The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  I sat in the darkness and breathed, and so did Jacques.

  I must have lost an hour on my party, but it was obvious they’d made it out the gate. There were a dozen little signs – the most obvious was a pack donkey I found half a league on in the moonlight, strayed from the convoy and placidly standing in the shadow under a palm tree that grew in a village square.

  But riding into the mountains above Genoa in the darkness proved to be as daunting as carving my way out of the town. I was lost twice, and the donkey, which I was leading, was no help, braying in the darkness like a trumpet and standing stubbornly against a wall and refusing to budge.

  In the end, I found myself back in the same town square where I’d found the donkey – showing I have no more sense than an ass – and I dismounted to give Jacques a rest. I got some water from the town’s spring, hung my helmet from my saddle bow, and sat down.

  I awakened to find myself looking at a sword held at my eyes. Beyond the sword’s point was the Count d’Herblay.

  I’ll pass over the beating. They took my armour and the Emperor’s sword and Jacques. They stripped me naked, and then they beat me.

  Let’s just say that I had several humiliating hours.

  On the other hand, d’Herblay wasn’t the Bourc. He ordered me beaten and went elsewhere. The men who beat me never really worked themselves up and, thanks be to the good God, they were hard men, but not evil. None of them particularly enjoyed the work.

  They were thorough enough, though. I had broken ribs, broken fingers, and a broken nose quickly enough.

  Eh bien. I won’t mention it again.

  By mid-afternoon, the pain had become a sort of constant haze; time had lost its meaning.

  At some point, d’Herblay came back out of wherever he was. They brought him a seat – my eyes were swollen almost shut.

  ‘Christ, you are ugly. If only Emile could see you now,’ he said. He laughed, nervously.

  In fact, he wasn’t really tough enough to destroy me, even to accept the consequence of his own orders. He fidgeted.

  And talked.

  ‘Really much more satisfying,’ he began, smiling, ‘catching you, instead of that pestilential priest. I’m not even sure these brigands I’ve hired would kill a priest.’ He nodded. ‘Tell me, where is my wife?’

  I’d lost an eye tooth – this one – and I’d bitten my tongue because, despite my youth, I’m not as good at being beaten as I ought to have been. And my lips were so swollen I couldn’t speak well.

  I didn’t even try to say anything, and to be fair, I suspect I just lay huddled, whimpering.

  ‘I gather that she is now spreading her favours around the court of King Peter. Perhaps she’s warming the king’s bed.’ He shrugged. ‘I suppose there’s some consolation in knowing that one’s wife is not just unfaithful, but a whore. I suppose she suffers from some sickness.’ He leaned over me. ‘I married her for her lands. I knew she was soiled goods, so I suppose I got what I deserved.’ He shrugged. ‘How’d your people slip past my ambush, Gold?’

  I suspect I whimpered. Let’s just take it as read throughout this reminiscence, eh?

  ‘As I say, perhaps for the best. But some people want your legate dead.’ He leaned over. ‘I really only want you dead, Gold. Although it brings me a certain joy to see you like this.’ His riding whip flashed. He struck my head, and I covered up, and his next blow went between my legs.

  His heart wasn’t in it. He could have exploded my testicles. He could have torn the nose from my face with his whip. He didn’t.

  This is the part that I remember. He didn’t laugh, or groan. He sighed. As if bored, or from simple revulsion.

  I’d like to say I spat in his face.

  I did not.

  He spoke. I couldn’t see, but I could hear.

  ‘Just take him somewhere and cut his throat. Kill the horse and bury all his kit.’ I could hear him shift his weight.

  I hated that they would kill Jacques.

  ‘Don’t be a fool – any of you. The sword looks good, but every knight in Italy will know whose it is, the same with the horse and any part of the harness. Off a cliff is best.’ I heard him walk away, and then I heard him mount his horse. And I heard every hoof beat as the horse walked right over me.

  ‘Goodbye, Cook. I find that I get very little in the way of pleasure from this, but I expect the knowledge that you are dead will cheer me up immensely.’ He cleared his throat. ‘By now, your legate will be as dead as you will shortly be. I’ll go and join my wife. Goodbye. Send my regards to hell.’

  To hell.

  I was unshriven.

  I had most certainly sinned.

  The brigands – let’s be fair, they were men just like me – tied my hands and feet to a spear and strung me, naked, between two horses. It was cold, although that was so little a part of my troubles that I don’t think I noticed until the swaying had stopped. My parts felt as if they had exploded and I couldn’t breathe.

  Gradually, though, I grew cold.

  Who knew that getting beaten keeps you warm?

  A freezing rain began to fall and I wondered if a peasant would rescue me – some brave, resourceful lad who hoped to be a knight.

  They carried me to the edge of a precipice. Far below, I could see Genoa sparkle beyond a rain shower. It was a long way down.

  The men who had beaten me had no contrition in them. No one offered me water, even with vinegar in it; no one eased the ties on my hands.

  They dumped me in the road.

  And then one said ‘I’ll take the horse.’

  I cannot remember when hope began. But after they bickered about the horse, and the barrack-room lawyer – there’s always one – argued that keeping the horse would see them all hanged, the first voice roared out, ‘Shut the fuck up!’ and they all fell silent.

  The man must have been bigger. He had a little authority, not much, but enough. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen and keep your fucking gobs shut. This piece of shit is someone famous. I’m taking this horse, which is worth more than all the rest of you combined, and I’m walking away. I don’t want to fucking lay eyes on you leprous lads ever again, understand me?’

  ‘We’ll all be caught!’ Barrack-room lawyer piped up.

  ‘No, we won’t. That’s a tale for children. It’s fucking Italy; we can do whatever we want. I found this horse grazing by the roadside. Eh?’ I heard a rustle, and then the sound of Jacques’ heavy hooves.

  ‘Then I’m keeping the Goddamned sword,’ said the barrack-room lawyer. ‘Mister high and mighty can give himself the shits for all I care.’

  ‘Why do you get it, then?’ said another voice, a Gascon. When there’s trouble, there’s always a Gascon.

  ‘Perhaps because I have it in my hand, fuckwit?’ said the barrack-room lawyer.

  Something wet hit the road.

  Men laughed.

  Barrack-room lawyers are seldom popular. I didn’t need my swollen-shut eyes to see what had happened.

  ‘I’ll just take this,’ said the Gascon. ‘I can get a good price for it in Lombardy, or Aquila.’ He had an odd laugh, like a dog’s bark, and his Gascon-French was strangely accented. Catalan, I might have thought, if I’d had a thought in my head.

  That started it, as the removal of Jacques had not. They tore into my kit – my rosary, my surcoat, and my harness.

  In a way, it was like death. Everything that made me a knight was taken: my golden plaque belt, my beautiful spurs. It took the routiers only as long as it takes a hungry horse to eat everything in a nosebag, and they’d stripped my pile. One old man only got my arming clothes.

  The Gascon’s servant got Charny’s dagger.

  And then it was all gone, and men were riding off into the gathering darkness like stray cats taking scraps of food.

  There were dead men on the
road, too. Three of them.

  And one hard bastard kneeling at my side with a dagger. ‘Who’d have thought you’d outlive Sweet Willy? Eh, laddie?’

  He spoke English.

  ‘I’m English,’ I said. I suspect it sounded like ‘Mmm gagliff.’

  I felt his dagger touch my throat. ‘George and England!’ I assayed. Which may have been a mumbled ‘org n’ gagle’.

  So he cut my throat, and I died.

  And blessed Saint George came in all his glory and raised me to heaven.

  Bless you, friends, it was not quite like that.

  In fact, he knelt for a long time. Long enough for my hope to ebb and flow a dozen times. I mumbled things, and he listened or didn’t. I couldn’t see.

  ‘Somewhere, you must be worth a fuck of a lot of money,’ he said quietly.

  I nodded.

  ‘In your place, I’d say the same,’ he agreed. ‘Still, that was a nice harness. And a horse to match.’

  He slung me over his horse. Thanks be to God, I passed out.

  Greed. There is something wonderful in God’s will, that I was saved by the greed of a dozen hard men. Mind you, in their place, I suspect I’d have done the same.

  I never learned my captor’s name. And I never got to thank him, because three days later, he sprouted a crossbow bolt in the chest and fell off his horse, stone dead, without another word. I saw that, but then there passed a period of waiting, and then something spooked the rouncey over which I was thrown, and I was gone again.

  When I came too, the man leaning over me was Sabraham.

  Nerio Acciaioli got the legate back to Venice. He had the money and the authority, and he gave orders and was obeyed. He ran south, almost to Florence, and hired fifty English men-at-arms from the break-up of the White Company – Sir John had been badly defeated in the south. But the Englishmen got the legate home to Venice alive. Juan rode with him so that one of them was awake at all times.

  Fiore and Sabraham doubled back to find me. I can’t bless them enough. I had missed the road – in fact, as best any of us can make it, I left Genoa by the wrong gate, and my finding the pack animal was a miracle of bad navigation. But the road I chose was the one that the innkeeper had thought we meant. Later I learned why. I’d ruin the story by telling you now.

  Sabraham and his henchmen killed my captors, of whom there were two. I never saw the other, but that doesn’t mean anything. My left eye has never been quite right since then but my right recovered well enough. I’m told it gives me a good stare, eh?

  Sabraham splinted my broken bones. He was ruthless – I’ve said that before – but he had the sense and the guts to re-break my arm and set it straight, otherwise I’d still have a ruined left arm. Christ, it makes me shake to think of it.

  They wrapped my hands. Most of my fingers were broken and so swollen they were like puffballs, those giant mushrooms. They got a tinsmith to make little channels to hold my fingers and Fiore reset my nose with a break and a twist.

  It was a little like being tortured again.

  Every time I surfaced to consciousness, it was to realise that d’Herblay would get to Emile ahead of me. Was already there. Emile must be dead …

  I find I have spoken too much of pain, and you gentlemen are appalled.

  Very well.

  Sabraham got me across the Lombardy plain. He didn’t do it in one go, but in little sprints and legs that I remember as days of pain and nights of cold ache. We went as pilgrims and sometimes I was a plague victim. Usually I was unconscious when we were on the road.

  Bless Nicolas Sabraham. He took me all the way to Venice where Father Pierre sent me to the monks. And then I had doctors and drugs, opium, good wine, and broth. Warmth, and no movement, and a warm bed, deep and white, or so I remember it.

  I really remember very little.

  And one day there was the sun, and I was awake, looking out over the lagoon, and it was beautiful. And the beauty made me cry.

  And crying hurt my nose, if you must know.

  And Emile said, ‘Oh, William!’ or something equally lovely.

  I looked at her. I considered whether I should tell her …

  Bah! When I look at Emile, I do not think well. ‘Your husband … I thought you were dead,’ I managed. Probably the first words I had said in months. I croaked them.

  She ran a finger down my hip. I suspect because the doctors had told her it was the only place that didn’t hurt.

  ‘Hush,’ she said.

  Days of Emile, and I was unable to speak. She would sing, or play with her children. Her two girls came with her, and she led one of them about – he was learning to toddle. She had wet nurses for both, and they would come and go, and after a while I decided that I was on the same island as she.

  Little by little, I recovered my head. It was scattered at first, and seeing Emile was somehow a blow. Perhaps I lost my wits. Perhaps in all the blows I received, something in my head was broken.

  But she was there.

  And at some point, I can’t remember when, she brought the King of Jerusalem. He spoke about the crusade. I can’t remember anything he said. Instead, I thought of what d’Herblay had said about Emile …

  It was dark, inside my head.

  Despite the darkness, I am not utterly a fool. D’Herblay had once told me that his wife had died in childbirth when she had not. He was, perhaps, too weak to torture a man physically, but he was the sort of bastard who enjoyed planting the needle inside, the torment of doubt.

  She was there by my bed every day.

  Why did I doubt her?

  When I had been a month in that bed, I was able to walk. And move my arms. My hands hurt all the time. And everything was stiff – so stiff that I thought at one point I’d never be able to swing my arms again. And then the old monk came.

  He didn’t say anything for the first two days.

  I was just learning to speak again. My mouth hurt, and my teeth hurt – everything hurt, really, and something in my head was just beginning to heal.

  I looked over, hoping it was Emile breathing, and it was the old monk. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  He smiled toothlessly.

  He was perhaps the most devoted torturer I have ever known.

  He worked for the abbey, and he trained men and women to go back to their lives. He was a man of few words; not from vows, I think, but inclination, and at some point, when he swore at me in frustration, I knew he’d been a knight. He knew a great deal about pain, and about the way muscles worked.

  And at some later point, he appeared with Fiore.

  I burst into tears. I was ruined, as a knight. I had no hands, no muscles. My hands were splayed claws with no grip – indeed, I could not close the left at all, the right would not make a fist. Neither hand could hold a sword.

  No armour, and no spurs and no horse.

  But Fiore, who often missed social cues, held me in his arms for as long as I moaned, and then put me back on my feet.

  And the next time he came, he brought two wooden wasters.

  The first time, I couldn’t hold one. But the old monk kept it and made me bend my stiff, painful hands around it – some days he dipped my hands in hot wax, some days he nearly boiled them in water: he had a thousand ways to torment me, but he got my right hand closed on the waster’s hilt.

  So the second time Fiore came, I could just barely hold one. And as soon as I did, which took another few visits, we stood on guard, Fiore swung – and I flinched.

  Fiore pursed his lips, as he did sometimes. ‘Um-hmm,’ he said.

  I had learned physical fear in a way that I had never learned it as a boy. I cringed when a hand was raised, and I turned my head away instead of covering a blow. I would break my posture to back away rather than swinging. Fiore would purse his lips and continue, with endless, damningly gentle
patience. Often he would talk with the monk.

  Sometimes he would speak to Emile.

  And this went on for a month. The sun began to grow warmer. There was a hint of green outside the window and my friends came. They came one at a time; later I heard that this was the stricture of the abbess and Fra Andreo. Nerio came and I was happy, for a little while, but his sanguine good humour, his handsome profile and his vanity in his own appearance – a fine velvet gown embroidered with his arms, an embroidered purse to match and a pair of gloves that I recognised with a pang as my own, borrowed, no doubt, from my portmanteau – all conspired to make me feel the more my own lacks.

  Miles came. He brought a chess set. Miles didn’t have a great deal of conversation at the best of times – he was younger than any of the rest of us, and less … experienced. He knelt by my bed and prayed, and held my hand. He, too, made me feel worse. His concern and his piety only made me feel fragile.

  Fiore came. His visits were in some ways the worst of all. He’d memorised two subjects to discuss, both foolish, and he stared out the window and muttered to himself. Then he sat and fidgeted. After half an hour, Emile, dressed in almost clerical black, came with her embroidery and sat with us. She had all three of her children with her. They always made me feel better. Edouard, the eldest, was not yet old enough to notice that I was badly injured or even out of sorts, and he would make me laugh by bringing in a frog or a butterfly. The girls, Magdalene and Isabelle, would curtsey, or at least attempt to do so – Isabelle was adept at falling plop on her bottom while assaying the curtsey.

  At any rate, Fiore spoke neither to Emile nor to her children. He stared at his sword hilt, looked at me, and said a cursory prayer.

  Please don’t imagine I couldn’t speak. By that time, I could talk, with some difficulty. It took time for my voice to recover because the ligaments that control speech had been damaged. So mostly I would smile and wave, trying to encourage people to speak. This worked on some adults, and was marvellous to children – what adult gives a child unlimited license to speak? But for Fiore, it was torture.