I heard a distant voice calling ‘Capitano!’
After the third call, Emile turned her head away from my lips. ‘They really want you.’
‘I want you,’ I said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said, and sat up suddenly. Maybe a woman’s sense of these things is better, but Marc-Antonio came running up through the woods, his sense of my location frustratingly unerring, which justified Emile’s straight arm pushing me away. By then we were both standing, and she appeared slightly flushed, but otherwise almost prim. I had on a long cote-hardie as befitted my status, and it hid … well. It hid me.
‘My lord!’ Marc-Antonio called, beckoning to me and turning to run back towards the fires.
I gave up, turned, and sprinted after him.
By the time I reached the huddle of people in the open-air kitchen, Demetrios was dead. I was told later that he’d puked his guts out, breathed hard for a while, and then rolled on the ground, clutching his stomach in agony. His brother Stefanos sat nearby, weeping. When I came up, he had only stopped rolling in agony by a moment; I may even have seen his last paroxysm.
The ovens were still burning. Most of the staff were either sitting around them, or standing looking at the corpse of my Greek servant, clinging to each other.
Fiore came from the other direction, running. Beside him came Peter Albin. He’d been with the count and Prince Lionel; he was increasingly welcome in the count’s inner circle.
I knelt by Demetrios, felt his forehead, and felt the elasticity of him, the coolness. He was dead. He smelled foul and looked worse.
Albin sniffed once and said, ‘Poison.’
I had already formed the thought. ‘What did he eat?’ I asked. But I didn’t really have to look far. The count’s silver cup that I had seen over and over since we were in Bulgaria lay on the ground, bespattered with blood and vomit.
All the wine was in pitchers; it had been brought by the local lords and provided straight into our provisions.
Fiore seemed to know what he was about. He sniffed the pitchers one by one and at the third, jerked his head back. ‘Arsenico,’ he said, in Italian. Albin nodded sharply.
I heard him, but I was already running for the count.
He was lying on the ground.
I called his name, ‘Amadeus!’
He rolled over and looked at me. Sane, healthy. Later, I discovered that he was playing a jape with the prince.
He sat up.
I knelt by him. ‘My lord,’ I said, breathing hard, ‘do not drink any wine.’
‘You called me by my baptismal name,’ he said, gently chiding.
‘I thought …’ I paused.
He gave me an enigmatic half-smile. ‘What?’
‘My lord, one of the pages is dead from poison.’
He stood up, his enigmatic smile banished. ‘Sweet mother of God,’ he said.
He came back to Demetrios’s body. Emile was there, too. We tried to hide the death from the English. Fiore was looking at the barrels.
No one knew exactly where any of the wine had come from. That is, the senior cook, who was shaking at how close his lord had come to death, thought perhaps some of the wine had come in pottery flagons, and perhaps a few pitchers had come already filled.
Fiore shook his head. ‘This is too bad,’ he said, a strong expression for him.
‘Demetrios is dead.’
‘Yes, you will find that inconvenient,’ Fiore said.
In fact I’d quite liked the boy; he had promise, and he’d worked hard. And in one filched sip of wine, he was dead. Stefanos admitted, days later, that he had dared his brother to drink from the count’s cup.
‘I killed my brother,’ Stefanos wailed.
He did, too. But he saved the count.
You didn’t know that part, did you, Master Chaucer?
It says here we didn’t reach Bourg-en-Bresse until the eighth of May, and Chaucer is nodding, which means that our progress was slower than that of an army of snails. I don’t remember that, but then, I was in a dark place because of the boy’s death and it was made darker by Sam Bibbo’s quarrels with Bohun’s archer captain, a big man called Hobhouse. Their quarrel was pure foolishness – or rather, was merely the usual sort of thing, men and experience and reputation.
I tried to stand aloof – Bibbo could fight his own battles. I paid no attention when I knew my horses were late coming up from a picket line; the Bohun party had moved them … I ignored the morning when the count questioned why his precedence had been changed in the line of march – I knew that Hobhouse had taken his archers to the head of the column without orders. But our fourth or fifth night on the road after Demetrios died, Hobhouse tried to take over two of our campfires under some absurd pretence of seniority. I was at one of those fires, in a nasty old wool gown, helping Marc-Antonio with our harnesses. Hobhouse came up, striding like a man of vast importance.
‘Build your fires closer to your own camp,’ he said. ‘Get gone now – these are our fire pits.’
Marc-Antonio glanced at me.
So did Gospel Mark. None of our corporals were there, and I no doubt looked like a servant.
‘No,’ I said. I suspect that, despite my attempts to be chivalrous, I told him to fuck off.
He put a hand on his dagger.
‘Draw that and you are a dead man,’ I said. ‘I am Sir William Gold, and I will, without a qualm, put your own dagger in you.’
Hobhouse narrowed his eyes. ‘You ain’t wearing no belt nor spurs,’ he said.
I shrugged.
‘I’m camp master,’ he persisted.
‘No,’ I said, ‘you are not.’
‘Damn your eyes,’ he said. ‘I am that, made so by the earl.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll just visit the earl and fix that, then,’ I said. I didn’t change my clothes, or my level of anger, which was foolish. I did send Marc-Antonio ahead, and he darted into the earl’s pavilion and a steward came out.
‘The earl will see you,’ he said.
I ducked through the flaps of Bohun’s pavilion. The great man, for so he saw himself, was seated in a chair, reading from a book of hours. He looked up.
‘William Gold,’ he said. ‘I remember you when you were a cook’s boy.’
It wasn’t said in a friendly manner. It was meant to take me down a peg.
I was too angry to care. ‘Your archer,’ I said.
‘Hobhouse?’ Bohun said. ‘My captain of archers.’
As the earl had fewer archers in his train than I had in mine, I thought the title a little grandiose. ‘Very well, my lord. Your captain of archers is attempting to give my men orders.’
‘He is the senior archer,’ Bohun said. ‘I don’t know your man.’
‘He is not part of my retinue and, begging my lord’s pardon, I command the escort of this column.’
‘You are delusional,’ Bohun said. ‘You are some hedge knight. I am the Earl of Hereford.’
‘My lord, I may be a hedge knight to you, but I am bid by the Count of Savoy, my liege lord, to protect the column. I have that duty, my lord, and it is specific. You are protecting the prince. We can co-operate, but I choose the camps, and your archer, my lord, has no place whatsoever in these decisions, much less waiting for my men …’
Bohun raised his hand to silence me. ‘I’m telling you—’ he began.
I’m quite loud – I bore down on him. ‘Waiting for my men to build fires before he orders them away? No, lord, I will not be silent.’
Bohun was quite red in the face.
‘I do not expect my arrangements to be interfered with again,’ I said. ‘Thanks for your courtesy, my lord.’ I bowed, and left his tent.
Later that night, I was summoned by the count. He was looking at a pair of gloves, but he glanced at me.
‘Tell me of
your quarrel with Bohun,’ he said.
I bowed. ‘No quarrel, my lord. I merely explained how the column was to be commanded and directed.’
Savoy smiled. ‘The prince spoke to me,’ he said.
I bowed.
The count nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I will assume this is why you Englishmen kill your kings so often. Take care, William – you have made no friend with the earl.’
I was not enjoying myself and, indeed, I spent a fair time in prayer since we buried the boy back in the orchard. Some of the younger knights would ride ahead and wait at fords and streams and pretend to be knights-errant from the romances. I had to keep my archers busy, scouting widely, as if we were on a chevauchée, which the local seigneurs might have resented, if the count had allowed them. I knew Camus was out there, and the easiest way for the Prince of Achaea to triumph was still to arrange the count’s death. We were tasting all of his food again; we watched over him to an almost embarrassing degree. I won’t even mention Lady Bonne’s fury on one occasion when our watching him grew too close.
We had an enormous, and valuable, baggage train, and we were crossing some of the very country that the routiers had held, and taxed, in the fifties. I was careful to use my French knights to talk to the peasants. I had to practise all the arts of diplomacy to avoid offending Lord Bohun, now described as the ‘Commander of the Prince’s Escort’, who imagined that I was some paid captain, often ignored me, and yet, because he had never served in the east, had not the slightest notion of the kind of care we exercised about securing our march route or our camps. And equally, as Emile was very much in looks, I began to note that a dozen or so of the English knights and squires were increasingly devoted to her. One morning, as she emerged from our pavilion to greet the day, there were five of them waiting. One had flowers, and another a pretty little hawk as a gift. I’ve never been a particularly jealous man, and Emile enjoyed a little admiration. And it was a damn good hawk.
The last morning before Bourg-en-Bresse, I found a cat, its entrails pulled out and its poor body crucified carefully on a little cross of sticks stuck in the roadside. I looked at the hillsides above us.
I knew his eyes were on me that moment, so I dismounted and pissed on the ground. I knew the bastard was out there, watching us, and I knew that Bohun could have no concept of the danger.
At any rate, once we arrived in Bourg-en-Bresse we had a fine dinner in the hall of the lord, and then it proved that our preparations were inadequate and we didn’t have sufficient space for people to sleep. Emile gave our room to Lord Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, because he had, somehow, been forgotten. My remaining Greek page, Stefanos, then served us well by finding us space in the loft over the stable. After some wandering back and forth, we ended up with quite a little party, with some of the best lances in France lying on hay, drinking good wine and flirting – mostly with my wife. She and her ladies were the only ones bold enough to adventure the loft, although, as Emile said in the morning, it was more spacious and comfortable than any of the rooms, and Lady Bonne, I was told, was bitten badly by bedbugs.
Every day, after we halted, the count would have a lesson with Fiore. I was privileged to see a few of them. More than once I was called upon to be the count’s companion, which could be a little like being his whipping boy in a harsh school. Despite that, the service raised me in his esteem, and there were some signs of informality in his regard. He stopped calling me by my title, and he began to mention me in the kind of tone he used about Richard – part serious, part mocking.
Let me add, here, the thing Froissart wants me to say: he was an excellent man with his hands. He was a near-perfect jouster, and as good a blade as I ever hope to have to face. Fiore had his measure quickly enough, but the count was quite able.
‘Do you enjoy teaching him?’ I asked Fiore. It was in the stable at Bourg, I think.
‘For the count, I am more of a guide than a teacher,’ he said. ‘He is a fully formed knight – he has some profound thoughts and practices. Indeed, I have to work to defeat him.’
As usual, Fiore’s manner suggested that he didn’t have to work very hard to defeat the rest of us, which was, for the most part, true. But it’s never really pleasant to hear.
The count was pleased with Fiore too. I enjoyed watching the two of them practise, and it was on these spring evenings that I saw what I still think is the full evolution of Fiore’s theory. If theologians can have theories, so can swordsmen. He taught the count a system to make use of crossings, reducing a complex jumble of half-instinctive judgements on close fighting to a game.
By close play, I mean those times when you and your opponent are close enough to touch each other with a bare or gauntleted hand. In armour, it is often essential to play for a grapple or a throw, rarer in battle than in the lists, but such techniques can be the difference between life and death, and Fiore was a fine wrestler and applied many of his wrestling lessons to the sword and even to jousting.
Finally, three days later, we reached Chambéry. The town was hung with banners; the cathedral church had a magnificent High Mass, and we had a feast on the evening of our arrival that was only barely exceeded by the still more lavish entertainment the next day.
But before the feast, there was jousting. The count formed a team from his own knights, and for the first time I was invited to serve with him. He led his team in person, and his jousts were open to all comers. He had a purse and a fine prize for the winner.
Boucicault captained the venans, or the visiting team. Humphrey de Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, who had been at Alexandria (although I’d seen him but twice) and who had served both with and against Hawkwood and the White Company, was pleased to joust, and he had a dozen English men-at-arms. They did not want to join with Boucicault’s team, and so a second team of venans was formed in defiance of the custom. Both Boucicault and Bohun made it clear that they wished to break a lance with the count.
The heralds and marshals had it all in hand, and there, as I remember, Master Chaucer came into his own, organising the pairings for the jousts and accepting no dissent.
My first opponent was one of Bohun’s knights: a very young man with a firm seat and an expensive horse. We ran three fairly unexceptional courses. He played very conservatively, and he was too good a rider to be unhorsed, although we both broke our lances into showers of splinters each pass.
Count Amadeus didn’t quite unhorse Bohun, but he did lay him back over his crupper, and I know that he hit the earl so stoutly that he didn’t choose to come back into the lists for the rest of the day. Boucicault ran three passes with my lord count, and both of them looked like heroes from the Grail tales, but only the lances were injured.
It was not my best day. I was not unhorsed, but I lost a stirrup on one pass, and Gabriel and I were almost knocked down by a French knight on an elephantine horse. Still, at the end of the day, Boucicault put an armoured arm around me.
‘I remember when you could scarcely get the lance into the rest under your arm,’ he said. ‘Now you are deadly.’
I probably blushed like a maiden – praise from such as Boucicault is praise indeed. This was a man who trained every day, and climbed ladders in armour for exercise. I wondered what he might be like running a few courses with Fiore.
My curiosity was not to be fulfilled. One of the English squires took a lance in the throat – he wasn’t killed, but he was badly injured, and the count declared the day’s sport at an end. A parade of pages in emerald green appeared, including my young Greek, drafted for the duty. Each boy had a goblet of solid silver, and every jouster received his goblet, full to the brim with red wine.
The count was just drinking his, toasting Prince Lionel, when a messenger, covered in mud to the waist, pressed his horse into the lists. Men cursed him; some were there in velvet-covered brigandines and corazinas, and they didn’t need to be spattered in spring mud.
I w
as still basking in Boucicault’s praise when I realised that the messenger under all the mud was de la Motte, one of my own men-at-arms from the old days, who was serving with Sir John Hawkwood.
He bowed to the count.
‘My lord,’ he said. Everyone fell silent.
‘My lord, Count Bernabò has sent me to beg you to come with all your strength.’ De la Motte glanced at me.
‘What has happened?’ Amadeus asked.
‘My lord, the Pope has marched by way of Mantua, and the Holy Roman Emperor has crossed the Alps and bid defiance to Verona and Milan. Count Bernabò has taken the army into the field. Sir John Hawkwood has been at the gates of Mantua since the first of May.’ De la Motte was well-born; he knew how to speak to a nobleman, and he was clear and distinct.
The count glanced around, but his eye fell on me.
‘I will send an advance guard immediately,’ he said.
PART THREE – Milan
May 1368 – July 1368
We had a hasty council that evening. Stacked like cut firewood, the problems confronting us appeared too thick for any axe: assassins hunting the count; the possibility of war, open or hidden, with the Prince of Achaea; and now, the reality of the war we all thought had been avoided – open war between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope on one hand, and the Milanese and the Green Count on the other.
But the count was a good lord and a good captain, and his plan was reasonable. He kept Richard Musard to direct his own protection, and sent me east with all the knights he could spare, and my own company, to join Bernabò and Sir John under the walls of Mantua.
He gave me only young knights with good squires: twenty lances of Savoyards, without archers, but good young men, most of whom had been to Bulgaria and the east, and their squires, who were often older men with more experience of war. He ordered them to muster the next morning, which would have been the morning of the thirteenth of May, and they surprised me by being attentive to their duty. They all had warhorses and riding horses, with mules for fodder and oats.
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