The Book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum Page B

badly hurt, but certainly surprised. I was slow in grabbing at the staff, because the drover danced away from me, like a wrestler at a summer fair. He braced himself, staff held across his body in the way of peasants when they fight.
    â€œLeave be, leave be,” said a short, bent man. He coughed, the dry hack of a fuller, one of those laborers who knead starch and salts into wool. Such men breathe years of sheep-chaff, and their insides grow soft and furry.
    â€œWe just delivered some two hundred ells of wool bound for Flanders,” said the fuller. “And happy to have it off our hands, we stop by for a sip of drink, and now the horse decides he has a willful nature.” This, at least, was what I understood him to be saying.
    â€œWe’re crusading squires from Nottingham,” I said, keeping my answer short, because the bald man was brandishing the staff and rising to his toes, shifting one way and another, staring at Hubert like the champion man-and-dray-horse beater of London, no challenger declined.
    Hubert’s sword was a flash, just as the staff whipped downward. A sharp, heart-stopping crack, and the drover’s staff was cut in two.
    I expected Hubert to be astonished at what I took to be a fluke, slicing a quarterstaff as thick as his arm. But Hubert moved quickly, tripped the man, put one foot in the drover’s chest, and the point of the broadsword at his throat.
    â€œDon’t kill him!” cried the fuller. “He’s got a new wife and a new little baby—”
    This was no common weapon, the blade in Hubert’s hand. The length and span of it reflected roof peaks and the sky. Hubert did not acknowledge the sound of my voice until I tugged his sleeve, like a man in jest, and said, “Let him live just this once, good Hubert.”
    I put my arm around the fuller, and said that if he applied at the White Hart inn my lord, Sir Nigel, would pay for the staff, and reward the fuller’s patience for not seeking the attention of a magistrate. The fuller might have worked out a retort to this, but he bent over, hands on his knees, racked with coughing.
    I took Hubert by the arm. I dragged him stumbling and protesting, down along the dockside, among coils of brown rope and barrels of wine. One or two of the barrels had sprung leaks, or had been purposefully gimletted so a sneak thief could suck his fill. Rats scampered among purple puddles and a customs man in a red cloak called to us, “Out, out,” without rising from his stool.
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    We could not find the way.
    As I straddled the gutter trickling down the center of the street, I was tall enough to see over the heads and shoulders of the passing Londoners. We walked without talking, until we stood at the edge of a broad field.
    A reeve sat on a swaybacked horse, nodding and gesturing to two peasants. Rooks filled a leaf-bare chestnut tree, and the road ahead was a footpath.
    We retraced our steps, and walked purposefully, looking neither to the right nor the left, past a tavern of pleasure women with more clothes around their hips and ankles, all swirls and ribbons, than on their chests and shoulders. We marched all the way to a flat deserted place, timber piled pink and fresh among weeds, keels set up on wooden braces. A shirtless man in the warm late afternoon sun plied an adze, white curls of wood falling to the ground.
    â€œWe’ve lost our way just a bit, good boatwright,” I said. “Could you please direct us to—”
    The man shook his head and uttered something in a language more obscure and guttural than any I had ever heard.
    He laughed at our crestfallen expression, not unkindly, a man red and gold from sun. “No English,” he said, as though the thought of speaking like one of us gave him wholehearted amusement. “Norge,” he said, touching his chest with his thumb. “Norwayan. Ha!”
    We were lost.

chapter ELEVEN
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    Hubert told Sir