The Long Sword (65 page)
I have nothing more to say, except that those days, the voyage from Alexandria to Famagusta, and the days that followed, were perhaps the blackest of my life.
Nerio had saved his Greek girl. He was well enough. And he and Fiore tried to comfort me. And Miles, who was as disconsolate as I.
What do you make of the ruin of all your hopes?
What is knighthood, when crusade is but a word for rape?
We buried Juan in the cathedral of Famagusta. You can still see his arms there, in alabaster, painted. I have been to visit him a few times. Sometimes I sit on his tomb, and talk to him, though I realise this is foolish.
Sometimes I weep.
I certainly wept that day.
It was Nerio – Nerio, for whom religion was an inhibition on his carnal pleasures – who saved me. The four of us we standing over the tomb, no alabaster yet, and we went to the altar to pray.
And Nerio said, ‘Let’s go to Jerusalem anyway.’
The four of us rose, and swore – four swords on the tomb.
The crusade broke up with frightening rapidity. The English were gone in less than a week, and the French immediately began to spread a rumour that the English and the Hospital had deserted the walls first.
I got to listen to the process by which a military disaster that was a catastrophe of cowardice, indecision and greed was transformed into a Christian victory, a blow to the infidel. I got to hear black told as white, the admiral of the Hospital called a coward for attacking the Pharos Harbour, the Hospital accused of deserting the king on the beach.
There was worse to come. But luckily, in the atmosphere of recrimination, I took my leave of the king and de Mézzières in a rose garden. I didn’t have to listen to the French, the Bretons, the Savoyards or the Gascons justify themselves.
King Peter looked drawn, his face pinched. Men said that he had come home to a cold bed and a distant welcome. Men said all sorts of terrible things. I saw the queen at a distance – but more on that later, if we sit together another night.
King Peter, true to his word, made me put my hands between his and accept a barony. Men told me it was a fine piece of land, would support ten knights and I swore to be his man and to serve him with three knights whenever he desired.
It did not lift the black fog entirely, but I had never held any land before. I was a lord.
By the grace of God.
The king gave me his leave to depart; not that, as a volunteer of the Order, I needed his leave. And he gave me his passport to Jerusalem.
He put a hand on my shoulder and sighed. ‘Some of the English go to Jerusalem. My people say that the Sultan is so discomfited by the overthrow of his army at Alexandria that he has withdrawn his garrison.’ His eyes met mine, and they were red. ‘
Where did we fail?
’ he asked.
‘The crusaders failed you, my lord,’ I said. ‘But for them, we should have won.’
He shrugged. His bitterness was immense. ‘You will see the Countess,’ he said.
My spine stiffened.
He looked at me. ‘I am told,’ he said, ‘that her husband did not survive the sack.’
‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, probably too quickly.
He smiled grimly. ‘As for that, Baron, I care nothing one way or another.’
I bowed, knee to the ground.
‘Will you wed her, Lord Gold?’ he asked. It was not the question, which was perfectly correct, but the manner of his asking – wry and discordant.
‘I will, with God’s help,’ I said. Oddly, one of the answers we gave in Church.
He looked down, and shrugged. ‘She is a wonder. When you see her,’ he said, ‘Tell her that she was correct in her surmise. Only that.’ He shrugged. ‘I never wanted to command the crusade.’
‘No, your Grace,’ I said. I accepted his kiss of peace, and I withdrew.
I will not say he was a broken man. I will only say that his light was dimmed. The fire that burned so hot in the lists at Krakow was almost gone. He knew – and I knew – that something was broken and would never, ever be restored.
The next day, we sailed for Rhodes, and the passage there was brutal, nine days of storm-tossed seas and fear. But by God’s grace, on the tenth day we raised the twin harbours and the fortress, and we landed in the sunset.
There were a great many people on the beach. They began to cheer as we came ashore: the galleys turned and landed stern first, and the oarsmen marched off, followed by the deck crews, and then the volunteers and last the knights, and we paraded on the foreshore in the sand. And Raymond Bérenger, the Grand Master, walked along our ranks as the people cheered us.
Marc-Antonio was recovering – yet another miracle. He appeared beside me with our horses in his fists, and John with two more. John the Turk was grinning.
Nerio was grinning.
We were, after all, alive. When you are young, horror does not last, thank God and all the saints, otherwise we would all run mad.
Fiore hugged me, and Nerio shook his head. ‘Turn around,’ he said.
I did.
Emile was waiting, and without, I think, considering her action, she threw her arms around my neck. And her lips were on my lips and I suspect that this was not a common display in front of the knights.
‘Will you come with me to Jerusalem?’ I asked.
She laughed her good laugh. ‘My love, we were always going to Jerusalem,’ she said.
C
haucer was toying with his wine cup, and Froissart looked dismayed over his.
‘But this is not what we hear of the great taking of Alexandria!’ he protested. ‘Percival de Coulanges is a great knight! And de Mézzières—’
‘De Mézzières wants another crusade, led by the king of France, to avenge the last one, and to wipe away the stain it left on all of us,’ Gold said. He sat back.
Chaucer smiled. ‘You are quite the hidden man, William. I had no idea you held a barony on Cyprus.’ He raised his cup to me. ‘That was a fine tale. I think I even believe parts of it. Did you go to Jerusalem?’
Gold nodded. ‘We did. But you know Sabraham, so you’ve heard all this before,’ he said.
Chaucer laughed. ‘I don’t need your word on it to know that a crusade manned with the same mercenaries who burned France would come to a bad end,’ he said. He set his wine cup down with a click. ‘But you haven’t made it to the Green Count’s crusade or the Italian Wedding yet, much less to being the Captain of Venice.’
‘By God’s grace, Master Chaucer! Why not regale us with your own Spanish War? You spin words at least as well as Messire Froissart. And you were, I think, with the Prince in Spain?’
Chaucer nodded. ‘Aye, William. We know all of each other’s secrets.’
Sir William laughed. ‘Not all, I think, Geoffrey.’
Froissart finished his wine. ‘I would very much like to hear of the tournament at Prince Lionel’s wedding – from a participant.’
Sir William nodded. ‘The one held in the lists, or the one where we murdered each other behind the curtains?’ he asked.
Froissart looked dismayed.
Chaucer guffawed. ‘Now there’s a tale!’
I
am not a professional historian. Or rather – I am occasionally and in a very small way a professional historian, and writing these books about William Gold has made me want to write an academic book on the War of Chioggia (William Gold’s greatest victory, I suspect.) But that aside, I’m a novelist first. While I care deeply for authenticity, I want to have a story that will move you. I try to make the experience real by practicing these things myself. I’m a reenactor and a collector, a patron of craftsmanship, and an amateur martial artist. I ride horses, I shoot bows, I cook at campfires, and I listen to music and read the languages and even fish with the period fishing tackle. But none of these makes for a story.
What does make for a story is my experience of humanity, and the people I see about me. I am not foolish enough to believe that the people of the fourteenth century were just like us; nor blind enough to think they were so very different, and that is merely one of the paradoxes that litter the work of the historical novelist.
It is essential to understand, when examining this world of stark contrasts and incredible passions, that people believed very strongly in ideas – like Islam, like Christianity, like chivalry. Piety – the devotional practice of Christianity – was such an essential part of life that even most ‘atheists’ practiced all the forms of Christianity. Yet there were many flavors of belief. Theology had just passed one of its most important milestones with the works of Thomas Aquinas, but Roman Christianity had so many varieties of practice that it would require the birth of Protestantism and then the Counter-Reformation to establish orthodoxy. I mention all this to say that to describe the fourteenth century without reference to religion would be – completely ahistorical. I make no judgement on their beliefs – I merely try to represent them accurately. I confess that I assume that any professional soldier – like Sabraham or Gold – must have developed some knowledge of and respect for their opponents. I see signs of this throughout the work of the Hospitallers – but that may be my modern multi-culturalism.
The same care should be paid to all judgments on the past, especially facile judgements about chivalry. It is easy for the modern amoralist to sneer – The Black Prince massacred innocents and burned towns, Henry V ordered prisoners butchered. The period is decorated with hundreds, if not thousands of moments where the chivalric warriors fell from grace and behaved like monsters. I loveth chivalry, warts and all, and it is my take – and, I think, a considered one – that in chivalry we find the birth of the modern codes of war and of military justice, and that to merely state piously that ‘war is hell’ and that ‘sometimes good men do bad things’ is crap. War needs rules. Brutality needs limits. These were not amateur enthusiasts, conscripts, or draftees. They were full time professionals who made for themselves a set of rules so that they could function – in and out of violence – as human beings. If the code of chivalry was abused – well, so are concepts like Liberty and Democracy abused. Cynicism is easy. Practice of the discipline of chivalry when your own life is in imminent threat is nothing less than heroic – it required then and still requires discipline and moral judgment, confidence in warrior skills and a strong desire to ameliorate the effects of war. I suspect that in addition to helping to control violence (and helping to promote it – a two-edged sword) the code and its reception in society did a great deal to soften the effects of
PTSD
. I think that the current scholarship believes that, on balance, the practice of chivalry may have done more to promote violence than to quell it – but I’ve always felt that this is a massively ill-considered point of view – as if to suggest that the practice of democracy has been bad for peace, based on the casualty rates of the twentieth century.
May I add – as a practitioner – that we as a society have chosen to ignore the reality of violence, and the hellish effect on soldiers and cops – and we have done so with such damning effectiveness that we have left them without any code beyond a clannish self-protection. Chivalry should not be a thing of the past. Chivalry is an ethic needed by every pilot, every drone controller, every beat cop and every
SWAT
team officer, every clandestine operator, every SpecOps professional. I often hear people say that such and such act of terror or crime justifies this or that atrocity. ‘Time to take off the gloves.’
Crap. If you take off the gloves,
that’s who you are.
Whether you do it with your rondel dagger or your
LGB
or your night stick. There need to be rules, and the men and women facing fire need to have some.
Rant off.
A word about the martial arts of the period. The world sees knights as illiterate thugs swinging heavy weapons and wearing hundreds of pounds of armour. In fact, the professionals wore armour that fitted like a tailored steel suit to the individual, and with weight evenly distributed over the body. We have several manuals of arms from this period, the most famous of which is by a character in this series – Fiore di Liberi, a northern Italian master who left us a magnificently illustrated step by step guide to the way to fight in and out of armour, unarmed, with a dagger, with a stick, with a sword, with a two-handed sword, with a spear, with a pole-ax, and mounted with a lance. The techniques are brutal, elegant and effective. They also pre-date any clear, unambiguous martial manual from the east, and are directly tied to combat, not remote reflections of it. I recommend their study, and the whole of Fiore’s mss in the Getty collection is available to your inspection at http://wiktenauer.com/wiki/Fior_di_Battaglia_MS_Ludwig_XV_13. If you’d like to learn more, I recommend the works of Bob Charrette and Guy Windsor. Guy’s School is at http://swordschool.com/ and Rob Charrette’s superb examination of Fiore’s techniques is available at http://www.freelanceacademypress.com/. Fiore Di Liberi was a real man, and his passion for his art shines through the pages of his book.
Sir William Gold, like Arimnestos, was a real person. He was a lieutenant of the White Company and often, but not always, followed Sir John Hawkwood. He had a fascinating career, and I suspect I’ll render it more exciting yet – but the events described, whether Poitiers and the dismemberment of France in the middle of the century, the Italian wars, or the Alexandria Crusade – all of them are real events. Most of the characters are real people, and when I’ve created characters, I’ve used sources like Chaucer’s remarkable ‘Canterbury Tales’ to make them live. Geoffrey Chaucer was a squire and a member of the Prince Lionel’s household. He knew Scrope and Sabraham and in fact was at a chivalric trial where Scrope, Sabraham and Stapleton all discussed the Siege of Alexandria. Boccaccio and Petrarch and all the officers of the Hospitallers were real men. I have tried to be faithful to what is known of all their lives (Sabraham I have embroidered a bit …). I hope that I have been faithful to the period and to the lives of these great men and women (great and terrible – Hawkwood was no man’s hero) and I do hope that my readers learn things. I think a good historical novel should teach, and I’m unabashed to say it.
But I remain a novelist first, and I hope that I have taken the bones of history and made a good story. Each of these books is about chivalry in some way – the laws of tournament and war, the rules of courtly love, and the ethics that ruled a world where violence was a commodity and money was of little importance except as a tool.
Finally, a word on this series. I would like to write three more – but that can only happen if you, my readers, support it. Please consider pushing it on your sword-swinging friends … I’d really like to tell the rest of this story!