The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  As if exasperated with herself, she put her babe into my arms, picked up the skirts of her kirtle and ran inside.

  We arrived, a party of a dozen pilgrims, at Chioggia in late November. I showed my papal protection and my courier letter at the causeway and we were conducted like royalty along the edge of the lagoon into Venice’s principle out-town.

  I remember most the sound of the gulls, the piercing cry, so different from any other bird. And the good, wholesome smell of sea and foreshore and fish. I’m a Londoner, if not born then bred up, and Chioggia and Venice have a great deal of London in them. Of course, my Venetian friends would say that perhaps poor London has a little of Venice in her …

  Do you know Venice? Last year, during the great war – of which I’ll speak in time, if we’re stuck her long enough – I was in a position to view the Serenissima’s accounts when she was at her lowest ebb, fighting Genoa to the death. Par dieu, messieurs, there is more gold in Venice than in all England. The merchants of the Rialto and the Lido have more commerce than all England and all France together. The customs intake at Chioggia, one small port, must rival Portsmouth. In England, most men have no idea just how rich Italy is.

  At any rate, I rode along the causeway the allows Chioggia and the long, narrow islands of Pellestrina and Malamocco to be connected to the mainland – or almost connected – to the terra firma at Clogia Minore or Sottomarina, as some say. It would all be a major part of my life, one day. But for the first time in three weeks, Emile brought her horse alongside mine.

  ‘You look happy,’ she said.

  I was, too. I had discovered that I didn’t really need to sleep with Emile to enjoy her. That in fact, I loved her, and not that springtime, sap-rising thing that young people call love. I was also discovering the joy of riding, looking, smelling, tasting. It was a beautiful autumn, except for the poor people dying of the plague, God rest them.

  ‘I love the gulls, Countess,’ I said. ‘They put me in mind of my home.’

  She smiled and looked away. ‘This town,’ she asked. ‘Is this such a place as I might buy a doll? My daughter has left hers over the mountains.’

  I knew that. Every man in our party knew. The poor little sprite had wailed for fifteen days. She was not inconsolable; in fact, as long as she was happy, she didn’t mention the missing doll, but the moment anything disturbed her, the doll became the focus of her outrage. She was two and a half and spoke well – eerily well, in fact.

  I spread my hands. ‘I will hope that we can stay with friends of my lord’s, and of the Acciaioli who I am lucky to call friends.’

  She made a face-raised eyebrow and the curl of her lip. ‘The Acciaioli? Who do you call friend?’

  ‘Lord Niccolò has long been a supporter of our legate and the order,’ I said. ‘Nerio rode to tourny with me in Krakow and even now—’

  Emile laughed. I knew her well; it was the laugh that expressed more discomfort than joy. ‘You know Nerio Acciaioli? The world is too small, indeed.’ She frowned. ‘I scarcely know him, only that my mother and his mother were great friends and had a – a falling out.’

  This was the longest speech I’d heard from her in three weeks on the road. But we were almost to the gate. ‘Countess, I will endeavour to find Mademoiselle Magdalene a doll.’

  Emile favoured me with a smile, her real smile, the smile that struck me like a poleaxe to the head. ‘I would be in your debt, if you would.’

  Indeed, I felt a fool for not thinking to find the girl a doll on my own. Magdalene was a delightful child, as long as she got her way. Like most children, really. I was searching for a way to prove myself to my lady and here was one I’d overlooked. I was not good with children – but I was wise enough to see that I had better adapt to them.

  In my own defence, I’ll say that while there was some good wine and good cheer and staring at beautiful mountains on that trip, I’ll also say that Bernard and Jean-François and I rode and scouted as if we were in hourly danger of our lives. I didn’t know if d’Herblay was ahead of us or behind, or what other agents Robert of Geneva might have deployed against us.

  Any road, on the causeway into Chioggia I felt we were safe. And I wanted to triumph with the doll.

  I reined in and waved for Marc-Antonio, who was preening like a peacock. And why not? He was about to ride into his home town as the squire of a knight. Wearing a sword, even if it was in a plain brown scabbard. Bernard, Jean-François’s silent friend, was not just a fine blade, he could work leather, and together the four of us had tinkered up a fair scabbard for my squire’s longsword. He wore silver spurs and hip-high boots and he was long, lean, and a little dangerous looking – and he knew it. Women were already watching him with the appetite that belies many of the things men say about women.

  At any rate, as he became more like a squire, so it was more of a pleasure to be served by him. He clattered up the causeway in a show of devotion and reined in by my side.

  ‘Can you get us lodgings with the Corners?’ I asked. ‘Go and ask once we pass the gate.’

  He bowed in the saddle. I was doing him a favour: now he could go to his home as my messenger, puffed in self-importance, his status on his hip.

  The gate guards welcomed us like long-lost friends – an odd reaction, but due, I found, to the esteem in which Father Pierre was held in Venice, where they well-nigh worshipped him for his part in making peace between France and Milan and the Pope. At any rate, I covered my surprise. Gate guards can be officious, obsequious, venal or rude, but I’ve seldom known them to be friendly, and it put me on my guard. Marc-Antonio clattered away after exchanging a lewd jest with one of the guards, and we were in the wide streets and canals of Chioggia.

  Emile rode with her head going back and forth.

  ‘These houses are as elegant as those in Paris,’ she said as we came to the grand central square. ‘They must have a fine run of noblemen for such a small town.’

  I nodded. ‘Countess, these are all merchants. The town owns all the land; it is a commune. They rent the land on the condition that the merchants built rich houses.’ I shrugged as if disclaiming my own knowledge. ‘My squire is Chioggian, so I know a fair amount about the town.’

  ‘By Saint Mary Magdalene, this town is a delight,’ she said. We ambled along the main street with a canal on our left running on the far side of the church and the great town hall and the fine tower that could be seen all the way across the marshes. But we were on terra firma; the square was paved, and the houses around it très riches, with three-storey stone façades and arched entryways.

  Marc-Antonio emerged from the Corner facade with the padrone at his back. Messire Corner bowed extravagantly on his own front loggia. ‘The famous knight Sir Guillaume le Coq!’ He grinned. ‘Or perhaps you are too great to be a cook, eh?’

  I shook my head. ‘Master Corner, I am at your service. This is the Countess d’Herblay. This is her captain, Jean-François de Barre, and these gentlemen are all her men-at-arms.’ I bowed from the saddle. ‘May we impose for a night?’

  ‘A night? You may come for Christmas if you want. My wife will be in heaven – a countess? I’ll have to buy her new everything.’ He smiled. ‘Countess, I am entirely at your service, and my house is yours. What brings you to my humble town in the swamps?’

  Emile dazzled him with her most gracious full-face smile; her eyes all but gave light, they sparkled so much. She spoke French – she had very little Italian, although like most Savoyards, she understood it well enough. ‘My lord, I appreciate this welcome,’ she said.

  Jean-François and I translated together, and we both laughed.

  ‘Tell your lady I’m no lord, but a free citizen of Venice,’ Messire Corner said. ‘But be gentle. Aristocrats are easy to insult. Eh? Come, there’s food. I see you have taken good care of my scapegrace bastard. He looks like a man.’

  ‘He is a man, messire. He has s
erved me well, and I have made him a squire. Indeed, he served as a squire in front of the Emperor.’ No harm in laying it on thick. This sort of thing can be a better reward than money. It is honour. Word fame is honour.

  If Emile could be said to be luminous when she was happy, Marc-Antonio glowed.

  The padrone glanced at his bastard son. He gave a long, steady nod. ‘I am delighted, Ser Guillaume, and deeply in your debt. Will you keep him?’

  ‘Indeed, I have undertaken to make him a knight, in time,’ I said.

  I was busy dismounting, handing Emile down – the first time I’d been allowed to do such a thing in the whole of our ride, and the touch of her hand caused me to miss the padrone’s next words. But when I turned, he enfolded me in a velvet embrace. ‘You are a true friend,’ he said. He had tears in his eyes, and he led me by the hand into his house, shouting for his wife.

  In England, a man, no matter how rich, does not brag to his wife of how well his bastard son by another woman has done. But Italy is different, I suppose, though no fool would call Italian women weak.

  You might think that she would be angry, or spiteful – certainly she had no time for the boy when he was a servant. But now she sat Marc-Antonio at the family table and his sword was hung with pride by the chimney.

  Emile favoured me with one of her smiles. Par dieu, it is good to play the great man sometimes, especially when you are young, and it is a pleasure to do a good thing, perhaps the greatest pleasure in the world for a Christian.

  Emile went off with the lady of the house, whose French appeared equal to the occasion and who gave, as I can testify, every evidence of being delighted to host a countess – so much delight that I fear that every matron in Chioggia was treated to an evocation of Emile’s gentility and demeanour for many weeks to follow. But perhaps I do the lady an injustice.

  I remember that evening well. We ate a simple meal (so our hostess claimed) and I had octopus in a dark-brown sauce made with its own ink, which was delicious, and curiously like a succulent beefsteak. We had it with a heavy red wine, something local. Ah, messieurs, it is not all wading in blood, the life of arms, and we sat and listened to the Corner daughters play the lute and sing, and then we all sang some Italian songs. In those days, my Italian was far from courtly, and I did not know the fashionable songs, the ones Boccaccio and Dante made popular in the upper classes. But I knew several new songs by Machaut, in French. I sang ‘Puis que la douce rousée’ and Emile laughed so hard I thought she might injure herself.

  ‘You are not the fair lady that Master Machaut expected,’ she said when she recovered.

  Of course, I’d only met Guillaume de Machaut through Emile, and she knew all his music. With only a little importuning from the company, Emile sang, and the elder of the Corner girls picked up her tune and even the words in one repetition – a quick ear and no mistake. They sang two rounds and a motet. Then I joined them for a third.

  Alors, it was a fine evening. I was with Emile – how could it be anything else? And when the wine had gone round and the girls gone to their beds, the padrone rose and toasted me. ‘You’ve made a fine young man of my wastrel son,’ he said. ‘My house is at your service. It is like a miracle from God.’

  I shrugged; no man deals well with heartfelt praise. ‘He was a fine young man to start,’ I said.

  Husband and wife glanced at each other and the wife’s sister looked at Marc-Antonio and snorted.

  But my squire rose and bowed. ‘Thanks you, my lord, for your work. I am sensible of my debt,’ he said, with more gentility than I had expected.

  If I needed a reward for my labours – and I don’t pretend I worked so very hard on Marc-Antonio – if I needed a reward, Emile’s appraising look and smile were beyond price.

  At any rate, a fine evening. And when the countess had retired, I took Corner aside in his hall and asked him if the shops of the town could produce a doll. In a story, he’d have produced one in the morning, but instead, he sent my squire out and he returned empty-handed and defeated.

  Italians are the most hospitable men and women in the world – they will never allow you to buy wine, and Corner obviously felt that the failure to provide a doll was a slight on his good name. He offered to have the attic ransacked for one of his daughter’s.

  ‘They’re all grown,’ he said. ‘All they think of now is shoes. And husbands.’

  But somehow, in this empris, I suspected that little Magdalene needed a new doll.

  That day, before we were ferried to the Lido, I sent a letter to Pisa, to John Hawkwood and Janet. And then we rode took the ferry to Pellestrina, and rode along the islands to Venice.

  I think that, if the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-five deserves to be remembered, it is as the year in which nothing – nothing I imagined, anyway – ever seemed to occur as I had expected it.

  I left Chioggia the happiest of men, and we rode the sandbanks and orchards of the outer islands like a company of pilgrims, telling stories and singing, and each time we dismounted for a cup of wine, I caught Emile around her waist, and her smile would take her like a flush of surprise. The gulls cried, the sardines were delicious, and I would have had that ride go on forever.

  But all too soon we came to Venice. And in an hour, a boat ride, I lost Emile and her children and her men-at-arms to an island convent, where lodging had been prepared for them, and I was separated from her by a stretch of water that was as effective a barrier as the Alps. There was no goodbye, no touching farewell, no kiss. She was a great lady, and she and her party were greeted by officials of the Doge and I was treated … well, as what I was, a gentleman-servant.

  The Doge’s secretary was kind enough to take me aside and tell me that the lapal legate wanted to see me as soon as I was at liberty. I sent Marc-Antonio to find us lodging with all our horses, and I walked across the square to the Doge’s palace where the legate had been given space to work.

  As homecomings go, it was quite good. Fra Peter embraced me in the guardroom, and there were Juan and Miles and a dozen other men I knew, as well as most of the Knights of the Order that I had met and trained with at Avignon, here for the mounting of the Passagium Generale.

  Fra Peter waited with what proved to be staggering patience while men embraced me, admired the Emperor’s sword, or praised my fighting at Krakow or warned me of the dire penances that the order demanded for breaking the rule against private warfare. I might have been more terrified if these threats hadn’t almost always been accompanied by a gruff laugh or a significant stare, and I had no idea I was in a hurry, but when I’d told my story three or four times, and I was just starting to describe the banquet to one of the Venetian captains, Fra Peter’s iron-hard right arm locked on my left and I was frog-marched to the stairs. As soon as we were safe on the first landing, I handed over the leather bag of scrolls and letters from Avignon.

  ‘Avignon!’ Fra Peter bit his lip. ‘We sent you to Vienna!’

  I nodded. ‘I went to Nuremberg, heard the king was in the east, and I chased him all the way to Krakow,’ I said. ‘He sent me back to Avignon with letters patent and missals for the Pope.’

  Fra Peter’s patience ran out. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘The Pope? Still in Avignon – what in the name of all the saints?’ I asked, as my misunderstanding had been genuine, and Fra Peter was breaking my arm.

  ‘The king, you young fool. Where is the King of Jerusalem?’ he demanded.

  ‘On his way here,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I left him at Nuremberg. I rode to Avignon. He should have been here three weeks ago.’

  Fra Peter shook his head and put two fingers to the bridge of his nose. ‘By Saint George and Saint Maurice and Holy Saint John, it has been a difficult two months. The soldiers—’

  We both bowed to one of Father Pierre’s Italian clerics, who returned my bow with a smile, and then I saw Sister Marie and sh
e allowed herself a broad smile.

  ‘Now that, my brother in Christ, is a sword,’ she said. She grinned. ‘When we have a moment, I’d like to fondle it.’ She laughed and retired to her cubicle by the legate’s office.

  ‘It’s very grand, after Avignon,’ I said to Fra Peter. In Avignon, Father Pierre had owned a cell like any serving brother and in it he kept his books and his desk, his prie-dieu and his sleeping pallet. I have known eight or ten men in that cell, or in the hall outside, waiting to confess, or waiting with messages or looking to consult.

  The Doge was considerably more helpful than the Pope. The legate had a suite of rooms, so that Sister Marie had a closet to herself, and a brazier to fight the freezing damp; Father Pierre himself had a room with beautifully stuccoed walls, a simple pattern in red and blue that pleased the eye and gladdened the heart like the cry of gulls. He was dressed in a plain brown robe, but he had a fur hood and a magnificent enamelled set of prayer beads on his belt. He still looked very plain amidst the magnificence of Venice, and I would say that it was not that he had made his clothing more sumptuous, as much as he had risen to the challenge of being a papal legate in Venice.

  He rose and embraced me.

  Then, after I had kissed his episcopal ring and knelt, he waved me to a chair. Italians have the best chairs. They have a dozen types, from thrones very like our own to my favourites, the folding chairs made of dozens of frame supports that fold into each other like two sets of human ribs interlocked and unfold into a chair. The Doge had provided the legate with a complete set of camp furniture for the crusade. He had set it up in his office and I confess that the Doge of Venice’s camp furniture was better than anything I had seen in the palaces of Poland and Bohemia or England.

  At any rate, I settled comfortably into my chair and told my story, leaving out nothing but venal sins.

  Father Pierre motioned to Fra Peter to sit, and it was just the three of us, and Sister Marie, scribbling madly away. She wrote so fast that when she dipped her pen, she did so with her whole body, and her pen case, hung round her neck, would tap against the desk; our whole conversation was punctuated by that ‘click’ that came every seventy or eighty heartbeats.