The Book of the Lion

The river was crowded along the banks with laystalls, latrines that emptied into the lapping water. Dung boats poured their still-steaming loads into the current, the scent of human soil lost in the odor of fires and the rising vapor of ditches that emptied into the current. Other ships were rolling out into the river, too, and in the cold vapor of morning the ships sounded horns, like hunters, the brassy notes mingling with the sound of birds on either bank.

I kept glancing in Rannulf’s direction, but the knight was hidden in a dark robe and cowl. Only two long oars were needed to propel the ship forward, following the tide toward the open sea, and the sailors who manned the oars rowed with spirit, calling to each other with an easygoing cheer.

The horses were lashed together, and hobbled with rawhide tethers. Shadow, Hubert’s mount, was as gentle as a maiden, and all the other horses, including Nigel’s and Rannulf’s stout chargers, accepted shipboard life with some degree of patience. Winter Star was the only animal that required a blindfold before he would stop whinnying and plunging, and even then he was quiet only when I stood beside him and spoke in a gentle voice.

I told him that all was well, and I told him that our ship was manned with seamen of the most skilled variety. I rattled on and on, and as long as I kept talking Winter Star was erect, like the statue of a horse, except that now and then he had to put forth a hoof to check his balance.

As soon as I left his side, and crept to the bucket, and poured a scoop of fresh water over my head, Winter Star would snort. Shivers ran up and down under his skin, his muscles twitching.

“I have never felt better,” I answered, because grumbling is the Devil’s Paternoster. “How long, my lord, before we see land again?”

But he seemed to not hear me. I thought he looked pale himself, and he took only a sip of Crete-wine and water, when Wenstan offered it. Nigel joined Rannulf, the two of them standing, hooded like priests.

Hubert was everywhere, upside down to watch the foam flow, halfway up the mast to see a gull diving time and again in the water, cheering when the bird flew off, a fish living gold in its beak.

By daylight I was hanging my head over the side of the ship, staring down into my own shadow. I vomited several times, like a sneeze, emptying what little I had in my belly into the eddies of the ship’s wake. And after that I emptied nothing, and vomited with the pointlessness of a dog who will not stop barking.

I prayed in my weakness, not unlike the offering of a dying man to Heaven. I begged the aid of Our Lord Jesu, from whom proceeds all understanding and goodness. I wished for a rosary, with its gaudy beads, but instead closed my eyes and opened my heart to Heaven.

Holy mass is not celebrated on board any ship, as a rule, lest an errant wave or a cursing sailor violate the worship. But I would have benefited from some divine solace that day. The smell of breakfast cheese froze me, wrenched my innards, and, I am afraid, made my skin turn the very color of death.

The air changed. The light brightened, the haze turning the color of egg white. No one moved.

With a flutter of soft thunder a sail fell open, shrugged and struggled like a living thing, and bellied out with wind.

Alive, the ship coursed, the spray freshening our faces. Hubert leaned as far out as he could, and Miles sang a song about kissing his lady’s bed with his keel. The wind did much to clear the fog, but a fine rain began to fall, and this gray low cloud stayed just close enough to keep us from seeing landmarks, as though the sky were a huge tent that we traveled within.

But eventually even an ignorant landsman like myself could tell that the ship was soaring skyward one moment and falling down into the trough the next, and I did not have to be told that we had left the river.

We had reached the channel, and every misery I had suffered was now multiplied. Winter Star was reeling, trying to rear up, and as carefree as the sailors were, they stayed well away from the stallion’s hooves. I crawled back to my place at Winter Star’s side, and with a bow and a smile a sailor provided me with a four-legged stool. The seaman gave me a long, kind-hearted, utterly foreign discourse on the nature of sea and wind.

Rannulf and Nigel stood silent, faces hidden in the dark hoods, but Wenstan spoke with the helmsman, a grinning, bearded fellow, who from time to time would lever the tiller out of the water and look back at it, water dripping off the broad steering oar. Sometimes a crook of seaweed was tangled there, and the helmsman would shake it free.

“Are they taking us all the way to Jerusalem?” I asked. I knew that the Holy City was so far away that people who journeyed there returned, if they came home at all, white-haired and wasted.

This news meant very little to me. The second, and finest, map of the world I had ever studied had been spread out on Father Joseph’s table. I had stopped by that afternoon to deliver a just-repaired chalice. Father Joseph saw the look in my eye, and explained, saying, “This is a true map of Earth under Heaven.”

As usual, Father Joseph punctuated his speech with a belch. Most men I know are troubled with wind, being fond of windy foods, cabbage and red meat. He said, “London is an unimportant place, Edmund, a speck of stone and humanity, compared with the Holy City.”

All of England was a little crumb off to the west of a mighty hill. On the summit stood a castle, with towers from which grew fruit trees. “Jerusalem,” explained Father Joseph reverently, “is the center of the world.”

Perhaps it was the sin of envy I experienced, watching Hubert rabbiting from stem to stern. Envy is sorrow at the prosperity of others, and Hubert prospered in his great health. But I did not wish him sorrow, and took no joy when he slipped on the wet deck and had to sit down for a while, blinking thoughtfully at the small rain that drifted down.

“Land,” I whispered to Winter Star. The horse pricked up his ears, shook his head. “So soon!”

But it was merely a scow awash with flounders, so full of the silver-bright, still-flapping fish, that the squat vessel could not swing out of our way. Long poles were used to fend off the fishing boat.

When the ridge of white sand appeared above the leaden water I took little notice, fearing another disappointment. But Winter Star snorted at the scent of fields, and the sailors worked the sweeps, the long oars, out through the oarlocks, and shortened the sail.

At last I saw footprints stitching the beach, clear, definite shapes, and saw a fisherman spreading his net. A peasant stood in the sunlight and emptied his bladder, an amber arc of blessed human piss.