With his arm around the legate’s shoulders, the Doge escorted Father Pierre out of the loggia and up the great stairs. We were taken to a side chamber and entertained by a pair of lute players and a tenor who sang beautifully. It was in many ways the most elegant reception we’d had in Italy, and it was further reinforced with wine and cakes. Ser Nerio smiled over his glass – in Venice everything was glass.
‘Welcome to the New Rome,’ he said. ‘They lie and they drive hard bargains, but they are far easier to deal with than Neapolitans or Genoese. Don’t quote me.’
After an hour, a pair of Venetian knights came and courteously escorted us to our lodgings in the Count of Savoy’s palace. I shared with the donats; eight of us in a single room, but the room was huge, on the piano nobile and elegant and full of light from windows of glass. We all had feather beds and trunks in which to stow our clothes, and we had another room in which to place our tack and our armour. The only difficulty was our horses; Venice has fewer than fifty open fields in the whole of the city, thanks to the population on the islands and the incredibly dense building. So our horses were, as I mentioned, to be kept on the Lido, and that meant that we had to rotate a watch to look after them. I found a pair of wax tablets and began on a watch bill, then carried my work to Fra Ricardo Caracciolo, who was sitting on his own feather bed, writing a letter while Sister Marie copied another.
I remember that I started to explain to Fra Ricardo , and he shrugged.
‘Take yourself off the watch bill, Sir William,’ he said. ‘You are going to Prague.’
While we fought off assassinations and engaged in political discussions across Italy, the newly appointed commander of our crusade, the famous King of Cyprus, had not yet arrived in Venice, despite having set off from Rheims in France two full weeks ahead of the time we set out from Avignon. By the time we arrived in Venice, there were five thousand men waiting to go on crusade, eating Venetian food and drinking their precious fresh water, so that the Venetians moved many of them to the mainland at Mestre or above Treviso. They were nearly mutinous, being unemployed and unpaid. Unscrupulous or over-eager papal recruiters had promised them pay – money that the papacy didn’t have, or at least had no intention of paying out. In the north, the ‘army’ of routiers that Arnaud de Cervole had raised for the crusade and led into the Swiss passes murdered peasants, ran riot and in the end, killed the archpriest himself. It’s not my story, except to say that I have since come to believe that Arnaud de Cervole was intending to join us – and the Green Count and his minions stopped him. I mention this to say that we did not win every round, or even know what was happening out there in the lands north of the Alps.
All this news greeted us at Venice, and much more beside. If Father Pierre already knew of the state of near war that existed between the Genoese on one side and the King of Cyprus on the other, he knew more than his household, but we all learned more than we wanted in a few hours in Venice. Some Genoese sailors had been killed in a brawl, and Genoa was using the brawl as a pretext to demand that the Cypriotes cede new rights of justice and commerce to Genoa. And of course, Venice wanted no such thing.
A lesser man would have despaired. I was that lesser man, and I returned to the donats and did what I should not – I conveyed to them my sense of defeat. I cursed and complained and predicted the collapse of the crusade.
An excellent piece of leadership, let us agree. But it seemed that whatever Father Pierre did, the hand of man or fate was against him.
I was railing against the injustice of it when Juan’s face changed and Liberi became very quiet. I turned, hand still raised to make another point, and there was Father Pierre.
He smiled, as he almost always did. ‘My son,’ he said.
I stood abashed.
‘The crusade may or may not happen at the will of God, and not because we are so very mighty, nor so very clever.’ His eyes had a glint of self-mockery. ‘Despite which, we shall do all in our poor power to help the cause. Will you take my messages to the King of Cyprus, William?’
I remember how much I didn’t want to go. Emile was coming, and I wanted to be with her – and with Father Pierre – although, like any young man, I didn’t consider what it might be like to divide my time between the two of them. And I was aware that she had said that d’Herblay was coming.
But Father Pierre was more than just my commander. So I knelt and put my hands between his. ‘Whenever you command,’ I said.
His smile didn’t waiver. ‘That’s my William,’ he said to the room. ‘I need you to leave now – today.’
Christ on the cross!
I suppose he’d been ready, because he’d made four of us bring our horses all the way to the city, when the guides had begged us to leave them. I had a hasty conference with Fra Peter about Juan’s coming knighting, about the command of the donats, about my failings as a leader and, oh yes, the threat of our being intercepted.
‘I have a fear heavy on me, William, that Bishop Robert and his faction will stop at nothing to end the crusade. Or rather, to subvert it to their own will.’ He looked at me. ‘Nothing.’
I nodded. Any faction that employed the Bourc Camus was blacker than pine pitch in my eyes, and I needed no warning, or so I thought.
In the end, I got Fiore and my new servant, Marc-Antonio, and Ser Nerio and his squire, Davide. I was handed a purse full of money and I got to repack the harness I’d just laboriously moved into a storeroom and placed on an armour rack, while I tried to teach Marc-Antonio the most basic elements of armour care.
An old man approached me as I handed my bags and leather trunk down into the boat that was to carry us to the mainland. He came down the water steps of the loggia and Fra Peter waved to tell me he was one of our own.
The old man bowed. ‘Sir Knight,’ he said, ‘are you William Gold of England?’
Despite feeling especially surly – hard done by, unwashed and unshaved in the face of elegance and civilization – despite all that, I returned his bow and tried to comport myself as a gentleman of the order.
‘I have that honour, my lord,’ I said with a flourish.
‘Ah, messire, I am no lord, but merely Francesco Petrarca,’ he said with immense dignity.
Even I knew who Petrarch was: the greatest man of letters in Italy or the world, discoverer of Cicero’s letters, poet, diplomat – hah, Master Chaucer, I see your surprise. By God, I know a few scribblers beside you! It is not all war and horses, messires!’
‘A name that is a title in itself,’ I answered.
The old man lit up like a church at Easter. None of us are immune to flattery, are we? And the older we are, the nicer it is when some young pup offers us some, eh? At any rate, the great man gave me a packet of letters to carry, for the Doge and on his own account. Those letters were bound to half the cities of Europe, but there was a packet for the Emperor and another packet for the King of Cyprus, and yet another for his chancellor, Philippe de Mézièrres, of whom more anon.
Darkness found me on the shore north of Mestre, with the magnificent city behind me. I’d been in Venice for almost six hours.
I hadn’t even had time to look for a sword.
Fra Peter had laid out my route for me. I had every passport that a knight could need, and the first thing I did on reaching Padua – again – was to purchase three excellent horses. Then we rode the way Fra Peter had crossed France two years before: fast and light, with no baggage but our armour and weapons and a fat letter of credit. We climbed into the Swiss passes and blessed the weather, but at the top of the great pass, where a monastery’s lights burn like the hope of heaven a thousand feet above the road, it was cold even at high summer.
We descended into the Grand Duchy of Burgundy, an amalgam of appanages and inherited towns owned by the King of France’s brothers and uncles, a feudal empire that was partly French and partly Imperial and that shared territory and feudato
ries with Lorraine and with Savoy. But we continued north and east, following Fra Peter’s instructions. We were careful, believe me. I used our Venetian passports and had reason to thank God for them. Papal passports had many foes.
It appeared that the King of Cyprus was his own man, and not the Pope’s tool. And he had decided to enlist the Emperor in his scheme for a great crusade in the east. The Emperor and the Pope were not actually at war, but neither were they friends – the Emperor tended to side with the English, or anyone else who could weaken mighty France.
Fiore knew the roads of Germany, having spent time there learning from the German masters and having followed their tradition of fighting on errantry, travelling from town to town challenging strangers. Ser Nerio knew how to get good accommodations in any town, usually by showing a letter of credit and a Florentine ambassadorial letter. I truly think that we escaped harm because we had so many different letters of passage that no spy could pin down our ‘side’. Nor were we much given to chatter.
In southern Germany, they took us for knights on errantry, and by God, gentles, we lived the part. We were challenged from time to time. Fiore was disposed to fight, but I had a mission and a fine sense of my own rank; well, arrogance is the specialty of the young, I think. I would flourish my various commissions and ride on.
But a day’s ride east of Nuremberg, we passed through a small village and saw a party of knights whose colours we knew from the day before. They were obviously French; German heraldry is very different from French, and even the colours they use in a blazon are different.
I didn’t know any of them, nor did I question how they’d got ahead of us on the road. But they barred the square, and tallest man – I called him the knight of the ship for the device on his shield – raised his arms and cried a challenge.
I sent him Marc-Antonio with my papal commission; I was chary of using it, but I did not intend to be delayed. I dismounted in the yard of the town’s wine shop to have a bite with my bridle over my arm. Fra Peter had been correct – again. The Emperor had indeed moved his court east to Prague.
I was considering all this when the Ship Knight struck my squire to the ground with his spear.
I was not fully armed. In fact, I had on a habergeon and a good brigandine of many plates, my ‘riding armour’. I had no leg harness and nothing on my arms, and wore only a light sword. Fiore was wearing even less – just a haubergeon. Germany is far too civilised a place to require a man to ride abroad in harness, and ours was packed in straw baskets on the panniers of our spare horses.
‘Don’t send me a peasant. Come and fight like a man,’ Ship Knight shouted.
He meant business.
I drank off the wine in my cup – sheer bravado – and vaulted into my saddle. Fiore was two ells away, negotiating for a sausage, but he was alert and he knew we were attacked. With the ease of long practice, he reached on to the pack horse, extracted a spear, and threw it to me overhand.
The Ship Knight had his lance couched against me, set in his lance rest. He wore good armour on all his limbs and a heavy breastplate under a full helm. His heavy warhorse was half again the size of my riding horse.
Behind him, his friends lowered their visors.
Very chivalrous.
I rode at the Ship Knight, and as he put spurs to his horse, I shifted my weight as du Guesclin had taught me, and my horse sidestepped, the mounted equivalent of stepping fora di strada in a foot combat. His big horse leaped forward and I stood in my stirrups and threw my spear. It wasn’t a full-length lance, but instead one of the six-foot spears we used to fight on foot, with a long, sharp head.
He could not ward his horse, and the spear went in by the horse’s neck and the big horse stumbled and blew blood from its nostrils. I had my arming sword out; Ship Knight hadn’t grasped what was happening and had no momentum, no forward speed, and my sword slipped unerringly along his lance shaft and flipped it aside. This, too, was the product of a spring of intense drill. Close in, my left hand closed on the haft of his lance, dragging it across his body and putting torque on his waist, and I dragged him from the saddle by his own lance. As his back struck the cobbled street, the lance finally came away from his lance rest and bounced once on the stones, and then I swung it by the haft, spun it in the air with a flourish – and turned my horse to face the other three.
Fiore trotted up by my side. ‘Helmet?’ he asked, and handed me my bassinet.
He covered me while I dropped it on my head.
‘Caitiff! Coward! You killed his horse!’ shouted another man, who I remember as the Knight of Coins.
Nerio reined in on my other side. ‘I couldn’t let Liberi have all the fun,’ he said.
Liberi frowned. ‘I don’t need you to defeat these riff-raff,’ he said.
‘Could you two save the fight for the enemy?’ I muttered.
We charged them.
I can seldom remember a fight that I enjoyed so much. We were better; simply, better men. Better trained. I think the best moment of the fight was that I hit my opponent squarely on his shield, having deceived his lance, and I rocked him flat across his crupper, so that his feet came up in his stirrups, and Liberi caught one going by and threw him to the street as if he’d planned this little manoeuvre all his life.
Truly, the only thing better than being a good knight is being one of a team of good knights. To have comrades …
Nerio, who was a fine jouster, put his man down, horse and all. Then his horse kicked the downed man. Their superior horses and armour were of no importance, and in seconds they were all lying in the dung-streaked stones of the square while Fiore collected their horses.
I rode straight to their squires and pages, who scattered. I shamelessly ripped through their pack horses, and I tipped a leather bag full of wallets into the muck, looking for letters, but I found nothing.
Nerio curled a lip in distaste. ‘Is this your mercenary’s chivalry?’ he asked.
‘I want to know if they are hired men,’ I said. ‘They are French knights and they attacked my squire. I suspect they are not what they appear.’
‘Oho!’ exclaimed Nerio, or words to that effect. ‘This is more like Florence than I had expected.’
Then I checked on Marc-Antonio. He was deeply unconscious, and already had an egg on his head big enough for a duck. I got him over his horse, and Fiore had all the knight’s destriers.
‘Right of arms,’ I called at the squires of my adversaries.
Nerio was for staying, perhaps to see if any of the downed knights was dead or needed a doctor.
‘Let’s move, before someone appears with a crossbow,’ I said.
Two days later I wished that I’d ignored Nerio’s aristocratic ways and scooped the purses out of the muck. Three destriers cost the earth and the moon to feed, and they were eating our travel money. However, they were beautiful horses, far better than those Fiore or I would usually have owned or ridden. We’d left our warhorses back in Venice – a perfectly sensible decision, given the cost of maintaining a warhorse on the road. Unless you have to fight, the warhorse is a useless mouth that consumes money.
We continued to speculate on who our late adversaries might have been, and then rode hard for Prague, crossing some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen – as rich as northern Italy. It was August, and the crops were coming; peasants stood in their fields, sickles in hand, to watch us pass their grain fields, which stretched away like a golden promise of heaven in the red light of the setting sun. Beautiful young women, the better for a sheen of sweat, wiped their faces and curtsied even as their fathers and mothers closed in on them protectively; indeed, some lay down and hid at the edge of the road so that we wouldn’t see them, but we were old soldiers and we knew where to look.
What we couldn’t fail to see was the lack of war. There were no burned towns and no crowds of starving beggars. Twice we passed road
side gibbets with men rotting in chains, but we never saw the tell-tales of regular banditry – sly informers, churned earth and heavy horse droppings on the roads like those left by a military column, columns of smoke on the horizon. Fire is the hoof print of brigandage.
Marc-Antonio took two days to recover, and then he was sick on horseback for two more and had real trouble speaking, so that I despaired of his wits. But by the sixth day from Nuremberg, he had again begun his litany of complaints in passable French, and devastating Italian. His riding improved drastically, and it appeared to us that the blow to his head had made him a better rider – a joke that didn’t appeal to him for some reason.
At the very edge of Bohemia we were robbed in an inn, and all our purses taken. That was when Marc-Antonio’s talents began to be seen; he had our travel purse under his pillow, and thanks to his preserving it, we weren’t wrecked. Nerio was mortified to have no money of his own, and tried in every village to cash a bill on the family bank, but in Bohemia, at least in the forest, no one had ever heard of the Acciaioli and their bank, or indeed even of Florence.
But par dieu, my friends, the women of Bohemia are beautiful, tall and honey haired and deep-breasted. Nor are the men any the less handsome, and the knights we saw there were big men, skilled in arms.
We arrived in Prague in late afternoon, and as the next day was the Sabbath, we went to church in the magnificent cathedrals. We knew within an hour of entering the city that the Emperor was not there, and my heart sank within me. But our letters from Father Pierre and the Pope gained me admittance at the castle, and the chamberlain, as I think he was, told me that the Emperor and the King of Cyprus had gone east to visit the King of Poland and the King of Hungary and to hold a great tournament at Krakow, in Poland and we would find him there.
As we travelled east in Bohemia the weather grew cooler and the harvest was more advanced, but the women were not any the less beautiful and the grain was like a shower of gold on the land, the very manna God promised the Israelites. The land grew flatter and flatter until we were riding across the steppes that I had heard described by Fra Peter and by other knights who had fought against the Prussians: Jean de Grailly and the Lord of the Pyrenees, Gaston de Foix. It is one thing to hear traveller’s tales, even from a courteous knight, of how flat the land of the east can be, but it is another thing to see it for yourself.
The Long Sword Page 12