The Book of the Lion

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.

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 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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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 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 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.”

“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.

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.”

“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.