Chapter One:

Flood spread out over the land.

Gusts of wind blew cold across plowland silver with water. This was the first sunny day in weeks, mudhens swimming cross pastures.

A mole tried to make its way across a puddle, flushed from its underground hiding place. Instead of paws, the earth dweller, a soft-furred, eyeless creature, had dark, glove-like appendages, and it struggled, floundering silently in the brown water.

John Little knelt and picked up the struggling animal, no bigger than his thumb. The snouty, helpless creature lifted its head, its heart thrumming wildly in John’s palm. In the dark earth, John knew, the animal had a silent, undisturbed kingdom. Here in daylight it was easy prey to fox and cat.

John gently tucked the mole into a mound of turf.

"Hide safely, friend," he said as the mole vanished, tufts of wet soil kicking up in its wake.

A step splashed beside John as he surveyed the wide river. A merchant with two gold rings on his sword hand paused on the sodden bank. "Is it safe to ferry across the river this day?" he asked.

John straightened and looked the merchant up and down. A woolman, by the look of him, garbed in a blue mantle, his kid-leather leggings spotted with mud. John was much taller than the merchant, who drew himself to his full heights and looked around for his companions.

"My master and I," said John, "gamble our lives on the river with every crossing."

The current churned. Stones rumbled deep within the river. The angle of a peasant’s roof, narrow skeletal timbers, tossed and spun as the river carried it past. A fisher had drowned upriver some three days past, his body stuck in the branches of a drift-tree that had carried him by this very bank. John had watched him drift by, ravens struggling over his body.

"We’ll wait," said the woolman, "For the river to go down."

"It won’t go down until Easter," chortled Simon the ferryman, John’s master, the Holy Day still weeks away. "Come aboard, my lords, all of you"

The travelers hesitated — wisely, John thought. There were four merchants and a sturdily built knight, as well as their horses, placid, stalwart cobs. Months of winter and late winter rains had forced merchants to keep within city walls. Now that spring was here such men hurried toward London, carrying gold and heavily armed.

Simon chuckled. "We won’t let you feel a drop of river."

The travelers stepped out onto the ferry, clinging to their horses and eyeing the tumbling river. At the last moment, as John pushed the ferry away from the bank, another passenger hurried breathlessly onto the vessel.

He was a leathery, quick-moving man, with a scar along his neck.

John poled the loaded ferry away from the wharf into the afternoon sunlight. Only a young man of strength could have propelled the vessel forward so steadily. A branch swirled and bobbed in the current. John hefted the pole free of the muddy bottom, plunged it in again, levering the ferry into the middle of the river. This was far more dangerous than any of the well-muscled merchants could guess — one slip, one instant of inattention, and the current would wrestle the ferry down-river.

"Speed, John, right speed or I’ll rake a leather strap to your back," said Simon in a cheerful voice.

John gave a nod and sank the ferry pole deep. Simon always threatened dire discipline when passengers were present. But as payment for his labor Simon let John sleep in the cottage corner on a rush pallet each night, with broth of eel, river fish and warm loaves of bread to sup upon, as much as John could want. The ferryman knew rhymes, danced to pipe and song, and could steal the buckle from a burgher’s belt while wishing him good day.

John used his strength to compel the ferry forward, closer to the opposite bank, still a far off gathering of low cottages with thatched roofs, cooking smoke sifting out across the river. It took a strong will, and a deft eye, to keep the ferry angling toward the staith, a wharf along the water. The ferry groaned and shrugged as it floated over a half-submerged log, and John set his teeth at the rumble that ran through the vessel.

"John’s a hearty lad, but he needs a stout kick to keep him going," said Simon with a laugh, looking at the ferry passengers around him. The merchants chuckled without good humor, eager to be free of this lurching ferry.

No other ferry was crossing during this wet, windy season, the rains heavy and standing water deep, the dairy maids hiking skirts and watching after their herds in the pastures. Only men with a great need to be on the road would be traveling in this early spring wet, and these were men of coin, their sword-sheathes chased with silver.

"A right proud gang of rich-folk, aren’t they?" said Simon in John’s ear.

"With purses ready to be lightened," said John in a low voice, accustomed to his master’s habits.

"I’ll ease that load for them quickly enough," said Simon.

The ferry master coughed richly, pursed his lips and spat, well into the wind, so the morsel of phlegm kissed river current well away from any of his passengers. The cautious men huddled together mid-ferry, feet planted solidly, trying to look more confident than they were. John and Simon fell silent at the knight’s approach.

John knew what it was like to be far from home, and he could not help feeling a grudging compassion for Simon’s patrons. John knew, too, how rough and hard he himself must appear to these soft-handed city men. John was broad shouldered, and very tall, with a short, sandy colored young-man’s beard and close-cropped mud-blond hair. He was called John Little, with the same logic that made his drinking companions call Simon, who was entirely bald, Simon le Hair.

If John still lived in York, folk would know him as John Edwardson, or John Tannerson, or even John Hide, after either his father’s Christian name or his trade. His father had been an honest man, dead of a fever three summers past. John had never known his mother, buried in the Fishergate churchyard eighteen winters ago. Now John was a wanderer and a cutpurse, robbing when he was hungry, learning thief-craft from experienced men.

The Crusades in the Holy Land had taken the best knights and squires for many years now, leaving castle hirelings like these travelers. Some were capable gatemen or aging squires, but many were mere house servants hastily trained to wear a sword.

The knight stood close to John as the big youth poled the ferry, and although this man was a head shorter, John could feel the stout man’s weight shift the ferry. John pulled the ferry pole from the current and plunged it deep again.

"It takes an iron arm to fight such a flood," said the man-at-arms.

This swordsman had tarried with men of quality, by the sound of it, and had picked up some of the lilting, courteous speech of a castle. John did not like the arrogance and vanity that made men learn gentle accents.

"I could do it easily enough, myself," said the man-at-arms agreeably. "But most folk would not be strong enough."

Simon shouldered his way through his passengers, bumped one, with a quiet apology, nudged another. Then the ferryman winked at John. The wink was signal, and meant that Simon had already pinched a purse or two, and John clenched his jaw, wishing that Simon had waited until they were closer to the opposite bank before stealing from his passengers.

"You could serve a Crusader, yeoman," the stout knight was saying, making his position in society clear. Only a knight would address another man with this well-intended disdain. "A strong youth like you could surely carry a lance, or saddle a horse."

The words gave John a moment of pleasure, and pride. Sometimes he had thought that he might have made a good fighting man, given the chance. But John knew that he was destined to be a robber, and little more.

Danger.

He glanced up at the empty blue. Then he hunched forward and peered across the simmering, stone-dark surface of the water. Unhap, it was called, an accident woven into the warp of events. You could feel it coming, even when you couldn’t guess what it was.

And then he saw it.

A great tree bristled out of the brown river.

It was a huge thing, dark, with the spiky stumps of lopped branches among shaggy growth, rich with green acorns. It was evidently the work of a sawyer who had hoped to trim and haul this grandfather oak, but lost it o the flood. The surging giant shot out of the muscular river, and John hurried forward, ferry pole ready, gleaming in the afternoon sun.

John tried to tell himself that this was just another bit of drift-timber spun along the river by weeks of rain. But he felt his pulse quicken as it coursed closer.

"Saints save us," prayed one of the merchants.

John caught the monster as it leaped from the water, and thrust the ferry pole into the branches, fending the tree away from the vessel. The force of the struggle drove the ferry sideways, and all John’s effort could not shove the giant wide. The huge tree rode up, free of the gleaming ferry pole and lifting high, casting a spiked shadow down over the travelers.

Even Simon, a veteran of the river, began the first syllables of a prayer.

John swung the massive ferry pole up and held it across his body. The drift-tree fell and he caught it on the staff, but with a sharp and sickening sound the pole broke in two. The shaggy oak giant fell upon John.