The Long Sword (16 page)

Fiore trotted up by my side. ‘Helmet?’ he asked, and handed me my bassinet.

He covered me while I dropped it on my head.

‘Caitiff! Coward! You killed his horse!’ shouted another man, who I remember as the Knight of Coins.

Nerio reined in on my other side. ‘I couldn’t let Liberi have all the fun,’ he said.

Liberi frowned. ‘I don’t need you to defeat these riff-raff,’ he said.

‘Could you two save the fight for the enemy?’ I muttered.

We charged them.

I can seldom remember a fight that I enjoyed so much. We were better; simply, better men. Better trained. I think the best moment of the fight was that I hit my opponent squarely on his shield, having deceived his lance, and I rocked him flat across his crupper, so that his feet came up in his stirrups, and Liberi caught one going by and threw him to the street as if he’d planned this little manoeuvre all his life.

Truly, the only thing better than being a good knight is being one of a team of good knights. To have comrades …

Nerio, who was a fine jouster, put his man down, horse and all. Then his horse kicked the downed man. Their superior horses and armour were of no importance, and in seconds they were all lying in the dung-streaked stones of the square while Fiore collected their horses.

I rode straight to their squires and pages, who scattered. I shamelessly ripped through their pack horses, and I tipped a leather bag full of wallets into the muck, looking for letters, but I found nothing.

Nerio curled a lip in distaste. ‘Is this your mercenary’s chivalry?’ he asked.

‘I want to know if they are hired men,’ I said. ‘They are French knights and they attacked my squire. I suspect they are not what they appear.’

‘Oho!’ exclaimed Nerio, or words to that effect. ‘This is more like Florence than I had expected.’

Then I checked on Marc-Antonio. He was deeply unconscious, and already had an egg on his head big enough for a duck. I got him over his horse, and Fiore had all the knight’s destriers.

‘Right of arms,’ I called at the squires of my adversaries.

Nerio was for staying, perhaps to see if any of the downed knights was dead or needed a doctor.

‘Let’s move, before someone appears with a crossbow,’ I said.

Two days later I wished that I’d ignored Nerio’s aristocratic ways and scooped the purses out of the muck. Three destriers cost the earth and the moon to feed, and they were eating our travel money. However, they were beautiful horses, far better than those Fiore or I would usually have owned or ridden. We’d left our warhorses back in Venice – a perfectly sensible decision, given the cost of maintaining a warhorse on the road. Unless you have to fight, the warhorse is a useless mouth that consumes money.

We continued to speculate on who our late adversaries might have been, and then rode hard for Prague, crossing some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen – as rich as northern Italy. It was August, and the crops were coming; peasants stood in their fields, sickles in hand, to watch us pass their grain fields, which stretched away like a golden promise of heaven in the red light of the setting sun. Beautiful young women, the better for a sheen of sweat, wiped their faces and curtsied even as their fathers and mothers closed in on them protectively; indeed, some lay down and hid at the edge of the road so that we wouldn’t see them, but we were old soldiers and we knew where to look.

What we couldn’t fail to see was the lack of war. There were no burned towns and no crowds of starving beggars. Twice we passed roadside gibbets with men rotting in chains, but we never saw the tell-tales of regular banditry – sly informers, churned earth and heavy horse droppings on the roads like those left by a military column, columns of smoke on the horizon. Fire is the hoof print of brigandage.

Marc-Antonio took two days to recover, and then he was sick on horseback for two more and had real trouble speaking, so that I despaired of his wits. But by the sixth day from Nuremberg, he had again begun his litany of complaints in passable French, and devastating Italian. His riding improved drastically, and it appeared to us that the blow to his head had made him a better rider – a joke that didn’t appeal to him for some reason.

At the very edge of Bohemia we were robbed in an inn, and all our purses taken. That was when Marc-Antonio’s talents began to be seen; he had our travel purse under his pillow, and thanks to his preserving it, we weren’t wrecked. Nerio was mortified to have no money of his own, and tried in every village to cash a bill on the family bank, but in Bohemia, at least in the forest, no one had ever heard of the Acciaioli and their bank, or indeed even of Florence.

But
par dieu
, my friends, the women of Bohemia are beautiful, tall and honey haired and deep-breasted. Nor are the men any the less handsome, and the knights we saw there were big men, skilled in arms.

We arrived in Prague in late afternoon, and as the next day was the Sabbath, we went to church in the magnificent cathedrals. We knew within an hour of entering the city that the Emperor was not there, and my heart sank within me. But our letters from Father Pierre and the Pope gained me admittance at the castle, and the chamberlain, as I think he was, told me that the Emperor and the King of Cyprus had gone east to visit the King of Poland and the King of Hungary and to hold a great tournament at Krakow, in Poland and we would find him there.

As we travelled east in Bohemia the weather grew cooler and the harvest was more advanced, but the women were not any the less beautiful and the grain was like a shower of gold on the land, the very manna God promised the Israelites. The land grew flatter and flatter until we were riding across the steppes that I had heard described by Fra Peter and by other knights who had fought against the Prussians: Jean de Grailly and the Lord of the Pyrenees, Gaston de Foix. It is one thing to hear traveller’s tales, even from a courteous knight, of how flat the land of the east can be, but it is another thing to see it for yourself.

On the plains, there were no inns and few farms, and while we saw herds in the distance more than once, we were not accosted, but neither were we hosted and feasted, and we ran low on food and had to hunt antelope. Our spear throwing was up to the challenge, and I spent a happy afternoon teaching my squire to lay a snare and take a rabbit. And to cook it.

I cannot remember if I stopped to consider that I was riding across the world on a feckless errand to find the commander of a crusade that might never happen. Or why a commander would ride away from his crusade. I suspect I thought about it, but I was young enough to enjoy the adventure that was offered to me, and that day, that month, that summer, I was offered the steppes and the antelope, the golden wheat, and the matching hair of the lovely maidens of Poland and Bohemia.

We had been a month and more on the road when the spires of Krakow came into sight on the horizon, and such is the flatness of the ground that we had a full day’s ride ahead of us yet, and we lay a night in the Monastery of Saint Nicolas, well out in the country. But the abbot put us immediately at our ease and told us that our quest was fulfilled, and that both the Emperor and the King of Cyprus were at Krakow, preparing a great tournament with all the best Knights of the Empire and Poland.

The abbot was a talkative man, with excellent Latin, our only common tongue, and he told us a great deal about what had transpired, and very little of it to the credit of the Emperor. If the abbot was to be believed, the Emperor had no interest whatsoever in a crusade, but was far too politic to say so, and was holding a tournament to allow King Peter to recruit knights – but Nerio, whose Latin was as much above mine as my swordsmanship was above Marc-Antonio’s, came away with the impression that the Emperor’s hospitality was wearing thin, and that the Cypriotes were expensive and perhaps troublesome guests for the people of Krakow. I remembered that Nan had told me when I was in London that the guilds had given a feast of four kings – the King of France, the King of England, the King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the King of Scotland – and how much it had cost the guilds and the alderman of the city.

When Nan told the story, I had been more interested in her, and her face, than in her tale. I had no idea, then, that I would meet Peter of Cyprus.

Any road, the last few leagues, I was as careful as I could be; I saw enemies behind every fence post and inn sign, and my hand was always on my sword and my purse, but looking back, I think we outrode our adversaries, if indeed Robert of Geneva
had
sent more than the one team of knights. So despite my caution, or perhaps because of it, eventually we reached the inn that bore the arms of the King of Cyprus, and several other blazons across the front.

We dismounted. It was evening, and the sun shining in long rays through the dust. In Krakow, and indeed all of Poland, the greater portion of the buildings are constructed of logs and wood, and the great inn was no different, although it smelled like any other inn from London’s Southwark to Verona; that indefinable air of hospitality and good beer and flees.

We’d crossed half the world to get there, or so it seemed, and then we stood in the street while Marc-Antonio held our horses, straightening our clothes and sorting out all the packets of letters. The Emperor was in the castle and would have to wait for another day.

We paused to wipe off the dust. Nerio’s squire, Alessandro, produced a brush and did his best. I was wearing a peasant’s cote over my red surcoat, to protect it from the dust, and I stripped it off. Fiore emulated me, and Nerio looked meaningfully at our pack horse where we had good clothes. Italian clothes.

Marc-Antonio shrugged. ‘It will take an hour!’ he whined.

Whine or not, I knew he was right. ‘Very well,’ I said, or something equally masterful.

Brushed and combed and still smelling strongly of horse, we walked up the steps, past the porch that was packed with cut firewood, and entered through the great front doors that were pinned back, wide enough for a wagon and team to ride through. A door ward looked us over and made a face.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked. He pointed mutely at my sword, and I unbuckled it off my heavy plaque belt. Fiore did the same, and then Nerio.

Nerio’s sword was one of the finest riding swords I’d ever seen, all blue and gold with a heavy gold pommel that held a saint’s relic, or so it was said. The door ward’s eyes all but popped. He bowed to Nerio again, thus instantly reinforcing my desire to own the very best sword money could buy. Swords command many kinds of respect.

I tried to offer my papers, but the door ward merely bowed silently and indicated the inner door.

We went into the inn and found the King of Cyprus and all his court inside. There were twenty knights there, and as many noble squires, all dressed in the latest Italian modes, with tulip-throated pourpoints and collared shirts as if every one of them was Ser Nerio or Ser Niccolò.

Every head turned to look at us.

A handsome man in white and silver approached us from the right.

‘By what right do you enter our lodging?’ he asked.

I bowed and again offered my papers. ‘My lord, I am a courier carrying letters for the King of Cyprus,’ I said.

The man in white and silver frowned. ‘You are not dressed for court,’ he said.

By that time, my eyes had become accustomed to the light of the interior. The walls were whitewashed, the ceilings were high, even to the rafters, and two great fireplaces lit what, in England, would have been an old-fashioned great hall of logs rather than stone. The heads of deer and elk and bear studded the walls, with tapestries nearly black with age and a magnificent reliquary in silver and gold with jewels that had to have been the property of the king, because it was too rich for any tavern.

Between the fireplaces was a great chair with a beautiful fur of shining black sable hanging over it like a quilt, and sitting on the fur was a young man, not much older than me, in a cloth of gold jupon and hose of red with pearls in the shape of swans as embellishment. He was frowning, playing with a child’s toy of a stick and a ball connected by a string.

He caught my eye. And rose with the sort of athletic fluidity that Fiore has, and Fra Peter. I strive for it: it is he mark of a great man-at-arms.

He moved like a greyhound, all long legs and stride. And he moved with purpose, crossing the great hall in ten paces, and his courtiers moved out of his way. He threw the ball-and-stick toy at one of them and the man caught it.

No one needed to tell me that this was Peter de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, King of Jerusalem. Men said he was the best lance in the West; the best knight in Christendom.

I went down on one knee.

Nerio and Liberi emulated me.

‘De Tenoury, tell these three that I am prepared to imagine that they are here on important business,’ the king said. ‘But to enter my presence dressed as peasants is to dishonour their master, whomever he might be, and me as well.’ He all but spat. ‘I’ve had enough of being humiliated today.’

Silver and white leaned over me. ‘You heard his Grace,’ he said. ‘Come back when you are properly dressed. Or come in by the servant’s entrance.’

I was well trained – the order drills etiquette as well as all the other knightly skills. So I kept my head bowed, but I growled, ‘I am a knight and a servant of the Order of St John and I am here with messages from the legate and the Pope.’

The king bit his lip and looked at an older man in blue and red standing near him. When I say older, this gentleman was perhaps forty, with grey in his blond hair and lines on his face. His blue eyes flashed over me.

‘If your Grace wishes to order these men away, of course he may,’ the man said.

‘But, de Mézzieres? My faithful pilgrim? Always, your voice has that hint of censure. Please, share with us the nature of our failings.’ The king’s voice rose and fell a little more than was necessary.

De Mézzières bowed. ‘Your Grace, it is not my place to put any censure on your royal head. Yet …’

‘Yet?’ asked the king, and there was an obvious warning in his voice.