The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Donats,’ they said together, and then Juan returned to his usual silence. Fra Peter nodded. ‘Young men of noble birth pay a large sum to the order to be trained. They owe some service later, and are called ‘Donats’. In battle, they wear a red habit.’

  I sighed. ‘I have no money,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I believe that in fact you have some thousands of gold ducats due you.’ He drank more wine. ‘Money you have from taking ransoms in battle.’ He swallowed. ‘Better, at least, than money looted from peasants paying patis to keep their daughters from being raped.’

  ‘I have never raped,’ I said hotly.

  He nodded. ‘Father Pierre Thomas would say that every woman you took, because she had no other choice, was rape.’ He sighed. ‘Father Pierre Thomas is a saint, and I am not. So I’ll confine myself to the reality of the man-at-arms. Few women can protect themelves. Will you protect them?’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Have some more wine,’ he said.

  The next day we reached Avignon. I’m a Londoner, and to me, London defines what a city should be, but Avignon was a fine city. A little hag-ridden with priests, I confess, and more whores than all of Southwark ten times over, which says something about the state of the church, no doubt, but they were pretty and well-paid, and the churchmen were, for the most part, well-educated and clean. The palaces were magnificent, and the streets were well laid out, narrow but comparatively clean. There were influences that I learned later were Arab or Saracen – for instance, some of the streets had trees trained to run up the shop walls and cover the street from rain or sun.

  You could buy anything in Avignon: a beautiful woman, a fine musical instrument, magnificent armour, a horse, the death of a cardinal. You could buy most of those things in London, but they were more expensive and harder to find.

  My new-found Christian idealism received some near-mortal wounds. In Avignon, you could sit in a tavern drinking fine wine and watch a monk fondle a child too young to be in school while a priest and a nun embraced in a closed booth. Discussions of philosophy and theology could result in daggers drawn – and used. The Cardinals plotted for power and exercised what they had with a naked purpose that was at least more discreet among merchants and nobles in London and Paris.

  That said, though, the new Pope, Urban V, was widely reputed to be the best man to hold the throne of St Peter in two generations, and he was advocating crusade on the one hand and church-wide reform on the other.

  We were a week in Avignon before Father Pierre Thomas received an audience. To my shock, I was taken along – clean and clothed decently, in well-tailored dull-red hose and a matching cote with a short brown gown. There were apprentices in London who dressed better, but it was a world with a certain reversal of worldly fashion, and my clothes carefully proclaimed my status as a man-at-arms bound to a churchman. I had neither sword nor dagger. I missed de Charny’s dagger. Its loss was more real to me than the loss of armour. Like Emile’s favour, it had always been the physical embodiment of my chivalric desire.

  The papal palace was both new and recently redecorated, and the paintings were as magnificent as the fabric in the hangings. I have always particularly loved gold leaf – the richness of gold, the way it looks over other colours, over leather, over wood. The papal palace at Avignon was a riot of gold leaf – there was more of the stuff than I’d ever seen before in one place in my life. The choir screen in the great cathedral was one solid mass of gold leaf, and the audience hall was decorated with two magnificent frescos, one on either wall. My memory is that one was the worthies of the church, including, of course, the last four popes, and that the other wall was the resurrection of Christ. Later, in Italy, I saw many better frescos, but that afternoon in late spring in Avignon, I had seen a few painted murals in England, but never the richness, the glow, the vitality, the gold leaf, of the frescos of Avignon. I gaped like a fish.

  In fact, apparently I missed the whole of Father Pierre Thomas’s formal introduction. I did note that he was a bishop, not a mere priest, as well as being the papal legate to the east. His precedence in the papal palace was very high. I had had no idea. Bishops, in my experience, wore crowns and mitres and garments of gold and had magnificent rings on their fat fingers.

  At any rate, the papal nuncio answered the Bishop’s greeting. Father Pierre Thomas – I always think of him that way – knelt and kissed the Pope’s slipper and then his ring. The Pope then rose and embraced Father Pierre Thomas.

  I must form loyalties very quickly as, in my head, I was already his man. I was – transported is not too strong a word – to find that the man I served was embraced by the Pope.

  The audience took most of the day. Urban had been elected after Father Pierre Thomas left for the east, and Pierre had raced from distant Candia back all the way to Paris to try and enlist King John of France for the crusade – and to try to get the Pope’s approval to use the Great Company as a tool against the infidel.

  I didn’t know that at the time.

  At any rate, I stood behind Fra Peter and flexed my knees. Wool is all very well, but May in Provence is like high summer in London, and there was sweat running down my back. I tried to catch Juan’s eyes – we were of an age, and he was the only man in the party who watched the pretty girls sway their hips and who licked his lips when the wine was served – but he was not interested in a whispered conversation in the papal palace.

  My attention kept going to the frescos.

  At some point, I looked up and saw the ceiling.

  I heard several of the Pope’s attendants laugh. I continued to watch the ceiling. There were stars in gold leaf on a deep blue – I’d seen work this good in London – but also the devil and his legions, who looked strangely like men I knew, and God and his angels, who appeared to me to be led by the Count of Savoy and Richard Musard.

  I may have laughed.

  Christ sat enthroned between the hosts, and he judged men and women. Some were taken to hell under Satan’s feet, and others went in raptures towards heaven. Not all of the figures were clear, and some were not very well painted, but I remember particularly a woman – something in her expression reminded me of Emile, and she was poised. Christ’s pointing finger showed that eternal joy was her lot, but her face conveyed the doubt she’d had, the sins she’d feared.

  Juan drove his finger into my ribs with the force you only use on friends. My head snapped down and I reached to snatch his hand, but he was too fast.

  ‘Hssss!’ he said, or words to that effect.

  I looked around.

  Father Pierre Thomas’s heavy gaze rested on mine.

  Later, near the end of our interview, we were moved forward, and one by one we bowed and kissed the hem of the Pope’s robe. Juan was enraptured. Fra Peter was detached. I was willing enough.

  The Pope touched his crozier to my back as I prostrated myself. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Young man, I take it you love paintings.’

  My tongue seemed stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  Father Pierre Thomas leaned forward. ‘A soldier, your Holiness.’

  ‘Your bodyguard?’ the Pope asked. The weight of his crozier on my shoulder was like the weight of a lead pipe.

  Father Pierre Thomas laughed. I wager not many men laugh in papal audiences. ‘I have no bodyguard,’ he said. ‘I am one poor sinner, and my death will merely martyr one more Christian.’

  The Pope’s crozier was removed, and he leaned forward. He, too, had eyes like Father Pierre Thomas. Gentle, and yet I reckon he’d run his abbey with a rod of iron. As I raised my head, he took my chin in his hand. ‘What kind of soldier?’ he asked.

  ‘I was a routier,’ I croaked. It was more than a statement; it was like confession – all my sins in one word.

  He nodded. ‘I thought as much. What did you see in my paintings, young man?’

  A woman who reminded me of Emile.

  I remained silent.

  ‘Redemption, let u
s hope,’ the Pope said. His attention went to another man, and I was free.

  It was in Avignon that I first trained with Fra Peter.

  I had watched him train many years ago, in the courtyard of Clerkenwell, while I sat with my sister. I knew now that he’d merely been accustoming himself to a new war horse.

  The Knights of Saint John had a preceptory – a house, almost a palace – in Avignon, and another to the south, overlooking the sea near Marseille. The preceptory was filled to overflowing, not with knights, but with princes of the church and great secular noblemen. However, the preceptory was also the command post for the papal army, which had at that time just been placed under the command of another Hospitaller knight, Sir Juan di Heredia, a name of great renown. In fact, my friend the donat squire was his nephew. Just to show you how small the world of arms is, it was Sir Juan – or Fra Juan – who had pursued us in the days just after the attack on Pont-Saint-Esprit, when Janet came to her senses.

  I met him on the first day we were in town, and he never looked at me. But a week later, when I stood stripped to my shirt and hose, lifting stones in the yard, he stopped, a dozen men at his heels, and smiled at me. His eyes roved the yard of the palace for a moment and settled on Fra Peter, who was standing at a pell, breathing hard. He’d hit the pell so many times I’d lost count.

  ‘Is this red-headed barbarian yours, Pierre?’ he called.

  Fra Peter crossed the yard, wiping his face on his shirt. It was already hot in Provence. Ah, the sun of Provence. ‘Oh, aye, he’s mine.’

  Sir Juan nodded. ‘Good size.’

  Fra Peter grunted.

  ‘Can he fight? Sir Juan asked.

  Fra Peter. ‘Of course he can fight. He won’t win, but he’ll always fight.’

  I must have flushed. Sir Juan paused. ‘You think you can win a fight with a knight of the order?’ he asked me.

  I bowed. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said, ‘my lord.’

  Sir Juan coughed and waved. ‘Looks to me like he’s on the path to wisdom,’ he said, and led his entourage to their horses.

  That day was odd for me, because, absent a few days at the Three Foxes, I had never trained, purposely, since I had swaggered my sword against a partner’s buckler in London. I had fought – quite a bit – but the notion of lifting stones for strength, or practising balance on a beam, or vaulting over a wooden horse – I’d never done any such.

  It takes time to learn exercises, and most young men resist them, annoyed or embarrassed or impatient. I was instantly in love. Exercise made a certain sense to me, and I could feel every stone I lifted, and how it related to the rest of my body.

  When we went to the pell, Fra Peter made us fight the pell in a different way than we practised in England and Gascony. We didn’t just swing at the pell; we fought it. Juan would circle the pell like it was a genuine opponent, circling and stabbing, circling and cutting, parrying blows so well-imagined I felt I could watch them develop.

  When I had my turn, the two of them stood silently, watching me hit the pell. I had a borrowed sword, and I felt the hilt was too short, but I cut until woodchips flew, and I stabbed repeatedly at a knot in the wood until I hit it.

  A young man of seventeen or eighteen crossed from the lodging house of the preceptory and came to lean against the railings of the barricade that surrounded the pell. He and Fra Peter exchanged greetings. His French had the same heavy accent I’d heard from many mercenaries: southern German.

  I went and attacked the pell again. More chips flew.

  The young man on the barricade laughed.

  That punctured my new piety and the focus I was growing to go with it. I whirled, furious.

  He shook his head. ‘Ignore me,’ he said.

  ‘Would you care to show me what is so funny?’ I asked through my teeth.

  He shrugged, an expressive, Italianate shrug. ‘I’m not sure even I could tell you what you do.’ He leaned back. ‘But I promise you it’s funny.’

  ‘Come in here and we will laugh together,’ I said.

  I confess that I expected Fra Peter to interfere, but he did not. Juan opened the barricade, and the new boy stepped in. Juan solemnly handed each of us a wooden sword – we call them wasters in England. You can kill a man with a waster.

  My adversary took up a ludicrous posture – legs apart, body rotated, sword cocked back so far that it came around his head and pointed at me. He looked like a mime or an acrobat mimicking a swordsman.

  By this time in my life I had fought a lot of men. One thing I knew, and respected, was the authority with which he adopted his ludicrous pose. He snapped into it, and then he was still.

  Mime or not, he was absolutely confident.

  I held my sword in the centre of my body and edged towards him cautiously.

  He stepped forward and his blow rolled off his shoulder as his hips uncoiled.

  Juan poured water on my head. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘He does that to everyone.’

  My head rang for a day, and I didn’t fight or exercise for three days. I mostly sat in my bed – an actual bed – in our inn, a fine hostel owned by the Knights of Saint John, who owned every building on the street outside their own gate, just as they did in London.

  Then Fra Peter sent me on an errand to the commanderie by Marseille, which took me a week – it shouldn’t have, but the bailli there assumed I was really a donat, and sent me off on an errand to Carcassonne. From there I had a message to carry for Narbonne, and then back to Avignon. I was stiff as a board when I got off my horse in the yard of a stable in Avignon. I carried my message to Sir Juan di Heredia, and he opened my sealed satchel and read several missives. Eventually he looked up at me. ‘Get some rest,’ he said. ‘I gather you’ve had a busy week.’

  Fra Peter was sitting with the German boy who had split my head in the common room of our hostel. ‘What took you so long?’ he asked, and I knew in a moment that he knew all about my trip already.

  ‘The bailli sent me to Carcassonne,’ I said. My eyes slid off his to look at the German.

  Sir Thomas nodded. ‘The bailli was told to try you.’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘You thought we’d just trust you?’

  I guess I had thought they’d just trust me.

  The German smiled and rose from his bench. He bowed. ‘I wish to apologize,’ he said. ‘My blow . . . was not properly controlled. I hurt you.’ He made a motion with his hand. ‘It was a compliment, if you like.’

  ‘A compliment?’ I asked. By Christ, the German kid was annoying.

  ‘You were almost too fast for my blow,’ he said. ‘So I traded speed for . . . control. I should not have. I’m sorry.’ He was stiff and formal, and Fra Peter permitted himself a very slight smile.

  I was aware I had passed some sort of test with Fra Peter, and the joy of it gave me the grace to bow. ‘No one has ever apologized for hurting me, that I can remember,’ I said, but I took his hand. ‘Now will you tell me what was so funny?’

  He raised an eyebrow and looked at Sir Thomas, who nodded.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘You have never been taught how to use a sword.’

  I bridled, let me tell you, messieurs. ‘I’ve been using a sword since before you were born,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Do you know how to read?’ he asked with the warmth of a youth.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Few men like me could read and I was quite proud of it. ‘Latin, French, and even a little English.’

  He nodded, his point made. ‘So you’ve been reading as long as you’ve used a sword?’

  ‘Longer,’ I agreed.

  ‘You are aware that there are other men who read with more facility than you?’ he asked, leaning forward. ‘Faster, more accurately, more . . . what word is it? More holding of knowledge?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And you can ride?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered.

  ‘Not really,’ Fra Peter said.

  That was two slurs on my fighting skills
.

  ‘Ah!’ said the German. Actually, by this time I suspected he was Italian and not German at all. Germans have a different kind of arrogance. ‘So you know how to ride, but you are not much of a rider?’

  ‘I have many failings,’ I snapped. ‘Where are we going with this?’

  He shrugged again and looked even more Italian. ‘You have used the sword all your life, but because no one has ever taught you to use it, you have never learned to learn, and thus, you grow no better. I would go further. At some point – perhaps in a monastery – you studied the sword with the buckler.’ He stroked his stringy beard. ‘You have a developed imbrocatta and two interesting wrist cuts – inside and outside rolls of the wrist. These were taught to you. You practice them. Almost every other guard and cut you reason from first principles every time, like a small boy attempting to debate Aquinas.’

  Unless a man is either very, very good or utterly lost, there come to him moments where things are revealed, and we know them immediately to be true. I have had this happen in various ways. I have heard something I knew to be true, but ignored it for years, and I have heard things that changed my life immediately. When the Italian said I had learned sword and buckler – that I had two wrist cuts and a thrust – that was true. Damn it, Thomas Courtney taught me those wrist cuts in a London square in the year ’50 or so.

  But in that set of sentences, I was convinced. He’d hit me, and I hadn’t blocked his simple attack, and now that I thought of it, in a cascade of swordsmanlike considerations, his blow was very like the one Boucicault had used on me – twice. His words made sense.

  ‘Teach me!’ I said.

  He shook his head, his face pained – really pained. ‘I am just a student,’ he said. ‘I have so much to learn. There are men in Swabia who teach this art – another man in Thuringia. One in Naples, I hear.’

  Fra Peter shook his head. ‘Well, well, it is a day for me to eat crow. William, I imagined you’d take your horse and ride for Burgundy, and look, you came back to me, and now you really are my problem. And I sat here to keep you from attempting to murder our Friulian visitor, and instead, you ask him to teach you.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I’m delighted that you have shown yourself a better man than I expected.’ He rose and threw some coins on the table. ‘The House of Bardi has a table of accounting in the main exchange in the street of Goldsmiths,’ he said. ‘If you wish to take the next step, Sir Juan and I have set your donation at one thousand florins. Think of it as the ransom of your soul.’