TO BEGIN WITH, I WAS LEANING OVER THE GUNWALE with an old crusader.
“It will be like this all the way to the Kingdom of Jerusalem,” he told me. “This light.” He squinted and his eyes glimmered like Venetian sequins. “And the land. All the way. Arid!”
It grew dark, and we could see the bow lanterns of all the galleys in our fleet. Gently swinging, and yet seeming not to. Night-floaters. Adriatic fireflies!
Then our galley began to sink. And around us the entire crusader fleet began to go down, quietly. Down into the dark bowl of the sea. Our lanterns lit the underwater, and made it beautiful.
Lord Stephen and I and Bertie and everyone else swam in a tight shoal, and Milon led us. Wido and Giff and Godard kept darting in front of me, mouths gaping. Bertie was so happy. First he rolled over and over, then he dived away into the dark, and I knew I’d never see him again.
Many other shoals crossed our water-path and got in our way: Norman louts, and those German sausage-squires who halfdrowned Bertie and me, a huddle of monkfish, the bloodthirsty Picardians who chopped each other’s fingers off, and the angry knights Queen Guinevere entertained to dinner, the Flemings who looted the food-barge, the graveyard demons Sir Lancelot fought.
Rhys swam up beside me. “We should make our boats of horse hides,” he said. “Sew them like coracles, see? You tell Simona that.”
“I see,” I said.
“You sew,” replied Rhys. “You’re clever, sir. You know what this is?
“Some people carry their horses
to the battleground on their backs.
They leap on their steeds to catch
their prey, then carry their horses
home again on their shoulders.”
A dusty wind began to blow through the water, and it snuffed out all our lanterns. We were in the dark.
Then shoals of fish began to rush at us and attack us. Their eyes were wicked—silver, bloodshot, periwinkle—and they arched their backs, and lashed us with the curved blades of their tails.
Their voices were shrill.
“Ours!”
“Not yours.”
“We’ll slit your throats.”
“And sip your blood.”
“And pick your bones.”
“Ours!”
“Out!”
Fish of all kinds, with furious eyes, surrounded us and crowded us. They lashed us and spiked us, they grinned and stung us, they coiled round us, bit us.
I yelled. I flailed with my arms. That’s when I woke up.
I lay under my skin and watched the breasting sails; I listened to each comfortable groan and creak and the rush and sluice of water.
Those angry fish, pike and swordfish, dogfish, octopus. Who were they? Were they Saracens?
If only Merlin were here. Or Johanna, the wisewoman, with her lobster whiskers. She’d be able to tell me everything my dream means. I wonder whether Simona can explain dreams.