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Nigel everything we had done when we returned, after many winding alleys, to the inn.
    â€œIt is really a blessing that we arrived when we did,” concluded Hubert, “to help the horse in its distress.”
    Sir Nigel set his wine cup down and looked into it as though a toad peered up at him from the interior.
    â€œBut it’s all right now, my lord,” added Hubert. “And I doubt that the horse will be beaten any time again soon.”
    Sir Nigel looked at Hubert without any expression on his face, and then he looked at me.
    I opened my mouth, but just as quickly I shut it again. The oak beams in the ceiling creaked.
    â€œI can’t blame you, Hubert,” Nigel said, “for nearly slaughtering a drover on your first afternoon in London. After all, you had an idle hour, why not kill a man?”
    Hubert and I did not speak.
    â€œWe’ll be leaving before dawn tomorrow,” Nigel said, “and in your absence the inn has taken on more travelers than it can hold. But there’s a perfectly good place for you to sleep:”
    Wenstan led us down toward the river, and out along a planked wharf. It was early evening, and the smell of frying fish mingled with the carrion-stench of a tannery. Wenstan clambered up a rope ladder and looked back, expectantly.
    I hesitated.
    I had never been on a ship before, nor any boat—not even so much as a floating log.
    Wenstan beckoned.
    A spiderweb of rigging swept upward into the dark. The rope ladder was knotted and spliced, and I slipped and fumbled my way up, and onto the deck. Even in this slack river current the ship rose and fell creaking under our feet. Hubert gazed at the mast and rigging wide-eyed, and I put out a hand to steady myself, clinging to a rope that stretched across the growing dark.
    An explosion of furious language met me, and I released the rope. A sailor hurried from some perch in the ship’s upper recesses and tested the rope I had deigned to set my hand upon. He gave it a tug, observing its effect on the mast. The sailor continued to scold, a stream of words more foreign to me than any London chatter.
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    Hubert and I crept down a short wooden ladder, and peered into a dark space, so shallow a dog could not have stood on his four legs.
    â€œThis is wonderful!” said Hubert, excitedly. “I knew Sir Nigel would find us a noble ship!”
    The ship rose on the river current, stayed up for a long time, so long it was easy to forget it had ever ascended. And then it descended, down, all the way down into some nerve-chilling abyss in the river. The ship drew away from the dock, and halted with a jolt when it reached the extent of its mooring. It swung sideways, and dug hard against the wharf.
    The boat’s uneasiness could not continue, I thought, and must be the result of some temporary disturbance in the river. But as the ship shied and shook, timbers grunting, I began to feel the stirrings of a sensation very much like fear.
    People did not look upon hills and mountains as anything but waste, dangerous and without light, a domain of the thousand-year-old spirits who were anything but human. The sea was even worse. It was an abyss, a void that no man looked upon with joy except for those unlucky enough to be sailors.
    I was cold, and I felt the stirrings of nausea. The ship shuddered out from under me and rose to take me up again. People went forth on ships to die.
    I did not sleep.

chapter TWELVE
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    Our ship nosed out into the river while a mist was thin on the water, the sun just rising.
    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