The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  He recovered well. ‘Satan had given you more lives than a cat,’ he said. He had a dozen of his blue and white men-at-arms with him, and I knew one of them immediately. He was a Gascon and I knew him from my days as a routier, but his name wouldn’t come.

  I had the belt undone. The dead man had tied it in a lose knot rather than take the time to buckle it. I rose to my feet.

  ‘You would know Satan better than I,’ I said. I had the sword in my hand again. And Father Pierre was a long way away.

  I’m only human.

  The man-at-arms was one of the de Badefols. That’s how I knew him. He took his master’s shoulder.

  At my back, I had six of the best swords in the world. And our weapons were all drawn.

  D’Herblay’s men closed around him.

  ‘Now who will be the first to reach Hell, Monsieur le Comte?’ I asked. I began to walk towards them, and all my friends and our squires walked forward with the nonchalance of bloody-minded young men.

  The count’s Savoyards and Gascons were not wilting flowers. They were knights. They drew – half a dozen of them – while the others pulled at their master.

  He turned and allowed himself to be led away, even as the camp’s marshal appeared.

  ‘Sheath!’ he roared. ‘Sheath or I’ll fine the lot of you.’

  That’s how you control routiers. With fines and money.

  Nerio ripped his purse off the hooks on his belt and tossed it at the marshal’s feet.

  ‘That will cover our fines,’ he said.

  It was a fine flourish, but none of us needed to kill Savoyards or Gascons. I wanted d’Herblay, and he was already a bowshot away.

  ‘Your master has a fine notion of courage,’ I taunted.

  Nerio – really, he would have made anyone a bad enemy, leaned past me. ‘Is he a difficult man to follow?’ he called. ‘He moves so fast.’

  But the marshal’s men were in half-armour, and had poleaxes. They took up positions between us.

  ‘Aren’t you the legate’s officer?’ the marshal said to me, incredulous.

  I sighed. I had a cooling corpse at my feet and a dead man’s sword in my hand. I bowed. ‘I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,’ I said.

  Nerio laughed. ‘You could be a banker,’ he said.

  Sabraham told me later that I should have caught Gap-tooth and held him, put him to the question and handed him to the Venetian authorities. I suppose that might have helped me in my struggle with d’Herblay, with the Bourc, with the Bishop of Geneva.

  Sabraham asked me many questions about the Hungarian, too.

  Perhaps. But that day, our one blow duel helped me a great deal. And God have mercy on his unshriven soul.

  I began to consider what action I might take against d’Herblay. Or rather, I began to consider how exactly I would reach him to kill him.

  June. We went to Mestre and practiced unloading the galleys on the beach over the sterns and we practiced fighting from the galleys, and a young Provençal knight fell into the sea and drowned, a warning to us all. If d’Herblay was there, I never saw him.

  I went to Mass with my brethren, and I confessed to Father Pierre, who was obviously delighted that I had so little to confess. I was perhaps less delighted; I might pretend that a chaste love for Emile was enough for me, but as my body returned to health, it expressed itself more forcefully than I might have liked. And there is some terrible urge on me, I admit, that after killing the brigand who had my sword, I would have lain with any woman available. It is always thus with me. But a barge from Mestre to a convent is not full of tools of Satan. And an evening chess game with the abbess was surprisingly free of temptation, as well.

  At any rate, it can’t have been three days before I was on my knees in the legate’s office at the Doge’s palace, confessing my desire to kill d’Herblay.

  After confession, I had a private interview with the legate. It may seem antic that I could go from my knees to a comfortable stool with my confessor, but he was the best priest I ever knew, and even the act of contrition was a shared thing, almost pleasant, despite the shame. At any rate, I sat with him while he wrote out orders, mostly to do with money and the accumulation of supplies for the summer. I learned from him that we still did not have a particular target for the crusade.

  ‘How do we make a war whose intention is the triumph of the Prince of Peace?’ he asked.

  I confess that I had no answer to that.

  When the business of my interview – the ordering of the volunteers – was done, the legate took off his spectacles. These were round, horn rimmed devices of ground glass that allowed him to read documents more quickly and gave him a look of slightly comic, owl-eyed wisdom. He polished them on the sleeve of his robe.

  ‘And what of you, William?’ he asked.

  I suppose I said something about being healed and eager for duty. What one says to a superior in such situations.

  He nodded. His eyes were elsewhere, on, I think, the crucifix at my back that dominated the room he used as his office. But then his eyes focused on me. ‘You are giving thought to revenge,’ he said.

  Remember that I had just confessed; remember, too, that revenge is not one of the sacraments of the church. Nevertheless, I did not lie to Father Pierre if I could help it. ‘I will, in time, avenge myself on the Count d’Herblay,’ I admitted.

  ‘I might tell you that wrath is a sin, and that the future is in God’s hands.’ Father Pierre smiled without cynicism. ‘But I will instead tell you that by my order, the count has been taken at Mestre and is to be tried in an ecclesiastical court for a blatant assault on a crusader.’ He held up a hand. ‘It occurred to me that no matter what I might say, your first act on reaching full recovery would be to ride to Mestre and find d’Herblay. And that you will kill him, in time. I need you, Sir Knight. The church needs you, and further, has first call on your time and life. You have been valiant in changing your actions, in penance and in contrition. Despite which, you owe the Order for your salvation – not just in heaven, but from a noose and a shameful death.’ He raised an eye brow. ‘I hope I’m making myself clear.’

  He leaned forward. ‘I’m sure that every soul is of value to God. But my son, I hold him worth less than a fig seed compared to you, and I beg you to treat him with the same indifference. Let him go. Such men punish themselves.’

  From that moment I subordinated any consideration of revenge. He was right; he usually was. Beyond religion, piety, faith, I owed Father Pierre and Fra Peter a debt of honour. I was not going to desert them to kill d’Herblay.

  I nodded. I think I said something foolish about changing my mind.

  The legate laughed. ‘Listen, Sir William. The crusade’s various enemies have made a number of attempts to kill me while you were dallying in bed. And agents of various powers have spent a small fortune luring away the bands of cut-throats that form the bulk of our crusaders.’ He shrugged. ‘Now I must woo them back. And remain alive to do it. May I trust that you will be at my back, William?’

  I bowed my deepest bow. By Christ, I loved that man, even when he reminded me of my sin. Or perhaps because of it.

  Mind you, after Father Pierre was done with me, I went to Fra Peter – out of the frying pan and into the fire. Fra Peter sat me down and filled me with dread about the legate. From him I learned the truth: that there had been two serious attempts on Father Pierre’s life over the winter. One had come from a hired assassin in the street who had been cut down by one of the Order’s brother-knights, Fra Robert de Juillac. The other had been a poison so strong that it killed a page named Clemento Balbi, a young noble of Venice who was waiting on the high table at a dinner given by the Ten for the Genoese ambassadors. As far as Fra Peter could make out, the boy, like pages the world over, drank a few sips from Father Pierre’s cup and died in agony.

  I mention this because all of
us, the thirty Knights of the Order gathered in Venice and the dozen or so volunteers who served with them, all practiced together in June; we practiced defending the legate on foot and on horseback, in streets and in fields and on the deck of a ship. It was a very different kind of fighting, and I was but a single oarsman, if you will, on a very well-coordinated ship. I think we trained together twenty or thirty times, which was more group fighting than I think I had ever trained for since I was first a man-at-arms. We all tried different weapons – spears, mostly, and poleaxes, although Lord de Grey seemed to fancy a heavy mace and one of the Provençal brother-knights fought with an axe, and I came to know the spear all over again.

  Fra Peter was our captain. He worked us hard, and then served us wine with his own hands and it was during those evenings in the Venetian Baillie’s house that we discussed the threat to the legate, the Genoese, the various factions at Avignon …

  In many ways, Europe was a cesspool and I was not the only man who longed for a good fight against an enemy I could see.

  I have perhaps given you the impression that we were a band of brothers; indeed, in my memory, we are always those seven swordsmen standing in the spring air, facing down the Hungarians at the horse fair. But it was not always like that. I loved Miles Stapleton like the younger brother I didn’t have, but he could be a stick. His piety was greater even than Juan’s: he talked no bawdy, he didn’t look at women, much less ride them in alleys, he was slow to anger and quick to forgive; his conversation was almost entirely about religion and weapons; he was dull at the best of times, and his relentless good cheer could increase the burdens of an early morning and a hard head.

  One evening, while I was still living at St Katherine’s, I remember preparing to leave my friends to go back to the island. There was wine on the table, and Nerio’s latest conquest was serving it. I rose, gave them all a half-smile, and bowed. ‘Friends, I must leave you,’ I said, or something equally witty.

  ‘To go back to your private nunnery,’ Nerio said. In Italian, as among us nunnery can be used to mean brothel.

  I bridled. Nerio’s casual blasphemy and arch misogyny could pall.

  He laughed in my face. ‘I suppose it frees you from sin that it isn’t a novice you’re tupping,’ he said with a superior smile.

  I may even have reached for my sword.

  Nerio put his hands on his hips and laughed derisively. ‘You know why it is so valuable to all of us to keep young Miles about us?’ he asked the room.

  Miles blushed, as usual.

  ‘Because without him, Sir William would seem a prude,’ he went on.

  So … Miles was holy. He was also more than a little superior about his holiness, which could at times be grating.

  Nerio’s abiding sin was arrogance. His endless venery was more comic than tragic, and his success, while legendary, was itself so fraught with complications as to render him more human. The evening he met his former mistress, the grocer’s daughter, on the street while strolling with a courtesan he’d hired remains indelibly printed on my thoughts. The courtesan, terrified for her looks, proved a coward, and the grocer’s daughter proved to have a full Venetian command of the language as well as a fast right hand. She was the victor of the encounter, leaving her rival stretched full length in the street, and Nerio was so inconstant and so obliging that he instantly restored the grocer’s daughter to her former position – and so charming that she accepted his blandishments.

  He did these things because he believed that he could escape the consequences. And he usually could; good birth, brilliant good looks, skill at arms, classical education and vast riches gave him every advantage. His riches made him insensitive, and he could be the worst friend imaginable.

  Gloves were a constant issue among us. In Venice, no gentleman could be seen without gloves. And good gloves were expensive; they take hours to make, the makers are expert, and the materials themselves are costly. To make matters worse, gentlemen’s gloves were expected to be clean.

  And yet, as swordsmen who trained each day, we wore good gloves, chamois, or stag skin, for fencing. And wearing gloves for such work stretches and discolours them.

  Now, we were poor. Or rather, Fiore was very poor, but cared little about dress; Miles had an allowance; I had no money at all but good credit, and Juan seemed to have money all the time, but seldom spent any. Only Nerio had all the money he required. And his money was always at our service – he would buy us whatever we asked, and never request repayment. And yet, this paragon of generosity never seemed to own a pair of his own gloves. He wouldn’t get fitted for them, or purchase them.

  And it happened that he and Fiore had hands exactly of a size. Now Fiore was not a pillar of courtly dress – in fact, he cared very little for his appearance. But two things he fancied, because he felt they contributed to his Art; shoes, and gloves. He would spend half a day being fitted for the plainest shoes, fine slippers with minimal toes at a time when all of us sported poulaines with toes outrageously endowed; and he would linger like a lover in a glove-makers.

  He was poor as a dock rat, though, and he hated to borrow money – any money. He never borrowed from Nerio. Instead, he would scrape together a few ducats and resort to a brothel that had cards and dice, from which, sometimes, he would emerge as poor as a shaved dock rat, but at other times, he would be as rich as Croesus. One evening he went with Juan, of all people, and returned laughing. He had lost all his throws but the last, and his fool of an opponent had accused him of cheating. The two of them had retreated to the alley, where Fiore had relieved the man of his life, and then his purse – such things were thought perfectly honourable.

  And he used his winnings – by the sword or the dice cup – to buy his gloves. He always kept one pair inviolate: virgin, as we all called them. One pair of perfect chamois gloves sat on top of his portmanteaux, and he would wear them in his belt, clean, uncreased, unstretched.

  Nerio, who never purchased gloves, had a tendency to pick up Fiore’s virgin pair as if by right. He would lift them off the Friulian’s trunk and put his hands into them before poor Fiore could speak.

  Fiore would scrunch up his face in rage.

  This happened several times, until it threatened to return them to the state of enmity from which they had begun. And Nerio never did understand why because he could replace Fiore’s gloves and his horse, sword, purse, and all his clothes if he wanted. Every time, he’d say ‘For Christ’s sake, I’ll pay for them!’

  And Fiore would shriek, ‘Buy your own gloves, you whoremaster!’

  The story had a happier ending that shows, perhaps, the utility of having your friends in fives. We were sitting in our tower – it might have been May or June – and I was reading a bit of Petrarch from a manuscript I had borrowed from de Mézzières. Juan was reading the gospels, and Miles was sharpening a dagger, and Fiore was staring off into space. I think it was the day we met the Vernonese artist Altichiero and he had sketched Fiore in some of his postures of fence; anyway, Nerio was going out to church with the grocer’s daughter and he snapped up Fiore’s gloves. He didn’t even think about it; he took them and thrust his left hand deep into the virgin chamois, and Fiore screamed and lunged at him.

  Nerio had his dagger in his hand – without thinking, I expect. Fiore grappled for the dagger hand and made his cover, of course.

  Miles leapt between them. That was a braver action than it sounds and Miles did it without a thought. He smothered the dagger. When he rolled away, Juan had Nerio, and I had Fiore.

  ‘Whoremaster!’ Fiore roared. ‘Sodomite! Banker!’

  Nerio was white and red with anger. He struggled. ‘You idiot,’ he said. ‘They’re only gloves! I’ll buy you a pair!’

  The bell was ringing for Mass.

  ‘I want my own gloves,’ Fiore bellowed.

  Of course it makes no sense.

  Juan stepped between them. ‘Gentle
men,’ he said, ‘it is time to go to church. But I propose, to solve this problem, that Ser Nerio give Ser Fiore one hundred ducats, and Ser Fiore, of his courtesy, take him to the glovers and get him ten or fifteen pairs of these gloves. And that he takes half for himself, for a penalty of Nerio’s poaching. And that Ser Nerio take the other pairs for his own, stack them in a drawer, and use them, and not Ser Fiore’s.’

  I laughed. Nerio and Fiore were still full of fight, but we got them to agree to Juan’s plan. Indeed, Nerio eventually referred to it as ‘The judgment of Solomon’.

  My point is that Nerio had little respect for the possessions of others. He could be a bad friend, but by God, he was a worse enemy, as I discovered. He would use the full power of his father’s house against any rival, however pitiful and he would not stint to bribe or threaten. After I began to recover, he informed me one evening of the steps he’d taken to ruin d’Herblay.

  He laughed. ‘You’ll be pleased at one of my little stratagems,’ he said. ‘Do you remember forming a society for sharing ransoms?’

  ‘After Brignais? In sixty-two?’ I asked. He nodded, and I said something like ‘Of course. I’ve told you—’

  ‘And you recall that my father bought your account from the Bardi,’ he went on.

  I struggled not to feel a little humiliated, but they were bankers. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘With that purchase came the documents on your unpaid shares of the society and your share was collected by Sir John Creswell, an Englishman. He in turn divided the money with the Count d’Herblay and the Bourc Camus – I have a witness statement, signed.’ Nerio smiled.

  I writhed. I had known it, and yet at another level, to hear it this way …

  ‘So I’m suing them in a French court, and again in a Savoyard court, and again in a Genoese court.’ Nerio laughed. ‘I have a suit against the Bourc and d’Herblay in Avignon that’s making him smart as if he’d been stung. The irony is that Father Pierre had d’Herblay taken up for attacking a man on vow of crusade – that’s you. And because he’s held at Mestre, he cannot escape my suit for debt!’ Nerio roared. This pleased him inordinately.