The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Good for the scabbard’s wood; good for the sword. And now the glue has nothing to hold.’ I smiled at Sister Marie, and she grinned.

  ‘You are a useful young man,’ she allowed. ‘Can you fix a book cover?’

  I shrugged. ‘I imagine I can, ma soeur. I made all the fittings for a Bible once.’

  ‘Hmmf,’ she said, or something like it. ‘Well, that was a good trick, that with the tallow. If I break my scabbard, I’ll come and find you.’ She turned to go, and paused. ‘My old memory is playing me games,’ she said. ‘I came with a curious letter. Addressed to “Guillaume D’Or, Miles Dei”.’ Her eyes met mine.

  I shrugged. And reached for it.

  ‘The bishop of Nantes included it,’ she went on, her eyes fixed on mine. She was withholding it.

  I sighed. ‘Truly, Sister, I have no idea.’

  She placed it in my hand. ‘The legate’s couriers are not for your private letters,’ she said. She raised one eyebrow, as if to suggest that she knew a thing or two, which I did not doubt for an instant.

  She slipped out of the room.

  Juan shook his head. ‘She thinks all men are fools,’ he said. ‘She is too forward.’

  Miles frowned. ‘I like her,’ he said.

  I was starting to open the parchment, which was folded eight times and sealed with a heavy archbishop’s seal in purple wax, when Ser Nerio pushed in the door.

  ‘Christ, what are you doing? Roasting heretics?’ Nerio wrinkled his nose and put a perfumed glove to his face.

  ‘I suppose you would know the smell,’ Fiore shot back.

  Nerio ignored Fiore. ‘What is this? Some foul English food?’

  I raised my eyes, still struggling with the parchment. ‘I fixed my scabbard,’ I said.

  Nerio laughed. He saw it leaning, point up, in the corner and went to pick it up.

  ‘With stinking glue? Maria Star of Heaven, messire! Pay a leatherworker to fix your scabbards! I have to sleep here!’ He waved his perfumed glove in front of his face.

  I got the parchment open.

  Juan said something about it being useful to know how to look after your own gear.

  It was from Emile. Well, it seems obvious like this, but it wasn’t obvious to me.

  My heart paused – then it beat again, very fast.

  Love and war – so different. But not, perhaps, so different.

  Dear William,

  My husband and I are determined to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Our preparations are made, and he has taken every precaution, including the arranging of a special dispensation at Avignon. His intention is to join the crusade at Venice. My intention is to travel with my children. Please be kind enough to inform me when the legate thinks that the fleet might sail, so that I will not be late. I will come with my own household, and my own knights.

  But be assured that I will come.

  Emile d’Herblay

  I looked up. Juan was glaring like a basilisk at Nerio. He turned and looked at me.

  ‘He just said you were a peasant!’ Juan said.

  ‘No,’ Nerio shook his head. ‘I said he worked like a peasant.’ The young Italian realised he’d gone too far.

  I beamed my happiness at them all. ‘Let’s go out and have a cup of wine,’ I said. ‘On me.’

  Under my happiness was the knowledge that she had also sent me a warning. But I’d already seen the man. I knew what I was up against. I thought of him as the man I’d bested at Brignais, the man who wouldn’t face me in an alley in Avignon. He wasn’t worth spit.

  Or so I thought.

  From Padua we turned back south, so that we had wasted two days travel.

  Father Pierre merely shrugged and said it was God’s will, and that he had reason to visit Chioggia. Now, today, every soldier in Europe knows of Chioggia, but then, it was merely a prosperous town, the southern land-link between the Serenissima and the mainland. The town was well walled, with a drawbridge and a long causeway road across a series of dykes all the way back to the mainland. It had a beautiful central tower of red brick and two fine churches, as well as a monastery on a nearby island and a forest of ships in her port. It was a fine place, with two central canals, and it gave me a taste of Venice without overawing me all at once.

  We arrived late in the day, and Father Pierre went to the island monastery by boat with Fra Peter and Fra John and Sister Marie. The rest of us had to make shift. We stood on the central square – a square that would have graced London or York, let me add, with fifty palaces and great houses fronting on it. They formed an unbroken façade, and every house had a covered, arched portico on the ground floor, so that a man could walk all the way around the square and only be exposed to the elements at the places where the roads came between the houses. Most were three storeys tall, and fronted in stone. All had magnificent chimneys like Turk’s heads atop poles, and in every case, curious to the English eye, the chimneys rose off the front of the house and came down almost to the front door. I later learned that this was a Greek style. The whole town smelled of fish.

  I am prosing on. At any rate, there we stood in the main square, having just seen the legate into his boat at the piers, and Ser Niccolò grinned his evil grin at me. ‘And where do you imagine you’ll stay this night, Messire Englishman?’ he asked.

  ‘An inn?’ I asked.

  Ser Niccolò shook his head. ‘There are two inns in Chioggia. They are fine establishments, but we will fill them both to overflowing. Come, let me introduce you to my friends, the Corners of Chioggia.’

  The Corners, a cadet branch of the mighty Venetian family, lived in mercantile splendour in a three-storey palazzo fronting on the square. It had room after room and the whole house seemed to me to be an endless profusion of blue and gold, bronze and aqua, over and over. The donna Signora wore jewels of lapis and aquamarine, and her husband was one of the richest men in the town. They were very deferential to Ser Niccolò and Ser Nerio, and I was delighted to be drawn in with them. I slept in a magnificent covered bed with Ser Nerio and Juan, and we drank Candian wine and played dice and went to Mass, which was said in a Latin so touched with the tongue of the Veneto that I understood little but the Kyrie.

  Really, the only reason I remember Chioggia – except for what came later, of course – is that night, Madonna Corner was complaining to her husband that the house was overstaffed with male servants. This led to a long, rambling account of the process by which one man had been disciplined for some crime so arcane I couldn’t get the gist, but was too old a family retainer to be dismissed. Again, they all spoke the Venetian dialect, Veneziano, of which I understood so little that I had to constantly ask my hosts to explain.

  Ser Niccolò was his usual debonair self in green wool and gold silk and fur, and he was wearing tall boots – up to the top of his hose, in fact, which matched his clothes. I remember this, because when he rose he was oddly discordant with the blue and gold house.

  He rose to his feet because the erring manservant had come in. The man was short and portly, but not fat; he had a cherubic face and a shock of bright red hair.

  ‘Come,’ Ser Niccolò said. ‘William Gold, I have found you the perfect page.’

  The man had the good grace to appear abashed.

  ‘What’s your name, sir?’ I asked.

  ‘Marc-Antonio,’ he said softly. ‘You are English?’

  I nodded, a little surprised at his boldness. ‘I am.’

  He dropped his eyes, but he couldn’t hide his smile.

  ‘We cannot cast him out, as he is one of my husband’s bastards,’ the lady of the house said. She rolled her eyes. ‘Judas Iscariot, I call him.’

  Hah. When I was a boy, that’s what they called me.

  After evening prayer, I was throwing dice with Nerio and Fiore, who were still not friends. It was exhausting, keeping them from blows. But it
passed the time.

  ‘I had an eight, until you jarred the dice box,’ Fiore stated.

  ‘Why were you so clumsy as to strike me with it?’ Accaioulo asked.

  ‘Why were you so clumsy as to allow it to touch you?’ Fiore asked.

  Juan was lying on our bed, playing with the points of his doublet while I sewed a new metal aiguillette on one. ‘Why don’t you two get a private room?’ Juan asked. ‘Then you can have your lover’s quarrels without troubling your elders.’

  Believe me, his Catalan accent made him sound even more arrogant.

  ‘I suppose you’d prefer if I was in the eaves with the servants,’ Fiore asked, clearly stung. Fiore’s relative poverty weighed on him far more than it need have, but he was very proud.

  Juan swung his legs off the bed. ‘I said nothing of the sort. William, you are a fine tailor, whatever I may think of you as a knight.’

  Nerio was looking down his nose at Fiore, but he couldn’t resist an opportunity. ‘I hear he’s a fine pastry cook, too,’ he jibed. ‘And he does leatherwork.’

  The room was too small for so many young men. But rain was falling like the wrath of God on Noah, and we had nowhere to go.

  Ser Niccolò knocked and was admitted, at which time everyone had to shift, we were packed that close. ‘William, can you afford to keep a page?’

  ‘Can he fight?’ I asked. ‘If so, yes.’

  If I wondered why the richest man in Italy, the chancellor of the Kingdom of Naples, was working on finding me a servant, I didn’t ask. I sensed that Accaioulo was a matchmaker at heart: it may have been the key to his success at negotiations.

  Nerio smiled to himself and turned away.

  Ser Niccolò nodded. ‘I’m sure he can fight, or if not, you can teach him, or your Friulian can. But he needs to leave here. Madonna is a fine woman, but her natural inclination leads her to be …’ He paused, looking for a word that would not be indelicate or unchivalrous.

  ‘To be petty?’ I asked.

  Ser Niccolò waved a hand in front of his face, the universal Northern Italian sign for a word or phrase that was too strong. The he frowned. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted.

  Well, I needed a servant.

  Fiore glared at Nerio. ‘Why is your father planting a spy on Sir William?’ he asked.

  Nerio stood up suddenly and put a hand on his dagger. ‘Withdraw that!’ he spat.

  I stood up too. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I am going to meet this servant. Please try not to kill each other while I’m gone.’ I looked back and forth. ‘Really, friends, I am growing tired of separating you.’

  Juan caught my eye and gave me the smallest head nod from the bed. I winked at him and walked out. Juan followed me into the passageway.

  ‘Just let them fight,’ he whispered. ‘The longer you keep them from it …’ He shrugged.

  He had some wisdom, did our Spaniard.

  Marc-Antonio lived behind the ground floor loggia: that is to say, he lived in a room without heat, which stank of dead fish and canal water. He bowed when I entered.

  ‘Christ on the cross,’ I said without thinking.

  Marc-Antonio made a face. ‘I’m used to it, my lord. But I am sorry.’

  I frowned. ‘Do you want to be my servant?’ I asked.

  Marc-Antonio looked at the ground, and he flushed. ‘No!’ he spat. More softly, he said, ‘But I’ll take any road out of this fish-shit hole.’

  ‘Boys used to call me Judas Iscariot,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ he muttered. Then he brightened. He was very young. ‘You are truly English?’

  I must have grinned, because he grinned back. ‘As English as Kent and London can make,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘The astrologer – he was here a week ago! He told me an Englishman would make my fortune.’

  Well, that was news. ‘He may mean another Englishman,’ I said. I was looking at the cuff of my jupon, which needed some work. ‘Can you sew?’ I asked.

  ‘No, my lord,’ he admitted. ‘That’s women’s work,’ he added with the reckless ignorance of the young.

  ‘Do leatherwork?’ I asked.

  He all but spat. ‘For tradesmen.’

  ‘Can you cook?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘No. I can toast bread on a fork. I can carve meat.’

  ‘Start a fire?’ I asked.

  He sneered. ‘Get a servant for that,’ he said.

  ‘Ride a horse?’ I asked.

  Marc-Antonio sighed. ‘I would very much like to learn to ride,’ he admitted. ‘I was on a horse once.’

  I paused. And watched him, from all the maturity of my twenty-four years.

  ‘I can wrestle!’ he said. ‘And I can row a boat. I know it’s not genteel, but I can row and cast a net.’ He knew he was failing. ‘Why do I have to know all those peasant things? Cooking? Sewing?’

  I sighed. ‘I’m a soldier,’ I said. ‘Those are the skills a soldier has. A page needs to know all of them, and in addition how to look after his own horse and his master’s.’ I thought, not for the first time nor the last, of Perkin, dead in a pointless skirmish. The best squire who ever lived.

  ‘Know anything about armour?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s metal,’ Marc-Antonio said with affected disdain.

  ‘Know how to use a sword?’

  ‘Yes!’ he said.

  ‘Really? Ever had lessons?’

  ‘No!’ he said, louder. He was growing angry.

  ‘Shoot a bow?’

  ‘No! No, I don’t know anything except how to read and write and count money, understand, my lord?’ He stood and glared at me.

  He was several stone overweight, and he didn’t know how to ride.

  I liked his defiance, but it seemed an odd virtue for a servant, much less for forming a squire.

  ‘What do you want out of life?’ I asked.

  He glowered the way only a very young man can glower. ‘I want to be a knight,’ he said. He deflated.

  I sat down on a bale of cloth. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but it was illegal Sicilian cotton, smuggled from Genoa.

  But that’s another story. I looked at him carefully. ‘Listen, Marc-Antonio,’ I said. ‘Will you obey me as if I was Christ come to earth?’

  He looked at me with his head tilted to one side, as if I was a madman. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I took a deep breath. ‘If you obey me, and serve me, I swear I’ll do my best to form you as a knight,’ I said. ‘But it is a long road, and there’s a great deal of work.’

  Marc-Antonio nodded seriously. ‘There’s always a lot of work,’ he agreed. It was the most likeable thing he’d said.

  The next day, we caught a pair of small barques for Venice. Each had room for a dozen animals and twenty people, and the two small ships swore to return as many times as was required to get the whole party to Venice. Most of the party’s horses made the short trip over to the Lidos, the barrier islands across the whole of the Venetian lagoon from Pellestrina to Lido itself, from which they would trans-ship for Venice. As it proved, we kept most of our horses on the grass and grain of Lido for months. But a few of us were ordered to keep our mounts to hand – I was, and so were Fiore and Juan and Stapleton. And Nerio.

  From Chioggia to Venice is no great distance, and by midday, the dome of Saint Mark’s was visible above the glassy surface of the lagoon as we rowed up along the Lido from the south, as people used to do in those days. As the city grew closer, my awe deepened. I had imagined that Venice would be like Chioggia writ large. Indeed, Fra Peter had been prosaic enough to say so, and the reality took my breath away. I had never seen so many stone houses all together in all my life.

  If every noble palace and great stone house and church in London and York were placed side by each, and then we added all the best houses of Paris and Avignon,
the resulting city would not be as magnificent as Venice. And a city with canals! No ditches, no stream of urine, no horse manure, no human excrement floating in muddy brown water. None of that. The sea washes Venice clean at high tide twice a day, and carries her effluvium out into the marshes that surround her.

  Venice smells of nothing worse than the sea. She has a hundred stone churches and the greatest square in the world; the Doge’s palace is one of the noblest structures in Italy, and the church of Saint Mark’s is the rival of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.

  Hmm. Perhaps not. But I hadn’t seen Hagia Sophia yet.

  And let us not forget the forest of her ships. Every street is a wharf and all along the outer rim of the city, and indeed, up the Rialto and along the Grand Canal there were ships: round ships and great ships and galleys – more galleys than I’d ever seen. As our barge brought us to the steps by Saint Mark’s and the Doge’s palace, I counted sixty fighting galleys I’d seen.

  Riches indeed. Spare me your counting houses and warehouses. Show me your galleys.

  I admit I fell in love at once. And I have never fallen out of love, my friends. Venice has a hold on my heart the way London has, and England. My second country, though I did not yet know it. And truly, Venetians are more like Englishmen than any other people I have met. Perhaps it is the sea. Perhaps it’s pig-headedness. Or a little liberty. But by God, the city of Saint Mark is a fine place.

  We wasted no time: the barge took us to the Doge’s steps, and we were welcomed into the palace.

  I swear, the Doge winced when he saw Father Pierre. I knew from Fra Peter that there had been months of negotiations with the Doge and his council about the fleet that would carry the crusade to the Holy Land, and that, in the end, Father Pierre had had his way.

  So now the Doge knelt and kissed the legate’s ring, embraced him, and then frowned.

  ‘Where’s the King of Cyprus?’ he asked without preamble. ‘Your Dogs of War are emptying my kennels of food.’