The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I hear you are to leave this beautiful city for its rival, Genoa,’ she said. Her attempt at dissimulation couldn’t hide the darting of her eyes.

  ‘Yes, countess,’ I agreed. ‘I regret it, but I have never had a chance to address you.’ Even as I spoke, I felt as clumsy as a young knight. I wanted to tell her what I thought of her deliberate avoidance of me, of her indifference. To remind her of what she wrote in her letter, when I had been with Hawkwood. To thank her, because, having puzzled out the verses on my surcoat – gothic script can be nigh on impossible for a layman to read – I knew whose hand had embroidered them.

  Her slight frown blew all that away like the rigging is stripped from a mast in a gale in the channel. ‘I do not know how best to state my … reservations,’ she said carefully. ‘But I do not think it is merest happenstance that while I wait here for a ship to the Holy Land, my husband has gone with a French embassy to Genoa, or so I am told.’ She paused. ‘And my chamberlain believes he is coming here.’

  She would offer no more, but I treasured the warmth of her hand and the slight pressure of her fingers. We were drinking in each other’s eyes when the King of Cyprus cleared his throat. ‘Madame la comtesse,’ he said with an elegant bow, ‘as you are the fairest flower to adorn my court this season, perhaps you would come and teach us the latest songs? I gather that Maître de Machaut claims your acquaintance?’

  She looked up under her lashes and flashed her most engaging smile, and something in my heart froze.

  But I was to go to Genoa.

  Even as the worm of jealousy, the black serpent, began to gnaw at me, still I treasured the information she offered, as well. I passed it to Fra Peter and he made a face.

  ‘See to it you protect the legate,’ he said. ‘Who is this Emile d’Herblay to you? I seem to remember the name.’ He looked up from a list of warhorses and feeding costs. ‘I hear her name linked with the king’s.’

  ‘I took her husband at Brignais,’ I said. They say that no man can hide three things – love, sorrow, and sudden increase in fortune – but I’ll add a fourth: no man can hide jealousy.

  Fra Peter’s eyes cut into mine. I knew he was not buying my evasion, that he had read me. He spat as if he’d tasted bile. ‘Listen to me, lad. You be cautious with our legate’s good name, here and in Genoa. The Venetians are all smiles, but they’d like to cancel the Passagium as much as the Genoese would. Do you understand?’

  Again, I had a sort of false outraged innocence. ‘I have done nothing of which I need to feel ashamed,’ I said.

  Fra Peter raised an eyebrow. And waved me away in dismissal.

  We were both wearing our splendid surcoats, as was Fiore, now a knight of the empire, and Nerio, when we escorted the legate. As donats of knightly status, we had scarlet coats, our own arms emblazoned in the upper canton, otherwise marked by white crosses. We wore gold belts and gold spurs, and we looked superb! Red is the most martial colour.

  We took boats to Mestre and then rode across the Venetian plain to Padua, where we were well enough received, although there was still plague in spots, poor souls. From Padua we rode to Vicenza, and from Vicenza to Verona and thence via Brescia to Milan.

  I was very conscious of our danger and of our dignity. The legate cared little for outward show, which was very holy of him, to be sure, but his very lack of show made him a target where he needn’t have been one. In some ways, the outward display of the richest churchmen was a protection from thieves and brigands. It could awe the populace in a town, too.

  Our legate in his brown Carmelite robe was far from an awesome figure. Further, other churchmen resented him. He had almost absolute powers in Italy; in any town in which he stopped, he had the power to take money from crusading funds, even to dictate the manner of collection of those funds. He could use revenues brought in by pilgrimage and donation – in cathedrals, for example. These were, in fact, funds that were intended for the crusades, going back two hundred years, but the bishops of these places looked on those revenues as their own money, and their resentment was dangerous.

  I think that perhaps they would have found Father Pierre easier to deal with had he been one of them, had he travelled with pomp, and a hundred men-at-arms. Instead, he wore an old brown cloak over his robes and had an escort of ten. In Brescia, we had an incident that was only averted by Nerio’s connections. In Milan, we owed our protection to Nicolas Sabraham, who appeared at dinner in the Episcopal residence and ordered me to change our lodgings, which I did, despite the cursing of all of our pages and squires. We carried every trunk halfway across the city, and moved the animals.

  Sabraham was not mistaken. That night there was an attack on our former beds. A dozen men, masked and hooded and carrying crossbows, killed two Episcopal men-at-arms and stormed our rooms – and found them empty.

  That was my introduction to Milan. We hadn’t been invited to the palace, yet. If Vicenza and Verona had tyrants, the Visconti of Milan were the greatest tyrants of all. We’d made war on Bernabo Visconti just two years before, and we were aware – at least, Sabraham and I were aware – that he was allied to the King of France, he was the most powerful man in northern Italy, and he was the inveterate foe of the Pope.

  I see you smile; yes, because there were not just two sides in Italy, or anywhere else. The Pope was the ally of the King of France, and so were the Visconti. But the Visconti and the Pope were enemies, and this fracture went deep – the Green Count of Savoy was friend to both the Pope and the Visconti – and the King of France. A remarkable balancing act. States like Florence tried to balance the Pope and the Visconti and cared nothing for the King of France.

  Our legate had an audience with the tyrant at the palace. I went with him, and stood at his shoulder while Bernabo, Lord of Milan, openly fondled a magnificent courtesan and promised thirty knights for the crusade. He meant to insult Father Pierre, but failed. On the way out of the palace, one of the more sinister buildings I’ve ever known, and perhaps I’ll describe it more fully in due time, the legate smiled his rare impish smile at me.

  ‘I am not here as a man, but as the legate of crusade,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Thirty knights? I may be sorry for his sin, but I needn’t bridle at it.’

  Milan was full of men-at-arms, almost an armed camp, and I suspected, as did Sabraham, that our attackers had been Bernabo’s men. I wondered if he would send us the very men he’d asked to assassinate the legate, but Sabraham laughed.

  ‘You don’t understand Italy as well as you think, my young apprentice,’ he said.

  I rather liked that he called me his apprentice. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Sabraham laughed his thin-lipped, grim laugh. ‘It would humiliate the Visconti if the legate had been killed in Milan, in the centre of Visconti power.’ He looked at me and winked. ‘Visconti has just discovered that his arrangements are penetrated and one of his men has sold himself to France. He’s in a rage – against the French.’

  I watched the houses like a hawk – and then it hit me. ‘You!’

  Sabraham smiled. ‘Never,’ he said.

  I didn’t breathe until we were in the countryside, riding west.

  Sabraham joined us with a pair of soldiers and it is difficult to describe them. They were not, strictly speaking, archers, although in England I think they might have been. They were both very professional, their kit clean and neat and well-cared for, weapons well-oiled. They rode good horses and had no badges. We called them George and Maurice. They accepted these names with a good nature.

  I had been around. I was getting an idea what Sabraham did, and I was delighted to have him with us. At an inn west of Milan, with half my friends on watch and all the precautions I could manage, I told Sabraham of my fears – Robert of Geneva, the Bourc, d’Herblay, the papacy, and the legate.

  He nodded and agreed. Finally he rubbed his beard. ‘You have done well to puzzle this for y
ourself,’ he said – warm praise from a master. But his next words chilled me.

  ‘The legate shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘The Bishop of Geneva means him humiliated or dead.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘The safest place for him is on crusade.’

  ‘Does the legate know what you did?’ I asked, looking around. ‘In Milan?’

  Sabraham frowned. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he said. ‘And neither does the legate.’

  The next morning, over watered wine and stale bread, I put some of this to the legate, who smiled his saintly smile.

  ‘You are going to tell me that God will provide,’ I said.

  Father Pierre nodded.

  My faith, much abused, sinned against, and manipulated, was as strong as it had ever been. Despite which, I suspected that God’s will would function best – as it did on crusade – if we were worthy, took precautions, and avoided ambush.

  Two days west of Milan, I sat in a chilly arbour – no grapes left – and read an old itinerary that the inn kept, a list of destinations and distances. I called Sabraham who had already scouted the road with his two professionals. I wasn’t sure which of us was in command: he was without a doubt the more experienced, but I was a knight. He was retiring, almost mild. He never stayed to drink wine in the evenings, and he was all but invisible in a group.

  I showed him the itinerary. ‘What if we approached Genoa from the south?’ I asked. ‘Two days extra travel …’

  Sabraham nodded, really pleased. ‘This is well considered. What a valuable little book.’

  Sister Marie overheard us. She nodded to Sabraham and stood with a false demure hesitation. ‘I could copy it,’ she said, riffling the scroll. ‘Two hours.’

  The little scroll covered Northern Italy as far south as Florence. It looked to me like a mighty resource, and Sabraham agreed. Sister Marie sat and copied. To speed us on the road, Sabraham and I both joined her, and before we were done, Ser Nerio sat down and stained his hands with ink. We paid the innkeeper to make that copy and I have it yet. Listen, knowing the fastest way from one place to another is all very well, but for a soldier – or a spy – it is useful to know all the other ways, too. And whenever I learn one, I add it to the scroll.

  Thanks to that little book, we went south, skirted the marches of Florentine territory, and arrived on the coast. The road wasn’t bad and the people were delighted; they had pilgrims in summer, but winter was a hard time. Twice we heard of brigands, but they were elsewhere or thought better of an armed party.

  At the southern extent of the Ligurian coast, we caught a small trading ship, a Pisan, and he dropped us on a wharf in Genoa, unannounced and safe.

  Genoa is a very different city from Venice. Perhaps the principle difference is in the people. In Venice, the small trades share the prosperity of the city. Our grocers were prosperous people; the guildsmen were rich, by English standards, and not just the Masters; the men who owned ropewalks were rich, and so were the men who owned boatyards.

  In Genoa, only the rich are rich. A handful of men own everything, just thirty or forty families. The caste of workers derives no benefit whatsoever from the riches of Genoa’s overseas empire. Let me give you the simplest example. On a Venetian merchant ship, all sailors, even the oarsmen, are allowed a space to ship their own cargoes, even if that space is only a single small chest as long as your arm and as wide as the span of a man’s hand. But fill that chest with spice at Alexandria, the richest city in the world, and sail it home to Venice or to England or Flanders, and an oarsman might make ten years wages in an afternoon.

  Genoese oarsmen are not allowed anything. Their masters feel that to allow them to trade might cost the owners some profit. The guilds derive little profit from the sea trade, because their wages and their products have set values: values set by the men who rule the city. They call themselves a republic, but they have fewer men involved in government than the Savoyards, who call themselves a feudal state.

  I think my dislike – nay, hatred – of Genoa began on the docks. Par dieu, docks are heartless places. The same vices rule every set in the world, from Southwark in London to the stews in Constantinople: prostitution of girls and boys too young to even know what their trade is about, drunkenness and dangerous drugs that rob a man of his senses, and thieves to take the rest; sheer greed, so that workers are underpaid and merchants are fat. Lust, gluttony, greed, pride –dockyards are, in most cities, nastier places than battlefields, and that’s saying something.

  Venice’s docks had Moslem slaves and tired stevedores. But the stevedores were mostly citizens and the slaves – well, they ate.

  The Genoese docks were peopled by men and women at the end of despair. It was the middle of winter, and there were beggars in women’s cast-off shifts and no shoes, backs hunched to carry bundles of rags. They looked as bad as the poorest French peasants, or refugees from the height of our war in France, when our armies burned a hundred hamlets a day and drove the villeins to the fields and forests.

  Father Pierre stopped on the quay, in a cold wind and light rain that cut through my harness and my arming clothes and froze the marrow in my bones. He began by blessing the poor, and to my great shame, I shifted from one foot to another, worried about my warhorse and wishing he would move on, my eyes scanning the crowd.

  I needn’t have feared the poor and the desperate. They were not my foes or his.

  The Pisan captain got our horses unloaded with professional competence, and I paid him with the legate’s money, having almost none of my own. He spat. Pisans hate Genoa, for good reason, and we had been lucky with him. ‘I may have to jump in the ocean to get clean,’ he said, when my Jacques was out of the cradle of the winch. ‘You would do well not to linger here.’

  Indeed, as soon as he had our florins in his purse and a small cargo of hides he picked up on the foreshore, he was away, his sons poling his small ship off the quay. I’d only known him two days, and I felt as you do when you have a sortie outside the walls in a siege and you see them lock the gate behind you.

  Father Pierre was saying Mass for the beggars on the docks.

  I gathered my knights and ordered them out into the crowd. In full harness, with a longsword, every knight was worth any ten attackers. Marc-Antonio and Nerio’s squire Davide held the horses. Sabraham nodded to me and vanished with his two henchmen, and I was, if anything, more comfortable for knowing that I didn’t know where he was.

  The legate’s religious retinue helped him with Mass. They were steady, reliable men. Father Antonio was another Carmelite from Naples; Father Hector was an Scottish Isleman, and there were nigh on a dozen others, mostly servants, all of whom had religious offices as deacons and sextons and the like. Sister Marie had by that time acquired an assistant secretary, a young Frenchman from the University of Paris named Adhemar. He never spoke; his eyes were always downcast, and I scarcely noticed him, but he was clearly well born and he wrote beautifully.

  At any rate, we got through Mass. I dare say it was beautiful, to the clerics, but to me it was a nightmare, as I was all too aware by then that the legate’s life was threatened, and there he was surrounded by riff-raff. Truly, I tried to see them as men and women. I have heard the sermons, that there is Christ in every man – but I looked into the open sores, the missing teeth, the black rot, and the hard, closed faces, the malignant cunning that comes of a life lived at the edge of death, the false humility of the professional beggar and I knew Christ was there, because Father Pierre had told me many times. But I saw a thousand criminals, any one of who could be bought for a copper, close enough to put a dagger in my lord.

  No one did, however.

  We did create a bread riot. The podestà turned out his army of thugs and drove the poor back under the piers and into the chicken coops and barns and sewers where they lived. I met him in person; I had mounted my friends and our squires and we made a living wall of armou
r and horseflesh that covered the legate and his people as they served Mass to the last stragglers of the poor.

  ‘Who the devil are you?’ he swore.

  I pointed to the man in a brown habit, apparently impervious to the vicious wind. ‘This is the papal legate for the Crusade. He has come to negotiate with your lords.’

  The podestà’s horse was nervous. It was the smell of blood that was worrying the animal: the podestà’s men-at-arms had killed a dozen of the beggars. Just behind the podestà, a small woman was pounded to the ground by a man in armour with a steel mace, the sort I grew accustomed to seeing in the hands of Turks, later.

  She was fifty, or even older, with no teeth and wisps of white hair and he caved in her skull with a whoop.

  ‘This thing is fucking perfect!’ he shouted, and tossed his bloody mace in the air.

  Some of the other men-at-arms had the good grace to look away.

  Some laughed.

  At my back, Marc-Antonio had the legate mounted.

  ‘I’d thank you for an escort through the streets,’ I said to the podestà. In powerful Italian cities, the officer who commands the garrison is usually a foreigner. That way, he can’t get mixed up in the endless internal quarrels of house against house that divide the Italians as much as money unites them. Looking at this man’s hat, his gleaming harness and his sword, I guessed he was Milanese.

  He frowned. ‘Papal legate? Never heard of him, but if he makes another riot …’

  One of Sabraham’s men appeared by my left boot, on foot. He tugged at my stirrup to get my attention. When I looked at him, he gave me the Order’s sign for a direction and I nodded.

  ‘Your men cannot be armed in the city,’ the podestà said.

  I bowed. I made no answer, but hoped that my bow would cover the exigencies of the situation.

  Even as I spoke to the podestà, two more beggars tried to run to safety behind us, risking our warhorse’s legs to get away from the podestà’s men. Both were men – one a leper, with no lips and no nose, and the other a poor deformed mite, a very small man or even a boy with something awry with his face.