The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Well-earned,’ he said. ‘Double pay, and a share of the value of the town. I’m paying because I suspect that the Count of Savoy is out of money. We’ll be off to Constantinople in a week, perhaps less, and then … I hope we are still rescuing my brother-in law.’

  I shared out the wages immediately, in the little square by the hospital-church. I bought a small tun of good wine and had it served, and made sure the Hospitaller brethren all had a cup too.

  When every man had his little bag of silver, I gave another speech. This one was about having an employer who paid on the nail. ‘No rape, no theft,’ I said again. ‘I’ve lost too many of you bastards to want to hang any of you.’

  No one laughed, but to the best of my knowledge, no one broke the rules. Soldiers are at their most dangerous with a pocket full of silver.

  I walked over to Orsini, as he wanted to be called.

  He didn’t meet my eye.

  ‘You fought well,’ I said. ‘I expected no less. Now lead. They will do as you do – that’s why I can’t have you messing about. Everyone knows who you are. Help me lead.’

  ‘Help you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to be a knight?’

  ‘I could go over to the Green Count and he’d knight me this moment,’ the boy said.

  I thought about it. ‘Yes, ‘I said. ‘He probably would.’ I nodded. ‘And then I’d have to raise your pay.’

  He didn’t get it at first, even with a little sack of silver coins in his fist. But then a smile crinkled the corners of his mouth.

  ‘I see,’ he said, in very much his father’s tone. Then sulky. ‘My father sent all my friends back to the ships.’

  I nodded. ‘I did that,’ I said. ‘You could go too. You’ve seen it – a real fight. You did your bit. There’s a thousand knights in England and France that have never been in fights that hard, and wear their spurs and fancy belts every day.’

  He nodded. ‘I’d like …’ He paused. ‘It was …’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t remember much, except when all the prisoners were killed.’

  I pulled at my beard. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was bad.’

  He didn’t meet my eye. He seemed to quiver a moment, and then the moment was gone. ‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in this town is a whore.’ He flourished his bag of silver, as if he was not the son of the one of the richest men in the world.

  My purse was full of gold, not silver; my little bag from the prince had four hundred gold florins.

  I remember praying that afternoon; asking God for more men and less fighting, and a priest, and a little luck with the prince’s son. It was a funny prayer, and yet …

  The next day emerged out of the darkness in a damp grey dawn. One of the Irishmen, Angus, who had taken what I viewed as a light enough wound, suddenly turned his face to the wall and died. None of the Hospitaller serving brothers could tell me what he died of, and I could tell they were, themselves, lacking spirit.

  I went and found the matron who had hidden me and fed me the day I scouted with Richard Musard, which by then seemed to have been a lifetime before. And she was awed and somewhat difficult. I tried to give her money, and she pretended not to understand.

  But I thought to ask her help in feeding my company, because I thought that a civilised dinner might help their flagging spirits, and my matron was the right woman to ask. She transformed from confused and bashful – and just possibly resentful – to helpful and eager, and with Syr Giorgios to translate, she produced a menu and a trio of women like herself to cook. I paid them in silver and everyone appeared well satisfied.

  Having arranged for a small hall in her bourg, I invited the Hospitaller knights and brethren to join us, and we settled to a feast of pork and fish and strong red wines. The fish was not one I could remember having before, and cooked inside out, with the skin turned in and stuffed full of ginger and nutmeg and other costly spices that made the archers wonder.

  During dinner, Pierre Lapot surprised me by willingly relating the tale of his experience in the darkness of the Holy Sepulchre, and Fra Daniele pronounced it a ‘road to Damascus’ conversion. This led to a general conversation about paths of chivalry; I remember it as a noble evening, and I was pleased to see my little company begin to have a tone – an idea of themselves as different, because so many of us had gone to Jerusalem together.

  But we were not a legion of angels, and we sat up late and drank a good deal of wine, and I was very late to rise the next day. My pavilion was still on a galley or a round ship twenty miles away. My bed was on a palliasse of straw on the floor of an Orthodox church, and I shared it with the big tom cat from the tower, who seemed to have been adopted by the company.

  So it was one of the serving brothers who woke me, and my head hurt, but not for long, for standing behind the serving brother was Nerio Acciaioli. With him, of all people, was Father Angelo, the Franciscan who had been so difficult at Jaffa and Jerusalem.

  Nerio laughed at my confusion. ‘I found him at Corinth,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d bring him along and show him a different kind of crusade.’ He looked around the church. ‘How bad was it?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Fourteen dead. Including Ned Cooper,’ I said.

  Nerio pulled his beard. ‘So you will be glad that I engaged most of the rest of my cousin’s brigands,’ he said. ‘They were going to Mystras to take service, and it occurred to me that they would only end up fighting against us.’

  I got up off my little bed of straw and embraced him. He was as elegant as ever, or more so, in blue and rose, with matching gloves. Then I opened my arms to embrace Father Angelo, who flushed, but accepted my embrace and gave me the kiss of peace.

  ‘Be welcome among us, Father. I had hoped to find my company a chaplain, if you are at liberty.’ I waved my hand at the nave of the little quincunx church. ‘And none of us have heard Mass since we left Rhodes.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t imagine …’ he began, and thought better of it.

  ‘Where are you bound, Father?’ I asked.

  He looked at Nerio.

  Nerio shrugged. ‘I will have the appointment of the new bishop for my lands in Morea,’ he said. ‘I like him, and he’s not a pushover.’ He nodded to the Franciscan. ‘I would be delighted if you would consider being our chaplain for the balance of this campaign.

  Father Angelo made a face. He tried not to; he was, as I have said, a well-bred man, and related to the Cavalli. In fact, he and Maurizio had to embrace twenty times …

  We were right by the doors, and I stepped outside, where one of the younger brothers was stirring a boiling pot full of dirty laundry. I took the huge ladle out of his hands without a word and stepped back inside.

  Father Angelo looked at me, bemused.

  I handed him the huge wooden utensil. ‘For supping with the Devil,’ I said in Italian.

  His eyes met mine. And he grinned.

  Nerio gave me a minute nod of approval.

  Then I had to return the ladle.

  Nerio had brought us better weather, a priest, and another eighty men. Most of them were Italians – exiled nobles and younger sons. They all had good harness, and Nerio had already offered them land grants in his principality when, as he put it, he ‘came into his kingdom’. His arrival was also a godsend for my dealings with Orsini, because suddenly he had twenty young Italians to impress – men not so different from him, and who were impressed that he had helped storm the town.

  And I had all the Kipchaks. Which is not to say they followed me; they followed John. John followed me. This seemed a perfectly adequate arrangement, and we didn’t question it.

  That day or the next, relations between my employer and the count grew more strained – mostly because, as I have said, the count insisted on appointing the captain of the town, a town he now clearly viewed as his own to keep or sell.
For twelve hours I feared I would be ordered to attack the count.

  At the same time, Nerio’s return meant a return to my usual levels of information. Nerio had gathered a great deal of news at Nafplion, a fortified town where he’d gone with his cousin, the Archbishop of Patras – and where he’d rented a Cretan military galley. I learned that the emperor was almost certainly being held in Hungary; that it was possible that Robert of Geneva had played some part in his captivity; that Turenne had declared us all dead; that Nerio’s credit was restored in some circles, but not others; and that Andronicus, the crown prince, if you like, of the Eastern Roman Empire, was moving to secure his power in his father’s absence.

  I listened, because Nerio seldom wasted time – at least with men – and I understood that he was preparing to be a Lord of Achaea; seeking to understand a new chessboard with new pieces. But for me, I was more interested in joining l’Angars and Stapleton and arranging messing groups, so that every man got fed, and so that the new men, who had not been to Jerusalem or stormed Gallipoli might nonetheless feel part of us. They were, for the most part, Italians, who willingly enough took orders from Maurizio di Cavalli, who had been on the stairs behind me when we held the gate tower of Gallipoli; he was one of them, and a scion of one of their greatest military families. Some were Bretons – but they were as stubborn and arrogant as Bretons always are, and l’Angars and Lapot were too Gascon for them. Their leader was a cocky man, as big as a house, named Ranulf Guiscard.

  ‘Why are you in command?’ he asked me. ‘I have more men than you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. Otherwise I ignored him. I came back to him later, when we assigned him to a mess-group.

  ‘I see no reason to take your orders as if I were some lackey,’ he said.

  I’ll wager I sighed.

  In the short term, I had all the Bretons serve directly under Nerio. He was paying them; they were unlikely to question his authority.

  That evening – or was it the next? Ah well, my friends, you can’t honestly expect that I remember every day … At any rate, that evening or the next, Prince Francesco summoned me, gave me good wine to drink, and informed me that we would ride to Constantinople and our ships would meet us there.

  As there were likely to be Turks all along the peninsula, it was no light undertaking, but Prince Francesco was so angry at Count Amadeus that he would be away the next day. We rode all the way back to Portefino, as the Genoese call it, and only there did we rally, gather supplies, and assemble something like a baggage train.

  The next morning, in brilliant sunshine, we rode out for the great city – almost a thousand men in a long column, with John’s Kipchaks in the van, and Syr Giannis and his stradiotes to talk to any locals. And the weather was fine for two days, as if to lure us onward, and then it turned to high winds and heavy rain, despite the season. The rain poured down onto the rocky ground, and drained away, but starting fires became a sort of test of arms and prowess and will. Then our two Welshmen became heroes, and Ewan the Scot; all three men had been foresters, and had the skill to make dry wood and light fires in any weather, and a thousand men owed them any little comfort they had.

  We had no tents. It was August in Thrace; we were moving fast. Men sickened, horses sickened, and the rain fell and fell. And fell. No Turks attacked us because only madmen would have been out in that rain. At every moment, I expected to see old Noah float by in his Ark.

  The prince shook his head in disgust, and water fell off his hood and dripped from his liripipe. ‘I’ve never seen weather like this,’ he spat. ‘August? The world is going to Hell.’

  Hector Lachlan, who had been recovering well enough to ride, sickened again. Several men with wounds took fevers.

  In a village on the north coast of the Sea of Marmara, we rented two stone barns belonging to the church and got our company warm and dry. Lachlan’s fever broke; the red marks around David the Brown’s arm wound retreated.

  On the other hand, the Greeks were surprisingly hostile. Where at Gallipoli they had rather liked us, on balance, at Larna the Orthodox priest would have nothing to do with us. I had intended to leave my wounded there, but when the next day dawned clear, I chose to take them, even if they slowed the whole column. I was afraid the Greeks would murder them. And despite being close to Constantinople, we were in debated land; no one seemed to know whether the sultan or the emperor held sway.

  And, of course, Franks had conquered the Greeks a hundred and fifty years before, around Magna Carta time. And not gently.

  We camped the last night in a gentle rain. Camp is a euphemism; I had horses with hoof rot, and men with inflamed wounds again. My joints were so stiff it hurt to dismount, and both of my hands were infected. No one slept; there was nowhere to sleep, even for veterans, and water flowed over bare rock. Prince Francesco cursed his ill luck and the weather, and Sir Richard Percy rolled his eyes.

  ‘Rather be here than at sea. Those bastards got it bad.’ he said, and I had to agree.

  We rose the next morning and the day was clear; there were a few clouds off to the west, but the sun was bright and warm. By mid-morning the road was dry and so were the rocks; the sun was hot. My back didn’t hurt for the first time in several weeks, and Hector Lachlan rode with his head up. He had the damned cat in his saddle pack, riding along like a small lion, head out of the bag, enjoying everything.

  I smelled Constantinople before I saw it, and it was a smell of city, like London or Paris – wood smoke and Man. Constantinople had another smell, like spice, under the scent of smoke; the prince told me it was incense from the forty or more monasteries and seventy or so churches. That may be so.

  ‘You have never been?’ the prince asked me.

  I shook my head.

  ‘A wonderful, terrible place,’ he said. ‘I prefer Lesvos.’

  We rode along. The ground was mostly flat, and soon enough we could see the walls.

  There is nothing on earth like the walls of Constantinople. I gather they were built by the Emperor Theodosius, a Roman emperor. Indeed, when I speak of Constantinople, you need to remember that the place has never fallen but once – and that was to Franks – and that the emperors of Rome have made it their capital since Constantine.

  The walls themselves are superb, and the Greeks keep them in good repair, for the most part. The land walls are over seven miles long; there is a deep ditch, and splendid towers, each as good as a fortress. The walls have so many gates that I never saw them all; the emperor’s army guards them in turn, rotating each day to prevent corruption or treachery.

  We came up from the Sea of Marmara on the road, and then rode north along the wall, all the way from the south to the north, while my employer regaled us with a description of the wonders to be found inside the mighty walls.

  Outside, I noted, were fields, and a few little villages; we passed a fine monastery dedicated to the Virgin, and many of us dismounted there and prayed. But the farming was not very modern – indeed, I saw two young men using a plough that was little more than a stick, not like our big English ploughs; ours take a yoke of oxen. And the soil is sandy.

  I could hear singing inside the city, and bells, but it all sounded very distant.

  In early afternoon, a unit of cavalrymen rode out of a gate. They were Mongols; by then, I knew a Mongol when I saw one. Their captain rode to the head of our column and exchanged words with John, and then the two of them rode down the column to where the prince was with me. The officer dismounted and bent his head, and handed Prince Francesco a fine scroll in an ivory tube with an eagle inscribed on it in gold leaf.

  The prince took it, kissed it, and opened it. He read briefly, nodded, and smiled at Sir Richard. ‘I think there has been a mistake,’ he said.

  The officer of the Mongols attempted to remonstrate, and Prince Francesco cut him off with a peremptory hand motion and summoned me, as well as Sir Richard and Sir John Partner.r />
  ‘Something is very wrong,’ he said. ‘Close up. Andronicus, the emperor’s son, orders me to turn around and says the gates will be shut against me.’

  Then he summoned Nerio, and Syr Giorgios. We all dismounted; most men fell asleep. It was sunny and warm, and we were desperately short of sleep.

  I found myself by the Breton knight, Guiscard.

  ‘We going to fight?’ he asked in French.

  ‘Only after I have a nap,’ I said.

  He chuckled and went to sleep.

  Marc-Antonio woke me as the sun was sinking. He had a canteen of fresh water; I drank half and poured some on my face and hands, but I still felt heavy and stupid.

  Not too stupid to thank him for the water, however. He was beginning to be a good squire; I didn’t want to let that slip by unremarked.

  No, that’s not fair. He was a good squire – an excellent squire, really – and he was growing better by the day. Soon I’d have to knight him, I thought.

  The prince was already mounted. ‘I believe I have solved our little trouble.’ He had Nerio by him, and Nerio raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I dislike this rumour that Andronicus is attempting to unseat his father,’ the prince said. ‘I do not want to hear it repeated.’

  ‘Yes, Your Grace,’ I said. I had a strong feeling that the old pirate was a right bastard when crossed.

  ‘Good. I have arranged quarters in the city. All the Englishmen will go together; I think you will find it quite pleasant to be with people who speak your language, yes? And perhaps hear Mass in English?’

  I agreed that this would be a fine thing. You might think that Latin is a universal language, but English Latin tends to be very different from Italian Latin. And some English priests will say a whole Mass in English, if you ask nicely.

  I saluted.

  ‘May I ask what happened?’ I said.