Fra Peter watched us for a while and then picked up a stave and joined in. He was the most devastated of all of us, and in truth, except for de Mézzières, Fra Peter Mortimer was the most stricken of all the men I knew. I think that, had he not had the passage to Jerusalem to command, he would perhaps have been in a very bad way, and even as it was, he was almost unable to speak at most times. But he crossed and struck and was struck, and eventually got a stout blow on his left thumb that won some cursing, and he stood shaking his left hand.
Sometimes pain helps.
‘I meant to speak to you days ago,’ he said. ‘I heard what the king did, from de Mézzières.’
I probably shrugged. I was immune to anger as long as I didn’t think too much about it. Once I began to think on it, I could get quite angry indeed.
‘You have got off very lightly. He did not strip your collar of the Sword – he has not taken your title.’ Fra Peter’s eyes were terrible – red and puffy and with lines like an old man’s. He had aged.
‘I don’t care,’ I said. I didn’t; it wasn’t adolescent posturing. For once.
He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Lesparre cannot brook a rival of any kind. It is the sort of man he is, although I have never seen this disease in so awful a form.’
‘I am no rival—’
‘The king spoke of you constantly after you left: of your saving his life; of your devotion;, of the way you and your friends behaved at a certain tournament; even of your devotion to a certain lady.’ Fra Peter’s eyes were red, but steady. ‘Lesparre means to make you small, simply so that he himself can be great.’
‘He has succeeded,’ I said. ‘We are going to Jerusalem, and we will be free of this Hell on earth. God send I never return to Famagusta.’
Fra Peter nodded. ‘You show wisdom,’ he said. ‘Come, and let us exchange some blows.’
‘Your thumb is broken,’ I said.
‘Only mashed. Come.’ And indeed, we swaggered sticks for a long time, and we were quite pretty; men came and watched, and a few women, including Sister Marie. Fiore nodded approvingly.
Men heal in odd ways. Fra Peter and I began the healing from Father Pierre Thomas’s death in the courtyard of our inn, with sticks.
And the next day, when we trained again, this time on the beach with horses, Ser Peter and I ran an open tilt, and then Fiore and I snapped some lances, which was expensive, but I was having a good day. And then Jean-François appeared with his mesnie, and despite my good work with a lance, he dropped me in the sand. He was always a good lance.
I rose from the sand to the sound of applause, and there, of course, in my little moment of humiliation, was the king and his court, and Emile, and the queen …
Jean-François came back down the sand to help me up, but I was in light armour and in fact nothing was hurt but my pride. I hadn’t been unhorsed in an age, and I probably needed the reminder of my own fallibility, but the laughter rankled. Still, I mounted, and we ran another course, and then the king waved to us. We both rode up, and I handed my tall Venetian helm to Marc-Antonio.
The king nodded pleasantly to me, as if we were good friends. ‘My good Lesparre makes a fine point of arms,’ he said.
Lesparre nodded. ‘You owe this knight your horse and armour,’ he said. He pointed to Jean-François.
My Savoyard friend grinned. ‘Par dieu, ten times over, by now,’ he said. ‘I have been unhorsing him since he was a mere boy.’ He laughed.
‘Pass them over, then,’ Lesparre said. ‘I will purchase his horse off you.’
I was stunned.
Jean-François looked at Lesparre a moment, and then burst into his roaring laugh. ‘By the good God,’ he said, ‘that’s a fine jape. Yes. But no.’ He was still laughing as he caught my eye, and he bowed to the king.
Lesparre smiled too. ‘I mean no jape,’ he said.
Jean-François roared again. ‘Of course not,’ he said.
It is hard to hold a conversation with a really big man who is laughing hard enough to endanger the fastenings of his harness.
I bowed to Lesparre. ‘I would be happy to run a pass or two with you, My Lord,’ I said. ‘If you’d care to send for your harness.’
‘But you have no harness yourself,’ Lesparre said. ‘As you have forfeited it.’
I’d had enough. ‘No one forfeits a harness in the tiltyard,’ I said.
‘We are not in a tiltyard,’ snapped the king.
Fiore, who was close enough to have overheard, stepped in, and uninvited, began to lecture the king on the law of arms and the places in which the forfeiture of harness applied.
Lesparre was enjoying himself. I had his measure now. This was his tactic – to make outrageous claims, and force opponents to dance to his strange tune.
The king of Cyprus glared at Fiore. ‘I do not fancy being lectured, sir,’ he said.
‘You should watch what you claim to be the law of arms, then,’ shot back Fiore. ‘These are simple mistakes to make, but a little attention to the …’
Nerio was kicking him in the armoured shin by then.
The king was almost perfectly red with anger.
Lesparre was delighted. This was the sort of thing that delighted him.
‘You see what manner of men these are,’ he said quietly to the king.
They turned their horses, and the Admiral of Cyprus and some other men who had been at Alexandria had the good grace to look pained.
But I could not restrain myself. ‘So you are afraid to run a course with me, Lesparre?’ I called.
’I don’t fight routiers in other men’s armour,’ he said. ‘Nor adulterers, nor men who commit murder.’ He nodded cordially. ‘Go to Hell, Gold, and cease to trouble men of honour.’
He said something to the king. I’m told since that he asked the king to revoke the Order of the Sword on the spot.
The king, despite his rage, frowned, and rode away.
It is hard to train all day and be a good officer when grief overwhelms you, when death stalks you, when you have other worries and other concerns in every waking hour. The next day was taken up with a foolish incident; one of the archers, not even a man I knew well, had been beaten and robbed. His name was William; everyone called him Bill Vane, and he was sullen, angry, humiliated – it was the sort of thing you deal with when you are a corporal. He was mine, by virtue of following Ewan, and the two of us stayed with him for a while.
‘He’s a man lover,’ Ewan said with a shrug. We’d left him at my inn with a bowl of soup and his stubborn silence, and we were watching John the Turk and Rob Stone compete at a level most of the other archers couldn’t touch.
I frowned. ‘So?’ I asked. Some men are, especially in armies. C’est la vie.
Ewan shrugged. ‘He’s a fine lad. He doesn’t want us to know where ’e goes. So he’s silent.’
I suspect what I said was ‘Fuck.’ I suspect what I thought was I don’t have time for this crap.
But it was my job, and another man’s sins can be a lighter burden than your own, I find.
I remember asking Marc-Antonio if he knew of brothels that catered to men who liked other men, and I remember his face.
I raised an eyebrow. Fra Peter had inculcated me with fairly high standards of obedience; Marc-Antonio swallowed carefully and allowed as how he knew of such.
God. Famagusta. Really, in some ways, worse than Alexandria. But I took Marc-Antonio and Fiore and Nerio with me, and we went to the stews.
Let me say a word or two about Famagusta. In the year of our Lord 1366, it was one of the richest small cities in the world. As the entrepôt for trading to Syria and Egypt from the west, it was a vital port, a superb fortress, and if the streets were not quite paved in gold, there was still an incredible amount of wealth. But unlike, say, Venice, where the wealth seemed to be held, lesser or greater, by everyon
e, in Famagusta the rich had everything and the poor nothing. Oh, there is poverty in Venice, but mothers do not sell their daughters as whores for bread.
The stews of Famagusta were bad.
The girl-whores looked like children, and the man-whores were more pitiful than any. I’ve known a good few whores – mostly army women, and a tough clan they are. But tough means fit, and healthy, at least in body, and this lot were …
Squalid. It is the only word I can offer. And the men who appeared out of unlit alleys to sell me their human wares were perhaps the most pathetic form of life I’d ever seen. Why do we kill Moslems, who are often honourable men, knights, men of honour, when we could exterminate the brothel keepers and pimps of this world? These were men who made a trade of flesh.
And slavery was, of course, legal in Cyprus. Anywhere the Genoese touch, they spread this disease. Bah. I am unfair. The Cypriotes practise slavery, and the Egyptians, so it seems natural. But to an Englishman, slavery is disgusting, and the slavery of prostitutes was … sordid beyond anything I’d had to endure.
Nonetheless, we found the place Marc-Antonio’s enquires had located. By then, neither Nerio nor Fiore was amused any more, and when the brothel keeper offered us hospitality, I took him by the throat and explained my errand, with my eating knife at his eyeball. I wouldn’t have touched de Charny’s dagger in that hell.
It would be satisfying to recount a fight, but they cowered before us, four armed men with all the signs of the profession of war: maille shirts, swords. No one showed any fight, and money was put in my hands. Was it my archer’s money, or some other poor bastard’s?
I took it.
There are worse men than routiers. This pimp wore a small fortune in clothing and gold jewellery. His fortune was made. And in me there burned a small fire; I thought for a moment of killing him for his gold.
And I myself have been a brothel keeper.
When the cringing caitiff offered me his wares for nothing, as a sop for my trouble, I kneed him in his privates with as much force and anger as I could muster, and I left him there, puking on his own floor. If I had been alone, I might have burned the wretched place. It was not that he traded in boys. Or children. It was everything about him.
This is the direct touch of Satan, and a few differences of opinion on the value of the Trinity, for example, are nothing by comparison.
Bah, I am sermonising. But by all the saints, gentlemen; when they send us men of the sword to fight, I find I am often told that the enemy represents the legions of Hell, and we are standing with angels. And yet, I have fought Tartars and Mamluks and even the Genoese and found good, worthy men and women among them all.
At any rate, by the close of that evening, I won the repute of a man who cared deeply for his archers; and I freely confess that afterwards, I felt a little better. And a little disgusted with my fellow man, as well.
It was the next morning, and I was kneeling at vigil for Father Pierre Thomas, thinking about the brothel keeper, and trying to be sorry that I had hurt him. And thinking unaccustomed thoughts about Anne, my sometime amis and sometime whore in Avignon; about prostitution, about the use of other people’s bodies and souls. About when Richard and I ran a brothel in Gascony. Kneeling for a long time can be hazardous to your amour propre. I was with Nerio, who was, I could tell, bored.
I envied him sometimes; so secure in himself that when I mentioned to him my doubts and worries, over a cup of wine, he’d smile, his eyes would twinkle, and he’d say ‘I know a young lady with flaxen hair and a surprising flexibility of both body and mind who could, in an hour or so, lighten your mood.’
At any rate, I knelt and prayed, and Nerio knelt and tried to flirt with pretty parishioners.
We were nearing the end of our watch – the moment when time seems to stand still, or run very, very slowly. And I will tell the truth – it is easy to stand vigil with the corpse of a friend on the first night, and perhaps the second, but by the ninth or tenth it is wearisome and dull. It is possible to think that you are doing permanent injury to your knees and hips and back.
I was aware that Sister Marie was in the church. She came to the edge of my peripheral vision and knelt. I saw her pray; I saw her tears.
I saw the bellringer go past us up the aisle and into the bell tower, and when my eyes followed him, I saw Sister Marie stiffen. I had an inkling immediately that she was waiting for me.
Vespers rang in the bells overhead.
Fra Peter came in with de Mézzières. They knelt, and we, who had now made a ceremony of this, rose as one, and bowed to the bier and the altar, which loosened stiff joints, and then we made a reverence and retired, sheathing our long swords together. De Mézzières looked at me.
But he said nothing. I could tell he had something to say, but the power of the vigil was too much for a man of his piety.
Nerio and I retreated to the side aisle and Sister Marie was there.
‘William!’ she hissed.
I went to her side.
She handed me a note. There was no light, so I lit a taper from a candle on the Virgin’s altar in a side-chapel and read it. I knew Emile’s writing well enough.
‘They mean to take the queen in adultery,’ it said. ‘Save her.’
I looked at Sister Marie.
‘The queen,’ Sister Marie looked around. ’The queen is to meet the marshal. She thinks she is going to ask him for help. Lesparre intends to surround them and take them.’
‘De Morphou?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘The queen agreed to meet de Morphou at night?’ I asked.
Sister Marie made an impatient hand gesture. ‘William!’ she hissed. By which she meant, ‘Judge not, less you be judged.’ I took her meaning instantly. In fact, I had the brothel keeper before my eyes, because, of course, I had been a brothel keeper.
And committed a fair amount of adultery.
‘Show me,’ I said quietly.
‘I will take you.’ She nodded to Nerio, who stood separate. Nerio was a fine man – in many ways my best friend; he was bad with women, and as Sister Marie was not pretty or beddable, she didn’t exist as a person, to him. ‘And him?’ she said with a sniff.
I walked to Nerio. ‘I need you,’ I said.
He knew I meant violence. He nodded his head. ‘At your service.’
‘We go to serve a lady,’ I said.
‘All the better,’ he said.
‘There will be political repercussions,’ I said. ‘And a fight, I think.’
‘Ah. Lesparre?’ he asked. He was perceptive, and he had access to his family sources.
‘I assume so,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘The queen, I expect?’ he said, which showed me how far behind the action I was.
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
He took off his mutton cap, ran his fingers through his hair, pulled his sword four fingers from the scabbard and checked the hang of his round cloak. ‘Ready,’ he said with his combat smile.
By the risen Christ, I loved him.
Since Marc-Antonio was waiting with Nerio’s squire, we sent them for Fiore and Stapleton if they could be found, and Sister Marie whispered to Marc-Antonio. Then we followed Sister Marie into the dark streets of the town. We went uphill, past the abbey and the great nunnery where the queen was housed, and then we came to a city gate. It was open; you could smell horse dung on the air.
‘They have already passed,’ she said.
‘How far?’ I asked.
‘Right here – the faubourg,’ she allowed. ‘We should wait …’
I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said.
Nerio nodded in the gate’s torchlight. ‘If we hit them now, we can save something,’ he said. ‘After they take her with the marshal, there’s no saving anything.’
‘Not that we don’t need the others, and horses,’ I sa
id. ‘Stay here.’
Sister Marie frowned. ‘I got you into this,’ she said.
I loosed my sword in my scabbard. ‘I need this,’ I admitted.
‘Need what, brother?’ Sister Marie asked.
‘A fight,’ I said. ‘Bring the others, they won’t be far behind.’
I had Nerio. I had the emperor’s sword.
I would not be so bold today, but I thank God I was so bold that night.
Besides, Emile had sent for me.
Then Nerio and I were running, pounding along the drawbridge and onto the cobbles in the dark, but we weren’t in armour and we made little enough noise. We came to the street of houses on the far side of the city’s deep moat; the first turn, right along the moat, of good stone houses built with pretty wooden balconies out over the cobbled street. Just inside the cover of the street there were four men. Even in the darkness, we could see that they wore maille, and expensive, tight-fitting clothes; one man had a jupon with the latest sleeves.
Courtiers.
They saved us a serious moral quandary by drawing their swords. Now, drawing a sword in the City of Famagusta is a felony. In fact, showing even two fingers of your blade to a potential adversary is the crime of assault in Famagusta, just as in Florence or Bologna or Genoa.
They meant us harm.
Four on two sounds like long odds; add darkness, a need for quick resolution, and our adversaries’ firmness of purpose, and I can only claim youth and chivalric love to explain my determination. In retrospect, I wonder if I was off my head.
I roared ‘A l’arme!’ at the top of my lungs. You may wonder, but we were, after all, there to warn the queen, not to be silent.
I slowed a few paces before I raced into them. Nerio, may God bless him, was with me stride for stride, and we slowed enough to draw our long swords. I promise you, there is no man born of woman who can draw at a run. The blade’s too long.
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