The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  A poor waif was emptying chamber pots; a noisome job, always given to the lowest. She was clearly the lowest; her shoulders slumped forward, she had a bruise on her face, and her face had the vacancy of the abused.

  ‘Should I help you, miss?’ I asked in Italian. ‘I’m new.’

  So clever. Clever enough to get to help empty other men’s shit, but in less than a watch I knew which room was Half-Cloak’s and the layout of the whole inn.

  Little Lise was disturbingly grateful for my help. I hated even to think about her life.

  She told me she didn’t go to the kitchen because of how men behaved, and she never let me within arm’s reach, and she flinched when I spoke. And she knew Half-Cloak by name, and she told me that there were four other men in the inn who went regularly to his room, and that she’d had to service him twice and he was ‘bad’.

  There aren’t enough knights in the world to right all the wrongs.

  I left the Pisan Quarter at curfew after scouting a way in through a broken wall and an abandoned house; Constantinople was crumbling, and I could use that to my advantage. Then I went to one of the ancient baths and bathed; no amount of hot water could make me feel clean after the shit I’d touched, and heard. But I made it back to our little camp in the Chora without incident, and all my archers were game.

  ‘Right now,’ I said.

  They had knives and cudgels. I had my baselard; de Charney’s dagger was back at Anna’s house.

  What I was doing was right. But I was going to do it a fairly rough way, and I wasn’t sorry to leave de Charny’s dagger out of it.

  I left the Davids with their crossbows to hold the abandoned house where we crossed the wall, and we moved carefully through the Pisan Quarter, but it was only six streets and the guards were playing dice.

  The inn was locked and shuttered. But then, I knew the back way, although Ewan cursed me and claimed he was knee deep in turds.

  Well.

  We went in past the midden, and I left Rob and Mark at the kitchen door and went in by the servants’ stair where Lise and I had gone to the rooms. The place rambled – several centuries’ worth of rebuilding like the English Inn at Rhodes.

  I knew the rooms, and I put Hector and the Irish and Roger LeBlanc, another English archer, on the doors.

  Then I went to Half-Cloak’s door.

  He was fucking someone. The noise was plain. And the door was unlatched.

  It wasn’t Lise, but bless her, she pinned his hands as soon as she saw I meant him harm. I got my baselard to his throat as soon as I had his shoulders, and I hauled him off her.

  The girl was terrified and managed a smile anyway.

  ‘Tell the other girls that Satan came for him and dragged him down to Hell,’ I said, and left her a gold florin.

  She bit it.

  He tried to escape. There were two candles; I suspect he knew who I was. I broke his arm, and then a rib, and then I had to hit him in the head because he was shouting. He went down.

  Not dead, either.

  I searched the room while the girl breathed raggedly under the dirty sheet.

  ‘Satan?’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘He told me if I ever touched his purse he’d rip my eyes out,’ she said. ‘It’s hanging on the chair.’

  Well. God sends the most unlikely helpers. I took the purse and it was heavy.

  Then I went out into the hall. All I had to do was nod.

  Four men died.

  Sorry, Monsieur Froissart. That’s how it is, sometimes.

  Then we were out of the inn and moving through the darkness. We made it to the abandoned house well enough, and then David the Brown grabbed my shoulder.

  ‘Someone is following ye,’ he said in his sing-song voice. ‘Like a ghost.’

  ‘Kill him,’ I said.

  Little David aimed his crossbow.

  ‘Fuckin’ girl,’ he said. ‘Kill ’er?’

  I peered back into the darkness.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I watched, and saw movement.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. I didn’t hear anything – no alarm, no shouting.

  ‘Satan?’ said a voice.

  Hector looked back. ‘Who’s that, then?’ he asked.

  ‘A girl from the tavern,’ I said.

  ‘Like the fewkin’ cat,’ he muttered. In one grab he had her. She didn’t even scream.

  ‘I want out of that place,’ she said. ‘Whoever you are.’

  She was tall, and might, in another life, have been beautiful. She was hard instead – wire-thin, muscular.

  Hector had her by the throat.

  ‘Bring her,’ I said.

  As raids go, it was one of my best. We took Half-Cloak and killed his henchmen and, as far as I know, no one knew until they found the bloody bedding in the morning. I can guess what confusion we sowed.

  Katrina was a Slav; a Russian slave who’d worked at the inn for four years or so, and knew a great deal. And she was like the cat; she followed us home, and the boys took her in. I had Mark watch her the first day, but when I found her sitting with his head in her lap, I decided maybe he was not the man to be trusted watching her.

  When day dawned, I went myself in my slave clothes and posted the chalk signal at the Chora church.

  Three hours later, and some coming and going, and I had the Prince of Lesvos sitting beside me on my fallen column, looking at Half-Cloak, who was conscious.

  ‘You are a dead man,’ he said to me.

  I shrugged. ‘You’re the one with your hands tied,’ I said.

  ‘The emperor is my friend,’ he spat.

  Prince Francesco laughed. ‘You are behind,’ he said. ‘About an hour ago, the Varangians took Andronicus into custody. He is at the Windy Tower now. The patriarch has command of the city, and I have a warrant for your arrest.’ The prince tapped him with the warrant and Half-Cloak flinched.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he snapped at Prince Francesco.

  The prince smiled. ‘Your Hungarian forgot me, but I’m the most important person in this blasted city.’ He looked at me. ‘You can just kill him. We don’t need him.’

  I was disappointed. I had performed a great coup, and no one cared.

  I emptied the man’s purse on the ground. He had about three hundred gold piseri or bezants, hence the weight, and a document sealed by the emperor.

  In the name of God and His Imperial Majesty, do not impede the bearer of this, it said, in Greek and Italian and Turkish.

  Prince Francesco’s eyes went to mine. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He looked at Half-Cloak. ‘We have your man Antonio, who has told us a great deal, and we have Andronicus, who is not one of you, and who has told the patriarch almost everything,’ he said. ‘Is there any reason to keep you alive?’

  ‘You are bluffing,’ Half-Cloak said.

  ‘How do you communicate with László?’ I asked.

  He looked at me as if I was a fool.

  Prince Francesco blinked. ‘Ah,’ he said. He looked at me as if he’d just seen the first sign of intelligence in me.

  ‘That would interest me,’ Francesco said to Half-Cloak. ‘But not much, and I don’t have much time.’

  He convinced me. Prince Francesco was a darker man than most, including, I think, John Hawkwood. I suspected he would kill merely to avoid inconvenience. Sometimes I feared Nerio would grow up to be this Gatelussi prince. On the other hand, the world is full of these men, and I was happy enough with the one I had chosen.

  Regardless, he had apparently convinced Half-Cloak that he meant business.

  ‘I don’t want to die,’ he said. ‘But … the Hungarian …’

  Prince Francesco smiled, and it was he who was like Satan. ‘I am here now,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I could make this nice young ma
n go away, and then make you walk around this fine old oak tree until you told me anything I wanted to know.’

  ‘Really?’ said Half-Cloak, a little of his cockiness returning.

  Prince Francesco smiled at me and blinked. ‘You know, he said, ‘when I was younger, I used to need to learn things from men.’ He shrugged. ‘I used to make them walk around trees,’ he went on. ‘The trick is to make a little cut, just above the groin. Take out a little bit of intestine – cut it. The man is dead from that time, but, of course, he will live a long time – maybe two days or three. Nail the end to the tree.’ His smile was unwavering. ‘And he can walk around the tree a long time – winding his guts on the tree so that he can see them. His own mortality. Eh?’ He moved his eyes from mine to Half-Cloak’s. ‘Choose,’ he said.

  He chose.

  He told us a series of signals. A recognition signal, and some cut-outs.

  ‘Name all your people in the city,’ Francesco said.

  Half-Cloak looked trapped. He named some names.

  Francesco didn’t write them down.

  ‘Give me a moment,’ he said. ‘Go get me that big man. The Scot.’

  I rose.

  ‘And wine,’ he said.

  When I came back, Half-Cloak was dead.

  Prince Francesco was shaking his head. ‘If you are going to do evil,’ he said to me, ‘you should do it for a purpose. Not for nothing. Not because you are an animal, and you like to cause pain.’

  ‘You killed him,’ I said stupidly.

  ‘He bored me, and he was lying.’ Prince Francesco sighed. ‘Ah, wine. I have not killed anyone in a long time.’

  I don’t remember much of the next three days. We paraded all of the prince’s soldiers in the Chora, and then we moved to take control of the palace and the harbours. We were spread thin, and we had to be diplomatic, so that the Varangians and the Vardariotes didn’t take offence. John, my Kipchak, was a great help with the Vardariotes. He had his own part in all this; in fact, there were plots in all directions, and really, I am only telling my part. But we struck with more information than Andronicus could have imagined that anyone could gather; we succeeded so well, at least in part, because the prince brought some Englishmen and a Mongol, and we had friends. Language, culture.

  At any rate, we struck. The prince wasn’t going to allow a counter-attack.

  There were arrests. Cavalli and l’Angars took part; I was protecting the prince and the patriarch. I lost more sleep, and I witnessed a dozen beheadings and blindings. Blinding is particularly horrible. They use boiling vinegar and a white-hot nail. I’ll say no more.

  I came to hate Constantinople.

  On the evening of the third day, with the city under curfew and all the foreigners restricted to their quarters, the Green Count’s fleet was sighted.

  The patriarch went out to meet the count. I was with him as the captain of his guard, with half a dozen Varangians, and Guiscard and some Bretons, and Fiore and our Franciscan, Father Angelo, who spoke Greek and Italian and French. We were taking no chances, and we rode around the patriarch and his dozen priests and acolytes, all across the city and down to the port on the north side by the foreign quarters. Thousands of eyes watched us; it was uncanny.

  The patriarch had no particular love for us, I can tell you. But by then I’d been with him two days; he’d heard from a captured killer that he was on Adronicus’s list for arrests and executions, and he knew he needed me. And he spoke several times to Father Angelo, which I saw as a good sign.

  We were standing on a stone pier in the Port of Theodosius when he turned to me.

  ‘Canst thou read?’ he asked in very careful Italian.

  ‘Yes, Eminence,’ I said.

  He didn’t offer me a smile. ‘Holy Father,’ he said, again in Italian.

  ‘Ah,’ I said. Of course, just like the Pope. ‘Yes, Holy Father,’ I said, waiting to be struck by a bolt of lightning for my temerity. But truly, all the schismatic Greeks seemed to me very holy men. I glanced at Father Angelo, who was amused.

  ‘Thou hast read this Aquinas?’ he asked me.

  Well, in truth, I had read some of the great scholar’s work, and understood very little of what I read. ‘A very little, Holy Father.’

  He grunted, and our boat came alongside the quay – a thirty-oared boat. The patriarch blessed the oarsmen, who seemed transfixed by his presence. I left most of my knights there on the dock, but took Fiore and the Varangians, and Father Angelo.

  I mean no boast, but if they meant the patriarch harm, I was sure Fiore and I could dispatch them. But I was fairly sure of them, even after three days. When pressed, all the Varangians, Greek-born and Scandinavian and English and Russian, had chosen the distant emperor over the traitorous son.

  Or so it seemed to me.

  Regardless, there were four of them, plus Fiore, and me, all in harness, and polished and pretty, unlike all the other times I’d been to see the Green Count. I had on a red surcoat, borrowed from Christos. So did Fiore.

  The Green Count’s galley was flying a big banner of the Virgin, and it had seen better days; later I heard they had terrible weather in the usually placid Sea of Marmara and had almost lost a ship. The count himself received the patriarch at the side of the ship, as was due his status. The patriarch had a Greek monk who was fluent in Italian and made introductions.

  Amadeus smiled, but did not bend his knee to the patriarch or kiss his ring.

  The patriarch expected no better, but was still, I could see, displeased.

  Richard Musard was standing by his count, wearing the collar of his Order, and his eyes passed over me a dozen times before he really looked, and saw.

  By then, the interpreter was done with the formality.

  The patriarch spoke very softly.

  The monk glanced at me in surprise, and translated.

  The count turned.

  I stepped forward. ‘Your Grace,’ I said, making a reverence.

  ‘You do keep turning up,’ the count said. ‘I am told,’ he said very quietly, ‘that the patriarch is merely here as a guarantee that you speak truth.’

  ‘Your Grace,’ I said again. ‘The Caesar Andronicus apparently intended to usurp the throne and hatched a plot to do so. By God’s will and good fortune we have frustrated that plot.’

  The count frowned. ‘Who is “we”?’ he asked.

  ‘Prince Francesco and the patriarch here,’ I said.

  Behind me, the monk, Sylvester, was translating everything I said.

  I handed him a scroll tube from Prince Francesco. He took it, stepped aside with a whispered command to Richard, and we were brought wine. The patriarch was brought a magnificent chair, on which he sat with dignity, and looked around himself with a lively curiosity.

  The count read through the prince’s letter carefully.

  ‘You think there is a plot against my life,’ he said.

  ‘I do, Your Grace,’ I said.

  He nodded and tapped the scroll against his chin. ‘I am not afraid of assassins, thanks to God,’ he said. ‘I will quarter my army in Pera, as the prince graciously suggests, but I will accept his offer of a house by Blacharnae, so that we can meet and plan our campaign.’

  His physician, Master Guy Albin, was to hand, and he copied out the count’s reply in a fair hand. While he wrote the count’s letter, the count spoke to the Orthodox patriarch through his monk, Sylvester, and introduced the Latin patriarch, whose presence obviously caused the Orthodox patriarch a nearly physical pain.

  I stepped aside to take wine with Antonio Visconti and Richard Musard, who seemed again to be my friend. It was hard to guess what Richard thought, but he was cordial, and I smiled at them both as we watched the count fail utterly to charm the Orthodox patriarch.

  ‘The Greek patriarch knows as well as I do myself that the Pope had ordered us
to give no support at all to the emperor unless he abjured the “Orthodox” schism and adopts the Latin rite,’ Antonio said.

  My head almost fell off. ‘What?’ I snapped, or something equally discourteous.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Antonio shrugged and grinned the grin that superior young men grin. ‘Everyone knows.’

  Richard Musard raised an eyebrow and pretended to know nothing.

  The physician, who was right by me at a little table, looked up at me. ‘Your Prince of Lesvos had better know that,’ he said quietly.

  I know I swore. For me, it was the last straw; my interest in crusade died there, for all my loyalty to my Order. Father Pierre Thomas preached a respect for all religions; tolerance, understanding, leadership by example. When he was legate, we had had a chance of impressing the Greeks with our tolerance.

  Now the Pope was sitting far away and dooming any attempt to retake the Holy Land to failure in a petty desire to be primate of the world. I have seen more good fellowship between two brigands arguing over spoils.

  My lips set. I remember looking away, and seeing Fiore, who looked at me with something like wonder.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked, a tribute to his growing powers of human understanding.

  Gentilhommes, you might think that my crusader vow would have died in the blood and rape of Alexandria. But it did not. However horrible, that was war, and it was the very war I had been commanded to make.

  And Jerusalem had been splendid.

  But I stood on the Green Count’s foredeck, and all I wanted to do was return to Italy. I am a soldier; arms are my profession. I didn’t propose to stop fighting.

  I merely proposed to stop fighting for bad men and foolish goals.

  The prince, the patriarch, and the count wrangled for days. The Empress Helena, who had been forcibly confined by her son, was released by Sir Richard Percy, and she took up the reins of government. She sent an embassy to Vidin, in Bulgaria, where one of the three candidates for the throne of Bulgaria supposedly had the emperor as a prisoner. The Count of Savoy sent another embassy, under his bastard son, to the King of Hungary, who was, as we heard, approaching with a great army to fight the Turks.