The Long Sword (30 page)

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 herself. 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.

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 my 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.’