Gulling The Kings

by Martin Archer

  As soon as the carts were turned and moving, I led the men who were around me, all but those who were pulling and pushing the carts, to get ahead of the carts and guard them from the front. It’s a good thing I did for just as my hastily assembled rear guard got past the carts to take the lead in our retreat, a number of armed men came rushing out of a side street and came up the lane towards us. It wasn’t a mob; these were fighting men rushing up the narrow lane to attack us—and some of them were wearing what looked to be papal livery.

  We were having quite a fight in the narrow lane and it was made all the more unbelievable by people living along the street opening their wooden shutters to view the fighting. They’d been up there watching ever since our men marched by to the beat of the rowing drum. Now they were calling out to each other and pointing and shouting.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Street fighting.

  The thirty of so armed men hurrying up the narrow lane towards us with their swords in their hands were obviously the main attack in terms of taking the coin chests from us. It was if the mob was a diversion to draw most of the archers away from the coin-carrying carts while the main force of attackers hit us in the rear.

  Whoever the men coming up the lane for the coin carts might be, they had waited too long before launching their attack. They were also too few; they must have expected the same number of men as took the prayer coins to the Pope yesterday.

  “Push at them, lads, push at them,” I shouted as I literally dropped my sword and shield at my feet as I slid my bow off my back and reached over my shoulder for an arrow to nock.

  I wasn’t the only one who began pushing out arrows. In an instant, arrows were flying down the narrow lane and the front ranks of the men running up the lane towards us began to go down. But not enough of them.

  A number of them reached us before they fell. I myself almost became one of their victims. A large man with yellow teeth and a black beard swung his sword at me. It was all I could do to get both hands on my bow and get it up in time to block it. His sword cut all the way through the hard wood of my bow but, in so doing, lost its strength to do more damage.

  I dropped my bow, now in two pieces, and stepped into him with my wrist knives flashing. He somehow escaped from the knife in my right hand, but the one in my left took him full in throat and a second later someone pushed a sword blade through him all the way up to the hilt. It was Freddy. We briefly, very briefly, smiled and nodded at each other. Others reached us and had the same fate even though some of the archers went down as well when our attackers crashed into the mini-company of archers I had organized to guard the carts.

  That was the high point of our attackers’ advance towards the coin carts. The hail of arrows coming at them from our veteran archers and the number of archers with swords defending the coins was unexpected. Our attackers were already turning around and desperately running in the other direction as Freddy put his foot on my attacker’s chest and pushed him off his sword even though he still wiggling about and making noises.

  It was obvious that the attackers who hit our rear wouldn’t be coming back in the near future, so I hurriedly gathered up the archers of my hastily organized rear guard and led them back up the narrow lane past our coin carts to where the mob had finally stopped pushing people forward on to the blades of our men who were trying to hold them back. What had saved them and the coins was that the lane was narrow and it had become so clogged with dead and wounded men that the pressure on our front line faded away.

  At first there was a great pile of dead and wounded men separating the archers from the mob and it was growing fast as more and more of the mob were forced up on to the pile by the press of the people pushing on them from behind. The mob didn’t stay behind the growing pile for long—they began turning around and trying to force their way back up the lane. Some made it; some didn’t and ended up adding their bodies to the pile.

  At the time, the entire fight seemed to go on forever in the narrow lane. In fact, it barely lasted five minutes. In that short time we lost seventeen of our men dead and twelve wounded.

  It took a while after the mob ran off leaving its own dead and injured behind, but we were finally able to pull the pile of bodies apart and find our missing men—and as we did, we stacked those who were still breathing on top of the coin chests to carry them back to the galley. We had to make two trips, one to pull the carts carrying our wounded men and coins to safety, the second to bring back our dead. Many of them had gone down for one reason or another and then suffocated under the bodies that had piled up as more and more of the mob were pushed up on top of them.

  ****** George

  It took almost all the rest of the day to recover all of our dead and return to the relative safety of the galley. John Cowherd was among the dead and so was Oliver, Peter’s apprentice. We found Peter wounded from a club that had broken his arm and knocked him down. He was still alive despite being trapped under a great pile of dead and wounded men. Somehow the bodies of the dead and wounded members of the mob piled on top of him had left an air passage so he could breathe. Oliver’s body was nearby.

  We didn’t return to our galley alone. We brought a number of wounded prisoners with us for questioning. They each told us everything they knew before we either turned them loose, for being innocent bystanders, or dropped them into the river for being attackers—and then watched in surprise as several of them swam for shore. Mostly, however, they just sank into the river and sent up bubbles.

  What we learnt wasn’t really all that much. Those who had been in the mob had been ordered to the square by their feudal patron, a wealthy Roman noble by the name of Conti di Segni who was a relative of the Pope. The men we questioned said their patron was quite religious and a supporter of the church and the Pope.

  On the other hand, the men who had been in the armed band of swordsmen which attacked our rear in an effort to get the coins were the bodyguards and relatives of various members one of Rome’s leading families, the Orsini; they had been promised big rewards if they returned with the chests we were reported to be taking to the Pope. It was these that we sent for a swim.

  Peter had his broken arm reset and wrapped with three headless arrow shafts tied around it to hold it straight. It was done by a hurriedly summoned bone setter recommended by the Greek physician we regularly consulted when our galleys reached Rome with poxed and injured men. Peter yelped and swore and then went to sleep for a while when the bone setter was working on him. The next morning, he grimaced as he told me he remembered the ordeal as having been quite painful despite the flower paste we fed him.

  As you might imagine, I was pleased and very relieved when I found Peter awake and talking. He was even able to get up from his bedding for a drink of breakfast ale and to eat some hot flat bread.

  We had many things to discuss because I was, until Peter recovered, the company’s senior sergeant in Rome and faced with making the many decisions that needed to be quickly made. They ranged from what we should do with our dead and wounded men, to how we should now go about delivering the coins to the Pope, and how should we respond to those who had sent their men against us? We talked for hours. I think talking about what I should do helped Peter forget his pain.

  The answers to some our questions arrived while Peter and I were still talking. A large party of senior church officials arrived in horse carts with an army of sword-carrying guards on foot, at least one hundred of them in papal livery. Their arrival initially caused a great deal of concern—the watch sounded the alarm and the men rushed to their battle stations “to repel boarders.” That included casting off the galley’s mooring lines so that we drifted away from the riverbank and the boarding plank dropped into the river and began to float away.

  It took a while to get things straightened out with much talking and shouting back and forth across the water as the galley was rowed to hold it in place near the riverbank and our dinghy chased after the boarding plank.

  The churchm
en were there, according to the white-haired but youthful appearing cardinal leading them, to pray for our dead and wounded men and collect some chests of coins that belonged to the Pope. He had, the cardinal shouted out over the water to me, a parchment from the Pope authorizing him to take the coins and ordering me to surrender them.

  Of course the cardinal spoke with me even though Peter was present; Freddy, my apprentice sergeant, and I were the only ones on the galley who could speak Latin now that poor Oliver was gone.

  What the cardinal and his men did not know was that our trading post’s interpreter had spent the night on board to interpret between our wounded men and the barbers and bone setters attending to them. He was an old English sailor who had come ashore in Rome many years earlier and never left. I told him to stand next to me and listen, but not to say a word or do anything to let our visitors know he could understand them.

  After a bit of conversation shouted at each other across the water, we rowed the galley back to the riverbank and I invited the cardinal to come on board with his advisors to show us the parchment from the Pope and discuss the matter. At first, he declined and rather imperiously insisted that we must come ashore. He quickly changed his mind and came aboard when I shrugged and told the sailors at the mooring lines to cast off. A number of priests came aboard with him and so did the very proper old soldier who appeared to be the commander of his guards.

  The Pope’s parchment had the Holy Father’s seal on it and looked real. After reading it and listening to the cardinal and his advisors, Peter and I agreed to turn the coins over to our visitors, but only at the Pope’s residence, not on the riverbank, and only on the condition that a strong force of archers accompany the chests all the way to the Pope’s residence. Some of the Pope’s men could march ahead of us and clear the way ahead of us with the rest marching behind us to guard our rear.

  Half the English archers and himself and his priests, I told the cardinal, would march in front of the coins with and half behind them—and all of the archers would march with their arrows nocked and ready to be pushed into any of his guards or anyone else who came within one hundred paces of them. He and his fellow priests, I assured him, would be the very first to fall.

  Our requirement that a strong force of English archers accompany the coins to the Pope’s residence, and particularly that we would kill anyone who tried to interfere with their delivery, caused consternation and dismay amongst our visitors.

  There was much talking back and forth in Italian which we, of course, pretended none of us could understand—all of which convinced us that something was not right. Indeed, the more our visitors argued that the Pope’s order obliged us to immediately turn over the coin chests to them, the more Peter and I became convinced that we should not.

  Peter was the senior man present. He made the final decision and I conveyed it to the cardinal and our other visitors in Latin as they stood on the deck of our galley—the archers would either accompany the coin chests to the Pope’s residence tomorrow morning in the manner we required, or else we would immediately sail for England with the coin chests and bring them back next year with more than enough reinforcements to insure the Pope would get them. Peter announced his decision so fiercely and definitively that the cardinal and our other visitors understood it before I even began repeating his words in Latin.

  “That is not the best outcome, but it is acceptable,” the cardinal finally said with a sigh and resignation in his voice. Then he angrily rounded on the men around him and gave them a tongue lashing in Italian which chastised them. Our interpreter later summarized his words as “you fools should not have tried to press the barbarians.”

  Strangely enough, I never learned the cardinal’s name. Perhaps more importantly, I realized after our visitors departed that I had never asked the cardinal if he and his men were with the Conti di Signi or the Orsinis or the Pope himself.

  All I could do after our visitors left, with Peter’s permission, was tell Edward’s interpreter to go into the city and try to find out more about the papal guards who had accompanied the cardinal. Specifically, he was to find out what had the guards been told before they rode to the riverbank with the cardinal, and what orders had they been given for tomorrow when they would help us deliver the coin chests to the Pope?

  I gave the interpreter a pouch of coins for drinks and bribes and told him to return an hour before the sun arrived in the morning with all the information he could obtain. He was visibly tired from being up much of the night with our wounded, but he said he’d go.

  Edward sent to our trading post for two men to go with him “so he wouldn’t run off with the coins or only pretend to search.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  An unsolved mystery

  The archers assembled before dawn after a big breakfast of breakfast ale brewed on the galley, fresh flatbread, and burned meat strips. I counted one hundred and sixteen archers including five of the slightly wounded men who volunteered to return to duty. And they were true volunteers—I spoke to each of the five privately to make sure they had not been “volunteered” by their sergeants against their will.

  The interpreter, who had earlier been introduced to Peter and me as “Joe known in Rome as Giuseppe Inglese,” returned with the archer from our shipping post while the galley’s archers were still breaking their fast. His news surprised me—he had nothing to report. He was also so tired and drunk that he was swaying on his feet and could hardly walk.

  According to Joe, everyone in the taverns frequented by the papal guards knew there had been some kind of a big fight in the city, but no one knew anything about papal guards being involved or what had caused the fighting.

  It must mean something, Peter and I decided; but what? Joe didn’t know.

  ******

  The cardinal and our other visitors from the previous day did not return to accompany us to the Pope’s residence. What showed up instead the next morning, to our surprise, was a company of forty Swiss mercenaries. They arrived just before dawn carrying long spears on their shoulders—a far cry from the more than one hundred sword and shield carrying papal guards who visited us yesterday.

  Moreover, and what was so strange, they were under the command of a sergeant who spoke neither Latin nor Italian—and neither did any of his men. They did, however, have a Latin-speaking priest with them so we could, at least, communicate with them in Latin.

  At the last minute, Peter decided we shouldn’t move out until we knew more about the new arrivals and their orders. So we questioned them. What they told us raised more questions than it answered. According to their priest-interpreter, the guards were newly arrived Swiss mercenaries and they thought they were there at the direct order of the Pope to help us defend church property.

  “If that’s actually true, these Swiss men could be useful today,” I finally told the priest as I gestured towards the double line of Swiss standing on the riverbank next to the galley. “And if it isn’t true, we’ll be killing them all including you.”

  And then I was surprised when the Swiss priest acted surprised and asked why we would do that? That’s when we found out that the Swiss hadn’t been told about yesterday’s fighting, or that they would be our advance guard and rear guard, or that we intended to push arrows into them if they came too close and we felt threatened.

  Strangely enough, at least it seemed strange to me, once I explained what had happened the previous day, the Swiss priest and the Swiss sergeant seemed to understand our uncertainty about them being near us; they said they were pleased that we were determined to reach the Pope’s residence with our precious cargo even if it meant serious fighting to get there.

  Indeed, they thanked us for explaining things to them, and vowed to help us fight if necessary to get the horse carts and their precious cargos, whatever they might be, through to the Pope. I believed them and told Peter I did—even though I still didn’t understand exactly what was happening and why.

  We loaded the chests on ho
rse carts in the early morning light and marched away from our galley in full readiness to fight with our bows strung and “heavies” nocked. For safety’s sake, we were taking a different and more roundabout route, one the Swiss guards who were going with us today and the cardinal who visited us yesterday didn’t know about.

  Once again Edward would be leading the column in the hope that he would know the way. This time, however, Joe would not be with him as his local guide and interpreter—he had fallen soundly asleep leaning against the deck railing and could not be waked from his loud snoring.

  Edward and two of the archers from our shipping post were walking in front with the Swiss and our march was proceeding normally when everything suddenly changed. I was walking at the head of the archers and saw the whole thing—a single knight in armour wearing a papal tunic suddenly came charging out of a side street after the Swiss had marched passed and galloped towards us. A couple of men on foot came out of the side street behind him and watched as he charged us.

  It was if he expected to ride right through us and come out the other end leaving us disorganized and vulnerable.

  Whoever he actually was, and we never did find out, he didn’t even get close enough for the men in our first three ranks to raise their pikes before he and his horse bounced off the wall of a building next to the lane and went down in a hail of arrows, including two from me.

  We waited anxiously with arrows nocked for a few minutes to see if any more knights were coming. None did, so after a couple of minutes I hurried forward to see if our strange attacker could be questioned. Not a chance; he’d been killed several times over.

  All we could do was strip him of his armour and weapons, and take the saddle from his horse after one of the archers cut its throat so it would stop screaming. Perhaps the holes the “heavies” of our archers punched into our would-be attacker’s armour could be repaired and we could sell it. The men who had come out of the lane behind him ran off. They might have been innocent local people, but somehow I doubted it; they were watchers, I was sure of it. But why?