Padraig began sketching with a bit of charcoal on the broken wall. “Make it that and I'll paint the sign for ye. 'Bull-and-Mouth'—every hungry man will see the meaning o' that.”
With a dozen strokes he sketched a huge mouth about to swallow a bull. This, done with a fine show of color, became the sign of the tavern. Martin never tired of explaining the pun to those who asked. Even before the guest-rooms were finished, travelers began arriving, drawn by the fame of Martin's savory and succulent dishes. Pilgrims, merchants, knights, squires, showmen, soldiers, minstrels, scholars, sea-captains—they came and came again. Almost every subject in church or state, from Peter's pence to the Third Crusade, from the Constitutions of Clarendon to clipped money, was discussed at Martin's tables, with point and freedom. Cold Harbor entered upon a new life and became part of the foundation of a new empire.
GALLEY SONG
Amber, copper, jet and tin,
Anklet, bracelet, necklace, pin,—
That is the way the trades begin
Over the pony's back.
Mother-o'-pearl or malachite,
Ebony black or ivory white
Lade the dromond's rushing flight
Over Astarte's track.
Crucifix or mangonel,
Steel for sword or bronze for bell,—
That is the way we trafficking sell,
Out of the tempest's wrack.
Marble, porcelain, tile or brick,
Hemlock, vitriol, arsenic—
Souls or bodies barter quick—
Masters, what d'ye lack?
XIII. — THE WISDOM OF THE GALLEYS
It was Nicholas Gay's last night at home. At dawn his father's best ship, the Sainte Spirite, would weigh anchor for the longest eastward voyage she had ever undertaken. His father's brother, Gervase Gaillard of Bordeaux, was going out in charge of the venture. Gilbert Gay, the London merchant, who had altered his name though not his long-sighted French mind in his twenty years of England, thought this an excellent time for his eighteen-year-old son to see the world.
Since Nicholas could remember, he had known the wharves of the Thames and the changeful drama of London Pool. He had been twice to Normandy, but to a lad French by birth, that was hardly a foreign land. Now he was to see countries neither English nor French—some of them not even Christian. Half Spain and all the north coast of Africa were Moslem. Sicily and Sardinia had Saracen traditions. This would be his first sight of the great sea-road from Gibraltar to Byzantium.
During the past three years Gilbert Gay had been often absent, and the boy had taken responsibility of the sort that makes a man. With the keen aquiline French profile he had a skin almost as fair as a girl's, and yellow-brown waving hair. The steady gray eyes and firm lips, however, had nothing girlish about them.