‘Oh, great lord,’ he said. Both men dismounted, with their hats in their hands. The merchant, Isaac, bowed deeply. The teacher, Benjamin, bowed a good deal less.
‘How may I help you?’ I asked. I’d been taken away from my food, and I was not in the best of moods.
‘Oh, great and gracious lord,’ Isaac said. ‘My brother and I, worthless Jews as we are, beg you to allow us to travel with you to Corinth.’ Isaac’s eyes burned with intelligence, and a certain relish, that I, a gentile, would be amazed that he knew we were going to Corinth.
My desire to punish him for his arrogant servility warred with the Order’s unstated support for the Hebrews. The Order protected Jews whenever it could; I had met a few knights with rabid hatred of the race, but never a knight in any position of authority, and officers like Sabraham were far more common. Sabraham had rubbed off on me.
Also, I had learned a little from Father Pierre Thomas, despite my sins.
‘I’m sure that we can find you a place,’ I said politely. ‘How many in your party?’
‘Fourteen,’ Isaac said. ‘I know it is many, but we will have our own food. It is very important to us, and we will pay you.’
I suppose the Devil was in me; a devil of humility, because Nerio and I needed money that summer. He had a piece of paper worth thirty thousand ducats in Venice or Genoa, but in the wilds of Thrace, it was worthless, and my lances were living out of my purse.
But I smiled in a manner I hope was gracious and said, ‘Such is my love for the mother of Jesus, who was a Jew, that I will charge you nothing, and only ask your blessing when we part.’
Isaac went as red as a beet.
Benjamin laughed silently, rocking slightly back and forth.
‘He thinks he’s so smart,’ Benjamin said – his first words. In clear Norman French, as you might hear in London.
‘You’re English!’ I said.
Isaac shook his head. ‘We’re Jews,’ he all but spat. He spoke at length to his brother, in a language I didn’t know – Hebrew, or some other cant.
Benjamin finally shrugged. ‘You are an English knight of the Order?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘No, sir. I am a volunteer with the Order from time to time. Not, in fact, at the moment.’ I showed my devotional ring. ‘But I consider myself a member of the Order at all times.’
‘Do you know Fra Peter Mortimer?’ the rabbi asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘My master in the faith and in knighthood.’
The rabbi threw his hands in the air with a certain theatricality. He spoke at his brother – at him, in that he was clearly attacking him in some way.
‘Isaac would trust you better if you took our money,’ the rabbi said. ‘I will choose to trust you for Fra Peter’s sake, and because I have heard of you and of your sister.’ Both men remounted.
I bowed, eager to get back to my food and not really giving them much thought. I had, at that point, known few Jews, and they were in many ways more alien to me than Turks or Syrians or Greeks. But Isaac, who seemed mercurial, paused and looked back at me. ‘The Sultan’s pasha, Angrium, is deeply troubled by your presence here.’
Well, I knew they’d come out from Didymoteichon. It wasn’t much of a guess that they’d come all the way from Edirne. ‘You know the pasha?’ I asked.
He turned his mule – a big and very practical animal that told me much about the man. ‘I do,’ he said guardedly.
The rabbi fingered his beard. I suspected that this was the actual purpose of their visit. We were in unofficial negotiations.
‘Why is he troubled?’ I asked. I play a bluff innocent very well. I didn’t need anyone to tell me why the Turkish warlord of a newly conquered province, who’d just been cut off from his bases in Asia by our fleet, would be terrified to find a small but elite army on his doorstep, coming to ‘negotiate’.
He met my eye. I suppose I smiled, and my smile gave away my lack of innocence.
His eyebrows moved a tiny fraction.
‘The pasha feels, perhaps, that the Prince of Lesvos is threatening him.’ Isaac leaned forward in his saddle, very much at ease.
I considered for a moment riding off and leaving them. I didn’t have any brief to negotiate anything for the prince or the Emperor. On the other hand, I had a good idea what was at stake.
‘Nothing could be further from the case,’ I said. ‘We were invited to participate in a tournament.’
Isaac smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There is some consternation inside the city about this tournament. Do you have among you some converso or renegade Turk or perhaps a Vardariot, a Christian Turk? The pasha’s captain thought that it was … men of his own kind. A contest of archery and horsemanship. I am …’ Isaac looked at me. ‘I am trying to prevent a difficult incident, my lord. I know jousting. These men have no jousting in the manner of the French or Italians, and if men are killed, if they are humiliated, nothing will be served.’
He looked back at his brother, who had clearly prompted this approach in confidence, and I didn’t need to speak Hebrew to read that Isaac was telling his brother, ‘There, now, I’ve done it, and it’s all your fault.’
I nodded. ‘I have a dozen men-at-arms,’ I said, ‘who would like nothing better than to compete in the Turkish manner.’
Isaac brightened. ‘They are Christian Turks?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Ah.’ Isaac was trying to be diplomatic. And he still didn’t think much of my intelligence. ‘The Turks are very, very good at horsemanship and archery, Sir William. They will easily defeat any—’
‘Perhaps we can have some archery on the flat as well as on horseback,’ I said. ‘And perhaps some fighting with a rebated spear on foot instead of jousting.’ I laughed. ‘We are negotiating the lists, yes? Why not just have the prince send a herald to the pasha?’
Isaac nodded. ‘I think that now …’ He managed a smile. ‘I think that based on this conversation, perhaps that could be arranged.’
As it proved, after dinner, and after a long conversation with the prince and his son, we sent Marc-Antonio and Sir Giannis to the town in the morning. They returned unharmed and full of mutton and rice, and in the evening, Everenos Bey and Timurtash returned, and this time we had them into our little camp, and they sat cross-legged with us at a campfire as we hammered out the terms of the ‘deed of arms’ between two very different races.
Timurtash, in an aside to me, said in bad Italian that he knew we had some Turks among us, because he’d seen them. I called for Marc-Antonio and Father Angelo, and they translated so we could be sure what Timurtash was saying.
He was warning us that Christianised Turks might be badly treated.
I clasped his hand and told him we would not field any.
In the end, the prince agreed to the following events: mounted archery, twelve targets; archery on foot, two targets at set distances of fifty and one hundred paces; and a mêlée in armour with cane lances or javelins. In addition, we agreed that a Turk would run a course with sabre against another Turk, and a few of our knights would run jousting courses against each other, so that each race could demonstrate its own favourite sport.
The plain at our feet sprouted silk pavilions like the first bloom of flowers in spring, and courses and lists appeared as if by magic; our little market became the market of the whole tourney, and suddenly there were carpets for sale, beautiful ring maille, damascene daggers and other wonders from the east and west too.
We paraded our teams for each other. We were allowed six ‘knights’ for the encounter with cane javelins, and so, after much discussion and some politics, we had Sir Richard and Fiore, Nerio and me, young Francesco and l’Angars. For the mounted archery, of course, our entire team was Kipchaks. Both Sir Georgios Dimitri Angelus and Sir Giannis declined, despite being excellent, accurate archers, and none of their stradio
tes felt up to the skill of the Kipchaks. And for archery on foot, we had three Englishmen, a Scot, a Turk and a Greek – the man from Peristera, Lascaris.
We rode out to the tourney grounds together, with the prince and his retinue in their best, us in our armour, and the archers as fancy as they could manage, with turbans in their helmets and all the dust beaten out of their jacks and brigandines. We made a brave show, but we were nothing like as magnificent as our adversaries, who seemed to be made of gold and silk, and whose horses were just as good as ours.
It was a fine day, without a hint of rain, and a huge pavilion was set up with half the walls rolled up so that the prince and the pasha could sit with their officers, emirs and beys all about them, drink iced sherbet and watch the games. The only thing missing was a crowd. In England or Italy, a thousand men and women would have watched the games, but here in Turkish Outremer the peasants were all Greeks, and despite our retinues having a dozen Greeks, the peasants seemed as uninterested in us as they were in the Turks. So the lists seemed curiously empty; there were no stands, and no women at all.
I knew that the prince and the pasha were negotiating the whole time we were fighting and shooting; I understood how the world worked, or so I thought. Five years’ peace, without any further conquests: that’s what Prince Francesco wanted. And after the Green Count’s campaigns, and the sack of Alexandria, and the sudden appearance of galleys of the Order in these waters … it didn’t seem like too much to ask.
Our hosts clearly esteemed the archery on foot the least, for they put the event first – or possibly did so to humour us. Either way, our team dominated the butts from the first arrow to the last, and with a wave from the prince, Ewan and Rob, after the shooting was done, walked back to two hundred paces and dropped a dozen shafts into the target, to the delight of the Turks. Their pleasure was unfeigned; I think they planned for us to win this unimportant event and they were gracious about it.
They were less gracious when they discovered that our horse-archery team was all Kipchak. The Kipchaks are rivals of the Turks twice over – in the east, on the high steppe, and in the south, where Kipchak slaves become Mamluk ghulams.
There were ten targets, five on either side of the course, all small wicker shields covered in silk, brightly coloured. The course was about three hundred paces long.
One of the Turks played first. He had a green silk kaftan and long moustaches and a fine gilded-steel helmet under his turban. He touched his horse, so far from me that all I could see was the sun dazzle of the peak of his helm, and a roar announced that he had hit the first target. He shot, left and right, his body flexing, his horse changing lead; he always loosed with his horse on the same foot. He managed nine of the first ten; John told me later that he dropped an arrow at mid-course.
The eleventh and twelfth targets were different. Boys stood with two more little shields, and I was afraid that they were going to hold them and be shot. But the boys were safe; it was the rest of us who were in peril. They threw the shields like discs, rolling them along the ground. Both shields rolled almost side by side, very fast, one on the rider’s right and one on his left. He leaned out and loosed into the one on his bridle side and hit it, and then turned, but by sheer bad luck his shield had hit a stone and skipped away, unhit.
Undaunted, the Turk followed it, his arrow point leading the shield, and he loosed, but by then the little shield had rolled in among the horses of our mêlée team, and his arrow skipped along the ground and pinked l’Angars’ charger.
The Turks laughed.
L’Angars was off his horse in a moment, seeing to the beast, but the head had not penetrated his Arab’s coat, and she merely had a long red slash on her withers. I could see l’Angars go red.
Timurtash was trotting up to me. He was laughing, and I didn’t think he was laughing at us. I looked at the prince, and met his eye from fifty paces away and I swear he was willing me to good humour.
I turned to Nerio. ‘Make light of this,’ I said.
Nerio raised an eyebrow. But he concurred, and he turned his horse.
‘Not the poor man’s best archery,’ he said, and Ewan the Scot laughed.
‘Mayhap he’s just used to shootin’ Franks,’ Rob Stone said.
Gospel Mark guffawed and Timurtash made a face.
I translated the comment about shooting at Franks and Timurtash laughed.
‘Ten of twelve is not a good score,’ he conceded.
I rode over to l’Angars. ‘Don’t show any temper,’ I said quietly.
‘But that was on purpose!’ l’Angars said.
‘We’re on stage,’ I said. ‘The prince needs us to be calm and unruffled.’
L’Angars made an effort and cleared his face. ‘I need another horse,’ he said.
‘Have mine,’ Sir Giannis said. He had a beautiful small mare who could ride rings around most of our horses, even the good Turkish ponies we’d picked up in the Holy Land, and yet she carried l’Angars without much effort. The Gascon clasped the Greek’s hand.
I went back to Fiore and Timurtash. They were speaking, through Marc-Antonio, about swords, and Fiore had the Turk’s sabre in his hand.
The first of the Kipchaks came into the lists. I saw his horse give a little bob, as if bowing to the guests, and then the steppe pony was hurtling down the lists like an ugly equine thunderbolt.
The targets were alternated, some on the ground, some hung on spears, so that the archer had to go high and then low, high and then low, while also alternating sides.
‘Is there a rule that a man must ride at a gallop?’ I asked.
Timurtash laughed. ‘No rule I know,’ he said. ‘Just … men.’
The Kipchak, Kerchus, the shortest of all the steppe men, moved like a centaur, a dancing centaur, and his bow arm rose and sank in a rhythm, and he loosed regardless of what foot his pony was on, rolling arrows off his bow hand which clutched all twelve – no mean feat, let me tell you. Just try holding a dozen fully fletched arrows in your hand. As it proved, Kerchus was cheating; he was loosing flight arrows, almost like darts, because weight and penetration were not important, but as the boys started their shields rolling across the bumpy ground, he was ten for ten, and he chose the harder shield first, shooting down into the right-hand shield almost as soon as it left the boy’s hand.
It was my impression that the boys, who were Turks, threw the little shields harder for the Kipchaks; certainly, the left-hand shield hit a hummock and leaped in the air the height of a man, sailing along like a thrown plate, at head height, and right in front of the Turkish military contingent in all their armour and finery.
Kerchus rolled his last arrow off his fingers and onto his string without a glance, his whole body seeming to follow the flight of the little buckler the way a dog watches a hare, and as he drew his bow he was leaning out, out … Everenos Bey was less than three horse-lengths behind the flying shield …
Kerchus loosed. John told me later that he barely drew, only pulling the horn bow to half its power; the lightweight arrow flew true, and transfixed the buckler in the air, and it fell to earth, and the steppe pony’s pounding hooves were, for a moment, the only sound on the course, and then Timurtash gave a scream and all the Turks took it up, and Kerchus pumped his bow hand in the air.
I give the Turks high points on chivalry. Kerchus had run a magnificent course and they applauded him as one of their own, and Everenos Bey crossed the lists to toss the little buckler to the Kipchak with a grin.
The next Turk scored eleven out of twelve. He missed the same target that the first Turk had missed – the middlemost high shield, where the first man dropped an arrow. He hit both of the rolling shields to loud applause, which I was happy to see our own archers joined.
Ten or eleven was the rule; no one shot nine, and one Turk scored all twelve, to the wild approval of his mates. I lost count of the score, but Ewan the Scot
and Gospel Mark did not; they were holding a book on betting and they had acquired both Frank and Turkish customers.
The last rider was John.
Gospel Mark looked up at me; he was on foot, and I on horseback, mostly because all the Turks were on horseback.
‘Ten to draw, eleven to win,’ Mark said.
John didn’t do anything the way the other riders had done.
He entered the lists at a gallop, having started far off. I didn’t see it, but he shot the sixth target, the high right-hand shield, first, as soon as his horse had a foot over the line. He had five arrows in his fist and six in his little belt quiver. He loosed the next five in order, very fast – so fast that he was, for the most part, loosing ahead and not to the right and left. At the sixth target, because he’d already hit it, he reached down and took all six arrows from his quiver and put them in his bow hand and drew, even as he passed the seventh target, which he hit over his shoulder. Then he made the next three shafts from the same position, shooting back over the rump of his horse, so fast that he was coming abreast of his tenth target as he drew, a simple low shield.
He passed it, and instead he shot the buckler that one of the boys was holding. The boy screamed and dropped the buckler, and the other boy threw his wildly and it sailed through the air, high as a bird, and John hit it for eleven.
But John was not done. He’d passed the tenth target, and now he turned with his last arrow and loosed it into the air, as if having a second shot at the flying buckler. His arrow flew, up and up, into the sky. I lost it in the blue and the sun, even as John skidded his pony to a stop in front of the grand pavilion, leaped from his mount and made a deep reverence to the pasha.
Behind him, his last shaft fell to earth. It struck the tenth buckler with a little pop as it penetrated the straw.
Timurtash gave a long throaty scream, and pounded his fist on his own shield.
‘Now, Allah be praised, but that man is a magnificent archer. Is he yours?’ he asked.
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