Free The Book of the Lion by Michael Cadnum Page B

his attention, stowing ration sacks, untying or tying knots, clinging to the tiller, calmly busy.
    Our captain was named Sebastiano Nero, a short, heavyset man with a bronze laugh. He folded his arms, and looked up at the sky.
    The walls of water clapped together overhead, and the white, rushing suds of brine swept me off my feet. Two sailors seized me, patted my back, but another wave fell forward, and only the strong arms of the sailors kept me from floating like a cork up and over the scuppers.
    Rannulf was at my side as I sprawled, soaked through. He took my arm in a steel grip. “Take this sennit rope,” he said. “Tie yourself around the waist.” He looped the rope and knotted it as he spoke. I felt grateful beyond words.
    The ship bucked. The horses, including Winter Star, screamed. But they were in an enclosure, a timber and canvas stable just beyond the mast, and the more fearful of them lashed out with a hind hoof at anyone who tried to approach.
    I was surprised when Rannulf spoke further to me. “It will profit God nothing,” said the knight, “if you drown.”
    Seas towered, mountains that fumed and spumed before they collapsed over our heads. Sebastiano Nero barked orders and laughed. His laugh was more genuinely good-humored than Nigel’s.
    The sky was blue, and the sun winked and peered over the massifs of sea, and even at sunset, when the sky was evening calm, stars standing forth out of the dark, the vessel plunged and shook so that no one but the saltiest sailor was able to walk from the stern to the prow without clutching at the man-ropes.
    Rannulf and Nigel gathered dignity about them, and stayed within, in a berth packed with straw and dry, soft wool blankets. Hubert and I were stowed in a less spacious, darker quarter of the ship, and while Hubert sought to view the crashing waters from various vantage points, high and low, I sought the ship’s side.
    I spent hours there. I suffered what the sailors called dolento di mare, although others argued dolente del oceane, or even dol’ di mar , until my seasickness became a cheerful point of dispute among seagoing scholars. No one could agree on what to call the disjecta from my belly, either, although vomito was the word I most easily recognized. One Genoan giant with blue trousers called out something every time I hung my head over the side, and coughed up my empty belly: The English youth is singing.
    If I heaved and brought forth nothing but an agonizing belch, the Genoan would comment. If I slipped and fell down as I barked forth empty air this gave rise to comment, too.
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    Day by day I felt more seaworthy.
    I could close my eyes without feeling that I was plummeting, and I scented fish frying on a coal brazier without convulsing. Stars swung wide and the moon joined them in a nightly dance, but the sight began to seem a pleasure to me, as did the coursing movement of the ship, only two fingers of planking between my listening ear and the quickness of the ocean.
    One noontime the giant Genoan laughed as I took Wenstan’s wine sack in my hands, and drank deeply. Like any man of sense, Wenstan knew that water was rich with disease of every nation, but sweet Loire wine carried no fever. I drank as much as was seemly, and thanked Wenstan. I let the giant laugh. I joined him, laughing.
    I would surprise this big man.
    I walked to where he stood, this giant binding the end of a rope with a yellow, bristling twine. I took the rope from his hands in a sudden gesture, and I was near to making a market loop, a dairyman’s favorite, one I had seen at market day every week of my life. You tie a noose, toss it over the dumb head of your prize cow, and lead her where you will.
    The Genoan said something, good-humored and challenging.
    A hand pressed my elbow. “We need this sailor alive and well, Edmund,” said Hubert.
    â€œI was only going to show him how we splice a knot in England.” Around a