Richard Lionheart, and many praised the king’s lionlike bravery, the royal symbol for his court was this leopard, an animal few Englishmen had ever seen in real life. It was a special kind of fighting cat, we believed, one especially noted for its courage.
The Leopard Sword Page 8
