The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  Nerio had eyes only for the shape of his conquest, and she was shapely, and delighted enough, or simply appalled enough, at her new role to carry off the part: she was naked under a single shift, and most of her was on display.

  ‘You made him drunk,’ I said, with a nod to the cot where Juan tossed and snored.

  ‘We promised him a festivity,’ Nerio said. ‘We are soldiers, not monks.’

  I looked at Miles. ‘Well?’ I asked.

  His eyes were large. ‘I – that is – my lord—’

  Nerio laughed. ‘You are all such children!’ he said. ‘Life is for living. Carpe diem. If the next lance stroke goes through my visor, I want to have sported every maiden in Venice – in Italy! What use is chastity to a corpse?’ He looked at me. ‘Eh? William?’

  ‘When he confesses all this to Father Pierre,’ I said. It was a weak thing to say, I admit.

  Nerio shook his head. ‘A fine man, but you fear him too much. Let him live a life of chastity if he will.’ He smiled at me.

  ‘Par dieu, brothers!’ I said. ‘In a few weeks, we’ll be going on crusade! To Jerusalem!’

  Nerio licked his lips. ‘I’m quite sure there will be women there, as well,’ he said.

  Later that day, or perhaps the next, but still with a disturbed and unclean spirit, I went to the Doge’s palace to meet with Fra Peter. I feared the summons was about Juan, but I was mostly incorrect.

  ‘Father Pierre is going to Genoa,’ he announced.

  ‘In the winter?’ I asked, and probably blasphemed.

  ‘Now that the King of Cyprus is here – and he’s been asking for you, William – Father Pierre feels free to try to move Venice on the matter of war with Cyprus. I must be here, to help the king with the men-at-arms – those who are left.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you have a few thousand ducats lying about that you could loan me, William? If I could make even the smallest of payments to our “crusaders”, I could hold this army together. We don’t have the great nobles that we expected. Indeed, the Green Count has obviously decided to spurn us and go his own way: he’s raising his vassals, but not for us.’ He gave me a withering look. ‘All we get is his useless cousin, the Count of Turenne.’ He looked at me – a look I knew meant trouble. ‘And we hear we are to be graced with the Count d’Herblay.’

  I thought of them – both from Geneva, both cousins of Robert the Bishop. I hadn’t considered that such obvious enemies would be travelling with us – fighting beside us. I entertained Fra Peter for a quarter of an hour with my thoughts on the alignment of that bishop and the party in the church that had been Talleyrand’s. I thought of having d’Herblay with us and something in me just … broke.

  Fra Peter tugged his beard, sent for wine, and heard me out.

  ‘This is all your own?’ he asked. I suppose my tirade was emotional.

  It is a great pleasure to be flattered by your mentor, and his response was flattering. He was taking me seriously.

  I shook my head. ‘A great deal of it is from Fra Juan di Heredia.’

  Fra Peter’s face altered. His pleasure in my explanation evaporated, and he frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You like him?’

  I shrugged. ‘Yes, my lord, I do like him, although he is a difficult man. He helped me in a – a personal matter. And he is absolutely loyal to Father Pierre.’

  I heard his sandals before I saw him, and suddenly Father Pierre was there, gliding into another of the beautiful camp chairs. ‘But William, I need no man’s loyalty. I am not a secular lord. I do not request or require your commitment or Fra di Heredia’s to anyone but the Saviour and the Church. The rest is mere vanity.’

  I understood what he said, and yet, in a way that is difficult to explain, I thought it was likely that Fra Peter and Father Pierre, two of the men I loved and trusted most in the world, were fools, and Fra Juan, who I suspected was as venal and ambitious as the Bishop of Geneva, was a man like me: a man who could accomplish a goal. For good or ill.

  Father Pierre was still talking, explaining to Fra Peter that the Venetians would not rent a single ship, by last year’s terms or any others, to the King of Cyprus while Genoa threatened war.

  Fra Peter stretched his booted feet towards the fire and leaned back. ‘William has just favoured me with an explanation of events which would stretch to fit the Genoese business.’

  For the second time in an hour, I found myself explaining Robert of Geneva’s role in Avignon, and his family stake in the bishopric of Geneva and the papacy and the crusade.

  ‘Genoa is a pawn of France,’ Fra Peter said.

  ‘France and Egypt,’ Father Pierre said. He looked at me, and his eyes told me that he had read my thought, and that his love of man included an understanding of how much the animal man could be. ‘Imagine: a hundred years ago, Saint Louis led a crusade to Cairo, but now the King of France conspires with the Sultan in Cairo to stop a crusade.’

  I looked at my feet and ran my fingers though my hair. ‘Does the King of France even know what’s afoot?’ I asked.

  Fra Peter looked at me, then the fire. ‘Probably not; it is enough for him to get a Frenchman as the next Pope. He won’t trouble himself about the ways and means.’

  ‘Fra di Heredia said you might be the next Pope,’ I said. I knew it was bold.

  Father Pierre’s wide eyes met mine. ‘If they make me Pope, I will fling the moneylenders from the temple,’ he said. ‘I will burn their fingers on their own ingots of gold.’ He smiled.

  Fra Peter laughed. ‘I pray I may live to see the moment you receive Saint Peter’s crown,’ he said. ‘I for one would like to see what you will make of Mother Church.’

  Father Pierre raised an eyebrow. ‘Enough. I will go to Genoa.’

  Fra Peter nodded to me. ‘After complete impasse, and some very underhanded dealing, suddenly Genoa invites Father Pierre to address her great council and make a case for peace.’

  I suppose we should have seen the connection, but we did not.

  Nor were we fools. Fra Peter ordered me to take a few volunteers. We thought we would be gone just three weeks, back in time for Juan’s knighting. King Peter intended to keep Christmas court in Venice; there was to be a tournament and a foot combat in the square of Saint Mark’s. We had three weeks to get the legate over the rain-swept roads of northern Italy, to an inimical city, to make a treaty.

  A week passed, and we still hadn’t left. These things happen; the legate was held up every day by the press of business, and now that we had the king in person, it was increasingly likely that there would, indeed, be a crusade.

  There were further letters from Avignon. The letters told the legate that the Pope was still interested in the expedition, but they told me that the passes above Turin had opened again, however briefly, and that Robert of Geneva’s agents would be abroad.

  I attended King Peter. The Venetians had moved him from the Doge’s palace and now housed him magnificently in a private one, and he kept court. Many of his men who hadn’t had the coin to travel Europe had come this far, and now he was surrounded by a phalanx of noble Franco-Cypriotes. Jehan de Morphou led them – he was the best dressed and the most arrogant. The admiral, Jean de Monstry, had been on the king’s team at the tournament of Krakow, and I knew him a little, and of course there was Phillipe de Mézzières. But none of them were overtly rude; Monsieur de Mézzières was distant but courteous enough, although I didn’t much like the way he watched me, and Morphou was full of praise for my exploits with the king at Krakow – praise that I found as insubstantial as a pimp’s promises of a wedding.

  However, I invited all of them to Juan’s knighting. I was determined to pack his ceremony with good knights.

  It was also while visiting the king’s court that I first met Nicolas Sabraham. He was older than I, grey-bearded and as plainly dressed as a monk, but he wore a heavy sword and spurs. I was briefly introduced
by a French knight, Brémond de la Voulte, who was serving King Peter as a volunteer with ten men-at-arms. Brémond and I had crossed lances on several occasions, or at least, we’d been within yards of each other in fights in France, especially Brignais, and we probably bored a number of Cypriote knights to tears with our reminiscence, but we were instant comrades, and swore to each other to go to Jerusalem come what may. He knew Sabraham, who often served with the order. I had never met him. Sire Brémond walked off and left us in order to flash his Poitevan smile at a Venetian lady, and left me with Sabraham.

  ‘You’re English,’ he said.

  His English was as good as mine, and pure Northerner, like John Hughes.

  I suppose that I grinned. ‘I would never have taken you for a Londoner, sir,’ I allowed. He was dark-skinned and dark-haired under his grey.

  ‘Nor should you,’ he said. ‘My family is from the north.’ He smiled and tugged at his beard. ‘Or do you mean I’m dark? It serves me in good stead here.’ He shrugged. ‘Men say our forefathers were Jews in York.’

  He said it with such simplicity – listen, I have not, myself, ever held with those who attaint the whole of the race of Jews with the death of Christ. Father Pierre said once in a sermon that we should never mind the Jews, that we kill Christ ourselves, every time we sin against another man, and I take that as a gospel. But Sabraham’s easy admission marked a kind of courage – or indifference – and yet instantly educated me about the man: he was surrounded by a circle of emptiness. A few men, like Sire Brémond, were not afraid of whatever taint might stick to such a man, but most of the Cypriotes left him a wide berth.

  It was their loss. He was a witty man when he spoke, yet careful and dignified. In ten minutes, I had learned that he had read the Koran in Arabic and the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, that he had travelled all over the Holy Land, and that he knew Juan di Heredia.

  I invited him to Juan the younger’s knighting, and he smiled. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, eyebrows pausing as if to check my intentions independently from his eyes.

  I wanted to tell him that I had no truck with the Jew-haters, but that might offend him doubly – perhaps from a convert family he was, himself, one of them? Men are hard creatures to know.

  About the same time, we were joined by two schismatic converts who served as knights with Father Pierre. They’d been on a mission for him to Constantinople, and they returned with Imperial bulls written in gold on purple parchment. Father Pierre had spent a great deal of time out in the East while we were fighting the French, and he knew the Emperor, John V, and many members of his court, and he had converted two of the Emperor’s noblemen – Syr Giannis Lascarus Calopherus and Syr Giorgos Angelus of the Imperial family. They were darker than Sabraham, as dark as Moors, with curling black beards and dark brows, but they were good men-at-arms. I had never really met any of the Greek Stradiotes, although there were already a few serving with the Hungarians and Venetians in the wars. These two were the first Catholic Greeks I met, and they spoke as many languages as Sabraham. And of course, the three of them knew each other – Venice is full of Greeks, and they attend the same churches and drink wine in the same houses and probably use the same brothels; and Sabraham was more readily accepted by the Greeks than by the Cypriotes.

  At any rate, we played dice with them and they taught us card games and we all practiced at arms together. The Greeks were a revelation, even to Fiore; they, too, had a martial tradition, and as Venice was afire for anything even obliquely Classical, and as Greeks claim a classical ancestry to anything they do, Fiore was at first amazed, and later at least interested, by their exercises, which they claimed to come from Galen, and their swordsmanship, which they claimed came from Roman manuals.

  In private, Fiore practised some of their exercises and mocked others. ‘The Romans never had the longsword,’ he said. ‘It is an invention of this age. Yet they both wear them, and their teacher was a High German, or I’m a Moslem.’

  Whatever their martial antecedents, they were good swordsmen, and they were amazing horse-archers, as we had cause to see in a little display they put on for the men-at-arms at Mestre. Fra Peter and the legate and the king all wanted the mercenaries and volunteers to see what the Turks and Saracens could do, and he used our Byzantine gentlemen to act as Turks. Later, when I saw real Turks, I realised that they were pretty good imitations, although Giorgos never rode as well as Giannis, much less as well as a Turk bred to it from birth. But I digress.

  Twice I had notes from Emile. Jean-François and Bernard joined us, and we had a feast in an inn, with a dozen Knights of the Order and another dozen volunteers, with Sabraham and the two Greeks and Sire Brémond. We drank and told lies and promised each other we’d kill all the Saracens on the face of the earth, which made Sabraham wince.

  ‘Why so solemn, Sir Nicolas?’ I asked. ‘We all go to fight the paynim together.’

  I think he shrugged. I was more than a little drunk and he was not. ‘They are all as God made them,’ he said.

  The only thing worth noting about that evening, beside the quality of the wine, was that we all agreed to share the cost of renting a small warehouse with a dry sand floor, well along the Rialto, for the balance of the winter, so that Fiore could exercise us. We had twenty knights and almost as many squires. I mention this because I’m quite sure it was the foundation of his fame as a teacher. We subscribed to pay for the warehouse and wood for wasters and a few ducats for Fiore’s time.

  And at dinner, Giannis leaned past Juan and informed me that he was taking letters for Avignon, and did I have any messages?

  I took the time to write the situation as carefully as I knew it, and send it to Fra Juan di Heredia. I had imagined that he would come to Venice for his ‘nephew’s’ knighting, but I reckoned without the man. He didn’t come.

  Sometimes it is hard to like the men you value most. His own son? I mentioned the coming knighting twice, and no doubt made a hash of it.

  Father Pierre informed me that we would not leave for Genoa until after Epiphany, and I laid down my last borrowed ducats for clothes for Juan’s knighting, and borrowed more from Nerio. It was almost evil, the extent to which he enjoyed giving us money. I hated to be owned, but I was poor, and there is no level of self-denial in Venice that can keep a man-at-arms fed and housed. When I look back at that happy time, surrounded by my friends, living comfortably, and seeing or hearing often enough of my love, I am pained to know that in that moment, unaware of what was ahead, I was afire to leave Venice just to save a little gold, and horribly lusty, eager to end my self-enforced chastity. Every girl and every woman looked appealing to me, and Nerio’s infatuation with our grocer’s eldest daughter and her wantonness – I know no other way to describe her eager acceptance of the role of mistress – was sapping my resolution to be faithful to Emile.

  Yet even while I watched Anna and Nerio bill and coo, I knew that there must be a thunderclap waiting in the wings. It is one thing to buy a Moorish girl on the docks, and another thing to deflower a merchant’s daughter of marriageable age. Or rather, it may be the same thing in the eyes of Father Pierre, or God, but in the eyes of the world …

  I sent two notes to Emile and one to the sisters of the convent, and worries about the state of Juan’s soul and my own were replaced, as young men do such things, by the constant worry that Juan’s surcoat would not be done for his knighting. But the day before Christmas Eve, I received a note from Emile promising her attendance and delivery of the surcoat, and the next day I met her at Saint Mark’s in time to take silk-wrapped package from Jean-François and another from Bernard. The first proved to hold Juan’s surcoat, resplendent in new red silk, with a perfectly white cross-edged in magnificent gold thread. I ran almost all the way back to our rooms in my arming clothes, untied laces flapping like the gills on a fish.

  The second package held my own surcoat, or rather, all that was left of my original surcoat. I assum
e they kept the lining, which had been used as a pattern. My new surcoat lacked the gold thread along the cross that distinguished Juan’s, but that was replaced with a tracery of embroidery – red on the scarlet and cream on the white, some verses of the New Testament in gold, and a magnificent embroidered rendering of my arms on my left breast, just as Juan’s had his on his left breast.

  It was magnificent. But I didn’t have time to stare, and I shrugged it on over my harness and Marc-Antonio laced the sides, but from the quality of his swearing I knew that he was impressed. I sent mine down to the grocer’s to be pressed, and one of the daughters returned, breathless and delighted to have played her part.

  On Christmas Eve, we all attended Mass, and Juan stood his vigil all night. We had all stood with him – Miles, Nerio, Fiore and I; as well as Sir Norman Lindsey, Jean-François, Bernard, Ser Brémond and Fra Peter and a dozen other Knights of the Order, too, so that we ushered in the dawn of our Saviour’s birth by making him knight. The King of Cyprus gave him the accolade and Fra Peter struck him the blow, and I buckled on his spurs. And then we all squired him, lacing the new surcoat tight, and it fitted him over his new breast-and-back like an outer silken skin, and he stood in the light of a hundred candles and glowed.

  But of course, between the vigil and the services and the Mass, I had missed Emile, who was gone back to her island.

  Ser Juan di Majorca, as we now called him, glowed all the way through the Christmas festivities. The guilds of Venice feted us, we fought for the pleasure of the ladies and the crowd, and we drank wine for free in every tavern in the city, although it made Fra Peter and the knights of the order frown. I saw Emile three times in a week.

  To say she seemed distracted would not fully do justice to her state.

  The third time I met her was at the Cypriote court, and when I had bowed deeply to her, she glanced around and drew me aside, making my breath stop in my chest as she seized my hand.