The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  I shook my head. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not by heart.’

  He nodded. A lay brother passed him, and a sergeant, too old for service, smiled at me and beckoned me to come faster. The chapel was half empty.

  ‘If I told you all I knew, you would scourge me with whips of fire,’ di Heredia said.

  After chapel, I grabbed Marc-Antonio by the hand and led him to my cell.

  ‘Pack!’ I ordered.

  He wept a little and swore he had not betrayed me.

  I hardened my heart – not that hard, for me – and gave orders. Then I went down to the scriptorium and took a scrap of parchment (the strips from the edge that are of no use to God or man) and I wrote Fra Juan di Heredia a letter.

  I told him that I had to go. That I would rejoin Father Pierre in Venice, and that I had a duty outside the Order that I had to fulfil.

  By the time I returned to my cell, my malle was packed, my harness was in baskets, and my white-faced squire had buckled on his dagger.

  The ‘bandits’ had taken his sword.

  ‘I’ll solve that for you later,’ I said. ‘Wear your mail.’

  Di Heredia was waiting for me in the stable. He was armed. I have occasionally got the better of him, but not often.

  ‘You are not making this easy for me,’ he said.

  I shrugged and saddled my riding horse.

  ‘I would rather you were where I could see you for a couple of days. The guilty flee where no man pursueth.’ His hand was on his sword hilt.

  I understood then, as never before, that this was all very, very serious. That di Heredia didn’t trust me.

  ‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I have put someone’s life in danger. I have no choice.’ I shrugged.

  ‘Who?’ di Heredia asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Tell me,’ he ordered. ‘Guillaume! I do not care whose knees you push apart. This is war. And a nasty kind of war.’

  My face went hot, but I got my girth done up.

  ‘Guillaume!’ di Heredia said, and he was coming around my horse.

  ‘She’s called Madame d’Herblay!’ Marc-Antonio said. ‘I’m sorry, Sir William!’

  We three – four, with my horse – stood like a painting of saints for a long time. Di Heredia had his sword drawn.

  That’s how it was.

  Finally, he sheathed it. ‘I voted for you to enter the Order. I saved your little whore. If you betray Father Pierre and our Order, I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do.’

  This did not sound like an empty threat from the Spaniard.

  I went down on one knee in the straw. ‘I swear on the Emperor’s sword and on the wounds of Christ that I will not betray Father Pierre. Or you.’

  Fra Juan raised me and gave me a squeeze. ‘Go with God, then. I will not ask who this Madame d’Herblay is. But I will ask you to carry the order’s letters to the legate. And a letter of passage.’

  When I looked sullen, he slapped my arm. ‘You may do all the errantry you like, my young ingrate, but I suspect you’ll find a letter of passage helpful.’ He looked at me. ‘You know the Count d’Herblay’s wife?’

  I was angry and afraid. My face was as red as my hair. ‘I do,’ I admitted.

  ‘God save us all,’ di Heredia said.

  Marc-Antonio and I rode out through the most vicious of autumn weather, and if I say we were not faster than the wind, it is only because it blew as if all the devils in hell wished to slow us.

  In truth, I didn’t know where I was going. My love owned vast estates in Burgundy and I knew from making war there that Burgundy extended over half a continent. Further, I knew her husband had ridden in the van of the army of Savoy at Brignais, and Emile had described herself as a Savoyard.

  The obvious place to start was Turin, and I went there. I knew the road, and I knew the inns.

  The first night on the road, we were in the steep hills east of Avignon and we stopped in a tiny town, Saint-Marie d’en-Haut, or some such. Marc-Antonio was so scared he didn’t even want to go to Mass, but the church supposedly had the relics of Mary Magdalene and we went to see them, armed as if for war, and we heard the sermon and took communion too, rare enough even then and probably the only reason I remember it,

  After Mass I hired a linkboy on the church steps and we were still on the steps when I saw a man’s head appear around the corner of the convent that fronted the tiny square. He put me on high alert: he was watching for someone, and I assumed it was me.

  We made our way back through streets so narrow they were more like goat tracks, so sloped that you could lose a shoe going uphill and the streets were already dark. Twice at turnings, I glimpsed men moving parallel on other streets.

  I tapped Marc-Antonio and gave him the Order’s ‘danger’ sign.

  He flushed and drew his dagger. The linkboy turned to see why we were stopped – and the sword bit deeply into his neck, and blood sprayed. He dropped his torch and screamed.

  They were coming from both ends of the alley.

  The closest man was one long pace behind me and coming fast. I raised my scabbarded sword, blocking the first downward blow of a club, and stabbed overhand, putting the gilded iron point of my beautiful red scabbard into the first man’s face. In fact, I got his eye more by luck than skill, and killed him instantly. I pulled the scabbard off the sword with my left hand and threw it in the second man’s face as he tripped over his dead comrade, turned on my hips without changing the placement of my feet, which can be chancy as hell in the dark, and thrust over Marc-Antonio’s shoulder one-handed. I hit his adversary, pivoted back and ripped the sword out of my second kill and powered it forward in a strong overhand cut at the man who had tangled with my scabbard.

  It’s very, very hard to face a longsword in the dark. I had no compunction about killing these men – the odds were too long. They could only come at me from two directions, and I had the reach. And the training. I don’t remember having a thought in my head, either: I killed, turned and killed, pivoted back and cut. My cut landed on a dagger and my blow blew through the man’s guard and into his head.

  It stuck. By a glint of light from a house’s horn window, I saw that this victim was still alive with my sword two inches deep in his scalp even as I rotated my weight and kicked him off my sword so that a piece of his head came off his skull.

  The other men to my front were now hanging back.

  I could feel Marc-Antonio, still up and breathing, against my back. I flicked a glance back. He was holding his own.

  Audacity is everything, in the dark. I abandoned Marc-Antonio and charged the men in the traboule – a tunnel through a house – behind me.

  Two of them failed to turn and run, and they stayed there in their blood. The place stank like an abattoir, the copper smell of blood and the ordure smell of guts and I probably didn’t even notice it until I had to go back to get Marc-Antonio and my precious scabbard.

  He was shaking, I was not. I dragged him through the tunnel of dead men and we ran across the cobbles, lost in the streets of a very small town.

  We went two streets over, or three – I was in a state of near-panic, which can happen to any man after a fight is over and Marc-Antonio was following me – and I ran full on into a man in mail.

  ‘Where is he?’ he asked in Gascon French.

  I must have teetered stupidly, trying to work it out. Marc-Antonio got there first and put his dagger in the bastard. Then we huddled under the eaves of a low house and listened.

  The town was full of men. There were shouts behind us.

  In the dark, audacity is everything.

  I got up on the roof of the house – it was not much higher than my head. From there, I saw the church spire and the tall, narrow roof of the auberge in which we were staying.

  The alleys were very narrow, the roofs were low, and mos
tly finished in slate, with some thatch. Most houses had stone chimneys. ‘Get up here,’ I hissed at Marc-Antonio, and extended him a hand.

  None too soon. A dozen brigands – or perhaps men-at-arms – came tearing down our alley. They turned at the base and ran off towards the church. We went over the roofs toward the inn.

  I won’t belabour it. I’m not good at being up high, and neither was Marc-Antonio, but we made it, roof to roof, stepping across the alleys and jumping the wider streets on to thatch. I suppose it was less harrowing than it feels now, but the streets were packed with mercenaries, and they were there to kill me. The roofs were safer, but they didn’t feel that way.

  We reached the roof across from the stable of the inn. There were no men at the inn yard, and I dropped into the street and caught Marc-Antonio down and we slipped into the stables and began saddling our animals.

  ‘Baggage!’ I hissed.

  Leaving my armour behind would be tantamount to ruin. I left Marc-Antonio and crept out into the yard, moving from shadow to shadow. The auberge was really just a private house with a large kitchen and extra rooms, and I gained the kitchen unseen, slipped up the servant’s stair to the main door, and threw the beam across. Then I went up the main steps to the top floor and pushed into the room in which we’d left our belongings.

  God was truly with me, because the man my enemies had left to watch the room was asleep. I hesitated a moment, and then made his sleep last forever, and may God have mercy on him. I remember that he stank, and that I moved his head to keep his blood off my luggage.

  I got my harness and our leather trunk, and ran down the steps just as there was a pounding at the door of the inn. In the street, a Gascon was shouting that the devil was loose.

  I got our bags into the yard even as Marc-Antonio brought out our horses. I mounted my warhorse, and my fears were calmed. Mounted on Jacques, I was worth ten brigands. I got my bassinet and my gauntlets on as Marc-Antonio tied the baskets on our mule.

  ‘All I want you to do is mind the mule,’ I said.

  Marc-Antonio nodded.

  ‘You are doing very well,’ I said, or some similar platitude, but really, he was doing well. His hands still functioned, he was alive, he’d put a man or two down, and we were on the last stretch of our escape.

  ‘They’re right outside the gate,’ he whispered. His tone gave away his fear.

  ‘Open it,’ I said.

  He slid back the bar on the stable gate, and there was a torch-lit crowd outside – at first glance, they appeared to be a hundred men.

  One man said, ‘Is that him?’

  And then I was on them.

  Jacques exploded into them and I might have killed them all, but one man knew how to fight a knight. Someone cut my girth and down I went.

  That, my friends, ought to have been the end of this story. I fell heavily, and my helmet protected me from being knocked senseless, but I had no armour and I should have been meat.

  Marc-Antonio and the mule had followed me out into the night and by luck and skill and the will of God, Marc-Antonio slammed his riding horse into the routier who’d put me down, staggering the man. I was already scrambling in the dark for my sword.

  I was damned if I was going to lose the Emperor’s sword.

  I took a blow to the helmet that sharpened my perception of the threat. Jacques was still fighting – that’s what a trained horse does. He bought me a moment and then another moment, and I still couldn’t find my sword, and then I was fighting in the dark. My opponent had a dagger, and another man had a sword, and I had a helmet and gauntlets, which proved by far the best armament.

  I found my sword with my booted foot, and cut myself badly. There’s ancient satire there, something Petrarch might have appreciated. I thought it worth the blood to find the sword, and when Jacques rallied to my side I knelt and got a hand on the hilt.

  I clutched it.

  The night was full of shouts, and there were men running in all directions, and Marc-Antonio was shouting my name like a war cry. Jacques came up right beside me and I was up on his bare back in the time it takes to say ‘pater noster’ and we were away, our hooves echoing off the stone buildings.

  For some reason I thought it was the Bourc Camus and his men, so I was shocked when I saw a man-at-arms by the gate in blue and white blazon. But he was badly mounted and his horse wouldn’t face Jacques, and I put my pommel between his arms and broke his teeth. I had his sword arm by the left wrist, and I stripped his sword in the moment of shock, and I still had it in my left hand when we burst out on to the steep mountain road below the town. We rode hard for the time it takes to hear Mass, but if anyone pursued us, it was on foot, and not for very long. We could see every foot of road in the clear moonlight, and I changed to my riding horse after checking Jacques for wounds. The loss of my war saddle was a sore blow to my finances, but we’d escaped.

  I handed the sword I’d taken to Marc-Antonio. He giggled nervously and pushed it through his belt.

  And so we passed into the night.

  We rode for three days without sleeping. We stank, and we didn’t care. We stole a pair of riding horses from two monks in fur habits and riding boots, wandering mendicants who claimed a vow of poverty, and probably as much brigands as I can be myself. With spare horses, we could move all the time.

  In the foothills of the Alps, Marc-Antonio reined in. ‘Lord, I have to halt,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’

  I shook my head. Fatigue and fear play strange tricks on a man, and the evils I had imagined and dismissed in Avignon now loomed as certainties in the light of day. I could no longer see Emile as a capable woman at no risk. I saw her now as the ultimate target of my enemies. D’Herblay was going to kill her – horribly. I could feel it, and dreaded that it had already happened.

  ‘If you dismount, I’ll leave you,’ I snapped.

  ‘Fuck you,’ my erstwhile squire said, but it was more of a moan of protest than a curse. Marc-Antonio made me smile, and that’s a good thing when you have fear all the way to the marrow of your bones.

  ‘No one ever died of lack of sleep, lad,’ I said. ‘Change horses.’

  Twenty leagues short of Turin, a day’s ride past the abandoned chapel where I’d slept twice, there is a Benedictine house high in a mountain pass. We were allowed into the guest house after I showed my pass on the order and let in with a swirl of snow at the very close of day when there was only enough light in the sky for owls. We were wet through, so tired we must have seemed like drunkards, so cold that my hands and feet hurt like torture as they warmed.

  Marc-Antonio was asleep as soon as he sat to take off my boots. I put a damp wool cloak over him and undressed and a monk brought me water.

  I shocked the monk by stripping naked in front of him, and shocked him more by bathing with a sword by my hand. He brought me good wine, good bread, and a bowl of something with rabbit in it that was superb. Or perhaps hunger and fatigue rendered it superb. I ate that bowl and another and drank the wine and fell asleep in the bath, and the monk awoke me silently – he had some vow or other – and got me on to a pallet in a cell.

  That’s all I remember, except that I kept my sword by me.

  Emile had a town house in Geneva. I learned as much from the monastery’s abbot, and as soon as he said it, I realised that I was a fool, for I’d heard her speak of it as the place she spent the autumn and winter and lay in with her babies. More comfortable than her damp castles, she had said with her laugh that hid pain and pleasure equally. Few knights go to battle as well armoured as my Emile is in her laughter.

  But the passes were closing with snow …

  I left Marc-Antonio with money and all my letters except those for local men, and I left my riding horse and took Jacques. I rode for Geneva.

  I was three days too late.

  That said, remember that it was Emile’s courage – well, an
d her beautiful body – that first attracted me, and her good sense that held me. I was three day’s too late to stop her abduction: luckily, she never needed me to save her.

  I arrived at the door of her town house in as pretty a town as ever you need see, on the shores of the most beautiful lake in the world. The door had been hacked about.

  The steward himself was in half-harness, and he only showed his face through a grill at first. I suppose that shaving might have helped me, but I looked like a routier after three days on the road, except for my scarlet surcoat. That got the gate open. Her steward still didn’t like the look of me, and behind him in the entry way, I could see a brown blood-splash on the whitewashed stone.

  ‘You say you are a knight of the order—’ he said.

  ‘Emile!’ I roared. Or perhaps I squeaked it. I don’t know. I got past the man in half-armour, roaring her name.

  I might have expected that her husband was there or had let the attackers into the house.

  I made it as far as the solar above the entryway, and I saw her.

  She was wearing a breast and back, and had a sword in her hand. And the ice-cold feel of a sword pricked the back of my neck, too.

  Some princesses rescue themselves.

  It is very unsatisfying when two people in armour embrace. There is no warmth to it.

  We managed.

  I put my lips on hers and she turned her head away so that I kissed the nape of her neck clumsily. I stepped back.

  ‘Emile!’ I said. I’m still not sure what I felt: hope, fear, delight, despair? Why was she not kissing me? But she was alive.

  ‘We were attacked,’ she said, indicating the sword she’d dropped to embrace me. ‘Oh, William. You came.’

  ‘I’m late,’ I admitted.

  She shrugged. ‘My esteemed husband gave himself away, and we were prepared. This is my house, the servants are mine.’ She smiled gently over my shoulder. ‘He’s not an assassin, Amadeus. He is my loyal servante, Sir William Gold.’

  I turned and saw the steward. He was as mad as an angry bull, and his sword was drawn. I had, of course, knocked him down. He was sputtering.