‘On me,’ I called, and slammed my visor down.
I cantered down the steep road with Marc-Antonio right at my heels and l’Angars not far behind. We flew like the wild hunt, on the very edge of darkness, and the hooves of our war steeds raised sparks off the rock of the road. Gabriel was blowing great gouts of steam like an equine dragon. Perhaps our wild careen down the ridge took us two minutes. I have no idea, but it seemed to take forever.
We turned a corner and there was Pennyweather, one of Ewan’s archers, face down on the road, his blood black against the moonlit white of the road. I knew him from the hood he wore over his armour. His bow was unstrung in his hand, and his rouncey was standing over him.
I shot by, and realised too late that there was a man by the rocks at the turn. More than one man …
An axe hit my helmet. I suppose I had a flash to move my head – perhaps Gabriel’s speed baffled my opponent – but the blow was hard enough to rock me forward, thankfully not hard enough to unhorse me or dash my brains out in the snow.
I flashed around the hairpin turn, close to the outside, still trying to regain my seat. Gabriel skidded on all four feet like a cat, and sat almost all the way down on his haunches, so that I nearly went over my crupper.
A man with a lance materialised out of the gloom. He was at a trot. The lance was coming for my eyes, and I had a two-thousand-foot drop behind my horse’s back legs.
I have no idea what I did. Perhaps nothing – perhaps it was all Gabriel. He went forward, swarming along like a dog, low to the ground, rather than like a high-spirited horse, and as his front legs pulled us forward, his back legs pushed off and we turned on Gabriel’s forefeet. I got some of my sword on the lance. The tip tore the spaulder from my left shoulder, popping the straps and the lace point and causing a lightning flash of pain. I swung my sword. It wasn’t elegant, but my blow came in on the charging rider as his horse turned to follow mine – a solid blow to the helmet. Pointless, in most circumstances, but in this turn, my opponent was trying to handle his lance. His weight was forward, and my blow turned him in the saddle. His horse sidestepped like a good warhorse, striving to get its weight under it …
… and vanished over the edge into the darkness.
They were already breaking past us, half a dozen men on tired horses. I turned Gabriel and gave chase, trying to find Camus. Now we were riding uphill. Luck, or good fortune, or my battle-brilliance, had caught Camus’s second ambush between two bodies. They had feared to rush Ewan, and the result was disastrous for them. The road was like an archery range – difficult in moonlight at moving targets – but men on horseback are big.
Ewan’s arrows were telling. Marc-Antonio unhorsed one. L’Angars took a staggering blow to his helmet and went down, and then I was pushing Gabriel up the steep slope, trading heavy blows with a mad-faced blond man. He looked familiar, but his face was frozen in a snarl of hate – his mouth was open, and he kept bellowing, but not a war cry. My Gabriel matched his roan stride for stride, and I was playing for his unguarded face. He was just pounding at me, hoping for luck.
Fiore doesn’t believe in luck.
After three strokes, I began to parry his hammer-like blows with some science. Then Gabriel surged ahead and I had to fight behind me. I reined in, Gabriel slowed, the other horse shot by, and deceived my opponent’s blade at the cross and my cut went into his face, cutting his mouth and both cheeks so that his face seemed to open in four parts, and he screamed. His scale-gauntleted hands went to his face, sword abandoned, and I put the point of my sword in under his arm.
My left shoulder felt as if I’d wrenched it, or taken a sword thrust. If I had had an astrologer, he might have had something to say about my shoulder, although Fiore said that I was a weak offside parry and that was why I kept getting hit there.
I prefer Fiore to an astrologer.
Rob Stone was dead. Clario Birigucci had a bolt in his groin, and we stood around him, waiting, to be honest, for him to die. But when he didn’t die right away, I realised how precarious our position was. More than half of our enemies had escaped, and we were cold, exhausted and had wounds.
I got Clario up on his brother’s horse and put Lapot on the horse of one of the dead enemy men-at-arms. Believe me that we stripped their dead and took their horses – the routier lives in every man. Clario didn’t die when we mounted him. He had blood coming from his nose, and I assumed he’d die in his brother’s arms, but at the base of the ridge he was still alive.
Benghi wanted me to leave the two of them at the first farmhouse, but I demurred. I could see awakening to find them both crucified on the road. I shouted him down; it was an ugly scene. I was prepared to use force to make him obey, and he was prepared to do the same.
‘You are killing my brother, you fuck!’ he shouted.
‘I am doing my best to save your brother. If you ever want to serve me again, keep riding.’ I had to say it. I rode up close, daring him to try to punch me. Daring him, although he had his arms around his brother, a cloak around them both.
‘Your brother’s only hope is Peter Albin,’ I said. ‘Let’s get him there.’
‘He needs to be warm! He needs to lie down—’
‘No,’ I said. I was trying to keep from anger, trying to make this strictly business – trying to be Hawkwood, with his immense authority, or the Earl of Oxford, or Peter Mortimer. But then I thought instead of Pierre Thomas, who had had an endless reserve of goodness and an incredible ability to turn the other cheek.
‘I will save your brother if I can,’ I said, as kindly as I could manage.
‘You sent us to die,’ he spat. ‘You just watched.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Move,’ I said. I wasn’t sure what to do with that accusation. I felt badly; indeed …
But not badly enough, even on the edge of collapse, to rise to a nineteen-year-old’s taunt.
He was wavering.
‘Move. And your brother will live. Go, now.’ It was, in the end, Fra Peter’s tone of absolute certainty that I managed, and Benghi obeyed. He turned his horse; the rest of my people didn’t look at me or him, and we rode as rapidly as tired horses would allow. I knew that men needed water and the horses were too cold, but it was dark, and I wasn’t allowing man or horse a break until we reached the monastery.
But I had found Ewan the Scot.
‘How far did you get?’ I asked.
‘All the way to the gates of Chambéry,’ Ewan said. ‘I raised the alarm, told them where their count was, and turned back. We saw armour on the hillsides. I knew they were out here, and we rode through their first attempt – they was late getting up, I’ll warrant.’
Beppo nodded. ‘A brigan must rise pretty early to deceive Beppo,’ he said.
‘And Pennyweather?’ I asked.
Beppo shrugged. He glanced at Ewan, who rode on stony-faced.
‘I told him to halt and dismount, and he kept riding.’
My memory of Pennyweather was that he had been a little deaf. In a helmet, while riding? The poor man would have had no idea what hit him.
The monks were saying Vespers when we rode up to the gate. But they got it open in no time, and Clario Birigucci was still alive. Under Albin’s direction, we got him off the horse and onto a stretcher, and then onto a bed.
I went and made a report to Richard, who sent me to bed.
We didn’t leave the next day, but everything changed. Messer Ogier came from Chambéry with twenty Savoyard knights. There had been an avalanche on the road. They’d brought peasants to clear it, and Ogier thought that the avalanche had been forced. But twenty men-at-arms and their armed squires put murder beyond the Prince of Achaea’s means. Much as it hurt me to rise, I managed to get my companions to Chambéry, where a small crowd gathered to greet their long-absent count with very genuine cheers. We went straight into the cathedral, where the countess had prepare
d a Te Deum for the count’s return.
I was still in harness, and my shoulder felt as if I’d been kicked by a mule. My whole left arm was bad, I was unshaven, and so tired that almost everything seemed to hurt, as if I’d been drunk for days. But I managed to swing down from Gabriel’s back. I straightened my sword and walked with Fiore in the rank behind Ogier and Musard into the cathedral through an aisle of merchants and Savoyard bourgeois who were cheering their lungs out. The countess was waiting on the steps, and they exchanged a frank kiss. Bonne clearly had some fire in her; the count’s eyes widened, and the crowd cheered again.
‘Messer d’Oro?’ A page, a very young page, was actually tugging at my fauld. ‘Are you Messer d’Oro?’
‘I am,’ I said.
The page bowed. ‘My lord, the Lady Countess asked me to say that your wife is here, and wishes …’
I glanced at the count. He didn’t need me. I followed the page.
Emile was lying on a bed. She didn’t look pale and wan – she looked wonderful.
‘You took your time,’ she said, and raised the bundle from her breast. ‘But you’re in time to name him. Even though you missed all the work.’
Christmas at Chambéry was one of the best of my life. The count had money. He paid me, and I paid my people, and Emile found them all lodgings in the town. Fiore had intended to go home, but then he made mysterious comments about some other trip.
‘He wants to go to Genoa,’ Emile said, after church. ‘How do you not know that?’
We proceeded to have one of those conversations – the kind married people have – wherein each thinks that the other is more than a little foolish. Emile couldn’t imagine that I’d ridden from Florence to Rome and back to Chambéry without asking my closest friend about his love life. I tried to explain that it was so difficult to imagine Fiore as a devotee at the shrine of courtly love that I preferred just to ask him hard questions about fighting.
‘He never said a thing,’ I mumbled.
‘Interesting that he mentioned her as soon as we were together,’ Emile said. ‘Of course, I did travel home with her. I have invited her for Christmas.’
Emile didn’t seem exhausted by childbirth; if anything, she seemed enlivened by it. Two children in two years is a heavy load for any woman, but Emile just laughed.
‘I’m built for babies,’ she said.
There’s really only one response to make to that.
The week before Christmas court, we made a circuit of her nearby estates. I had never seen any but the townhouse in Geneva; I had no idea, really, of how rich she was. But it was pleasant, if cold, to ride abroad, with l’Angars and Fiore and Gatelussi as company and protection. Everyone was on edge about the Prince of Achaea. I heard a fair amount of speculation about what courses were open to him, now that Milan had apparently spurned him.
And even then, the Prince of Achaea was yesterday’s news. All the talk at court was about Prince Lionel of England, who was already on his way to Paris – or perhaps he wasn’t – who was coming to be wed to Siora Violante of Milan, and who would be the count’s neighbour. His marriage to the Visconti was rewriting the map of northern Italy – even as the Holy Roman Emperor threatened war alongside the Pope. The web of alliances was crystallising, forming like icicles on a mountain cottage: stronger with every thaw and refreeze.
Against the coming wonder of a prince of England, the Prince of Achaea could not compete, and his name faded away. I was still cautious, and Richard Musard kept very close watch over the count.
The other interesting discovery at the court of Chambéry was that Richard Musard was a very important man indeed in Savoy. I knew this already, but when the count was in his own lands, Musard was all but paramount. Yet he did it with grace. None of the native Savoyards seemed to begrudge him his position as favourite and, best of all, our fragile new friendship was not ruined by his sudden accession to power. Instead, I met his wife, and we danced, and went on a hunt together. We hunted chamois, with crossbows, across the snow. I never saw a chamois, but we did see some other mountain goats. I shot one of those, assuming it was a chamois, and there was some laughter.
It was good-natured laughter.
Bonne, the count’s lady, smiled at me. ‘I have done the same,’ she said. ‘And they are just as cruel to me.’
Musard bowed. ‘And I. It’s almost a requirement of coming to Savoy, shooting the wrong goat.’
I also got to see how close my lady wife was to the countess. Of course, Emile was a countess in her own right – her relationship with Bonne de Bourbon was a good deal closer than mine with the count – and, of course, Amadeus of Savoy knew her very well from their childhood.
I had found the count easier to like when he was in danger. Now, in the bosom of his court, he was at his aristocratic best, or worst. He noticed me from time to time, mocked my lack of hunting skills, and wondered aloud that I was such a fine dancer, as if that obvious slight to my birth and training could be construed as a compliment.
In fact, as soon as Emile was out of her accouchement, she had me dancing – with an Italian instructor, and with her.
‘Christmas is all about dancing,’ she said.
‘I thought it was about the birth of the Christ child?’ I asked.
‘My love, is he not “lord of the dance”?’ she shot back, as good an answer as I’ve ever heard. But, thanks to her and Maestro Senis’s tutelage, I was a tolerable dancer, and I could leap and turn with the rest of them.
Two days before Christmas, a convoy came over the Alps from the coast, and with it was Davide Doria of Monaco and his niece, Bianca: a lively girl, with a narrow face, features so fine as to be elfin, and long brown hair. I was there when she slipped from her horse; she waited to be caught by Fiore, who put her on the ground. They looked at each other and both blushed. I was afraid for a moment they’d kiss in public and we’d all end covered in blood.
I had not met Davide Lornier Doria, one of the coast’s merchant lords, before. He owned six ships, and he had fought at Crécy – against us, of course. He was perhaps forty-five. He seemed to have a sense of humour about his niece.
‘My brother’s willing for them to wed,’ he said to me, before the bells had rung for Nones. ‘And all of us are deeply conscious of the value of a connection with this court.’
It’s a funny world. I can make a decision in the snow about which way to lead my reserve – who to kill, who to let die. But put me at a court and ask me to manage my closest friend’s attempts at matrimony …
Luckily I had Emile. She had the whole situation in hand, the same way she knew the balances due to her on every estate she owned, and the names of every new child born in any of her houses or villages. She knew Fiore’s prospects to the soldo, and the Dorias, even though they were in banking and shipping, were worth twenty times as much. Emile made sure Fiore appeared with the count; she paid for him to have several fine suits of clothes, which I’ll warrant he still owns. And when, on Christmas Day, he showed signs of irritable mooning after the young lady, I took him over the mountain to the monastery to fetch young Clario and his brother. Clario had failed to die. He’d had three weeks, and, after the count rode away, Albin had grown bold, cut the bolt and drawn it. Birigucci had begun to heal.
Albin met us in the yard of the monastery. ‘Don’t praise me,’ he said. ‘Praise God, because taking a bolt in the groin without losing your balls or your life is a miracle from God, not a healing by the hand of man.’
Clario didn’t share the view and had become Albin’s devoted admirer, and Caterina’s too.
He couldn’t ride, and so we put him on a litter between two mules. We had about seven miles to go, back to Chambéry, and I was still conscious of the Prince of Achaea and Camus, although they seemed less a threat in bright, snowy sunshine. Nonetheless, I had Sam Bibbo and Gatelussi and a dozen men behind us, and I had Fiore. I was wi
lling to fight all the legions of Hell, let alone the Bourc Camus.
We didn’t see an adversary, and we rode along, listening to the Christmas bells ring in valley after valley, and the road, while snow-covered, was passable. We got Birigucci to Chambéry and installed him in Emile’s townhouse with his brother. It became clear during the ride that Benghi couldn’t find a way to apologise for his words to me when his brother was dying, so when we were dismounting, I made the time to help him with his brother’s stretcher.
‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ I said, or something to that line. He had to smile back.
‘I’m sorry …’ he began.
I smiled. ‘No matter. I don’t have a brother, but I imagine losing one would be terrible.’ I offered my hand. ‘I have a sister; I almost lost her to plague.’
‘So sorry,’ Birigucci said.
‘Never mind,’ I said. It’s odd, how hot you get, and how quickly an apology lances the boil.
‘We have done everything together …’ the boy said. And he did seem like a boy, although he was fewer than ten years younger than I.
No matter, while we’d spent Christmas Day in the saddle, my lady had bargained with Messer Davide of Monaco, and made the best part of a marriage agreement.
After church we dined, and then we danced. The music was not, I fear, as good as that at the French court, or in Venice or Florence, and some of that, I’m told, is the mountain air. But we managed somehow, and Countess Bonne showed that she could dance as well as my wife. The two of them led a dozen dances, and I was much thrown together with the count, who fingered his gold cup and raised an eyebrow at me a couple of times.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he said. He waved his cup at me. ‘Later.’
Whatever that was supposed to mean.
It didn’t take me long, at Chambéry, to find that, however much I loved Emile, this life was not for me. Out on the road, leading the count’s escort, I had begun to imagine a career with Savoy as one of his captains. But the reality of Chambéry was different. He didn’t need me at all. And it was not as if Emile needed me to ‘manage her estates’. She was the best estate manager I’ve ever met; she knew her business better than I knew my company.
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