‘On me,’ I called to Marc-Antonio, and we went back across the stream.
There was no one on the road – no one at all, barring the grotesque figure of the impaled man. The fighting was further up the hill.
I went off to my left, into the brush. I had no reason to do so, bar my feeling, based on the sounds, of what was happening. It sounded to me as if Camus was fighting the Baron’s men-at-arms, and perhaps winning. They had never made it to the ford, so that the defection of the back half of the ambush had not affected the fight one way or another.
For Aemilie, here, and the others who have never been in a fight, let me add that a man in armour on horseback in deep woods can be very quiet indeed. Ah, you doubt me, lass? But all the gentilhommes here will support me, I think. Horses make very little noise, and armour, which can rattle or clank when a man moves on foot, is relatively silent when a horse walks through leaves.
Regardless, we moved silently, gliding along the flat by the little stream, flush with recent rains, and then I turned up the hill. I heard the della Scala captain’s war cry, the war cry of all the Scaligeri.
‘Shoot them down!’ called Camus. I knew that voice, and I knew where he was, to a few dozen paces. ‘Take that one!’
I heard a man beg for mercy, and the sound of a crossbow snapping.
I went forward, Marc-Antonio right behind me.
I got up the steep slope. I’m sure I made noise then, but none of the banditti were listening; they were intent on their prey. The Lord of Bolsena was dismounted, and several of his men-at-arms were down, dead or wounded. They were trapped in a little huddle, silhouetted against the darkening sky, where the brigands could shoot them down with impunity.
I could see Camus, in outline.
They were about to shoot the Lord of Bolsena.
Conscience is an odd thing, and so is the way we make decisions. I wanted Camus dead – but there were two crossbows I could see pointed at the Lord of Bolsena, who lay pinned under his dead horse.
I’d led the Lord of Bolsena to this.
‘Savoy!’ I bellowed. ‘Saint Maurice and Savoy!’
I crashed in on the bowmen I could see, and my longsword cut right and left. One raised his crossbow, but he was a fool if he thought he could parry a blow from a mounted knight, and I broke his head open. Then I turned my horse and went for Camus.
Marc-Antonio, thanks to God, went for the brigands, and the surviving men-at-arms, released from whatever spell of horror had bound them, burst forward out of their huddle.
‘Savoy!’ I roared. I cut, one-handed, at Camus. Our blades met, edge to edge. He was turning his horse, and his second blow was down almost the same line as the first, and I got my blade back over my shoulder. It was one of the few times Gabriel has ever misstepped in a fight, but he turned the wrong way, and I had my back to Camus for a critical moment. My desperate over-the-shoulder cut got a piece of his blow. The rest fell on my much-abused left shoulder and left hand, but I had spaulders and maille on, and the blow did me little damage beyond my pride. Little damage, but one terrible effect – I lost my reins.
There’s a question knights ask each other: which is more important in a fight, your spurs or your sword? I always vote spurs. I lost my reins, but I didn’t waste a beat of my heart looking for them. I had spurs and I had Gabriel, the best horse I knew.
I got my left hand on the pommel of the Emperor’s sword and cut up from my left side, the blade rising past Gabriel’s ears. Camus missed it in the dark, and I got him, a strong blow under his left arm, but his horse was turning, its head out, teeth reaching for Gabriel’s neck. Then Camus rocked forward and his horse sprang away.
We were with him, stride for stride. Gabriel was in the flower of his strength, and he got in a vicious bite at the other horse’s hindquarters, and then we were going down the hill, neck and neck in near-perfect darkness, hammering away at each other with our swords, no technique, no finesse, just blow after blow. Some blows were lost in the branches, some missing, some covered by the other man’s sword, some going home. I have heard men say ‘blind with hate’ before, but this is the closest I have come to such blindness. I wanted him dead, and I was not really in control – of my horse or myself.
We came to the stream and both horses leaped. I remember the moment. I remember floating free, trying to put my sword in the bastard, and then we landed, a great shock that drove my knees almost to my shoulders – big horses can jump a long way.
My balance was going. It was a little of everything – trying to reach too far with my cuts, trying to get Gabriel under me … I began to fall. And as I fought for my balance, my left shoulder caught a tree in the dark, and I was off in a heartbeat, lying flat on my back. I was stunned, the world circling me, and I knew I had only a moment to get on my feet.
I couldn’t do it. Camus’s opening blow to the left side had done something, and I couldn’t get onto my knees. It took me three tries. I was starting to panic when I finally got onto my front, got my knees under me, and began to get to my feet. I could hear hooves.
I stood, swaying, and used the tree that had felled me for support. I could just see the horse coming at me. It took far too long for me to realise that the horse was riderless, the stirrups flapping. It was Gabriel.
He stopped by me and turned, as if expecting me to mount.
The hero of the hour was Marc-Antonio. He had flushed the brigands and rescued the lord’s captain, and he received an hour’s worth of congratulations and thanks from all of the local men-at-arms. Praise which he richly deserved, and which didn’t turn his head.
By the time we’d all found each other in the darkness and caught various riderless horses, Ewan was back with Fiore. I had managed to get myself mounted and greet my lord with some pretence of competence, and we rode back into Bolsena before the moon was fully up.
His lady was waiting in the moonlight outside her gate. She had torches lit and fifty townspeople ready to take horses; I could tell from their clothes they were not grooms, but citizens. The Lord of Bolsena was well-loved, and his lady had a head on her shoulders. Shoulder or no shoulder, I made her a deep reverentia when I dismounted.
She shook her head. ‘I am no great lady,’ she said.
‘You are to all of us,’ I said, and she smiled.
Later, she served us wine with her own hands, and I watched her, wondering whether she was indeed a servant or a mistress, or something complicated and Italian in between.
Peter Albin was looking at my shoulder. We were all in Bolsena’s very comfortable upper hall; I had wine, and I was beginning to come down from the rush of spirit that is combat.
‘I don’t know your lady’s name,’ I said.
‘Caterina,’ he said. ‘You know her, I think.’
I smiled. ‘I do. But she’s helping the lady of the castle serve all the men – I think she has a fine heart.’
Albin nodded. ‘Your support means a good deal to me. I intend to marry her and take her home to England.’
‘Not too soon, I hope.’
And after we’d all been bandaged, and when the Lord of Bolsena’s hall was ankle-deep in cast-off armour, a pair of troubadours came and sang for us: wonderful Italian stuff I hadn’t heard much of, and some that was new to me. Landini and some Machaut.
The count rose and thanked us all, pledging all of us, men-at-arms and retainers too.
‘But we must finish these routiers in the morning,’ he said. ‘The Lord of Bolsena and I have agreed it, so I must beg you, my companions, to go to your beds.’
He bowed and kissed the hand of the lady of the hall.
I escorted him to his room.
He was still in his leg harnesses, and I took them off him as if I was a page.
We had a candle, and not much else. Perhaps the darkness inclined him to a confidence.
‘The lady …’ he began
.
‘Yes?’ I said, or something equally noncommittal.
‘Not the lord’s wife, I think,’ he said. He drank some more wine.
‘Beppo says he is a widower, and she is his … housekeeper.’ I could still hear Beppo’s voice, telling stories – bawdy, deeply funny. He was keeping my archers awake.
There was a pause; I got his greaves off.
‘Yet a fine woman for all that. She thought ahead, had grain for horses …’ He looked at me.
‘I think her a fine woman,’ I agreed.
‘When I bowed to her …’ he said. ‘What is rank? I am the Count of Savoy. But that’s nothing but an accident of birth.’
And then he handed me his goblet, as if we were old friends.
I drank some and handed it back.
As soon as it was light, the Lord of Bolsena took all of us back out into the countryside, with twenty men-at-arms, fifty huntsmen, and dogs, including Beatrice. He was angry, and losing a prized warhorse had not sweetened him – neither had the death of one of his vassals. He told the count that he also feared to appear weak to his neighbours, which sounded like France. We had our prisoner from the night before, his hands bound and a halter round his neck. He directed us to a camp, empty, and then to another, where two wounded men lay in a cloud of flies, abandoned by their mates. The Lord of Bolsena’s men-at-arms strung them up and let them kick out their souls from old willow trees, and left them there as a warning to others.
There were footprints and hoofprints, and the dogs had the scent. Before Nones we had come up with two of the men and taken them; they made no attempt to fight. At dusk, Fiore and I caught three more. They had bad horses, and no remounts, and they could not keep up a chase in open country. We were halfway back to Florence when we caught them, on a broad plain of wheat fields. I was on Juniper, and she ate the miles. We watched them getting closer and closer, and their hearts must have died within them.
But they didn’t even stand by each other. One man’s horse foamed at the mouth and fell over, dying, legs thrashing, and the other two rode on, leaving him for us. And then another horse foundered, ridden to death. The last man might have got away. His mount was better, I was sickening of the game, and Fiore and I were the only men-at-arms in sight. We’d outdistanced dogs and men. But his horse cast a shoe and then stopped in the road and would not budge a foot. I rode up one side and Fiore on the other, and we took the man, still screaming imprecations at the dumb animal between his legs.
We made them walk, and it took us another day, a rough, tiring day, to get them to Bolsena. But we’d missed Camus.
The Lord of Bolsena had his notary take the statements of all of our prisoners, and we attested them, affixing seals or signing, or both. None of the five men knew the Prince of Achaea, but all of them knew Camus, by various names, and they were all afraid of him – afraid even to accuse him. But I took copies, in case my lord the count needed them later, and then the Lord of Bolsena hanged all six of them from his gatehouse, including the man who’d guided us. He talked about impaling them all, but it was just talk, and Fiore, who feared no man, pointed out that if we impaled them, we were no better than they.
The man who’d guided us was the first. The Lord of Bolsena asked him how he wanted to die.
‘Shriven,’ he said. He didn’t weep. He didn’t beg. He talked for a long time to Father Angelo, and then he walked to the scaffold. The other five yelled at him, begged for mercy, and called him traitor.
He bowed to Bolsena. ‘I was once a gentleman,’ he said. ‘I beg you forgive me, my lord. I followed Satan. I repent of it.’
‘I forgive you,’ Bolsena said. ‘Would you rather die by the sword?’
The man nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And not with these dogs.’
Bolsena did it himself, which I admired. The man knelt, without restraints; his hands shook, but by God, I hope I go to my death as well.
The rest of them died like criminals – screaming and fouling themselves.
The next day, we rode for Viterbo. It was only a day’s ride south of us – a magnificent ride along the high ridge above the lake. I remember little of it. I was so tired that I might have fallen off my horse several times, and the walk up the last of the slope on the pilgrim road, where you climb a mountain in a hundred steps, or so it seems, was almost the end of me. But the bloom was off our rose; the attack and the executions had left us low. Even the sun on the fields could not cheer me.
Viterbo is a fine town – older and plainer than, say, Verona, but full of Roman antiquities and Etruscan decorations. It is pretty and rich, with a fine market, a huge square just inside the walls and a fine citadel. The Pope had been there for weeks, waiting for his triumphal entry into Rome; no Pope, remember, had resided in Rome for forty years or more. The town was crowded with people: monks, priests, nuns, the great and the small, abbots and abbesses, moneylenders, nobles, ambassadors and soldiers.
Fiore saved me from failure. I was so tired I sat on Juniper, virtually witless, but Fiore moved us briskly through the gates, showed all of our passports, and used the count’s name relentlessly until a young knight, a family friend of the Birigucci, offered to see if his sister’s nunnery inside the walls might take us all. He proved as good as his word, and we were given cells. I collapsed into a bed and slept the clock round, rising only the next day for Vespers. I had probably been ill, in addition to sheer muscle fatigue and some wounds. Certainly, a full day asleep healed me more than any leech might have done, although my right side was stiff and my left hand was very sore. I think now, having had more than my share of wounds, that Camus’s first blow broke a bone in my left hand, right through the gauntlet. At the time, I just tucked the hand in my belt and got on with my business, most of which, to be honest, was being done by Fiore and Marc-Antonio. They found lodgings for the Greek monks, and they arranged an audience for the count at the Papal court, Fiore shamelessly parading his donat’s coat up and down until Papal courtiers took notice. So finally, on the tenth day of October, we were presented to the Pope.
It was curiously like a reunion. The last time I’d seen Urban V, he had given the rank of Papal Legate for the Holy Land to Father Pierre Thomas, and Lord Grey had unfurled the Papal standard. I had stood with Peter Mortimer, no longer a routier, but a knight serving the Order of St John.
Three years had passed, and the Pope had aged a great deal. His hair was white, his face thin, and he had the kind of troubled look you see mostly on statesmen with strong ethics and on mothers of large families.
Nonetheless, he received the Count of Savoy in state, in the great hall of the palazzo, and we all wore our best. Marc-Antonio, who was working every minute to be reinstated in my good graces, had polished my harness until it appeared to be made of quicksilver. I wore over it my red donat’s coat, which the nuns were kind enough to clean and repair for me, as a fight in the woods and a fall from Gabriel had not increased its lustre by any measure.
The Green Count handed the Pope two banners – one, his banner of the Virgin. The other, to my stunned surprise, was the cross we’d drawn hastily in blood on bed sheets in the taking of Gallipoli, to show the count that we held the castle. The count told the story well, as it gave him an opportunity to play the great lord, to laud his own people, who now included me. It was a good piece of politics and, when he was done, the Papal court was as silent as a tomb.
Urban raised a hand in benediction. He blessed the banner, and the count, and declared him again to be the very ‘Athlete of Christ’, as he had called him when the crusade had been declared.
After a great deal of formality, we were dismissed, but only to go to our lodgings, take off our stiff satins and jewels – not in my case, you understand, but the count’s – and return to the palazzo for a more intimate meeting with the Holy Father.
You may imagine that I watched the crowds like a hawk. The last time I had left the Pope’s
presence, I had been attacked by the Bishop of Geneva’s men-at-arms, led by Camus. I understood that the bishop was still in Avignon, manoeuvring to make himself Pope at the next election, along with that part of the faction of French prelates who were adamantly against the Pope moving the office of the papacy back to Rome.
So many factions. And most of them packed into Viterbo.
Back we went to a private audience with the Pope. He received us seated on a low throne, with a dozen cardinals and some other bishops, and he asked the count to tell him the history of his campaigns in the east. The count was kind enough to mention me several times, as well as Richard and Georges Mayot and others. He told the whole story of the campaigns, first against the Turks, and then the Bulgars, but it was almost unrecognisable, couched in the language of chivalric romance, as if dysentery and foot soldiers had been absent from the whole thing.
And then we came to the delicate matter of the Emperor – that is, the eastern emperor. The count lauded his own success in the east, and described the Emperor’s conversion in glowing terms, even going so far as to mention the Emperor’s financial guarantees about his conversion, a matter which Nerio had told me was absolutely secret. The Greek monks were then led forward and presented. After the count’s fine speech, the Pope must have expected that our dozen Greek monks were theological representatives who had come to make their obeisance to the head of the western Church.
The Greek monks were theologians, all right. No sooner were they introduced than they began to toss questions at the Pope, as if he was on trial. Three of them spoke Italian, and all of them had fair Latin, and they were not a bit hesitant to ask the Pope difficult questions. It was all completely unexpected.
Let me add to this moment of disaster by saying that Urban V was perhaps the finest Pope I have ever known and that, had he been prepared, the meeting might have borne better fruit. But he was not prepared, and he was, I think, mortified. It had appeared that the Union of Churches was actually in his grasp, and then a dozen monks were haranguing him as if he was a scholar accused of heresy.
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