The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  When the marshal’s white wand dropped, I put spurs to Jacques, and he blew forward with his usual explosive grace. Before his third stride, though, I had my lance in its rest – so different from my first years with the weapon – and I let the head fall low.

  Lowering your lance head is bad practice. It is terrifying. A low blow, a blow to your opponent’s horse, forfeits not just the run but your own horse and armour. It is considered cheating. With my lance across my body, under my right arm and couched against my lance rest on the right of my breast plate, but pointing to the left side of my horse’s head and across the barrier, and now aimed down, almost at the ground, it looked as if I’d lost control of my lance. This happens sometimes in the joust.

  My opponent still had his lance tip high in the air. He didn’t couch until the last possible moment, just the way, let me add, that Boucicault used his lance.

  We had heartbeats to impact.

  His lance tip stooped towards my face and I did as Fiore had taught me and flipped my lance up, using my saddle bow as a fulcrum and my lance as a lever. It came up very fast, and our lances crossed, still in the air. But weight and the power of his lance on mine slapped them down again.

  He missed his lance rest. With all the pressure my lance was putting on his lance, torqueing it, he’d have had to be Lancelot himself to maintain control.

  My hit was unspectacular, just barely clipping his shield. But my lance-staff snapped cleanly with the impact, and he lost control of his lance three strides later and it fell to the earth.

  The foreigners with the hawks were laughing and slapping their long whips against their thighs. One waved to me.

  The judges all clustered at the centre of the lists.

  Fiore slapped my back. ‘That was nicely done,’ he said, rare praise indeed. Then, ‘We need to practice your seat and how it relates to your control of the lance, but otherwise – good.’ He looked at Nerio. ‘I wish some Frenchman would challenge me.’

  ‘Find the man’s wife and sleep with her!’ Nerio said with a sneer.

  ‘Why?’ Fiore asked, genuinely puzzled.

  Even Marc-Antonio laughed.

  ‘They are calling for you,’ Nerio said, and I rode down the lists to where my French adversary sat on his destrier. He had his helm off and looked as sweaty as I felt.

  I had forgotten he was a judge. But he was smiling, not grinning, and his eyes met mine.

  So, just by way of experiment, I returned his smile.

  We were an arm’s length apart.

  ‘Is your honour served?’ he asked me.

  Well. That was the question, wasn’t it?

  I bowed, like one gentleman meeting another when mounted. ‘Very well, monsieur. My honour is served very well.’

  He urged his horse forward one single step. ‘Sometimes, a gentleman is only doing what his liege bids him do. Eh bien?’ He gave me a casual wave, and turned his horse, and rode away, neither angry nor afraid.

  The judges held that I had been the victor, but on balance, I think he gave me the lesson.

  Later that day, Fiore ran some courses, unhorsing men to the right and left until the judges forbade the use of his spear-crossing parry. Then he unhorsed more men.

  He was spectacular to watch, and yet, at the same time, dull. He made one Polish knight very angry by unhorsing him on the first pass, and the man raged, claimed that Fiore had cheated, and looked like a fool.

  Nerio, without my knowing, challenged one of the Savoyards to fight on horse and foot. I hate to think who was foolish enough to loan the Savoyard a horse. But Nerio took it.

  The Savoyards had been loud in denouncing us to no avail, and after Nerio knocked their champion in the dirt on three straight passes and the man declined to fight on foot, no one would listen to them.

  King Peter announced that we would leave for Venice after matins on the Friday, two days hence.

  The two days passed in a haze of audiences, music, poetry, sweat and fighting. A few moments surface in memory. I remember giving Marc-Antonio my riding sword, and belting it on him, and Nerio and Fiore pounding him on the shoulders with their fists. Nerio bought him a pretty pair of iron spurs, and Fiore began to give him lessons. As of that moment, he was a squire. For a few days, he carried himself like a great lord and was very difficult, and then he had a fight – I never found out with whom. His mouth was cut, one of his eyes was black, and he became a much milder man.

  I paid him his wages so that he could shop in the magnificent market, and he bought, of all things, a book. And a dagger. He was an odd boy, but he’d won my love in the matter of Emile’s favour and a hundred other ways, and I was ready to tolerate him.

  The other two encounters were just as pleasant. The first was meeting the Tartar lord who had laughed at me after the joust. He spoke no French and only a little Latin, but he had a Franciscan with him, booted and spurred, and the Franciscan translated.

  The Tartar’s name was Jean-Christ, or something like that. He was a commander of a thousand in the great army known to the Poles as the Golden ones or the Golden Horde. He had come as an ambassador to the court of the Emperor.

  We were packing to leave: King Peter was travelling with only six knights, their squires, a dozen priests and servants, and my friends, and leaving the rest of his ‘court’ to follow after. At the time I didn’t understand that the King of Cyprus was not the richest man in the world; that he did not desire to command the crusade as much as de Mézzières and the Pope wanted him to command it; that, indeed, the command was a massive imposition on the king. Nor did I understand that he travelled Europe with only a handful of his own knights; that most of his ‘courtiers’ were relations – French relations – of Cypriote lords, there only to make weight, so to speak. To give his entourage the appearance of riches.

  I was an old hand at making war, but this was an entirely new game. The game of kings and princes and cardinals and popes.

  At any rate, the Tartar duke rode up with a dozen of his soldiers and his Franciscan.

  ‘My son, the Duke Jean-Christ wishes to address you,’ the priest said. ‘I am Father Simon, his confessor.’

  I bowed, dismounted – after all, the foreigner was a Christian and a duke – and bowed. Father Simon blessed me.

  ‘He asks, why do you dismount like a churl? And I tell him that you respect his rank.’

  Father Simon spoke and the language was like the twittering of birds. Father Simon himself looked like a bird, a plain brown robin. He was as English as I am, and that made him easy to talk with. He had brown hair and deep creases in his face.

  The duke threw back his head and laughed. He spoke straight at me, and his eyes twinkled like a jugglers.

  ‘He says that if this is true, you are the first man north of the Volga to behave in such a way. But he says “be easy”.’ Father Simon smiled. ‘For my part, I thank you. He is a great man, and has had but little respect here.’

  I smiled at the foreign duke.

  He spoke at length, and Father Simon followed as best he could. ‘He says you are good at the lance. And this trick you do – pardon me, Sir Knight, but I really don’t know quite what he’s saying – this trick is not like any other Latin trick. But that all the People do it. By which he means his people, the Mongols and Tartars and the Kipchaks.’ Father Simon shrugged ruefully. ‘He said a great deal more than that, but I fear I don’t understand the fighting words.’

  ‘Fiore!’ I called. Ser Fiore, as he now liked to be addressed, was packing his threadbare harness in wicker panniers for mules to carry. He came out into the yard, popped his eyes at the Tartar lord, and I repeated Father Simon’s comments.

  Before the next set of hours rang on all of Krakow’s hundred bells, the two were riding up and down the street, demonstrating. Fiore picked twigs off the street with his lance point, and the Tartar Duke loosed his bow three tim
es into a shield, striking with each arrow, and then flipping his lance off his back, striking a straw dummy with the point, rolling the thing over his head like a mountebank and placing it under his left arm and striking again against a target on the other side.

  While he executed this deadly trick, Philippe de Mézzières appeared with two more mules and the king’s compliments and two servants to help us pack. He watched the Tartar for a few breathes and then frowned.

  ‘That is how the Mamluks fight,’ he said.

  ‘This man is a Christian and a lord,’ I said with a polite bow. De Mézzières had fought at my side, but he’d been careful not to bespeak me. ‘Yon Franciscan is his confessor and his chaplain.’

  De Mézzières brightened. ‘Come, that is glad news,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine the world we might make, if every man and woman might be brought to Jesus Christ?

  I had never given it much thought. I belonged to a crusading Order that was content to provide the protection of pilgrims to and from the Holy Places. I think that like practical warriors, the Knights of St John had surrendered any notion of the conquest of the Holy Land.

  But I managed a smile.

  De Mézzières met my eye. ‘We must travel together,’ he said suddenly. ‘You have behaved well here, and to my liege lord, who holds you high.’ His eyes bored into mine.

  I think he rocked me back in the saddle as hard as my French opponent had done.

  ‘I am at your lordship’s service,’ I said. ‘On horse and foot.’

  ‘I would like nothing better,’ he said. ‘But my lord has forbidden me to fight you. So I will withhold my hand.’

  I’m an Englishman. Hating Frenchmen comes easily to me, but de Mézzières seemed both cautious and capable. And not a man I’d want as an enemy.

  He clearly wanted a piece of me. I flushed, assuming he hated my low birth. As I remembered, his first dislike had arisen when I said I’d been knighted on the battlefield.

  Of course it never occurred to me to just ask why he hated me.

  At any rate, my usual reaction – anger – rose to choke me. ‘I care nothing whether you withhold your hand or not,’ I spat with all my usual restraint.

  ‘That is the difference between us,’ he said calmly, and rode away.

  The other encounter was very different. I met the merchant who had brought the king’s prize, the falcon. I was in the market shopping for something to send my sister, and perhaps something for Emile, since I might hope to see her soon. The king’s new bird had stopped eating, and it was such a magnificent animal that we were all in a state trying to preserve it, and I said that as I was going to the great market, I would find the merchant and ask for his aid.

  He was not a big man, but as broad as he was tall, formed as if from oak, fair-skinned and fair-headed and with one of the greatest beards it has ever been my pleasure to see. I could see, also, that he was a rich man, and a mariner. He wore clothes of blue and black, with furs even in a Polish August, and a magnificent hood, and carried an astrolabe around his neck. That’s how they knew him throughout the fair: as Master Astrolabe. He was from the Kingdom of Denmark, which was as exotic in those days as saying the Kingdom of Heaven, and he had a scar across his face where it appeared that a finger’s breadth of skin had been peeled away. I have seen some horrible things and I had a guess that he had been tortured. And lived. And for all that, his face was jolly, and his demeanour open and bluff.

  I explained my troubles to one of his red-haired apprentices – we tend to hang together, we copper heads – and the apprentice led me to the great man. ‘He’s the only one who understands them,’ the boy said.

  Master Astrolabe, Carl Markmanson, as he was called by Danes, grinned and tried to break my hand. ‘Ah, the English knight. Are the ladies through with you, zur? Have you fathered a hundred bastards yet?’ He laughed.

  I told him the king’s problems, and he came immediately to the inn, and saw the bird, and fed it and talked to it. He spent a few minutes closeted with the king, and then I walked him back to the fair.

  ‘Always best it is to council the great in private,’ he said with his wide smile. ‘Great men resent being taught, and yet no one needs teaching more, eh? Remember that when you are a great man, Englishman.’

  I laughed.

  But he fed me stew and wine by his wagons, and he and his journeymen told me about sailing to Iceland for birds. And how they had seen the Faroes, how they had come on Ireland from every direction under God’s sun, and how they had seen great monsters and whales on the sea, and fought with Skraelings.

  I may have looked doubtful. They told more tall tales in an hour than a roomful of Venetians in a day, and that’s saying something.

  But Master Carl put his finger to his forehead. ‘I was taken,’ he said. ‘We had a fight on a beach, and my armour saved me, but the Skraelings took me.’ He shrugged. ‘They peeled an inch off my forehead, and a man in paint stood over me with a stone axe, and he raised it.’

  I leaned forward. It was so real.

  ‘And I was so afraid I began to sing. All I could think of was the Kyrie, you know?’

  We all sang the Kyrie together.

  ‘And the painted devil smiled. He smiled, and tossed the axe in the air.’ Master Carl shrugged. ‘So perhaps I was in the Kingdom of Prester John, and they were all Christian men. The next day they fed me and took me to another beach and left me.’

  ‘Gospel truth,’ said the tall journeyman. ‘I plucked him off that beach in fear of my life and mortal soul, but we never saw a one of them again.’ He looked shamefaced. ‘We were off course – we thought we’d make a profit by taking a few as slaves.’

  Master Carl shrugged. ‘I’d wager they’d make terrible slaves,’ he said.

  I spoke more with them; they were all shipmen as well as traders, and they had adventures that would fill a good-sized book.

  All I gathered from their stories was that the world was very broad indeed, and more full of adventure than a hundred tales of King Arthur.

  We rode back west via Prague. Prague was, and probably still is, one of the most beautiful places in the west, with magnificent palaces and churches. Even the burghers’ houses are as fine as those of Venice. But we stayed only one night, and then we were away west.

  At Nuremberg, King Peter sent me to Avignon with his dispatches. I was loathe to leave him by then. Despite his mercurial moods, he was a natural leader and a fine lord, generous with praise and with money, even when he had very little himself.

  I’ll add that we cleared the road of bandits for the next several years, or so I’ve been told. King Peter would ask at every inn, and twice we left the road to hunt the robbers as if they were stags. One cold afternoon in the Tyrol, we caught a band that proved to be more like human scarecrows than like the demons of Satan we’d been led to expect. We surprised them, despite the late hour in the day, scattered them off their smoking fires and began to kill them.

  There were only about a dozen of them. We were as many knights and then as many again –all the squires were mounted and armed by then. They had no chance, and a boy of perhaps twelve years old threw down his notched falchion and knelt at my feet.

  I cut off his head.

  I can still see it today. He was trying to surrender, and I had just fought another, older man, his father, perhaps. I saw his posture of surrender, but I didn’t change my mind. My new sword severed his head as easily as a lady cuts pork at dinner with her eating knife.

  He fell forward over his own lap. His head made an odd sound as it struck the sword he’d dropped. And it didn’t roll anywhere.

  I saw his eyes move.

  I pray for his soul, even to this day. I had not meant to kill him. It was a wrong act, a murder, the sort of thing I used to do, when I was a routier.

  When I was, in fact, like his father and his brothers. A brigand, if a be
tter armed one. They didn’t even try to rob us. They simply died.

  I’m sorry if I cannot make a better story of that empris. It was, and is a lesson I have had to face many times. The line between knight and brigand is the width of the edge of the sword.

  I left the king at Nuremberg. I took only Marc-Antonio, who was, after two months in the saddle, a decent blade and a good companion. He could cook a little, although I did most of it; he could make a camp and tend to horses; and if he tended to speak a little too loudly to his social superiors? Why, so did I. He couldn’t sew to save his soul, and I did all the sharpening, but he was already a tolerable squire, and he was interested in learning more … most of the time. But I noted that almost anything could distract him: a pretty face, an interesting song, a new poem, a handsome horse. I would ride along, piously enjoining him to something that seemed important to me that day – by our sweet Saviour, what a hypocrite I have been, and no doubt will be again – and I would look back and see on him that look that meant he was a thousand miles away. He was also a glutton. He ate constantly, and while I was following the Queen of Love’s instructions and refraining from lechery, he made up for my chastity with a noisy relish that I came to resent. He was so soft-faced and angelic that girls trusted him – that’s the only explanation I can offer.

  We lay the night in Pont Saint Esprit, a day’s ride from Avignon. The place reminded me of worse times, and it seemed odd to have the man at the gate salute me and bow to my surcoat. I dreamed badly: of the taking of the town and the rape of Janet. And the Bourc.

  Dreams have purposes. Ah, Boethius – you have read him too, eh? That dream was a warning and, thanks be to God, I took it as one.

  I entered Avignon as alertly as I had entered Krakow, and to better reason. Marc-Antonio watched my back, and I rode to the Hospital. The gate warden embraced me as if I was a prodigal son, and Fra Juan di Heredia embraced me and took all my messages. I had all King Peter’s letters, as well as a dozen parchment scrolls from Polish and Imperial prelates, even one, the last added to my satchel, from the Archbishop of Nuremberg.