The Ill-Made Knight

by Christian Cameron

  We were all doomed.

  We ate and drank, and in an hour she was part of us again. When Andrew Belmont came by to congratulate Fiore, he noticed her. He put an arm around her waist, and she dropped him on his arse.

  Andrew was a true knight, for all his failings, which were many. He bounced to his feet and grinned. ‘Horse or foot, messire,’ he said. ‘If you dress like a man, you’d best fight like one.’

  She grinned. ‘Horse,’ she said.

  Belmont paused. I think he still thought she was a whore playing dress-up, but he shrugged. ‘Dawn, by the bridge,’ he said.

  We were young, and we were still awake when it was time to arm her. She had a fine harness – still some bits we’d picked up in the fight in Provence, which seemed ten years ago but was only two. She was drunk as a lord, and suddenly flirtatious and angry by turns. She kissed Fiore while he struggled to get her brigantine closed, which I promise you is not the best way to get your squires to arm you quickly, or well. On the other hand, it does seem to get devoted service.

  It took three of us to get her on her horse, and I held the bridle all the way down to the bridge. Andy Belmont was there, and so was half the White Company, as we had taken to calling ourselves, drunk as only successful mercenaries – and sailors – can manage. The rumour had gone round that the handsome Belmont had run afoul of a whore who intended to fight him. Remember, to us there was nothing funnier than watching two cripples fight with sticks – an incontinent dwarf who could drink wine and piss it in the same action could keep a dozen men laughing for an hour. So a knight jousting with a whore?

  The sun was just above the rim of the world.

  Somehow I’d become the marshal. I had severe doubts about the whole thing – I was afraid for her, and afraid that someone would be killed. Both of them rode expensive horses, and a dead horse was both dishonour and financial ruin.

  They set their chargers at either end of the course. We didn’t have a barrier, but then, we did this for a living.

  Andrew motioned to me, and I trotted to his stirrup.

  ‘She’s not a whore, is she?’ he asked.

  ‘She wishes to have a lance and fight,’ I said. ‘She used to fight. She’s been with us before.’

  He made a face. ‘Very well,’ he said. He was drunk, too. ‘I won’t hit her too hard.’

  I went to my place and held my neck-cloth aloft. It fluttered in the cold wind and someone called, ‘Get on with it!’

  I let it go.

  Andrew leaned forward slightly, and his horse gave a small rear, then began to head down the list.

  Milady’s horse came from a stand to a dead gallop in three steps, accelerating like an arrow from a bow.

  His lance struck her in the shoulder and rocked her backwards. She was light, and so was her horse, and suddenly both of them were crashing to earth.

  Her lance tip caught him dead in the centre of the breastplate, and even as she went down, her lance tip continued to track him, bursting the girth on his saddle and throwing him back over the rump of his horse.

  Both of them crashed to earth.

  We stood in shocked silence, broken only by the hoofbeats of Andrew’s riderless horse galloping down the rest of the list.

  Then Milady’s small horse got to his feet. He shook like a dog and walked a few steps. Uninjured.

  Milady sat up and said, ‘Fuck.’

  Andrew just lay there for a moment, then he rolled over to get a knee under him – most of us have to do that, in full armour – and he was laughing. He got to his feet, tottered over to her and extended a hand.

  She looked up at him. ‘Don’t we have two more courses to ride?’ she said.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Belmont said, and we all burst into cheers.

  Our victory over von Landau shocked Italy. Von Landau had been very famous, and we killed him.

  After the battle, everyone called us the White Company. I don’t know who started it – I’m sure it was the white surcoats, although I’ve met some useless bastards who say it was our spotless reputation – I sneer – or our shining armour – to which I’ll attest that at Canturino, there were maybe fifty Englishmen in white harnesses. Five years later, we all had them, but that’s another story.

  We were famous.

  In days, the envoys arrived, and Milan sued for peace with the Pope. We didn’t even bother to burn their countryside again.

  I wasn’t knighted, but as I sat drinking wine with other men – Andrew Belmont, John Thornbury, Perkin and Fiore – I felt like a knight. We had fought well, for something reasonably worthy. I’d shown mercy and I hadn’t done evil.

  It was hardly great reknown, but it was a start.

  By mid-June, the war was over. Crops were growing all over the plain of Lombardy, and Italy looked rich and at peace. We did not burn the peasants or rape their women.

  Offers rolled in. We sat and practised, drilled and rode, read and played music. Fiore fell in love with Milady. It was so predictable, it was like one of the romances. He taught her his way of the sword, and they jousted, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She would turn to me after her third cup of wine and say, ‘Would you keep the swordsman from following me like a puppy?’

  In late June, there were ten rumours in camp about our next contract, but most of us who knew Sir John knew that the two highest bidders were Pisa and Florence, and since Florence was the richest, most secure state in Italy, we were pretty sure we’d be fighting for them.

  I noted that if we accepted either contract, we would leave alpine Savoy. And the Green Count might have his deal with the Pope, after all.

  That was the night that Fiore followed Milady out into the spring air, and came back with a handprint on the side of his face. He wouldn’t talk about it. Someone had given him bad advice. Juan sat and talked with him.

  Later, when I ‘went for a walk’ with one of the girls who had made herself available, I passed a couple by the stream – they weren’t making love, merely talking, but for my money, they were Andrew Belmont and Janet – Milady – and they weren’t particularly overdressed.

  I don’t tell you this so you can gossip. It’s all relevant.

  Two days later, a priest coming over the pass from Turin said he’d found a body. One of our archers had wandered a bit too far from town and been knifed.

  The general verdict was that it was probably time we moved on.

  The next morning, Sir John announced that we’d been hired – by Pisa.

  Pisa hired us, not Florence. I didn’t even know where Pisa was; it was only a matter of months since I’d found that Pisa was a place, not a man.

  ‘Florence is our enemy,’ Sir John said, with enormous, foxlike satisfaction.

  We were going to Tuscany to make war on the banks. We were a professional army, and not one of us was a great lord. We were an army that bore every resemblance to a guild of craftsmen, and we were marching into the richest part of the Christian world.

  The Florentines lost a battle to us before we even arrived. War in Italy, in general, was smarter than war in France – both sides used strategems worthy of the old Romans, and ambush and subterfuge were part of those battles. The most cunning general was held to be the best. It was the same with the way they did business – I’d seen that first hand. Italians admired sleight of hand. They admired you if you beat your opponent in such a way that showed you were smarter, rather than merely stronger.

  Consequently, the moment Florence’s envoys knew for sure that the White Company was off to serve Pisa, Florence hired a dozen small German bands close by and sent them to devastate the Pisan contada (countryside). The Germans moved quickly, crossing the frontier in just a week.

  But the White Company had a fine reputation for fast marches, and we arrived in Pisa the night the Germans crossed the frontier. By the time they’d burned a dozen small farms, their scouts and spies brought them word of our 8,000 mounted men (and one woman) riding in triumph through the streets. We outnumbered t
hem, and we had a high repute – a sovereign preux. The Germans retreated over the frontier, leaving so quickly they abandoned some of their food carts.

  The cream of the jest is that we were still two weeks of hard marching to the north, but such was our repute that the Pisans mounted their best young men, armoured them, and had them ride all night – in one city gate and out another – wearing white surcoats. they fooled their own citizens well enough to fool the spies.

  By late July we were in Pisa, where they gave us a parade in earnest – young women ran out of respectable houses to hand me cups of wine and kiss me. Ah, Italy! Making war in France is like having sex in a dirty room. Making war in Italy is like . . .

  That was a good year, but we knew our business and the German captains knew theirs, so we manoeuvred and collected our thirty florins a month. My ransoms came in from Canturino. I took over a dozen lances from other men – a Scotsman who was going home, an Englishman who retired and married a rich Pisan woman.

  I wanted to be a corporal.

  I wanted to be knighted.

  And despite being a junior officer in a company of mercenaries, I practised what I had learned.

  Pisa didn’t trust us, particularly, so were seldom inside the city walls, but Tuscany was beyond beautiful – magnificent, like a fine horse, a beautiful woman, a good bottle of wine and a choir singing all at the same time. The trees are tall, the farms perfectly managed, the sky a colour of blue that just doesn’t occur in England. In Tuscany, I ate olives for the first time. I knew the oil, but the fruit itself . . . Superb! And the wine – if French wines are good, and they are, and Piedmontese wines are better, and they are, the best vintages of Tuscany are, well . . .

  Perfect. If there is wine in heaven, it comes from Tuscany.

  The bread is good, and the food is good, if you like garlic, and I do.

  Tuscan woman know what they want. Many of them didn’t want anything to do with me, but those who did – I very much preferred their manner of address, to steal one of Milady’s phrases.

  Janet was my entrée into polite society. Despite her past – perhaps because of it – and despite riding abroad dressed as a man – or perhaps because of that, too – young women of good family flocked to her. A few wanted to emulate her. Most did not, but wanted to be seen with her, or to be seen to approve of her. Gentlewomen in Italy – rich merchants’ wives and daughters, and aristocrats – were sometimes cloistered and sometimes exceptionally free.

  At any rate, they were well-educated and free enough to ride abroad in camps full of mercenary foreigners who leered at them – I leered as much as the next man, I promise you. No camp girl, not the prettiest, easiest or most free of them, can compete with a woman of the same age who has the advantage of clothes, posture, diet and a good horse.

  At any rate, through Janet, I met Pamfilo di Frangioni, a young noblewoman of Pisa. Her family owned sixty or seventy farms, and she rode out to our camp most days with her brothers, all of whom were, in fact, gentlemen of Pisa and served with us by turns. They were decent men – a little odd-seeming and foreign to me, but good hearted, and they loved their sister. She could ride like a Turk, and she dressed – you know, she wore pearls in her hair every day I saw her, and she never wore the same clothes twice. It took me weeks to realize that she did this apurpose; that she was, in her sixteen-year-old way, perfectly aware that she had several hundred young Englishmen panting every time her horse skimmed along the road and she jumped the barricade into our camp.

  From her, I learned a little of how to flirt.

  Pamfilo was not going to run off to the bushes with a mercenary, no matter how attractively red-bearded. But she might discuss the matter – she would certainly allow the nape of her neck to be kissed on a warm evening, and she might, after a glass of wine, run her bare foot up your leg to the thigh under the table while chatting with her mother.

  I am not sure whether I loved her or not, merely that she was great fun, and seeing her raised my heart every time.

  From her I learned what Emile might have taught me of courtly love – about how love can make you a better knight.

  We usually made camp within an hour’s ride of the Frangioni castle, and many of us would then wait to see how many hours passed before we saw the tell-tale dust rising as, dressed in silk, she galloped her horse across the fields, her brothers trailing behind.

  Twice that autumn we marched on Florence. Florence went so far as to recruit Rudolph von Hapsburg – another famous knight, this one with a name I’d heard, from one of the most powerful families in Swabia. He promised to catch us and – a nasty piece of work – crucify us.

  Well. I find Englishmen love to be threatened by fools.

  We marched and he marched, and the dust rose. I spent long days in the saddle, siting ambushes that were never sprung, looking for his supply convoys and watching his main force from scrubby trees at the edge of the largest wheat fields in Europe. I had one small feat of arms that fall – I met a German knight at a ford and unhorsed him. I let him go – he was a penniless adventurer – but my name gained a little lustre, and I made him go back to Florence and tell every lady he met that he was the slave of Pamfilo di Frangioni.

  When Sir John heard of it, he summoned me to his tent.

  ‘William, what are you playing at?’ he asked.

  I thought I was the wit of the world. ‘Courtly love,’ I said.

  ‘By St George, young man, our business is war. Tup a ewe if you need to, but make war, sir. Good day.’ He turned and went back to his letters.

  I ignored him. To John Hawkwood, of course, war was a business.

  In November the weather turned – even Tuscany gets cold rain, and that was the coldest winter anyone could remember. We headed south, but before we’d gone two days march, some of Sterz’s German barbutes turned us from our usual campsites and we were sent west around the city and far from the Frangioni’s.

  It was the Plague.

  Plague went through us like lettuce through a goose, and we lost men – not many, as most Englishmen were salted, by then – but a great many girls and some of the German men-at-arms. Juan’s pretty lass died, and he never got it. To his immense credit, the Spaniard stayed by her side, moved her to his own tent and breathed her air until she passed. Then he paid for Masses for her soul.

  We lost about 300 lances to the Plague.

  I thought of my sister, and for the first time in a year, I sat down in an inn and wrote her a long letter, six pages on vellum that cost, each page, as much as the best woman you could buy in our camp.

  I rode into Pisa with a safe conduct from Sir John, and purchased another manuscript, this one a selection of Latin recipes from Constantinople. I wrapped the letter and the book in Egyptian fustian and some fine silk, and sent it with a Florentine merchant bound for England. Despite being at war, we traded with Florence pretty freely.

  The process of writing and sending my letter caused me to search my trunks – I had two – for wax. By now, even our French boys were men-at-arms, and Perkin commanded a lance, but I still asked him to find things for me. When I explained my problem, he struck himself in the face – a little over-dramatic, but he meant it.

  ‘By the virgin, William!’ he said. ‘I have your . . . your things. From the factor.’ He shook his head. ‘Your old clothes and things.’

  There followed a joyful searching through a chest unopened in almost two winters. My clothes were food for moths and worms, as they had been put away filthy. I lifted them from the old trunk with a knife, they were so dirty.

  They smelled like old sins, but under the old sins lay one bright virtue.

  The trunk held Emile’s favour. I had long assumed it lost. I think I held it and stared at it for most of the time it took my companions to play a full game of piquet, which the Pisans were busy teaching us in order to lighten our wallets, little knowing that the companions had known it for five years. I tucked it into my doublet, walked to our local chapel and paid for a Ma
ss for her soul.

  The next day, I heard that Pamfila had died of the Plague. I was riding into Pisa to fetch new clothing, and I met her mother, dressed all in black. She was on a mule, and she rode up to me.

  I knew immediately.

  She took my hand and cried a little. I had almost no Italian back then, and I had to wait until Fiore came to translate.

  She’d taken the Plague only two weeks earlier. She’d swelled for a day, breathed badly and died. But her mother said that before the pustules broke, a man came with a letter from a friend of hers in Florence to tell her the quaint story of having met a German knight who said he was her eternal slave because he’d been taken in a fair empris.

  Fiore turned to me. ‘She says, my daughter died with your name on her lips,’ and she says, ‘Always will our family see you as one of us.’

  That, too, changed me. If you don’t get why, well . . .

  Sir John Hawkwood was named captain of Pisa.

  It was, in its way, as great a compliment as he could ever have received, and it moved him to the top of our profession. He had been Sterz’s marshal for two years.

  But I think it ruined his relations with Sir Albert. I agree that we – the White Company – were a little tired of Sterz’s ways. We would sit in camp for weeks, but we had to rise at dawn every morning. We never slept in, and we never missed a day of lacing, cleaning . . .

  He was like that. But so was the Order of St John, so I didn’t mind as much as men like William Grice did.

  Or, as it turned out, Sir John Hawkwood. But the lads had the notion that Sir John would be easier – and they also knew he was English, while our enemies kept being German. All in all, I think Sir Albert was as good a captain as I ever served under – he was brave, he was careful, he planned well and men liked him. But he didn’t have the – I can’t describe it – the sprezzatura that Hawkwood had. Sir John seemed to do things well – without effort. He had wonderful spies and he used them to stay ahead in everything. He rode well, and he could joust, and he spent the autumn learning to use a hawk and hounds so that he could hunt or falcon with Italian noblemen. He learned these things because he saw it all as part of his profession.