The Ill-Made Knight (65 page)

I remember thinking, with the old ways of a routier coming back, that it was the richest country I’d ever seen – even in winter.

We rode to the gates of Milan. Milan is a magnificent city, and should, you’d think, have been well-defended. It’s well-walled, but the lords thereof are tyrants – I’ve fought for and against them, and I know whereof I speak. So they have a fortified palace inside the city to defend against their own citizens, and fortress walls to keep the likes of me out.

Our orders were exact and our discipline was excellent. We were to rob and burn our way to the gates, killing as few men as possible and outraging no women. Sterz summoned all the leading men on the night before we raided Milan, and stood by his camp table.

‘What we want is to force Visconti to make peace,’ he said. ‘What we
do not want
is a lot of enraged Milanese demanding further war. Murder and rape won’t get you a florin, lads. Rob them, burn them out, push their sorry arses into the walls. That’s all it will take.’ He smiled.

Sir John nodded. ‘Enough angry Milanese inside his walls,’ he said, ‘and Galleazzo might find himself overthrown.’

We had assignments and guides – towns, monastries, fortified houses. Mine was written out, and I had a Milanese exile, a bitter old man named Bernabo Pieto. He led me through the cold winter’s night, and we stormed a house full of soldiers – killed a couple, took the rest, and turned the noble family out into the cold, stripped of jewels and gold.

By morning, we’d struck to the very gates and posted the Pope’s demands there; we had twenty senior Milanese officials to ransom and we hadn’t lost a man. Milan did nothing in response – Galeazzo cowered in his palace and let his countryside burn.

If I felt a trifle dirty from the rampage, I had 300 florins in gold from my share.

He might have been slow on the battlefield, but he was quick enough, politically. Galeazzo reacted by hiring the most famous mercenary in Italy – the German captain, Konrad von Landau. That is, he was famous, but we’d never heard of him.

He brought a great company of German lances – almost 4,000. He arrived in early March, and drove us back into the hills – or perhaps Albert Sterz had always meant to retire. Certainly there was no haste to our movements.

Sterz was a good officer, but a harsh disciplinarian. When we camped, he would punish men for fouling the streets outside their tents – sensible, I confess, but not a way to win an archer’s love. He never hesitated to apply punishments, and we had the impression that not only did he like to order punishment, he liked to see it carried out, too. Some men get drunk on authority. Sterz wasn’t one of them. He merely liked the taste.

A company of Hungarians joined the Germans. Most of us had never seen a Hungarian, but we heard they had bows which they could shoot from horseback. The archers shook their heads and said they must be puny things that couldn’t penetrate armour, and the handful of men who had fought the Turks said it was all horse shit.

All the fears and angers of the days before battle.

We were badly outnumbered, but we were confident. It worried me, the casual arrogance of the English.

We had a steady stream of Milanese ambassadors coming into our camp. I became the officer responsible for meeting them and bringing them to Sir Albert, because of my good manners and genteel air. They were really emissaries, often accompanied by heralds with all the trappings of chivalry, yet they came to spy. Their intention was to count our archers and look at our entrenchments and the shape of our camp.

So we greeted them each day with the same ten lances – mine – in full armour, and we rode them into our camp by different routes. This amused us more each day. One day, I showed them men-at-arms practising on horseback in groups of 100; the whole was an elaborate stage show, like a passion play, staged by Sir John. The next day they rode through an empty camp – the army, right down to our whores, was behind the next ridge.

And I was present as the Milanese offered Sir Albert and Sir John ever more elaborate bribes. I was even offered one myself.

After a week of this, I was with Sir John after we escorted a particularly unctuous Milanese churchman back to the Milanese lines. When he was gone, I turned to Sir John. ‘If the French had offered us 20,000 florins to retreat the night before Brignais,’ I said, ‘Mechin would have taken it, split it with a half-dozen captains and ridden away.’

Sir John nodded. He had a hint of red to his beard and moustache, and I had seldom seen him look so much like a fox. ‘That was a different
empris,’
he said. ‘We had too many Gascons. Too many brigands.’ He shrugged. ‘Here, we are professional soldiers, and we have some faith in each other. I’m sure Albert would ride away and abandon the Pope for enough money.’ His eyes twinkled. ‘I would myself. A hundred thousand florins?’

‘
Par dieu
!’ I said, shocked. That was a King’s ransom. Swearing was returning to my vocabulary.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The world is changing, William. If we were someone’s army – your friend the Green Count’s, for example – and the Visconti offered him twenty thousand florins to go away, why, he’d take it. Twenty thousand florins is a fortune.’ He nodded. ‘But in our army, a
hundred
thousand florins is still only forty florins for each man-at-arms.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s one month’s pay – not enough to break the contract. It only makes it less likely the next bastard won’t hire you, or play fair on the
condotta
.’

Condotta
was the first word every Englishman learned in Italy. It means ‘contract’.

Sir John reined in and looked back at the Milanese camp – the German and Hungarian camp. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘this is the richest country in the world. The banks are here, William. All the money comes here from all over Christendom.’ He watched as fires sprang into being, like the rising of the evening stars. My little company passed behind us, harness rattling.

‘In France, we took grain from peasants,’ he said as he turned and looked at me. ‘Before we’re done here, we’ll take the gold from the banks.’

The next morning, a Flemish merchant came over the passes behind us. He sent a pair of his men-at-arms to negotiate with Sterz, who charged tolls like a lord, of course.

Perkin led one of the patrols, and told me that evening that the merchant had 200 mules loaded with wool – a fortune – and another 100 loaded with goods meant for us.

‘Good English wool – undyed and white as virtue.’ He laughed. ‘And all the things we need: thread, bronze kettles, tin bottles, wool cloaks.’ He showed me his new water bottle.

The next day, the merchant opened a small fair in Romagnano. Now that we were back at our base in the Count of Savoy’s lands, I wondered how he was doing in his negotiations with the Pope.

I was slipping away from the life of a donat, and becoming an officer in a mercenary company.

At any rate, 2,000 lances of soldiers is a fair number of customers, and this man’s company had many things we wanted – razors, for one. Cups, Flemish cloaks, goatskin boots, pewter chargers.

His wool shipment was for the dyers of Florence, but fashions spring up very quickly among soldiers. Andrew Belmont, who was a devilishly handsome fellow, bought three cloth yards of white wool and a tailor threw him off a fine surcoat in an hour – it didn’t have to be lined, of course, because he wore it over his armour. The wool was beautiful and warm. A dozen of us saw him in his fine surcoat that evening – and laughed when he spilled red wine on it – and in the morning there were fifty of us, me included, in white surcoats. Three days after the Fleming arrived, he’d sold 4,000 cloth yards of his fine white wool.

Most soldiers can sew. I made my own coat; I hung my breast and backplate on a cross of wood and tailored the wool, coached by Perkin, who was working his own and teaching Fiore, while Juan emulated him from afar while pretending he wasn’t involved. We had to send a boy to buy shears – from the Fleming.

I dagged my sleeves. Hah! There was a rumour that Sir John Hawkwood had been an apprentice tailor in London – not true, on my honour – but we had some tailors, and they taught us, so we were all popinjays.

At any rate, we were still retreating – very slowly – before von Landau’s advance. But the same day the Fleming arrived, Sterz told the Milanese envoys that he saw no further point in their sending spies to his camp dressed as heralds – a mortal insult, even though the honest truth. And our German challenged their German to a contest of arms. He offered to meet von Landau on horse or foot, with lances, spears or swords – man to man, twenty against twenty, a hundred against a hundred, or army to army.

The very next morning, Konrad von Landau led his 12,000 men across two small streams and formed in close order by the castle of Canturino. We rode down the opposite ridge.

We were formed in six divisions and mine was commanded by Sir John. I had fifteen lances on the right flank of the centre battle.

I have some things to say that might matter to your account.

I was wearing the best armour I’d ever worn into a fight, and I was with better men then I’d ever had around me, except at Poitiers, and I didn’t know anything, then. I trusted the men on my right and my left; I trusted the man leading my battle, and I trusted the man leading the
battle
to the left and to the right. I trusted Albert Sterz.

I ate well the night before the fight, the week before and the month before and, in fact, most of the year before. I was in the best physical state of my life, and I had slept well. I prayed, and was shriven by a priest.

I had changed. The order had changed me. But at the same time, the whole world of the companies had changed. These men around me were not routiers. Like me, some had been, but in Italy, they were professional soldiers, and war was about to become an entirely different affair.

When you ride at the enemy on a good horse, in good armour, surrounded by your friends and well rested and fed – truly, lads, you have to be a coward to fight badly. Or a fool, which may be the same.

We were all afraid – the Germans outnumbered us – but not with a fear that paralyses, but with a fear that pushes you to strive harder.

We stared at each other across the stream for half an hour.

Sterz rode down our front. ‘Dismount!’ he called. We dismounted in a orderly way – the pages came forward, took the archers’ horses first, then the knights’ chargers, and there was, I confess, a moment of chaos as every man sought his place in the ranks. Then, like a sword going home in the scabbard, we were set, with only a few unhandy sods still pushing.

Front rank: knights and men-at-arms.

Second rank: armoured squires and pages.

Third rank: archers.

Fourth rank: men with less armour.

In my lance, I stood in front, armed cap-a-pied. Behind me stood a new man, Richard Grimlace, both of us with heavy-headed seven-foot spears. Then Sam Bibbo. Then Arnaud, in a good jack and brigantine, with a second quiver of arrows for Sam and a spear and a sword and buckler, a basinet on his head. We had 2,000 of these little units.

Sir John stayed mounted, and so did Sterz, Belmont and a few other officers.

Sterz trotted to our front and waved his baton. ‘Front!’ he roared. ‘Let’s go!’

We moved forward to the very edge of the stream.

It was fairly full of ice-cold water, and I remember staring down into the depths of the stream at my feet. It was, of course, a mountain stream, filling its stone banks to the brim.

There was a trout in it.

The old Romans lived by signs – animals, birds – I was reading Ovid by then.

That trout made me absurdly happy.

‘Ready!’ called Sterz.

All along the third rank, the archers nocked arrows. Heavy, quarter-pounder war-bow arrows.

Opposite us, the Germans were 100 paces away, sitting on their horses, listening to a trio of Germans address them.

I had a long look at the Hungarians. They were moving; their horses fidgeted.

I pointed them out to Sir John, who was sitting on his charger just behind Arnaud.

‘They’re not happy and they haven’t been paid,’ Sir John said with infinite satisfaction. ‘Watch and learn, William the Cook.’

‘Draw!’ called Sam Bibbo at my back. No one had named him master archer, but archers aren’t men-at-arms: they have strange, craftsmanlike notions of leadership. Sam was widely held to be the best bow, and that made him master archer.

When you see 2,000 war bows bent in earnest, it stops your heart. The white bows go down, swooping like hawks, then they rise as the archers bend them, like a great flock of birds turning and rising together, and at the top of their flight—

‘And
loose
!’

Two thousand shafts, loosed in the same breath.

They make a noise, like 100 nuns whispering at Mass.

‘Nock!’ Sam roared.

‘Draw! And loose!’

There were horses down all along the German ranks, and a few men. Germans don’t bard their horses like the French do.

Because unlike the French, they don’t fight us.

Horses scream.

‘Nock!’ Sam screamed. He was out of practice and his voice broke a little.

‘Draw! And loose!’ Another 500 pounds of steel and wood went off to meet the Germans. Every war arrow weighs almost a quarter of a London pound.

The trio of German officers were yelling at the top of their lungs – you could tell that from their posture. As I watched, one took a clothyard of ash under his arm, right through his body, and fell.

‘Nock!’ Sam called.

‘Draw!’ The only noise from the English was the muscular grunt of 2,000 men drawing their great bows together.

‘Loose!’

The Hungarians broke.

They turned and ran, their small, swift horses carrying them clear of the arrow fall. They were led by knights, who wavered longer, but the mounted archers were gone in as long as it takes to tell the story.

All 3,000 of them.

Sterz held up his baton.

Fingers reaching for shafts stopped, paused and reached instead for swords.