When I spoke of leaving the king, Father Pierre winced and steepled his hands.
When I spoke of Bishop Robert, Father Pierre put his face in his hands for a moment and then exchanged a long look with Fra Peter.
Fra Peter was playing with his beard and staring out the elegant window at the lagoon.
‘And this lady you escorted south – the Pope ordered this?’ Father Pierre asked.
‘No, my lord,’ I said.
‘Fra Juan di Heredia? He ordered you?’ my legate asked. His eyes met mine.
Listen. Father Pierre was not of this world – he was then a living saint. But while he was above many worldly considerations, he was at the same time deeply knowledgeable of the world. Fiore liked to brag that in the whole of his youth he’d never got away with one trick on his mother – I suspect that Father Pierre would have made a frightening parent.
I knew that his look was neither angry nor amused. It was the look he kept for the condition of man. Which gave him pain.
‘No, my lord,’ I said. ‘She is a friend. I had occasion to render her a service during the Jacquerie. And I had heard she intended to make the pilgrimage.’
‘So you rode two days out of your way to greet her,’ Father Pierre said.
Friends, I was a small boy with a nasty piece of work as an uncle – I can lie with the best of them. And as Emile and I had committed no sin – well, not outwardly – I had the feeling of somewhat hypocritical indignation that sinners get when accused of a sin they have not committed.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I said.
Our eyes locked.
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘She is a very rich woman, and very powerful,’ he said. ‘And she brings six good knights.’
‘Which is good, because we’re bleeding men at arms like a beheaded traitor gushes blood,’ Fra Peter put in.
Father Pierre winced again. ‘My son—’
‘If the King of Cyprus doesn’t get here soon, we’ll have no army, and it will all be for nothing,’ Fra Peter said. I’d seldom seen him angry, but the last four months had aged him. And tired him.
‘Surely the legate can hold the men at arms?’ I asked carefully.
Father Pierre raised both eyebrows. ‘I might,’ he admitted. ‘But our Holy Father the Pope has ordered me to suspend use of church revenues until the whereabouts of the king have been determined. So I have no money.’
No commander and no money. Most of the men gathered around Venice and living in peasant’s houses, squalid, windswept camps and expensive lodgings were mercenaries. Men like me. Our purses are not bottomless and many had come to make a profit – well, to be fair, to make a profit and to save their souls.
‘Tell him about the Genoese!’ Fra Peter said.
Father Pierre smiled at me. ‘I don’t want to overburden his spirit,’ he said.
Fra Peter laughed. ‘I do. He runs about fighting in tournaments and winning beautiful swords and I get paperwork in Venice?’ He glared at me, a mocking glare. ‘Genoa has all but declared war on Cyprus.’
Since Genoa, Cyprus, Venice and Constantinople – the Eastern empire – were the supports of the crusade, war between Genoa and Cyprus would kill the Passagium Generale as thoroughly as a poleaxe blow to the head of an unarmoured man. ‘Why? What for?’ I could vaguely remember discussions about this – hadn’t someone been killed on the docks in Cyprus?
Father Pierre looked away, almost as if he was disassociating himself from Fra Peter’s answer.
‘The charges against Cyprus are trumped-up forgeries. It is all tinsel and make-believe – but Genoa has a fleet in home waters for the crusade, and they are threatening to use it against Cyprus.’ Fra Peter sat back, his nose showing white spots. He was angry.
I leaned forward. ‘Are they in league with the paynim?’ I asked.
Father Pierre laughed. ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost also – Genoa trades with the Hagarenes. So does Venice, as the Doge never tires of telling me, even when I tell him of the traffic in Christian slaves, of the Greek boys and the Venetian gentlemen sold to the cruellest of masters … My sons, Cyprus herself trades with the infidel.’ He shook his head, not in sorrow but in rueful appreciation of the world. ‘We are as God made us, and the world must be as it is,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this is a false doctrine, but for the moment I am content with it. Venice, Genoa and Cyprus are all engaged in trade with the Saracens, despite which I am charged with this crusade and I will see it through. I need to travel to Genoa and force them to peace, but I cannot go until the king comes here, to reassure the soldiers.’
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Fra Peter said.
We all prayed together, and Fra Peter walked me out to the guardroom.
‘Do we have beds?’ I asked.
‘I doubt that there’s a bed in this city,’ Fra Peter said.
Marc-Antonio found us both rooms in a decaying Byzantine structure near the new fish market. On the ground floor was a scriptorium where illuminated manuscripts were produced, and just walking through it was a dazzling experience for every sense with its gold leaf and size and resin and ink and lapis and turpentine and parchment. It was one of the smells of my youth: the monastery in London had a scriptorium, although neither this lavish nor this commercial, and I felt at home. The second storey rooms were in the hands of a prosperous grocer and his family: five daughters, a wife, and the wife’s mother – a sort of commercial nunnery. They owned the building and the one next to it, where the grocery was on the ground floor.
Donna Bemba demanded twenty gold ducats for a month’s rent, paid in advance. I’d like you to note that this represented about five years’ wages for a peasant in England with his own farm; the cost of a good helmet made by a good armourer and half the cost of a decent warhorse over on the mainland. This, for two small rooms which were damp and whose windows sagged on their sashes.
‘Just pay,’ Marc-Antonio advised me. ‘My father knows them a little. It is a fair price.’
‘A fair price!’ I all but shouted. I was down to the last of my money. Remember, I was not paid. The word ‘donat’ implies donation – a man donating his time and his body to the order. I had made a fortune in Lombardy and Tuscany, and now I was spending it on a failed crusade.
Had spent it. When I paid for the fodder for my horses and gave another month in advance and covered my debt to the tailor who had made up my clothes for the trip to Poland, my purse was empty.
Venice is a dreadful city in which to be poor. Food is expensive, trinkets are magnificent – and expensive – and everyone knows the value of everything to the last farthing. I needed a new helmet if I was to fight Saracens or really anyone except small children, and when I had a rower take me to the streets where the armourers plied their trade – that is, where both armourers and merchants dealing in Milanese or Pavian armour resided – I saw a dozen helmets I liked and two I adored, but the prices were now beyond me.
My favourite armourer was a Bohemian, a tall, handsome man with a fashionable forked beard who had earned his citizenship fighting for Venice in Dalmatia. I liked his work and I liked him, and we drank a cup of wine together while he tried to sell me a full harness in the new style, breast and back together, matching arms and legs. He had a helmet after which I lusted like a young man following a young woman, a cervelliere, or skull cap, in the new hard steel with a fine, light aventail lined in silk, and a separate helm, beautifully rounded and sloped so that it was all glancing surfaces, with a moveable visor. The best feature of the helm was that it slid on to the skull cap on little rails and locked into place.
My Bohemian, Jiri, nodded when I had it on. ‘Not my work,’ he admitted. ‘But a good fit and it would keep anyone alive in a mêlée, eh?
He also had gauntlets that were lighter and stronger than anything I’d ever worn. Of course, they cost three months’ r
ent on my third-storey hovel.
‘Pawn the sword,’ Marc-Antonio suggested.
I didn’t.
I had been two days in Venice, and I had landed Juan to share my palace above the grocers, when Father Pierre sent me to Terra Firma to review the men-at-arms at Mestra and north around the lagoon. He sent Fra Peter north the same day despite the cold weather to see if the king was coming over the passes.
I visited Sir Walter Leslie and his brother, who were festering in Mestre and growing impatient. They had two thousand men, many of whom I knew, and I received a good deal of heckling while riding through the cold and muddy camp.
I have seen a troupe of prostitutes turn on one of their number who has married, screaming at her about the men she’s had and the services she provided, as if these things should bar her from marriage. So too with some of my former comrades.
I noticed, though, that none of my lances was with Sir Walter. I saw this with mixed emotions; I would have liked to see friends, and have swords at my back that were closer than family. Yet, it meant they were still together and with Sir John, and I rather fancied that, too.
I visited the English and the Gascons, too, Among the Gascons I met was Florimont, Sire de Lesparre. He had served the King of Cyprus before, but he’d also served the King of England. He had a famous name as a fighter, and an infamous one as a knight. I had been ordered to visit him in the legate’s name and a squire pointed him out to me.
He was sitting under an awning in front of a great pavilion, playing chess with one of the King of Cyprus’s nobles, when I rode up. I had a very small tail; just Marc-Antonio and Juan, both in the scarlet surcoats of the Order. Marc-Antonio was a penniless bastard and Juan was the scion of a brilliantly old and wealthy Catalan family, but luck, and some of my money, had given Marc-Antonio a fine horse and saddle and a good sword, and Juan had donated some ‘old’ clothes to the cause so that we did no shame to our order.
At any rate, Lesparre glanced up from his chess game and made a little moue with his mouth. ‘By the Virgin’s Holy cunt,’ he swore. ‘Some nuns have come to visit us.’
I have lived in military camps since I was fifteen and I had never heard a man refer in such a way to the Virgin, not even the Bourc. Juan’s face flushed.
Marc-Antonio giggled.
Lesparre saw my stare. ‘Eh, little nun? Does my bad language disturb you?’ he roared. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make me shut up?’
I slid from my saddle. When you most desire to make a good entrance, that is, of course, when your spurs get stuck in the mud under your heels. It never fails.
‘Perhaps she has never worn spurs before, the pretty thing,’ Lesparre said.
His companion laughed.
But I had spent years at this sort of thing and then been with the order for more. So when I’d sorted out my spurs, I said a little prayer to Saint George, put out my inner fire, and squelched my way to the awning and bowed.
‘We are to be favoured with some—’ Lesparre began.
I nodded and cut him off. ‘If you want to fight, all you have to do is ask,’ I said. It was, to be fair, Richard Musard’s line – he’d trot it out when he was taxed for his colour. I always admired it.
Lesparre’s mouth shut.
‘In the meantime, the legate is solicitous for your comfort, and sends his greetings and blessing,’ I went on. ‘You are, I assume, Monsieur Florimont de Lesparre?’ I took a small twist of parchment with the legate’s seal from my purse.
‘Did you just challenge me?’ he asked, and when he stood, he was a head taller than I.
‘No, my lord,’ I answered. ‘I am forbidden to challenge while I wear this coat, but if you insist, I will be delighted to oblige you.’
He nodded. And as he drew, he stepped out into the drizzle from under the awning.
Marc-Antonio reached out my sword hilt – he was carrying my sword over the crook of his arm. I took it and drew, cut the air once, and rolled the sword over the back of my hand.
‘You have beautiful eyes, sweet,’ he said, and a dozen other fanfaronades to distract me.
When he struck, he meant business. He flicked his sword up from a low guard, back over his shoulder, and cut at my head.
Have I mentioned how much I hate facing big men? I’m as large as a man needs to be, par dieu! I caught his sword over my head on mine, near the hilts, and let it slide off like rain off a steep roof, but I felt his strength in my wrists.
I counter cut a mezzano, a middle cut, at his cheek, and he parried. He was fast, as fast as me, and strong like a wild animal, and he’d been well trained somewhere – he made his covers with the kind of precision that announces the trained man in or out of armour.
He tried to wind on my head cut, and after the rapid exchange we switched places and he flicked a tip cut at me to cover his retreat. I stopped his blade but failed to catch it with my left hand and got my fingers cut for my pains – not badly, but enough pain to distract me if I let it.
He raised his sword up over his head. It’s German posture, although I’ve seen Englishmen do it, too. He strode forward, I stepped off his line, fora di strada, and I cut at his cut.
Our blades met with the oddest sound, and the resistance told me that I’d misjudged and his cut was a feint, the whole of his power slipping away from mine, and then I hit him. It’s hard to describe, but my blade encountered some resistance but not enough, and my point slapped down on his right shoulder, cutting through his gambeson into his shoulder.
His blade had snapped. I’d never seen anything like it – it must have had a flaw near the hilt, because at our second crossing, with both of us powering our blades together, his had simply failed, and I was one push on my pommel from killing or maiming him. Even as it was, my point was two fingers deep in his shoulder.
He looked at his sword blade and said, ‘Fuck me.’
I raised my sword and touched my knee to the ground in salute.
He was bleeding quite a bit by then, and a pair of squires sat him down. But he had no trouble meeting my eye. ‘We must do that again, when this heals. A broken blade doesn’t decide a fight.’
I shrugged. ‘I remain at your service,’ I said. ‘Do you have any messages for the legate?’
Perhaps not my finest hour, but I felt I behaved with restraint.
I was only on the mainland a week, but I missed the arrival of the king and his magnificent entry. I might as well have been there, as Maestro Altichiero da Verona put me in the painting – it hangs in the Doge’s Palace yet, I believe. But that’s another story.
The King of Cyprus received an entire wing of the Doge’s working palace. All of his nobles – those too poor to follow him around Europe, or too old or young to serve on his tournament team and embassy, now rallied to him from the towns around Venice and had their offices confirmed and set up for him a sort of government in exile to handle his business and the business of the Passagium Generale before we sailed. His appearance engendered respect; he looked rich, young, debonair and very competent. The Venetians liked him, and he loved Father Pierre, and suddenly, once again, the crusade seemed real.
I was delighted to have Nerio and Fiore back. With Miles Stapleton and Juan and our servants, we made a small company of ourselves. They all took sections of my little roost above the scriptorium, despite the fact that by then we knew that our grocers quarrelled every night, screaming like fishmongers about unpaid rents, bad debts, and infidelity. The process of reconciliation could also be loud, and the daughters were generally able to keep up with their parents, and the ringing battle cry of the youngest: ‘I hate you! You want to ruin my life!’ was so insistent and so frequent that we took to calling it along with her in our newly learned Veneziano, and on one famous occasion, when her mother called her a whore for wearing her hair down with a fillet to Mass, Marc-Antonio roared it out before the maiden thought to say it her
self. We all dissolved into laughter, even Miles Stapleton, who was the strictest stick to ever be thrust into mud.
It is odd how company can change a man. Among John Hawkwood’s men, I was the mildest, the most chivalrous; the only man-at-arms in the company given to reading Aquinas or Malmonides or even Aristotle. But with Ser Nerio, Juan, Fiore, and Miles, I was the most adventurous, with the possible exception of Nerio, and the most raucous, and it made me see myself in a different way.
Venice is a city with a thousand adventures but a great deal of law. Perhaps too much law for my liking. Men are forbidden to bear arms in public, but there are a dozen exceptions to that law – the Arsenali, the guilds of ship’s carpenters, shipwrights and caulkers in the arsenal where they build the great galleys for war, are allowed to wear swords, rather like London apprentices and for much the same reason; they are the militia. And the noblemen of the city are allowed to bear arms in public.
We, as members of the order, were perhaps not allowed to wear our swords. Or perhaps we were, but I did, and Ser Nerio, who had taken the donat’s coat, did as well. Because we did, the rest did. Perhaps we swaggered a bit too much, but we were in a rich city, packed to the rafters with vicious cut-throats, seasoned by the shopkeepers, who instead of being soft-handed bourgeois, were in fact tough little bastards who cut an empire out of the guts of the Greeks and the Turks.
If it hadn’t been for poverty, I’d have had the time of my life; well, poverty and the knowledge that Emile was a league away across the lagoon.
Like many good times, the scenes blur together, but I know that we were preparing for the Doge’s Christmas court and the great masses at Saint Mark’s. The city was covering many of the crusade’s costs, invisible, inglorious costs, and in return they seemed to feel that the legate and his men, most especially the Order of St John, were at their personal service.
The Long Sword Page 23