The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  But I’ll never know, because whatever they decided in the first light, it did not include pursuit. This is the thing I learned fighting Turks – they are very, very good at war. And because of that, you never get to use the same trick twice; nor do they fall into ambushes.

  On the other hand, when the sun rose towards mid-day and there was no pursuit, Ned took off his basinet, wiped his face with a rag, and laughed.

  ‘Proper job,’ he said.

  By which he meant that the English are also very, very good at war.

  We each had three horses to catch the column, and we still didn’t catch them until the edge of darkness. Sabraham and Nerio pushed them along, and after almost twenty days in the saddle, we were all hard and our horses were just as hard. Horses get in and out of shape as well as men; sea voyages and stable life are no better for horses than they are for men, and the ride from Jaffa to Jerusalem and then along the coast had trained our horses as well as it had trained us.

  And it did train us. In the fullness of time, if I’m still telling you tales, you’ll hear of my days fighting under Hawkwood in Italy, and then the War of Chioggia. L’Angars, Pierre Lapot, Ewan and I learned something on the road to Ladiquiya. I can’t define it – it’s about how everything counts from the moment you rise in the morning; how the trade of soldiering involves measuring the grain for the horses and seeing to it that your slowest man learns to ride better, rather than just being punished for riding badly. It’s harder to teach in Italy, which is rich, and has no Turks. Nor the holiness that somehow focused me, and did as much, I think, for Miles and Bernard, but not for – say – Nerio, or Jason.

  At any rate, we caught the column at sunset, and the lights of Ladiquiya were visible, twinkling in the evening air on the next headland, and our pace picked up. I remember riding towards the rear of the column, gathering men as I went, to form a rearguard for the last light, just in case the Turks had shadowed us. What I remember was the professional joy of riding along through the dust, pointing at a man, and having him silently turn his horse and fall in, so that we formed a skirmish line, two deep and ten horses wide, and then spread out, and all done without a word said. We learned from John, from Jesus-Maria, from the Greeks, and from the Turks who faced us, and the way I remember it, we were as disciplined a body of light horse as I have ever had the pleasure to command.

  Our caravan trotted into Ladiquiya untouched. We’d lost one man.

  I was the last man through the gates. Sabraham was waiting there with the emir of the town. It proved that our Persian scholar had won us entry in a few sentences, backed by our Syrian merchant.

  It brings tears to my eyes to relate, but after I handed over my absolutely useless pass from the dragoman at Jaffa, and the emir read it, and we exchanged some compliments, he smiled and invited me to dinner through Sabraham. And then we entered by the Jerusalem Gate, and there was my little army, all formed by lances, standing by their horses as if we were going to be mustered by Hawkwood for our pay.

  The emir of Ladiquiya rode over and walked his horse along their front. He smiled at me, made a comment to Sabraham, and rode off into the evening.

  ‘He says, your ghulams are as good as his own,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a compliment.’

  I gave the lads a little speech. By then, I knew there was a pair of Genoese cogs in the harbour, and that we were safe.

  Then I kissed Emile and went off to dine with an emir.

  It was interesting, and a very great honour, I have no doubt. I sat between ulema, that is, their priest-scholars. Sabraham and I were the only two soldiers there, except the emir and a man I took to be his lieutenant. The Syrian merchant was not invited, but his passenger, the worthy Hafiz-i Abun, was, and held forth at great length. I was treated to a tale of his cleverness in solving a Christian religious question, which he told as if Sabraham and I were not there; the question was about the celebration of Beltane.

  I smiled. I assume I’d sound the same if I attempted to lecture about a point of Sharia law and Ramadan.

  And if I’m allowed a digression – later, when I met more Turks at Adalia, I discovered through Hafiz-i Abun that Islam has the same division on points of law that concern ‘old’ practices; some see such things with toleration, and others view them as heresies or straying. There are, in fact, many wisdoms.

  I had my first sherbet, too. Delicious – like flavoured, pounded ice, but more clever. Mine was coloured and flavoured with honey and saffron, which might have been an astrologer’s way of warning me that my next two weeks were to be intimately tied to saffron.

  An advantage of dining with Moslems is that they drink no wine – or rather, Arabs do not – and so you awake with a clear head and strong purpose for the day. But, in fact, my exuberance was wasted. In the morning, I found that Emile and Jason had done all the work with the Genoese. It was all luck; they had no cargo, and the near annihilation of government in Syria since the sack of Alexandria meant that they were having a difficult time assembling any cargo at all. They took all the Syrian’s carpets and all his glassware and then, with delight, accepted our entire little army as passengers for Corcyra at a very good rate. Corcyra was, and is, one of the best fortresses on the coast of Anatolia; the fortress is a small island off the coast, and the town is on the coast, an open beach, sheltered by the rock, and with access to one of the richest sources of saffron in the world.

  It is also one of the principal ports of the Armenian Kingdom.

  Arnaud made no secret of his joy, and I was repeatedly embraced.

  The Genoese were as friendly as I’d ever encountered; it was clear to me that our money for passage was probably saving them from penury.

  Nerio was particularly amused. He went into the bazaar and got us both money on a draft on his bank. ‘You think we’re a long way from Florence,’ he said. ‘But in fact, I was only charged eight per cent on this, and that’s almost the same as our rate in Genoa or Venice – so that, in fact, we are very close to home indeed.’

  The Genoese could only carry so many horses. At the same time, I could see that I had the nucleus of a company here, and the horses were veterans, just like the men. I was loath to part with such good horseflesh, and in the end, the Genoese, eager to increase their profits, agreed to take two horses a man. We took all the best, the Arabs and the best Turkish ponies, horses we could not easily replace; in fact; with John coaching me, I bought a dozen more Arabs in the market, and we left them the plugs that the stradiotes had ridden, and sailed away the next morning.

  Messire Parmenio, the capitano, and his mate, Messire Doria, tried to explain to me why the wind was so fair for Corcyra; I’m not a sailor. Apparently we’d come so far along the coast that the prevailing winds were different from what they had been at Jaffa.

  Not my business.

  Arnaud leaned over the stern rail and told me of the country as we passed. Perhaps I should say, the ship was a type you never see in northern seas – very Italian: a two-masted ship with very round, low bows and a tall stern with a fighting castle. She was as round as a sow, really, and could clearly hold an immense cargo, so that Parmenio said that they often took passengers for free. We all slept on deck; there were no cabins, and we made a tent for the women of our horse-cloaks.

  The country we were passing went from low and fertile to parched mountains very quickly as we passed from Syria to Anatolia, although Cilicia has deep, fertile valleys that stretch away from the sea, and you can see vineyards and olive groves on every seaside hill, and whitewashed buildings.

  The sea was far easier on us that it had been in the passage from Cyprus to Jaffa. And the two Genoese kept easy company in a fine breeze, their great lateen sails filled with wind.

  Hafiz-i Abun was fascinated with all of it, pointing into the rigging and trying, through John or Sabraham, to explain Persian ships and how different they were.

  We also taught him
to play cards. That led to trouble; as soon as we’d taught him to play, Nerio introduced money, and Hafiz-i Abun rose angrily and stalked off.

  Sabraham shrugged. ‘Apparently the Prophet—’ he began.

  ‘Peace be upon him,’ we all said together, in Arabic. It was becoming habit.

  ‘… was against gambling,’ Sabraham said.

  John rather pointedly looked out to sea.

  ‘And wine?’ Ewan asked. ‘Damn me. I know the sort.’ He looked at Sister Marie.

  She smiled. ‘I have absolutely nothing against wine,’ she said, and wrinkled her nose. ‘I feel the Prophet—’

  ‘Peace be upon him,’ five of us said together.

  ‘… may have had the right idea about gambling.’ Sister Marie sighed, and began to say her beads.

  But Hafiz-i Abun returned to cards, and eventually began to play for money with a ferocious determination that was fuelled, I suddenly understood, by his desire to defeat Fiore, whom he viewed, perhaps alone among us, as a member of his own caste.

  We landed behind the castle at Corcyra, and when Arnaud went ashore, he knelt and kissed the sand. One by one his people did the same, except Lady Eugenia, who had told my Emile the night before that she wished that the voyage would never end. I was troubled for her, because no sooner were we ashore than she was enveloped in women, and veiled as she had not been for many days, and taken off in seclusion. In fact, I didn’t see her again on that empris, and neither did Nerio.

  I confess I was not there to support my friend in his moment of loss. Ser Arnaud wanted to take us to see every part of the country, and I was aware of the campaign season proceeding, of spring and even summer on the coast, and the Genoese were only staying three days to chaffer for saffron. But I agreed with Arnaud that we would make a party to go up country, to see the source of the saffron at the Valley of Corcyra. Emile and I went, attended only by Marc-Antonio and her maid Helen, who spoke Greek and had dressed as a groom through the whole of the pilgrimage.

  We rode up into the cool hills, and again there was the smell of jasmine, this time augmented with oregano and fifty other herbs. And when we reached the caves we were astonished. There are two deep valleys, which the local people call ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’ and which, according to Ser Arnaud, were once thought to lead to those very places. And there is a monastery built into the mouth of the cave of ‘heaven’, with forty monks of the Armenian rite. We heard Mass there, and Emile and I walked among the crocus flowers that grew like a riot, a forest of orange and yellow, a living fire.

  We walked hand in hand, and spoke of the pilgrimage, of the life around us, of my plans for Marc-Antonio. It was in many ways the first time we had talked as man and wife. Eventually we reached a small spring above the carpet of flowers, with a stunted olive tree growing from it, and then above the pool of the spring, a great holly oak perhaps a thousand years old, or older, so big around that we could not, together, get our arms around it. And caught in its trunk there is a stone, clearly cut by the hand of man, with square edges, so that we wondered, and after a little digging, I found that the pool of the spring had been made of stone, laid up carefully with no mortar, and was very ancient.

  We found a little patch of grass, and we lay on it.

  ‘This is how I imagined life might be, if I were a man,’ Emile said.

  Now, I was used to her mercurial direction changes, but I was not prepared for this. ‘If you were a man?’ I asked.

  She was looking at the clouds overhead. ‘When I was a little girl, I dreamed of being a man. So free – to vent your anger when you wish, to kill your enemies, to ride about and see things, participate in things.’ She looked at me. ‘As opposed, my love, to sitting quietly with my hands in my lap while some arse slanders me; to calming the arguments with a husband who hit me; to sitting at home when the meanest churl with men’s parts could walk into the mountains, giving no one a reason. Try being a woman, William. Try telling your father you intend to go for a walk.’

  Aye. Well, I had thought these things, and more than once. I thought them about girls and women, about my sister, about Annie in Avignon and Janet, trying to live as a man in a company of mercenaries.

  ‘I hate what they are doing with Eugenia,’ she said. ‘I hate how we all just let it happen. As if it is right that her brother shut her up with a dozen other women to live out her life waiting for some man to come and make babies with her – some man appointed by her brother. In a romance, we’d call a monster who did such a thing an ogre.’

  I lay on the grass and looked at the bright summer sky. The flower smell was staggering in the high-sided valley, like a perfume given off by the earth.

  ‘Women must be protected …’ I began.

  She rolled over. She was fast, and strong, and she got my hands faster than many men would have done, threw her hip atop me.

  She was smiling. ‘Must we?’ she asked. ‘Am I the worse for having lain with you out of wedlock, in a certain castle in la belle France?’

  She was fast. She knelt on my right wrist, and used both hands on my left. Short of using actual violence, I had no chance of escape, and she was not light, my Emile. She was only three fingers shorter than me, and she had the muscles of a woman who rode and hunted; indeed, she’d ridden just as hard for twenty days.

  ‘Are you saying I should not have told Nerio to behave himself ?’ I asked. I was a little uncomfortable, but not so uncomfortable as to fail to notice her scent, her slightly tanned neck, the strong muscles of her shoulders, the way her hair was slipping out of its net.

  ‘I have no idea what I’m saying,’ she said. ‘I want to overthrow the order of the world and make everything new. Mostly, like Eugenia, I want the pilgrimage to go on and on. With you, my glorious knight, despite the ease with which you ride off and abandon me.’

  She leaned down and kissed me.

  Her hair fell around me, a smell of citrus and healthy woman.

  ‘This has been the very best time of my whole life – all the way from Venice to now. I don’t want to go home. I just want to wander the world. You can command our escort – that seems to please you. You remind me of my mother. She gloried in her housekeeping, and by the Saints, she was the best housekeeper I have even known, and she would fuss to make sure that the jellies were made on the right day, that the right cake was baked for the saint’s day – things a steward and a head cook might do.’

  While she made this little speech, she pulled her skirts up to her hips, which freed her legs so that she could sit on my arms, her lap on my chest.

  ‘You enjoy all the details of war like no man I’ve ever met,’ she said, pulling her overgown over her head.

  I couldn’t pretend to be anything but elated with the afternoon’s developments. ‘I do,’ I said. ‘There are few delights, for me, as wonderful as seeing a well-ordered company—’

  ‘Of course,’ she whispered in my ear. ‘A well-ordered company.’

  She unlaced her kirtle. ‘Tell me,’ she asked breathily. ‘Tell me what delights might equal a well-ordered company?’

  Emile was no blushing maid. She was a strong woman of almost thirty years with children. The sight of her – the lush skin where her breasts rose from her chest, the place where her neck met her shoulder, and she was tanned, and then suddenly her skin was soft and white, the muscles of her arms …

  Who can really describe the person they love? But she freed her side-lace and crossed her arms and pulled her kirtle up over her breasts, and she was naked from head to toe. In daylight.

  ‘I can’t think of any,’ I said.

  She leaned over and kissed me. It was a long, long, provocative kiss, and she let her tongue play inside my mouth.

  She sat up. ‘No pleasure at all?’ she asked.

  ‘None,’ I said.

  Her hands began to play behind her hips, and then suddenly she jabbed her thumb
s into my side and I writhed, giggling; I am ticklish.

  ‘None?’ she asked.

  And then, when the laughter died away, she kissed me again, her clever fingers at all my laces. And she released my arms and lay full length on me.

  ‘Let’s make a baby’ she said. ‘A pretty one to remind us of this day and hour, when we are in some draughty castle in France, awaiting the good pleasure of some old bastard.’

  ‘But … People?’ I said, with the cowardice of the public man.

  She laughed. ‘Helen and Marc-Antonio have their orders,’ she said.

  And there on the grass in Cilicia, she showed me that there was at least one thing much, much sweeter than a well-arrayed company. But in truth, I already knew it.

  We dallied there for hours; we swam in the cold, cold water of the spring, and made love again, to get warm.

  Truth be told, I learned a great deal that day.

  And ever since, I have loved saffron above all other seasonings.

  Back at Corcyra, we were feasted by the Cilicians, and Emile tried to arrange for Eugenia to dine with us, or at least to visit us, and that’s when we discovered that she had already gone north, to the capital.

  And I felt some of Emile’s anger. I understood her brother; if my sister was as beautiful as an exotic angel, I’d have been wary of Nerio, too. That is a man’s part; but Emile had me questioning even that protection.

  At any rate, we ate with the Persian, Hafiz-i Abun, in our company.He was sailing west with us again, at least to the next port, which was Alayie, one of the Turkish emirates of the coast.

  ‘Karamanid,’ said Sabraham. ‘Held, in fact, by Uthman Bey’s nephew. Or cousin. They are all related.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ I asked, looking at my love.

  Parmenio shook his head. ‘I have all the safe conducts,’ he said.

  ‘We are knights of the Order,’ I said. ‘I am not sure …’

  Messire Doria shook his head. ‘They need our money,’ he said. ‘Fear nothing. We’ll touch at Alayie and Adalia and then we’re off to Rhodes. But we need a cargo.’