The Long Sword (7 page)

Camus put spurs to his warhorse and aimed it at Father Pierre. He had a staff in his hands, the sort of baton that commanders carry, and he cut down at the nun who, by ill-chance, was in front of all of us.

She got an arm up, but he cut hard. I heard her arm break, but she didn’t flinch, and her struggle cost him time. As her action bought us a few moments, I pushed past Father Pierre and caught Camus’s blow on my crossed arms. My steel vambraces were easily proof against his oak baton, although I felt each blow. He threw three, very fast, and half a dozen of his other men-at-arms were charging us on the steps.

If this seems insane to you, remember who he was. And what he was. And what Robert of Geneva has become.

I had never faced a foe in full harness, but without a weapon or a helmet. A man can spend a great deal of effort protecting his own head; indeed, the piece of armour everyone gets first is a helmet. But by Camus’ third blow, I had his tempo. My left hand trapped his descending right, just for a moment, and my fingers closed on the cuff of his gauntlet covering his wrist.

The oak staff carried on and smacked me in the nose, a light blow that nonetheless almost took me out of the fight, and my right hand closed on his baton and I almost screamed with pain. It was only a few days since I’d had a dagger blade in the palm – and despite all that I managed to get my left on to the flange of his right elbow cop. I pulled.

He came off his horse. The horse was trying to bite my face – a warhorse does that – but Father Hector put his crucifix into the horse’s teeth with a two-handed blow that would have done honour to many a belted knight and the horse reared, finishing Camus’s attempts to retain his seat, and they went down, the horse one way, and Camus at my feet.

To my left, Fiore had another man-at-arms flat on his front and was kneeling on the man’s back, and Juan and Fra Peter had their arms up, covering Father Pierre. But more and more black and white men-at-arms were closing in, and it finally penetrated my head that this might be a real assassination attempt and not mere arrogant happenstance.

The blue and white men-at-arms took no part. They merely watched.

Miles Stapleton put a horseman down by throwing himself under the man’s arm and lifting his foot. And Lord Grey opened the papal banner, so that every man in the Place de Palais could see the papal arms in glittering gold on white silk.

I had the Bourc at my feet. ‘Call off your dogs,’ I shouted, and rotated his arm a little farther in its socket. It was already dislocated.

He screamed. That scream got more attention than any call to arms – four paces away, a mounted soldier reared his horse and fell back. D’Herblay had his sword in his hand. He pointed it at me and shouted.

‘Let him go,’ Father Pierre said, gently. He put his naked hand on my armoured one, and lifted my thumb. My hand was locked in place on the Bourc’s arm. I was rigid with anger, with shock – with not-really-suppressed violence.

‘I’ll kill you all,’ Camus said. ‘I’ll kill you and then I’ll flay your souls in hell.’

Father Pierre shook his head, his mild eyes unmoved. ‘No, my son, you will not.’

‘I am not your son!’ roared Camus. Even then, his right shoulder dislocated, a swarm of men-at-arms around him, he went for his dagger.

I was too slow.

Fiore dei Liberi was not. He stripped the dagger from Camus’s left hand as if he was taking a pie from a street seller. Fra Peter picked up the oak staff that Camus had dropped and held it high.

The Savoyard prelate was just watching. He wore his gown with long black gloves so that he appeared entirely black except his head, where his ferocious, inquisitive, bulging eyes and his narrow, chinless face made him look more like a cat than was quite right. If he cared at all that one of the captains of his escort was lying flat with his arms pinned and his own dagger at his throat, he betrayed nothing but an intense interest, as if we were a troupe of travelling players performing something vaguely obscene. Those eyes of his!

Fra Peter gave Father Pierre a gentle but very commanding shove away from the Bishop’s men and towards the open steps to our left. ‘Move, Excellency,’ he said.

Now the blue and white men-at-arms were also moving, working their way to block the ends of the street. Robert of Geneva leaned down from his chair to speak to his cousin d’Herblay.

Father Pierre was not used to being called ‘Excellency’ and he didn’t react at once.

‘By Satan, I will find the peasants who are your father and mother and flay them alive,’ the Bourc Camus spat at Father Pierre. This, let me say again, on the steps of the papal palace.

‘You are like a child,’ Father Pierre said. ‘You seek to break things—’

‘
Don’t patronise me, you low-born hypocrite. You were born on the dung heap, and I will fling you back to it.’
Camus’s voice had taken on an odd, sing-song chant and a sibilant hiss.

Father Hector had his crucifix in Camus’s face, and Liberi had the man pinned, despite his demonic strength – demons, for all the aid of the netherworld, have a hard time with one shoulder dislocated and the other locked by an expert man-at-arms.

Fra Peter stopped talking, caught Father Pierre around the waist and carried him away.

I found that I was standing over the nun. Her face was white and her left arm was clearly broken, but she got to her feet without using either hand, rolling forward over her hips like a knight. She tucked the broken arm into the cord that bound her habit and met my eye. I moved my head, indicating that she should follow Father Pierre and then I looked past her at Liberi.

He had the tiniest smile on his face. With a look of pleasure on his narrow face, he rolled Camus off his hip and threw him down the steps and into his own men-at-arms.

Chaos ensued – shrieks, bellows of pain – and under their cover we slipped away to the left, moving fast. Juan was one step ahead of me. None of us had drawn our swords.

‘At them!’ shouted d’Herblay. But Fra Peter had chosen an alley, not the street itself. The sacrifice of our dignity gained us ten valuable steps on our enemies, and their horses only hampered them in the press.

At the base of the steps, I saw that Fra Peter was already running – in full armour, carrying a grown man – to the left into an alley, as I said, the Rue des Mons. The two priests followed, and then Juan and Fiore and the nun. I paused and looked back, ready to make a fight at the narrow mouth of the side street.

D’Herblay was coming.

I drew my sword. Father Pierre was no longer there to stop me.

The alley was so narrow that only one horseman could pass and that with his head brushing the overhanging houses. And d’Herblay’s posture and his seat on the horse betrayed that he did not want to enter the alley first. He and another man jostled for position at the mouth of the alley, where the old palace gates had been forty years before.

I stood, my heart beating like a troubadour playing a fast dance. But I had my sword on my hip – Fiore’s
dente di cinghiale.

But d’Herblay reined in. He shouted something. I’m sure it was an insult, but I didn’t care. He didn’t dare face me.

There was no further pursuit – and the Savoyard bishop was still watching us.

As a group we were deeply shaken. Violence can impart a dangerous air of unreality to events, and the demonic – and I use that term deliberately, messires, for the nature of Camus’s outbursts shook even the gentle Father Pierre.

Our Italian priest returned to the papal palace, escorted by Juan, to deliver a strongly worded protest that was written by Fra Peter. Father Pierre was already moving on to other things: to the revolt on Crete, which remained his see, and to his duties as papal legate. In an hour, he was a functioning prelate again.

I found it hard to breathe. The nun, Sister Marie, had her arm set in the hospital. I remember that part, because the Hospitaller cleared a ward for her, as if having a woman in the place might spread a contagion. But he also sent for sisters of his own order from their nearby house, and they came quickly, surrounding her with kindness.

I spent enough time with her to glean that she was not as shocked as one might expect from a Latin Secretary.

Fra Peter gathered us all in the chapel after vespers and we prayed together. The shock of the open violence so close to what we all thought of as ‘home’ didn’t wear off immediately.

It was almost midnight before Fra di Heredia arrived from the palace. I was not included in whatever he discussed with Fra Peter.

But it didn’t matter, because the crusade was a reality. We were going. And with the Bourc’s threats ringing in our ears, it appeared we were leaving immediately.

I need to remind you that, whatever his reservations about the crusade, the Pope had sent men, trusted men, all over France and Italy, summoning the routiers and the men of the Free Companies to save their souls by going on crusade. It was said that the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole, with whom I served before Brignais, was to gather the men who would serve, and lead them over the Alps to Venice. Sir Walter Leslie and his brother Norman, who were both famous knights and sometime mercenaries, were gathering men-at-arms in Italy. If the crusade was a charade, at the very least many powerful men hoped that the Holy Land would draw the Free Companies from France and Italy the way a leech draws poison from a wound.

The crusade was to depart from two ports, Genoa and Venice, both of which were being forced to cooperate each with the other. In fact, each of those cities hated the other far more than they hated the Turk; each city, in fact, sought only the best trade status with the very
paynim
we were going to fight. But let me add that of the two, Genoa was virtually allied with the Saracens of Egypt.

Hah! Messire Froissart, I know you have met Peter of Cyprus, and I know you wish for me to get to the meat of my tale: the fighting, the chivalry. But in truth, the tale is how anyone came to fight, and not the fight itself. Let me say this much without the spoiling of my story: I am not sure that the old French Pope ever intended the crusade to march, although I think Urban wanted it, and I’m damned sure that neither Genoa nor her arch-rival Venice intended a real blow to be struck. I’m reasonably sure that none of the routiers in France and Italy ever truly intended to save their souls and become crusaders, and I can attest to the desperate reality that not a single king of Christendom, save one, intended a blow to be struck, whatever they promised.

It was all lies and half-promises and empty titles and silk flags.

Listen, then. Sometimes, as Father Pierre used to say, Christ works in mysterious ways.

It is a flaw of the deeply self-interested men of the world that they assume that idealists are fools.

Father Pierre – I will keep calling him that, as he was always ‘Pater’ to us – moved like lightning when he moved. The Pope had appointed him to a dozen offices and given him various sources of income to enable him to gather the crusade. Whatever the Pope’s real intentions, Father Pierre gathered his household and all the knights and volunteers of the Order who were in Avignon and led them to Italy. Less than two days passed after his appointment, and we were on the road with twenty men-at-arms and his whole household staff. To my shame, I barely had the courtesy to pay Anne a farewell visit.

Listen, it is not all war, the life of arms. Eh? I owed her better than a casual goodbye in an inn yard. As events proved, I’d have done better, far better, to have slunk away without a farewell, but I betook me to the inn and called her, and told her I was away on crusade.

She looked at me, yawning. And smiled her half-smile. ‘
Eh bien
,’ she said. ‘Some day you will come back here, too fine to speak to me.’ She turned her head away.

Love … love is a powerful force, but sometimes, plain liking is the easier emotion to distinguish.

‘Don’t be like that,’ I said, somewhat pettishly. ‘I’m a donat of the Order. I’ll be back.’

She smiled a false smile. ‘And your lady … will she approve of me? Like your priest and your knight approve of me?’

I hadn’t really thought of Emile in a month. The word ‘lady’ was like a blow. And of course, Anne was only guessing, with the unerring instinct of the young woman.

‘I don’t even know why you came to say goodbye, monsieur,’ she said, casting her eyes down. ‘I suspect I’m little more than a whore to you.’ She looked at me with something of her usual twinkle. ‘A badly paid whore, an unpaid spy. I have work to do.’

I hadn’t even brought her a present. I walked quickly into the street of jewellers and bought her a good cross with an emerald, and the booksellers were only just opening their stalls. It was a lovely summer day in Avignon, and sin made me think of my sister, and I spent far too much money, almost all my available gold and silver, on a fine copy of
Cyurgia
by the Pope’s doctor. The bookseller said it was new, the latest scholarship. He didn’t have a plain copy, so I paid for a small illustrated one, with drawings in blue ink and scrollwork in the margins and some magnificent capitals.

Then I went back towards the inn. At some point, I began to wonder if I had been followed – I saw the same scraggly ginger beard for the third time since leaving Anne. I was cautious, and when I came to the fountain at the Place de Saints, I paused to drink water and wash my hands, and saw a boy that I had seen several times before.

I should not have gone back to the inn, but I misunderstood the threat. I found Anne washing tables.

‘Anne,’ I said.

‘Go away! I’m working,’ she said.

‘I brought you a present,’ I said.

She turned and her scorn was palpable. ‘So that I can be a whore in truth, monsieur?’

She went back to washing the wooden table. The limp-haired innkeeper came down and leered at me, which did nothing to improve my mood.

I didn’t like him listening from the common room, either.

‘Run along on your crusade,’ she said. ‘You’ll make me lose my place.’

‘I
like
you!’ I protested. ‘Please, ask the innkeeper, and I will take you to Father Pierre.’