The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  De Mézzières looked at me and blinked like a man facing bright light. ‘Legate? The Cardinal de Perigord is surely the legate,’ he asked.

  ‘My lord, the cardinal is dead, and the Pope has appointed Father Pierre as the Patriarch of Constantinople – and the legate of the crusade.’

  French was the lingua franca of the Cypriote court. Every head turned.

  I bowed again, keeping Father Pierre’s humility before me. ‘I have a packet of letters for you from Venice,’ I said. I handed him a heavy set of envelopes. ‘This one is from Messire Petrarca, as well.’

  De Mézzières paused. He was about to speak, but the king waved at me.

  ‘Ah! The courier of last night, now dressed in the latest Italian fashions to make us all feel dowdy.’ But despite his words, the king smiled, and his smile was warm. ‘Come here, sir, by me. And ten thousand apologies for my surliness of last evening.’

  I bowed. ‘It is nothing, your Grace. I have letters from the papal legate—’

  ‘Who, it proves, is none other than our well-beloved friend and father in Christ, Pierre Thomas! I have ears, sir, and I can hear when you speak.’ He held out a hand. ‘We are impatient to read the words of our fathers, Holy and spiritual.’

  I placed his letters directly in his hand.

  ‘Were you charged with any particular message?’ he asked carelessly.

  I bowed my head. ‘I was asked to tell you to come as quickly as you might, to Venice, where your army awaits.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he answered. ‘Tell my legate that I will come when it suits me. Tush!’ he said, grabbing my arm. ‘Say nothing of the sort. That is only my surliness speaking. Are you by any chance a jouster?’

  It was like talking to Ser Niccolò, except that if you were quick-witted you could follow the jumps Ser Niccolò made – his conversation was all connected, and often strung together with bits of scripture and quotes from the ancients. King Peter simply moved from one topic to the next without a shred of warning.

  It was like fighting.

  ‘Your Grace, I can run a course,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Do you have other men in your train?’ he asked. ‘That is, who can handle a lance and not make fools of themselves or me? Can drink a cup of wine and not cause an incident at a dinner?’ His voice rose as he spoke, and silver and white – I assumed that he was the Sieur de Tenoury since I’d heard him so addressed – cringed.

  ‘Your Grace—’ de Mézzières said, and his tone urged caution.

  ‘I will not be gainsaid in this, de Mézzières.’ The king spoke with great vehemence. ‘We are challenged and we will fight.’

  No one in the hall was looking at me, or the king. All of them were attempting to slide under the oak floor. I had been a squire when the Prince of Wales was angry – I had even been the target. I knew exactly how they felt.

  I was still kneeling in front of the king, and my eyes were cast down. ‘Your Grace, I have two men by me who can run a course.’

  ‘You have horses? Arms?’ the king asked eagerly.

  I wondered what I was getting Fiore and Nerio into. Perhaps I should have considered carefully, or been cautious. Or remembered the humiliations of the evening before.

  Perhaps, but I am not made that way. ‘Your Grace, we have horses and arms, and we are completely at your service.’ Some devil made me raise my voice. ‘The more so as you are the Pope’s appointed commander, therefore I am your knight.’

  Then the king turned the full sun of his smile on me. ‘By Saint Maurice and the Holy Passion, monsieur, that was well said.’ He nodded. ‘I ask you, Sir Knight, to rally your friends and join us here; display your arms at my window, and serve with me this day.’

  Yes, I fought in the Grand Tournament of Krakow.

  Now, if you gentlemen have been listening carefully, you know that I had never actually participated in a tournament. I had certainly practised for them, and several times in my career I had the honour of fighting in deeds of arms, but I was – and am – a soldier, and tournaments are for the richest and most powerful lords.

  I do not need to explain this to you, gentles – but Aemilie has never served in arms, have you, my sweet? So let me tell you how it is. To participate in a great tournament, you must first of all be invited. In the romances, of course, knights on errantry simply arrive at the tournament field, lance in hand, already armed – but that is pure fantasy. In this world, tournaments are very expensive affairs, with thousands of ducats spent on building the stands, on decorating an entire town, on the costumes of the knights, and on actors, jongleurs, bards, and food – and that’s before a single course is run.

  To participate, a man needs the bluest of blood and friends in the highest places and most tournaments are held by a team, who share the expense, usually led by a prince or a very great nobleman. To be invited to serve on the prince’s team was a very, very great honour, and if you have been listening, you’ll recall that I was going to fight on my own prince’s team at Calais back in the year sixty, at the time of the great truce. But in the end, I was thrown off.

  Tournaments are both socially and physically dangerous. Reputations are won and lost in a tourney. Chivalry is, indeed, tested. In fact, I think it is worth saying that, short of battle, the tournament, a great tournament, with kings and queens and great ladies watching, is the greatest test of a knight’s virtues that there is. The whole empris is difficult, dangerous, expensive, and public. Bad conduct is instantly seen. Thousands of people, high born and low, are watching everything: the arming, the horses, the quality of harness, the techniques employed – everything.

  The church has a very ambiguous view of the tournament, too. Most priests see the tournament as a sink of iniquity, where lechery, pride, and gluttony triumph and where the virtues of chivalry are seen to overwhelm the Christian pieties. Yet many churchmen come from noble families. And many churchmen see the tournament as a relatively harmless way to harness the men-at-arms without war. In some countries, men who fight in tournaments are considered to be outside the church for the duration of the deed and men who die in a tournament are considered unshriven. In some places, they cannot be buried in hallowed ground.

  But, ma petit, there are jousts, and there are tourneys, and then there are deeds of arms, foot combats, encommensailles and bohorts. I could weary you with the language of arms, and truly, it differs from country to country. But in brief – a joust is two men with lances, tilting at one another. And in a greater deed of arms, the encommensailles may be jousts or even foot combats; they proceed the tourney, sometimes as many as three or four days of them.

  But the tourney, the true tournament, is a different thing. It is a battle of equals, a team of horsemen on either side. I have been told that in King Arthur’s time, men fought with lances in the tourney, but we are smaller, weaker men, and we fight with swords on horseback, and it is illegal to use the point. Indeed, in many tourneys the participants much use a special sword with a blunted point. In such a game, each team has a goal post – a heavy post, usually with a flag atop it. And the desire of every knight is to unhorse his opponent, take his horse, and lead it to the post. Once the horse is at the post, it is the property of the knight who took it.

  You can make a fortune in minutes, taking warhorses from the great lords. And you can make a mortal enemy who will hate you all your life.

  Well. I nearly burst with excitement, and I raced to our inn where I found Marc-Antonio eating in the kitchen.

  ‘Where are they?’ I demanded.

  He took his time chewing.

  I was fit to burst.

  ‘Bathhouse,’ he managed.

  I ran in all my finery to the bathhouse.

  The fat man laughed when I came in. ‘Not got enough, eh?’ he asked in his slow, accurate Latin.

  ‘I need my two friends,’ I said.

  ‘Two?’ he asked, and s
lapped his great thighs so that they wobbled like jellies. ‘We’re that busy this morning, my lord, I’m not sure I can spare you two.’ He roared at his own wit.

  I moved past him into the baths – you must see this, me, dripping self-importance, wearing a fortune in scarlet and black, pushing into the damp heat of a brothel-bathhouse.

  ‘Fiore!’ I called out. The bathhouse had twenty tubs and each was partitioned from the others by screens of birch bark or parchment.

  Various Polish comments were shouted by male voices. Someone suggested how I might use my virility in a particularly offensive way – in French.

  Fiore’s voice carried perfectly. ‘I am here, William,’ he called.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, unmindful of my friend’s somewhat literal cast.

  ‘I am in the very act of copulation,’ he replied.

  Only Fiore would explain that he was in the very act. I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t elaborate on the mechanics of the thing. The sound of laughter and some very exact comments, more like coaching than anything else, favoured us from the other partitions.

  ‘The King of Jerusalem has invited us to fight on his team. In the tournament!’ I shouted.

  A girl squawked, and cursed. I don’t know what she said, but it wasn’t nice.

  ‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Fiore said in Italian. I was at his screen, holding his towel.

  ‘Where’s Nerio?’ I asked, while Fiore blushed and his girl cursed him. I had my purse on my belt – a nasty piece of poor leatherwork, my temporary replacement for the purse that had been lifted in Bohemia. I tossed her two silver pennies, and she was mollified.

  ‘We are to serve?’ Nerio asked, a trifle rhythmically. ‘In the tournament? Against the Emperor?’

  ‘Yes!’ I said through his screen.

  ‘Splendid,’ Nerio said. ‘I – shall – be – with – you – dir-ec-tly.’

  I got the two of them back to the inn; collected our harness and our warhorses, our shields and our somewhat bedraggled papal banner, and transported them to the king’s inn. By this time the morning was well advanced, and the king was none too pleased with us for the time we’d taken; he and eight of his knights were fully armed save only their helmets and gauntlets, and they were sitting on stools out in front of the inn, on the loggia.

  But every squire present leaped to arm us. It was chaos for a few minutes, as the armour was laid out on the floor of the loggia and my harness and Fiore’s were hopelessly intermixed. But Marc-Antonio had been paying attention as we travelled, and Nerio’s squire Davide marshalled his master’s harness, and then the steel fairly flew on to our bodies while the Sieur de Mézzières, resplendent in good Milanese and wearing a fine brigandine in dark blue leather, stood by us and explained.

  ‘The king is an expert jouster, and he has borne away every prize these last four weeks – in Low Germany, in Prague, and now here. The Emperor has tired of seeing his best knights get tumbled, and has challenged the king to tourney – to a mêlée.’

  And you don’t like it, I thought. De Mézzières seemed cautious and old – but he was thorough, and he had a famous name as a crusader, having been knighted at the taking of Smyrna. He’d been a friend of de Charny and he’d held Caen against us in the year fifty-nine too. He was no parchment saint: he knew the business of war.

  He looked at the three of us. At that moment, we had our leg harnesses on, and I was lacing up my mail haubergeon. Fiore was ahead of me, already getting an arm laced up.

  ‘You are all knights?’ he asked.

  ‘I was dubbed on the battlefield,’ I said.

  De Mézzières paused. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sir, I mean no insult, but nothing – nothing – can be allowed to humiliate the king my master. Can this knighting be slighted or challenged?’

  Well, that turncoat Baumgarten was good for something, after all. ‘I was knighted at Florence in front of a thousand men-at-arms by the Count von Baumgarten – a knight of the Emperor, I believe.’

  De Mézzières started. ‘You are Sir William Gold?’ he asked. ‘I thought I knew the name.’ He looked away and set his jaw.

  I knew something was wrong. Battlefield knightings are for poor men and third sons and mercenaries.

  ‘And the others?’ he asked, his tone icy.

  I tried to control my temper, because being on this tournament team was a gift from God. ‘Ser Nerio is the son of Ser Niccolò Acciaioulo of Florence; also a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire,’ I said.

  De Mézzières nodded, but was not looking at me.

  ‘Master Fiore is a donat of the Order of St John, a volunteer. His father is a knight of Cividale, but he has not yet been knighted.’ I raised my voice. ‘Have I offended, monsieur?’

  De Mézzières took a deep breath.

  But whatever he might have said, the king interrupted him. ‘The thin lad’s a squire? What is your name, sir?’

  Fiore knelt, as the king was addressing him directly. ‘Fiore Furlano de Cividale d’Austria,’ he said.

  The king exhaled. ‘Only knights may play in this great game, Messire Fiore.’ He looked at de Mézzières.

  De Mézzières raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I must have twelve, or forfeit,’ the king said. ‘And I will not forfeit, if I have to arm a serving maid!’

  Fiore raised his hands together in a position of prayer – or homage. ‘Try me, your Grace. I am a very good jouster.’

  The king nodded. ‘The mêlée is not a joust. It is a vicious game played on horseback.’

  Fiore kept his head bowed. ‘Your Grace, however it is played, I will be quite good at it.’

  The king looked at me. He was smiling: an open smile, not a politic one, and his face seemed to glow like the sun. ‘Well, Messire Fiore, seeing as you are so very sure of yourself …’

  Mézzières frowned. ‘You are determined to do this,’ he said.

  The king nodded. ‘Am I the king, de Mézzières?’ he asked.

  ‘Your Grace knows that he is indeed king.’ De Mézzières still didn’t look my way.

  ‘Your sword, then.’ The king took de Mézzières’ sword – and knighted Fiore on the spot.

  Lucky bastard.

  By the time we reached the field that had been staked off for the tournament, there must have been ten thousand people in the crowd. The sun was high, and the king’s squires were agitated because the judges had already cried for the juges diseurs, the judges, to come forward.

  We were late. And the Emperor, according to Nerio, was trying to disqualify us.

  The Empress sat on a great throne in the central stand, a tiered confection like a Venetian cake made of canvas and wood, more like a great galleys of war than a tent. She sat thirty feet above the crowd, with all her ladies about her like the lilies of the field, and there was many a pretty face there. Beside the Empress sat the King of Poland in robes of gold and ermine. He looked like a church icon come to life.

  And seeing them made me realise that I had left Emile’s favour back at our inn, folded in my clothes.

  I was fully armed, and the judges were circulating among us, asking after men’s lineage and the dates of their knighting. The crowd was cheering like the roars of a victorious army – the roll of the Emperor’s team was being called, and one by one, the most famous Knights of the Empire were riding on to the field.

  ‘Marc-Antonio!’ I called.

  He came with an ill grace. He had worked hard all morning and had scarce thanks, and if you don’t think servants like thanks, perhaps you should spend more time serving, eh?

  ‘Marc-Antonio, I have left something very important to me at our inn.’ I leaned over, even as one of the judges approached.

  ‘I’ll get one of the foreign gents to loan it to you, whatever it is,’ he said.

  ‘I would take it as a courtesy if you would ride back to our inn
, open my clothes press, and fetch me the small square of blue silk—’

  ‘Now?’ he asked and rolled his eyes.

  I thought of a snappish reply but bit my lip. ‘Marc-Antonio,’ I said, ‘I ask you to fetch me my lady’s favour.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘The tatty blue thing?’ he asked. Then he raised his hands in mock fear. ‘And you want me to help you?’ he asked with all the sarcasm of which a fifteen-year old Italian is capable.

  The judge was watching me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said carefully. ‘I humbly request it.’

  ‘Hunh,’ Marc-Antonio said.

  But he turned his horse and began to push through the press – not, I’ll note, with any particular vigour.

  The judge spoke good French. ‘You are one of the king’s late additions?’ he asked. His tone was offensive and his manner so superior that he should have been a doorman in Avignon – or a cardinal. ‘Sir William Gold of England?’

  I bowed. ‘I am Sir William Gold,’ I said.

  ‘And who knighted you, Sir William?’ he asked.

  ‘Hannekin Baumgarten,’ I said. ‘A knight of your Emperor.’

  That staggered him. But he was determined, and that gave his game away.

  ‘Not my Emperor, sir, I serve the King of Poland. Can you prove this – this field knighting? Anyone might make such a claim.’ He was being a prick, anyone could see it. If a king puts a man on his tournament team, no one questions his birth or his standing. Or so it is in England and France, but the Germans have a ceremony and a rule for everything.

  ‘Sir, I am also a volunteer of the Order of St John, with my pass at my inn,’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘The Order of St John? Of no moment here.’

  I struggled with anger; hot, sick anger that seemed to come out of my throat. He meant to offend. He meant to disqualify me.

  He had two men-at-arms with him, and they looked sombre.

  He meant to disqualify me.

  That would be a whole pile of humiliations.

  Very chivalrous.