Read Online The Book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    â€œAre you well?” asked Sir Nigel.
    â€œI have never felt better,” I answered, because grumbling is the Devil’s Paternoster. “How long, my lord, before we see land again?”
    â€œI do believe we’re still on the river, Edmund,” he said.
    â€œOf course, my lord. I meant—when we set forth on the sea—”
    â€œIt’s been known to take a month to cross the channel,” he said.
    A month of this!
    â€œBut God willing not so long for us,” said Sir Nigel with a laugh.
    â€œA channel, my lord,” I had to ask, “between what land and what other land?”
    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.
    The sailors hushed. Nigel and Rannulf looked upward.
    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