The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Beggars cannot be choosers, and the service was not so very onerous. We practiced for various processions in armour and I declined invitations from other knights because I couldn’t return them, and ate what I could afford – fish.

  Nerio took time to notice. I was too proud to ask him for money, although he seemed to have enough for us all. And I was busy planning Juan’s knighting, which was to be included in the great Mass of the Eve of our Saviour’s birth. I suppose that by that time I had heard, from Nerio, that Juan was actually Juan di Heredia’s son, not his nephew, by one of the great ladies of Spain, to be forever unnamed. Once Nerio told me, it was so obvious as to need no hint – I can be a fool.

  At any rate, it was in the days before the festival of Christmas. Every guild in Venice was working at full capacity to satisfy every customer and to prepare for their own roles in processions, passion plays, mimes and dances and feasts.

  Venice was like an army on the eve of battle, except that everyone was happy.

  I was searching the streets for an ecclesiastical vestment maker who would run up a new surcoat for Juan. Fra Peter and Father Pierre had left this to me, and I had been busy. My friend’s knighting was ten days away, or that’s how I remember it, perhaps less. Marc-Antonio was searching the tailors of the Judaica while I walked along the Rialto. Money was no longer an object, I was that desperate. I needed a tailor who would finish the garment by Christmas eve.

  I had Nerio by me, and I was at a stand in a street so narrow that passers-by, apprentices and servants and great ladies in Byzantine turbans all had to press against the wall to avoid the four feet of steel that stuck out behind me like a scarlet tail. I’d just been laughed out of an establishment so squalid that I couldn’t imagine how to proceed.

  I was standing in front of a toy shop. Really, it was the shop of a fine leather worker, but his window displayed items he’d made that best showed off his skills, and one of them was a beautiful girl’s doll wearing a fine gown of wool over a kirtle of real silk, some fancy eastern stuff with a pattern. The face of the doll was leather, and while not, strictly speaking, lifelike, it had a vivacity to it that most girl’s dolls lack: the eyes seemed almost to cross, the lips to laugh. The body of the doll was cloth, and I shocked Nerio by striding into the shop, scabbarded sword bouncing off the lintel, and asking for the doll.

  The master came out to wait on me, and he laughed to see my face when he told me the price. ‘I thought you foreign nobles were all rich,’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  Back on the street, Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Too much,’ I said. ‘Too dear.’

  Nerio walked several steps beside me. ‘Give me your purse, brother,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t come out with any money.’

  He held out his hand and I unhooked my purse and handed it to him.

  He used most of my worldly fortune to purchase a saffron-laced street pie with beef, and we walked along the Grand Canal. He was kind enough to give me a bite. Then he used the rest of my money to buy us a cup of wine from a very pretty girl whose wine was scarcely her only commodity. He let his fingers linger on hers when he passed her back the cup and she seemed to tolerate the familiarity with good humour.

  He said something and she laughed and looked away, and Nerio came and grabbed my shoulder and we walked on.

  He still had my purse, and as we crossed the narrow bridge over a side canal, he folded back the cover and emptied it into the canal – or rather, he up-ended it and nothing happened.

  ‘Broke?’ he asked. ‘Destitute?’ He tossed me the purse and went back to walking.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Why the doll?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Who is it for? You should have seen your face, my friend.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Bah! The disappointment of love.’ He pointed at me. ‘You have no money and you are in love. Every banker knows the symptoms!’

  I don’t know whether I glared or cringed or denied.

  He walked off again, lengthening his stride as we crossed a tiny square with enough room for a man to walk fast. I followed him back to the leatherworker’s shop. He walked in, exchanged a few sentences in rapid-fire Veneziano, and bought my doll for a third what I’d be told. He tossed it to me on the step. ‘Don’t play with it where the other mercenaries can see,’ he said with a grin. ‘You need money? Let me put some in your hands.’

  Rich men borrow money. They are rich, so they get into debt. This is the rule of the street – no one loans money to the poor. And the poor know better than to borrow. I was used to pawning armour, pawning horses, but I was unwilling to pawn armour in Venice and besides, the army of the Passagium Generale had caused a glut of used armour in the shops. The value was practically nil.

  My point is that I was, mostly, unwilling to borrow, even from Nerio and his father. He spent the rest of our walk trying to convince me that I was a good business risk. I took him to the armourer’s quarter, and introduced him to my Bohemian.

  He looked at the helmet and heard out the Bohemian’s pitch on a full harness of new Milanese altered to fit, and Nerio shrugged. ‘If you are going to keep me alive going to Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘come, what does this amount to, five hundred ducats?’

  He wrote the Bohemian a note of hand.

  I tried to thank him, and he declined. ‘Listen, my friend, my father is the banker, not I. But I will not see a friend starve in Venice of all places. Here, he did it all for four hundred and seventy ducats. Take these thirty, and call it five hundred.’

  I embraced him, and bought him wine. But I still hadn’t found a tailor who would make a surcoat by Christmas eve.

  I had, however, found an excuse to visit Emile.

  ‘Where are you off to?’ Nerio demanded.

  ‘I have an errand,’ I said.

  ‘To the mother of a child who wants a doll?’ Nerio asked. ‘How very Italian of you, William. My mother used to tell me, when I was young and amorous, only lie with matrons and never virgins, and no damage is done. Eh?’

  I suppose I flushed. I’m a redhead with a vicious temper and my face often gives me the lie.

  ‘Well, be back by tonight,’ he said. ‘Remember Juan!’

  Which made me feel a guilty fool, a bad friend. We had all decided to throw Juan a little feast before he was knighted – Nerio thought it would be amusing to make the Spanish boy drunk.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ I insisted. In fact, I was too fond of Juan to want to make him drunk and foolish.

  In the end, I had to ask Sister Marie for help. It was she who provided me with the visiting hours of the convento, although she did so with a wry look that told me that I’d intrigued her a little too much. Or that she saw right through me.

  It cost me six solidi I could ill-afford to get a gondola to the island, but my gondolier was young, tough, talented, had a fine singing voice and new many of the newest songs. I gave him wine from my canteen and we had a fine trip out from Saint Mark’s.

  Landing at the convent’s brick pier gave me pause. But Jean-François rescued me from a sense of sacrilege by greeting me like a long-lost brother. Escorted by a silent sister, we walked past the great convent church to the two dormitories as I regaled Jean-François and Bernard with my doings.

  I invited them to join me – and my brothers – for a dinner.

  ‘We’re all of us ready to die from boredom,’ Jean-François allowed. ‘I went to Mass three times yesterday.’ He rolled his eyes, and our escort glared at the brick walkway.

  Bernard smiled his soft smile. ‘What brings you, messire?’ he asked.

  I produced the doll, and both men clapped their hands. ‘Par dieu!’ Jean-François said. ‘Perhaps we’ll have some quiet out of miss yet! Where’d you find such a treasure?’

  I was part way through m
y story and had got to the tale of the search for Juan’s surcoat as we reached the dormitory receiving room. I must explain: this was a convent for well-bred Venetian girls, and most of the sisters were from the best families of the lagoon. No one was sworn to silence, and some novitiates wore fashionable clothes and had servants. Each dormitory had a fine parlour with good oak panels and paintings or frescoes as fine as the piano nobile in a Venetian palazzo for receiving brothers and fathers – and lovers.

  Our escort blushed and didn’t look at me, but she bobbed her head for my attention. ‘Perhaps my lord has been led here,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I make ecclesiastic vestments. Indeed, we have just made a chasuble for the new Bishop of Aquila, even though he is no friend of ours.’

  I unlaced my own and the nun sat down and turned it over. She wrinkled her nose, but smiled, and I imagined her as someone’s sister.

  ‘You wish a line of gold edging the cross, perhaps?’ she asked.

  ‘It is for his formal knighting,’ I said.

  Emile came in through a barred door. I felt her enter the room, turned, and bowed.

  ‘So,’ she said. With the smile for which I would die.

  She was happy I had come. What more did I need to know?

  ‘Are you the same size?’ my nun asked. ‘Oh, my lady countess, I did not mean to intrude.’

  I grinned – Emile was so prettily confused. ‘Countess, this pearl among Christ’s brides thinks that she and her sisters might solve my pressing duty to have a surcoat made for my friend’s knighting.’ Emboldened, I said, ‘It is on Christmas Eve, at Saint Mark’s. You should attend!’

  Emile laughed. ‘Indeed, my people would accept an invitation from Satan to get off this island, although we have been treated with every courtesy.’

  I produced the doll. She pounced.

  ‘You didn’t forget!’

  I confessed. ‘I did forget, madonna. My lord sent me on a mission, and it is only this morning that I found this. But I came as soon as I could.’

  She wasn’t listening. She swept out, and there were peals of laughter, giggles, a shriek!

  And then nothing for so long that I feared that I had lost her again. I filled the time explaining to the sister that yes, I was very much of a size with Juan.

  She went out and came back with an older woman.

  ‘For the Order of St John?’ she asked. Her voice was flat, and a little shrill.

  ‘Yes, my lady,’ I said in my best Italian.

  She unbent a little. ‘This is an impossible task, but all my little reprobates love a knight. Very well. Thirty ducats in a single donation on completion, and ten for me to dispense as I see fit.’

  A month’s rent. But I had no choice; it was cheaper than some of the tailors.

  ‘We’ll have to keep this,’ the older lady said, holding up my surcoat. She sniffed. ‘Perhaps we’ll return it clean.’

  Emile came back with Magdalene at her apron strings, clutching the doll. The little girl wouldn’t meet my eyes and kept turning away, but she managed to mumble her thanks for ‘Lady Guinevere’ very prettily. I bowed my very best bow to a lady.

  Then I made bold enough to meet her mother’s eye. ‘May I expect you on Christmas Eve, Countess?’ I asked.

  She half-smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She looked at me with a little of her old self. ‘We are so very busy.’

  Strong in the knowledge that I had saved Juan’s knighting, I helped my gondolier to pull over the choppy water of the lagoon. There was rain, a cold rain, with a little sleep mixed in.

  I came back to my cramped rooms by the fish market to find Juan on the wooden steps with a young Moslem girl in a red shawl – a slave-prostitute of the kind favoured by the gangs that ran the waterfront brothels and wine-houses for foreign sailors. Behind them on the steps was Marc Antonio, wearing a heavy cloak.

  He read my expression and bridled. ‘I’m a grown man and can sin as I like,’ he said. His voice was thick with angry wine.

  ‘Where did you get her?’ I asked.

  He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I …’

  Marc-Antonio’s eyes gave him away.

  I turned on him. ‘You? You went and bought—’

  Juan shoved the girl down the steps and put a hand on his sword. ‘I will take no moralising from you, Sir William. You have a doxy in every town.’

  ‘You’ve paid her?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  Juan’s cheeks flushed. ‘Of course I’ve paid!’

  I turned to the girl. ‘Run along, now,’ I said, and she bolted.

  ‘You fucking hypocrite,’ Juan said. He said more, in Spanish, about my affair with a notorious married woman.

  Nerio, called forth from his den – he paid the most, and in return he’d arranged for our room to be divided by panels so that he could have his own snug chamber – stood in his shirt and hose on the landing. ‘Can you children be a little less noisy?’ he asked. ‘Juan, come back to your party!’

  ‘I was taking my ease with my friend—’ Juan said.

  ‘He arranged to have my squire buy him a strumpet on the docks,’ I said. ‘Juan …’ I thought of a thousand things to say: about the life of a Moslem slave in Venice, about women, about prostitutes.

  Nerio laughed. ‘For a fornicating adventurer, William has a fine sense of moral outrage.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow at me. Juan brightened, and Nerio turned on him, ‘But gentlemen – at least, gentlemen in Italy – do not hand over coin for access to a whore. At least, not in such a way as their friends can mock them for it.’

  Juan, caught between us on the steps – it was almost like one of Dante’s poems – looked up and down, and his rage returned. ‘You have some bitch in your room this minute!’ he spat at Nerio. His use of language, the way he spoke – he was very drunk. I’d never seen the younger Spaniard as a man dedicated to any of his appetites and I’m not sure I’d ever heard him use foul language. He lived like a monk and his piety was proverbial, even if he was less a priest in armour than Miles.

  ‘How long have you all been drinking?’ I asked.

  ‘You thought we’d wait for you?’ Juan snapped. ‘I assumed you’d be stuffing your baggage all night.’ He looked back at Nerio. ‘You are all the same!’ he shouted. ‘Liars and hypocrites!’

  Nerio laughed. ‘But mine is not paid, and comes there of her own free will, my dear caballero, and if you call her further names, I will be forced to—’

  Fiore appeared behind Nerio and said something which included the words ‘not helping’.

  Nerio winced and withdrew, and Fiore came down the stairs. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s take Juan out for a walk.’ He looked at me. ‘Can’t you tell something is wrong?’

  This from a man who thought that swordplay was a form of human communication.

  We walked most of the way around Venice that night, and discovered nothing except that Juan was very unhappy, and in some ways very naive.

  ‘You all have your loves,’ he said. ‘I have nothing. And no one.’

  He had been quite smitten with a girl in the company the year before, but the plague had taken her. I didn’t think of Juan as inexperienced; he had been a year or more with the companies, and two years with the order. But before that, he’d been raised mostly by religion, and as we slopped our way from bridge to bridge in the icy rain and fog of a Venetian winter night, I heard a great deal about growing to manhood in a Spanish monastery.

  Ascetic monks, fanatical monks, and sexually predatory monks in equal doses; an automatic hatred of all things Moslem, and a healthy dose of pride and the fear of his true parentage, his bastardy – itself a sin.

  I had known him eighteen months, and I truly had no idea. Until that night, he had always seemed young, courteous, a fine blade and a virtuous man. But the thin ice of virtue sat atop a steaming pile of dung: mistreatment, abuse, an
d two busy, arrogant parents pursuing worldly careers – a knight of the order and an abbess, neither interested in acknowledging a child.

  Fiore proved himself as a friend that night, not that he needed to prove himself to me. But he listened, and in the end it was our ability to listen rather than speak that measured our friendship and worked what healing there was. Juan vomited his childhood like a man spewing bad wine, and we listened.

  ‘‘I’m not fit to be a knight,’ he said in the grim first light of day. A tailless cat rubbed against our boots, sensing a trio of soft touches who might provide food.

  Aha I thought. At last we are to the essential wound. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. He was sobering up. ‘No one is worthy of knighthood. Think of all the bad men who are priests.’

  Juan looked at Fiore.

  Fiore looked at me.

  ‘None of us is Galahad,’ I said, all too conscious that I had just returned from a day spent with Emile.

  ‘I am afraid, all the time!’ Juan said.

  ‘So am I,’ I said.

  Fiore looked at me across the back of Juan’s head and raised his eyebrows. Well, I suspect that Fiore was so very much himself that he was not afraid most of the time.

  We walked Juan around and fed him a little more wine, and by the time the cocks were crowing on the islands, we undressed him and put him in bed.

  Nerio had one of the grocer’s daughters in his room, I discovered, and she emerged, shy but triumphant, to display her cooking skills.

  Triumphant, and certain her mother would never catch her.

  Nerio grinned with masculine accomplishment. Anna was, in fact, very pretty, with a round face and dark curls that were, I think, genuine and not the product of fiddling with an iron, and they had certainly survived a night’s athletic entertainment with Nerio.

  She began to heat milk for us to break our fasts, and Nerio and Fiore sat with Miles at the table. Miles looked distant, as if he was pretending not to be there at all. Fiore was untroubled. He was repairing a shirt.