She laughed. ‘I think I have been bested,’ she said.
Ser Niccolò took a bite, and he looked at me over his pie with pure, unadulterated approval.
I cut the pies as small as I could, and almost everyone had a bite.
At the door, Ser Niccolò took my hand. ‘I love a man who is not afraid,’ he said.
I assumed he was serious, so I shook my head. ‘My gracious lord, I’m afraid all the time.’
‘You were not afraid to make the pies. In public.’ He was serious.
‘I was afraid that they might not come out. It has been a few years.’ I smiled.
He didn’t return the smile. ‘But this is exactly what I meant. Wait, please. I want you to meet my son Nerio.’
I had seen Nerio all evening, and never known him to be the great man’s son. But of course, when I saw them together, it was obvious. Nerio was my own age, as handsome as his father, and at this late stage he had another spectacularly beautiful woman at his elbow, this one thinner and more otherworldly than Donna Giuglia, but neither more nor less magnificent. I knelt to her and to him, and he pulled me sharply to my feet.
‘By God, messire, you are a famous knight and a competent pastry cook, and I am neither!’ He laughed. ‘When there is steel singing in the air, I find a lady’s lap and hide my head there like a unicorn.’
It has amused me all my life, the different ways men boast.
I had a fine night. After I saluted Nerio, I slipped around the palazzo and in by the tradesman’s alley, and found the cook. ‘Here’s three florins to share,’ I said. ‘I know how much work you went to for me.’
He took the florins without hesitation and gave me a little bow. ‘You were truly a cook?’ he asked.
I looked past him at the circle of apprentices. ‘Never,’ I said. ‘I was a cook’s boy, and Master Arnaud would never have trusted me to cook a pie on my own.’
That made them all laugh, even the master. And as if he’d been drawn by the laughter, I saw Ser Niccolò appear on the servant’s stairs.
‘Sneaking into my house?’ he asked.
‘Offering my compliments, because these men made me look better than I am,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘If you always remember to thank the men that help you step up …’ He shrugged. ‘Where do you bank, Ser William?’
‘With the Bardi,’ I admitted. My Genoese bankers.
He nodded and cocked his head to one side. ‘They will fail – if not this year than the next. Your prince has served them but ill again and again.’
I was sitting on the same table where I’d prepared the pies. It seemed incongruous to me: Ser Niccolò was wearing the most magnificent grande assiette pourpoint I’d ever seen in crimson silk covered in gold embroidery, and he was leaning against the fireplace.
Well, I wasn’t his squire, thanks be to God.
‘Move your money to my family’s bank,’ Ser Niccolò said.
I grinned. ‘My lord, I’d move only my debt. I’m owed some ransoms, but another knight collected …’
Ser Niccolò smiled and made a very Florentine gesture with his hands, a sort of denial of the very statement he was about to make. ‘I know all this,’ he admitted. He smiled at me. ‘Give me your account, and I will find your money.’
I suppose I frowned. ‘Why?’ I asked.
Ser Niccolò tilted his head to one side like a very intelligent dog. ‘You are a friend of Acuto Hawkwood. A good friend for me to have. A good knight. And you serve Father Pierre. Any one of these things might have made me notice you, but you now have all three things.’ He leaned towards me. ‘You can, I think, read and write.’
I shrugged. ‘Yes. Latin or English.’
He nodded. ‘Write me a letter giving me your account, and I will see to it you receive the money due you on your ransoms.’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Really, I ask nothing more.’
As I walked through the dark streets with his linkboys lighting my way, I searched for the strings that would make this dangerous, but all I could see was that it would be a fine thing to be friends with the Florentine. He was the Queen of Naples’s chancellor, a great knight, and a powerful lord.
And I had had a wonderful time.
If I’ve given another impression, I’m a poor storyteller. And back at the university, I had to tell all the tales of the evening to Fra Peter, who had stayed with Father Pierre. He laughed at my failure to recognise that Nerio was Ser Niccolò’s son.
‘By his wife, who stays in Florence,’ he said.
Father Pierre came in behind us, carrying a pitcher of wine. He poured me wine with his own hands – he always did. He was the worst great church officer imaginable. He helped servants carry furniture and he liked to lay out his own vessels for serving Mass, even in Famagusta when he was with the king – but I get ahead of myself.
‘Ser Niccolò wears his sins as well as he wears his jewels,’ Father Pierre said. ‘He would be more beautiful without them, but he never allows them to weigh on him.’ He shrugged to me. ‘I have known him ten years and more. The power he wields has corrupted him, but not so very much.’
‘I liked his lady,’ I confessed. ‘His mistress.’ I flushed.
Father Pierre laughed. ‘Why should you not? God made her as much as he made you or me and she is a very good lady, despite her sins.’ He shrugged. ‘I am a bad priest. But as a celibate, what do I know of the world? Nothing. It is not for me to judge, but God.’ He turned to Fra Peter. ‘But Niccolò will accompany us to Venice, at least for a few days. I have word of King Peter. He left Rheims; not for Venice, as he promised, but for the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.’
Fra Peter went white.
Father Pierre sighed. ‘I agree with your unspoken words. There are three thousand men-at-arms at Venice, and it is the most expensive city in the world. Every day he delays is a day he is not making war on the infidel. And those men will drift away to wars in Italy. Will they not, William?’
I blew air out of my lips. ‘Unless Walter Leslie has a great many more ducats than he showed at Pisa, he can’t keep them together for long.’
Fra Peter looked at the crucifix on the wall for a long time. ‘What is King Peter thinking of ?’ he asked.
Pierre steepled his fingers in front of him. ‘I am thinking that he was not informed that he was the commander of the crusade before he left Rheims.’ He looked at me. ‘But he is a strange man; a wonderful man, and a great knight. But very much a man.’ Father Pierre looked over his hands at the table in front of him and finally shook his head. ‘I don’t think we can do anything. Any day, the Pope’s appointment will reach him, and he will realise how essential is his presence. We must get to Venice now, and see to the men who are to be my flock.’
Fra Peter tapped a thumbnail on his lower teeth. ‘You could send me to the king.’
They looked at each other for a bit. I drank my wine, which was delicious, and I poured more for my elders.
‘What do you think of the wine, Ser William?’ Father Pierre asked me.
‘Delicious,’ I admitted. ‘As good as anything Ser Niccolò had to offer.’
Father Pierre’s eyes crinkled with his smile. ‘Denied all the other pleasures of the flesh, my brother priests and I can rarely resist a good wine,’ he admitted. He looked back over his hands to Fra Peter. ‘No, I need you at Venice. You and the other men of the Order are my ambassadors to the brigands and routiers who will be our phalanx of Angels.’
Sometimes, I suspected that the saintly Father Pierre had some cynicism lurking under the surface, but like some shy forest animal, whenever it peeked out with his rare half-smile, it was soon gone again.
I needed a new sword, and I spent some delightful hours prowling Bologna for the one I wanted, with Fiore and Juan and Miles, who had recovered from his sullenness to become one of us. But in three days, I knew every sword available for
sale in the city, and none of them were quite what I desired.
I’m sure you will say that a sword is a sword, a tool for killing. This is true, and I can use any of them. But listen, gentles. There are many beautiful women in the world. Yes? Consider every charm, every allure. Consider the endless attractions: ankles, shoulders, the curve of a wrist, the top of a breast, the tilt of eyes, the corners of mouths. Consider also the subtlety that is the interplay – the conversation, the soul of a lady, so that some are dull and others sparkle like a fine jewel in any company.
So … every man has his taste, and perhaps every woman also. So many details that we cannot track them all or even remember what we like, and yet, at least with a sword, I have to no more than wrap my hand around a hilt and raise the blade from the floor and I know. Some blades demand to be swung up and over my head. Some hilts fit my hand as if they were some sort of inverse glove. And some do not. Perhaps they have warm conversations with other swordsmen, but not with me.
The perfect sword … it is a very intimate thing.
When I find one such, I think of it constantly. Listen, I remember once I saw a woman through the curtain of a shop; she was raising her dress over her head, trying something for a seamstress, perhaps, and all I saw was the line of her side, and that ell of her flesh stuck with me for two days, filled my waking thought, found its way into my head even while I prayed. And so it is with the right sword, so that the memory of the perfect weight across my palms will follow me out of a shop and into church.
Well, she was not to be had in Bologna.
But I did enjoy three days with Ser Niccolò and his knights, and I drank a great deal of wine with Nerio and was surprised to find how much he and Fiore disliked each other. I mislike it when my friends cannot make accord, and this was the most instant dislike between two friends I’d ever experienced. I suspect that Fiore resented Nerio’s familiarity – and his riches. And Nerio was not used to being thought to lack anything, but Fiore found him wanting as a man-at-arms. I have no idea why. Nerio looked quite dangerous to my eye, and I’d killed a great many more men than my Friulian friend.
To complete the complexity of my existence, Fra Peter and Father Pierre had decided that they would arrange for Juan to be knighted in Venice. But as he was from a great Catalan family, this involved a good deal more preparation than a cook’s boy from London got on a battlefield, and they wanted it kept secret, so I was handed a list of things to purchase and things to do and letters to write, all without letting Juan know. This, of course, had the unfortunate effect of letting Juan think I was ignoring him.
And finally, while I was writing letters, I mustered my courage and wrote to Emile. That is to say, I helped Sister Marie compose a circular letter from the legate to the bishops of the Duke of Burgundy about pilgrimage and crusade, and in it were dates for pilgrims who wanted to accompany the crusade to Jerusalem, assembly points at Venice and Genoa, and other points. When I copied the legate’s letter out – to Sister Marie’s surprise – I made sure that my name had been included among the list of routiers turned to soldiers of God, and she had included it.
It took me most of my last day in Bologna to copy that letter. Three hundred lines, and two small errors, and we covered them both. I had not entirely wasted my time with the monks in London, and no donat at Avignon escapes without some copy jobs, unless he is absolutely illiterate, which is increasingly frowned upon in the Order.
Sister Marie wore heavy Venetian spectacles to copy and they made her look like some avian monster, owl-eyed and beaked. But when she pulled them off she looked human, almost homey. ‘Sir William, I would never have marked you down as a writing man. My thanks, I would not have finished in time without your clerking.’
‘Sister Marie …’ I paused. My petty troubles with Fiore and Juan had suddenly made me more careful than was my wont with other men and friendship, but I am in general a blunt man, and I ploughed on, ‘I would not have taken you for a sword hand, but as you are, can we not be friends?’
She met my eye – I’ve said it before, but she never flinched from eye-meeting like a normal woman. I suppose girls are trained to it and nuns, perhaps, are trained out of it. At any rate, she raised an eyebrow. ‘I suppose we could be friends,’ she admitted.
Well, she was not the warmest of women. But she wasn’t my mother or my bed warmer; she was the legate’s Latinist. And witting or not, she had been my ally in writing to Emile.
All told, I suppose we were a week in Bologna, although it seemed a year, and when we rode east for Venice, crowds cheered us in the streets. Leaving Bologna, we were a small army; two dozen knights and donats of the Order, brilliant in scarlet, Lord Grey at our head with the papal banner; Ser Niccolò and his score of men-at-arms as brilliant as angels from heaven; another dozen volunteers from Bologna with their harnesses and their warhorses and carts full of belongings they were taking east. And with another twenty priests and nuns and clerks, as well as squires and pages and servants we had at least three hundred horses in our cavalcade.
Fra Peter had command of the whole, and I found myself commanding the donats. The older Knights of the Order were quite content that I do so: they stayed close to Father Pierre. There were almost a hundred Knights of the Order heading for Venice that autumn, but only half a dozen chose to ride with the legate. Or perhaps that was Father Pierre’s choice. A big column of knights ate up the countryside and devoured more bread and more grass.
I have not, up until now, described the intense faction that split Italy from the Italian point of view; I have to at least mention it to explain how I almost lost my life in the streets of Verona. The della Scalas were the lords there, and like every family of aristocrats in Italy, they belonged to one of the two competing factions – the Guelfs and the Ghibbelines. In brief, these two parties stand for allegiance to the Pope and allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. The quarrel is an old one and now has elements of the absurd, but the division remains lively.
Verona was a Ghibbeline city, and the della Scala, the local tyrants, were ancient supporters of the Pope. Since we served the Pope, you might have thought that we would make popular guests, but a rumour met us in Verona, to wit that the Emperor was coming to Italy with a large army to join the crusade. By some stretch of the popular imagination, that made us Guelfs – supporters of the Emperor. With papal banners at our head.
In truth, the London mob is every bit as fickle as the mob of Paris or Rome or Verona.
At any rate, we did not receive a hero’s welcome to Verona, and while we rode in through the white Roman Gate and trotted by the marvels of the amphitheatre, and the magnificence of Saint Anastasia, we were watched by a sullen crowd. Father Pierre dismounted in the courtyard of the Carmelite convent, and the Knights of the Order closed around him, wary of the people. The nuns watched from the upper cloisters like curious birds.
Fra Peter watched the crowd for as long as it took the clock to strike three, and then handed me an ivory tube with many of our travel documents. He shrugged. ‘This may be ugly. I need to be with the legate. Get to the castle and get our documents signed. Tell della Scala …’ He paused and looked at the ground. ‘Never mind. But if you can find out what this is about, I’d like to know.’
Well, we had by then a dozen donats, all fully armed and armoured. I turned to Miles Stapleton.
‘Will you play my squire?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Your servant, my lord,’ he said.
Nerio Acciaioli caught my bridle. ‘It could be murder out there,’ he said, pointing to the gate.
It was my turn to shrug. ‘I have orders,’ I said. ‘And Fra Peter is worried. He never worries.’
Ser Nerio let go my bridle and nodded. ‘Do me the kindness of waiting on my father.’
I dismounted and bowed to Ser Niccolò, who listened while his son whispered in his ear.
‘Do it,’ he said. He smiled at me. ‘You ne
ed a servant,’ he said.
It seemed the oddest thing, at the time.
There were no women in the streets of Verona, that’s the first thing I noted. The second was that there were a great many men of fighting age, all with swords. In Bologna, I hadn’t seen a sword displayed in a week. University students who wanted to fight went outside the town.
We were watched in a heavy silence as we rode, and I suspect the sheer number and quality of the men-at-arms kept us safe – a dozen of the Order’s men-at-arms and another dozen of the Accaioulos, with their green and gold banner and the Pope’s, too.
The castle was the most modern, elegant, and imposing fortification I had ever seen. It is all red brick and white marble, with palatial facades and workaday walls; a magnificent design that is equally suited to holding the city against an invader or holding an escape route against a local insurrection. The della Scala were, after all, tyrants. Not really ill-natured tyrants, although there had been trouble.
We entered by the main gate and entered a courtyard, and my spine tingled: the walls around the courtyard were full of crossbowmen, and they were watching us, their bows spanned.
Fiore whistled softly.
Stapleton played his part perfectly, riding forward with my helmet and lance and calling for the captain of the fortress.
The man who emerged from the main tower was in full harness and had a poleaxe in his hand. I couldn’t even hear him when he spoke, because his visor was down.
I didn’t have a helmet on, and I was afraid. There were enough crossbows around us to kill us all in a matter of seconds, and I had led my friends into this. And I had led the life – I could tell how close to the edge all these men were.
I turned. ‘Dismount!’ I called. ‘Everyone show your hands to be empty. Smile!’
Behind me, Nerio said, ‘Smile?’
I looked at him and made myself smile. ‘It’s harder to kill a man in cold blood when he’s smiling,’ I said. I got an armoured leg over the cantle of my saddle and slid to the ground, then walked toward the armoured man with the poleaxe.
The Long Sword Page 9