‘Is this how you lead your men?’ I asked. ‘With talk of sacks of meat?’
‘Is this how you lead your men? With pious crap about your fake god and your righteousness?’ he asked, his voice sing-song with contempt. ‘I kill, and I like it. I make men grovel, and I like it. I am strong, and they are weak. That’s all there is.’
‘You must be very popular at court,’ I said. ‘All the best parties …’
There are many moments when your life changes – when you change yourself, or someone changes you. That was one. It is, perhaps, difficult to explain, but something left me, and something entered. It was not that I was no longer afraid of Camus; he made me afraid every moment. But I was afraid that I was him – he had me down in that respect – not of him. I was afraid I was a pious hypocrite. You cannot kill men with a sword and not wonder. I knew what he meant; in many ways, we were very alike.
But I didn’t find him as … intimidating. I found his anger childish and his antics a little overdone. Perhaps Alexandria burned something away; perhaps two years with Pierre Thomas taught me something about good and evil. I had seen evil that rendered the Bourc Camus … banal.
‘You mock me!’ Camus spat. ‘I dream of killing you.’
I shrugged. I admit that my disdain was largely feigned, but just two years before I could not even have feigned it.
I said, ‘You dream of killing me? I don’t even think of you. Go away and plot, or whatever you do. I wish to pray.’
And then, in one of the bravest acts of my life, I turned my back on him. He had spittle flecking his lips and his eyes glittered and his hand was on his dagger, but I turned my back on him, raised my little paternoster, and knelt at the prie-dieu below the icon.
Pater noster qui es in caelis …
‘I will kill you,’ he said.
Sanctificetur nomen tuum
‘I will kill the people you love. All of them,’ he said. ‘Turn around!’ he shouted suddenly.
Adveniat regnum tuum
Fiat voluntas tua
Sicut in caelo et in terra …
‘You will turn around!’ he roared. He was very close. I could hear footsteps, but I was committed. It was curiously like the time I was kneeling and waiting to be recognised by Peter of Cyprus last year.
I finished my paternoster and began Ave Maria. A bead passed through my fingers. I realised I had started without a Credo, because I was, in fact, deeply afraid, but I went on anyway.
I could hear a man with a Venetian accent speaking insistently in French.
‘You are hiding behind the Doge,’ Camus said behind me. ‘You think I won’t kill you here, and that’s smart of you, isn’t it? But you have to leave here eventually, Gold, and I’ll find you. Or your nice little Greek boys, or your wife, or your children. I fucking hate you all.’
‘You must not speak this way, messire,’ said the equerry.
I went on praying.
‘I will get you,’ Camus said. ‘I will get you and strip away everything from you. Everything!’
‘I will report your behaviour to the Doge,’ said the equerry.
‘Go and tell him, little puppy,’ Camus snapped. ‘Tell him I pissed in the milk, too.’
‘You are absurd, messire,’ the equerry said. ‘I must ask you to leave.’
‘Or you will do what, pup? Lick me?’ Camus laughed his terrible high-pitched laugh.
Musard was near me. I could feel him; I knew his breathing. He spoke in good Venetian-accented Italian. ‘If you want him gone, I’ll be happy to help you move him.’
‘I have nothing against you, Darkie. Don’t cross me,’ Camus said. ‘Although I see you and Gold are butt-buddies again.’
‘You are a foul-mouthed fool, Camus,’ Musard said. ‘I am a knight, and you are a criminal. If I run you through right here, no one will complain about anything but cleaning the floor.’
‘Dream on,’ Camus said. ‘I am the captain of the Prince of Achaea. We will take your Green Count and make him nothing. My master will be Count of Savoy. And you can go back to sucking cocks in Avignon.’
As prayer, it was worthless; my mouth formed the words, but my entire attention was focused behind me, and I was ready to roll to the right and draw in a heartbeat. Yet I had decided to kneel and pray rather than engage in precisely this wordplay. Camus was mad – as mad as any inmate in Bedlam. And bad, right through. There was no point in talking with him.
I heard Richard’s indrawn breath. His hand had been on my shoulder and I felt it go to his dagger. As he was not a Knight of the Hospital, he didn’t have the right to wear a sword; no doubt his squire had it, further down the room.
I rose and turned, raising my paternoster.
Camus was surprised, and he backed a step, so that it appeared that he fell back before the image of the cross.
He stepped back into a huddle of his own people. He had flinched.
‘Fuck your God!’ he shouted.
I turned to the equerry. ‘He is mad. Forgive him.’
‘You know what comes next,’ he shouted. And then it was as if, between one breath and the next, someone else was in his head. ‘The jolly part.’ He nodded, suddenly calm. He bowed to the equerry. Then he leaned over to one of his liveried bravos and whispered in his ear, and the man bowed, clearly afraid – who could serve Camus and not fear him? But he turned and ran for the stairs.
‘I was going to kill him,’ Richard said. He was red with fury.
‘And that would have made trouble for your master. Our master.’ I smiled. I was feeling fairly confident, by then. And I was thinking of the next move. Whatever happened was going to be bad, I could tell. Thunder rolled in the south. I thought of the storm coming up the Lagoon, and the heavy rain, and the narrow streets.
The count thought that he had been summoned to the palace to discuss high policy with the Doge: Milan, the Pope, the Union of Churches. As it turned out, the Doge, Marco Cornaro, another member of the endless Corner clan, intended to affect a reconciliation between the prince and the count. Perhaps he had been bribed, although I find that difficult to imagine; instead, it seems to me probable that he didn’t know the depth of the quarrel.
Camus was standing there with his smile and his sudden accession of good humour, and I was just considering how vulnerable we were, when the candles seemed to flicker and there was a levin-flash that illuminated for a heartbeat the corners of Camus’s mad eyes. He turned, and the first crash of thunder hit. The panes of glass rattled; the walls vibrated. Then, as quick as thought, another flash, followed too closely by another peal of thunder, and a series of flashes off to the east, fast and bright orange, and a long snake of forked lightning visible in the sky through the upper windows of the chamber.
The doors to the Doge’s inner apartments opened.
‘I would ask you to reconsider, as a friend of Venice,’ Doge Marco Cornaro said. He was seventy-five or eighty years old, wearing a long gown edged in miniver, and he had a rod of office in his hand, but he was not wearing his cap of state.
I could tell at a glance that the count was angry – deeply angry.
‘Serenity,’ the count replied with a barely civil inclination of his head, ‘I beg to be excused. I wish to be back at my house before the rain hits.’
The Doge tried again. ‘If you would just allow me …’ he said.
‘This is not your business,’ the count said icily. ‘This importunate young man needs to submit his claims to my justice, not yours.’
‘I’m not your vassal, cousin,’ the prince said. He had a high-pitched voice – high without being melodious, so that it almost grated on the ear. ‘I cannot hope for a fair hearing in your courts; everyone knows how corrupt you are. His Serenity has graciously agreed to act as—’
‘His Serenity has no business whatsoever in the law courts of Savoy,’ the count said. �
�Your father made a will. You were not included in it.’
‘Because my mother died and my father married a whore, a low-born slut …’
The Doge froze, his face changing.
‘My father disinherited me because of that witch. I am the prince, not her little bastard …’ He smiled nastily. ‘Any woman like that is a witch and a whore.’
The Doge stepped back from the Prince of Achaea.
‘This is not the situation you described to me,’ the Doge said. Dignity and age failed to cloak anger.
Camus was standing his ground, and his bravos were all around him. But luck, and the prie-dieu, and perhaps God, had placed me nearer the doors to the Doge’s apartments, and I was virtually at the count’s shoulder.
‘Foolish old men lose their wits and marry smooth-skinned whores all the time,’ Prince Filippo spat in his contralto. ‘It is common knowledge.’
‘This audience is at an end,’ the Doge said suddenly. He turned, his face deeply flushed.
‘But can you not require him …’ Prince Filippo said. ‘Listen to me!’ he roared, when the Doge turned his back. ‘I paid for this meeting, God’s curse on you! Require him! Force him!’
With slow dignity, the Doge vanished into a crowd of his own officers and courtiers.
Lightning flashed, three pulses, and then thunder rattled the windows again, closer now. I could see, out of the south windows, the Lagoon beaten to a froth by the wind. I’d never seen anything like it, not even when I lay watching the Lagoon for a month, recovering from d’Herblay’s beating.
But the violence of the surface of the Lagoon was nothing compared to the prince’s face; his cheeks were mottled red and white, and the muscles of his mouth were moving like rollers on the deep. His right hand was spasming open and closed like a dying man’s hand. He was not privileged to wear a sword there, and it was as well, as that hand was looking for a sword hilt.
I took the count by the shoulder.
‘Now, my lord,’ I said sharply, and Roger, the page, threw the count’s cloak about him. We put ourselves between the count and Camus and moved to the head of the stairs, while Achaea stood stupefied and lightning flashed again. I passed Camus, so close that I could have touched him. In a levin-flash, his face was stark and white, and his eyes wide and glittering. He reached for his dagger. Perhaps he hesitated; perhaps I was faster. I didn’t go for my own, but for his, and I threw it towards the fireplace and backed to the head of the stairs. Thunder cracked, closer, and his words were drowned in an explosion as loud as the petard at Corinth. We were down the staircase in a moment.
‘My lord, that man means us harm,’ I said.
Amadeus glanced at me. ‘You cannot be serious,’ he snapped.
I didn’t answer. We emerged into the courtyard, and even there the wind was high. The sky overhead was dark and getting darker, and lightning shot across it from side to side, a brilliant fork of a malignant red-orange such as I have seldom seen.
‘He is a fool,’ Amadeus said. ‘But not such a fool that he would attack me in Venice.’
I shook my head. ‘My lord, my mother used to say better safe than sorry. Let us be safe, and move.’
‘I feel that I am running from … Jesu!’
A flash and deafening crash of thunder. We were in the short tunnel between the courtyard and the guarded portico, and I saluted one of the guards.
He shook his head. ‘You should wait,’ he said. ‘Something is happening on the docks.’
I ran out into the wind, leaving the others in the tunnel. I wanted to hire a boat before the weather got worse.
There were no boats. As I emerged, the first rain hit, and in a moment it was raining steadily. The rain might have explained the absence of wherries, except that I saw a boatman trying to land off to my left, down the wharves, and an unliveried man forcing him away.
I ran back to the gate of the palace. ‘Someone is paying the boatmen not to land here,’ I said to one of the guards.
He shrugged. ‘In this much rain, boats are difficult to find,’ he said.
I cursed. I probably tried some blasphemy, and perhaps even a prayer.
‘Could the Doge provide a boat?’ I asked. ‘Or an escort?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not today, in this kind of rain,’ he said. ‘Pierrot and I are all that there is in the lower hall.’ He clearly thought I was an excitable foreigner; his next comment confirmed it. ‘This is Venice,’ he said, with kindly contempt. ‘You may get a soaking, but the streets are safe.’
That’s what you think. I remember feeling that I owed Richard Musard an apology; clearly Camus was willing to use violence. We were being set up to walk, and I could feel the Bourc’s malevolence. He wanted me to know that we were to be ambushed, and he wanted me to feel terror.
Thunder rolled outside.
‘Perhaps we should wait out the rain?’ I suggested to Richard. I made a motion with my head at the guards and he clearly agreed.
He made the suggestion to the count, but the count would not hear of it.
‘We are soldiers,’ the count said piously.
‘There are no boats, my lord,’ I said. ‘We will have to walk all the way to the Rialto Bridge.’ The Rialto is another landmark of the city – built of wood, and quite ancient, with shops all along it.
I could see men coming down the Doge’s stairs into the courtyard at our backs.
‘Do you know a good route?’ he asked me. ‘I really only know the ground around our “hotel”, and the square of San Marco.’
I was thinking. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘If you are determined to go now.’ I caught Richard’s eye. ‘Now,’ I said.
We walked out of the portico, all of us close about the count, and we had to lean into the rain, which hit us like hail. I turned them north, and we walked along the magnificent front of the ancient cathedral of San Marco, and then across the tail of the square and into a street. I saw movement behind us in the rain, but I hoped that if we stayed closed up, we wouldn’t be a target. In a narrow alley overhung with houses as big as those in Constantinople, I stopped them all.
‘Everyone stay close,’ I said. ‘We’re being followed. Do not get lost. Don’t trip over your feet and fall. Keep your dagger to hand.’
The count’s green eyes seemed to bore into mine.
‘You really think we may be attacked?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I do, my lord,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have faced Saracens and Bulgars together. I do not expect much from the Prince of Achaea.’
It was well said, and he went up a little more in my estimation.
We set off north and a little east. I knew a route, on a sunny day, with the shops open, but I was less confident in a downpour in the dark, with all the lanterns out. I thought that the next alley was the Spadaria, the street of sword makers.
I was wrong.
‘Are we not walking north instead of east?’ the count asked, mildly enough.
‘Men ahead,’ Richard said.
A flash of lightning. Richard’s eyes must have been sharper than mine, or I wasn’t paying enough attention – a huddle of men in the rain, all standing together to avoid the flood of water coming off one of the tall buildings like a waterfall.
They had swords and cudgels. The flash spun off the swords and glittered on the wet wood of the clubs.
I pushed the count back into Richard’s arms and drew. The Emperor’s sword caught a flash of lightning in the sky above and burned orange-red in my hand.
I walked forward at the six of them. The obvious leader was a bandit or a routier; he wore maille and had a black silk scarf around his head. But he wanted no part of me after his bravos flinched. I saw his face in the flash of a levin-bolt; he was more angry than afraid, but he wasn’t coming for me alone.
When I reached the corner
, they were gone.
In that moment, I made a new plan. Camus had to assume we were making for the Rialto; there were only a few routes, and he could cut us off.
But if we didn’t make for the Rialto …
‘This way!’ I called, and led them west, towards the Greek neighbourhoods.
We crossed two little streets and a very small canal.
‘You have a plan, messire?’ the count asked me.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I admitted. ‘I have a plan.’
The rain began to fall on us as heavily as following waves fall on ships in a storm. I was soaked through my half-cloak and my new hose; my new black shoes were wet through, and I had no pattens. The rain fell heavily enough that the count put up his hood, which was largely decorative. I did not, because I needed to see and hear, but it was hard to hold your head up in so much water. I could only see the length of a church nave, or less, and the streets twisted and turned, and it was hard to know exactly where I was, even with tavern signs and shops I knew. I knew that I was lost when we came through the Spadaria the wrong way, but perhaps that saved us. I knew where we were, and perhaps, when I think of it, we had doubled our scent, like a wily old fox.
The shops and houses overhung the street enough for us to stay dry for a few moments, and I looked both ways. There were people behind us; I was tempted to go for them because I didn’t fancy being taken between two parties. I had to assume that if the Bourc was paying boatmen to stay clear of the wharves, then we were the target of a real attempt.
It still didn’t make much sense. How many men could the Prince of Achaea have?
‘We are going west, away from our house,’ the count said.
‘Yes, my lord.’
Musard looked like a half-drowned cat. He glared, his hood up; was it possible, I wondered, that he thought me false?
‘My lord, we are being followed by men who mean you no good,’ I said. ‘I am taking action to keep you safe.’
The count nodded. ‘Carry on,’ he said, and we turned right, passed over a bridge and then emerged onto one of the narrow canals.
Sword of Justice Page 22
