Young William caught his smile and managed to relax a little. Gold saw him clear his head of rubbish, saw him give a little shake with his shoulders, and then the great bow went down like a diving swallow and then up, high in the air. The boy’s shoulders quivered, but the string came all the way back.
‘One,’ Gold said.
The boy let the tension off and took two deep breaths, and then, almost as swift as the swallow he imitated, the bow went down again. The muscles across his shoulder blades stiffened, and the bow came up.
‘Two,’ Gold said.
One of Gold’s archers came out – a swarthy man with an odd face, narrow eyes and skin like crackled parchment. He stood close by Gold.
The boy thought the archer looked like a demon from Hell. He tried to quell his pulse; he’d never managed more than three pulls in succession.
He breathed out, and began …
‘Three,’ Gold said.
‘Not fucking bad, by Jesus,’ said the demon, who ducked his head as he said the name Jesus.
‘John, when you bow your head at the name of Jesus, which, may I add, you are using blasphemously,’ Gold said, ‘it makes no sense.’
‘Every fucking sense,’ John the Turk said. ‘Eh, boy. Don’t stop for me.’ The swarthy man looked back at the knight. ‘Jesus,’ he bowed his head, ‘is God. Yes?’
‘Yes, John.’ Gold sounded weary. The boy’s bow went down, trembled a little at the fetch, and then rose again, an avenging angel.
‘Four,’ Gold said. ‘Give me one more, lad.’
‘Well trained, boy,’ John grunted. ‘So I swear by God, and I bow my— Jesu! Damnatione!’ John spat.
The bow had exploded with a sharp crack.
The boy, despite his august audience, fell on his knees, the pieces of his father’s bow across his lap, ignoring the blood that the whiplash of the bowstring had drawn from his bow hand.
Gold looked back. Aemilie and her father were both standing in the great mullioned window that was the hallmark of the inn, the best in Calais. Master Chaucer was leaning in the doorway.
Shaking his head at the Tartar’s blasphemy, Gold approached the boy.
‘I’m sorry it broke,’ Gold said, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘But you have the makings of an archer, eh, John?’
John nodded. ‘Take him.’ He turned without bowing and went back towards the barn.
‘Why not leave him and let him live?’ Chaucer called from the doorway, a little too loudly.
‘Oh, master, I want to go!’ Young William was fighting tears. His father’s bow had been his most prized possession.
‘You are too young to know anything,’ Chaucer muttered, approaching the pair. The small, wiry man stood very close to Sir William, who was a head taller. ‘Let him go, William. Your tales go to his head. He’ll just die, face down in the mud somewhere. Or the plague will take him, or dysentery, torture, raped by captors, gutted like a fish, puking blood …’
Gold shrugged. ‘You would know,’ he said mildly. ‘And yet he might ride back here in ten years in a coat of plates, riding a tall horse with a squire and a full purse.’
‘A killer,’ Chaucer said bitterly.
‘There’s more to the life of arms than killing, Master Chaucer,’ Gold said.
‘Aye, I can hear the same poem from a Southwark strumpet, who’ll tell me she brings comfort and love to loveless men, when all she does is fuck them,’ Chaucer spat.
Gold’s face turned a bright crimson, and then returned to its normal shade. ‘You are hard on your fellow men, Geoffrey,’ he said. ‘But then, you are hard on yourself. Let the boy decide for himself.’
‘He can no more decide for himself than he could choose chastity if …’ Chaucer caught himself, but his glance at Aemilie revealed the pattern of his thought; the girl flushed, and her father put a hand to his dagger.
Gold shocked them all by passing his arm around Chaucer and locking him in an embrace. ‘I hear ye,’ he said. ‘We’ll leave this for the morn. I’m off to prayers.’
‘I’ll come,’ Chaucer said.
The two men walked off in what appeared perfect amity, leaving a boy and a broken bow in the yard.
John the Turk appeared with a new, white yew bow, almost as tall as Sir William himself, and its belly thicker than Aemilie’s wrists. ‘Spanish,’ the Kipchak said, running a hand down the smooth wood. ‘The best. For you.’
‘Sweet Virgin, I cannot afford such,’ young William said.
John the Turk knew a great deal about bows, but more about young men. He nodded gravely. ‘You broke good bow in service of company,’ he said. ‘We replace it, eh? We have a bundle of sixty.’
‘Sixty?’ the boy asked, stupefied at such riches.
The Kipchak shrugged. ‘And another sixty in Italy. War is bad for bows.’
He grinned his odd grin and went back towards the barn.
Aemilie glanced at her father. ‘I don’t understand them,’ she said.
‘The one who looks like the Devil?’ the keeper asked.
‘Nay, Pater. The knight and Master Chaucer.’ She looked after the two men.
Her father was watching the strange man with the slanted eyes walking away from them. ‘I don’t really, either,’ he said. ‘But I’m going to wager that when men spend enough time together, and experience enough … even if they mislike each other, in time … they are like brothers. My brother and I used to fight like that.’
‘I like him, Pater,’ she said. ‘But I’m not going to play the fool.’
He ruffled her hair. ‘He’s a fine man,’ the innkeeper admitted. ‘But also the Devil incarnate.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘By the Virgin, Pater, do ye think I don’t know?’ She shook her head and went to find her mother.
The rain started before Matins were over, and came down like Noah’s flood, and even Sir William, usually so debonair, looked like a drowned cat and smelled like wet wool when he returned from church. Master Froissart, late from his bed, was drinking small beer in the common room. When the damp men had changed into dry garments and the fire had been touched up, Sir William took a chair by the chimney and drank off a huge jack of hot porter.
‘Ah,’ he sighed. ‘England. Italy has nothing like that.’ He wiped his beard.
‘Passports?’ Froissart asked.
Gold looked over the common room. A dozen of his men-at-arms and most of the archers were packed in the low room, as well as several off-duty servants and some local Englishmen – a shoemaker and a cutler. Gold shrugged.
‘I suppose now is as good a time to say it as any,’ he said. ‘There’s trouble in England, gentles. They say the commons have risen against the lords, and that there’s been a lot of killing.’ Gold looked over the room, and then at Chaucer. ‘They say Sir Robert Hales is dead, murdered by the crowd.’
‘Christ,’ Chaucer said.
‘Aye, and I will pray for his soul. He was a good knight, whatever his sins.’ Gold looked into the fire. ‘He was with us at Alexandria …’ He shook his head. ‘Any road, gentles, the way of it is this: the castle is holding our passports until such time as they have a ship out of the Thames or the south ports that gives them cause to hope.’
‘That could be weeks,’ Froissart said.
‘Aye,’ Gold said. ‘And all my profits wasted on good living in a fine inn.’ He raised an eyebrow at the keeper. ‘If it hasn’t resolved itself in a week or two, I’ll be headed back to Venice.’
‘More stories!’ called a voice.
Chaucer laughed. ‘I think you have a willing audience,’ he said, and then more soberly: ‘The Italian wedding?’
Gold looked at Froissart. ‘It’s not just my story, although I know an ending that mayhap you do not. But you were both there; you’ll interrupt me constantly and insist that I tell the truth.’
Chaucer laughed. ‘You really should have been a scribbler, like me,’ he snorted.
Froissart leaned back. ‘I would like to understand what I saw in Milan,’ he said. ‘I still … It was beautiful, yes? And terrible?’
‘Aye,’ Gold said. ‘So it was. The worst year of my life, in many ways. But the year before it was wonderful.’
‘Made your reputation,’ Chaucer said.
‘Perhaps,’ Gold said.
At the far end of the room, young William the pot-boy had just slipped into a corner, eyes bright with expectation. Sir William reached behind him, hiding a smile of satisfaction, and his squire handed him a well-thumbed book of hours. The knight laid it on the table. Chaucer leaned over, flipped a page, and exclaimed, ‘You are a scribbler!’
Sir William smiled. ‘It started one afternoon in Venice; I was copying itineraries, the year I served the Green Count. Look, it’s not much; just the weather, usually.’
‘And the saints’ days,’ Froissart said. ‘And these little crosses. What are they?’
‘Men I killed,’ Gold said. ‘I pray for them. I like to remember who they were.’
PART ONE – Outremer
April 1367 – August 1367
There I was with an arming sword in my hand, and I was desperately outmatched. A trickle of blood running down my right bicep, my old arming coat cut through all eight layers of linen, and sweat blinding my eyes.
I made a bad, hasty parry, but at least I wasn’t deceived by my opponent’s devilish deception. From the cross, I pushed, eager to use my size and strength against the little bastard, but he was away like a greased pig. He evaded my winding cut at the face with a wriggle and we were both past, turning, swords back into gardes; he in the boar’s tooth and me with my sword high …
He raised his sword, a clear provocation, given he was so damnably fast.
I shook my head to clear the sweat. Backed a step in unfeigned fear.
He glided forward, perfectly controlled. I dropped my sword hesitantly into a point forward garde; I couldn’t allow his point so close to my heart …
And then, out of my hesitation, I attacked. My wrist moved; my blade struck his a sharp blow. And I snapped the blade up into a high thrust, right at his face.
He had to parry. And he had to parry high.
I rolled my right wrist off that parry, rotating my heavy arming sword through almost a full circle, from the high cross all the way around, my thumb flat against the blade for control, and my blade just barely outraced his desperate parry to tag him under the arm, where no one has a good defence.
He burst into peals of laughter, spun away with my sword tucked under his arm, and sprawled to the ground in a pantomime of death. My son Edouard flung himself on the prostrate Fiore and pretended to shower him with dagger blows.
Fiore was laughing. ‘I just taught you that!’ he roared.
And he had. Just the day before.
It was a glorious spring of training, and we were all on the island of Lesvos, in Outremer. In the year of Our Lord 1367, I had reached the end of my desire to go on crusade. I’d be too strong to say I was sick of the whole thing; that came later. But I doubted the very basis of the idea. It was clear to me that the Infidel were neither so very bad nor so easy to convert. I had, I fear, spent too much time with Sabraham; I began to see the wisdom in the Venetians and the Genoese, who traded with them every day and seemed to know a great deal more about the Infidel than anyone in Avignon or Rome or Paris.
Spring in Outremer is as magnificent as spring in England. Lesvos is the most beautiful of the Greek islands, with magnificent contrasts: steep, waterless valleys like the Holy Land, which is close enough, for all love; and then lush greenery and magnificent fields of flowers; hillsides like a Venetian miniature; roses. Gracious God, it was beautiful. And as Emile recovered from pregnancy, having given us Cressida, we wandered the fields of my new lordship, and we were like sweethearts. The only cloud in the sky was that Sir Miles Stapleton, one of my closest companions, was recalled to England to marry and take up his uncle’s lands. His uncle of the same name had been killed at Auray, in ’64. We threw him an excellent revel; before he left, we all wrote letters and I sent Hawkwood a long one, as well as another for Messire Petrarca in Venice and Marc-Antonio added a long one for his family. Finally, I wrote a long letter of eight or ten pages to my sister – some of it in the Latin I had laboured too hard to master with Sister Marie. I sent her some saffron and some ambergris and a few other drugs and spices in a packet, and I sent her a bolt of silk.
Losing Miles was hard. The four of us – Miles and Nerio, Fiore and I – had been together a long time. And we had seen a great deal; we’d lost Juan; we’d been to Jerusalem. I knew when Miles left that soon I’d lose Nerio, and eventually, Fiore. On the other hand …
I had Emile. My life with Emile remained as fine as a dream.
I had a new horse, a magnificent horse, a gift from the Prince of Lesvos. At first, I thought that no horse would ever replace Gawain, but Gabriel, as I called my new charger, was big and glossy and intelligent, and the more we trained together, the better I liked him.
After Miles left for Venice in February, Gabriel and I were training hard for the Prince of Lesvos’s tournament at Mytilene, which was to be given on Ascension Day. Actually, our entire little company was training; Nerio, my good friend and one of the richest men in the Inner Sea, was hiring us to defend his holdings in Achaea. That is to say, to defend them by conquering them. He did a little training – if by training you mean being fitted for new armour he was having made in far-off Bohemia – while parading around with his magnificently beautiful Greek mistress. Occasionally he deigned to cross swords or lances with my friend Fiore, who was in many ways his foil: poor, when Nerio was rich, devoted to training, where Nerio was lazy to the point of indolence, chaste, where Nerio’s pursuit of women had something unhealthy about it. They quarrelled constantly, yet they were the quarrels of an old married couple, and each knew full well how to land a blow on the other, in conversation or in combat. Indeed, it had become impossible for me to touch Fiore on foot, and hard for me to shake his seat on horseback, but Nerio, who, to be fair, I could strike almost at will with sword or spear afoot, seemed to trouble Fiore a good deal.
At any rate, training for a great tournament is a fine way to pass a spring, in between dalliances with one’s lady and playing with children in a pleasant, airy house full of good food and laughter and one’s best friends.
It doesn’t make much of a tale, though. I remember a perfect, golden sun, not too hot, not too cold. I remember making love with my wife under our lemon tree, giggling lest we be caught by our servants. I remember swaggering swords with Fiore in our courtyard, and jousting with Nerio, day after day.
One of my favourite memories is that of watching Fiore with a wooden waster in his hand, haranguing all of our knights and men-at-arms and a few others – two local Frankish-Greek boys and half a dozen of the prince’s men-at-arms – who had all come to our School of Mars. Or Ares, as the Greeks would say.
He had just effortlessly dispatched three good knights, allowing each just one blow. They made a little line and came at him; one swung a great blow, one thrust, and the third, rather remarkably, threw his sword.
Fiore just laughed. To each blow he responded by a rising cut from a low, left-hand garde, the garde he called the boar’s tooth or Dente di Cinghiaro. The cut came out of the low garde, false edge up, crossed the incoming weapon with precision, striking it away, up and left, and then descending like an avenging angel in the same line to strike the knight on the head, arms, or neck. The thrown sword he sent out of the lists like a boy hitting a stick tossed by another boy – same garde, same cut.
Oh, no, gentles. There’s nothing false about the false edge. Look here: I talk about swords all the time. Let’s look at mine. Here she is: four feet of steel, a long h
andspan of hilt and the cross guard as wide as the hilt is long. Not one of those new long hilts you see in High Germany; those are for men who never have to fight a-horse, and never have to fight close, either. A good wide blade, too; narrow blades break, and they don’t cut.
A true sword has two edges. Saracen swords have but one edge, because they are simpler men than we, perhaps, or less deceptive, or really, just because their smiths use a different temper process and they can only get one edge hard as good steel ought to be. But in Milan they can make a blade that’s straight as truth and has two sharp edges that run to a point fine enough to punch through maille. That’s the whole point of the weapon, really, the point. It is mightier than the edge. But for all that, we play a lot with edges; and of the two, the true one is the one under your hand when you grip her – put a finger round the guard if it helps you, and there you are. The true edge is the one that it is natural to cut with: raise your arm and drop it, and you are cutting with the true edge. The false edge is the one on the back, and there’s no false thing about it but the name. The true is the downstroke and the false is the reverse, and a better philosopher than me would point out that when you change grip, true and false are reversed, and that on a new sword it’s impossible to tell the two edges apart.
I have found Truth and Falsity to look very similar in my time.
Regardless, there was Fiore, with a wooden sword. His falso, his false edge cut, had opened up his adversary, and then his own cut came down the line that his falso had traced with a precision and fluidity that was beautiful to watch.
‘That’s all I have to teach you,’ Fiore insisted. ‘The whole of this art is in emerging like a wild animal from the cover of the outside lines to strike the opponent’s weapon and win the centre – and then to strike like the leopard.’
Now, this is the part that I always love when Sir Fiore teaches. Everyone nodded; after all, they were all professional men-at-arms, who at least notionally fought and killed for their livings. But, certes, not everyone fights the same way, and many good knights are merely brave enough to set their spear and push in the stour or the mêlée. They have no more idea of the art of armizare than they have of tactica or logistica. They put their heads down and they fight manfully and they survive.
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