The man opened his visor without demur. It was de Lesparre. I was not very surprised; I knew he hated me, and I knew how big he was.
‘Where is the Bourc Camus?’ I asked.
‘He is indisposed. He expected that you will try some coward’s cheat. I was proud to take his place. I will prove on your body what a caitiff you are.’
‘There now,’ Gian Galeazzo said. ‘All settled.’ He smiled.
I walked to the lists, and was admitted. They tied a scarf with the Visconti colours to my left arm, and my helmet went on my head, and the gauntlets on my hands. I still didn’t see it.
Fiore was leaning on my corner of the lists, ignoring the prince, who was trying to praise him.
‘Look at his pole-hammer,’ Fiore spat. I was trying to ask something, and he actually punched my shoulder. ‘Look at it.’
Marc-Antonio held a cup of water to my lips and I drank.
I closed my eyes, knelt, and tried to imagine the three wise men kneeling before the Christ child. I rose, thinking of my first blow – of how obviously my opponent intended to pin me in my corner. Everything about his body language suggested that he was going to charge.
My visor went down. Gian Galeazzo was still on horseback, outside the tiny ring. I had the royal couple at my back. Turenne was now nowhere to be seen, and there were ten thousand people pressing close around the lists, and another ten thousand beyond them.
I looked at my opponent. He was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, six feet and more of armour and muscle. His great pole-hammer was held across his body, the head back and the butt-spike pointing at me. I looked at it, and whatever Fiore had seen, I didn’t see. But I did know some tournament tricks. I saw the white wand go up, I saw my enemy’s tension. I rotated my hips, from a weight-back garde to a weight-forward one.
He sprang forward before the twitch of the white wand – a virtual leap of six feet, meant to pin me against the barricade.
I had already moved. And Gian Galeazzo, in an odd display of fairness, called halt, all twenty trumpeters braying out the sound. I nodded.
My opponent had moved too early. He had also revealed something of his intentions. I went back to my corner, and took up my garde, this time with my spearhead pointing well off to my right, off line – porta di ferro.
Fiore said, ‘He has something in that hammer.’
That made no sense to me.
When the wand dropped, I powered forward like a man going into an enemy line of battle. So did he, but without the convulsive leap of his first attempt. He thrust with the iron butt-spike, a clear provocation, to enable the swing of that massive hammer. I tapped the iron aside.
That was not the response he’d expected. He tried to turn me, and, remember, the lists were small.
I was not interested in turning. Fiore always tells you to do the easy thing first. I thrust at one of his hands.
And I caught him, a tiny blow, between the fingers. But my borrowed spearhead was sharp, and blood flowed over the haft of the great hammer.
And I rotated my spearhead up, glided it over his hands … My spearhead vanished under his arm and we struggled.
In any public deed, that was the end of the bout, because I could see his blood. Perhaps for a heartbeat I relaxed. I expected the baton to drop …
He smashed at me with the haft.
I had nowhere to retreat, so I met him, haft to haft. Then he pushed me, and while I am big, he was bigger. Fiore, and all that dancing, saved me – our hafts remained locked. He swung the whole weight of his hammer at me as we pressed together, and for such a huge head, it moved with astounding speed. But then, so did I. I got the spear out from under his arm and cut. We crashed together like warhorses, and his blow went past my head, and the crossbar on my spear had the head of his hammer, so that he could not land a blow with it, but his shaft slammed into my shoulder even as my rising parry ended in a thrust to his shoulder.
Then a great many things happened at once.
The two of us were instantly blind, surrounded by something that stung the eyes and made me cough. I thought for perhaps a single heartbeat that it was dust. But it tasted like metal.
Stefanos screamed, ‘A l’arme!’
The pain of de Lesparre’s blow went through me like a red-hot spear. My left shoulder had been abused repeatedly for two years, and in one blow, his haft alone broke something. I couldn’t breathe.
De Lesparre grunted and danced back, cursing. I was blind, and all I could do was stab with the blade of my spear, one-handed – my left arm was almost inert. I pressed forward.
De Lesparre slammed the butt of his pole-hammer into my helmet. I didn’t see it coming. It should have put me down, but it only staggered me. My good helmet held the blow, and I stumbled. I still couldn’t see.
He hit me again, but his back was pressed against the oak poles of the lists.
De Lesparre coughed. He was right in front of me, and people were screaming. Sweat saved me – the sheer volume of sweat pouring down my face got the powder out of my left eye, and I had a glimpse of him. The air was like the haze of a battlefield after an hour of cavalry fighting, except that the haze was pale grey or white, like flour, but it tasted like metal. De Lesparre was as blind as I. Even as I watched, he swung a blow with both hands, and I saw powder spraying from the head of his hammer. He missed me and hit the wooden barricade, and a great puff of the stuff slopped over the crowd.
And he was bleeding badly. My first cover and thrust had scored, right under his right arm, when I thrust over his bleeding hands. I thrust again, overhand, like the men in the statues I’d seen in Outremer. I put my spearhead into the rent in his maille. He coughed, and threw a sloppy cut, and stumbled and I tried to pull my spear back, one-handed, but I couldn’t. Again, I got a glimpse of the action. He was bent over, and my spear was five fingers deep in his side.
I let go.
He screamed, coughed, and brought his pole-hammer up.
I stepped in, kicked my own spear haft knowing it would hurt him, and drew my dagger right-handed. His right arm was slow and my left wrapped it as I entered into this close space, and there we were in the stinking dust, faceplate to faceplate.
It was, despite my broken left shoulder and the intense pain I was in, pretty much the play I’d imagined, except that, as my shoulder was hurt and his right arm was pouring blood, we neither of us had much grip on each other. But he tried to cock the hammer back one-handed.
Behind him I saw flame.
How to put this …
In one beat of my heart, I understood what I had been seeing: what Stefanos saw when he shouted. I understood what the deception was for, why Geneva was not there, and why they had duped de Lesparre the blowhard.
I could see the man with the burning cord in his left hand and the clay pot in his right.
I pivoted on my right foot, and slammed my dagger into de Lesparre’s visor, but I used the blade, not to kill him – as a scythe, out behind his head, clutching his neck like an iron claw. Weight change. Right foot between his legs.
The dagger rolls outward, and my hips pivot, and he is on his back.
I stepped forward onto my right foot, and threw my dagger. It struck the bomb-thrower sideways – not blade first as in a romance – but I threw hard, all the desperation of the hour, and it hit him in the head.
And Stefanos, the unlikely hero, stripped the clay pot from his hands and tossed it. It seemed to sail through the air forever. More importantly, he appeared to have thrown it at Prince Lionel.
But the boy’s aim was true. The clay pot vanished over the edge of the well head.
There was the sound of the pot breaking, and then a flash of intense heat and light went straight up out of the well, as if it were a great cannon planted in the earth.
The bomb shocked us all to silence. I couldn’t hear anything,
but I do not think anyone made a noise. I had de Lesparre at my feet, and I didn’t even think to fall on him. I stood, stupefied.
Then I saw Gian Galeazzo.
He was smiling.
I looked down at de Lesparre. He was in a bad way. I struggled to get my visor up, threw down my gauntlets, and knelt by him, even as Marc-Antonio came and took my helmet right off my head.
‘Christ,’ de Lesparre said. ‘What is this stuff?’
I missed the next few minutes. William Boson did it all. He got Prince Lionel out of the box and surrounded him with English soldiers. Lionel was panicked for his bride, who had, it appears, been summoned away just before I was to fight. Emile was with her, safe.
They took me to my pavilion. I could walk, and de Lesparre, who seemed to me uncomprehending of the role he’d played, was carried.
I stopped twice to cough. It was terrible, that stuff, and my eyes burned. Emile appeared and began to pour water on my eyes before my armour was off. The hellish stuff from de Lesparre’s hammer was all over me, but very little of it had penetrated my armour, even at the maille.
‘Don’t touch it,’ Peter Albin shouted, coming in. I have no idea how much later that was – most of my harness was off. His wife came in with hot water and towels.
Albin tasted it and spat. ‘Arsenico,’ he said, ‘with hellebore and mustard powder. Something like that. Sweet Virgin Mary. What hellish stuff.’
He pinned me, with Marc-Antonio, and with a feather made me vomit. That was grim. Caterina began to wash any part of me touched by the powder.
Then I was given water. My stomach began to gripe.
Ewan and Gospel Mark were doing the same with de Lesparre – none too gently – and Albin snapped at them and went to bandage his wound. They made me vomit again.
Emile was just cleaning my face, and Albin was fussing over my collarbone, when Count Amadeus entered. Some men went on one knee, and some continued their work.
The Green Count was in an apotheosis of emerald magnificence. I was stained in sweat and vomit.
He ignored me and looked at Albin. ‘Well?’
‘His collarbone is broken,’ Albin said. ‘Otherwise, much as usual.’ He smiled.
The Green Count bowed to Emile and then to Caterina.
Emile burst into tears. Having worked like a mule for half an hour, I think she’d been ready for worse news.
Count Amadeus came to me. He nodded, as if we were old friends.
‘Guillaume, I know you have done us a fine service. And I know you would lie down and sleep. But if you can manage, put on your fine clothes and join us for dinner. Because,’ he looked at Emile, ‘because victory in these awful things is in appearances.’
Emile washed me, Marie dressed me, and I had fresh braes and a fresh shirt. Every motion of my left side hurt. But the griping in my stomach calmed, and Albin mixed me something – dates and honey and wine, he said – and I drank it off, and was better for it.
I wore the pink cote-hardie, and my lovely belt of enamel plaques, and the two orders I had earned over my hood. Emile also changed, and her pink matched mine to perfection. Really, for once in my life I was a great noble, and too damned hurt to really enjoy it.
I walked the five-minute walk to the square, and I was cheered when I left the pavilion, a wonderful thing. I bowed and waved my hand, my right hand, and a guard of my own archers closed in around me and Emile and Caterina and Sister Marie, and we reached the palace square alive and untouched.
And so I attended the wedding dinner, the most outrageous feast of my lifetime, with my arm and shoulder in a fine brocade sling. We were late, of course. And being late, we made an entrance, even though the Visconti were wearing matching cloth of gold, even though Violante looked like the goddess Venus come to Earth, or perhaps the very keeper of the garden of chivalric love that poets write about.
We had missed four courses. Chaucer will tell you more, but there were eighteen in total, each a double, one of game and one of fish, and there were thousands of guests. And at every course, the master of ceremonies, now in magnificent cloth of gold and miniver, was giving away incredible gifts to the newly married couple and other guests.
Food is the very best drug of all. I sat with Emile, and Master Chaucer was at my right hand, and Petrarca himself was across the table, and Monsieur Machaut sat not three places away – almost the only French dignitary present, as it appeared that the rest had chosen not to attend. Boucicault and his lady were there; he came and congratulated me.
He shook his head. ‘Bad business,’ he said. ‘I told the king not to trust Turenne.’
‘Or the Prince of Achaea?’ I asked him, and he would not answer.
I ate and ate, and felt better – my stomach remained calm enough.
Emile asked me why they had involved de Lesparre.
Before I could answer her, the Lady Violante rose, was kissed by her new husband, and then went out into the square to her brother, who stood like a statue of a pagan youth. He didn’t look at her, and she ignored him, took a cord from his hand, and pulled. A thousand doves were released into the soft evening air, and a cheer went up that terrified them, and they went in all directions. Not merely rising out of the square, but roosting, or colliding, or rushing madly between the buildings.
The next course was marvellous – cheese gnocchi in jugged hare, or so my palate told me – and I ate a dish. Gian Galeazzo called out my name. I had time to turn. People were applauding, and there, on a mannequin, was a whole harness, all white, with pretty latten edges – everything complete in the latest Milanese style with the heavy shoulder pieces that could keep a man safe, and with my arms engraved across the breastplate. The master of ceremonies beamed at me, and I rose, winced, and went to him. My legs had stiffened up just from a brief spell of sitting. I was very tired, despite having fought only once, for perhaps two hundred heartbeats.
I was eye to eye with Gian Galeazzo. I bowed, and he bowed. He waved at the armour. I rather expected it to explode, or reveal snakes.
He looked at me and said quietly, ‘How little you understand.’
I bowed again, a little confused, and went back to my place, and Chaucer here gave me a cup of wine and started to tell me of the attempt on the count, and how it was foiled – but that is not my story.
Trout was served, an amazingly fat fish, in a mint sauce. I ate mine, and Emile mocked me for my eating. I happened to glance up at Sister Marie, who was serving my lady directly – still part of our security arrangements. She was staring over my shoulder, to where the master of ceremonies stood.
‘No,’ she breathed.
There was the boy, and he had another cord in his hand, as he had had for his sister’s doves.
Carts had rolled up: more birdcages. Everyone was slower than Sister Marie in realising that they held Icelandic falcons – dozens of them. A fortune in birds.
Gian Galeazzo had the oddest look on his face. Not triumph. Not dejection.
How little you understand.
He pulled the cord, and the cages opened. Falcons leaped into the air like chargers into battle.
Above us, above a thousand noble guests in their very finest clothes – a fortune in silk and cloth of gold and pearls and lace – there circled half a thousand doves, symbols of peace and a happy marriage, and perhaps even more ancient symbols than that.
The falcons hit them, and it began to rain blood across the square.
And Gian Galeazzo stood in the centre. He stood proudly, his back straight, and then, as the blood began to fall, he turned and looked at Bernabò, and he bowed.
Bernabò looked as if rage might cause him to ignite like a giant torch.
People scrambled onto the church portico, or into the palace gates, to avoid the rain of blood. But it touched everyone, like a curse.
And there they all were, Master Froissart, all
the players: representatives of England and France, the Pope, Genoa, Venice, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Florence. We were all poised on the edge of the abyss. The Union of Churches had failed, the Emperor was at war with Milan; everything we had won in the Holy Land was being abandoned so that the kings and princes of Europe could squabble. The future held nothing but war, and the birds showered us with blood.
I met Emile’s eyes, and as we huddled under the palace gates, she kissed me.
‘We lived,’ she said.
‘We should go back to Jerusalem,’ I said. ‘It’s safer there.’
Historical Note
I am always delighted to return to the world of William Gold. Perhaps that’s because this is what I did for my thesis, way back in my university days; perhaps it is because this is what I love to re-enact; perhaps because this world, the world of England, Italy and Outremer in the late fourteenth century, speaks to me in a way that only a few other epochs in history speak to me. All of history interests me, but I confess that William Gold’s period seems especially vibrant and especially relevant.
Many of the characters in this series are historical personages, not creations of my pen, although I confess I’ve chosen to give them life in ways that are fictional. So William Gold himself is an historical character; he was one of Hawkwood’s lieutenants, and he really was ‘William the Cook’. We don’t know a great deal about him, which is convenient for the historical fiction writer. We do know that he was knighted on the battlefield in front of Florence, and that he was one of the captains of Venice (possibly ‘the captain’) during the ‘War of Chioggia’, which will be the climactic event of this series and was one of the most important conflicts in Medieval history – certainly the most important war about which most people have never heard. To round out his character, I have given him a lifelong acquaintance with Geoffrey Chaucer, and I have suggested that his (fictional) self might be the basis for Chaucer’s Knight in The Canterbury Tales.
Fiore Furlano di Liberi was also an historical personage. Fiore is known to us now as the great sword master of the fourteenth century, and author of some of the earliest treatises on fighting, both in and out of armour, with sword, spear, poleaxe and lance, on horse and foot, as well as wrestling and dagger fighting. The most accessible of his manuscripts is in the Getty Museum and is known as MS Ludwig XV 13. From his manuscripts we can understand the whole art of Armizare, or knightly combat, in ways that had been completely lost. I practice Fiore’s art every day. I owe the maestro a huge debt of gratitude.
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