The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  But it didn’t matter, because the crusade was a reality. We were going. And with the Bourc’s threats ringing in our ears, it appeared we were leaving immediately.

  I need to remind you that, whatever his reservations about the crusade, the Pope had sent men, trusted men, all over France and Italy, summoning the routiers and the men of the Free Companies to save their souls by going on crusade. It was said that the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole, with whom I served before Brignais, was to gather the men who would serve, and lead them over the Alps to Venice. Sir Walter Leslie and his brother Norman, who were both famous knights and sometime mercenaries, were gathering men-at-arms in Italy. If the crusade was a charade, at the very least many powerful men hoped that the Holy Land would draw the Free Companies from France and Italy the way a leech draws poison from a wound.

  The crusade was to depart from two ports, Genoa and Venice, both of which were being forced to cooperate each with the other. In fact, each of those cities hated the other far more than they hated the Turk; each city, in fact, sought only the best trade status with the very paynim we were going to fight. But let me add that of the two, Genoa was virtually allied with the Saracens of Egypt.

  Hah! Messire Froissart, I know you have met Peter of Cyprus, and I know you wish for me to get to the meat of my tale: the fighting, the chivalry. But in truth, the tale is how anyone came to fight, and not the fight itself. Let me say this much without the spoiling of my story: I am not sure that the old French Pope ever intended the crusade to march, although I think Urban wanted it, and I’m damned sure that neither Genoa nor her arch-rival Venice intended a real blow to be struck. I’m reasonably sure that none of the routiers in France and Italy ever truly intended to save their souls and become crusaders, and I can attest to the desperate reality that not a single king of Christendom, save one, intended a blow to be struck, whatever they promised.

  It was all lies and half-promises and empty titles and silk flags.

  Listen, then. Sometimes, as Father Pierre used to say, Christ works in mysterious ways.

  It is a flaw of the deeply self-interested men of the world that they assume that idealists are fools.

  Father Pierre – I will keep calling him that, as he was always ‘Pater’ to us – moved like lightning when he moved. The Pope had appointed him to a dozen offices and given him various sources of income to enable him to gather the crusade. Whatever the Pope’s real intentions, Father Pierre gathered his household and all the knights and volunteers of the Order who were in Avignon and led them to Italy. Less than two days passed after his appointment, and we were on the road with twenty men-at-arms and his whole household staff. To my shame, I barely had the courtesy to pay Anne a farewell visit.

  Listen, it is not all war, the life of arms. Eh? I owed her better than a casual goodbye in an inn yard. As events proved, I’d have done better, far better, to have slunk away without a farewell, but I betook me to the inn and called her, and told her I was away on crusade.

  She looked at me, yawning. And smiled her half-smile. ‘Eh bien,’ she said. ‘Some day you will come back here, too fine to speak to me.’ She turned her head away.

  Love … love is a powerful force, but sometimes, plain liking is the easier emotion to distinguish.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ I said, somewhat pettishly. ‘I’m a donat of the Order. I’ll be back.’

  She smiled a false smile. ‘And your lady … will she approve of me? Like your priest and your knight approve of me?’

  I hadn’t really thought of Emile in a month. The word ‘lady’ was like a blow. And of course, Anne was only guessing, with the unerring instinct of the young woman.

  ‘I don’t even know why you came to say goodbye, monsieur,’ she said, casting her eyes down. ‘I suspect I’m little more than a whore to you.’ She looked at me with something of her usual twinkle. ‘A badly paid whore, an unpaid spy. I have work to do.’

  I hadn’t even brought her a present. I walked quickly into the street of jewellers and bought her a good cross with an emerald, and the booksellers were only just opening their stalls. It was a lovely summer day in Avignon, and sin made me think of my sister, and I spent far too much money, almost all my available gold and silver, on a fine copy of Cyurgia by the Pope’s doctor. The bookseller said it was new, the latest scholarship. He didn’t have a plain copy, so I paid for a small illustrated one, with drawings in blue ink and scrollwork in the margins and some magnificent capitals.

  Then I went back towards the inn. At some point, I began to wonder if I had been followed – I saw the same scraggly ginger beard for the third time since leaving Anne. I was cautious, and when I came to the fountain at the Place de Saints, I paused to drink water and wash my hands, and saw a boy that I had seen several times before.

  I should not have gone back to the inn, but I misunderstood the threat. I found Anne washing tables.

  ‘Anne,’ I said.

  ‘Go away! I’m working,’ she said.

  ‘I brought you a present,’ I said.

  She turned and her scorn was palpable. ‘So that I can be a whore in truth, monsieur?’

  She went back to washing the wooden table. The limp-haired innkeeper came down and leered at me, which did nothing to improve my mood.

  I didn’t like him listening from the common room, either.

  ‘Run along on your crusade,’ she said. ‘You’ll make me lose my place.’

  ‘I like you!’ I protested. ‘Please, ask the innkeeper, and I will take you to Father Pierre.’

  Her head turned. ‘That’s much better,’ she admitted. ‘I thought we liked each other. Remember the auberge at Chateauneuf ? Last year?’

  I smiled. ‘With Juan?’

  ‘One of my best days. Give me your present, monsieur.’ She raised her head and put her hand to her back, and for a moment she was a much older woman. Remember that noble girls live longer, keep their looks longer, because they do not work from dawn to dark.

  She went and whispered to the fat owner, and he shrugged. ‘Don’t come back too pious to help a customer,’ he said, but he waved.

  I paused and gave him a Florentine silver coin; it was bigger than most and unclipped. He took it with some respect.

  I took her to the Hospital, where the gatekeeper looked at me as if I had grown an additional head. ‘You cannot bring a slattern into the Hospital!’ he said.

  Chance had caused us to reverse positions, as men will when they argue, so that I was looking back down the street out the gate, and there was ginger beard.

  Before I could cajole or intimidate the gatekeeper, Father Pierre appeared mounted on a mule, with Fra Peter Mortimer and Fra Juan di Heredia at his side. He didn’t smile at me, but he smiled at Anne.

  ‘Ah, Daughter,’ he said, and he dismounted clumsily.

  She burst into tears. I don’t think she said a word.

  He whispered to her, and she sank to her knees.

  He made the sign of the cross on her and when he looked at me, his mouth twitched. His eyes cut me like knives.

  I couldn’t meet his eyes long, and I raised her and took her home.

  In the doorway of the inn, she stopped and smiled at the ground. ‘I really prefer not to think of you as a customer.’ Then she lifted her eyes and they met mine. ‘But really …’

  I put the cross around her neck. There was a pause, and I decided to kiss her neck.

  She frowned, and then slipped away. ‘Do you know that man?’ she asked. She pointed out the door of inn.

  Ginger beard saw her out-thrust arm – and bolted.

  I shrugged. ‘He followed me here.’

  She sighed. ‘Some footpad. Friend of the men you killed, perhaps?’ She kissed me, but it was sisterly. ‘I love your priest. He is everything people say he is. Go follow him. Be careful, mon cher. They mean him harm, the rich fucks, Geneva and his people.�
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  That’s how I left her.

  I left the medical book at the Hospital with instructions that it should go to my sister.

  We climbed into the Alps, headed once more for Turin, and I had days to consider meeting Richard Musard, to fence with my comrades on the road, to joust, to share cups of wine – and to think of Emile.

  I had, in addition to plain lechery, been repeatedly unfaithful to her; all very well when she was distant and thought dead, but a stain on my chivalry now that I knew her to be alive. I thought about her a great deal, because I knew it was possible that I would meet her at the Green Count’s court. And because of Anne’s barb. My ‘lady’.

  I had a number of reasons to be dissatisfied with myself. I pondered the twists and turns of the Bourc’s attack on us, and the only conclusion I could draw is that, despite my best efforts, I had been afraid. And despite Fra Peter’s exhortation, I was sure I should have killed him.

  In fact, I thought a great deal about the two thieves I’d killed, desperate men. They had looked to me like brigands, and two of them at least had borne the stamp of men-at-arms by the way they moved, their strength.

  I had been a brigand.

  I hadn’t dealt well with Anne, I had betrayed Emile, I had failed to kill the Bourc and I’d slaughtered a couple of down-on-their-luck routiers when I should have knocked them out or even handed them some silver.

  I went to confession with Father Pierre again, in the same ruined chapel where we’d cooked dinner a year before. It is no pleasure to confess to a man who knows you, and whose good opinion you crave. Indeed, it is even less a pleasure to confess in the damp corner of a wet stone ruin with a flickering fire twenty feet away and a circle of professional ears cocked for your every failing.

  That’s just my fear speaking. God knows I never listen when some poor fellow is confessing, and I doubt they listened to me, but it made it all worse, and the rain fell on us. Father Pierre seemed immune; indeed, his patience was untouched by weather.

  I confessed killing the two thieves and letting the third live. And I confessed my desire to kill the Bourc. And then I confessed to having lain with Anne, which he’d heard before – do priests tire of hearing men’s sins? Does God tire? What can be duller than repeated sin, eh? And with the farm girl in Italy.

  Emile I kept to myself.

  Father Pierre heard me out, all my rambling, my disputations on my own sin; all the hollow arguments of the guilty.

  He smiled in the flickering firelight. ‘Killing thieves,’ he said softly. ‘Two thieves died by Jesus.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Listen, William, what you’d like is for me to set you some strong penance, and then you’d push yourself to accomplish it, and be cleansed.’ He shrugged and looked away.

  ‘Yes!’ I agreed.

  ‘Let me ask you a thing,’ he said, and his gentle eyes met mine. ‘If you kill a Saracen on crusade, how is that different from killing a thief in the dark streets of Avignon?’

  I rubbed water from my forehead. ‘I don’t know, Father,’ I said. ‘Since they are all unshriven, they go to Hell – is that what you mean?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and shook his head. He took a breath and then shook his head again. ‘I don’t know either, but as I am about to lead men to die and kill, I have prayed on this subject every night. And now you set me this.’ He put his chin in his hand. ‘Let me ask you another thing. The Bourc Camus. Do you think him to be … a servant of Satan?’

  Just thinking of Camus made my breath catch a little. But I paused, and saw him in my mind’s eye. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I think he believes it himself. But if he were Satan’s knight, surely he’d be …’ I found that I was grinning. ‘Better? Or rather, worse? More … preux? More dangerous?’

  ‘He may yet serve the enemy in this world and the next,’ Father Pierre agreed. ‘But yes, he seems all too human to me. And yet … he made me afraid. And for me to be afraid, I must, for a moment, have doubted God, because you know that a Christian who hopes for heaven has nothing to fear.’

  ‘I have never met a mortal man who did not know fear,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps battle teaches a wisdom and humility that the University of Paris lacks.’ Father Pierre smiled. ‘Perhaps fear and sin come from the same wellspring, then,’ he said. ‘At any rate, I can shrive you like any village priest. But you knights … you kill. You strive hard to excel at it. You have fine words – beautiful, noble words like preux and courage to describe yourselves and your way.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if your way is not altogether wrong.’ He raised a hand. ‘Ah, your pardon, my son; tonight it is I who needs a confessor, not you. I do not like this mantle of authority thrust upon me. Listen, cut all the firewood from here until Turin, and while you cut dead wood, think of the living men you have killed, and say prayers for them.’ He blessed me then. ‘And stop your lechery. I am not amused by it – you are not a schoolboy. Wake up, or you will be awakened roughly.’

  I went back to the fire, and he sat out in the wet.

  The Green Count was not at Turin. He was at Geneva on business, but the word was that he was serious in his crusading vows, and intended to mount a campaign. Despite that, he was still very close to the Visconti of Milan, and the Pope was still on the other side of a deep political divide.

  I tried to add it up in my head: Milan was the enemy of the Pope, and Savoy was related to Milan and an ally of the Pope, and Robert of Geneva, our erstwhile assailant, was part of the Savoyard clan, trying to take control of the crusade, and all the mercenaries that the Pope was enlisting …

  If the prelates thought that they could control the routiers this way, they needed to spend a winter with John Hawkwood. I had the notion that the Savoyards were plotting without understanding the consequences of their actions. As the great often do, the Savoyards had forgotten that lesser men might have better heads for plotting.

  One of the ways that Italy had changed me was the way in which I saw the divides. Listen – when you are a London apprentice, the divides are simple enough: the Goldsmiths before all the other trades; Trades and Mysteries before the nobles; London before any other town; England and England’s King above all other kings and countries.

  Simple.

  As an Englishman, I had tended to see every conflict measured by the English side; so, for example, in the war between the Pope and Milan, the Pope represented the ‘French’ side and Milan the ‘English’ side, although as time went by it was clear to me that these simple views of Italian politics wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, and in the end, Milan married his daughter to the King of France. But Hawkwood assured us, his English soldiers, that when we fought for Pisa against Florence (an ally of the Pope) we were still fighting on the ‘English’ side. And that mattered.

  It mattered, but a year in Italy had revealed a few things to me. One was that Milan was richer than all of England. I had yet to visit Venice or Genoa, but knew each city was richer than the whole of England including London and Florence was larger than Paris and hadn’t endured ten years of near-constant starvation and war.

  That meant that to see Italian conflicts through English eyes was like the plough dragging the ox. Edward III of England might plot all he wanted, but his schemes and those of Charles V of France were mere back alleys in the labyrinthine city of European diplomacy. I didn’t come to this in one year, but I was beginning to suspect that there was more to Amadeus’s quarrels with the Pope, or with Milan, than his relations with England and France.

  So the divides were both true and false, and a mercenary, or a crusader, needed to be able to look at every plot from several angles. It was possible for a good man, a true man, to find himself on both sides of any question, because of divided loyalties or interest. As one example, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, and his Savoyards hated the English and were at least in their hearts loyal to the French King, but the Gre
en Count was a sovereign prince; he owed no fealty to anyone, king or Emperor, except for a few estates. He served the Pope, but he had designs of his own in Italy. He wanted a crusade – and he wanted to control it himself. He was not the sort of man who would abide another’s commands. And his cousin Robert of Geneva, formerly Bishop of Cambrai, was a Savoyard first and foremost.

  And my lady Emile was the wife of one of the Savoyard nobles.

  At any rate, the Green Count was not at Turin, and neither was the Comte d’Herblay or his wife, nor Richard Musard. We stayed three days; Father Pierre had a long discussion on crusade funding with the Green Count’s chamberlain, and we rode east and south, over the passes to Italy. There was still snow on the mountaintops, but the valleys were already in summer, with fields of flowers stretching away like the very embodiment of paradise.

  And then we rode down out of the mountains into the plain of Lombardy, and I was back in Italy. By Saint Maurice, gentlemen, I hope I won’t seem a worse Englishman to you if I say that I love Italy. It is warm and the wine is good.

  We were bound for Bologna. To make the crusade possible, the Pope had curtailed his war with Milan, and his only concrete benefit from two solid years of war was that he had gained the city of Bologna. But let me put that in perspective. Bologna’s taxes were roughly the same as those of the City of London. Eh bien?

  Italy is rich.

  Father Pierre had taken the city as papal legate while I’d been fighting for Pisa, and had proved himself both a fine governor and a Christian man in his dealings. Now he was going back to perform a good deed for the Bolognese, and to rally his own support for the crusade.

  We were housed in the university. Bologna was not the most famous house of learning in Italy, but it had a mighty reputation for its doctors of medicine. The main palazzo was a magnificent building of brick and marble, and had frescoes better than anything in Avignon. I shared a room with Juan and with Fiore, and the three of us filled it to bursting with clothes and harness and horse tack.