The Book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum

passed through, aproned men standing disconsolate, the smell of charred beef in the air.
    Far from needing encouragement from me, it was Hubert who delighted at the sight of a flock of sheep fording a river, swimming like a vast, tufted rug. He was the one who brought a smile from the ferryman, and when he bid a mason good morning, the broad, swarthy man, powdered with sandstone, told us all that the shire bridge had been washed away, but that the ford not four miles east was no deeper than a laugh.
    As we approached London the road grew populated with castle stewards and wine merchants, barrels of wine rumbling over the wagon tracks in the road, and barrels of money, too, under guard, spearmen and ox handlers alike wearing black Exchequer’s armor. Oxen and dray horses labored shoulder to shoulder, wheels sending forth scythes of mud as the drovers lashed the straining beasts.
    Sometimes we would pass a lady with her attendants, side-saddle, as her gentle horse picked its way through the mountains of mud, but for the most part this was a world of men, figures clotted with black mud and chalk clay, gray loam and black topsoil. God’s universe was suffering a second Flood, and was transformed to mud.
    â€œMore mire,” was all Hubert would say as we struggled to a hill crest and gazed at the rain-bronzed acres ahead. Priest and dairymaid climbed stiles, slathered with muck, hesitated, and descended to the mire, slogging through the deep, wet world.
    In my heart I was alive with excitement, each starling’s chuckle an adventure to me. I was far from the place I knew, so far that I was in a foreign land already, although we were still in England. I affected the manner of a war-wise traveler, but inside I was ablaze with curiosity.
    Waking each morning was less painful to my frame now, and climbing into the saddle each time hurt less and less. After a few days I did have trouble recalling any field that was not so sodden it mirrored sky—dry dirt was distant memory. But this was a further sign that I was embarked on a high adventure. My clothes were so damp they chafed my skin, but I didn’t mind. A few mornings I drank deep of Nigel’s wine, and by the time we hurried toward the thatch and timber of London, knight and man among us were indistinguishable because of the skin-deep dirt.
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    The first carta mundi I had ever seen was rolled out on my master Otto’s counting table, a king’s clerk showing off a prize purchase, a map of the world, as rare as a mermaid’s tooth. On this map London was a stand of spires and flags on a hill overlooking all of England, which lay around it in an irregular but pleasing shape, like a pie. London was at the center of the kingdom of England, and all that was beyond the pie’s crust was mapmaker’s fancy, a ship like a beetle, and off to one side a sea dragon with a head like a hen.
    And so the real, actual city was at first a little bit of a disappointment.
    At a distance in the morning sun, the great city looked like any other town that had grown beyond its walls. A smelter, or an alchemist, was melting some light metal—tin, I thought by the smell, and a walker trod around and around, treading his master’s chalky earth into a powder that could be oven-fired into mortar. A wheelwright rolled one of his wares ahead of us, splashing in the gutter down the middle of the street, but it was only as we entered the town, and continued to enter it, in the shadows of the high, thatched roofs, that I was able to believe I was really in London at last.
    â€œA mighty town!” breathed Hubert. A mickle toun.
    Full of people speaking a tongue I scarcely understood, wearing hats of a fashion new to me, full and floppy, dyed rich colors, beet black, carrot gold. A great town that was noisy, and rich with smells. Infants wailed, and pleasure women sang. The smell of ordure and incense flavored each breath. And we all fell silent as we passed the