I heard his horn ten minutes later, while picking sausage gristle out of my teeth with my pricker, and I ordered the column forward. I assumed, correctly, that any men on the south bank of the Po were our own – but imagine the pleasure of my surprise when I realised it was Sir Giannis and his dozen stradiotes.
We shared a well-armoured embrace.
‘You, here?’ I said, or words to that extent.
He gave a minute, Greek shrug. ‘Eh,’ he said, expressively. ‘De Mézzières has no use for us, and the Emperor is still in Constantinople. A man must eat. I had your letter last autumn …’ He shrugged.
‘Tell me the lie of the land,’ I said.
He raised an arm. ‘Our main camp is at Guastalla, just a few miles. We have an earthwork fortress a few more miles to the east – Borgoforte, they call it. Hawkwood crossed to the river at dawn, intending to raid into the suburbs of Mantua. But some militia said they saw armour in the west, and Lord Bernabò sent me.’
‘We are not expected?’ I asked, thinking of Galeazzo’s messengers.
Giannis shook his head. ‘Not for weeks,’ he said.
‘And the Emperor?’ I asked.
‘Close. But north of the Po.’ Giannis smiled. ‘To me, you understand, there is only one Emperor, the Emperor of Constantinople. Not this Holy Roman one.’
We turned east on yellow dirt roads south of the Po. We passed Guastalla, where we watered our horses. The camp was large, for ten thousand men, and more Milanese militia were expected every day. But Lord Bernabò was at Borgoforte. Lord Cangrande of Verona – one of the endless della Scala family – exchanged gossip with Father Angelo for a few minutes and then begged us to ride east in haste.
‘There is fighting,’ Lord Cangrande said.
We changed horses again, and before Nones we were at Borgoforte, a fine position with a huge, round earthwork bastide and a swarm of peasants digging to add outworks to the north while forty men put stakes into the top of the ramparts. It was a formidable work, dominating the north shore of the ford across from the sand flats on the south bank. Bernabò, never a man for half measures, had put a bridge of boats across at his ford. Altogether, it was very like Roman works I had heard described by Petrarca.
We rode up to the riverbank and Giannis gave the password for the bridge, and just as I was thinking of Petrarca, there he was – the most remarkable example of that kind of premonition I have ever experienced. He was in a boat, a long riverboat, which was being held by the officer in charge of the bridge. L’Angars was just taking the advance guard across. I rode down the bank to the edge of the water.
‘Maestro!’ I called out, and Petrarca looked up from the book he was reading.
‘Messer Guglielmo!’ he called. I dismounted and walked out on the plank laid to his riverboat, and we exchanged pleasantries, and I had the delight of showing him how closely the bridge and bastide resembled the description he himself had read aloud to me from Vitruvius the Architect, years before in Venice when I lay, half-dead, recovering from d’Herblay’s assault.
The maestro laughed. ‘I was sitting here reading,’ he said. ‘And I never noticed this at all. And perhaps, to me, the reality is disappointing. So dirty – so many animals and sweating men.’
‘Ah, but illustrio, those Romans must have sweated like pigs to build the Pantheon, or a marching camp.’ I made him laugh. ‘What are you doing here, in the middle of a war?’
‘I am on my way to decorate the illustrious wedding of the Princess Violante and your English Duke of Clarence,’ he said, and I laughed aloud.
‘My wife will be there by now,’ I said. ‘Send her my regards.’
We parted with goodwill, and later I sent him two good bottles of wine from the camp.
My next meeting was not so pleasant. I’d seen the bustle of men across the river. I was surprised to see so few soldiers, and almost no men-at-arms. But as I crossed the bridge, I saw a clump of armoured men on big horses near the bridge, and I rode up to find Gatelussi nose to nose with Lord Bernabò.
Fiore caught me before I joined the group. ‘There’s fighting to the north. They want us to go.’
Forewarned is forearmed.
I had never met Bernabò, but he had every reason to be called ‘The Beast’. He was huge – a hand taller than six feet, as tall as King Edward but wider and thicker – and the warhorse he bestrode was the size of a small elephant. He had thick black hair that grew even from his nose and ears, and a double-forked black beard that made him look more than a little like Satan.
‘You are the English knight who gave Gian Galeazzo a sword lesson?’ he asked. ‘See? I know you. Now I need you to ride north. There is fighting – I have no men.’
In fact, he was surrounded by men. He had almost two thousand men-at-arms for the garrison of the great round earthwork, and another eighteen hundred militia, mostly working as labourers.
‘Do you doubt me, Englishman?’ the giant belted out. Every word he said, he shouted. And the men around him were lickspittles.
It wasn’t worth debating; Sir John was in trouble, and we were to hand. Something was wrong, but I wasn’t going to sort it out there and then.
‘Let’s go,’ I said. I turned to Giannis. ‘Will you stay with me?’
He gave that enigmatic little smile he often used. I never really learned what it meant, since I’ve seen him do the same in moments of great emotion. ‘Certo.’
I rode along the column and ordered Sam to wheel them from column into line, and I pulled my first and last divisions across the road so that we were a three-sided box with me in the middle.
‘Our old friend Sir John Hawkwood is in trouble,’ I said. ‘And we’re just in time to take care of that. Listen to orders and don’t get carried away. The Mantuans won’t have anything the Turks didn’t have.’
Most of them laughed.
‘Double pay?’ Lapot asked.
‘If we win, I expect there will be double pay,’ I called out, and men nodded, pulling at gauntlets and checking the hang of their swords and the length of their stirrups.
This was where high training counted, and our superb horse herd, the product of campaigning in the Holy Land almost two years before. Every man changed horses. The knights and men-at-arms mounted fresh chargers, and the archers and pages mounted fresh rounceys, although the old veteran archers like Ewan had Arabs – better horses than many a knight.
Giannis went off immediately, probing north from the lines beyond the earthwork fortress. His dozen Greeks spread out.
It was a little less than ten Roman miles to Mantua. We could move fast, and we did; our horses were fresh, and we had practised moving behind the screen of our light horse.
We found the first corpses an hour after Nones – a dozen dead men who seemed to be Mantuan militia – and Richard Grice with three archers, watching some prisoners. I knew Grice; he’d been one of my lances in my first condotta, and he was as pleased to see me as I him, and de la Motte as well – the two of them had been virtually inseparable.
‘I’m worried,’ Grice said. ‘We hit the Hungarians at midday and blew through them. But Sir John followed them north, and he ain’t been back.’ He looked at de la Motte. ‘Did Bernabò get my messages?’
I shook my head. Grice had a bad sword cut on his left wrist – not severed, but angry and red and still bleeding through the woman’s shift wrapped around it like a bandage.
‘Fetch me Master Albin,’ I said. The Mantuan militiamen were sullen. The two captured Hungarians were staring blankly into space, and there was little to be got by interrogating them.
I looked north. The shadows were getting long; Mantua was still three or four miles away.
I hated to lose a man, but Grice was in too precarious a position to be left. Any city patrol would snap him up, retake his prisoners and take all of Sir John’s wounded.
For
that matter, most of the Savoyard pages, while they had crossbows, were too young for field service, and had no armour and little training. But they’d look like a decent body of horse at a distance.
‘Messer Albin,’ I called. He had just rewrapped Grice’s bandage after applying some pressure and a hasty stitch – not something you want to watch every day.
‘Sir William,’ he said, correctly. In the face of the enemy, a little courtesy is very useful.
‘Peter, I would like you to take command of the wounded and our Savoyard pages, and retreat to Borgoforte. I can give you twenty young men and forty horses. But I need to move.’
Albin, who was dismounted, bowed. ‘I deem it an honour,’ he said.
I nodded, and called the pages out of the ranks. Then we went forward. Indeed, Giannis had never stopped moving, and we went a mile, and then we could see Mantua, the way you can see London when you come in from the east, across the Lea.
We crested a very shallow ridge, and there was John Hawkwood.
Probably easiest if I explain what had happened to him. He’d gone north at dawn to raid the suburbs. It was not his first attempt on Mantua, and the Mantuans had laid an ambush with almost their full army, four thousand men, in a wide, shallow ‘V’, with the Hungarians as the bait. But the Hungarians got too far away, as men will do, and thought they’d lay their own ambush, making everything too complicated. William Boson, one of Hawkwood’s corporals that I didn’t know, caught the Hungarians, or caught sight of them, and Hawkwood, the fox, manoeuvred out onto the plain and came along the fields, keeping the woods between him and the Hungarians. His surprise was complete, which sounds impossible, and no body of Turks would ever have been taken so. He took twenty captives and as many Mantuan militiamen, who had no business there anyway, and he went off after the rest, hoping to deprive Gonzaga of the whole of the Hungarian banda.
Then he had the luck of the devil. He went right into the ambush – and galloped straight out the back. It had been set too shallow, and the Hungarians could not rally. Hawkwood’s men-at-arms, formed very close, rode through the ambush without losing a man.
So far so good, but now Sir John and his hundred lances had four thousand men behind them. Sir John turned east, hoping to simply ride around the wing of the ambush, but four thousand men take up a great deal of space, and Hawkwood had taken losses clawing his way free from the suburbs. Men told me later that the fighting was house to house, yard to yard, and never a chance to rally, with the flanks crumbling all the time.
As the sun began to set, Sir John began to lose his rearguard. He was clear of the suburbs, in the fields north and east of Mantua, around Parenza, south of the Mincio river. He was losing horses to an endless shower of crossbow shafts. He had the whole army of Mantua chasing him, and he’d lost almost a quarter of his compagnia. Just south of Parenza, the fox made his stand. He found two woods, like a good Englishman, and dismounted his men-at-arms between them and put his archers behind them, with some pages and squires off on one flank to keep the Mantuans from going around the woods.
I knew none of this at the time, but I didn’t need to know. I came over the shallow ridge, with Giannis up ahead, pointing with his sabre, so I knew something was up. I could see Mantua, and Pietole, a big suburb, off to the east. Just in front of me were the two woods, so that I was coming up behind Hawkwood.
I was also coming up behind the body of Mantuan men-at-arms closing on Hawkwood’s rear.
Here’s why training matters. We were in the right place, at the right time, but we were only there because we’d crossed three hundred Roman miles in a matter of days. As the sun set on our seventh day from Savoy, we were well closed up, on fresh horses, and every head was turned towards me, ready for orders.
‘Bibbo!’ I called. ‘Archers on you, follow Sir Giannis! Giannis, off to the left now, and cover us.’
Half a smile, and a twitch of the sabre; his eyes were already on the ground to his left, which was almost black with Mantuan infantry. There appeared to be thousands of them … because there were. But they were in no order at all. I could see clumps of banners all across the plain, and indeed, later I heard that many of the better armoured men had already walked home to eat their suppers.
Militia.
‘Knights!’ I called. The Savoyards looked like avenging angels; the men who had been to Jerusalem looked bored. But very proficient.
We had forty lances, and I made two lines from the column of march. I put the best lances around me, and put l’Angars in charge of the second line.
I turned to Lapot, who had our banner of the Virgin. ‘Let’s see her,’ I said, and he unfurled our flag.
I didn’t order them to cheer. But our little Virgin had been across the world, and the Virgin is the patroness of the Savoyards, too, and they let forth a shout like the crack of a trebuchet.
Fiore was next to me, naturally. Who else would I want on my right?
He looked at me and grinned. ‘At times like this, I miss Nerio,’ he said.
‘And Miles,’ I agreed.
‘This will be very good,’ Fiore said.
The battle was laid out before us, and we were eager for it. We manoeuvred at a trot, where our opponents, with their backs to us, could at best manoeuvre at a walk. I suppose that for the first two hundred paces they might have imagined that we were Imperial knights come to aid them, or some such – men believe what they want to believe. But even after we went from the trot to a heavy gallop, they didn’t turn.
I unhorsed two men without breaking my lance, and used it on my third opponent somewhat unchivalrously, sweeping it like an oar across the backs of two squires. One fell, and my sharp point caught the withers of the second horse and it tossed its rider in the air.
The Mantuans burst away in all directions. They had been forming, cautiously, and laboriously, for a finishing blow at Hawkwood, but we’d won the race. And now we were in a different contest: there were fortunes to be made, because we were unhorsing the very cream of the Mantuan nobility. We were only forty horses, but the surprise was complete, and our archers and pages and Greeks made us look like twice our numbers, moving to cut the men-at-arms off from the Mantua road.
The whole line broke.
At my back, Marc-Antonio, bless him, scooped up both of my dismounted opponents, and while I was cantering across the open ground into the rear of Sir John’s position, he was making himself wealthy by knocking down fleeing Mantuan knights. I will admit that I lost my company in the next half an hour. If a new force had threatened us, we’d all have been taken, and not a man was going to obey me – even l’Angars.
Sir John was sitting in the setting sun, his armour brilliantly polished. He was calm, if a little grim-looking, but he managed a smile as I came up.
‘Will Gold,’ he said, ‘as I live and breathe.’
We watched the Mantuans race for their walls together. William Boson, who had a bad cut across his nose because he had no visor, gave orders, and Hawkwood’s weary archers got on jaded rounceys.
‘A bad day’s work,’ Hawkwood said bitterly.
‘We’ll share our ransoms,’ I said.
Hawkwood nodded slowly. ‘You’re a good lad,’ he said.
Three days of prisoner exchanges followed. We were paid our ransoms on the spot, for knights taken within sight of their city walls, and we traded all of our Mantuan infantry for Sir John’s men lost in the fighting in the suburbs. It was all very civilised.
I went north and east twice – once with twenty of our men and Giannis, and again with Sir John.
We jogged along over empty country north of the Mincio, moving fast so that we wouldn’t be caught out by enemy patrols. We saw nothing.
‘Where the fuck is the Emperor?’ Sir John said. He was angry, tense and very tired.
I had never seen him like this. He was dispirited. Finally, after we recrossed the riv
er, I offered him my flask. ‘What’s wrong, John?’ I asked quietly.
He looked at me. ‘I don’t know, exactly,’ he said. ‘Thanks again for the rescue, by the way. Don’t think I’m too fucking proud to admit I was rescued.’ He spat.
I could tell it rankled. The whole army was talking of our daring rescue. Bernabò sent me a purse of money; Cangrande sent me a pretty arming sword in a velvet scabbard.
Hawkwood fumed.
Men are men. He was the best soldier I have ever known, and he was used to having the acclaim. He probably took it for granted. I saw him considering, but I’d like to think his friendship for me won out over any injury he fancied I’d done his reputation.
‘Listen, Will,’ he said. ‘A week ago we had a riot – English against Germans. Some of the Milanese sided with the Germans. Men were killed.’ He shrugged. ‘I sent Antonio Visconti to Bernabò to plead our case; he hasn’t spoken to me since. And he sent me on that raid …’
‘And abandoned you,’ I said.
Sir John reached down and half-drew his sword. He plucked a scrap of parchment from the blade, where it had been cunningly hidden.
It wasn’t much bigger than a dagger blade, that scrap of parchment, and on it, written in scribal Latin, was a description of Hawkwood’s company, their march order, and the route from Borgoforte to Mantua.
‘Jesu,’ I said.
‘We had it off one of the Mantuan militia,’ Hawkwood said. ‘But a dozen of the prisoners knew that they had a spy—’
‘You were sold out!’ I said.
Hawkwood nodded. ‘Occupational hazard,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you, young William, I am tired of untrustworthy employers and foolish antagonism. And Germans. I think most of the German men-at-arms in service to Milan are still loyal to their Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope has excommunicated all the Visconti – men are deserting.’
‘They say the Emperor has fifty thousand men,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Hawkwood agreed. ‘Yes, they say that, but where in Hell are they?’
It was Giannis who found the Holy Roman Emperor. He had moved much further south than we expected – still on the north bank of the Po, he was actually south and east of us, at Ficarolo, forty miles away. It was there, not in the north, that the Papal army met the Emperor’s. And it was there that a skirmish happened that helped determine the course of the whole war.
Sword of Justice Page 43
