The Long Sword (31 page)

I unlaced my own and the nun sat down and turned it over. She wrinkled her nose, but smiled, and I imagined her as someone’s sister.

‘You wish a line of gold edging the cross, perhaps?’ she asked.

‘It is for his formal knighting,’ I said.

Emile came in through a barred door. I felt her enter the room, turned, and bowed.

‘So,’ she said. With the smile for which I would die.

She was happy I had come. What more did I need to know?

‘Are you the same size?’ my nun asked. ‘Oh, my lady countess, I did not mean to intrude.’

I grinned – Emile was so prettily confused. ‘Countess, this pearl among Christ’s brides thinks that she and her sisters might solve my pressing duty to have a surcoat made for my friend’s knighting.’ Emboldened, I said, ‘It is on Christmas Eve, at Saint Mark’s. You should attend!’

Emile laughed. ‘Indeed, my people would accept an invitation from Satan to get off this island, although we have been treated with every courtesy.’

I produced the doll. She
pounced.

‘You didn’t forget!’

I confessed. ‘I did forget, madonna. My lord sent me on a mission, and it is only this morning that I found this. But I came as soon as I could.’

She wasn’t listening. She swept out, and there were peals of laughter, giggles, a shriek!

And then nothing for so long that I feared that I had lost her again. I filled the time explaining to the sister that yes, I was very much of a size with Juan.

She went out and came back with an older woman.

‘For the Order of St John?’ she asked. Her voice was flat, and a little shrill.

‘Yes, my lady,’ I said in my best Italian.

She unbent a little. ‘This is an impossible task, but all my little reprobates love a knight. Very well. Thirty ducats in a single donation on completion, and ten for me to dispense as I see fit.’

A month’s rent. But I had no choice; it was cheaper than some of the tailors.

‘We’ll have to keep this,’ the older lady said, holding up my surcoat. She sniffed. ‘Perhaps we’ll return it clean.’

Emile came back with Magdalene at her apron strings, clutching the doll. The little girl wouldn’t meet my eyes and kept turning away, but she managed to mumble her thanks for ‘Lady Guinevere’ very prettily. I bowed my very best bow to a lady.

Then I made bold enough to meet her mother’s eye. ‘May I expect
you on Christmas Eve, Countess?’ I asked.

She half-smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She looked at me with a little of her old self. ‘We are so
very
busy
.
’

Strong in the knowledge that I had saved Juan’s knighting, I helped my gondolier to pull over the choppy water of the lagoon. There was rain, a cold rain, with a little sleep mixed in.

I came back to my cramped rooms by the fish market to find Juan on the wooden steps with a young Moslem girl in a red shawl – a slave-prostitute of the kind favoured by the gangs that ran the waterfront brothels and wine-houses for foreign sailors. Behind them on the steps was Marc Antonio, wearing a heavy cloak.

He read my expression and bridled. ‘I’m a grown man and can sin as I like,’ he said. His voice was thick with angry wine.

‘Where did you get her?’ I asked.

He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I …’

Marc-Antonio’s eyes gave him away.

I turned on him. ‘You? You went and bought—’

Juan shoved the girl down the steps and put a hand on his sword. ‘I will take no moralising from you, Sir William. You have a doxy in every town.’

‘You’ve paid her?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Juan’s cheeks flushed. ‘Of course I’ve paid!’

I turned to the girl. ‘Run along, now,’ I said, and she bolted.

‘You fucking hypocrite,’ Juan said. He said more, in Spanish, about my affair with a notorious married woman.

Nerio, called forth from his den – he paid the most, and in return he’d arranged for our room to be divided by panels so that he could have his own snug chamber – stood in his shirt and hose on the landing. ‘Can you children be a little less noisy?’ he asked. ‘Juan, come back to your party!’

‘I was
taking my ease
with my friend—’ Juan said.

‘He arranged to have my squire buy him a strumpet on the docks,’ I said. ‘Juan …’ I thought of a thousand things to say: about the life of a Moslem slave in Venice, about women, about prostitutes.

Nerio laughed. ‘For a fornicating adventurer, William has a fine sense of moral outrage.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow at me. Juan brightened, and Nerio turned on him, ‘But gentlemen – at least, gentlemen in Italy – do not hand over coin for access to a whore. At least, not in such a way as their friends can mock them for it.’

Juan, caught between us on the steps – it was almost like one of Dante’s poems – looked up and down, and his rage returned. ‘You have some bitch in your room this minute!’ he spat at Nerio. His use of language, the way he spoke – he was very drunk. I’d never seen the younger Spaniard as a man dedicated to any of his appetites and I’m not sure I’d ever heard him use foul language. He lived like a monk and his piety was proverbial, even if he was less a priest in armour than Miles.

‘How long have you all been drinking?’ I asked.

‘You thought we’d wait for you?’ Juan snapped. ‘I assumed you’d be stuffing your baggage all night.’ He looked back at Nerio. ‘You are all the same!’ he shouted. ‘Liars and hypocrites!’

Nerio laughed. ‘But mine is not paid, and comes there of her own free will, my dear
caballero
, and if you call her further names, I will be forced to—’

Fiore appeared behind Nerio and said something which included the words ‘not helping’.

Nerio winced and withdrew, and Fiore came down the stairs. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s take Juan out for a walk.’ He looked at me. ‘Can’t you tell something is wrong?’

This from a man who thought that swordplay was a form of human communication.

We walked most of the way around Venice that night, and discovered nothing except that Juan was very unhappy, and in some ways very naive.

‘You all have your loves,’ he said. ‘I have nothing. And no one.’

He had been quite smitten with a girl in the company the year before, but the plague had taken her. I didn’t think of Juan as inexperienced; he had been a year or more with the companies, and two years with the order. But before that, he’d been raised mostly by religion, and as we slopped our way from bridge to bridge in the icy rain and fog of a Venetian winter night, I heard a great deal about growing to manhood in a Spanish monastery.

Ascetic monks, fanatical monks, and sexually predatory monks in equal doses; an automatic hatred of all things Moslem, and a healthy dose of pride and the fear of his true parentage, his bastardy – itself a sin.

I had known him eighteen months, and I truly had no idea. Until that night, he had always seemed young, courteous, a fine blade and a virtuous man. But the thin ice of virtue sat atop a steaming pile of dung: mistreatment, abuse, and two busy, arrogant parents pursuing worldly careers – a knight of the order and an abbess, neither interested in acknowledging a child.

Fiore proved himself as a friend that night, not that he needed to prove himself to me. But he listened, and in the end it was our ability to listen rather than speak that measured our friendship and worked what healing there was. Juan vomited his childhood like a man spewing bad wine, and we listened.

‘‘I’m not fit to be a knight,’ he said in the grim first light of day. A tailless cat rubbed against our boots, sensing a trio of soft touches who might provide food.

Aha
I thought. At last we are to the essential wound. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. He was sobering up. ‘No one is
worthy
of knighthood. Think of all the bad men who are priests.’

Juan looked at Fiore.

Fiore looked at me.

‘None of us is Galahad,’ I said, all too conscious that I had just returned from a day spent with Emile.

‘I am afraid, all the time!’ Juan said.

‘So am I,’ I said.

Fiore looked at me across the back of Juan’s head and raised his eyebrows. Well, I suspect that Fiore was so very much himself that he was
not
afraid most of the time.

We walked Juan around and fed him a little more wine, and by the time the cocks were crowing on the islands, we undressed him and put him in bed.

Nerio had one of the grocer’s daughters in his room, I discovered, and she emerged, shy but triumphant, to display her cooking skills.

Triumphant, and certain her mother would never catch her.

Nerio grinned with masculine accomplishment. Anna was, in fact, very pretty, with a round face and dark curls that were, I think, genuine and not the product of fiddling with an iron, and they had certainly survived a night’s athletic entertainment with Nerio.

She began to heat milk for us to break our fasts, and Nerio and Fiore sat with Miles at the table. Miles looked distant, as if he was pretending not to be there at all. Fiore was untroubled. He was repairing a shirt.

Nerio had eyes only for the shape of his conquest, and she was shapely, and delighted enough, or simply appalled enough, at her new role to carry off the part: she was naked under a single shift, and most of her was on display.

‘You made him drunk,’ I said, with a nod to the cot where Juan tossed and snored.

‘We promised him a festivity,’ Nerio said. ‘We are soldiers, not monks.’

I looked at Miles. ‘Well?’ I asked.

His eyes were large. ‘I – that is – my lord—’

Nerio laughed. ‘You are all such children!’ he said. ‘Life is for living.
Carpe diem.
If the next lance stroke goes through my visor, I want to have sported every maiden in Venice – in Italy! What use is chastity to a corpse?’ He looked at me. ‘Eh? William?’

‘When he confesses all this to Father Pierre,’ I said. It was a weak thing to say, I admit.

Nerio shook his head. ‘A fine man, but you fear him too much. Let him live a life of chastity if he will.’ He smiled at me.

‘
Par dieu
, brothers!’ I said. ‘In a few weeks, we’ll be going on crusade! To Jerusalem!’

Nerio licked his lips. ‘I’m quite sure there will be women there, as well,’ he said.

Later that day, or perhaps the next, but still with a disturbed and unclean spirit, I went to the Doge’s palace to meet with Fra Peter. I feared the summons was about Juan, but I was mostly incorrect.

‘Father Pierre is going to Genoa,’ he announced.

‘In the winter?’ I asked, and probably blasphemed.

‘Now that the King of Cyprus is here – and he’s been asking for you, William – Father Pierre feels free to try to move Venice on the matter of war with Cyprus. I must be here, to help the king with the men-at-arms – those who are left.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you have a few thousand ducats lying about that you could loan me, William? If I could make even the smallest of payments to our “crusaders”, I could hold this army together. We don’t have the great nobles that we expected. Indeed, the Green Count has obviously decided to spurn us and go his own way: he’s raising his vassals, but not for us.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘All we get is his useless cousin, the Count of Turenne.’ He looked at me – a look I knew meant trouble. ‘And we hear we are to be graced with the Count d’Herblay.’

I thought of them – both from Geneva, both cousins of Robert the Bishop. I hadn’t considered that such obvious enemies would be travelling with us – fighting beside us. I entertained Fra Peter for a quarter of an hour with my thoughts on the alignment of that bishop and the party in the church that had been Talleyrand’s. I thought of having d’Herblay with us and something in me just … broke.

Fra Peter tugged his beard, sent for wine, and heard me out.

‘This is all your own?’ he asked. I suppose my tirade was emotional.

It is a great pleasure to be flattered by your mentor, and his response was flattering. He was taking me seriously.

I shook my head. ‘A great deal of it is from Fra Juan di Heredia.’

Fra Peter’s face altered. His pleasure in my explanation evaporated, and he frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You like him?’

I shrugged. ‘Yes, my lord, I do like him, although he is a difficult man. He helped me in a – a personal matter. And he is absolutely loyal to Father Pierre.’

I heard his sandals before I saw him, and suddenly Father Pierre was there, gliding into another of the beautiful camp chairs. ‘But William, I need no man’s loyalty. I am not a secular lord. I do not request or require your commitment or Fra di Heredia’s to anyone but the Saviour and the Church. The rest is mere vanity.’

I understood what he said, and yet, in a way that is difficult to explain, I thought it was likely that Fra Peter and Father Pierre, two of the men I loved and trusted most in the world, were fools, and Fra Juan, who I suspected was as venal and ambitious as the Bishop of Geneva, was a man like me: a man who could accomplish a goal. For good or ill.

Father Pierre was still talking, explaining to Fra Peter that the Venetians would not rent a single ship, by last year’s terms or any others, to the King of Cyprus while Genoa threatened war.

Fra Peter stretched his booted feet towards the fire and leaned back. ‘William has just favoured me with an explanation of events which would stretch to fit the Genoese business.’

For the second time in an hour, I found myself explaining Robert of Geneva’s role in Avignon, and his family stake in the bishopric of Geneva and the papacy and the crusade.

‘Genoa is a pawn of France,’ Fra Peter said.

‘France
and
Egypt,’ Father Pierre said. He looked at me, and his eyes told me that he had read my thought, and that his love of man included an understanding of how much the animal man could be. ‘Imagine: a hundred years ago, Saint Louis led a crusade to Cairo, but now the King of France conspires with the Sultan in Cairo to stop a crusade.’

I looked at my feet and ran my fingers though my hair. ‘Does the King of France even know what’s afoot?’ I asked.

Fra Peter looked at me, then the fire. ‘Probably not; it is enough for him to get a Frenchman as the next Pope. He won’t trouble himself about the ways and means.’