‘The pasha does what the sultan tells him,’ he said.
His friend Sir Alessio agreed. ‘It is always like this,’ he said. ‘The extreme demands, the string of captives, the humiliation, the insults. Next day, flowery apologies and new arrangements.’
‘It is a test?’ I asked.
Nerio shook his head. ‘Remember how Sabraham used to say “they are not us”?’ he said. ‘Truer words were never said. I would hate to do business with them. Everything is a war.’
But then the prince laughed. ‘That is exactly what they say of us,’ he said. ‘And the pasha is, in fact, a fool. He may be a tool in the hand of the Sultan, but he’s overplayed. He keeps telling me that the crusaders have all gone home, when we have all of you right here with us to prove him wrong to his people. I was not altogether sad to see you win today, Nerio, and—’
‘And I’m your pasha!’ Nerio laughed.
‘I saw you make the play – the tough upstart …’
The two men laughed together, and for all that I loved Nerio and saw the prince as a fine leader, I was chilled, because the nuns were nothing to either of them. They had that ruthlessness that Hawkwood had; I lacked it.
‘I would like to save the nuns,’ I said.
‘What, a dozen heretics?’ muttered Nerio. ‘Let the Turks have them.’
He saw my face and stopped. ‘Guglielmo,’ he said, his hand reaching out for mine.
‘Do you bastards remember Father Pierre Thomas?’ I asked. Fiore looked away, and l’Angars took a sharp breath.
The prince glanced at me. Our eyes met; he didn’t flinch. ‘I am trying to save all the nuns in the empire,’ he said. ‘I can’t save these few women. And I beg you not to try. That’s the response he wanted.’
I held his gaze.
He shrugged. ‘Sir Guglielmo, in truth, my fleet is too small to fight all the Turks, and the emperor cannot afford to pay his army, such as it is, and now he owes the Venetians thirty thousand hyperaspers. The empire needs time to rebuild. The Franks sacked it, and the Turks – if they don’t have time, they will fall, and then …’
‘Can you imagine what has been done to those women?’ I asked. I was in France, in my head. Looking at the nuns that Camus had turned to whores. And their blank faces.
‘Don’t be so pious,’ Gatelussi said. ‘That’s what happens to women, in war.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I will not let it stand.’
In the end, they were all with me. All but the prince.
I summoned John. ‘We will rescue those nuns,’ I said. ‘I need to know where they are kept.’
He nodded. ‘If Turks catch us,’ he said, ‘it will be very bad.’
‘Noted,’ I said. ‘My plan is this: you find the women; Fiore cuts loose their horse herd after I set fire to the pasha’s tent.’
John laughed. ‘I love you, William Gold,’ he said. ‘Good Mongol plan.’
‘No killing,’ I said.
‘That not so Mongol,’ he said.
I have done this sort of thing before, and so has Ewan the Scot, who’d taken his fair share of English cattle, and we crept through the night past the outer guard posts, which were all manned by Turks on horseback keeping a very poor watch. We worked our way along the lists; they were unguarded and empty, and stretched like a highway to the pasha’s tent, which was unguarded too. I’d had a notion it might be.
There were Turks in the streets between the pavilions for a while, but they didn’t stay out late; men were tired, and most of them went to bed after a trumpet was blown. And then the camp was empty, and we were unobserved. I will never forget the long crawl down the lists over which I’d ridden so casually all day: the pats of horse manure, the dust, the spiders …
In the chansons, there are never any insects. In real life, everything bites. We were both completely unarmed; I had ordered it. If we were taken, I wanted no accusation of camp-murder. But unarmed is a form of nudity, and I felt very naked, crawling like a worm on my belly in a smelly old linen gown and my oldest braes and hose – more like a servant than a knight.
When you start on an empris, you imagine how it will be if you succeed, and yet, I was startled, somehow, inside myself, when we were lying in the grass under the pasha’s tent ropes. His tent billowed and snapped in the breeze. The walls were back in place; there was a light away at the back, on the side of the city, but the rest of the huge tent was dark.
Ewan touched my wrist. ‘What if,’ he whispered, ‘the women are in the tent?’
Oh, the things you never think of.
I lay in the darkness and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and Mary Magdalene for the salvation of those women. And I knew perfectly well that I was trying to rescue all the women I’d wronged myself – Richard and I ran brothels in France. We knew …
God.
You never escape your own evil, you know. Unless you are made like Nerio, or Gatelussi. Sometimes I envy them. But I am as I am.
I struck sparks from flint and got a burning coal on my little square of char cloth, and then I used a little dry tow, blew it to light, and instantly raised the flame to the eaves of the pavilion.
Silk burns quickly. Silk that has been all day in the brilliant Greek sun, oiled with a little linseed oil? The pavilion was like a giant lamp wick.
A man shouted, off to the left.
The pavilion caught with a rush; in ten heartbeats, we had a wall of flame behind us.
‘Lie still,’ snapped the veteran cattle thief. I obeyed. I wanted to run into the darkness.
Instead, I lay with the raging heat of the flaming tent above me. Most of the heat passed over, but it was uncomfortable, and then worse as the tent’s hangings and furnishing caught, and there were screams, and I prayed …
The earth vibrated with running feet, and Turks appeared out of the darkness, perfectly visible against the fire. No one had any water, and the fire was too fast, and then they were shouting for the pasha.
‘Now we run,’ Ewan said, and we rose and ran off, first towards the water stores, with twenty other men, some of whom were Christian slaves. Then we lay still awhile, and then we were slipping off to the south. By then their guards were shouting that there was an attack, the crusaders were attacking them, and others were shouting that the horse herd was under attack by Mongols. It would have been delightful, except that we were in the midst of it.
A woman screamed, and then another.
I pinched a kaftan off a line between two tents; it was sweat-soaked, but it covered my gown, and changed my profile. Ewan wrapped a stolen strip of cloth around his head and we ran again.
The earth shook. A thousand horses broke into a panicked gallop to the north of us, and every Turk in the camp cried out, and turned that way, as if they were under a compulsion. They ran for the horse herd.
We ran the other way. We ran almost to the Turkish sentry line, and then we lay down in the dust and crawled. We might have spared ourselves the effort; the sentries were chasing horses.
It was almost an hour before I made it back to our camp. John had all the nuns in a tent; Sir Giannis was trying to talk to them. They were terrified of the Kipchaks, who had blackened their faces.
I went to Prince Francesco.
‘It is done,’ I said. ‘We lost no one.’
He was furious. ‘You have risked the lives of fifty thousand people against these twelve women.’
He didn’t like piety, so I spared him mine. In my heart, though, I was full of joy. I still am. I am a knight. This is what knighthood is for.
In the morning, the pasha was gone. Angry men make mistakes; he made the mistake of accusing Everenos of burning his tent.
Everyone has politics, even Turks.
We waited for two days to hear from the sultan. The nuns stayed in two tents, and had the Kipchaks around them at all time
s. The Turks never mentioned them; we pretended we knew nothing. It was a curious game, but one I understood.
‘We can’t admit we have the lasses,’ Gospel Mark said. ‘They can’t admit they lost ’em. Stands to reason.’
On the third day it rained like fury – it was more like England than Outremer, and we all had to look to our horses. The farmers didn’t come, and we were very short on food.
Prince Francesco frowned at me over some stale bread. ‘Here we go,’ he said. ‘They are calling our bluff. Cut off our food, and we have to act.’
But the next day the sun rose, and the farmers came. We ate well enough. I wondered if every Greek for twenty miles was selling us his oldest mutton, but old mutton is infinitely better than no mutton.
About noon Everenos came with Timurtash at his side. I rode down with Nerio and Young Francesco, and we saluted them.
‘The pasha has gone north for a while,’ he said easily. ‘My master the sultan says threats are for children, and neither he nor your master are so young.’
Young Francesco bowed. ‘This is true – nor did we ever suspect that the sultan was young.’
‘My master says, let us make an equitable peace. He says, come to Edirne with thirty men, and you will be received like a son.’ The bey nodded and flashed his toothy smile. ‘I myself will provide an escort. And I am to say,’ he raised an eyebrow, ‘that the son of Acciaioli is to have a pass and firman, but is not welcome to join the Emperor’s friend. Yet.’
He handed Nerio a pair of scrolls. ‘You are free to cross the sultan’s possessions of Greece and Morea,’ Everenos said.
‘The sultan’s possessions?’ Nerio asked.
The two men smiled.
‘Did you have a fire the other night?’ Nerio asked innocently.
‘We might have, and we search high and low for the culprit,’ Everenos said. ‘Arson is punishable by death among us.’ He looked around at us. ‘Some slaves escaped. We assume they set the fire. If they are caught, it will be terrible for them.’ He nodded, rocking in his saddle. ‘So it would be better for everyone, perhaps, if they were not caught.’
‘I have no idea what you are saying,’ Nerio said lazily.
‘Whereas I understand you perfectly,’ I said, through Marc-Antonio. Everenos turned and met my eye. His were blue.
‘You and I have always understood each other,’ he said, in Italian. ‘We could make this peace in as long as it takes an arrow to fly.’
I reached out and took his hand. ‘Mayhap we’ll have a chance someday,’ I said.
He handed me de Charny’s dagger. ‘I have no more need of this,’ he said. ‘We know you now as men of honour, like ourselves.’
I embraced him. I was no friend to the pasha, but I could have spent a year alongside Timurtash and Everenos.
Nerio was going to say more, but I turned my horse and his horse followed mine, thank God.
I liked Timurtash and I liked Everenos, but I have seldom been happier to get well away from anywhere as Didymoteichon, and we left the two walls behind and rode away on tracks that only our Greeks knew. Lascaris was a good guide; so was Sir Giorgios’s squire. We all rode together for a day, to a town that they called Mandritto, which sounds like the Italian for a right-hand blow, and made us laugh, and if the laughter was a little unnatural, still we were elated to be away. I bid farewell to my lord at Mandritto; I bent my knee and he forgave me for risking everything by rescuing the nuns.
‘You can earn back my trust by taking care of my son,’ he said.
I was surprised. ‘My lord?’
The old prince shrugged. ‘The sultan may have me killed at Edirne,’ he said. ‘I want my son free to avenge me.’ He nodded. ‘If it doesn’t offend your delicate sense of morality, perhaps you’d kill a few Turks as well.’
I embraced Sir Richard. I little thought that it would be the last time I saw the prince, or five years until I next saw Sir Richard.
I thought only of the ten nuns who were wearing Kipchak clothes – the worst riders ever to grace steppe ponies – but the Turks were either fooled or pretended to be, and we left Everenos Bey at Mandritto. I shook his hand and embraced Timurtash, my near double. I never expected to see them again. Well, God works in mysterious ways, eh?
In a day we were on the Via Egnatia, the ancient road the old Romans built, like the highway near Chester in England: two carts wide, paved in stone. It went west, a ribbon you could follow with your eye, with country houses, inns, ruins and bandits. It runs almost all the way from Constantinople to Venice – well, Ragusa, anyway.
It was only on the third day out of Mandritto, when we rounded the corner of a hill and the Aegean was laid out at our feet, blue as blue for as far as the eye could see on a perfect day, that one of the women cried aloud.
‘Thalassa!’
And the other women took up the cry. Then the tallest woman managed to get her pony close to Sir Giannis and they had a brief exchange, and he caught my eye.
‘They want to know where we are taking them,’ Giannis said. ‘They want to go to Thessaloniki.’
Thessaloniki, or Salonika, depending on who was speaking, lay on our route. It was a major city, the second city of the Empire, and like many of the Italian communes, it had vicious internal politics, or so Giannis told me as we descended from the mountains to the coast road. The city regarded itself as virtually autonomous, and had in fact been ruled by a council of workers, farmers and sailors in the past.
‘How’d they do?’ I asked.
Giannis made a face. ‘Not very well,’ he admitted.
It turned out that they’d been overthrown by a moderate group of merchants who’d returned the city to the allegiance of the Emperor, but one of the results of the years under communal rule was the presence of a Venetian bailli and the development of the town as the easternmost port open to Venice; Genoa did their best to keep Pera and Constantinople closed, or at least difficult for the Venetians.
‘It is a fine city,’ Sir Giannis insisted. ‘And returning to normal. And there are more than forty monasteries and nunneries for these women.’
The women kept very much to themselves; Marc-Antonio and Achille and I did most of their cooking, because they flinched when other men came close to them. I can’t claim I saw much in the way of smiles from any of them. Giannis was our translator, slow and patient, and I wished every day that I had Sister Marie, whose Greek was excellent.
‘I know they have been through a great deal,’ I said one day. ‘But I can tell they are … still afraid. Is it us?’
‘Two of them are afraid they are pregnant,’ Giannis said bitterly. ‘They will not be admitted to a nunnery.’
Nerio shrugged. ‘In Italy it is practically a requirement.’
Sir Giannis turned red, and one of the nuns clearly understood Italian. Her face hardened, and she turned away, white with anger.
‘Jesus,’ I spat, blaspheming in my anger. ‘Do you say every stupid thing that comes to your mind?’
‘Yes, he does,’ Fiore said.
Nerio glared at me like an unfed cat.
‘Nerio, those women have been raped by infidels, and where they are going, it is quite possible they will be held responsible – punished, made whores for their “sin”,’ I growled. And my anger was fuelled by my own self-knowledge. Oh, yes. I knew how it all worked.
Nerio could not, for once, meet my eye.
‘Tell the good sister that I apologise. It was ill-said,’ Nerio muttered to Giannis.
I tell this story mostly because when we reached Thessaloniki, we took the sisters to an inn outside the gates, not to one of the nunneries high on the hill in the city. And Nerio took charge. He insisted.
I let him go. I spent the morning billeting my lances, making sure we had fodder, and loaning men money. We were desperately short of hard coin. On the other hand, I had a go
od supply of silk and some saffron to trade, and Nerio had more, and I saw him in the market, which was as big, and as good, as the market in Florence. He and young Francesco spent almost an hour with the Genoese factor. After we had all done some haggling, both selling and buying, I met up with the two of them.
Nerio nodded to me as if I had not castigated him mere hours before. ‘I have some news for you,’ he said. ‘But first, the Venetian bailli.’
I went with him to the Venetian bailli, who quite happily cashed Nerio’s bills of exchange and my own, as well as paying us a thousand compliments on our campaign against the Turks and our visit to Jerusalem, about which he was surprisingly well informed.
‘The Count of Savoy sent a ship in for greens,’ he said. ‘And one of our captains needed a foremast. And you have no friend in Messire Florimont de Lesparre, I think?’
‘He does not seem to like us,’ Nerio said.
‘The feeling is mutual,’ I said.
The bailli nodded. ‘Well, he spews poison like a woman scorned, so beware. To me, he is a Gascon adventurer, while both of you come highly recommended by friends. But in other places … among other things, he claims that Sir William betrayed the crusaders at Gallipoli and served alongside the Turks, for money.’
Nerio looked at a spot of dirt on his glove. ‘I think it is time that Messire Florimont was reminded of the cost of speaking so,’ he said softly.
The bailli made a face. ‘In fact, I would not have been disposed to pay Messire Florimont much mind. He is full of gasconades. But he arrived on the heels of the news that he had accused the King of Cyprus of cowardice. He did so at Rhodes; my brother is a knight there. He was present.’
I bowed. ‘Your brother is a knight of the Order?’ I asked, showing my ring.
He nodded. ‘This is how I know your reputation so well, Sir Guglielmo. You have nothing to fear from my city, I promise you. But Messire Florimont has apparently challenged the King of Cyprus to a duel. And the king has accepted.’
‘Bon Dieu,’ I muttered, and Nerio shook his head.
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