The Leopard Sword Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Published in 2001 by Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers.

  Copyright © Michael Cadnum, 2002

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Cadnum, Michael.

  The leopard sword / Michael Cadnum

  p. cm.

  Summary: A knight’s squire, exhausted from the Crusades, must use his sword

  to fight attacking infidels during the return voyage to England.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68485-2

  [1. Knights and knighthood—Fiction. 2. Crusades—Third, 1189-1192—Fiction.

  3. Middle Ages—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.C11724 Le2002 [Fic]—dc21 2002018933

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,

  or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

  recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both

  the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for Sherina

  ♦

  Tide so high

  our boats part

  the treetops

  ONE

  The San Raffaello began her turn, her oars churning the water.

  But then a wind off the sea came up, and small boats continued to gather nearby, impeding the oars—boats filled with camp followers and Templar knights, all crying farewells. The last load of war booty had been heaved up onto the deck from the tenders, and now servants gathered the chests and leather bags. Beyond, on the horizon, a line of Saracen war vessels blocked our route, and despite my private prayer I knew there would be a sea battle before night.

  But as yet most of us gave the enemy no thought. We crowded the landward side of the galley, our eyes on the army camped along the shore of the Holy Land we were putting behind us, the Crusading force of King Richard Lionheart and the distant, half-hidden sulk of the Saracen tents. I stood beside my tall, brown-haired friend Edmund, both of us leaning out over the ship’s side so that we could gaze back at the gleam of afternoon sun on helmets and spear points, everything that we were leaving.

  Nearly every capable fighting man in Christendom had joined in the effort to free Jerusalem from the grip of the Infidel armies, and that struggle was far from over. But we were a ship of wounded and disease-wracked knights and squires, our warring done. Many of us were not expected to live to see the Greek island of Chios, our first port of call on our long voyage back to England.

  My master Sir Nigel raised his voice. “Hubert, it’s a pleasure to taste salt after all that fly-dirt,” he told me, strong feeling straining his voice as he turned away from the sight of the Crusading army, blinking tears.

  I was quick to agree with him, but I knew his heart.“Seawater is a cure for our ills, my lord,” I said in apparent agreement.

  But a squire empties his master’s chamber pot, when servants are sick or few, and a squire hears his knight cursing demons in his sleep. I knew Sir Nigel was brokenhearted at leaving the fighting.We had spent long weeks laying siege to the walled city of Acre, and had clashed with our enemy when the city fell, and later at the bloody battle at Arsuf. Loyalty and custom required our departure with our sick and war-battered companions. Sir Nigel cradled his heavily bandaged arms, unable to hide his tears, forced by his injuries to depart before Jerusalem could be won.

  The captain sang out orders in Genoese as Sir Rannulf made his way through the battle gear and treasure on the deck, crutch-propped warriors and yelling ship’s mates, calling through his scarred lips for Edmund. My friend was quick, joining his master and Edmund’s own man Osbert, gathering together the goatskin bags of silver-chased scimitars and knives. As I hurried over the slatted vents in the wooden decking, I caught the odor of the rowers, a sharp, pungent whiff of sweat and human soil, and a waft of body heat.

  I joined Edmund in securing our baggage, lashing it together, as a tall young squire called Nicholas de Foss asked, “Whose gear is this?” He indicated our equipment, hauberks and shields Edmund and I had fastened tidily together.

  It was true that our gear occupied a central place on deck, but Sir Nigel and Sir Rannulf were knights of good name, and servants and mariners avoided it without complaint.

  “It’s in the way of every man here,” said Nicholas. He was golden-haired and freckled, older than my own eighteen years and a good two handsbreadths taller. He spoke quietly, with an evenhanded disdain for me—something we often encountered from the Franks, but unusual from other Englishmen.

  Then his master limped into view, a large man with a set frown, a square jaw, and a dazzling blue tunic, dark along the hem with long-dried gore.“Move all this,” said the squire, in an even harsher voice, now that his master could hear, “so my master Sir Jean can walk the deck unhindered.” He offered me the subtlest glance of apology as he spoke, performing his duty.

  Jean de Chartres had toppled off his warhorse while drunk, and sprung a sinew in the days before the city of Acre had fallen. Sir Jean’s leg had swollen so he could not fit it into his mail leggings, or force it into a stirrup. During the battle such sick and injured knights had been forced by their wounds to labor in the rear, their lances angled proudly but far from any living enemy. Rumor had it that Sir Jean had nearly killed a young washerwoman for spilling water on his poor share of war spoils—a worn carpet, a hard-used Saracen saddle, and a few worn coins. Men said he had beaten his previous, Frankish, squire with a mailed fist just before the battle’s end.

  Now Sir Jean listed from side to side as he walked, his jaw outthrust, a sack of wine seeping through its seams at his side. As the ship heaved upward and gently fell again, he nearly toppled, and Nicholas caught him to keep him upright.

  “We’ll all need our arm
or soon, Sir Jean,” said Sir Nigel evenly.

  Nigel carried one broken arm in the other, having fallen off his warhorse giving chase to a Saracen emir after the fierce battle. My master was a very different man from the knight who had set forth from England just a few months ago. His close-cropped hair was shot through with more silver than before, and despite all the pain he must have felt, he wore a look of solemn acceptance. Suffering can be a gift from Heaven, and Nigel never asked for pain-dulling poppy wine, although we had a clay bottle of it. His broken arms had been set and bound by a Templar surgeon, who pressed the medicine on us and told us to pray for the help of the Archangel Michael himself, patron saint of the injured.

  “Those of us still willing to fight,” Jean of Chartres was saying, “will enjoy the opportunity.” Talk was that he had outstanding gambling debts in his homeland that few knights could afford. Nearly all his worldly treasure was in the slack, nearly empty purse at his belt.

  I made a point of studying the seven Infidel galleys, embarrassed on behalf of the Chartrian knight. The Infidel ships were no longer so far away. Edmund and I had studied these menacing vessels from the shore, and Sir Nigel had explained that these particularly deadly ships were called gallea sottile, galleys built for ramming other ships.

  “For men of courage like us, there is still blood to spill,” continued Sir Jean in Norman French, emphasizing courage and sangre to anyone who would listen.

  Many men had hoped to die in service to Our Lord, not because they hated life, but because the Church had promised that all those who fell in such battle would win Heaven. Sir Jean’s tone was less belligerent now, as he fingered the yellow bird stitched onto the front of his tunic. A corner of the bird emblem—a swift, I thought—had come loose, and he tried to press it back into place.

  I was thankful that I had buried the sprig of dried rue my mother had given me on a hilltop from which the Holy City could be seen. I would never set foot within the sacred walls, but I prayed I would live to see my family at the end of my travels—and not lose my life now, at the hands of Saracen seamen.

  “There is no shortage of courage,” Sir Nigel was reminding Sir Jean, “anywhere among us.”

  “The little squire here,” said Nicholas, indicating me with a nod and something like a smile, “was the picture of courtesy just now, agreeing to shift these bags.”

  There are taller men, and there are shorter men. I nudged the sheathed sword lashed onto a trunk at my feet, secure with our other war gear. I knew too well what it was like to cut flesh with a sharp edge, but just then I was willing to do it once again.

  The two knights eyed each other. “I have taught him knightly patience,” said Sir Nigel. “But he’s the son of a prayerful woolman, and he learned fast.”

  “How wise of him,” said Sir Jean.

  If an enemy had not been available in the distance, all of us would have found reason to fall upon each other.

  But our vessel gained momentum, and even the shrillest-voiced servant fell silent as we craned necks and half climbed the hot-board—the freeboard planks that kept waves from washing the deck—to watch the enemy ships ahead of us, no longer so far away.

  One voice in a London accent lifted high in a fervent Our Father, the holy Latin silencing and shaming what had been the bitter squabbling among us, none of us happy to be leaving the Crusade.The prayer done, Sir Nigel knelt to our bundled equipment, and with his weak and injured arms tried to undo the knots.

  “Outfit me in my armor,” said Sir Nigel, as I knelt to help him, “and buckle on my sword.”

  All around us came the sounds of jingling mail and creaking leather, and the low, rhythmic chime of whetstones against blades.

  TWO

  A Christian ship, tacking hard and leaving a wide wake, was driving west far ahead of us. Even though the Saracen galleys closed fast, I told myself that the enemy vessels would be no match for the Sint Markt, a sturdy Low Country freighter.

  The ship and the galleys were like designs in a tapestry—the golden sail, the wide blade of the rudder, the gleaming rise and fall of enemy oars. As I watched, the vessels seemed to move deliberately, the sailing ship working merrily against the breeze, the Saracens gliding soundlessly, as though it were all sport, and nothing harmful could follow.

  I tried briefly to spy Edmund and to catch his eye, but I could see him nowhere in the throng of knights and squires now crowded forward to watch the distant Crusader ship. The Sint Markt, her sail fluttering, made a last-moment maneuver as we looked on, turning herself before the onrushing galley, heading into her attacker prow forward.

  I once believed I knew something of war. My father’s house had been graced with kind and cheerful servants, and during my boyhood, teachers explained to me which stars in the nightly dome were Taurus, and which Orion the hunter, lifting his weapon to strike a blow. I played at war with my sister Mary, who joined in eagerly—we arranged our hearth-knights made of straw in wide battle formations. On a sunny afternoon we would be taken down to the millpond and allowed to row in coblets, small craft designed for children. I knew how hard it was, even in play, to take a boat’s impact in the side of a vessel, and how the wily boater will turn prow forward, to give the assaulting craft a smaller target, one less likely to capsize.

  But now that I had tasted war, I felt I knew nothing about battle, or, in truth, about much else. The massacre of two thousand prisoners, at King Richard’s command, had made me believe that war was a butcher’s craft, and not a knight’s. I had taken a man’s life in the recent battle, with Heaven’s blessing, but I hoped it would be many a long season before I would see fighting again.

  Now the onrushing Infidel galley had two bronze battering rams thrust forward like horns. The gray prow of the Flemish vessel wedged violently between these rams, and yet even when white wood and jagged gaps appeared along the Crusader ship’s wales, I believed the damage was slight. I thought the sailing ship would master the long, slender attacking craft as the enemy galley backed away, and then drew alongside the larger ship.The swarming bodies of Saracen swordsmen streamed into the broad-beamed freighter, an attack we could hear even at our distance, the shrill of voices, and the unsettling ring of iron on steel.

  Aboard our ship, anguished voices were raised at the sight of faraway Crusaders raising shields, parrying blows, sunlight glinting off mail-clad bodies. Many of the far-off knights clambered onto the castles, the wooden structures prominent on the ship’s stern and bow, but even as they beat off the flood of boarders, another Saracen gallea approached from the opposite side, and every voice onboard our ship was raised in protest, a ragged roar as we sought the intervention of Heaven.

  In a deliberate, pretty maneuver the second galley hooked the side of the Crusader ship and opened a long, ugly rent, splinters of wood flying. The prow of this second attacker locked firmly in the Flemish ship’s ribs.This meant that the Saracens had to flow over a single point near the galley’s prow, and the flashing blades of two or three brave knights showed that this foray was being held off, and our voices lifted in an encouraging cheer.

  We were no longer so distant from the fighting.The time between the flash of a far-off weapon and the sound of the blow, blade against armor, was less and less as the power of our oarsmen propelled us closer in sweeping strokes. The remaining enemy galleys turned, aiming their prows in our direction. At a shouted command from the captain, our galley took a wide turn, leaving an arcing wake in the water.

  The San Raffaello’s captain was a tanned, bald-headed man with a short white beard and muscular forearms. He climbed the stern castle, briefly shielded his eyes, and descended again, barking further commands. Eager as our knights and squires might be to join the fight, our voices lost some of their strength as we measured our own galley against the enemy’s longer, sleeker warships, each armed with a pair of waterline rams.

  The Sint Markt foundered as we left her behind, canting so severely to one side that she forced the prow of one of the attacking
galleys downward. Bright oars streamed water, working powerlessly, the ship a helpless, many-legged insect.

  Just then Edmund appeared, carrying a large wooden chest, an enormous cask, fitted with leather and green brass hinges. Osbert, Edmund’s new manservant, made a show of helping with this load, but he did little more than flutter. My friend set down the chest, and Osbert tried to shift it into a new position, failing to move it an inch.We worked to stow as much of our treasure as we could in the confines of this chest, and then Edmund carried it below for safety.

  The Sint Markt was settling into the water behind us now, and some of our men cried out in futile protest, and many prayed in various tongues—Burgundian, Norman, Saxon—all beseeching Our Lady.Two knights remonstrated with our captain, forced to speak in an easy-to-understand pantomime: Turn the ship around, pointing, making the sign of the cross, and other, harsher gestures: They are killing Christians.

  “We must help them,” said Edmund quietly.

  Enemy galleys were gaining on us.

  “How should we help that shipload of fighting men, Edmund?” asked Sir Nigel. “What do you suggest that we do?”

  Edmund lowered his gaze, and I could see him formulating tactics, imagining hand-to-hand combat. He looked to me and I spoke up for both of us, to spare Edmund the embarrassment of confessing an ignorance we both shared. “You will have to teach us the keener points of sea war, my lord.”

  “We’ll have a battle of our own soon enough,” said Sir Nigel.“You’ll learn—we’ll send a shipload of Saracens to the devil.”

  As much as I admired Sir Nigel, and prayed for his recovery, sometimes his view of upcoming combat surprised me. I knew he was a man of feeling, his moods changing hour by hour, and I knew he was a worshipful man in his way, whispering prayers each night before he slept. But I had seen sling stones punch the earth at his feet as he criticized the enemy’s marksmanship and did nothing to seek a hiding place.