Free The Leopard Sword by Michael Cadnum

“Knights should call you Edmund Stronghead.”
    He laughed gently.
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    Only later, much later, when the other squires had attached their canvas beds to hooks in the ship’s timbers, and the keel rose and fell, did I wake, brimming over with a warning.
    I tried to climb out of my swinging bed.
    â€œStay easy,” said Rannulf’s voice. He pressed a clay bottle to my lips, and I drank poppy wine. It was a thick, sweet medicine, with a tarry undertaste.
    For a taciturn man, Sir Rannulf was a tireless nurse, and had sat with Edmund during our voyage to the Holy Land when fever robbed my friend of strength and reason. I had begun to wonder if the seasoned knight had his own species of mercy.
    â€œYou should have seen the blow coming,” Rannulf chided gently.“Always be ready to check the blade,” he added, offering perhaps the oldest rule in swordplay.
    But before I could make a sound, the poppy wine snuffed all thought, even as I struggled against it.
    Don’t trust him, I wanted to say.
    Don’t trust Osbert.

SIXTEEN
    The ship’s captain was called Giorgio al Cimino, broad and bowlegged, a man not too proud to call on me in my sickbed, as I swung to the movement of the sea.
    He swore by his name saint, the patron of warriors, the famous dragon slayer. He gave my friends Genoan-sounding names, Nigello, Ranolfo, Edmundo. He said that he was proud to have us all on his ship.
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    Captain Giorgio swung a knotted rope, judging by the sound, although he varied his choice of instruments, sometimes using a tawse, a leather strap that made a fine cracking noise against the deck. For long hours I could judge his position on the ship by his thumping blows. In my dazed state I believed I could hear demonic voices—or, perhaps, goats.
    Father Stephen visited me again, and reminisced about his boyhood pleasures. He said that his family had enjoyed the services of a cupboard, supplied “floor to roof beam with meat pies. Pigeon, both cock and squab. And pullet and cockerel, and every venison pie known to man.We ate such on meat days, of course,” meaning that his family went meatless on Fridays, as the Church decreed. “And mead,” he recalled, entranced at the memory.“We drank mead at table, not brown ale.”
    I let him describe these early days, feeling that Father Stephen was weaker than ever and sustained by the memory of comforts he might never taste again.
    As an afterthought, he turned back to me one evening and said, “Squire Hubert, you have lost the look of a young man about to die. Unless pirates intercept us, of course. Then—” He ran a quaking finger across his throat.
    Pyratys.
    The word sounded familiar, but I could not guess its meaning.
    â€œThieves,” he said in his thin, unsteady voice,“of the sea!”
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    Some people have praised the power of the poppy drug, sap from a blossom that flourishes in the distant East. Mixed with tart red wine to disguise the bitter flavor, it erases pain and delights the soul with dreams.
    Or so I had been told. My poppy visions were tediously detailed—a splendid tower house, a castle assembled stone by stone. I beheld such a building take shape in my waking dreams, constructed by invisible masons, with oak roof beams, a strong tower for defense, a solar room for quiet moments, turrets, newel staircases, one wardrobe for garments, and another for armor.There was an audience chamber—surely this was a house for a bishop—and traceried windows, richness I had never actually seen in life.
    At last, aching for fresh air, I rolled from my sailcloth swing, and groped for the ladder.
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    The sea dash cleared my head. The air tasted of salt, and of salt fish, and something pungent and earthy.
    A goat pen was crowded with animals, nannies and young billies. The captain cracked a lash, hitting nothing.
    I observed to Edmund, “He isn’t