The Long Sword (39 page)

Everything seemed to still. Perhaps this is only memory playing tricks on me, but I think the crowd fell silent and the running Hungarians slowed and stopped.

Far off, one woman was singing.

Gap-tooth raised his sword in a poor imitation of the middle guard,
posta breva.

The woman’s voice rose.

Three paces away, I drew. My sword swept up from the scabbard even as his fell. Up and up, covering me, and back along the same line, and he fell, dead. I’d slammed his sword out of line, up into the air with my rising stroke and then cut about two inches into his head and ripped the point all the way from his temple to his jaw with my descent, and then continued down into my first guard.

He fell without a cry.

The Hungarian stepped away from the body.

Gap-tooth’s hand twitched and I put my point through his neck into the ground, knelt, and retrieved the Emperor’s sword from his not-quite-dead hand.

At my back, Nerio, Juan, Marc-Antonio, Davide, Miles and Fiore all stood with their blades in their hands. Despite the blood and the flies that began to gather immediately, it is one of my favourite memories: I knew we could not be beaten, not all together.

And I knew I had never been so good.

And I admit, a little revenge can be like a drug.

I pointed the Emperor’s sword at the Hungarian. ‘Monsieur has my dagger,’ I said. ‘I am Sir William Gold, and I can prove my ownership if required.’

My Hungarian untied the dagger from his belt without outward fear or flourish. He bowed and handed it to me. ‘I believe I have just had all the proof any gentleman requires,’ he said in good French. ‘A pity. A fine weapon. I wondered why I had it so cheap.’

I offered to cover his purchase, and he grinned and shouted something in Hungarian, and twenty longhairs faded back into the camp.

‘Perhaps we can discuss a price if we meet again,’ he said.

He walked away, unruffled.

I bent and began to retrieve the scabbard from the dead man’s belt. I know he’d ruined it, but it had a bye knife and a pricker in the scabbard and pretty furniture, and I was sure that Bernard and I could run up a new scabbard on the old wooden core.

So naturally, I was kneeling in the spring mud robbing a corpse when I saw d’Herblay.

Well – the Bourc thought he’d killed me, and now d’Herblay had the same experience.

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.