The Long Sword

VENICE

1364

In the spring of 1364, I had just been knighted on the battlefield by that two-faced bastard, the Imperial Knight Hans Baumgarten, for my feat of arms at the siege of Florence. Except, as you know if you’ve been listening, there was no siege and we never had a chance to take the city. Five thousand men against a city with a hundred thousand citizens?

And the aftermath of my great deed was bitter; most of the companions, the Englishmen and Germans who had formed the great company that had made war on Florence for Pisa, accepted bribes and changed sides. There were fewer and fewer of us with Hawkwood — even Baumgarten himself, one of the most famous soldiers of our day, took the gold and crossed the river to join the Florentines.

Sir John Hawkwood didn’t change sides. Some say this is because of his honour. That’s possible — he had a solid view of his own worth, and no mistake — but for my money, he stayed loyal to Pisa because they’d made him their Captain General and that meant promotion. He had never been the sole commander of an army before, and he knew that if he could stick it out and attract men, he’d make a name that would mean employment and real money, not the forty florins a month that most of the men-at-arms earned, if they didn’t take a wound, lose their horses or pawn their armour or get the plague or fall prey to the hundreds of perils that beset soldiers.

At any rate, I stuck with Sir John. If you’ve been listening, you know he saved me once or twice, and despite being the devil incarnate in many ways, I liked him. And I still do. But by late May, we were down to two hundred lances or perhaps fewer. And that’s when Fra Peter came into our camp — Fra Peter being a Knight of the Order of St John that most men call the Hospitallers. Fra Peter brought me orders from his superior, the Grand Master; from Father Pierre Thomas, who had saved my soul, and from my lady, who I loved par amours — Emile d’Herblay. I won’t tell you which of those three held the highest rank in my heart, but I will say that the three together pulled far more weight at the plough than Sir John. And since tonight’s story will be about fighting the Saracens, let me begin where the story truly began; in Sir John’s pavilion outside Pisa, in May of 1364.

Sir John seldom displayed any emotion at all, and if the loss of two-thirds of his lances troubled him, he never showed it. Neither did he drink, or wench. That is, he liked a maid as much as the next man, but he was unwilling to show weakness — any weakness. His clothes were always perfect, and his horse was always groomed, and he did not lie abed, nor did he let us spy a pretty thing between the blankets of his camp bed. If there was one such, I never saw her. Indeed, he kept much the same discipline of the brothers of the Order, with none of their piety or purpose.

His squire served me wine.

‘How much have they offered you?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘It’s Fra Peter,’ I insisted. ‘I’m off for Avignon.’

He fingered his beard. ‘I can let you have a hundred florins if you stay.’

Now, this felt odd. First, I knew I was leaving with Fra Peter. If Emile was going on pilgrimage, I was going to be with her. And I had sworn to a living saint to go on crusade when my Order called me.

And a hundred florins was no longer so very much money. I had a surprising reserve of money in my purse, and a gentleman-squire to carry that money, and an account with the best Genoese bankers that could get me cash anywhere in the Christian world and pretty far among the paynim.

‘I’m not going with Andy,’ I said. ‘I’m off to fight the Saracens.’

He held up an ewer of wine, voicelessly asking if I wanted more wine. I nodded.

‘At least you have the honour to come and face me,’ he said. ‘But if you are riding with Walter Leslie, you might as well tell me.’

I knew of the Scottish knight, Sir Walter Leslie. I knew his two brothers, Kenneth and Norman, as well. We’d all served together in France. Sir Walter had the ear of the Scottish king, and the Pope, and he was across the river. That is, with the Florentines.

‘I’m not going with Sir Walter,’ I said.

‘He says he’s recruiting for the King of Cyprus,’ Hawkwood said. He drank a little more. ‘But right now, he’s in the pay of Florence. Stealing my men. For the fucking Pope.’ He looked at me. ‘If you go with him, you are, in effect, leaving the service of the King of England for the King of France.’

I was used to this; Sir John had the habit of using patriotism against us. And I knew — none better, as Master Chaucer will allow — that Hawkwood was always the king’s arm in Italy. ‘I thought we were serving Pisa against Florence,’ I said.

‘Florence is aligned with the Pope, who is raising the French king’s ransom,’ Sir John said.

I smiled, then, because Fra Peter had passed me a titbit of news when he gave me Emile’s letters, and I had assumed Sir John already knew it. But he didn’t.

‘King John of France is dead,’ I said.

Hawkwood froze for a moment. And for the first time in the conversation, his eyes met mine. ‘Says who?’ he asked quietly.

‘Fra Peter Mortimer,’ I said.

Sir John pursed his lips, but he didn’t protest. The Hospitallers had superb sources of information — they were the Pope’s mailed fist, and their intelligencers, too.

‘And you go to Avignon,’ he said.

I nodded.

He took a deep breath. ‘The Spaniard and the Friulian are donats, too. But I can’t let you take my master archer and ten lances. Nor Courtney nor Grice nor de la Motte. I know they are your men, but by God, William Gold, if you take all your companions, I’ll lose the rest by morning.’

‘I’ll come back!’ I said.

He embraced me, one of perhaps three times he did so. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘If you don’t — God be with you.’

John Hawkwood embraced me and invoked God. My eyes filled with tears, but I clasped his hand and left the tent.

Say what you like about John Hawkwood: he could have made my leaving him a test of loyalty and allegiance. But he didn’t. Which is why, when the lines were drawn later, I went back to him.

Fra Peter agreed with Sir John. ‘I’m not hiring your lances,’ he said. ‘You are volunteers for the Order, and you have to pay your own way. The Order will feed you and your horses; we’ll find you lodging, but there is no wage.’

Crusading is a rich man’s sport, and no mistake.

I sat down with Sam Bibbo and laid it out for him, and he laughed. ‘You needn’t make a fuss,’ he said. ‘I’m your man, but I wouldn’t go to the Holy Land for all the fish in the sea. Italy is rich, the fighting is easy, and this is all I need.’

I had hoped that he’d insist. I relied very heavily on Sam Bibbo — he knew how to do everything, and when he didn’t, I still felt better for his support while I made things up. But I understood.

Bibbo also embraced me. ‘Bring me a piece of the true cross,’ he said.

We were sitting at a camp table in a sumpter’s tavern one of the wine shops that served the army. I shaved a splinter off the table and gave it to him, and he laughed and slapped my back.

‘John Hughes won’t want to go to the Holy Land,’ he said. ‘But he’s had a message from home, and if you are headed north across the passes, he’ll want to ride with you.’

I went and found John Hughes, a Lakelander from Cumbria or Westmoreland. I got to know that country later, as you’ll hear, if this goes on long enough, but to me they were names, as alien as Thrace or Turkey, far off in the north of England. He was Milady’s archer, and he was a damned good hand. He was also devoted to Janet — Milady — and seldom left her.

I won’t prose on. He’d had word that his sister had died of plague and that he was needed at home, which was a village called Kentmere near Kendall where the green cloth comes from.

Milady Janet glared at me with her cat’s eyes. ‘If you leave, Hawkwood will treat me like a woman.’

I sighed. ‘Janet, ma vieux, I have sworn.’

‘Men and their oaths,’ she said. She had her arming coat on, and her squire was trying arm harnesses on her. She was not the only armed woman among the English, but she was the only one who didn’t make a secret of it. ‘You leave, and John Hughes leaves. Mark my words, I’ll end up married to some loutly lordling.’ But she smiled, and she also embraced me.

That was odd, too, because Janet and I never touched. But there are few things less like lovemaking than rubbing steel breastplates together, and the moment passed. ‘Andy Belmont-’ I began.

‘That cowardly shit,’ she hissed. In fact, they had been lovers — at least, I thought they had been lovers. But now Andy had run off to fight for Florence.

She shook her head. ‘At least you’re taking Fiore,’ she said. ‘His love oppresses me.’

Indeed, I had to watch him kneel and swear his eternal devotion to her before we rode away.

There were too many goodbyes. This was, as I learned by leaving it, my home, and I was abandoning fame and fortune to return to lower rank with the Order. On the last night, we all shared wine, and John Courtney gave me letters from a lot of the Englishmen for Avignon, and Kenneth MacDonald, who now looked as Italian as the rest of us in fine hose and a silk jupon, gave me a packet of letters from all the Scots and Irish. Olivier de la Motte had letters for the Gascons and Normans. Avignon is a great clearing house for letters — priests come and go from there to every part of Europe, even Hyperborea.

At any rate, the next morning, with a hard head and an empty heart, I rode for Avignon. Listen, it is all very well to have a letter from your long-lost lady love, but it is damned hard to leave your friends.

We stopped on the old Roman road north of Sienna, well along toward Lombardy, for the evening, at a fine farm that has since been burned eight or ten times, I’ll warrant. We sat at the farmer’s table and ate his chickens and paid handsomely for the privilege.

After supper, Fra Peter prayed, and when we had joined him and said the office of compline, and when he’d looked at the two boys and the girl of the house and found nothing worse than some scrapes and some lice, then we sat under the grape arbour outside.

‘You boys are too polite to ask me what’s happening,’ he said, leaning back against the stone wall of the house.

Fiore — that’s Fiore dei Liberi, a tall, strong man of twenty with good manners and an ascetic manner and a tendency to forget anything that didn’t involve fighting — Fiore raised both eyebrows. ‘You did say there would be no crusade for five years,’ he allowed. Fiore had the terrible habit of remembering everything you said; accurately. Unforgivable, in a friend.

Fra Peter laughed, though. ‘Did any of you meet the King of Cyprus last autumn?’ he asked.

We all shook out heads, and Fra Peter nodded. ‘He came to the Pope and to King John of France too, and King Edward of England, looking for help against the Turks and the Mamluks of Egypt.’ He took a sip of wine and smacked his lips. ‘Italy, land of wine. At any rate, he’s a good soldier and a fine man-at-arms, but the Pope thought him too young and of too little consequence to lead a crusade, so he chose King John of France.’

I snorted. So did John Hughes. Fra Peter was not much on social distinctions, and John was a senior archer.

Fra Peter raised an eyebrow at John and John shrugged innocently. ‘Which he did so well, fighting us,’ Hughes said in his Lakeland accent.

We all laughed. It was true. King John the Brave of France had lost to us, the English, every single time he’d faced us.

Fra Peter shrugged. ‘The Holy Father has other concerns than ours, messires. At any rate, King John took the cross and then nothing happened. But now he has died. Father Pierre told me to gather my knights because the word in Avignon is that the Holy Father will re-declare the Passagium Generale. He has appointed Talleyrand as papal legate to lead the faithful, and he will offer the command to King Peter of Cyprus.’

Talleyrand, no friend of mine, was reputed to be the richest man in the world. And perhaps the most venal priest ever born.

Then he told us how he had spent the winter with Father Pierre, holding the city of Bologna to its allegiance for the Pope. In truth, I’d heard nothing of it, even though it had all happened two hundred leagues from me.

‘You needed good men-at-arms,’ I said.

‘I fear the day that Father Pierre needs an escort,’ Fra Peter said. ‘He rides in among his enemies — at Bologna, he rode boldly in among men sent to take him, unarmed, holding aloft a cross. I thought we were dead or taken, but God supported his saint, and the mercenaries were moved to their knees.’

We murmured appreciatively. We all knew him: the force of his genuine conviction was like one of Fiore’s smashing sword blows.

‘And he made peace between the Pope and the Duke of Milan, where the King of France had failed. To some of us, it was a miracle come from God — one day, the Duke was threatening to hang us all, and the next day, he signed the peace. And the Pope held Bologna, despite all threats. Friends, I will not hide from you that the Pope had already sent letters to command a renewed campaign against Milan and a cancellation of the crusade.’ He looked around at us. ‘Even now, there is a powerful party at the papal court that attempts to cancel the crusade or to have it declared against Milan.’

Fiore recoiled. ‘Infamous!’ he said. ‘A crusade against a Christian duke?’

Fra Peter nodded agreement. ‘It would, to you and me, make a mockery of everything we hold dear about Christian knighthood and the crusade. But there are men in Avignon who hold the papal authority is the higher good — the true cause.’

Well, we were Pierre Thomas’s men, and Fra Peter Mortimer’s. We all shook our heads, or spat, or frowned. Even John Hughes. And he spoke for many men when he swore.

‘By our Lady,’ he said. ‘The priests and the popes will be the ruin of the church. A crusade against Milan? It’s like declaring a crusade against England.’

Fra Peter met Hughes’s eye. ‘It could come to that, if the papacy continues on this path.’ He shrugged. ‘Our Father Pierre has worked without pause for two years to make the Passigium Generale a reality. He made peace between the Pope and the Duke, and he’s helped settle the Cretan Revolt. Now we’re gathering knights and in two months, the army will meet us in Venice.’ He looked from one to another. ‘It’s real, lads. We’re off on crusade.’

Ah, Monsieur Froissart, since you treasure tales of deeds of arms, let me say that through that entire passage to Avignon, Messire dei Liberi and Juan Hernedez and I exchanged many blows, indeed, some evenings, if we had made enough miles, Fra Peter would join us. My new delight was fighting with the heavy spear, and Fiore loved it too, and where he might be blind to the glances of a pretty farm girl and deaf to the offers of a merchant looking for a guard, he was as avid for arms as a young priest in a university is for his theology. And he approached his study in much the same way, so that on that trip he began to sketch out a theory of — well, it is hard to describe. A theory of fighting, a theory of how to train.

North of the Alps, few men know of Master Fiore. But south of the Alps, we think him the best sword that ever was. And that summer, he was just coming into his own, growing in confidence in his own methods, and experimenting in how to teach them. He made us do the oddest things: we wrestled on horseback, of which you’ll hear more, and we jousted, and we fenced with spear and sword and we wrestled and fought with sticks and fought with daggers.

One evening in Lombardy, with the mountains clear on the northern horizon, still snow-capped in late May, he and I were fencing with spears in harness in the yard of yet another farm. Let me add that my squire, Edward, was back with John Hawkwood, and that meant that all three of us were back to scrubbing our own harnesses — and Fra Peter’s — like boys of fifteen. And that meant that getting thrown in the rain-soaked dung of an Italian farmyard was not just a petty humiliation — it represented the reality of an hour’s work.

And in answer to your question, we fought with sharp spears. By our Saviour, gentles! We didn’t carry blunts on campaign, and it is only by playing with sharp weapons that a man loses his fear of them.

Nor were we playing in visors. Truly, it is a miracle we made it to Avignon alive.

Now, when I met Fiore, I thought myself a good man of arms. After he disabused me of this, with many of the same lessons I’d had to learn in pain with Jean le Maingre and du Guesclin and others, I learned from him mostly by simple emulation. Fiore didn’t teach in the way a master-at-arms teaches. He simply stood in different ways — some subtly different, like his version of the Woman’s Guard, and some startlingly different, like his low guard which he called ‘The Boar’s Tusk’.

But it was in spear fighting that he departed most from the established manner. Yes? This interests you, messieur? I thought it might. So I’ll say this. Most men who fight with a spear fight with the long spear; they vary in length, but in Italy we usually had them nine or ten feet long. But long spears break easily, and have only a temporary advantage over swordsmen.

Fiore preferred a shorter spear, just six or seven feet with a stout shaft, octagonal in cross section. We talked about such weapons, but it was not until we had a day in Milan that we were able to purchase a pair, and then he was avid to fight with them.

And he refused to fight as other men did — and still do. Most men, even trained men, face each other with their points crossed. On the battlefield, men will advance until the spears cross, and then fence with them as if they were long, stiff swords.

Fiore had different words for everything and he made us learn them. He called this tactic the ‘Point in line’. He meant that it kept your point in line with the body and head of your opponent. It made sense to me, for this was the best defence against a spear, kept my weapon in the middle of the fight, and allowed me to push with my superior strength against the shaft of most of my adversaries.

Enough digression. That evening north of Milan, the light was fading, we were in harness, and there were six pretty farm girls pressed along the edge of the yard watching the knights duel with spears.

Fiore sprang into the yard and took up one of his fantastic positions — the boar’s tusk, in fact — with the spear point low to the ground in front of him, right foot forward, spear on his left hip. I had mine up high across my body in two hands, right foot forward and spear point level with Fiore’s unvisored face.

‘Try to hit me,’ he said. From another man, it would have been a taunt, but Fiore never taunted. He merely said what he thought.

I aimed my blow for the centre of his breastplate. Fiore was the fastest man I ever faced — thanks be to God for the mercy of never facing a man like him in mortal combat! — but not enough faster than me to have a decisive advantage.

I thrust.

He snapped his spearhead up from its low position, exactly like a Tuscan boar tossing its head to gore you. He slapped my spear out of line, and while I tried to recover, he stabbed me with the spearhead through the cheek.

I spat a tooth and sat down, blood pouring out of my mouth, and Fiore flung his spear down and started a steady stream of apologies.

I had been a single inch from death, and the shock of it was as bitter as the copper taste in my mouth. The cheek wound took a week to close and left me with this little twist on my mouth. And there are few things as hard to get off armour as blood! Sweet Jesu, it etches steel faster than acid! And of course, I sat in the wet dung.

On the other hand, Fiore was pitifully sorry to have hurt me, and yet from that moment he had his theory: the theory of the weapon ‘off ’ line versus the weapon ‘in’ line, and the theory of the shorter versus the longer. I can say all this better in Italian. The phrase ‘off line’ sounds like something a scribe would say, but fora di strada conveys more. As if a common fight happens on a road, and you have had the courage to step off the road.

And, of course, there were the young women who had been watching. I have observed this many times: some girls relish the sight of blood, and some do not. Some desire the man who sheds the blood, and some seek to care for the one bleeding.

I compounded blood loss and trauma with fatigue by staying awake all night.

Fra Peter was not amused; not amused by my injury, and not amused by my lechery.

For three nights running, I was ordered to wash the dishes. And I was given several forms of penance, including standing with my sword by the pommel, held out at arm’s length, while Juan prayed some rapid pater nosters and tried not to laugh at me.

The third day, my cut cheek hurt like an imp of Satan had it in fiery tongs, and my hips hurt, and my arms hurt, and I’d had enough of Fra Peter.

He came to see how I was doing. In fact, I could barely stand, and I was kneeling by the hot water in a tin basin, trying to wash his handsome Prague glass while keeping my hair out of the puss and blood coming out of my cheek.

‘Let me see your cheek,’ he said. He played with it, none too gently, and then smeared honey over the wound, which burned all over again.

‘Fuck, that hurts,’ I said, or something equally English.

He sighed.

That was enough to set me off.

‘By Saint George!’ I swore. ‘I am a knight, not a squire! I don’t polish armour and carry dishes! I fight! I do as I will!’

‘Hush, you will split your cheek — ah, there, you’ve done it again.’ He looked at me. ‘Truly, William, perhaps it would be best if you went back to Sir John.’

‘Sweet Christ, because I tupped a lass? I did her no harm, I assure you. Nor did I take her maidenhead.’ I leered, as the young are wont to do when they know perfectly well that they are in the wrong.

‘Really?’ he asked. He sat back. ‘And if she kindles, what kind of life will your red-haired bastard have, got on a serving wench in a barn? Is that the life you want to give to God?’

A thousand hot answers entered my head. ‘She will not kindle,’ I said. ‘She knew her courses.’

‘But you don’t care, do you, Sir William?’ he asked quietly, and his use of my title of knighthood hit me like a lance. ‘I mean, whether she kindles or no is her loss, not yours.’

By God, I’d thought of those very words and almost said them to him.

‘She should guard herself from lust, if she doesn’t want to pay the consequence, eh, Sir Knight?’ he said.

I was breathing as hard as a man in a fight.

‘After all, knighthood does not lie in protecting the weak, does it?’ he asked quietly. ‘It lies in taking whatever you will. Does it not?’

He didn’t threaten to send me back to Italy, where I would be rich, famous, and where pretty girls were available to me at any time. He didn’t ask me to do any more peasant work; any more, that is, than we all did to get through the day.

In fact, he embraced me. ‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘Please stay with us.’

I think I struggled against his embrace for a moment. Indeed, just then, I hated him more than the Bourc Camus. There is nothing worse than knowing that you have done wrong, and been seen to do it. Nothing.

Well, I still have the scar. Eh?

We were twenty days to Avignon, and mostly it was a wasted trip. But my cheek healed, to my relief and I saw my sin and my disfigurement together, and I swore a great oath to never fornicate again — an oath which I confess I’ve broken more than once or twice. When my cheek knitted we were high in the Savoyard passes, and I stopped at a roadside chapel and left a gold florin and a small silver cross.

We jousted. The weather was good, and I was a better lance than I had been, and Fiore was experimenting with lances and swords on horseback. He spent days trying to use his low guard with a lance against my lance, and I dropped him on one Savoyard field a dozen times before he snorted and agreed that his technique did not apply on horseback.

We arrived at Avignon and it, too, was like a home. The four of us had lived there almost a year, after all, and we got good rooms in the Hospital this time because most of the garrison had been dismissed. My room had a lovely glass window, a fine desk, a bed and a magnificent applewood and ivory crucifix of our lord in his passion that I admired so much that I took to using it as a focus for meditation. Fiore was excited by breathing that summer — breathing exercises, of course — and he taught us how to breathe in his own peculiar way as a sidelight to prayer, and the three of us practised it a great deal, because there was little else for us to do.

Father Pierre Thomas was there, too. He was in apartments at the palace, as if he was a great prelate, and indeed, I discovered that my spiritual father was now a powerful bishop with a magnificent amethyst on his thumb. When I met him, I kissed it, and he laughed.

‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘I’ve lost it twice?’

‘It is blessed by God!’ I said.

He looked away. ‘I could feed twenty poor women for a year on this ring,’ he said. ‘That is its value.’ His eyes met mine.

I have heard of men with burning eyes — fanatics. Pierre Thomas was not one such. His eyes were brown and large and held nothing but love — all the time. But that summer he was deep in the matters of the Court of Avignon — the papal curia. The death of King John had thrown yet another blow at his crusade project, and again he had to repair the rent fabric of the church, cajole men to do their duties … Indeed, it was at times difficult to watch. He was so absolutely humble that he would accept what we, his knights, saw as insults; would accept them with bent head and a smile.

At any rate, after my audience with him, he introduced me to his squire, Miles Stapleton. Miles was also a donat of the Order, younger than me, and far better born. And deeply pious, like Juan more than me. He was my size, with broad shoulders, blue eyes, and light-brown hair, another of Father Pierre’s Englishmen, as they called us.

He had a smile as solid as his shoulders. ‘Father Pierre has spoken of you,’ he said, as if that was the highest praise a man could receive. Well, I suspect I shared that view, at least while I was in his presence.

Miles joined our little group — Fiore, Juan, and Miles and I. I was the worldly one, and a belted knight. Juan and Miles were better born, far richer, and far, far more religious. Fiore — well, he was what he was: tall, odd, and difficult to have around.

Unless you happened to be fighting.

We’d been a week or two in Avignon and nothing seemed to be happening. The rumour was that the crusade was cancelled because the King of France was dead. Peter of Cyprus — it was the summer of Peters, as far as I was concerned — was supposed to be in Avignon, but he’d stayed in Rheims to see the new king of France crowned and to persuade him to take the cross.

We were sitting in my favourite inn in Avignon, drinking wine.

‘That coward won’t take the cross. He’ll make some excuse and send King Peter packing,’ I said. Of course, at twenty-four, you know virtually everything there is to know.

‘King Charles is a coward?’ Juan was looking at a girl … come to think of it, that girl looked familiar, and when she caught my eye, her face burst into a smile the way a sunflower faces the sun.

Truly, it is nice to be remembered. Her name was Anne, and she brought us wine, touched the back of my neck lightly with the back of her hand, and went off to avoid the attentions of other patrons.

Her touch caused me to lose the chain of my thoughts for a moment, and then I shrugged. I was watching Anne. ‘I saw him run at Poitiers. In truth, if he had stood his ground, I think his father would have finished us.’

And I thought of the terrified man we’d seen at the Louvre in fifty-eight. Remember, Geoffrey?

Aye.

But the others wouldn’t have it, that a king could be a coward.

We were having this conversation, and it led to another about Poitiers, and two young Scottish priests joined us. I remember all this because I wasn’t too drunk, and since they were bound for Scotland, I thought of Kenneth’s letters, and I rose, bowed, and ran to the Hospital.

And this whole incident only stays in my head because three men tried to rob me. I probably looked unarmed, and because I was running I looked like easy prey.

I had gone to the Hospital and bounded up the steps, barging into Fra Peter in his robes. He grinned.

‘I’ve found some Scottish priests,’ I said, as if that excused everything.

He went off to hear Mass, and I went to my little cell. I collected the letters and jogged out the gate, down the same alley …

I saw the movement out of the corner of my right eye.

The smaller one had a heavy dagger in his right fist, point down, the way most men use a dagger, and he thrust at my head as he leaped. But he’d played this game before — he was a leering bastard with scars, and I saw all that by the flicker of the torches on the Hospital gate.

As I ducked and pivoted to face him, I raised my left hand to ward the blow, and he flowed around it, changing his blow to the other side, a backhand, descending blow at my right temple.

And four weeks practice on the road paid off in one heartbeat.

Unbidden, my right hand rose and covered his right wrist as my left hand passed close to my face, warding me from his point, and in fact he struck his point into the palm of my right hand because I was slow and it was dark, but I was already flowing on, ignoring the pain. My right hand gripped his, and my left rose, the point slipped out of my flesh, and I grabbed the blade and pushed at it, my fingers clumsy with blood and pain, but the grapple on his right wrist and the turning motion did its work and he let go the dagger as I spun him out and to my left, passing my left foot behind his, breaking his arm at the elbow and then throwing him to the ground, a foot on his arm, and his own dagger into his throat.

But there were three of them.

The other two had hung back, and I didn’t go to the ground with the small man, but killed him with my back straight and my head up, so I saw the next pair come.

They had cudgels.

Cudgels are not to be spat on, friends. A stout oak branch can break a sword or turn a spear, and a strong man can break your arm right through your harness or break your head. Two big men with cudgels are long odds.

‘He killed Jacques,’ the nearest man said, as if I’d done him a favour.

The other man spat.

Both of them flipped their cudgels from hand to hand.

They didn’t even ask me for money.

I settled my weight, and as the nearer of the two tossed his cudgel again, I struck.

He missed his grab at the cudgel, and he was stabbed. I used the blade in his body as a lever to move his weight into his friend’s path — if such men have friends — and I left the dagger there and passed with my right foot, and the screaming man collapsed over his partner’s blade in his chest, and the last of them cut at me and missed.

We were at an impasse.

He swung at me, half-hearted swipes from out of distance. And then he began backing away, and I followed him.

He was no fool. A soon as I followed him, he stepped in and swung.

I was ready and in time, and I stepped off line and avoided the blow, turning him.

He cut again, angry and afraid.

I moved with the blow, followed it, and caught his wrist; he pulled back sharply, and I rammed his elbow over his own head and threw him to the ground.

My own dagger, which I hadn’t drawn, flowed into my hand.

I was standing on his wrist, as the Order taught, and as I had lowered my weight my knee may have already cracked a rib or two.

But I’d just had an interview with Father Pierre, I had other things on my mind, and I’d just killed two men.

I put my knife at his throat. ‘Saint John commands you to change your life,’ I said. I rose, sheathed my dagger while watching him, and walked away down the alley. The second man was already dead — my stab to the heart had indeed gone straight in.

I prayed.

I didn’t see the third man get up. But I was aware, painfully aware, that I had killed two men. Letting the third live was a poor consolation to the other two. And yet …

My hands shook.

My hands were still shaking when I reached the tavern. It is odd that always I react in fear after a fight is over. Sometimes, especially if there is a crowd, I’m terrified before a fight. Luckily, the fear never gets into my head while I’m fighting. But by the time I made it back to the table with the priests, I could barely walk, and my breathing was shallow.

I took a sip of wine and had to go outside and throw up my dinner.

Glorious. All glorious. Isn’t it?

I expected Juan or Fiore to come find me, crouched in abject misery by the stables, but it was Anne who came with a cup of soft cider and a hot, wet cloth.

‘I’m sorry, my sweet,’ I said.

She smiled. In fact, I think I scared her. ‘What happened?’

‘Men attacked me.’ I drank the cider and it stayed down.

‘Did they abuse you? Take your purse?’ She put a hand to my head in the way of mothers the world over.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I killed them.’

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she said nothing, being wise. After a while, Juan leaned out the door of the inn and then came out and saw me, saw Anne, and bowed. ‘Ah, Sir William, the priests must be abed, and crave your letters.’

When I passed him, he had the good grace to say ‘Sorry, Brother!’ Juan was never a prude about women. And he knew Anne from before.

But I bowed to Anne and mumbled something, used her cloth to wipe my face, and went inside, where I managed to say something civil to the two Scotsmen, one from Hexham, and one from the Western Isles, a place called Mull, which seemed such a commonplace name that it made me laugh. But, according to him, there’s a great monastery there, and a nunnery, out on the very edge of the Great Western Ocean. Truly, God is great.

As it proved, they were passing so close to John Hughes’ home that they engaged him as a guard and thus got him on their French passport, solving all of his travel problems. The Scots are far more popular in France than the English.

I hugged him. ‘Go well,’ I said, and I gave him twenty gold florins.

‘Christ, I can buy a new farm for that,’ he said. ‘Milady gave me the same,’ he admitted.

I shrugged. ‘You’ve kept us both alive. I’ll think of you, sitting by your fireside in whatever godforsaken hamlet in which you settle. Go be a farmer and forget your wicked ways.’

Hughes grinned then and we hugged, and hugged.

‘To think I almost killed you in an inn yard,’ he said.

‘No, I almost killed you!’ I answered, and we both laughed.

‘Make me a promise?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘If you see Richard Musard, kick him in the crotch for what he did to Milady, and then help him up. For me. I miss him.’

John Hughes shrugged as if he couldn’t help himself. ‘Good fortune out east, Sir Knight. Come to Kentmere and tell my children tales of the wars.’

‘All right, John. I will,’ I said. ‘Go in God’s grace and stay safe across France.’

I awoke the next morning and had no idea where I was, but my companion smelled like lavender and spices. I looked down at her when she rolled towards me, and she was Anne, and I was in her garret room in the inn, which meant her three friends were shivering out in the narrow hall or under the eaves.

She leaned over; we were on a pallet of linen filled with new straw, and it smelled healthy and wholesome, as Anne did. She drank water from a pitcher and gave it to me: it had mint leaves in it and I remember that trick still. Her breasts were heavy, white against her brown arms, and the mere sight of them aroused me, despite my painful awareness that I had just broken my oath. In fact, my cheek hurt.

I’ve known many a witty titbit exchanged between lovers at this point, the first sally of the morning so to speak; I’ve heard recriminations and I’ve heard love babble.

She lay back, unworried by her nudity. ‘A girl does prefer a soldier to a priest,’ she said. She rubbed a hand over the muscle in my belly. ‘Do you know that Cardinal Talleyrand is dead?’

Cardinal Talleyrand had been appointed the Cardinal Legate of the crusade. He was leading it, and he was paying for a great deal of it. He intended to be Pope, after all.

Women are different from men in this way, I think. She was already flushed — I won’t go into details — but she intended to start our day as we’d ended the last, and yet she could talk church politics with me.

I could see nothing but her lips, her nipples, the sharp line of her side where it met her hip.

At some point another girl pounded on the wooden partition. ‘Stop your lechery and let us dress or we’ll all be beaten!’ she said.

Anne responded by pushing her hips up into mine and making a little emphatic noise.

‘Marie had a customer, a papal courier,’ she said. ‘From the coronation at Rheims,’ she went on, her voice raising a little, speaking in the rhythm of our lovemaking.

I’m sure we talked of other things. But I can’t remember them.

See now, I’ve made Monsieur Froissart blush.

Almost the first person I met outside the inn while I was still tying my points of my hose to my doublet, was Father Pierre Thomas, with Miles Stapleton.

Miles waved. ‘Did you spend the night in the inn?’ he asked. Another boy might have said it with malice, but Miles was an innocent, and he looked at me without guile.

Father Pierre winced.

‘I did,’ I said simply, having learned a variety of lessons from my time at the Hospital. ‘Father, do you know that Cardinal Talleyrand is dead?’

I hated Talleyrand — well, I disliked him, but he was in some ways the power behind Father Pierre. Pierre Thomas came from Talleyrand’s home of Perigord, and had, it was said, been a peasant on his estates. And of course, he was the papal legate for the crusade. And the next Pope, or so we all guessed.

It was one of the few times I’ve ever seen the man hesitate. Then his face took on its habitual look, his eyes calmed, and he nodded. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But this is not the place to speak of it. We were walking to the river, but now I think we will go to the Hospital.’

I had seldom seen Father Pierre agitated or walking more quickly than his determined, workman’s stride. But now he did, and when he reached the Hospital, he sent for the Baillie, the local commander, Sir Juan di Heredia, and his own staff. Miles Stapleton was there, and so was Father’s Pierre’s Latin secretary, a nun called Marie. About whom you will hear more of later. But she was an exceptional woman — she would have to be, to be the Latin secretary to the best mind the Church had produced since Aquinas. Lord Grey was also there.

‘Can the crusade survive this blow?’ Father Pierre asked.

Di Heredia shrugged. ‘And be stronger for it, truly. The King of France was always a broken reed, and Perigord (that’s what they often called Talleyrand, after his title) would have used the crusade solely to further his own ambitions.’ Now, di Heredia knew what he was about when he spoke of furthering personal ambitions — he was the most ambitious man I’d ever met, with a finger in every political pie. Related to half the crowned heads of Europe, he had been raised with the King of Aragon, and he intended to make himself Grand Master.

I see you both smile. Well, he is Grand Master, is he not? Forty years and more, the order was the servant of the Pope and the Doge of Genoa, eh? However much the truth hurts, let us face it. And the Catalans and the Aragonese had had enough.

But that’s another story. Suffice it to say that I sat as a belted knight and a volunteer and watched di Heredia, who had once chased me out of Provence when he was the papal commander and I was a mere routier, a brigand. I might have hated him for that, or for his avarice and ambition, which contrasted so sharply with Father Pierre’s saintliness. But di Heredia was a fine soldier, a good knight, and it was he who had made the decision to accept me into the Order. Knowing of my past.

Enough digression. Di Heredia twirled his moustache — he was very much the Spanish grandee — and smiled, leaning one elbow on a great table that clerks used to cast accounts.

‘Now the legate will be you,’ he said, smiling at Father Pierre.

Father Pierre made a face. ‘I have no worldly interest,’ he said. ‘No one will make me the most powerful man on the Crusade, nor, I think, am I fit for the role. I would prefer to be the legate’s chaplain, and try and keep him to humility and God’s purpose. If a crusade is ever God’s purpose.’

At this, Fra Peter and di Heredia both winced.

But di Heredia leaned forward, his dark eyes twinkling. ‘I have the interest,’ he said. ‘My earthly king and your friend the Pope have the interest.’ He sat back. ‘Talleyrand was too powerful and too French. You are everyone’s priest. Will you accept?’

Father Pierre leaned back and thrust out his jaw. ‘With King John and Talleyrand both dead, surely the Pope will simply cancel the Passagium Generale. Or allow it to expire.’

Fra Peter glanced at me. ‘Indeed, my lords. In England last year, the Prior there told me, quite frankly, that King Edward saw the entire crusade to be a false emprise. A mummer’s play to hide the use of papal funds to pay the King of France’s ransom.’

I remembered the trip to England — a very happy time for me, as I have said. Being young and full of myself, and my sister, I’d completely missed Fra Peter’s deep disquiet. Indeed, one of the most difficult aspects of serving the Order was, and is, the divided loyalties. Fra Peter was a good Englishman. And to be told by his immediate superior, the Prior of England, that the King of England saw the crusade as a crass political manoeuvre to support the crown of France — by God, that must have hurt.

Father Pierre smiled, at me, of all people. ‘I, too, have heard this. And perhaps it was true, although I assure you, my friends in Christ, that God moves men in mysterious ways, and that a Passagium Generale declared falsely to support the King of France might, in the end, serve God’s will. Do you doubt it?’

Di Heredia nodded and twirled his moustaches again. ‘That’s what I hoped that you would say. I will suggest that the Pope appoint Peter of Cyprus to command the expedition, and you, my good and worthy priest, to be papal legate.’

Father Pierre’s mild blue eyes met di Heredia’s falcon’s glance. ‘As long as you and your king and the Pope understand that I have no higher interest than the will of Christ on earth, so be it,’ he said. ‘But I am not the man to listen to the Doge of Venice or the King of Aragon’s interests.’

Di Heredia made a sound of annoyance and twirled his moustaches again.

Father Pierre looked around, for a moment more like an eagle than a dove. ‘Why now, though? When to all, the crusade seems dead?’ His eyes rested on Fra Peter’s. ‘Again?’

Di Heredia laughed. ‘Sometimes, Excellence, you are the merest child to the politics of the rotten fruit that surrounds you. Listen. The crusade was only declared to collect the tithes to pay the King of France’s ransom and to allow the Pope to recruit mercenaries for his war with the Duke of Milan. But now the Duke of Milan’s daughter will be Queen of France, yes? Now the foolish but brave King John is dead no ransom is required. Talleyrand wanted the crusade as a tool of temporal power in Italy — now he is dead.’

‘I know all of this,’ Father Pierre said simply. ‘I am a Christian, not a fool.’

‘Then you should believe, as I do, that this is God’s will!’ di Heredia said. ‘And that God can plot more thoroughly and more subtly than the Cardinal Talleyrand or the Pope of the King of France.’

Father Pierre wrinkled his nose in distaste at di Heredia’s easy blasphemy.

Di Heredia snorted. ‘King John is dead, and he has been replaced by your candidate, the King of Cyprus. Talleyrand is dead — who better to replace him than you? Now keep Genoa from going to war with Venice, and by Saint George and Saint Maurice, the crusade is a reality. And all the mercenaries that Talleyrand raised for war in Italy will be ours for the faith.’ He smiled like the cunning fox he was: the Pope’s version of John Hawkwood. ‘We will have to restrain the French faction. They will lose much by Talleyrand’s death.’ He leaned forward. ‘The aristocrats will not want you because you cannot be bought, and you are not one of them. There will be consequences.’ He tapped his teeth. ‘The Bishop of Cambrai has lost a great deal with Talleyrand’s death.’

Fra Peter turned to look at his brother-knight. ‘Tell us?’

‘Robert, the Bishop of Cambrai, went straight to the Pope on word of the death of Talleyrand.’ He made a face. ‘I would wager a donkey against a warhorse he asked for command of the crusade, to take the soldiers for himself and his family.’

Well might you wince, monsieur. That was Avignon. That was our crusade.

No one even mentioned the Turks.

Juan was attacked. It began to seem as if we were being targeted.

Anne told me that the Bishop of Cambrai was intending to have a magnificent audience with the Pope. ‘He thinks he will command the crusade,’ she whispered to me.

‘Who the hell is he?’ I asked. I suspect I nuzzled her neck or tried to move on to other matters.

‘The Count of Geneva’s son, the Count of Savoy’s nephew …’ She shrugged, which made her nipples move against my chest, and we moved on from church politics to other matters.

Another day of carrying messages for Father Pierre, and Anne told me we were to have an audience with the Pope. She laughed as she shrugged out of her shift. ‘Do other girls talk about leaves and flowers and poetry?’ she asked. ‘I feel I have gone from being your light of love to your spy.’

Of course I assured her of my ardour.

She shrugged. ‘You’ll leave me soon enough,’ she said. ‘Your Father Pierre has an audience with the Pope. May I tell you something serious? Your Father Pierre … people love him. But no one in Avignon can imagine how he has come to win the Pope’s ear.’ She leaned over me. ‘Would you — could you — arrange for him to bless me?’

The path of love and lechery is never a straight one.

The next afternoon, I took a pair of scrolls to the Carmelite house, and another across the city to one of the Roman cardinals. I knew I was followed, and I was growing very careful. When I returned to the Hospital, I had time with Father Pierre. We prayed together, and he showed me a meditation that I still use with my beads, and then he asked me if I wished to confess.

I am a poor liar. It is one of my best virtues, I think. I confessed Anne, and begged him to shrive her.

He shrugged. ‘I would bless her soul for her own sake, but for yours I will demand that you not sin with her again,’ he said. He didn’t smile, but there was a smile in his voice. ‘The sins of the young,’ he said softly.

On the eleventh of June, we were summoned to the papal palace for an audience with the Pope — Urban II, a French Benedictine whom I have mentioned before.

The last time I’d had an audience with the Pope, I’d stood in a dull brown cote and clean hose and had tried to listen to what my betters discussed while I looked at the wonders of the ceiling over my head and the rich frescoes on the walls.

Since then, I’d been to Italy and seen enough frescoes to dull the edge of my wonder. And men in their twenties are critical of everything; I was, by then, a hardened man of the world, and I looked at the frescoes with less awe and more judgement.

A pity. The awe was more worthy. I have the knowledge to judge a lance strike, a sword thrust, or the placement of a battery of gonnes, but I’ve never painted a stroke.

This time, I stood in the Pope’s audience chamber in harness, with the red surcoat adorned with the white cross over my armour, and a small shield with my own coat-armour in the right quadrant: a knight-volunteer of the Order. I wore gold spurs and a gold belt of plaques and a sword. I’m quite sure that I looked very fine, perhaps finer than Fra Peter, whose scarlet surcoat had seen more wear and who eschewed the earthly vanity of a gold belt. I was not as splendid as Lord Grey, and Miles Stapleton rivalled me, but that only meant that our party looked martial and, at least in my memory, puissant. Sister Marie-Therese wore black, as did the two priests of Father Pierre’s entourage, one Scottish Hospitaller priest, Father Hector, and one Italian, Father Maurice.

And then there was Fiore, in his plain harness and red coat. But we’d brushed him and mended him and I’d put him in my second-best doublet, and his golden hair made him look like a military saint.

Father Pierre, who was, of course, a bishop, nonetheless knelt and kissed the Pope’s ring and there was a low murmur between them. Juan, my friend, the great Juan di Heredia’s nephew, winked at me. He, too, was resplendent in gold and scarlet and harness, and as he was apparently the richest of the lot of us, he, too, glittered. In his case, he had a superb sword worth ten of mine, and a single ring with a ruby that was worth more than my warhorse and my harness.

Altogether, we made up Father Pierre’s entourage. We were his household, and we’d been gathered for the crusade. Father Pierre was the least resplendent — despite being the Archbishop of distant Crete, he wore his Carmelite habit, and his plain dress was echoed by the Pope himself, who wore a magnificent chasuble over his plain Benedictine habit.

As Father Pierre kissed the Pope’s ring, I saw that Fra di Heredia was also in harness, and that he held a magnificent white banner embroidered in gold. He was the Pope’s standard bearer.

I think it was seeing the standard that made it all real. I had heard the talk. I’d been present for the negotiation. But Anne gave odds on the Passagium Generale, the crusade, being cancelled. Fra Peter was more cynical than I’d ever heard him, decrying the waste of time and money and manpower that had allowed the movement to be delayed and delayed.

But now, it was happening. One of the papal secretaries read out a scroll, and my Latin was good enough to make out that Father Pierre had just been promoted to be Patriarch of Constantinople.

A sigh went through the hall. It is an empty see, an appointment without a church, because, of course, the Emperor of Constantinople was a schismatic, a follower of the Greek heresy. But the appointment said everything. We were going on crusade to take Jerusalem, and I had heard rumours that we would go to Constantinople — or that the Emperor would join us. Why else appoint a Patriarch?

And then, in his slow, elegant French, the Pope appointed Father Pierre the papal legate. Legates were the commanders of the ancient legions of mighty Rome, and it was difficult to see the slight figure of my spiritual father, shoulders bent like a peasant’s, as the military commander of the legions of Christ.

But Lord Grey was summoned and appointed the Gonfalonier — the standard bearer — of the legate. And Fra di Heredia placed the papal banner in his hands.

We bowed, and one by one we filed in front of the Pope, and he blessed us. When I bent to kiss the hem of his garment, he placed his crozier on my shoulder.

‘I remember you,’ the old man said.

I raised my head.

‘Pierre, you seem to have a taste for Englishmen,’ he said.

Father Pierre laughed. ‘Perhaps they have a taste for me,’ he said. ‘But they are very brave.’

‘You had the smell of a routier when last I saw you, young man,’ the Pope said.

It is not easy to make a witty remark to the most powerful man in the world while you kneel at his feet in eighty pounds of armour. My memory is that I grunted.

‘Well, well. Go with God, my son. I am pleased to see you are a knight, and still a volunteer. Will you go on this crusade?’ Pope Urban II asked me.

‘Holy Father, I will,’ I managed.

He smiled. ‘There,’ he said to Father Pierre. ‘One soul saved, if we lose the rest.’ He put his whole hand on my head and blessed me.

I suppose we stood around for a long time, but I don’t remember it. What I do remember is Fra Peter listening to a page, one of the Order’s, I believe. I saw him stiffen, and I knew what that meant.

The Order has signals, hand signals, we use in the field. He made one to me, then.

The signal meant ‘A l’arme!’

We were forced to stand on the steps of the palace by the arrival of prelate with an enormous retinue — a hundred men-at-arms and fifty religious — and I think that we were all relieved to be out of the palace. Father Pierre was silent, already, I think, planning his next step. Fra Peter was looking out over the plaza. I had loosened my sword in its sheath and checked my dagger.

Juan shook his head on the steps and hit me lightly with his beautiful gloves. ‘I look like an angel come to earth, but the Pope talks to you!’

Juan thought his voice was low, but Father Pierre stopped and looked up. He was a small, slim man and his wool robes all almost buried him, but his smile pierced like a Turk’s arrow. ‘Juan, do you know the story of the prodigal son?’ he asked.

Juan shifted. ‘Excellency, I spoke only in jest.’

Father Pierre — really, the Patriarch and legate was far too powerful a man to be called ‘Pater’ — nodded. ‘Listen, the Pope rejoices, as he should, in the redemption of a single sinner.’

Juan looked at me. ‘Perhaps Fiore and I should commit more sins,’ he said.

‘Be ready,’ Fra Peter hissed.

Fiore turned and loosened his sword. Juan looked at me.

Fra Peter was just raising a hand for silence when we saw the men-at-arms of the prelate’s entourage approaching on the street before the palace, their flags a mixture of sable and argent on some men-at-arms and azure and argent on others, all riding behind a gonfalonier bearing a banner that bore the arms of the house of Savoy, a white cross of Saint Denis on red ground.

Is it happenstance that the great enemy of my youth bore the exact opposite of the arms of England and Saint George?

At any rate, they were on horseback, arrogant as Frenchmen, and refusing to give way to Father Pierre’s smaller retinue.

My hand tightened on my sword hilt.

I had last seen that man lying in the mud, where Fra Peter had put him with a single blow while I sat with a halter around my neck waiting to die.

The Bourc Camus. He hadn’t changed. That is, he was clean, neat, and his eyes passed over us with obvious contempt. ‘Clear the steps, priest,’ he ordered the papal legate. ‘Your betters have need of them.’

The magnificent knight to his left on the caparisoned horse, in crisp dark blue embroidered with silver — that was the Count d’Herblay.

D’Herblay didn’t see me at all. His eyes were on his kinsman (not that I knew that at the time), the Bishop of Geneva.

But the Bourc’s eyes came back to me.

There is a great deal of worldly satisfaction in the shock of an enemy. He was dismayed and I rejoiced.

But I was no longer so very young, nor so afraid of all the world. Or perhaps I was simply inside the warm aura of my priest, and thus immune from the anger of Satan’s messenger.

I smiled at him.

He was surrounded by his own men, and in the entourage of a prince of the church — if Robert of Geneva did not yet have the cardinal’s hat, he would. Anne had told me that he was superbly rich in his own right, commanded all his family’s connections, and was, in addition, one of the best minds the church had produced in twenty years.

The bishop was craning his head to see what had disturbed his arrival; he was in a chair, carried by eight liveried men. He was quite young, with a bulbous nose and no chin to speak of. His eyes were wide set, and seemed to question everything.

By my side, Fra Peter said ‘Do not draw.’

I had already used my thumb to break the seal of sword to scabbard. I had slid the sword an inch free, ready to pull her free, all without any conscious thought. This, on the steps of the papal palace.

And yet I was not so far wrong.

The Bourc was still mounted. So was d’Herblay.

I could tell from the set of his mouth and the movement of his eyes that he recognised Father Pierre. And remembered him and his role. But more — his eyes kept going back to my priest, and I thought of di Heredia’s warnings.

‘Clear this hedge priest off the steps,’ he shouted to his men-at-arms.

Then a great many things happened at once. All of us, even the nun, closed in around Father Pierre. We were his bodyguard and, even then, we had already begun to practice how we would defend him, if it came to fighting: on the crusade, of course. It had not occurred to any of us that we’d defend him from an animal like Camus on the steps of the papal palace, but we locked up around him in a few heartbeats.

Camus put spurs to his warhorse and aimed it at Father Pierre. He had a staff in his hands, the sort of baton that commanders carry, and he cut down at the nun who, by ill-chance, was in front of all of us.

She got an arm up, but he cut hard. I heard her arm break, but she didn’t flinch, and her struggle cost him time. As her action bought us a few moments, I pushed past Father Pierre and caught Camus’s blow on my crossed arms. My steel vambraces were easily proof against his oak baton, although I felt each blow. He threw three, very fast, and half a dozen of his other men-at-arms were charging us on the steps.

If this seems insane to you, remember who he was. And what he was. And what Robert of Geneva has become.

I had never faced a foe in full harness, but without a weapon or a helmet. A man can spend a great deal of effort protecting his own head; indeed, the piece of armour everyone gets first is a helmet. But by Camus’ third blow, I had his tempo. My left hand trapped his descending right, just for a moment, and my fingers closed on the cuff of his gauntlet covering his wrist.

The oak staff carried on and smacked me in the nose, a light blow that nonetheless almost took me out of the fight, and my right hand closed on his baton and I almost screamed with pain. It was only a few days since I’d had a dagger blade in the palm — and despite all that I managed to get my left on to the flange of his right elbow cop. I pulled.

He came off his horse. The horse was trying to bite my face — a warhorse does that — but Father Hector put his crucifix into the horse’s teeth with a two-handed blow that would have done honour to many a belted knight and the horse reared, finishing Camus’s attempts to retain his seat, and they went down, the horse one way, and Camus at my feet.

To my left, Fiore had another man-at-arms flat on his front and was kneeling on the man’s back, and Juan and Fra Peter had their arms up, covering Father Pierre. But more and more black and white men-at-arms were closing in, and it finally penetrated my head that this might be a real assassination attempt and not mere arrogant happenstance.

The blue and white men-at-arms took no part. They merely watched.

Miles Stapleton put a horseman down by throwing himself under the man’s arm and lifting his foot. And Lord Grey opened the papal banner, so that every man in the Place de Palais could see the papal arms in glittering gold on white silk.

I had the Bourc at my feet. ‘Call off your dogs,’ I shouted, and rotated his arm a little farther in its socket. It was already dislocated.

He screamed. That scream got more attention than any call to arms — four paces away, a mounted soldier reared his horse and fell back. D’Herblay had his sword in his hand. He pointed it at me and shouted.

‘Let him go,’ Father Pierre said, gently. He put his naked hand on my armoured one, and lifted my thumb. My hand was locked in place on the Bourc’s arm. I was rigid with anger, with shock — with not-really-suppressed violence.

‘I’ll kill you all,’ Camus said. ‘I’ll kill you and then I’ll flay your souls in hell.’

Father Pierre shook his head, his mild eyes unmoved. ‘No, my son, you will not.’

‘I am not your son!’ roared Camus. Even then, his right shoulder dislocated, a swarm of men-at-arms around him, he went for his dagger.

I was too slow.

Fiore dei Liberi was not. He stripped the dagger from Camus’s left hand as if he was taking a pie from a street seller. Fra Peter picked up the oak staff that Camus had dropped and held it high.

The Savoyard prelate was just watching. He wore his gown with long black gloves so that he appeared entirely black except his head, where his ferocious, inquisitive, bulging eyes and his narrow, chinless face made him look more like a cat than was quite right. If he cared at all that one of the captains of his escort was lying flat with his arms pinned and his own dagger at his throat, he betrayed nothing but an intense interest, as if we were a troupe of travelling players performing something vaguely obscene. Those eyes of his!

Fra Peter gave Father Pierre a gentle but very commanding shove away from the Bishop’s men and towards the open steps to our left. ‘Move, Excellency,’ he said.

Now the blue and white men-at-arms were also moving, working their way to block the ends of the street. Robert of Geneva leaned down from his chair to speak to his cousin d’Herblay.

Father Pierre was not used to being called ‘Excellency’ and he didn’t react at once.

‘By Satan, I will find the peasants who are your father and mother and flay them alive,’ the Bourc Camus spat at Father Pierre. This, let me say again, on the steps of the papal palace.

‘You are like a child,’ Father Pierre said. ‘You seek to break things-’

‘Don’t patronise me, you low-born hypocrite. You were born on the dung heap, and I will fling you back to it.’ Camus’s voice had taken on an odd, sing-song chant and a sibilant hiss.

Father Hector had his crucifix in Camus’s face, and Liberi had the man pinned, despite his demonic strength — demons, for all the aid of the netherworld, have a hard time with one shoulder dislocated and the other locked by an expert man-at-arms.

Fra Peter stopped talking, caught Father Pierre around the waist and carried him away.

I found that I was standing over the nun. Her face was white and her left arm was clearly broken, but she got to her feet without using either hand, rolling forward over her hips like a knight. She tucked the broken arm into the cord that bound her habit and met my eye. I moved my head, indicating that she should follow Father Pierre and then I looked past her at Liberi.

He had the tiniest smile on his face. With a look of pleasure on his narrow face, he rolled Camus off his hip and threw him down the steps and into his own men-at-arms.

Chaos ensued — shrieks, bellows of pain — and under their cover we slipped away to the left, moving fast. Juan was one step ahead of me. None of us had drawn our swords.

‘At them!’ shouted d’Herblay. But Fra Peter had chosen an alley, not the street itself. The sacrifice of our dignity gained us ten valuable steps on our enemies, and their horses only hampered them in the press.

At the base of the steps, I saw that Fra Peter was already running — in full armour, carrying a grown man — to the left into an alley, as I said, the Rue des Mons. The two priests followed, and then Juan and Fiore and the nun. I paused and looked back, ready to make a fight at the narrow mouth of the side street.

D’Herblay was coming.

I drew my sword. Father Pierre was no longer there to stop me.

The alley was so narrow that only one horseman could pass and that with his head brushing the overhanging houses. And d’Herblay’s posture and his seat on the horse betrayed that he did not want to enter the alley first. He and another man jostled for position at the mouth of the alley, where the old palace gates had been forty years before.

I stood, my heart beating like a troubadour playing a fast dance. But I had my sword on my hip — Fiore’s dente di cinghiale.

But d’Herblay reined in. He shouted something. I’m sure it was an insult, but I didn’t care. He didn’t dare face me.

There was no further pursuit — and the Savoyard bishop was still watching us.

As a group we were deeply shaken. Violence can impart a dangerous air of unreality to events, and the demonic — and I use that term deliberately, messires, for the nature of Camus’s outbursts shook even the gentle Father Pierre.

Our Italian priest returned to the papal palace, escorted by Juan, to deliver a strongly worded protest that was written by Fra Peter. Father Pierre was already moving on to other things: to the revolt on Crete, which remained his see, and to his duties as papal legate. In an hour, he was a functioning prelate again.

I found it hard to breathe. The nun, Sister Marie, had her arm set in the hospital. I remember that part, because the Hospitaller cleared a ward for her, as if having a woman in the place might spread a contagion. But he also sent for sisters of his own order from their nearby house, and they came quickly, surrounding her with kindness.

I spent enough time with her to glean that she was not as shocked as one might expect from a Latin Secretary.

Fra Peter gathered us all in the chapel after vespers and we prayed together. The shock of the open violence so close to what we all thought of as ‘home’ didn’t wear off immediately.

It was almost midnight before Fra di Heredia arrived from the palace. I was not included in whatever he discussed with Fra Peter.

But it didn’t matter, because the crusade was a reality. We were going. And with the Bourc’s threats ringing in our ears, it appeared we were leaving immediately.

I need to remind you that, whatever his reservations about the crusade, the Pope had sent men, trusted men, all over France and Italy, summoning the routiers and the men of the Free Companies to save their souls by going on crusade. It was said that the Archpriest Arnaud de Cervole, with whom I served before Brignais, was to gather the men who would serve, and lead them over the Alps to Venice. Sir Walter Leslie and his brother Norman, who were both famous knights and sometime mercenaries, were gathering men-at-arms in Italy. If the crusade was a charade, at the very least many powerful men hoped that the Holy Land would draw the Free Companies from France and Italy the way a leech draws poison from a wound.

The crusade was to depart from two ports, Genoa and Venice, both of which were being forced to cooperate each with the other. In fact, each of those cities hated the other far more than they hated the Turk; each city, in fact, sought only the best trade status with the very paynim we were going to fight. But let me add that of the two, Genoa was virtually allied with the Saracens of Egypt.

Hah! Messire Froissart, I know you have met Peter of Cyprus, and I know you wish for me to get to the meat of my tale: the fighting, the chivalry. But in truth, the tale is how anyone came to fight, and not the fight itself. Let me say this much without the spoiling of my story: I am not sure that the old French Pope ever intended the crusade to march, although I think Urban wanted it, and I’m damned sure that neither Genoa nor her arch-rival Venice intended a real blow to be struck. I’m reasonably sure that none of the routiers in France and Italy ever truly intended to save their souls and become crusaders, and I can attest to the desperate reality that not a single king of Christendom, save one, intended a blow to be struck, whatever they promised.

It was all lies and half-promises and empty titles and silk flags.

Listen, then. Sometimes, as Father Pierre used to say, Christ works in mysterious ways.

It is a flaw of the deeply self-interested men of the world that they assume that idealists are fools.

Father Pierre — I will keep calling him that, as he was always ‘Pater’ to us — moved like lightning when he moved. The Pope had appointed him to a dozen offices and given him various sources of income to enable him to gather the crusade. Whatever the Pope’s real intentions, Father Pierre gathered his household and all the knights and volunteers of the Order who were in Avignon and led them to Italy. Less than two days passed after his appointment, and we were on the road with twenty men-at-arms and his whole household staff. To my shame, I barely had the courtesy to pay Anne a farewell visit.

Listen, it is not all war, the life of arms. Eh? I owed her better than a casual goodbye in an inn yard. As events proved, I’d have done better, far better, to have slunk away without a farewell, but I betook me to the inn and called her, and told her I was away on crusade.

She looked at me, yawning. And smiled her half-smile. ‘Eh bien,’ she said. ‘Some day you will come back here, too fine to speak to me.’ She turned her head away.

Love … love is a powerful force, but sometimes, plain liking is the easier emotion to distinguish.

‘Don’t be like that,’ I said, somewhat pettishly. ‘I’m a donat of the Order. I’ll be back.’

She smiled a false smile. ‘And your lady … will she approve of me? Like your priest and your knight approve of me?’

I hadn’t really thought of Emile in a month. The word ‘lady’ was like a blow. And of course, Anne was only guessing, with the unerring instinct of the young woman.

‘I don’t even know why you came to say goodbye, monsieur,’ she said, casting her eyes down. ‘I suspect I’m little more than a whore to you.’ She looked at me with something of her usual twinkle. ‘A badly paid whore, an unpaid spy. I have work to do.’

I hadn’t even brought her a present. I walked quickly into the street of jewellers and bought her a good cross with an emerald, and the booksellers were only just opening their stalls. It was a lovely summer day in Avignon, and sin made me think of my sister, and I spent far too much money, almost all my available gold and silver, on a fine copy of Cyurgia by the Pope’s doctor. The bookseller said it was new, the latest scholarship. He didn’t have a plain copy, so I paid for a small illustrated one, with drawings in blue ink and scrollwork in the margins and some magnificent capitals.

Then I went back towards the inn. At some point, I began to wonder if I had been followed — I saw the same scraggly ginger beard for the third time since leaving Anne. I was cautious, and when I came to the fountain at the Place de Saints, I paused to drink water and wash my hands, and saw a boy that I had seen several times before.

I should not have gone back to the inn, but I misunderstood the threat. I found Anne washing tables.

‘Anne,’ I said.

‘Go away! I’m working,’ she said.

‘I brought you a present,’ I said.

She turned and her scorn was palpable. ‘So that I can be a whore in truth, monsieur?’

She went back to washing the wooden table. The limp-haired innkeeper came down and leered at me, which did nothing to improve my mood.

I didn’t like him listening from the common room, either.

‘Run along on your crusade,’ she said. ‘You’ll make me lose my place.’

‘I like you!’ I protested. ‘Please, ask the innkeeper, and I will take you to Father Pierre.’

Her head turned. ‘That’s much better,’ she admitted. ‘I thought we liked each other. Remember the auberge at Chateauneuf? Last year?’

I smiled. ‘With Juan?’

‘One of my best days. Give me your present, monsieur.’ She raised her head and put her hand to her back, and for a moment she was a much older woman. Remember that noble girls live longer, keep their looks longer, because they do not work from dawn to dark.

She went and whispered to the fat owner, and he shrugged. ‘Don’t come back too pious to help a customer,’ he said, but he waved.

I paused and gave him a Florentine silver coin; it was bigger than most and unclipped. He took it with some respect.

I took her to the Hospital, where the gatekeeper looked at me as if I had grown an additional head. ‘You cannot bring a slattern into the Hospital!’ he said.

Chance had caused us to reverse positions, as men will when they argue, so that I was looking back down the street out the gate, and there was ginger beard.

Before I could cajole or intimidate the gatekeeper, Father Pierre appeared mounted on a mule, with Fra Peter Mortimer and Fra Juan di Heredia at his side. He didn’t smile at me, but he smiled at Anne.

‘Ah, Daughter,’ he said, and he dismounted clumsily.

She burst into tears. I don’t think she said a word.

He whispered to her, and she sank to her knees.

He made the sign of the cross on her and when he looked at me, his mouth twitched. His eyes cut me like knives.

I couldn’t meet his eyes long, and I raised her and took her home.

In the doorway of the inn, she stopped and smiled at the ground. ‘I really prefer not to think of you as a customer.’ Then she lifted her eyes and they met mine. ‘But really …’

I put the cross around her neck. There was a pause, and I decided to kiss her neck.

She frowned, and then slipped away. ‘Do you know that man?’ she asked. She pointed out the door of inn.

Ginger beard saw her out-thrust arm — and bolted.

I shrugged. ‘He followed me here.’

She sighed. ‘Some footpad. Friend of the men you killed, perhaps?’ She kissed me, but it was sisterly. ‘I love your priest. He is everything people say he is. Go follow him. Be careful, mon cher. They mean him harm, the rich fucks, Geneva and his people.’

That’s how I left her.

I left the medical book at the Hospital with instructions that it should go to my sister.

We climbed into the Alps, headed once more for Turin, and I had days to consider meeting Richard Musard, to fence with my comrades on the road, to joust, to share cups of wine — and to think of Emile.

I had, in addition to plain lechery, been repeatedly unfaithful to her; all very well when she was distant and thought dead, but a stain on my chivalry now that I knew her to be alive. I thought about her a great deal, because I knew it was possible that I would meet her at the Green Count’s court. And because of Anne’s barb. My ‘lady’.

I had a number of reasons to be dissatisfied with myself. I pondered the twists and turns of the Bourc’s attack on us, and the only conclusion I could draw is that, despite my best efforts, I had been afraid. And despite Fra Peter’s exhortation, I was sure I should have killed him.

In fact, I thought a great deal about the two thieves I’d killed, desperate men. They had looked to me like brigands, and two of them at least had borne the stamp of men-at-arms by the way they moved, their strength.

I had been a brigand.

I hadn’t dealt well with Anne, I had betrayed Emile, I had failed to kill the Bourc and I’d slaughtered a couple of down-on-their-luck routiers when I should have knocked them out or even handed them some silver.

I went to confession with Father Pierre again, in the same ruined chapel where we’d cooked dinner a year before. It is no pleasure to confess to a man who knows you, and whose good opinion you crave. Indeed, it is even less a pleasure to confess in the damp corner of a wet stone ruin with a flickering fire twenty feet away and a circle of professional ears cocked for your every failing.

That’s just my fear speaking. God knows I never listen when some poor fellow is confessing, and I doubt they listened to me, but it made it all worse, and the rain fell on us. Father Pierre seemed immune; indeed, his patience was untouched by weather.

I confessed killing the two thieves and letting the third live. And I confessed my desire to kill the Bourc. And then I confessed to having lain with Anne, which he’d heard before — do priests tire of hearing men’s sins? Does God tire? What can be duller than repeated sin, eh? And with the farm girl in Italy.

Emile I kept to myself.

Father Pierre heard me out, all my rambling, my disputations on my own sin; all the hollow arguments of the guilty.

He smiled in the flickering firelight. ‘Killing thieves,’ he said softly. ‘Two thieves died by Jesus.’

I shrugged.

‘Listen, William, what you’d like is for me to set you some strong penance, and then you’d push yourself to accomplish it, and be cleansed.’ He shrugged and looked away.

‘Yes!’ I agreed.

‘Let me ask you a thing,’ he said, and his gentle eyes met mine. ‘If you kill a Saracen on crusade, how is that different from killing a thief in the dark streets of Avignon?’

I rubbed water from my forehead. ‘I don’t know, Father,’ I said. ‘Since they are all unshriven, they go to Hell — is that what you mean?’

‘No,’ he said, and shook his head. He took a breath and then shook his head again. ‘I don’t know either, but as I am about to lead men to die and kill, I have prayed on this subject every night. And now you set me this.’ He put his chin in his hand. ‘Let me ask you another thing. The Bourc Camus. Do you think him to be … a servant of Satan?’

Just thinking of Camus made my breath catch a little. But I paused, and saw him in my mind’s eye. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I think he believes it himself. But if he were Satan’s knight, surely he’d be …’ I found that I was grinning. ‘Better? Or rather, worse? More … preux? More dangerous?’

‘He may yet serve the enemy in this world and the next,’ Father Pierre agreed. ‘But yes, he seems all too human to me. And yet … he made me afraid. And for me to be afraid, I must, for a moment, have doubted God, because you know that a Christian who hopes for heaven has nothing to fear.’

‘I have never met a mortal man who did not know fear,’ I said.

‘Perhaps battle teaches a wisdom and humility that the University of Paris lacks.’ Father Pierre smiled. ‘Perhaps fear and sin come from the same wellspring, then,’ he said. ‘At any rate, I can shrive you like any village priest. But you knights … you kill. You strive hard to excel at it. You have fine words — beautiful, noble words like preux and courage to describe yourselves and your way.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Sometimes, I wonder if your way is not altogether wrong.’ He raised a hand. ‘Ah, your pardon, my son; tonight it is I who needs a confessor, not you. I do not like this mantle of authority thrust upon me. Listen, cut all the firewood from here until Turin, and while you cut dead wood, think of the living men you have killed, and say prayers for them.’ He blessed me then. ‘And stop your lechery. I am not amused by it — you are not a schoolboy. Wake up, or you will be awakened roughly.’

I went back to the fire, and he sat out in the wet.

The Green Count was not at Turin. He was at Geneva on business, but the word was that he was serious in his crusading vows, and intended to mount a campaign. Despite that, he was still very close to the Visconti of Milan, and the Pope was still on the other side of a deep political divide.

I tried to add it up in my head: Milan was the enemy of the Pope, and Savoy was related to Milan and an ally of the Pope, and Robert of Geneva, our erstwhile assailant, was part of the Savoyard clan, trying to take control of the crusade, and all the mercenaries that the Pope was enlisting …

If the prelates thought that they could control the routiers this way, they needed to spend a winter with John Hawkwood. I had the notion that the Savoyards were plotting without understanding the consequences of their actions. As the great often do, the Savoyards had forgotten that lesser men might have better heads for plotting.

One of the ways that Italy had changed me was the way in which I saw the divides. Listen — when you are a London apprentice, the divides are simple enough: the Goldsmiths before all the other trades; Trades and Mysteries before the nobles; London before any other town; England and England’s King above all other kings and countries.

Simple.

As an Englishman, I had tended to see every conflict measured by the English side; so, for example, in the war between the Pope and Milan, the Pope represented the ‘French’ side and Milan the ‘English’ side, although as time went by it was clear to me that these simple views of Italian politics wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny, and in the end, Milan married his daughter to the King of France. But Hawkwood assured us, his English soldiers, that when we fought for Pisa against Florence (an ally of the Pope) we were still fighting on the ‘English’ side. And that mattered.

It mattered, but a year in Italy had revealed a few things to me. One was that Milan was richer than all of England. I had yet to visit Venice or Genoa, but knew each city was richer than the whole of England including London and Florence was larger than Paris and hadn’t endured ten years of near-constant starvation and war.

That meant that to see Italian conflicts through English eyes was like the plough dragging the ox. Edward III of England might plot all he wanted, but his schemes and those of Charles V of France were mere back alleys in the labyrinthine city of European diplomacy. I didn’t come to this in one year, but I was beginning to suspect that there was more to Amadeus’s quarrels with the Pope, or with Milan, than his relations with England and France.

So the divides were both true and false, and a mercenary, or a crusader, needed to be able to look at every plot from several angles. It was possible for a good man, a true man, to find himself on both sides of any question, because of divided loyalties or interest. As one example, Amadeus of Savoy, the Green Count, and his Savoyards hated the English and were at least in their hearts loyal to the French King, but the Green Count was a sovereign prince; he owed no fealty to anyone, king or Emperor, except for a few estates. He served the Pope, but he had designs of his own in Italy. He wanted a crusade — and he wanted to control it himself. He was not the sort of man who would abide another’s commands. And his cousin Robert of Geneva, formerly Bishop of Cambrai, was a Savoyard first and foremost.

And my lady Emile was the wife of one of the Savoyard nobles.

At any rate, the Green Count was not at Turin, and neither was the Comte d’Herblay or his wife, nor Richard Musard. We stayed three days; Father Pierre had a long discussion on crusade funding with the Green Count’s chamberlain, and we rode east and south, over the passes to Italy. There was still snow on the mountaintops, but the valleys were already in summer, with fields of flowers stretching away like the very embodiment of paradise.

And then we rode down out of the mountains into the plain of Lombardy, and I was back in Italy. By Saint Maurice, gentlemen, I hope I won’t seem a worse Englishman to you if I say that I love Italy. It is warm and the wine is good.

We were bound for Bologna. To make the crusade possible, the Pope had curtailed his war with Milan, and his only concrete benefit from two solid years of war was that he had gained the city of Bologna. But let me put that in perspective. Bologna’s taxes were roughly the same as those of the City of London. Eh bien?

Italy is rich.

Father Pierre had taken the city as papal legate while I’d been fighting for Pisa, and had proved himself both a fine governor and a Christian man in his dealings. Now he was going back to perform a good deed for the Bolognese, and to rally his own support for the crusade.

We were housed in the university. Bologna was not the most famous house of learning in Italy, but it had a mighty reputation for its doctors of medicine. The main palazzo was a magnificent building of brick and marble, and had frescoes better than anything in Avignon. I shared a room with Juan and with Fiore, and the three of us filled it to bursting with clothes and harness and horse tack.

The day we arrived, the three of us spent the entire afternoon going over all the tack — every mule saddle, every bridle. We were, in effect, the squires of the whole party.

In the evening, we laid out the knight’s tack and several items that needed serious repairs, and Miles Stapleton came and joined us in the cloistered courtyard. Some of the men in gowns were scandalised, but most smiled to see us so industrious.

Half the bridles needed some repair, and Fra Peter’s saddle was leaking stuffing and the tree was wearing through the leather so that it had to be troubling his mount. I went and fetched him, and he shook his head.

‘I need a new saddle,’ he confessed. ‘I should have seen to this in Avignon. I hadn’t expected to leave in such a hurry.’

I showed him the saddle for Sister Marie’s mule, which was in worse shape than his. ‘She must ride a great deal,’ I said.

Fra Peter smiled. ‘She does indeed. Mon dieu — that’s bad. The tree is broken.’

Indeed, you could flex the saddle in your hands.

Fra Peter made a face. ‘In Avignon, I could have us new saddles in a few hours.’ He was frustrated, a face he never showed us.

‘Can’t we buy saddles?’ I asked. ‘It seems a mighty city!’

Indeed, Bologna was two-thirds the size of London and had shops and stalls and a great market and many leatherworkers.

Fra Peter smiled; not a bitter smile, but not a happy one, either. I noted that there was something of Anne’s derision in Fra Peter’s smile. ‘I’m vowed to poverty, William,’ he said. ‘So is Sister Marie.’

Throughout the conversation, he was sitting comfortably on the stone between two columns of the cloister, while I continued to sew away at Father Hector’s bridle.

‘I’m not,’ said a man from behind Fra Peter. ‘Vowed to poverty. Ser Peter Mortimer, how fare you?’

The man addressing my knight was one of the handsomest men I ever saw, despite being more than half a century old, as I later discovered. He was also one of the most richly dressed men I’d ever seen, as out of place in the cloister of Bologna as a nun in a Cheapside chophouse. He wore a green silk pourpoint, stuffed and quilted, with a band of gold at each wrist and a collared shirt that emerged from the collar of his pourpoint like a white flower, a fashion I’d never seen before. He also wore a sword, which was unheard of in Bologna; a longsword, the kind that Fiore favoured, gilded steel on the cross guard and a jewel in the pommel, which was a wheel of gold. His hose were gold and green, and he wore a profusion of gold rings and a gold collar that matched the gold plaques on his belt.

He and Fra Peter embraced like old comrades. In fact, I discovered that this prince and Fra Peter were old comrades.

‘Let me buy you some saddles,’ he said. ‘Peter, it is the least I can do.’

Fra Peter shook his head. ‘Nicolas, I could not.’

‘We accept!’ I said, leaping to my feet. I had on my own plaque belt, the heavy belt that showed my status as a knight. Mine was silver with heavy gilding, and was worth roughly the price of my ransom: that’s what we used to say they were for. I realised that I looked incongruous — knights don’t sit about repairing horse tack and mule saddles.

But the prince took no heed. ‘Here’s a man of sense — your squire, I doubt not?’

Fra Peter raised an eyebrow. ‘No one’s squire, my lord. This is Sir William Gold-’

‘Ha! The Cook!’ cried the prince. ‘But I know of you, of course! Knighted at Florence, attacking my home city! My bastard brother wrote and told me every cut, every blow. He said you were the best caveliere he had ever seen.’

Too much praise can be as confusing as an insult. ‘My lord has the better of me,’ I said, a little stiffly.

‘Ah, my pardon!’ he bowed.

Fra Peter laughed. ‘William, this is the richest man in the world and one of the best knights I’ve ever met. Ser Niccolo Acciaioli, of Florence. And Naples. And the Morea?’

‘I am no longer Baillie,’ Acciaioli said. ‘I remain Count of Melfi.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘A fine accomplishment for a man who started as a baker’s errand boy, eh?’

‘I started a cook, my lord baron,’ I said. Acciaioli seemed to boil with energy and good humour, and I had to like him. His neat pointed beard and perfectly groomed hair were the height of Italianate fashion. His eyes were large, and almost never serious.

‘So this is true?’ Acciaioli took my arm. ‘I think we are both the better for humble origins. Eh? Do you love chivalry? My heart says you do.’

This man was an assault on the senses: rich, quick of wit, brilliant — and penetrating. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘He’s not easy to share a campfire with, either,’ Fra Peter said. ‘Has Father Pierre brought you here?’

Ser Niccolo shrugged. ‘I could make excuses, but yes. My Lady Queen has sent me with some letters of support, and I will arrange some funds.’ He smiled at me. ‘Do you like to spend money, Messire Le Coq?’

‘At least as much as any banker I’ve ever met,’ I said.

Ser Niccolo laughed. ‘Well struck. Although let me tell you that in my family, they think my talent for spending gold a fault, not a virtue.’

Fra Peter interrupted him to introduce the other squires. He embraced Juan. ‘I know your uncle,’ he said. ‘You must be close to your knighting?’

Juan blushed to the roots of his hair.

Ser Niccolo looked at Fra Peter.

Fra Peter shrugged. ‘It hasn’t been talked of, but he is ready.’

I felt like a fool — I had been knighted and I hadn’t thought about Juan.

Miles Stapleton bowed to the Florentine. ‘Messire is a famous knight,’ he said. ‘I have heard of your exploits in Greece from my father.’

Ser Niccolo made a face and grinned. ‘It is good to be both handsome and rich and good at arms,’ he said. He laughed. ‘Come, i miei amici. Let us go to the streets of Bologna and see the papal legate’s retinue better equipped.’

Fra Peter caught at his trailing sleeve. ‘Niccolo!’ he said in rapid Italian, ‘You shame us! We can raise the funds for saddles.’

Niccolo put a hand to Fra Peter’s cheek, an intensely familiar gesture, even from a Florentine. ‘By God, if I buy you a saddle for every time you saved my worthless life, I would still be the richest man in Bologna when I was done, and you would be buried in Cordoba leather. Eh? So let us hear no more piss.’ He looked at me. ‘Tell me, English Knight. What are the seven virtues of Chivalry?’

I nodded. ‘Preux!’ I said. ‘Loyalty to my lord, Faith in Christ Jesus, Prowess on the field of battle, Love of a Lady, Courage to face the foe, Generosity to all, Mercy to my foes and to the weak.’

‘Well said,’ Ser Niccolo said. ‘So when I practice generosity, is it enough if I give a few pennies to the poor? Listen, if a poor knight gives half his cloak to the poor, he gives more than I live when I buy you saddles.’

‘You argue like a Dominican,’ Fra Peter said.

Niccolo Acciaioli fluttered his eyelashes. ‘But of course! I was to have been a Dominican!’ He winked at me. ‘Only the chastity was lacking.’

So the richest man in Italy took us out into a Bologna evening.

He was joined at the gates of the palace by a retinue of men-at-arms, a dozen, all well dressed. He had a squire dressed in his heraldic colours and his entire retinue wore his badge, so that they made a glittering parade.

Men and women cheered his name.

Shops opened that had closed. In the street of leather workers, all the saddlers knew we were coming before we walked to the corner, and every master was in the door of his shop, bowing to the great man.

Sister Marie received a fine mule saddle with silver buckles and a matching bag which buckled behind the back of the saddle, all in fine red Spanish leather and Fra Peter spent the better part of the hour before compline protesting various magnificent war saddles, each finer than the last, ivory plaques, gilding, heraldic decoration, matched reins and bridles and straps. In the end, though, while Fra Peter denied that he would ever use a brilliant saddle in Hospitaller scarlet, I nodded to my new friend, Ser Niccolo, and while Fra Peter protested, I was arranging to bring the knight’s charger the next morning for a fitting, and promising to bring Sister Marie’s mule as well.

It was great fun. Ser Niccolo’s men-at-arms were as pleasant a set of men as the great man himself, and they were free with a jibe or a compliment. As they were all Florentines, I expected that they would hold some rancour for my attack on their city, but they seemed to have the opposite views, holding all their ire for Duke Rudolph, who they viewed as a poor soldier.

One young knight, Ser Nerio, had actually witnessed my feat of arms, and his flattery was effusive, and, to me, very sweet.

‘Were you fighting, messire?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I was on the walls with the ladies,’ he said. ‘My harness was in Naples with my lord, and I was home for a wedding and a funeral.’ He shrugged.

Another young knight, a blonde who had to be five years my younger, leaned over. ‘Don’t believe him! He’s so rich he has ten armours, all different, spread across Italy like his women, and he was watching from the walls because he’s a great coward.’

I thought there must be a fine pun on amours and armours but I couldn’t get it right.

Ser Nerio didn’t take offence. Rather, he laughed. ‘I rode well that night and drank deep, Antonio. While you-’

Ser Antonio turned his blonde curls to me. ‘I exchanged blows with two of your valiant gentleman, although I find now that one of them may indeed have been an Amazon.’

We all went to church together, laughing. I knew I was leaving Juan and Fiore and Miles to flounder, but I make friends easily, and I liked these men.

We heard compline sung in the Italian manner. Italian Latin is virtually incomprehensible to an Englishman and so I translated for Miles Stapleton, who gazed at the altar with pious devotion.

After church, we gathered around Father Pierre, and he and Ser Niccolo embraced. Then the Florentine lord departed, inviting all of us to dine at his house the next day.

I was up early the next morning. By then, I had discovered that Father Pierre was in Bologna to arrange grants and loans in aid of the Crusade and because he had a writ from the Pope to establish a chair of Theology at the university, which would, of course, greatly enhance the prestige of Bologna. But it meant that for the next three days he would be sitting with six other great prelates in examination of two candidates for the honour of a Doctorate in Theology.

The world is more complex than we often imagine. That the good men and women of Bologna were being pressed to provide funds for the crusade was true, but the Pope, and Father Pierre, who loved the Bolognese and had made many friends at the university, were providing value for money, a chair of theology would bring students from all over Italy and even all over Europe, and Father Pierre, himself one of the most famous theologians since Aquinas, would add enormous lustre to the founding.

At any rate, I had days to pass, and I had decided to apply myself to my new life. I curried Fra Peter’s charger and emerged from the university’s stable yard to find Sister Marie with her mule’s reins in her fist.

She grinned at me. ‘I’m told I have your intercession to thank for a new saddle,’ she said. That was more words than I had heard from her altogether. She spoke in French, and her French had a very odd accent, which I couldn’t place.

I bowed. On the road here I had decided that she was older than I had first thought, perhaps as old as forty. She had an upright carriage like a warrior and her eyes met mine with a frankness that was rare in women, even nuns. She never looked down. ‘Ma soeur, you owe your saddle only to the generosity of Ser Niccolo Acciaouli.’

She looked at me for perhaps twenty or thirty heartbeats. ‘Are you bound there now?’ she asked. ‘To the saddlers?’

‘Yes, ma soeur. I could take your mule.’ I noted that she held her left shoulder stiffly and I guessed her arm still hurt.

She shook her head. ‘I will be happy of your company,’ she said, ‘but I can manage my own animal. And have, the last thousand leagues.’

I nodded. ‘Fra Peter said you had many miles in that saddle.’ I wanted to convey that I respected her accomplishment. She lived in the world of men, which was no easy task. Janet had given me a taste of how hard that could be. ‘Have you made many pilgrimages?’ I asked, as that seemed the safest answer to why a woman would have travelled so far as to wear a mule saddle to the point of failure.

‘I have made a few pilgrimages,’ she said, and lead the way out of the yard.

I gathered I’d somehow mis-stepped. I elected to remain silent, but that only lasted through three crowded morning streets. A pair of carters abused her; she was a horse length ahead of me, and they yelled in their countryside dialect that she should stop fucking the Pope and move.

Just as I reached the offending peasant, she turned and smiled at him. ‘The Peace of Christ to you,’ she said.

The man fell back a step.

To me, she said, ‘I fight my own fights, Englishman.’

We walked on. Eventually, because she didn’t really know Bologna, I had to pass her. ‘Don’t I at least deserve the Peace of Christ?’ I asked. ‘The saddlers are this way.’

She narrowed her eyes. But she followed me.

At the saddlers, we had to wait while the apprentices tried the saddles on our mounts and then worked on the saddles, spreading the tree of my knight’s and narrowing the tree on Sister Marie’s. The shop had a wonderful smell of beautiful leather, wax, and oil and gilding and resin. The apprentices were well fed and cheerful, and I listened to the banter. My Italian was good by then, and I laughed when one young man let flow a stream of invective so pure and so malicious in response to a slip of his round knife that the swearing itself was an art.

I found Sister Marie looking at me.

I had no idea what I’d done to offend her, but as I felt guiltless, I answered her look with a smile. ‘Sister?’ I asked.

She frowned and looked away.

Her saddle was fitted first, and she took it and her animal and hurried away. I lingered, exchanged a few careful barbs with the witty apprentice, learned a little about leatherwork, and scrounged some leather thong and some scraps for future repairs. Leather work is a basic skill of arms, like wrestling. I imagine Geoffrey de Charny knew how to sew a good chain stitch, and I know for certain that Jehan le Maingre and John Chandos were both capable of touching up their own horse tack. A morning in a leather shop was not ill-spent. A few silver coins got me two new awls and a packet of steel needles better than any I’d ever used.

Back at the university, Fiore and Juan and Miles and I worked in the stable yard. Almost no one went there, and we had it to ourselves. Like every other part of the university, the stable yard was magnificent: bands of bricks and pale marble on two sides, with oak supports for the wooden roofing on the third and a great cobblestone yard comfortably padded in old dung. When we had all the horses seen to and all the new tack stored and all the repaired tack hung, Fiore grinned and produced a pair of blunted spears and a poleaxe.

We had been playing with spears all summer, but toward the end of our time in Avignon, Fiore purchased an English axe. The English have always been great ones for axes — the English Guard in Constantinople have carried them since King William’s time, or so I’ve been told. But just about the time of Poitiers, many of our men-at-arms gave up the spear or the shortened lance for a long-handled axe, and many of them had a back spike and sometimes a spear point. Some men viewed the poleaxe as un-knightly, and others saw it as ‘typically English’. In fact, one of the first men I knew to own one and wield it was Bertrand du Guesclin, and he was anything but ‘typically English’. Hah! At any rate, Fiore had fallen in love with the thing. So we took turns with it, and as we had no pell, we used one of the support pillars of the stables, an oak beam two handbreadths on a side. We left some fine marks in it, I promise you.

I showed Miles the basic postures of fighting with a spear. He was a careful, quiet young man. He listened. But he was not impressed.

When we had practiced various motions, most of which had to do with changing guards from right to left, which was one of Fiore’s doctrines, we stripped to our shirts and hose and fought with sharp swords. I know that today men sometimes use blunts, but we were neither rich enough nor cowardly enough to fence with special swords. By then, I had ceased to be a contemptible opponent for Fiore, and we swaggered our longswords up and down the yard, stubbing our toes on cobbles, covering our hose in old dung, and enjoying ourselves hugely.

I had learned an enormous amount of postures and simple doctrines from Fiore. But he was still my master with the sword, and I remember that morning he finished me with a sharp tap to the side of my head that drew no blood.

At some point I realised that we had spectators. One of them was Sister Marie, and she beckoned to me.

‘Do you know that the university has a law against public use of swords?’ she asked softly.

The stable boys were on our side, so we organised them as a watch, and went back to our play after None. Fiore fenced with Juan, and pinked him through the doublet, which seemed funny enough at the time, although Sister Marie frowned.

Then Fiore turned to young Miles. Miles Stapleton was, if anything, worse than I had been when I arrived in Avignon, and Fiore took him on immediately, with his usual brusque impatience. Fiore had little understanding of other men and women, and he didn’t see why young Miles couldn’t immediately grasp the essentials of the postures he was shown.

I’d like to say that Juan and I leaped to help Miles, but what we really did was to spend an afternoon laughing our fool heads off as Fiore cracked a waster over the boy’s head. Fra Peter joined us before vespers — he had attended father Pierre all day — and he laughed, too.

Fiore stepped back from poor Miles, who was a sweat-soaked bundle of nervous failure.

I had, despite my laughter, been watching carefully. I had seen that, despite our ridicule, Miles had learned steadily for over an hour. But as Fiore’s criticism was relentless and accurate; eventually the younger squire could no longer concentrate on all the errors he was supposed to correct, and he began to fail. And as he failed, Fiore bore down, spitting out his criticisms fast and more insistently, because Fiore felt that somehow he was failing. Miles all but collapsed.

‘And now you cannot even stop a simple cut to the head,’ Fiore said, stepping back.

Young Master Stapleton didn’t burst into tears. A lesser man might have.

I jumped up. ‘Eh, Fiore, give the boy a rest and let’s have another bout.’

Fra Peter gave me a slight nod, which was often his warmest sign of approbation.

Fiore was angry, feeling that he had failed, but he took three breaths — I told you, it was the summer of breathing — so he was outwardly calm, and we took our guards and engaged.

At the third or fourth pass, I got Fiore’s sword in a bind at the crossing, but I was so surprised at my little triumph that I didn’t move my hand correctly to place the blade on my cross guard, and got a nice cut across the back of my thumb even as I struck him lightly on the shoulder. Now, let me say, I had hit him before. He was not yet the master he is now, but it was a moment for personal rejoicing for me or Juan any time we landed a good blow.

He smiled and pointed his sword at my hand. ‘Another pair of gloves ruined. You need to fix that.’ He seemed to be ignoring that I had hit him. ‘You rely on your iron gauntlets. In a street fight, you could lose your thumb.’

Well, of course he was correct, and I had just ruined another pair of three-florin chamois gloves.

I consoled myself that I had the thread and needles to fix them up, if the bloodstains weren’t too bad. Gloves were expensive.

‘Let me have some exercise, Sir William,’ Fra Peter said. He nodded to me — we were all knightly courtesy when we had live swords in our hands, and I recommend such behaviour to any man-at-arms. Heightened awareness deserves heightened courtesy, eh?

Fra Peter began in a low guard, and Fiore began high. They met with a heavy crossing (I wouldn’t have risked such a heavy strike) and Fiore leaped forward to strike with his pommel — and Fra Peter passed back and took Fiore’s blade out of his hand as easily as a thief takes a purse on Cheapside.

Fiore grinned from ear to ear, while the rest of us clapped, and I discovered that I had Sister Marie behind me.

‘Show me that again,’ Fiore said.

Fra Peter grinned, suddenly one of us and very human indeed. ‘No, I think I need to have something on you, since you have youth and speed!’ But he relented, and began to demonstrate.

The laugh of it was that it was just like one of Fiore’s dagger defences — in effect, the pommel strike turned the mighty longsword into a dagger. We all began to learn it.

I noted Sister Marie moving her hands through the disarm.

She caught me looking and turned away, a hot flush on her cheeks.

I went back to practising the turning of the pommel with Juan. Miles just shook his head.

Fra Peter put an arm around Miles. ‘Just practice what you understand,’ he said.

Miles looked at the ground a moment. ‘I don’t understand anything,’ he said sullenly. I had never heard Miles be sullen. ‘My father’s master-at-arms says I am a very promising swordsman.’

Fiore looked at the younger man — they were, after all, only two years apart. ‘I’m sure you are, to a provincial knight in rainy England.’ He looked at us. ‘You saw what Fra Peter has just done to me? Yes? And just like that, I am disarmed and dead. Yes?’

Miles shook his head. ‘Yes.’

Fiore frowned. ‘You know what the worst fault of most knights is? The one that kills them?’

I wanted to hear this. So, it appeared, did Fra Peter. He stopped wrestling with Juan.

Stapleton shrugged. ‘They don’t listen?’ he said.

Fiore’s frown turned to a small smile. ‘That’s not bad. But no. It is that they think they are much better than they really are, and they are not careful. You have only one skin, Messire Stapleton. If you are careful with your blade, you can win many fights against men who should have killed you. Did you see what Fra Peter did to me? Really did?’

‘He turned your pommel strike,’ Stapleton said.

‘He used my arrogance against me,’ Fiore said. He smiled. ‘That’s how to win any fight.’

Behind me, Sister Marie laughed. ‘Women would rule the world,’ she said.

That was the day that I discovered that mild Sister Marie, the Latinist, was an accomplished swordsman. She fenced with Fra Peter after he had us secure all the views into the stable yard. She was tall for a woman, but had nothing like the muscle or the height of a belted knight, and her weapon was an arming sword, the sort of weapon I’d grown to manhood using with a buckler. I’d seen her with her sword and her buckler while we were crossing the bandit-infested passes east of Turin, but what of it? Most women who travelled had weapons, unless they were so rich as to have men-at-arms or so poor as to have only a dagger or an eating knife. Many nuns carried staffs or even cudgels to discourage rape and thievery.

Sister Marie moved like a snake. I had never seen anyone move as she moved. She leaned well forward, so that whichever foot was moving, her weight was out in front of her, and her sword led everything. She passed forward and forward, changing from guard to guard, and it was all alien to me, but like a lethal dance.

Fiore’s eyes shone. ‘This is very interesting,’ he said. ‘She appears to strike from out of measure, yet it is all deception. She dances forward offering a strada, but it is all a lie. She has no line. She engages where she wishes.’

It was not so very different from the sword and buckler of my youth except that we tended to circle, refusing to take a guard until our opponent crossed some invisible distance. Sister Marie flowed from one guard to another, sword over her left shoulder, down by her left hip, up over her head to turn Fra Peter’s cut, and then she was in at him, her little buckler over his sword arm. He wasn’t having that, and he spun and kicked her and she leaped — and giggled. And cut backhanded at his arm. He covered with his pommel high and the sword falling over his hands, blade pointed at the ground to the right, and struck crisply with both hands and she covered with her sword and her buckler, a move I knew well. I suspected that if he’d cut with all his force, he’d have opened her head; even as it was, her buckler moved.

Each of them tried to bind, but her sword, while quicker, was lighter, and as the edges bit into each other, Fra Peter turned her blade down and touched her very carefully on her forward leg.

She leaped back and saluted him and bowed.

‘Fra Peter, it is too seldom that I get to face a swordsman,’ she said.

He grinned. ‘And you a poor weak woman.’ He shook his head. ‘If I had to fight in a wool gown, I doubt I could do as well.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘If you plan to pity me, perhaps I should just shave you.’ Her eyes glittered.

Fiore stepped forward. ‘May I have the pleasure of a bout?’ he asked.

She looked him up and down. ‘I have to copy letters,’ she said. ‘You must promise to be careful.’

He frowned. ‘Are you suggesting that I lack control?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘Messire, you have put a spear through Sir William’s cheek, cut his thumb, pinked Messire Juan, and worn the poor English squire to a rage.’

Fiore looked hurt. But he bowed.

Fiore was so tentative that she mastered the first cross and touched him on his sword arm. And then she turned her sword in the same wind as she had lost to Fra Peter and although she didn’t touch him, Fiore stepped back and bowed. ‘You might have hit me,’ he admitted.

‘Yes,’ she said, and stepped forward again, this time warding his guard with her buckler as she advanced.

Fiore lifted his weapon and struck her lightly on the side.

She stepped back and laughed. ‘Usually, after I hit a man twice in two crossings, he folds,’ she said.

Fiore frowned. ‘Why?’ he asked.

Fra Peter stepped between them. ‘Juan is waving. Sister, put up your sword before the university provost arrests us all. Fiore, she played you. From the moment she accused you of having trouble controlling your blade, she was controlling your actions.’

Fiore wiped an arm across his face and frowned at me. ‘It is like facing a rival fencing master,’ he said.

As Sister Marie disappeared up the steps behind the stables, Fra Peter collected the swords. ‘She is a rival fencing master, Messire dei Liberi. She teaches monks and nuns; indeed, she has a special licence from the Pope to do so anywhere she goes.’

I flushed. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘I tried to protect her from some carters this morning.’ I thought back over various other comments I’d made. ‘She’s old enough to be my mother,’ I added. And then, ‘If she has a licence, we were in no danger-’

Fra Peter stood up straight and put a hand to the small of his back. ‘And I’m old enough to be your father. What difference does that make?’ He nodded to me. ‘Surely you have learned from your Janet that it is one thing to have official approval and another thing to be the woman in the armour? Eh?’

That afternoon, Fra Peter introduced Fra Ricardo Caracciolo, who had been the papal commander of the city and was now accompanying Father Pierre. He was a tall, grey-haired Italian, with heavy eyebrows and a lively laugh. We exchanged bows, and I liked him immediately.

‘By the Blessed Saint John,’ he said in accented English. ‘It is good to see my Order can still bring the best young knights.’

Who doesn’t like praise?

But his next words chilled me. ‘My squire has just come from Milan,’ he said. ‘Do you know the Count d’Herblay?’

‘Why?’ I asked.

Fra Ricardo shrugged. ‘My young Giovanni only mentioned it because we know you follow the good Fra Peter.’ He shrugged. ‘The man is looking for you. Or so my Giovanni says.’

That night, we dined with Ser Niccolo. He had a rented house — really, very like a palace. We did not eat peacock, nor was any of the food gilded. Instead, we ate a number of dishes I had eaten before, but served hot, and not on gold or silver, but on plain pottery dishes. The wine flowed freely, and was served in beautiful cups of brightly coloured glass, green and blue and yellow.

I can’t remember everything we had, but I remember a fine dish with noodles and duck and truffles, and a game pie. And roast beef served the way the Italians serve it. Several times, Ser Niccolo would rise from his place at the head table and walk among us — there were forty men or more, and as many women, so that for me it seemed a feast in a royal court. He served wine to some, and brought a sauce to another, as if he were a page or squire.

I sat by Ser Nerio, and after the master had offered me wine — delicious red wine — I turned to Ser Nerio. ‘His wife is very beautiful,’ I said.

Ser Nerio laughed. ‘That’s not his wife,’ he said. ‘That’s Donna Giuglia Friussi, his mistress and the mother of two of his children.’

Mistress or wife, she was the hostess of the evening, and she summoned minstrels, applauded a poet, and led the ladies in a fast-paced estampida that seemed more like a fight than a dance.

After a second dance, she came to our table and we all rose and she seated herself with two of her ladies. She was warm from dancing, and she had a scent I had never before experienced, something from the Levant. ‘You are the famous Ser Guillaumo the Cook!’ she said. ‘Ah, every girl in Florence pines for you, messire. Do not, I pray you, break too many Florentine hearts.’

‘Madonna,’ I replied, ‘I promise that, should I ever see a sign of a Florentine lady casting an amorous glance at me, I’d do whatever I could to make sure that her heart remained unbroken.’

She laughed, not a simper or a giggle. ‘Your Italian is good, and so are your manners,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you were ever really a cook.’

I liked this kind of game, always have. I sat back and played with my wine cup. ‘Perhaps if we were to slip into the kitchen, I could prove myself,’ I said.

The two ladies-in-waiting both giggled.

Donna Giulia leaned forward, and I could smell her scent again, more like musk than flowers, and yet at the very edge of perception. Her presence was … palpable. I have known a few women like her, where up close, the impact of beauty and personality can rob you of breath. She put a warm hand on my arm. ‘You play this game very well for an Englishman. What would you make me, in the kitchen?’

I sighed. Italian ladies can play this way for hours and mean nothing, or mean everything, where an English girl would be reduced to giggles — or a blow with her hand. I thought of Sister Marie, Donna Giuglia’s direct opposite.

I leaned forward. ‘I should make you …’ I said softly.

She smiled.

‘… dessert,’ I finished. ‘Perhaps a nice apple tart.’

Now the whole table laughed; some at me, and some with me. Ser Nerio, beside me, gave me a look that told me I’d found the right path. We had skirted the marshy ground, for flirting with your host’s mistress is a dangerous game at the best of times.

She threw back her head and laughed, not a ladylike simper, but almost a roar.

Ser Niccolo appeared at my shoulder. He poured his lady wine and she told him of the whole exchange, word for word.

He raised his eyebrows. ‘But of course you must go make her an apple tart. I insist only that I have some too.’ He grinned. ‘Think of it as a feat of arms. Or a task of love.’

‘He loves apples,’ Donna Friussi said.

Juan glared at me, and Miles looked offended on my behalf, but given Ser Niccolo’s origins, I didn’t think he meant a slur. At any rate, I rose and took my beautiful glass of wine to the kitchen, following a page.

The cook was a big man with a pair of enormous knives in a case in his belt, and he frowned and then shrugged. ‘Whatever my lord and lady require,’ he said, ‘it is my task to provide. You wish to make an apple tart? So be it.’

I found that the darker of Donna Giulia’s ladies was at my shoulder. ‘This may take an hour or two,’ I said.

She shrugged and sipped her wine.

By the time I’d made my dough and was rolling it out, I had a little crowd. Ser Nerio was there, and Ser Niccolo, and Donna Giuglia. I had flour on my best doublet, and I was having a fine time. In fact, I was the centre of attention, and I like that well enough. And the cook had decided to humour me — better than that, he was actively supporting me, so that when I was at the point of forgetting salt in my crust, he slapped a salt horn on to the table beside my hand.

A pair of boys chopped apples for me. I discovered that the palazzo boasted a majolica jar of cinnamon, a fabulous spice from the east — you know it? Ah, everyone does, now. I ground it myself, and held my fingers out to the dark lady-in-waiting and she breathed in most fetchingly.

More and more of the guests found their way into the kitchens, and Ser Niccolo served a pitcher of wine to the cook’s staff. He had rented the house, and none of the staff knew what to make of him: cook’s apprentices do not usually mix with the guests. But Donna Giuglia brought musicians into the kitchen, and there was dancing, and a lady began to sing. And then, as I assembled my little pies, Donna Giulia took a tambour and raised it, and everyone fell silent, and she whispered to one of the lute players. Accompanied by only a single lute, she danced and sang to her own song.

She was magnificent. Let me add that she was so good that the fifty guests and twenty kitchen staff crammed into the corners of a great kitchen gave her both silence and room — and that she had an open strip of tiled floor no wider than a horse’s stall and not much longer, and she held us all spellbound.

I finished my pies. I put Master Arnaud’s mark on them — I don’t know what imp moved me to do that. Perhaps just the memory of every other apple tart I’d ever made. The cook swept them away into the great oven by the fireplace, itself big enough to roast an ox.

Donna Giuglia finished, her honey-coloured hair swaying, and every man and woman whistled, shouted, clapped their hands or laughed aloud, and she stood and swayed a moment, eyes closed.

Ser Niccolo went and threw his arms around her and kissed her — a lover’s kiss. I had seldom seen outside of army camps a woman kissed in such a way in public, but I gathered that there were few rules that applied to Ser Niccolo.

After the dance, it was difficult for any of us to reach the level that Donna Giuglia had set us, and we chatted. I began to tidy up the mess I’d made, and the cook and his apprentices began to look at me reproachfully, but in truth, it gave me something to do, and I didn’t want to stand idle and silent among strangers.

Ser Niccolo came and put an arm around my shoulder. ‘Now I believe that you were truly a cook,’ he said.

‘While I confess, my lord, that I have trouble believing that you were ever a stingy banker,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Perhaps I became a knight because I was such a very bad banker.’

My little pies emerged from the oven, no thanks to me, and carefully watched, no doubt, by the professional. But they were golden brown, and the scent alone — I’d used more eastern spices in six small pies than one of Prince Edward’s cooks would see in a month of Sundays — the scent alone suggested that the gates of heaven might be close.

I put one small pie on a wooden trencher and presented it on my knees to Donna Giuglia.

She laughed. ‘I think I have been bested,’ she said.

Ser Niccolo took a bite, and he looked at me over his pie with pure, unadulterated approval.

I cut the pies as small as I could, and almost everyone had a bite.

At the door, Ser Niccolo took my hand. ‘I love a man who is not afraid,’ he said.

I assumed he was serious, so I shook my head. ‘My gracious lord, I’m afraid all the time.’

‘You were not afraid to make the pies. In public.’ He was serious.

‘I was afraid that they might not come out. It has been a few years.’ I smiled.

He didn’t return the smile. ‘But this is exactly what I meant. Wait, please. I want you to meet my son Nerio.’

I had seen Nerio all evening, and never known him to be the great man’s son. But of course, when I saw them together, it was obvious. Nerio was my own age, as handsome as his father, and at this late stage he had another spectacularly beautiful woman at his elbow, this one thinner and more otherworldly than Donna Giuglia, but neither more nor less magnificent. I knelt to her and to him, and he pulled me sharply to my feet.

‘By God, messire, you are a famous knight and a competent pastry cook, and I am neither!’ He laughed. ‘When there is steel singing in the air, I find a lady’s lap and hide my head there like a unicorn.’

It has amused me all my life, the different ways men boast.

I had a fine night. After I saluted Nerio, I slipped around the palazzo and in by the tradesman’s alley, and found the cook. ‘Here’s three florins to share,’ I said. ‘I know how much work you went to for me.’

He took the florins without hesitation and gave me a little bow. ‘You were truly a cook?’ he asked.

I looked past him at the circle of apprentices. ‘Never,’ I said. ‘I was a cook’s boy, and Master Arnaud would never have trusted me to cook a pie on my own.’

That made them all laugh, even the master. And as if he’d been drawn by the laughter, I saw Ser Niccolo appear on the servant’s stairs.

‘Sneaking into my house?’ he asked.

‘Offering my compliments, because these men made me look better than I am,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘If you always remember to thank the men that help you step up …’ He shrugged. ‘Where do you bank, Ser William?’

‘With the Bardi,’ I admitted. My Genoese bankers.

He nodded and cocked his head to one side. ‘They will fail — if not this year than the next. Your prince has served them but ill again and again.’

I was sitting on the same table where I’d prepared the pies. It seemed incongruous to me: Ser Niccolo was wearing the most magnificent grande assiette pourpoint I’d ever seen in crimson silk covered in gold embroidery, and he was leaning against the fireplace.

Well, I wasn’t his squire, thanks be to God.

‘Move your money to my family’s bank,’ Ser Niccolo said.

I grinned. ‘My lord, I’d move only my debt. I’m owed some ransoms, but another knight collected …’

Ser Niccolo smiled and made a very Florentine gesture with his hands, a sort of denial of the very statement he was about to make. ‘I know all this,’ he admitted. He smiled at me. ‘Give me your account, and I will find your money.’

I suppose I frowned. ‘Why?’ I asked.

Ser Niccolo tilted his head to one side like a very intelligent dog. ‘You are a friend of Acuto Hawkwood. A good friend for me to have. A good knight. And you serve Father Pierre. Any one of these things might have made me notice you, but you now have all three things.’ He leaned towards me. ‘You can, I think, read and write.’

I shrugged. ‘Yes. Latin or English.’

He nodded. ‘Write me a letter giving me your account, and I will see to it you receive the money due you on your ransoms.’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Really, I ask nothing more.’

As I walked through the dark streets with his linkboys lighting my way, I searched for the strings that would make this dangerous, but all I could see was that it would be a fine thing to be friends with the Florentine. He was the Queen of Naples’s chancellor, a great knight, and a powerful lord.

And I had had a wonderful time.

If I’ve given another impression, I’m a poor storyteller. And back at the university, I had to tell all the tales of the evening to Fra Peter, who had stayed with Father Pierre. He laughed at my failure to recognise that Nerio was Ser Niccolo’s son.

‘By his wife, who stays in Florence,’ he said.

Father Pierre came in behind us, carrying a pitcher of wine. He poured me wine with his own hands — he always did. He was the worst great church officer imaginable. He helped servants carry furniture and he liked to lay out his own vessels for serving Mass, even in Famagusta when he was with the king — but I get ahead of myself.

‘Ser Niccolo wears his sins as well as he wears his jewels,’ Father Pierre said. ‘He would be more beautiful without them, but he never allows them to weigh on him.’ He shrugged to me. ‘I have known him ten years and more. The power he wields has corrupted him, but not so very much.’

‘I liked his lady,’ I confessed. ‘His mistress.’ I flushed.

Father Pierre laughed. ‘Why should you not? God made her as much as he made you or me and she is a very good lady, despite her sins.’ He shrugged. ‘I am a bad priest. But as a celibate, what do I know of the world? Nothing. It is not for me to judge, but God.’ He turned to Fra Peter. ‘But Niccolo will accompany us to Venice, at least for a few days. I have word of King Peter. He left Rheims; not for Venice, as he promised, but for the court of the Holy Roman Emperor.’

Fra Peter went white.

Father Pierre sighed. ‘I agree with your unspoken words. There are three thousand men-at-arms at Venice, and it is the most expensive city in the world. Every day he delays is a day he is not making war on the infidel. And those men will drift away to wars in Italy. Will they not, William?’

I blew air out of my lips. ‘Unless Walter Leslie has a great many more ducats than he showed at Pisa, he can’t keep them together for long.’

Fra Peter looked at the crucifix on the wall for a long time. ‘What is King Peter thinking of?’ he asked.

Pierre steepled his fingers in front of him. ‘I am thinking that he was not informed that he was the commander of the crusade before he left Rheims.’ He looked at me. ‘But he is a strange man; a wonderful man, and a great knight. But very much a man.’ Father Pierre looked over his hands at the table in front of him and finally shook his head. ‘I don’t think we can do anything. Any day, the Pope’s appointment will reach him, and he will realise how essential is his presence. We must get to Venice now, and see to the men who are to be my flock.’

Fra Peter tapped a thumbnail on his lower teeth. ‘You could send me to the king.’

They looked at each other for a bit. I drank my wine, which was delicious, and I poured more for my elders.

‘What do you think of the wine, Ser William?’ Father Pierre asked me.

‘Delicious,’ I admitted. ‘As good as anything Ser Niccolo had to offer.’

Father Pierre’s eyes crinkled with his smile. ‘Denied all the other pleasures of the flesh, my brother priests and I can rarely resist a good wine,’ he admitted. He looked back over his hands to Fra Peter. ‘No, I need you at Venice. You and the other men of the Order are my ambassadors to the brigands and routiers who will be our phalanx of Angels.’

Sometimes, I suspected that the saintly Father Pierre had some cynicism lurking under the surface, but like some shy forest animal, whenever it peeked out with his rare half-smile, it was soon gone again.

I needed a new sword, and I spent some delightful hours prowling Bologna for the one I wanted, with Fiore and Juan and Miles, who had recovered from his sullenness to become one of us. But in three days, I knew every sword available for sale in the city, and none of them were quite what I desired.

I’m sure you will say that a sword is a sword, a tool for killing. This is true, and I can use any of them. But listen, gentles. There are many beautiful women in the world. Yes? Consider every charm, every allure. Consider the endless attractions: ankles, shoulders, the curve of a wrist, the top of a breast, the tilt of eyes, the corners of mouths. Consider also the subtlety that is the interplay — the conversation, the soul of a lady, so that some are dull and others sparkle like a fine jewel in any company.

So … every man has his taste, and perhaps every woman also. So many details that we cannot track them all or even remember what we like, and yet, at least with a sword, I have to no more than wrap my hand around a hilt and raise the blade from the floor and I know. Some blades demand to be swung up and over my head. Some hilts fit my hand as if they were some sort of inverse glove. And some do not. Perhaps they have warm conversations with other swordsmen, but not with me.

The perfect sword … it is a very intimate thing.

When I find one such, I think of it constantly. Listen, I remember once I saw a woman through the curtain of a shop; she was raising her dress over her head, trying something for a seamstress, perhaps, and all I saw was the line of her side, and that ell of her flesh stuck with me for two days, filled my waking thought, found its way into my head even while I prayed. And so it is with the right sword, so that the memory of the perfect weight across my palms will follow me out of a shop and into church.

Well, she was not to be had in Bologna.

But I did enjoy three days with Ser Niccolo and his knights, and I drank a great deal of wine with Nerio and was surprised to find how much he and Fiore disliked each other. I mislike it when my friends cannot make accord, and this was the most instant dislike between two friends I’d ever experienced. I suspect that Fiore resented Nerio’s familiarity — and his riches. And Nerio was not used to being thought to lack anything, but Fiore found him wanting as a man-at-arms. I have no idea why. Nerio looked quite dangerous to my eye, and I’d killed a great many more men than my Friulian friend.

To complete the complexity of my existence, Fra Peter and Father Pierre had decided that they would arrange for Juan to be knighted in Venice. But as he was from a great Catalan family, this involved a good deal more preparation than a cook’s boy from London got on a battlefield, and they wanted it kept secret, so I was handed a list of things to purchase and things to do and letters to write, all without letting Juan know. This, of course, had the unfortunate effect of letting Juan think I was ignoring him.

And finally, while I was writing letters, I mustered my courage and wrote to Emile. That is to say, I helped Sister Marie compose a circular letter from the legate to the bishops of the Duke of Burgundy about pilgrimage and crusade, and in it were dates for pilgrims who wanted to accompany the crusade to Jerusalem, assembly points at Venice and Genoa, and other points. When I copied the legate’s letter out — to Sister Marie’s surprise — I made sure that my name had been included among the list of routiers turned to soldiers of God, and she had included it.

It took me most of my last day in Bologna to copy that letter. Three hundred lines, and two small errors, and we covered them both. I had not entirely wasted my time with the monks in London, and no donat at Avignon escapes without some copy jobs, unless he is absolutely illiterate, which is increasingly frowned upon in the Order.

Sister Marie wore heavy Venetian spectacles to copy and they made her look like some avian monster, owl-eyed and beaked. But when she pulled them off she looked human, almost homey. ‘Sir William, I would never have marked you down as a writing man. My thanks, I would not have finished in time without your clerking.’

‘Sister Marie …’ I paused. My petty troubles with Fiore and Juan had suddenly made me more careful than was my wont with other men and friendship, but I am in general a blunt man, and I ploughed on, ‘I would not have taken you for a sword hand, but as you are, can we not be friends?’

She met my eye — I’ve said it before, but she never flinched from eye-meeting like a normal woman. I suppose girls are trained to it and nuns, perhaps, are trained out of it. At any rate, she raised an eyebrow. ‘I suppose we could be friends,’ she admitted.

Well, she was not the warmest of women. But she wasn’t my mother or my bed warmer; she was the legate’s Latinist. And witting or not, she had been my ally in writing to Emile.

All told, I suppose we were a week in Bologna, although it seemed a year, and when we rode east for Venice, crowds cheered us in the streets. Leaving Bologna, we were a small army; two dozen knights and donats of the Order, brilliant in scarlet, Lord Grey at our head with the papal banner; Ser Niccolo and his score of men-at-arms as brilliant as angels from heaven; another dozen volunteers from Bologna with their harnesses and their warhorses and carts full of belongings they were taking east. And with another twenty priests and nuns and clerks, as well as squires and pages and servants we had at least three hundred horses in our cavalcade.

Fra Peter had command of the whole, and I found myself commanding the donats. The older Knights of the Order were quite content that I do so: they stayed close to Father Pierre. There were almost a hundred Knights of the Order heading for Venice that autumn, but only half a dozen chose to ride with the legate. Or perhaps that was Father Pierre’s choice. A big column of knights ate up the countryside and devoured more bread and more grass.

I have not, up until now, described the intense faction that split Italy from the Italian point of view; I have to at least mention it to explain how I almost lost my life in the streets of Verona. The della Scalas were the lords there, and like every family of aristocrats in Italy, they belonged to one of the two competing factions — the Guelfs and the Ghibbelines. In brief, these two parties stand for allegiance to the Pope and allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor. The quarrel is an old one and now has elements of the absurd, but the division remains lively.

Verona was a Ghibbeline city, and the della Scala, the local tyrants, were ancient supporters of the Pope. Since we served the Pope, you might have thought that we would make popular guests, but a rumour met us in Verona, to wit that the Emperor was coming to Italy with a large army to join the crusade. By some stretch of the popular imagination, that made us Guelfs — supporters of the Emperor. With papal banners at our head.

In truth, the London mob is every bit as fickle as the mob of Paris or Rome or Verona.

At any rate, we did not receive a hero’s welcome to Verona, and while we rode in through the white Roman Gate and trotted by the marvels of the amphitheatre, and the magnificence of Saint Anastasia, we were watched by a sullen crowd. Father Pierre dismounted in the courtyard of the Carmelite convent, and the Knights of the Order closed around him, wary of the people. The nuns watched from the upper cloisters like curious birds.

Fra Peter watched the crowd for as long as it took the clock to strike three, and then handed me an ivory tube with many of our travel documents. He shrugged. ‘This may be ugly. I need to be with the legate. Get to the castle and get our documents signed. Tell della Scala …’ He paused and looked at the ground. ‘Never mind. But if you can find out what this is about, I’d like to know.’

Well, we had by then a dozen donats, all fully armed and armoured. I turned to Miles Stapleton.

‘Will you play my squire?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Your servant, my lord,’ he said.

Nerio Acciaioli caught my bridle. ‘It could be murder out there,’ he said, pointing to the gate.

It was my turn to shrug. ‘I have orders,’ I said. ‘And Fra Peter is worried. He never worries.’

Ser Nerio let go my bridle and nodded. ‘Do me the kindness of waiting on my father.’

I dismounted and bowed to Ser Niccolo, who listened while his son whispered in his ear.

‘Do it,’ he said. He smiled at me. ‘You need a servant,’ he said.

It seemed the oddest thing, at the time.

There were no women in the streets of Verona, that’s the first thing I noted. The second was that there were a great many men of fighting age, all with swords. In Bologna, I hadn’t seen a sword displayed in a week. University students who wanted to fight went outside the town.

We were watched in a heavy silence as we rode, and I suspect the sheer number and quality of the men-at-arms kept us safe — a dozen of the Order’s men-at-arms and another dozen of the Accaioulos, with their green and gold banner and the Pope’s, too.

The castle was the most modern, elegant, and imposing fortification I had ever seen. It is all red brick and white marble, with palatial facades and workaday walls; a magnificent design that is equally suited to holding the city against an invader or holding an escape route against a local insurrection. The della Scala were, after all, tyrants. Not really ill-natured tyrants, although there had been trouble.

We entered by the main gate and entered a courtyard, and my spine tingled: the walls around the courtyard were full of crossbowmen, and they were watching us, their bows spanned.

Fiore whistled softly.

Stapleton played his part perfectly, riding forward with my helmet and lance and calling for the captain of the fortress.

The man who emerged from the main tower was in full harness and had a poleaxe in his hand. I couldn’t even hear him when he spoke, because his visor was down.

I didn’t have a helmet on, and I was afraid. There were enough crossbows around us to kill us all in a matter of seconds, and I had led my friends into this. And I had led the life — I could tell how close to the edge all these men were.

I turned. ‘Dismount!’ I called. ‘Everyone show your hands to be empty. Smile!’

Behind me, Nerio said, ‘Smile?’

I looked at him and made myself smile. ‘It’s harder to kill a man in cold blood when he’s smiling,’ I said. I got an armoured leg over the cantle of my saddle and slid to the ground, then walked toward the armoured man with the poleaxe.

He backed away a step.

‘Messire, I don’t have a weapon in my hands, and I have no helmet on my head, and you have fifty crossbowman pointing at me this minute,’ I said in passable Italian. ‘I come in peace, with travel documents from the Pope, who is our spiritual father. I am sworn to the crusade, as is every man here, and if you harm us, you will be excommunicated. Please open your visor and let us talk like gentlemen.’

‘Put your papers on the ground and back away,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I represent the Cardinal Legate of the Pope.’

We stared at each other.

That is to say, I stared at his visor, and he stared at my naked face.

After some time had passed, I became angry. I took a step back, and turned slowly to face the walls. I held aloft my ivory tube and pointed at the papal banner. ‘We are servants of the Pope and we are sworn to crusade.’ I looked around. The impasse had lasted long enough that the crossbowmen — all mercenaries, and mostly Bretons — were tired of aiming their weapons.

‘Shut up,’ said the visored man.

‘If you harm us, you will be excommunicated,’ I said, and my voice rang off the stone. ‘Whatever you have been told-’

‘One more word and they shoot,’ growled the Visor.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Leave your papers and go,’ he said.

‘Why? This is an insult to the Pope.’ I put my hands on my hips. I fetched a glance at Juan and he nodded. We weren’t just young bucks with a message. We were soldiers of the papacy. I leaned toward the visor. ‘And frankly, messire, you have done nothing to indicate that I should trust you with all of our travel documents. Which …’ I raised my voice, ‘which are signed by the Pope, the King of France, the Emperor, and the council of Bologna.’

He stepped forward and placed the blade of his axe against my neck. ‘You!’ he began.

I grabbed the haft just below the head and pivoted on my back foot, gave the haft a sharp pull to throw him off balance and then slammed my unarmoured hand into the chainmail of his aventail at his neck, got my right leg behind his knee, and put him down with his own axe as the fulcrum. As fast as a crying woman draws a breath, I had his dagger under his aventail at his throat.

Everyone was very, very still.

‘I can help you up, and we can start this again,’ I said very softly. ‘Or you can die. I may also die, but please understand that you will be ahead of me at the gates.’

His eyes were not daunted. ‘You will not seize this castle while I’m its commander,’ he said.

‘I’m not here to seize your poxy castle!’ I spat. ‘I’m here to get the papal legate’s travel paper’s signed.’

All this while fifty Breton crossbowmen considered whether to kill me or not.

‘Do you know that man over there?’ I asked, pointing at Ser Nerio. ‘He’s an Accaioulo.’

‘Heraldry can be faked,’ he said. Then, ‘Very well, let me up.’

The change was too sharp. ‘Let you up? Why?’ I asked.

He raised his head and opened his own visor. ‘Stand down,’ he shouted. ‘Clearly been a misunderstanding. Stand down!’

The crossbowmen sighed all together, so that it sounded like a flock of birds landing on a pond, their wings all beating together. The knights in the courtyard watched the cup of death pass away from them, and they sighed too.

I probably sighed.

The man who opened his visor was Antoine della Scala. The lord of the city.

He poured wine with his own hand while a pair of boys in red and white livery disarmed him. ‘The cardinal of Geneva sent word that you would attempt to seize the citadel and take the city for Milan,’ he said. He passed this as if it was a pleasantry, a matter of little consequence.

I decided that he was quite mad. His eyes glittered, and his movements were curiously uncoordinated. He spilled a little wine almost every time he raised the cup to his lips and he had spittle at the corner of his mouth.

As I was now deep inside the castle, I was more scared than I had been in the courtyard. They had my sword and my dagger, and my armour was not going to keep me alive very long against a dozen trained adversaries. Men whose master was, as I say, a lunatic.

‘The Bishop of Geneva?’ I asked.

‘The Green Count and Bishop Robert have always been a friends of this city,’ della Scala said. ‘He sent me a letter from Avignon …’

I understood. Pardon, gentles. Now that it has all happened, it seems obvious — that Bishop Robert was our enemy. But at the time I scarcely knew him, and I had no notion that a bishop, a virtual prince of the church, would attempt to undermine a crusade.

‘My lord, I can only promise you that if the weather is fair, we will quit your gates tomorrow on our way to Venice, the city of Saint Mark.’

The mad tyrant of Verona shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘Cavalli, have all their papers prepared.’ He turned to me. ‘There, my English bravo. Is that enough for you?’

I bowed.

‘And how exactly shall I punish you for the lese majeste of attacking my person?’ he asked suddenly.

My hand went to the empty space over my hip where my arming sword should have been.

He shrugged again and turned away. ‘We will see,’ he said.

We made it back to the convent by riding quickly on the main streets with our helmets on and our visors closed. I dismounted in the yard, gave my horse to one of Nerio’s pages, and ran, fully armed, for Father Pierre and Fra Peter. I found them at prayer.

I had never interrupted a priest at prayer but I cleared my throat a few times, and eventually Fra Peter and two of his knights turned to look at me, and he saw it in my posture and my face and came to the back of the chapel, scattering nuns and lay sisters as he came.

‘I have the papers, but della Scala means us harm, I’d swear to it. He claims a bishop, Robert of Geneva …’ I paused.

Fra Peter let slip a nasty word.

Father Pierre’s head came up.

Well, we’re all merely mortals.

‘If it were up to me, I’d take the legate and ride right now,’ I said. ‘Somehow the populace has been convinced that we are Guelfs and the guilds are arming under their banners.’

Ser Niccolo Accaioulo took a deep breath. ‘Of course, we are Guelfs. Famous ones, too.’ He shrugged elaborately. ‘Whether this is planned or happenstance, our presence is making it worse.’

I shook my head. ‘Begging your pardon, messire, but Nerio’s presence gave della Scala a little pause. It might have been what saved us. We rode into a trap.’

Father Pierre, clad only in his Carmelite robes, strode down the nave of the chapel to join us.

‘You men of blood,’ he said. He was angry. ‘What have you done?’

I was more than a little crushed, I can tell you, to have my spiritual father assume I was to blame.

Fra Peter raised his hand. ‘Your Excellency, this is apparently brought on by your brother in Christ, Robert of Geneva.’

The legate narrowed his eyes.

‘They will use the Accaioulo as an excuse to attack us,’ Fra Peter said.

‘They would provoke war with the Pope, with Venice, and with Florence,’ Ser Niccolo said. He pulled at his beard. ‘Someone has told them otherwise, eh, messires?’

While we stood, the abbess and two senior nuns rose from their knees and went to the great oak doors of the chapel. There, a pair of novices whispered to them; the abbess looked stricken, and put a hand to the cross at her neck.

She approached the legate with her eyes cast down. ‘Excellence, there is a rabble at the gates,’ she said.

Fra Peter turned to me. ‘You and your men are armed. You must hold them until the knights of the Order are ready …’

Father Pierre looked at us — and smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not allow a single Veronese to be killed. Much less you gentlemen, who love me. God will protect me, messires.’ He turned to me. ‘Do not follow me, unless you are unarmed.’

Fra Peter gave me a look. It is surprising how much information a man or a woman can convey in a single flick of the eyes. I knelt before the legate, and he put a hand on my head and blessed me.

‘Come!’ he said. ‘But leave your swords. Because I will neither live by one nor die by one.’ He walked out of the chapel and I followed him into the yard. It was already dark, and we could hear the crowd at the convent gates.

‘Mount,’ I said. ‘For the love of God, gentles, mount and draw your swords, but take no action unless the crowd strikes the legate.’

Nerio pressed his horse in beside mine. ‘You know what you are doing?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

Nerio saluted me with his sword.

Ahead of us, Fra Peter and Fra John of the Scottish priory — John Cameron, that was — opened the gates.

A cluster of nuns appeared around the legate with torches.

The legate wore neither cope nor chasuble, nor any garment of gold. But in the orange torchlight, he seemed to glow. The mob — the crowd, I should say, because they were citizens and craftsmen, not the poor — the crowd gave back a step.

‘Brothers and sisters in Christ!’ Father Pierre said. He said it gently, firmly, and his voice carried.

He took a small wooden cross from one of the sisters. They stood their ground with the resolution of English archers or Swiss spearmen — women can be stauncher than men. Behind them stood a dozen knights of the Order, all in their scarlet, but none armed beyond daggers.

‘He’s the Emperor’s man!’ shouted an educated voice safe in the heart of the crowd. A voice whose Italian was tinged with French.

‘Brothers and sisters!’ Father Pierre called again. ‘Do you know that the Holy Father has preached a great crusade? Do you know that the princes of the West are even now gathering at Venice under the banner of the King of Cyprus to strike a great blow for Christ, and retake Jerusalem if it can be accomplished?’ He smiled his gentle smile. ‘I would serve the Emperor, if he would come to me and tell me that he would lead a thousand of his best knights to Jerusalem. In the eyes of Christ, there are no Guelfs and no Ghibbelines! There is only the flock of Christ — and the wolves that seek to divide us so that they can consume us. Brothers and sisters, shall we all pray for the state of Christendom?’

‘He is a liar and a hypocrite!’ the voice said, conversationally. ‘The Pope will sell this city for gold — to barbarians!’

I knew that voice. I’d listened to it for too long — after Brignais.

It was d’Herblay. In Italy. Safe, deep in a crowd, and I was standing, head bowed, unarmed.

But Father Pierre ignored the voice as if it didn’t exist. He knelt. He was within a spear’s length of a man with a heavy axe; there were armed apprentices even closer than that. The nuns drew back a little, so that all could see him. Then they knelt, ten women of faith.

The knights knelt. If you have never knelt in steel leg harnesses, let me tell you that it is God’s own penance for the Orders of Chivalry.

After a pause of a breath most of the people in the crowd knelt, too, but my horse sensed my tension and began to fret, tossing his head and moving his back feet.

Father Pierre raised his hands and began the paternoster.

All the people in the street began to say it with him.

It isn’t listed as one of his miracles. But I was there. He glowed. And not a man or woman died.

The crowd broke up quickly. I waited by the gate, eager to follow my quarry, but Father Pierre was on to me as soon as he rose to his feet and walked back in to the walls. He saw me and smiled.

‘Your whole body speaks of violence,’ he said. ‘Jesus came to speak of peace. Walk inside.’

‘But-’ I began.

He didn’t frown. He looked pained.

I took a deep breath, took my hand from my dagger hilt, and turned away from the gate.

In truth, had I killed d’Herblay in Verona that night, my Emile would have been a widow, and I might have been a much happier man. Yet, as Fra Peter said to me, the habit of obedience is essential to honour. Once you put your trust in a man, you must be prepared to obey. And perhaps, in my scarlet surcoat, I would merely have walked out into the streets and been killed.

We left Verona very early. I didn’t sleep much, and neither did Fra Peter or Ser Niccolo, but in the end we had everyone saddled and ready in the courtyard as the darkness began its retreat from morning’s light. We opened the gates on an empty street, and we rode into the next square, formed our column, and moved to the river as quickly as we could manage.

They were just opening the gates, a fine triple arch to the north. I presented our travel documents to the officer on the gate.

He flicked through them. And nodded.

The gates continued to open.

We passed through them, bags and baggage, in about the time it would take a man to say the Ave Maria. No one was disposed to linger. I saluted the gate officer, took our travel papers back, and rode through. When I emerged on the other side, I found I’d hunched my back against … well, boiling oil, which I feared all the way under the arch.

We passed Montorio, a Cavalli castle, a little outside of town, and one of the knights of that house rode up to us with his banner displayed. He knelt in the road and accepted the cross of a crusader, and we rode for Vicenza — and Venice.

Vicenza was beautiful, although not as beautiful as Verona. Padua was richer yet. The plains of northern Lombardy were, if anything, yet richer, and the hills were incredibly lush. Everything smelled wonderful — the hills smell of flowers and crushed grass even at the height of summer.

Fiore looked at the country north of Verona with a predatory eye. ‘They say the cows give butter,’ he said. ‘That’s how rich they are.’

Indeed, as we passed from town to town and city to city, I was struck nearly dumb by the riches. Every town had a cathedral and some had two. There were monasteries and castles on every hill; vineyards covered the hillsides, and there were almost as many olive trees as I had seen around Sienna and Pisa.

As far as I could tell, this country had never known war. And having just come from Avignon, the contrast with France couldn’t have been greater — the difference between a beautiful house and a burned-out shell. The peasants wore good wool, and many had Egyptian cloth shirts; women wore fine gowns, often well fitting, and with enough buttons to pass as the gentry of England. They ate good bread and drank good wine and their sausages were among the best I’ve ever had.

And the closer we got to Venice, the denser the traffic on the roads. By the time we reached Padua, we were passing trains of merchant wagons and laden pack animals carrying cloth from the northern fairs, cloth that had come over the passes from Savoy and the Swiss cantons, from Germany and Flanders and England. And we passed a pair of wagons carrying Bohemian glass and armour, sword blades from Germany, and then load after load of grain from all the country about.

Fra Peter winked at me. ‘Have you been to Venice?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘You know I have not,’ I answered.

He laughed. ‘You are full of surprises, William. But Venice is … remarkable. And all of this is but a tithe of the products that flow through her port. Most of it comes by sea, or up the canals.’

Well, who has not heard of Venice?

We had planned to take a more northerly route from Padua and the legate had tasks in every city, but he received letters at Padua, one from the Pope urging him to haste, and letters from the bishops of England, Normandy and Burgundy.

That night in Padua, Sister Marie came to my room. She found me reworking the scabbard of my arming sword. It was a fine sword, and I prized it, but the leather was coming off the wood core of the scabbard where Juan had stepped on it. All the donats were gathered around my straw pallet, watching me, and Miles Stapleton had a stinking pot of fish-hide glue he’d got from the leatherworker across the convent yard.

‘But the wood’s broken!’ Juan said in his Catalan French.

Sister Marie appeared at the door. I remember this as if it was yesterday. She wrinkled her nose at the smell and then pushed in with her intense curiosity about everything that characterised her.

I pulled a small, flat piece of bronze out of my shoulder scrip. It was a clipping off a larger piece, and I’d bought it for almost nothing the day before. I held it up so Juan could see it.

He grinned.

I used my eating knife, which was sharper than a razor, to shave the broken wood away. My eyes met Sister Marie’s, and she smiled, so I went on.

I took the brush from the warm glue and spread the stinking stuff on the wood, and pushed the broken edges together. ‘It looks repaired, like this,’ I said. ‘But it’s like a man with a broken bone. If you don’t splint it, it won’t knit. So I take the metal plate …’

Suiting action to word, I laid one small bronze strip on the back of the scabbard, and the second on the front, as if I was splinting a bone, indeed. Then I pulled the leather of the scabbard cover back into place. ‘The leather makes a tight seal. You have to sew it up while the glue is still warm and wet.’ I used a curved needle — a rare commodity, purchased back in Bologna for half a florin — and in twenty stitches, I had the whole scabbard fixed.

I used a little more glue on the mouth of the scabbard’s chape, and slid it back on to the point of the scabbard; then I put two holding stitches through the leather. I turned the scabbard around. The plates showed a little under the thin-stretched red leather, but altogether, it was a decent job.

Sister Marie shook her head. ‘The glue inside will dry and fill the scabbard,’ she said.

I grinned; it’s so nice to actually know something, when you are a young man. ‘Miles?’ I said, and Stapleton produced a second smelly tin, this one full of tallow. I took my arming sword and coated the blade a fingernail thick in tallow, and then slid it home.

‘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 facade, 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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 Niccolo 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.’

With his arm around the legate’s shoulders, the Doge escorted Father Pierre out of the loggia and up the great stairs. We were taken to a side chamber and entertained by a pair of lute players and a tenor who sang beautifully. It was in many ways the most elegant reception we’d had in Italy, and it was further reinforced with wine and cakes. Ser Nerio smiled over his glass — in Venice everything was glass.

‘Welcome to the New Rome,’ he said. ‘They lie and they drive hard bargains, but they are far easier to deal with than Neapolitans or Genoese. Don’t quote me.’

After an hour, a pair of Venetian knights came and courteously escorted us to our lodgings in the Count of Savoy’s palace. I shared with the donats; eight of us in a single room, but the room was huge, on the piano nobile and elegant and full of light from windows of glass. We all had feather beds and trunks in which to stow our clothes, and we had another room in which to place our tack and our armour. The only difficulty was our horses; Venice has fewer than fifty open fields in the whole of the city, thanks to the population on the islands and the incredibly dense building. So our horses were, as I mentioned, to be kept on the Lido, and that meant that we had to rotate a watch to look after them. I found a pair of wax tablets and began on a watch bill, then carried my work to Fra Ricardo Caracciolo, who was sitting on his own feather bed, writing a letter while Sister Marie copied another.

I remember that I started to explain to Fra Ricardo, and he shrugged.

‘Take yourself off the watch bill, Sir William,’ he said. ‘You are going to Prague.’

While we fought off assassinations and engaged in political discussions across Italy, the newly appointed commander of our crusade, the famous King of Cyprus, had not yet arrived in Venice, despite having set off from Rheims in France two full weeks ahead of the time we set out from Avignon. By the time we arrived in Venice, there were five thousand men waiting to go on crusade, eating Venetian food and drinking their precious fresh water, so that the Venetians moved many of them to the mainland at Mestre or above Treviso. They were nearly mutinous, being unemployed and unpaid. Unscrupulous or over-eager papal recruiters had promised them pay — money that the papacy didn’t have, or at least had no intention of paying out. In the north, the ‘army’ of routiers that Arnaud de Cervole had raised for the crusade and led into the Swiss passes murdered peasants, ran riot and in the end, killed the archpriest himself. It’s not my story, except to say that I have since come to believe that Arnaud de Cervole was intending to join us — and the Green Count and his minions stopped him. I mention this to say that we did not win every round, or even know what was happening out there in the lands north of the Alps.

All this news greeted us at Venice, and much more beside. If Father Pierre already knew of the state of near war that existed between the Genoese on one side and the King of Cyprus on the other, he knew more than his household, but we all learned more than we wanted in a few hours in Venice. Some Genoese sailors had been killed in a brawl, and Genoa was using the brawl as a pretext to demand that the Cypriotes cede new rights of justice and commerce to Genoa. And of course, Venice wanted no such thing.

A lesser man would have despaired. I was that lesser man, and I returned to the donats and did what I should not — I conveyed to them my sense of defeat. I cursed and complained and predicted the collapse of the crusade.

An excellent piece of leadership, let us agree. But it seemed that whatever Father Pierre did, the hand of man or fate was against him.

I was railing against the injustice of it when Juan’s face changed and Liberi became very quiet. I turned, hand still raised to make another point, and there was Father Pierre.

He smiled, as he almost always did. ‘My son,’ he said.

I stood abashed.

‘The crusade may or may not happen at the will of God, and not because we are so very mighty, nor so very clever.’ His eyes had a glint of self-mockery. ‘Despite which, we shall do all in our poor power to help the cause. Will you take my messages to the King of Cyprus, William?’

I remember how much I didn’t want to go. Emile was coming, and I wanted to be with her — and with Father Pierre — although, like any young man, I didn’t consider what it might be like to divide my time between the two of them. And I was aware that she had said that d’Herblay was coming.

But Father Pierre was more than just my commander. So I knelt and put my hands between his. ‘Whenever you command,’ I said.

His smile didn’t waiver. ‘That’s my William,’ he said to the room. ‘I need you to leave now — today.’

Christ on the cross!

I suppose he’d been ready, because he’d made four of us bring our horses all the way to the city, when the guides had begged us to leave them. I had a hasty conference with Fra Peter about Juan’s coming knighting, about the command of the donats, about my failings as a leader and, oh yes, the threat of our being intercepted.

‘I have a fear heavy on me, William, that Bishop Robert and his faction will stop at nothing to end the crusade. Or rather, to subvert it to their own will.’ He looked at me. ‘Nothing.’

I nodded. Any faction that employed the Bourc Camus was blacker than pine pitch in my eyes, and I needed no warning, or so I thought.

In the end, I got Fiore and my new servant, Marc-Antonio, and Ser Nerio and his squire, Davide. I was handed a purse full of money and I got to repack the harness I’d just laboriously moved into a storeroom and placed on an armour rack, while I tried to teach Marc-Antonio the most basic elements of armour care.

An old man approached me as I handed my bags and leather trunk down into the boat that was to carry us to the mainland. He came down the water steps of the loggia and Fra Peter waved to tell me he was one of our own.

The old man bowed. ‘Sir Knight,’ he said, ‘are you William Gold of England?’

Despite feeling especially surly — hard done by, unwashed and unshaved in the face of elegance and civilization — despite all that, I returned his bow and tried to comport myself as a gentleman of the order.

‘I have that honour, my lord,’ I said with a flourish.

‘Ah, messire, I am no lord, but merely Francesco Petrarca,’ he said with immense dignity.

Even I knew who Petrarch was: the greatest man of letters in Italy or the world, discoverer of Cicero’s letters, poet, diplomat — hah, Master Chaucer, I see your surprise. By God, I know a few scribblers beside you! It is not all war and horses, messires!’

‘A name that is a title in itself,’ I answered.

The old man lit up like a church at Easter. None of us are immune to flattery, are we? And the older we are, the nicer it is when some young pup offers us some, eh? At any rate, the great man gave me a packet of letters to carry, for the Doge and on his own account. Those letters were bound to half the cities of Europe, but there was a packet for the Emperor and another packet for the King of Cyprus, and yet another for his chancellor, Philippe de Mezierres, of whom more anon.

Darkness found me on the shore north of Mestre, with the magnificent city behind me. I’d been in Venice for almost six hours.

I hadn’t even had time to look for a sword.

Fra Peter had laid out my route for me. I had every passport that a knight could need, and the first thing I did on reaching Padua — again — was to purchase three excellent horses. Then we rode the way Fra Peter had crossed France two years before: fast and light, with no baggage but our armour and weapons and a fat letter of credit. We climbed into the Swiss passes and blessed the weather, but at the top of the great pass, where a monastery’s lights burn like the hope of heaven a thousand feet above the road, it was cold even at high summer.

We descended into the Grand Duchy of Burgundy, an amalgam of appanages and inherited towns owned by the King of France’s brothers and uncles, a feudal empire that was partly French and partly Imperial and that shared territory and feudatories with Lorraine and with Savoy. But we continued north and east, following Fra Peter’s instructions. We were careful, believe me. I used our Venetian passports and had reason to thank God for them. Papal passports had many foes.

It appeared that the King of Cyprus was his own man, and not the Pope’s tool. And he had decided to enlist the Emperor in his scheme for a great crusade in the east. The Emperor and the Pope were not actually at war, but neither were they friends — the Emperor tended to side with the English, or anyone else who could weaken mighty France.

Fiore knew the roads of Germany, having spent time there learning from the German masters and having followed their tradition of fighting on errantry, travelling from town to town challenging strangers. Ser Nerio knew how to get good accommodations in any town, usually by showing a letter of credit and a Florentine ambassadorial letter. I truly think that we escaped harm because we had so many different letters of passage that no spy could pin down our ‘side’. Nor were we much given to chatter.

In southern Germany, they took us for knights on errantry, and by God, gentles, we lived the part. We were challenged from time to time. Fiore was disposed to fight, but I had a mission and a fine sense of my own rank; well, arrogance is the specialty of the young, I think. I would flourish my various commissions and ride on.

But a day’s ride east of Nuremberg, we passed through a small village and saw a party of knights whose colours we knew from the day before. They were obviously French; German heraldry is very different from French, and even the colours they use in a blazon are different.

I didn’t know any of them, nor did I question how they’d got ahead of us on the road. But they barred the square, and tallest man — I called him the knight of the ship for the device on his shield — raised his arms and cried a challenge.

I sent him Marc-Antonio with my papal commission; I was chary of using it, but I did not intend to be delayed. I dismounted in the yard of the town’s wine shop to have a bite with my bridle over my arm. Fra Peter had been correct — again. The Emperor had indeed moved his court east to Prague.

I was considering all this when the Ship Knight struck my squire to the ground with his spear.

I was not fully armed. In fact, I had on a habergeon and a good brigandine of many plates, my ‘riding armour’. I had no leg harness and nothing on my arms, and wore only a light sword. Fiore was wearing even less — just a haubergeon. Germany is far too civilised a place to require a man to ride abroad in harness, and ours was packed in straw baskets on the panniers of our spare horses.

‘Don’t send me a peasant. Come and fight like a man,’ Ship Knight shouted.

He meant business.

I drank off the wine in my cup — sheer bravado — and vaulted into my saddle. Fiore was two ells away, negotiating for a sausage, but he was alert and he knew we were attacked. With the ease of long practice, he reached on to the pack horse, extracted a spear, and threw it to me overhand.

The Ship Knight had his lance couched against me, set in his lance rest. He wore good armour on all his limbs and a heavy breastplate under a full helm. His heavy warhorse was half again the size of my riding horse.

Behind him, his friends lowered their visors.

Very chivalrous.

I rode at the Ship Knight, and as he put spurs to his horse, I shifted my weight as du Guesclin had taught me, and my horse sidestepped, the mounted equivalent of stepping fora di strada in a foot combat. His big horse leaped forward and I stood in my stirrups and threw my spear. It wasn’t a full-length lance, but instead one of the six-foot spears we used to fight on foot, with a long, sharp head.

He could not ward his horse, and the spear went in by the horse’s neck and the big horse stumbled and blew blood from its nostrils. I had my arming sword out; Ship Knight hadn’t grasped what was happening and had no momentum, no forward speed, and my sword slipped unerringly along his lance shaft and flipped it aside. This, too, was the product of a spring of intense drill. Close in, my left hand closed on the haft of his lance, dragging it across his body and putting torque on his waist, and I dragged him from the saddle by his own lance. As his back struck the cobbled street, the lance finally came away from his lance rest and bounced once on the stones, and then I swung it by the haft, spun it in the air with a flourish — and turned my horse to face the other three.

Fiore trotted up by my side. ‘Helmet?’ he asked, and handed me my bassinet.

He covered me while I dropped it on my head.

‘Caitiff! Coward! You killed his horse!’ shouted another man, who I remember as the Knight of Coins.

Nerio reined in on my other side. ‘I couldn’t let Liberi have all the fun,’ he said.

Liberi frowned. ‘I don’t need you to defeat these riff-raff,’ he said.

‘Could you two save the fight for the enemy?’ I muttered.

We charged them.

I can seldom remember a fight that I enjoyed so much. We were better; simply, better men. Better trained. I think the best moment of the fight was that I hit my opponent squarely on his shield, having deceived his lance, and I rocked him flat across his crupper, so that his feet came up in his stirrups, and Liberi caught one going by and threw him to the street as if he’d planned this little manoeuvre all his life.

Truly, the only thing better than being a good knight is being one of a team of good knights. To have comrades …

Nerio, who was a fine jouster, put his man down, horse and all. Then his horse kicked the downed man. Their superior horses and armour were of no importance, and in seconds they were all lying in the dung-streaked stones of the square while Fiore collected their horses.

I rode straight to their squires and pages, who scattered. I shamelessly ripped through their pack horses, and I tipped a leather bag full of wallets into the muck, looking for letters, but I found nothing.

Nerio curled a lip in distaste. ‘Is this your mercenary’s chivalry?’ he asked.

‘I want to know if they are hired men,’ I said. ‘They are French knights and they attacked my squire. I suspect they are not what they appear.’

‘Oho!’ exclaimed Nerio, or words to that effect. ‘This is more like Florence than I had expected.’

Then I checked on Marc-Antonio. He was deeply unconscious, and already had an egg on his head big enough for a duck. I got him over his horse, and Fiore had all the knight’s destriers.

‘Right of arms,’ I called at the squires of my adversaries.

Nerio was for staying, perhaps to see if any of the downed knights was dead or needed a doctor.

‘Let’s move, before someone appears with a crossbow,’ I said.

Two days later I wished that I’d ignored Nerio’s aristocratic ways and scooped the purses out of the muck. Three destriers cost the earth and the moon to feed, and they were eating our travel money. However, they were beautiful horses, far better than those Fiore or I would usually have owned or ridden. We’d left our warhorses back in Venice — a perfectly sensible decision, given the cost of maintaining a warhorse on the road. Unless you have to fight, the warhorse is a useless mouth that consumes money.

We continued to speculate on who our late adversaries might have been, and then rode hard for Prague, crossing some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen — as rich as northern Italy. It was August, and the crops were coming; peasants stood in their fields, sickles in hand, to watch us pass their grain fields, which stretched away like a golden promise of heaven in the red light of the setting sun. Beautiful young women, the better for a sheen of sweat, wiped their faces and curtsied even as their fathers and mothers closed in on them protectively; indeed, some lay down and hid at the edge of the road so that we wouldn’t see them, but we were old soldiers and we knew where to look.

What we couldn’t fail to see was the lack of war. There were no burned towns and no crowds of starving beggars. Twice we passed roadside gibbets with men rotting in chains, but we never saw the tell-tales of regular banditry — sly informers, churned earth and heavy horse droppings on the roads like those left by a military column, columns of smoke on the horizon. Fire is the hoof print of brigandage.

Marc-Antonio took two days to recover, and then he was sick on horseback for two more and had real trouble speaking, so that I despaired of his wits. But by the sixth day from Nuremberg, he had again begun his litany of complaints in passable French, and devastating Italian. His riding improved drastically, and it appeared to us that the blow to his head had made him a better rider — a joke that didn’t appeal to him for some reason.

At the very edge of Bohemia we were robbed in an inn, and all our purses taken. That was when Marc-Antonio’s talents began to be seen; he had our travel purse under his pillow, and thanks to his preserving it, we weren’t wrecked. Nerio was mortified to have no money of his own, and tried in every village to cash a bill on the family bank, but in Bohemia, at least in the forest, no one had ever heard of the Acciaioli and their bank, or indeed even of Florence.

But par dieu, my friends, the women of Bohemia are beautiful, tall and honey haired and deep-breasted. Nor are the men any the less handsome, and the knights we saw there were big men, skilled in arms.

We arrived in Prague in late afternoon, and as the next day was the Sabbath, we went to church in the magnificent cathedrals. We knew within an hour of entering the city that the Emperor was not there, and my heart sank within me. But our letters from Father Pierre and the Pope gained me admittance at the castle, and the chamberlain, as I think he was, told me that the Emperor and the King of Cyprus had gone east to visit the King of Poland and the King of Hungary and to hold a great tournament at Krakow, in Poland and we would find him there.

As we travelled east in Bohemia the weather grew cooler and the harvest was more advanced, but the women were not any the less beautiful and the grain was like a shower of gold on the land, the very manna God promised the Israelites. The land grew flatter and flatter until we were riding across the steppes that I had heard described by Fra Peter and by other knights who had fought against the Prussians: Jean de Grailly and the Lord of the Pyrenees, Gaston de Foix. It is one thing to hear traveller’s tales, even from a courteous knight, of how flat the land of the east can be, but it is another thing to see it for yourself.

On the plains, there were no inns and few farms, and while we saw herds in the distance more than once, we were not accosted, but neither were we hosted and feasted, and we ran low on food and had to hunt antelope. Our spear throwing was up to the challenge, and I spent a happy afternoon teaching my squire to lay a snare and take a rabbit. And to cook it.

I cannot remember if I stopped to consider that I was riding across the world on a feckless errand to find the commander of a crusade that might never happen. Or why a commander would ride away from his crusade. I suspect I thought about it, but I was young enough to enjoy the adventure that was offered to me, and that day, that month, that summer, I was offered the steppes and the antelope, the golden wheat, and the matching hair of the lovely maidens of Poland and Bohemia.

We had been a month and more on the road when the spires of Krakow came into sight on the horizon, and such is the flatness of the ground that we had a full day’s ride ahead of us yet, and we lay a night in the Monastery of Saint Nicolas, well out in the country. But the abbot put us immediately at our ease and told us that our quest was fulfilled, and that both the Emperor and the King of Cyprus were at Krakow, preparing a great tournament with all the best Knights of the Empire and Poland.

The abbot was a talkative man, with excellent Latin, our only common tongue, and he told us a great deal about what had transpired, and very little of it to the credit of the Emperor. If the abbot was to be believed, the Emperor had no interest whatsoever in a crusade, but was far too politic to say so, and was holding a tournament to allow King Peter to recruit knights — but Nerio, whose Latin was as much above mine as my swordsmanship was above Marc-Antonio’s, came away with the impression that the Emperor’s hospitality was wearing thin, and that the Cypriotes were expensive and perhaps troublesome guests for the people of Krakow. I remembered that Nan had told me when I was in London that the guilds had given a feast of four kings — the King of France, the King of England, the King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the King of Scotland — and how much it had cost the guilds and the alderman of the city.

When Nan told the story, I had been more interested in her, and her face, than in her tale. I had no idea, then, that I would meet Peter of Cyprus.

Any road, the last few leagues, I was as careful as I could be; I saw enemies behind every fence post and inn sign, and my hand was always on my sword and my purse, but looking back, I think we outrode our adversaries, if indeed Robert of Geneva had sent more than the one team of knights. So despite my caution, or perhaps because of it, eventually we reached the inn that bore the arms of the King of Cyprus, and several other blazons across the front.

We dismounted. It was evening, and the sun shining in long rays through the dust. In Krakow, and indeed all of Poland, the greater portion of the buildings are constructed of logs and wood, and the great inn was no different, although it smelled like any other inn from London’s Southwark to Verona; that indefinable air of hospitality and good beer and flees.

We’d crossed half the world to get there, or so it seemed, and then we stood in the street while Marc-Antonio held our horses, straightening our clothes and sorting out all the packets of letters. The Emperor was in the castle and would have to wait for another day.

We paused to wipe off the dust. Nerio’s squire, Alessandro, produced a brush and did his best. I was wearing a peasant’s cote over my red surcoat, to protect it from the dust, and I stripped it off. Fiore emulated me, and Nerio looked meaningfully at our pack horse where we had good clothes. Italian clothes.

Marc-Antonio shrugged. ‘It will take an hour!’ he whined.

Whine or not, I knew he was right. ‘Very well,’ I said, or something equally masterful.

Brushed and combed and still smelling strongly of horse, we walked up the steps, past the porch that was packed with cut firewood, and entered through the great front doors that were pinned back, wide enough for a wagon and team to ride through. A door ward looked us over and made a face.

‘What do you mean, sir?’ I asked. He pointed mutely at my sword, and I unbuckled it off my heavy plaque belt. Fiore did the same, and then Nerio.

Nerio’s sword was one of the finest riding swords I’d ever seen, all blue and gold with a heavy gold pommel that held a saint’s relic, or so it was said. The door ward’s eyes all but popped. He bowed to Nerio again, thus instantly reinforcing my desire to own the very best sword money could buy. Swords command many kinds of respect.

I tried to offer my papers, but the door ward merely bowed silently and indicated the inner door.

We went into the inn and found the King of Cyprus and all his court inside. There were twenty knights there, and as many noble squires, all dressed in the latest Italian modes, with tulip-throated pourpoints and collared shirts as if every one of them was Ser Nerio or Ser Niccolo.

Every head turned to look at us.

A handsome man in white and silver approached us from the right.

‘By what right do you enter our lodging?’ he asked.

I bowed and again offered my papers. ‘My lord, I am a courier carrying letters for the King of Cyprus,’ I said.

The man in white and silver frowned. ‘You are not dressed for court,’ he said.

By that time, my eyes had become accustomed to the light of the interior. The walls were whitewashed, the ceilings were high, even to the rafters, and two great fireplaces lit what, in England, would have been an old-fashioned great hall of logs rather than stone. The heads of deer and elk and bear studded the walls, with tapestries nearly black with age and a magnificent reliquary in silver and gold with jewels that had to have been the property of the king, because it was too rich for any tavern.

Between the fireplaces was a great chair with a beautiful fur of shining black sable hanging over it like a quilt, and sitting on the fur was a young man, not much older than me, in a cloth of gold jupon and hose of red with pearls in the shape of swans as embellishment. He was frowning, playing with a child’s toy of a stick and a ball connected by a string.

He caught my eye. And rose with the sort of athletic fluidity that Fiore has, and Fra Peter. I strive for it: it is he mark of a great man-at-arms.

He moved like a greyhound, all long legs and stride. And he moved with purpose, crossing the great hall in ten paces, and his courtiers moved out of his way. He threw the ball-and-stick toy at one of them and the man caught it.

No one needed to tell me that this was Peter de Lusignan, King of Cyprus, King of Jerusalem. Men said he was the best lance in the West; the best knight in Christendom.

I went down on one knee.

Nerio and Liberi emulated me.

‘De Tenoury, tell these three that I am prepared to imagine that they are here on important business,’ the king said. ‘But to enter my presence dressed as peasants is to dishonour their master, whomever he might be, and me as well.’ He all but spat. ‘I’ve had enough of being humiliated today.’

Silver and white leaned over me. ‘You heard his Grace,’ he said. ‘Come back when you are properly dressed. Or come in by the servant’s entrance.’

I was well trained — the order drills etiquette as well as all the other knightly skills. So I kept my head bowed, but I growled, ‘I am a knight and a servant of the Order of St John and I am here with messages from the legate and the Pope.’

The king bit his lip and looked at an older man in blue and red standing near him. When I say older, this gentleman was perhaps forty, with grey in his blond hair and lines on his face. His blue eyes flashed over me.

‘If your Grace wishes to order these men away, of course he may,’ the man said.

‘But, de Mezzieres? My faithful pilgrim? Always, your voice has that hint of censure. Please, share with us the nature of our failings.’ The king’s voice rose and fell a little more than was necessary.

De Mezzieres bowed. ‘Your Grace, it is not my place to put any censure on your royal head. Yet …’

‘Yet?’ asked the king, and there was an obvious warning in his voice.

‘Yet I will say that I would expect the King of Cyprus, the commander of the Passagium Generale, to fall on his knees and kiss any missive the Pope sends him,’ said the older man, with his head high and his eyes boring holes in the king.

The king glared for a moment at the older Frenchman. I knew that the older man must be Philippe de Mezzieres, the king’s chancellor; I had letters for him and had heard him described. The king pursed his lips and stalked across the great hall, opened a door, and paused.

‘It may be your fondest desire that I be shackled hand and foot to your damned crusade, Monsieur de Mezzieres, but it was never mine.’ He went through, and slammed the great oak door behind him.

The silence was like that of the pause between strokes of thunder.

‘Let’s go,’ I said, very softly. My instinct was to obey the orders of the king, however childish, and not get caught up in some courtier’s drama. I had been a squire for the Prince of Wales, and I knew something of princes. Quick to anger, and often deeply regretful later of letting the mask slip. But very conscious of the rules.

I was trained for this. I knew to bide my time, hide my emotions, and remain a knight. But I was angry.

I felt … humiliated. I had come a long way, and somehow had grown used to the armour of authority that was the habit of St John. Indeed, I felt that my Order had been humiliated. I was angry, and to my shame, I took it out on poor Marc-Antonio. Out on the street, he dared to ask what had happened.

‘We were tossed on our ears,’ I spat. ‘Because our clothes are dusty and unsuitable.’ My tone and my glare carried a clear message — he and his whining were at fault.

His face fell. In fact, it didn’t just fall — it collapsed like an undermined stone tower.

It’s a small thing, for a man who has killed. You’d think I was hardened to it, but I had been with the Order for more than a year, and the collapse of his face, the twitch of his mouth — it was as if I’d kicked him.

I promise you, I didn’t think of it at the time. I was so furious that I almost missed my mounting, and when I was up I found that I’d left my arming sword with the door ward. Fuming, I had to dismount and reclaim it.

He bowed. ‘The king’s had a hard day,’ he said, in good French.

I considered a nasty reply, and thank God I bit my tongue and acted the part of a knight. I nodded, forced a smile, and bowed.

But between getting our own inn, finding our clothes and bribing a pair of maids to iron our things — we couldn’t get back before darkness fell.

Nerio finally put a hand on my arm. ‘Sir William,’ he said carefully, ‘I am going for a glass of wine and some beef. I recommend that you do the same.’ He didn’t wait for my expostulations, either, but took Fiore by the shoulder — took Fiore, for the love of the good Jesu; Fiore, who he affected to despise — and left our rooms and went to the head of the inn stairs without looking back at me. Fiore went with him willingly enough.

I suppose I had given them a difficult afternoon. In fact, I had behaved badly — disappointment and humiliation bring out the worst in most of us. I was left with Marc-Antonio. He kept his head down and kept laying out clothes and trying to boss the maids, who ignored him and went back and forth, heating their irons in a box by the fire. The box, of course, kept soot off the irons so that they were clean.

I still didn’t apologise. I sat there, my black mood further darkened by the abandonment of my friends, until the maids lit tapers and I smelled the beautiful smell of resin in the torches. The smell woke me from my mood, and I went down and ate, but my companions were scarcely civil. Twice, Fiore looked at me in a way that suggested he was considering physical violence.

I went to bed early. As a consequence, I rose with the dawn. I dressed plainly and left a message that the others should not wait for me. My anger was gone, replaced, as it often is, with a sort of guilt complicated by fear — fear that I would be humiliated again and fear that I had behaved badly with my friends and it couldn’t be fixed; a common fear for a young man, I think.

I had no experience of this particular world. I’d been a minor servant, and now, to all intents, I was a sort of ambassador. I didn’t know the rules, but I knew damned well that if I went back as the Order’s representative to King Peter, I would go alone, test the waters, and do my best to avoid public humiliation. And spare my friends. And, perhaps, apologise to them.

I was dirty, and I decided to wash. I managed to find a bathhouse. Like Bohemia and High Germany, the bathhouses of Poland are correctly notorious as dens of vice, staffed with scantily clad women whose single layer linen garments stick to their bodies in the steam in a most attractive manner.

Shall I go on? They really are splendid, and if priests don’t want men to fornicate, why did God make women so beautiful? Eh? Answer me that. By Saint George, I was in a much better mood when I emerged, clean in body if slightly soiled in soul. The woman who washed me — I can still see her, because she smiled all the time and nothing so becomes a woman as a smile — she was a good leman, luscious and lovesome and very tall. And very apt for the game.

Hmm. I digress too much. I think perhaps old men think too much of the pleasures of the body, eh? But by Saint Maurice, sirs, I had my sport, and discovered that she spoke some little Latin, and we amused each other thoroughly, chanting prayers back and forth in the steam.

‘You are a nun?’ I asked her, and she laughed.

‘Never in this life,’ she said. ‘And you are no priest.’

‘I am a knight,’ I said with all the pride of Lucifer. Ego miles.

She clapped her hands together. I suspect that it is a universal truth throughout the Christian world that women — working women — prefer soldiers to priests. Mayhap not when the soldiers are burning your barn, but in a bath or a bedchamber -

‘You are with the King of Jerusalem?’ she asked. Tu es cum rege Hierusalem. Not the best Latin, perhaps. She was saying I was the king of Jerusalem — su es should have been sis. ‘You will fight?’

I snorted water.

She said something in Polish, not to me but past me. Across the little linen screen that hid us from the other tubs, a girl’s somewhat shrewish voice shouted back.

I must have looked my question. She swirled water and looked demure, a fetching trick for a girl wearing two yards of wet linen. She was in the tub with me by then. The better to wash me, of course.

The shrewish voice said something that caused my girl — Katerina, that was her name! — to look surprised. She shouted back, and a male voice shouted indignantly.

‘King of Jerusalem’s men fight last night,’ she said. ‘Drunk. Stupid.’ She shrugged, indicating that this was the limit of her Latin and that any fool knew how stupid men were. ‘drunk’ and ‘stupid’ were conveyed with hand signs.

When I went to fetch my clothes, I found them neatly ironed. A closed-faced young woman, clearly not amused by the goings-on, was busy killing lice in a pair of hose with an iron so hot it made the wool sizzle and the insects pop. They were not, par dieu, my hose. But the service was good and I paid her. Who wants to put on dirty clothes on a clean body?

And at the desk, the table where money was taken, I counted over my silver cheerfully enough. The man at the desk was enormous — fat and tall. He smelled as if he had never used the services of his own establishment. Despite which, he had a smile almost as winning as Katerina’s and I gave him a small tip as well.

‘Speak French?’ I asked.

‘Non volens,’ he said. Not willingly.

I laughed. The Poles are a nation of Latinists.

But I left with my mood changed, and sin made me humble. Aiming for the humility practiced by Father Pierre, I went back to our much plainer inn — although it still sported a dozen coats of arms, including, I say with pride, my own red and sable. I had Marc-Antonio dress me, ignored his sullen looks, took the packets of letters and went to the king’s inn, which I entered through the kitchens. There, cutting capons and rabbits with heavy knives, were two enormous women at the main table, and at the next table, two equally fat women were putting eggs and bread in a basket with a tall pitcher of new milk and some cider. I couldn’t understand a word they said — Polish is not in my list of languages — but they giggled a great deal and waggled a sausage at each other. I blew kisses at them and snagged a piece of bread and a cup of cider, and watched the great hall from the kitchen door while my eyes grew used to the gloom.

De Mezzieres was there, and silver and white, now dressed in more practical clothes, and with his arm in a sling. With them were a dozen other men in arming clothes and younger men who looked to my practiced eye like squires. There was armour all over the floor and on benches long the far wall.

I could see that now I was the one who was overdressed, and my embroidered scarlet pourpoint, the very best of Bolognese fashion, was as out of place today as my dusty riding clothes and riding boots had been the night before. But it is far better to be overdressed than underdressed.

I could see the king, in his shirt, waiting while a pair of squires laced his arming coat. I caught de Mezzieres’ eye.

He nodded and came towards me. ‘From where do you come, young man?’ he asked. ‘I must apologise for yesterday,’ he said quietly. ‘The king had had a very difficult day.’

‘My lord, I am from the legate, Pierre Thomas, in Venice. I left Venice on the first of July.’ I bowed.

De Mezzieres looked at me and blinked like a man facing bright light. ‘Legate? The Cardinal de Perigord is surely the legate,’ he asked.

‘My lord, the cardinal is dead, and the Pope has appointed Father Pierre as the Patriarch of Constantinople — and the legate of the crusade.’

French was the lingua franca of the Cypriote court. Every head turned.

I bowed again, keeping Father Pierre’s humility before me. ‘I have a packet of letters for you from Venice,’ I said. I handed him a heavy set of envelopes. ‘This one is from Messire Petrarca, as well.’

De Mezzieres paused. He was about to speak, but the king waved at me.

‘Ah! The courier of last night, now dressed in the latest Italian fashions to make us all feel dowdy.’ But despite his words, the king smiled, and his smile was warm. ‘Come here, sir, by me. And ten thousand apologies for my surliness of last evening.’

I bowed. ‘It is nothing, your Grace. I have letters from the papal legate-’

‘Who, it proves, is none other than our well-beloved friend and father in Christ, Pierre Thomas! I have ears, sir, and I can hear when you speak.’ He held out a hand. ‘We are impatient to read the words of our fathers, Holy and spiritual.’

I placed his letters directly in his hand.

‘Were you charged with any particular message?’ he asked carelessly.

I bowed my head. ‘I was asked to tell you to come as quickly as you might, to Venice, where your army awaits.’

‘Hmm,’ he answered. ‘Tell my legate that I will come when it suits me. Tush!’ he said, grabbing my arm. ‘Say nothing of the sort. That is only my surliness speaking. Are you by any chance a jouster?’

It was like talking to Ser Niccolo, except that if you were quick-witted you could follow the jumps Ser Niccolo made — his conversation was all connected, and often strung together with bits of scripture and quotes from the ancients. King Peter simply moved from one topic to the next without a shred of warning.

It was like fighting.

‘Your Grace, I can run a course,’ I said carefully.

‘Do you have other men in your train?’ he asked. ‘That is, who can handle a lance and not make fools of themselves or me? Can drink a cup of wine and not cause an incident at a dinner?’ His voice rose as he spoke, and silver and white — I assumed that he was the Sieur de Tenoury since I’d heard him so addressed — cringed.

‘Your Grace-’ de Mezzieres said, and his tone urged caution.

‘I will not be gainsaid in this, de Mezzieres.’ The king spoke with great vehemence. ‘We are challenged and we will fight.’

No one in the hall was looking at me, or the king. All of them were attempting to slide under the oak floor. I had been a squire when the Prince of Wales was angry — I had even been the target. I knew exactly how they felt.

I was still kneeling in front of the king, and my eyes were cast down. ‘Your Grace, I have two men by me who can run a course.’

‘You have horses? Arms?’ the king asked eagerly.

I wondered what I was getting Fiore and Nerio into. Perhaps I should have considered carefully, or been cautious. Or remembered the humiliations of the evening before.

Perhaps, but I am not made that way. ‘Your Grace, we have horses and arms, and we are completely at your service.’ Some devil made me raise my voice. ‘The more so as you are the Pope’s appointed commander, therefore I am your knight.’

Then the king turned the full sun of his smile on me. ‘By Saint Maurice and the Holy Passion, monsieur, that was well said.’ He nodded. ‘I ask you, Sir Knight, to rally your friends and join us here; display your arms at my window, and serve with me this day.’

Yes, I fought in the Grand Tournament of Krakow.

Now, if you gentlemen have been listening carefully, you know that I had never actually participated in a tournament. I had certainly practised for them, and several times in my career I had the honour of fighting in deeds of arms, but I was — and am — a soldier, and tournaments are for the richest and most powerful lords.

I do not need to explain this to you, gentles — but Aemilie has never served in arms, have you, my sweet? So let me tell you how it is. To participate in a great tournament, you must first of all be invited. In the romances, of course, knights on errantry simply arrive at the tournament field, lance in hand, already armed — but that is pure fantasy. In this world, tournaments are very expensive affairs, with thousands of ducats spent on building the stands, on decorating an entire town, on the costumes of the knights, and on actors, jongleurs, bards, and food — and that’s before a single course is run.

To participate, a man needs the bluest of blood and friends in the highest places and most tournaments are held by a team, who share the expense, usually led by a prince or a very great nobleman. To be invited to serve on the prince’s team was a very, very great honour, and if you have been listening, you’ll recall that I was going to fight on my own prince’s team at Calais back in the year sixty, at the time of the great truce. But in the end, I was thrown off.

Tournaments are both socially and physically dangerous. Reputations are won and lost in a tourney. Chivalry is, indeed, tested. In fact, I think it is worth saying that, short of battle, the tournament, a great tournament, with kings and queens and great ladies watching, is the greatest test of a knight’s virtues that there is. The whole empris is difficult, dangerous, expensive, and public. Bad conduct is instantly seen. Thousands of people, high born and low, are watching everything: the arming, the horses, the quality of harness, the techniques employed — everything.

The church has a very ambiguous view of the tournament, too. Most priests see the tournament as a sink of iniquity, where lechery, pride, and gluttony triumph and where the virtues of chivalry are seen to overwhelm the Christian pieties. Yet many churchmen come from noble families. And many churchmen see the tournament as a relatively harmless way to harness the men-at-arms without war. In some countries, men who fight in tournaments are considered to be outside the church for the duration of the deed and men who die in a tournament are considered unshriven. In some places, they cannot be buried in hallowed ground.

But, ma petit, there are jousts, and there are tourneys, and then there are deeds of arms, foot combats, encommensailles and bohorts. I could weary you with the language of arms, and truly, it differs from country to country. But in brief — a joust is two men with lances, tilting at one another. And in a greater deed of arms, the encommensailles may be jousts or even foot combats; they proceed the tourney, sometimes as many as three or four days of them.

But the tourney, the true tournament, is a different thing. It is a battle of equals, a team of horsemen on either side. I have been told that in King Arthur’s time, men fought with lances in the tourney, but we are smaller, weaker men, and we fight with swords on horseback, and it is illegal to use the point. Indeed, in many tourneys the participants much use a special sword with a blunted point. In such a game, each team has a goal post — a heavy post, usually with a flag atop it. And the desire of every knight is to unhorse his opponent, take his horse, and lead it to the post. Once the horse is at the post, it is the property of the knight who took it.

You can make a fortune in minutes, taking warhorses from the great lords. And you can make a mortal enemy who will hate you all your life.

Well. I nearly burst with excitement, and I raced to our inn where I found Marc-Antonio eating in the kitchen.

‘Where are they?’ I demanded.

He took his time chewing.

I was fit to burst.

‘Bathhouse,’ he managed.

I ran in all my finery to the bathhouse.

The fat man laughed when I came in. ‘Not got enough, eh?’ he asked in his slow, accurate Latin.

‘I need my two friends,’ I said.

‘Two?’ he asked, and slapped his great thighs so that they wobbled like jellies. ‘We’re that busy this morning, my lord, I’m not sure I can spare you two.’ He roared at his own wit.

I moved past him into the baths — you must see this, me, dripping self-importance, wearing a fortune in scarlet and black, pushing into the damp heat of a brothel-bathhouse.

‘Fiore!’ I called out. The bathhouse had twenty tubs and each was partitioned from the others by screens of birch bark or parchment.

Various Polish comments were shouted by male voices. Someone suggested how I might use my virility in a particularly offensive way — in French.

Fiore’s voice carried perfectly. ‘I am here, William,’ he called.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked, unmindful of my friend’s somewhat literal cast.

‘I am in the very act of copulation,’ he replied.

Only Fiore would explain that he was in the very act. I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t elaborate on the mechanics of the thing. The sound of laughter and some very exact comments, more like coaching than anything else, favoured us from the other partitions.

‘The King of Jerusalem has invited us to fight on his team. In the tournament!’ I shouted.

A girl squawked, and cursed. I don’t know what she said, but it wasn’t nice.

‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Fiore said in Italian. I was at his screen, holding his towel.

‘Where’s Nerio?’ I asked, while Fiore blushed and his girl cursed him. I had my purse on my belt — a nasty piece of poor leatherwork, my temporary replacement for the purse that had been lifted in Bohemia. I tossed her two silver pennies, and she was mollified.

‘We are to serve?’ Nerio asked, a trifle rhythmically. ‘In the tournament? Against the Emperor?’

‘Yes!’ I said through his screen.

‘Splendid,’ Nerio said. ‘I — shall — be — with — you — dir-ec-tly.’

I got the two of them back to the inn; collected our harness and our warhorses, our shields and our somewhat bedraggled papal banner, and transported them to the king’s inn. By this time the morning was well advanced, and the king was none too pleased with us for the time we’d taken; he and eight of his knights were fully armed save only their helmets and gauntlets, and they were sitting on stools out in front of the inn, on the loggia.

But every squire present leaped to arm us. It was chaos for a few minutes, as the armour was laid out on the floor of the loggia and my harness and Fiore’s were hopelessly intermixed. But Marc-Antonio had been paying attention as we travelled, and Nerio’s squire Davide marshalled his master’s harness, and then the steel fairly flew on to our bodies while the Sieur de Mezzieres, resplendent in good Milanese and wearing a fine brigandine in dark blue leather, stood by us and explained.

‘The king is an expert jouster, and he has borne away every prize these last four weeks — in Low Germany, in Prague, and now here. The Emperor has tired of seeing his best knights get tumbled, and has challenged the king to tourney — to a melee.’

And you don’t like it, I thought. De Mezzieres seemed cautious and old — but he was thorough, and he had a famous name as a crusader, having been knighted at the taking of Smyrna. He’d been a friend of de Charny and he’d held Caen against us in the year fifty-nine too. He was no parchment saint: he knew the business of war.

He looked at the three of us. At that moment, we had our leg harnesses on, and I was lacing up my mail haubergeon. Fiore was ahead of me, already getting an arm laced up.

‘You are all knights?’ he asked.

‘I was dubbed on the battlefield,’ I said.

De Mezzieres paused. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sir, I mean no insult, but nothing — nothing — can be allowed to humiliate the king my master. Can this knighting be slighted or challenged?’

Well, that turncoat Baumgarten was good for something, after all. ‘I was knighted at Florence in front of a thousand men-at-arms by the Count von Baumgarten — a knight of the Emperor, I believe.’

De Mezzieres started. ‘You are Sir William Gold?’ he asked. ‘I thought I knew the name.’ He looked away and set his jaw.

I knew something was wrong. Battlefield knightings are for poor men and third sons and mercenaries.

‘And the others?’ he asked, his tone icy.

I tried to control my temper, because being on this tournament team was a gift from God. ‘Ser Nerio is the son of Ser Niccolo Acciaioulo of Florence; also a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire,’ I said.

De Mezzieres nodded, but was not looking at me.

‘Master Fiore is a donat of the Order of St John, a volunteer. His father is a knight of Cividale, but he has not yet been knighted.’ I raised my voice. ‘Have I offended, monsieur?’

De Mezzieres took a deep breath.

But whatever he might have said, the king interrupted him. ‘The thin lad’s a squire? What is your name, sir?’

Fiore knelt, as the king was addressing him directly. ‘Fiore Furlano de Cividale d’Austria,’ he said.

The king exhaled. ‘Only knights may play in this great game, Messire Fiore.’ He looked at de Mezzieres.

De Mezzieres raised an eyebrow.

‘I must have twelve, or forfeit,’ the king said. ‘And I will not forfeit, if I have to arm a serving maid!’

Fiore raised his hands together in a position of prayer — or homage. ‘Try me, your Grace. I am a very good jouster.’

The king nodded. ‘The melee is not a joust. It is a vicious game played on horseback.’

Fiore kept his head bowed. ‘Your Grace, however it is played, I will be quite good at it.’

The king looked at me. He was smiling: an open smile, not a politic one, and his face seemed to glow like the sun. ‘Well, Messire Fiore, seeing as you are so very sure of yourself …’

Mezzieres frowned. ‘You are determined to do this,’ he said.

The king nodded. ‘Am I the king, de Mezzieres?’ he asked.

‘Your Grace knows that he is indeed king.’ De Mezzieres still didn’t look my way.

‘Your sword, then.’ The king took de Mezzieres’ sword — and knighted Fiore on the spot.

Lucky bastard.

By the time we reached the field that had been staked off for the tournament, there must have been ten thousand people in the crowd. The sun was high, and the king’s squires were agitated because the judges had already cried for the juges diseurs, the judges, to come forward.

We were late. And the Emperor, according to Nerio, was trying to disqualify us.

The Empress sat on a great throne in the central stand, a tiered confection like a Venetian cake made of canvas and wood, more like a great galleys of war than a tent. She sat thirty feet above the crowd, with all her ladies about her like the lilies of the field, and there was many a pretty face there. Beside the Empress sat the King of Poland in robes of gold and ermine. He looked like a church icon come to life.

And seeing them made me realise that I had left Emile’s favour back at our inn, folded in my clothes.

I was fully armed, and the judges were circulating among us, asking after men’s lineage and the dates of their knighting. The crowd was cheering like the roars of a victorious army — the roll of the Emperor’s team was being called, and one by one, the most famous Knights of the Empire were riding on to the field.

‘Marc-Antonio!’ I called.

He came with an ill grace. He had worked hard all morning and had scarce thanks, and if you don’t think servants like thanks, perhaps you should spend more time serving, eh?

‘Marc-Antonio, I have left something very important to me at our inn.’ I leaned over, even as one of the judges approached.

‘I’ll get one of the foreign gents to loan it to you, whatever it is,’ he said.

‘I would take it as a courtesy if you would ride back to our inn, open my clothes press, and fetch me the small square of blue silk-’

‘Now?’ he asked and rolled his eyes.

I thought of a snappish reply but bit my lip. ‘Marc-Antonio,’ I said, ‘I ask you to fetch me my lady’s favour.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘The tatty blue thing?’ he asked. Then he raised his hands in mock fear. ‘And you want me to help you?’ he asked with all the sarcasm of which a fifteen-year old Italian is capable.

The judge was watching me.

‘Yes,’ I said carefully. ‘I humbly request it.’

‘Hunh,’ Marc-Antonio said.

But he turned his horse and began to push through the press — not, I’ll note, with any particular vigour.

The judge spoke good French. ‘You are one of the king’s late additions?’ he asked. His tone was offensive and his manner so superior that he should have been a doorman in Avignon — or a cardinal. ‘Sir William Gold of England?’

I bowed. ‘I am Sir William Gold,’ I said.

‘And who knighted you, Sir William?’ he asked.

‘Hannekin Baumgarten,’ I said. ‘A knight of your Emperor.’

That staggered him. But he was determined, and that gave his game away.

‘Not my Emperor, sir, I serve the King of Poland. Can you prove this — this field knighting? Anyone might make such a claim.’ He was being a prick, anyone could see it. If a king puts a man on his tournament team, no one questions his birth or his standing. Or so it is in England and France, but the Germans have a ceremony and a rule for everything.

‘Sir, I am also a volunteer of the Order of St John, with my pass at my inn,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘The Order of St John? Of no moment here.’

I struggled with anger; hot, sick anger that seemed to come out of my throat. He meant to offend. He meant to disqualify me.

He had two men-at-arms with him, and they looked sombre.

He meant to disqualify me.

That would be a whole pile of humiliations.

Very chivalrous.

But God delivered him into my hands as surely as he saved Daniel from the lions. Because at that moment, a bowshot away, the brass-lunged herald announced the next knight serving the Emperor, and it was none other than my recent enemy, Duke Rudolph von Hapsburg, last seen lying unconscious under one of his knights, a victim of my spear, about half a bowshot from the gates of Florence.

I pointed at the knight, who was in dazzling bronze-edged panoply with a scarlet surcoat that matched his beard and his caparison, wearing a link-belt of gold and looking the chivalric hero of every romance. ‘Duke Rudolph was present when I was knighted,’ I said. Unconscious at the time, of course.

The judge looked at me. He didn’t collapse, or vanish in a puff of ill-smelling smoke, but my victory was total, and he could only cover it with a display of ill breeding. ‘These battlefield knightings,’ he said. ‘Anyone can claim them.’

I bowed my head briefly. ‘I’m sure it makes your work very difficult,’ I said, emphasising work as if to imply that he was some sort of tradesman. I smiled at him. ‘I’ll try not to let it happen again.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You make light of serious matters, sir.’

I shrugged. ‘Will you be fighting, sir?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘I am a judge.’

‘Very convenient, I’m sure,’ I drawled in my best Gascon French. ‘But should monsieur at any time feel the urge to don his harness, I would be at monsieur’s pleasure.’

Nerio, at my left side, choked on his laughter, and then threw back his head and brayed like an ass.

The judge turned a dark purple.

On my right, Fiore caught my reins. ‘Ahem,’ he said.

Fiore was not the best man at social complexities, but he was, in this case, right — I was not doing my duty by the Order in provoking some French functionary of the King of Poland. So I turned my head and managed to say nothing.

The Frenchman turned on Fiore. ‘And you, monsieur? Were you also knighted on the battlefield? Perhaps by the Emperor himself?’

Fiore beamed with satisfaction. ‘I was knighted this very morning, before all these worthy gentlemen, by the King of Jerusalem!’ he said with such evident goodwill that it was hard for our Frenchman to be rude. But someone had set him his mission, and he was determined, like any petty court functionary.

‘Knighted this morning?’ he said, his voice rich with insinuation.

The King of Jerusalem and Cyprus, who, through all of this, had been moving among his team, discussing the contest, rode up behind the King of Poland’s man so silently that we all missed him. He leaned over and tapped the Frenchman’s back with his tournament sword. ‘I knighted him this morning, yes. I’m sorry — is there a rule against it?’

The Frenchman sniffed — very like a princess of France I knew — a sniff of contempt. ‘There is no rule, he said, implying the opposite.

‘Excellent!’ the king said. ‘Then if you are done investigating our noblesse, perhaps you could let us have a chat, eh, monsieur?’ The king’s French was perfect — it was, after all, the native tongue of the nobility of Outremer.

The courtier bowed. He wasn’t uncivil to the king, at least in form, but the tension was palpable.

The king backed his horse and waved the sword in his hand. ‘Visors open. On me, mes amis. Come — press close!’

The judges were all conferring together, and the Emperor’s team was forming for the contest. This was the first I had seen of the Emperor. He was in a fine armour, but not an ostentatious one — Rudolph von Hapsburg was much showier. The Emperor, Charles IV, was also King of Bohemia; a famous jouster and by all accounts an excellent king and lord. I couldn’t see his face, but knew him to be quite old — almost forty or so.

Hah! Younger than I am now.

But our king leaned in. ‘They want us to be afraid. The Emperor wants us to fail or withdraw or be disqualified.’

Mezzieres looked pained.

The king gave a little shake of his head. ‘Each time I win, it is that much harder for that cautious windbag to stop his knights from following me on crusade.’

Don’t imagine I had anything to say. These were matters of high diplomacy, being acted out on a tournament field. Nerio and Fiore and I were the merest participants.

The king looked around. He glanced at the Emperor.

A judge raised his baton and shouted, ‘The knights will now swear the oath!’

The king shook his head. ‘Listen, the Emperor’s men will form close about him — a wedge, I suspect. They will stay together like the expert fighters they are. I say we will fight them like Turks: we will divide at the first onset, scatter, and come at the ends of the Emperor’s formation in threes. Do not abide! For their wedge will crush us if we allow it. Swing wide, stay off their front, and pick off the men on the ends. Remember, the only thing that counts is throwing a man to the ground, seizing his mount, and returning it to our pole. You may deliver as many blows to a man’s head as you like — it is worthless.

A herald was riding in our direction.

Well, I had seen a dozen of these fights. I’d watched one in London with Nan, a thousand years ago, or so it seemed.

The king looked right at me. ‘You three know each other — and we do not know you yet. Stay together. Don’t get taken. I’ll put enough Germans down to win the contest — don’t you three lose it for me.’

His other knights nodded, as if this wasn’t a piece of cocksure bravado, but a home truth. I glanced at de Mezzieres. He looked away.

He did not like me.

Before the herald reached us, we trotted forward a few yards and formed a line. You can learn a great deal about a group of horsemen by how well they form and keep a line: by what horse frets, and what rider has to curb, or walk, or turn his horse. Right there, I saw that the Cypriotes were superb horsemen. And their horses were good.

Well, thanks to the Bishop of Geneva’s best efforts, my horse was good, too. He was my favourite colour, a pale gold with darker gold mane and tail. He wasn’t the largest horse I’ve ever had, but par dieu he was beautifully trained, and his best trick was that, at a weight change, he’d turn on his front legs, like my first great horse, Jack. He was also intelligent, for a horse.

Well, I called this one Jacques. He was like Jack, only French. Ha ha!

Fiore’s horse was a rich black, the biggest of the three, an odd contrast to Fiore’s shabby harness. Nerio’s horse was a deep, dark bay with black mane and tail, which went perfectly with his family’s green and gold arms. He had a caparison — God only knows why he brought it, but most of the Cypriote knights had them, too. His was an exercise in extravagance — a horse caparison embroidered in gold, with tiny gilt leaves attached everywhere. There was a motto running around the base, a line from Dante, I was told later. As it never stopped moving, I couldn’t read it.

At any rate, he was without a doubt our side’s most magnificent knight after the king, and the crowd — especially the Poles, who did not particularly love the Emperor — began to cheer him and the king.

The judges waved their batons, and we all raised our voices and swore the oath in unison, as if we were reciting prayers in church.

‘Raise your right hand to the Saints!’ intoned my French courtier.

‘By my Faith! And on the promise of my body and my honour, I swear that I will strike none of this company in this tourney with the point of my sword, or below the belt or line of his fauld, nor will I attack by surprise, or an unarmed man! And if it should happen that a man’s helmet comes off, I swear I shall not touch him. If I knowing do otherwise, I will be banished from the tourney, I will lose my horse and my arms, and I swear this on the faith and promise of my body, and on my honour!’

You see, I can recite that oath to you, seventeen years on. I’ve said it many times, now, but it’s serious. And for me — for Fiore — the loss of our horse and arms would have been a catastrophe.

In truth, by the time I was done with the oath — my helmet off, my gauntlets still with Nerio’s squire — I had had a good look around. There were ten thousand people, as quiet as a crowd that size can be. There were two queens, an Emperor, several kings, and a crowd of aristocrats and courtiers as big as the parade of the guilds in London.

If I hadn’t had a horse between my knees, they’d have banged together like a tinker’s pots. I stood to lose my horse and arms and professional reputation in front of a crowd of ten thousand commoners and another thousand of the most powerful people in Christendom. Any failure would be reported for the rest of my life.

Nerio leaned over. ‘You look white, my friend, not Gold.’

I just shook my head. My breastplate was too tight and I couldn’t breathe.

Nerio laughed. ‘I’m used to this public performance,’ he said. ‘I forget that you are not. Listen; forget them. They aren’t even here. It’s just us.’ He pointed at the Emperor’s men, even then riding down the field to their flag on its pole — the great red lion of Charles IV. ‘And them.’

I managed a deeper breath.

‘Or you could just look at Fiore,’ Nerio said with a wicked smile.

Fiore beamed at me. ‘I’m a knight!’ he said.

De Mezzieres came by, arranging the team. Our trio went at the left of the line — the position of least trust and confidence.

To be fair, I’d have done the same.

I heard the king — our king — laugh and say to one of his knights, ‘It’s nothing, mon ami. We can take them, even nine against twelve.’

That stiffened my spine. The king thought we were worthless. No, to be fair, he thought we were a liability and he was planning around us. He’d made that clear when he told us to simply avoid capture.

I bit my lips and looked around again, still really searching the crowd for Marc-Antonio. I suspected that my lady, par amour, would forgive me some Polish girls if I wore her favour in front of the Emperor — but that really only shows how little I know about ladies.

Then I looked at Nerio.

Nerio was a popinjay, a dandy, a courtier. He wrote poetry and danced. I’d never really seen him in a fight, and yet he had my total confidence. That was based on small things — his demeanour when his purse was lifted, the way he rode, the way he handled his sword. Now, as the imperial squires handed us all the tournament swords — rounded points, light and flexible — he met my eye and winked.

‘I’d like to take the Emperor,’ he said. His eye twinkled.

On my other side, Fiore grinned. ‘That’s the most sensible thing you have ever said.’

I won’t say my fear dropped away. That would be a lie. But Fiore’s grin leaped to my face, and I laughed. ‘You two are the best companions a man could wish,’ I said, and I meant it. ‘Let’s take the Emperor!’

The judges came by, mounted now, and absolved us of our oaths. That actually mattered to Nerio. This meant that for the duration of the melee, Nerio did not have to feel any fealty to the Emperor. I had never seen this ceremony before — but I liked it, and I added it to the tournament at the Italian Wedding. Ah, we’ll reach that in time, messieurs. If not tonight, than another night.

And then the judges called Le Laisser. My heart pounded again. I knew all these formalities from watching tournaments in Smithfield; from hearing about them in romances and from knights, all my life, but now I was the one donning my helmet, and lacing it up.

The world closed in to be the width of the slit in my visor and the height of the air holes from my brow to my jaw. I was already sweating, and my sweat ran down the back of my arming doublet inside my mail and my backplate — right to the base of my saddle. Cold as sin.

I swished my tournament sword through the air a few times. It was very light — but stiff enough, I thought. I looked around for Marc-Antonio-

And there he was, the blessed man. Even as I spotted his cherubic face, he passed under the ribbon that held back the crowd with more grace than you’d have expected from such a portly lad, and deftly evaded a halberdier’s kick.

He ran at us.

Nerio’s horse didn’t shy. If you are a horseman, you know what I mean.

He ducked under Nerio’s horse’s head without getting bitten, and managed a bow to me. Really, he earned his right to be my squire and not some servant right there — it was a beautiful performance, and he had an audience. He handed me Emile’s favour.

I had my helmet and gauntlets on, so I couldn’t help, but he got it on my left shoulder, flashed a bow, and vanished back into the crowd before the three halberdiers could catch him.

The blank, cold stare of Nerio’s sugarloaf helm turned to regard me. ‘That was a pretty play,’ he said in Italian. ‘Now every woman in the crowd is watching you.’

And then there was nothing but the chief judge, and his white baton, held above his head.

All I could hear was my own hot breath inside my helmet. All I could see was the red lion on the Emperor’s banner, and the solid wedge of horsemen in plate armour sitting in front of it. My hands were shaking.

The baton dropped.

Sometimes, when I tell my tales — bah! — perhaps I embroider. But this … by the passion, friends, I remember that day in Poland as if it was happening today.

I just touched my spurs to Jacques, and he went forward. One of his many excellent qualities was his ability to accelerate, because he was trained to the joust, unlike almost every warhorse I’d ever had. So he went from the stand almost to the gallop in four or five paces, and that explosion off the line placed me a half-length in front of my companions.

I rode at a shallow angle to the left, where the crowd was. Fiore and Nerio followed me. We cantered, our horses throwing clods of earth — at least, I assume they did, because everyone else’s did.

Off to my right, the king was the first off the line, and he angled sharply to the right, all but riding away from the oncoming metal wave of German knights. All the Cypriotes went with their king like a flock of starlings, leaving the three of us alone on the left.

The German wedge wheeled neatly — they were only moving at the trot — and the centre of the wedge point was about twenty yards in front of me.

They were coming for us. Excellent tactics. Break the weakest link in the chain. Start any fight with an easy win. Twelve to three; excellent odds. And in a melee, not the least unchivalrous.

Their wedge had some cracks in it. If they had practised together often enough, I imagine they could have ridden about, knee behind knee, for hours, without showing a fist of daylight between their horses, with their Emperor in front, and every man echeloning away, a single unstoppable wall of horseflesh and knighthood. That was the German tactic.

But in fact, they were a dozen great nobles, and there was a horse-wide gap between Johann von Hapsburg and his brother. I’ll guess that Johann didn’t see the wheel — the turning of the whole wedge — begin, and he was late to the turn, had too far to go to catch up …

I pointed my horse’s head at the gap and put spurs to Jacques’s sides.

He exploded forward.

He did everything. Because of his sure-footed turn and his magnificent burst to the gallop, I was on Johann von Hapsburg in less time than it’s taken to say this.

I let him swing his sword at me. He hit me — hard. He put the whole weight of his strength and hips into that cut and he rocked me. The blow hit just on my left temple, and then my sword went past his head on the inside; I put my right knee into his knee — at the gallop — and my arm was around his neck and I ripped him from the saddle, just as Fiore taught. My beautiful horse threaded the gap and I let go of Johann before I shared his fate, and I was through.

Oh, but that’s not the best of it.

Fiore was on my right, and he collected the beast’s reins. Go ahead and practice that at a gallop in the tiltyard.

Nerio slammed his horse, chest to chest, into Rudolph von Habsburg as that knight turned to attack me or recover his brother’s horse, and knocked them — horse and man — to the ground — and rode on.

The crowd roared.

Have you heard a crowd roar for you, messires? It is like strong wine and love and the touch of God all in one moment.

I turned Jacques to my right, and rode along the back of the German line, even as the wedge struggled to right itself and turn about. They had passed almost up to the crowd and missed their quarry.

I gave Jacques a strong left knee and made him sidestep — we were not moving fast yet — and slammed my sword into the Emperor’s helmet as I went past him.

And so, of course, did Fiore.

And so did Nerio.

The crowd roared again. The first roar had, apparently, not been their best effort.

The three of us passed all the way across the German wedge, and cantered easily to our flagpole — the arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, gold on white. There were half a dozen unarmed squires there, and one of them grinned and grabbed Johann von Hapsburg’s horse.

People cheered, and we were up, one to nothing.

We swung around the flagpole, saluted our squires — and the Cypriotes struck the far end of the German line. We were too far from them to take part, but it was sudden and stark. I had never fought the Turks, or I would have known.

The Cypriotes fought the Turks all the time. They came in at a dead gallop, caught the Germans halted, trying to rebuild their wedge, and they knocked the end two knights down, swept up their horses, evaded the German attempts to turn the raid into a general combat, and galloped away. They had two horses.

King Peter slapped his visor open a horse-length from me. ‘Well fought!’ he shouted. Then he pulled it down and turned his horse. He held his horse for the length of his speech, half reared, perfectly collected, his weight back — he looked like a centaur. He was, in that moment, the knight I wanted to be.

The Cypriotes fell in as if they were mercenaries coming for a pay call. They seemed to gallop their horses straight into the line and de Mezzieres actually turned his horse on its hindquarters, with the beast’s front feet off the ground.

We trotted into position — the last three, let me add.

The king was in the centre. We all looked at him, and he looked right, looked left.

He tossed his sword in the air — and caught it.

‘Pour lealte maintenir,’ he said. His knights cheered.

I had no way of knowing it was his motto, but I flourished my sword, and we started forward.

The Germans had pulled their wedge back together. The squires had helped the three downed knights off the field, and now their nine prepared to take on our twelve.

This time, the Cypriotes stayed together, and we had a more traditional clash. Guy le Baveux, one of King Peter’s Cypriote lords, was slammed into the dust by the German wedge, and King Peter only avoided the same fate by charging his horse breast to breast with a Bohemian knight with a black lion on his golden coat. Both horses reared, the two knights swaggered swords, and I lost it all in the dust cloud.

We were almost off the end of the German line, and Fiore, on my right, swept in to make his capture. He met his opponent — Duke Rudolph, again — sword to sword. Rudolph cut hard enough to make sparks fly, and Fiore let him have the bind, leaned forward as his horse rose, and smashed his pommel into the count’s visor, rocking the man’s head back — but the sword continued its rotation, the pommel skidded across the visor and locked across the count’s neck, and the relative motion of the two horses unseated him.

I reined in to pass behind Fiore and collected his new-won horse, but the next knight in the line, a big man on a big horse with barred black and yellow barding, grabbed at the same reins and leaned out to swing at Fiore over Von Hapsburg’s now riderless horse.

Fiore took the blow on the back of his right shoulder and momentum carried him forward and I lost him in the dust. I changed leads over to the right and came up on what would have been Fiore’s right side, and I could feel Nerio hard on my heels. Again the black and yellow knight reached across the empty saddle to cut, this time at me.

I covered, crossing my sword with his, hilt-to-hilt and close to my head. He was big and strong, and I let him press me, then I locked my free, steel-gauntleted hand on the flange of his outstretched steel elbow and used my spurs to tell Jacques to pivot on his front feet. I think I laughed aloud as I controlled his arm with my hand and my horse, dislocating his shoulder and throwing him forward over his saddle as I dropped him, dragging him over Rudolf ’s empty saddle as my horse backed. I swear to you that Jacques understood my intention all through, perhaps better than I.

I got my hand on to Duke Rudolf ’s bridle. Nerio was flank-to-flank with yet another German knight, but he had black and yellow’s reins.

I had no opponent. I had a moment — there must have been a gust of wind — and I saw that the King of Cyprus was down.

Philippe de Mezzieres was locked in a steel embrace with the Emperor, and three German knights were hammering away at him while a pair of the Cypriotes I didn’t know tried to break into the circle around the king. The king’s horse was — I assume — hit with a sword or a sabaton-clad foot, because he bolted instead of standing by his master. The king was on his feet, reaching for his horse, but the animal went past his reaching hands and ran for the crowd line.

Well, I had a great desire for fame and a captured horse in my left fist. I remember crossing the two horse lengths between us, and my only fear was that someone else would get to him first.

Philippe de Mezzieres twisted, the Emperor rocked back, and de Mezzieres’ sword shot out and slammed into a German knight’s head, rocking him back and opening a hole.

The king saw me and took two steps towards me. He was coming right at me, and he leaped — got his right foot into the stirrup and mounted without stopping the horse. Really, it was one of the most spectacular feats of horsemanship I’d seen, then.

Nothing beside what followed.

He swung himself like a door on the stirrup leather, mounting with the horse’s stride, and then — as if he’d planned it every day of his life — he reached out his right hand and struck the Emperor in the helmet with his fist, pulled his arm back, reached under the Emperor’s arm and pulled him back. De Mezzieres let go his hold and got one of the Emperor’s legs and lifted — and the mightiest monarch in Europe was down in the dust.

Nerio skimmed through the melee at a canter, plucked the reins out of the air, jerking the Emperor’s horse’s head savagely, provoking the great best to a lumbering gallop. The reins broke, and Nerio was left without his prize, but they were galloping along, side by side.

Headed for the Emperor’s flag. By which I mean, the wrong way.

There were two Cypriotes down, by that time, and a third so badly injured — broken arm, dislocated shoulder — that he was staying at the edge of the fight, trying to avoid capture. But six of the Emperor’s knights were out, and the other six were already breaking off, slamming their swords into the king’s brother Hugh and riding clear of the dust.

Nerio was a patient hunter. He followed the Emperor’s horse across the field, penned it into a corner of the crowd, and got its bridle.

I was riding flat out by then, because all six of the Imperial Knights had gone for Nerio. By my side were the King of Cyprus and his chancellor, and from the other edge of the field Fiore was galloping at the Germans and Swabians and Bohemians. The two Bohemian knights turned and faced us, and they were good. Better than me, I’m not ashamed to say. I locked one of them up, and he was dragging me from my saddle when the king passed his sword across the other man’s neck and pulled him off me. The other Bohemian dropped de Mezzieres, which was no mean feat of arms, I can tell you.

That left four Swabians on Nerio. But it was Nerio’s moment — he cut and turned and cut, and he had his horse’s back to the crowd, which limited the ability of the Swabians to get at him for a throw.

By that time I was riding for him again, although I wanted to throw up into my helmet and I’d lost my sword. The king was by me.

The second Bohemian — the one who had put de Mezzieres down — was at our heels.

They were hammering Nerio as if they were armourers and he needed to be forged. Ever seen three master bladesmiths work a blade together? That’s how they pounded him, and yet he was as light as air, dancing under them. He took blows, but he gave them, too.

I came up on a knight in red and blue, caught his sword hand from behind and beside him, and disarmed him as if he’d passed me the blade. I tried to throw it over his head, and he slammed his fist into my visor, and I bent back like a bow — he was a puissant man. I lost a moment, but in that time the king hit him, and I recovered my seat — Jacques had danced clear of the fight, may God care for that horse.

My nose was broken inside my helmet, and blood was flowing over the cloth of the padding of my aventail and down my breastplate and my coat armour. The pain was blinding. But I could see Nerio’s green and gold, and I got my horse to do the work for me. I put spurs to Jacques — he didn’t deserve that, but I was hurt and in a hurry, and Jacques exploded in outraged innocence, put his head down and crashed into one of the Swabians with a sound like an army of tinkers doing battle with an army of wooden spoons.

The Swabian reeled in his saddle, tried to regain his seat -

Fiore stripped him from the saddle as easily as a conjuror makes a scarf vanish. One moment there was a knight, and the next, there was not. Nerio still had the Emperor’s horse. He was now free, and he turned and began to gallop for our flag, a bowshot away. There wasn’t an imperial knight on the field to stop him that I could see.

Jacques followed Nerio’s horse, bursting into a canter. I was recovering, but not as fast as I would have liked. Then something hit me like a butcher’s knife hits a carcass — from behind.

I’d lost the Bohemian knight in the press, and he was the wrong man to lose track of. His first blow to my helmet stunned me. Then he hit me three more times. I couldn’t get my sword up.

I fell. Suddenly, my knees could no longer keep the horse between them. I just couldn’t continue. The fall seemed to take a long time.

I was only out for about as long as it took me to hit the ground but that was the last time I wore that helmet. Blows to the head are everyday business in war, or in the tournament, and you need to be able to take a great many of them. In a melee — whether of peace or war — men hit you; your guards are never perfect, and your opponents don’t come one at a time. Many of my worst blows have come from behind or the side, and in a visor you cannot see those coming. I know men, good knights, who still prefer to fight in open-faced helms precisely because they fear the attacker they cannot see. My fancy bassinet with its long beak and light construction did not provide enough vision or enough protection.

But that was not my first thought as my eyes fluttered open.

I was lying on my back, and there was my lovely golden horse standing over me. He somewhat ruined the effect of his loyalty by voiding his bowels in the thoughtful way horses do, but he didn’t do it on me — he was really a very intelligent animal, for a horse.

I raised my head, and a spike of pain appeared behind my left eye. I may not have bounced to my feet like a hero in a romance, but I got up fast, got a hand in Jacque’s girth and let him pull me all the way up.

Once on my feet, I noticed that the king had his visor up and a pretty Polish maid was giving him water from a blackware jug. My Bohemian adversary was behind him, waiting patiently for the water — his visor was also up. Nerio was surrounded by people from the crowd.

The world swirled, my mouth filled with a salty taste, and then I was on the ground, throwing up inside my helmet. I don’t recommend it, but I see glancing around that you’ve all shared this glorious experience of the life of arms, so I’ll pass on.

Marc-Antonio appeared, sweating profusely, and got my helmet off me, then got a wet rag and began to wipe me down. The boy was going up and up in my estimation — apparently, he’d run along the crowd as we fought our way down the field, to be ready at hand.

Two young girls, one red and one blonde, appeared with a bucket of water. They were very young, and very determined to help, and dressed in their best clothes, covered in meticulous if not very well-rendered embroidery. But they wanted to help a knight, and I was chosen, vomit and all. And I admit they cleaned me up very nicely.

I drank a good deal of their water, and then managed to get back into my saddle. I did not vault, I promise you. There was a dent in my bassinet as deep as my thumb, and to the best of my ability to guess, my Bohemian adversary had struck the exact same place on my helmet three or four times.

I held it up to him and smiled.

He smiled back and rode over. ‘I did my best,’ he said in French, ‘but it was too late. The judges called the contest.’ He laughed. ‘Because in a moment your Italian gentleman was going to take the Emperor’s horse to the stake, and that would have been too humiliating!’ He stripped the gauntlet off his right hand and extended it.

His goodwill was evident — he was as big as me, handsome as a God, and a year or two older. We shook hands, and people began to cheer.

He reached down and patted the redhead on the cheek. ‘Oh, how I wish I had been on your team.’ He smiled. ‘Your king rides like a Turk or a Tartar. Or a Pole. The Emperor is too — cautious.’ He shrugged. ‘Or he assumed that he would be allowed to win.’

‘Those were beautiful sword bows,’ I said. ‘You put me down — such a light sword!’

‘My father says you can defeat any armour if you hit it repeatedly in the same place,’ he said. ‘Look, the judges are gathering us.’ He gave me a lopsided grin. ‘I wish I’d taken your horse. But I could not — your friends were on me as soon as I got you.’ He nodded. ‘We should fight again. I am Herman z Hradce. In Latin, you might say Hermanni de Novadomo.’

I bowed, head throbbing. ‘William Gold,’ I said.

We rode to our respective teams — cheered, I’ll add, by the crowd. I’ll note here that I’ve seen this many times — the crowd wants to see men behave like knights, to exchange words after the blows, and behave with dignity and good cheer. Surliness is the very antithesis of chivalry.

There were five judges, and they sent us to our inns and pavilions. I managed to ride through the streets to the king’s inn without tumbling off, and I waved and smiled as best I could, but my ears were ringing and I had a sharp pain in my head. By the time we dismounted, I had a lump in my scalp where the sword blows had dented my helmet that was soft and mushy and blood oozed from it each time I touched it, which was too often. And another on my forehead where I’d fallen face-first to the ground. I’ll skip ahead in this catalogue of minor injuries and say that my neck was stiff for a week because apparently my bassinet’s beak had dug into the soft earth when I fell and twisted my neck.

Ah, the glories of the tournament!

That night we entered the presence of the Emperor himself, who received each of us and gave us gifts. If he was bad-tempered from being unhorsed, I never saw a sign of it, and his behaviour was … Imperial. He complimented Fiore, praising his skill, and he gave Nerio his hand. I received a warm smile and a beautiful golden cross, worked in enamel — this is it, here. I still wear it. I’ve pawned it a dozen times but always had it back, eh?

He said something very quietly to Nerio, who flushed and bowed and came back to us holding a beautiful gold and silver cup with a ruby in the base. Nerio whispered to Fiore and they laughed together.

‘What’s that?’ I asked. I wasn’t exactly stung — they were clearly the men of the hour — but suddenly they were whispering like old friends. I was used to arbitrating their quarrels, not to being left out of their confidences.

‘We’re both Knights of the Empire. Technically, we’re his men. He said that it was a pleasure to see that the King’s best knights were — ahem — his own.’ Nerio glanced around.

Duke Rudolf was whispering in the Emperor’s ear.

The Emperor — that’s Charles IV, of recent and glorious memory — was at the time about fifty years old, handsome, dark haired, and very strong. He was a cautious man, and he dressed elaborately and his court kept to complicated ceremonials, even at a tournament, so there was no easy approach to him, and as I have said, he was no proponent of crusade.

Rudolf bowed, the Emperor smiled, and Duke Rudolf swept down the room in his beautiful scarlet clothes. He paused near me and I bowed, knee to the floor.

‘That’s twice you’ve knocked me down, monsieur,’ he said.

‘Your Grace does me too much honour,’ I said in my best Gascon-French.

He inclined his head. ‘I’ve just done you a favour, I think,’ he said. ‘So that you will know I bear you no ill feeling. But listen, Sir Gold — take good care of your King of Jerusalem. There are those here who would do him harm.’ He looked at a cluster of men I did not know, gentlemen all, in the older French style and long boots. They were the only men there in boots.

I guessed who they were. I guessed that they were a party of knights on errantry who’d lost their horses in a town square near Nuremberg.

Nerio was close enough to hear. I did the courteous thing and introduced him, at least in part to cover my confusion, and because the blows to my head had not made me wittier. I tugged his sleeve and gestured in the direction of the cluster of Frenchmen.

Duke Rudolf exchanged bows of near equality with Ser Nerio. ‘Ah — Accaioulo the Younger? We were allies at Florence; how do you come to the company of this English Lancelot?’

Nerio smiled at me. ‘I took a fancy to his red hair. In truth, Italy is better with Sir William in Poland.’

‘Oh, my lords!’ I protested, or something equally foolish. My head was not working well, and the room spun each time I drank wine, and I was thirsty.

King Peter came and we bowed again — knees to floor, hats off — and he paid us all sorts of compliments. I was still trying to work out who might do the King of Cyprus harm, or why, when the Emperor summoned the judges.

My enemy of the morning, for so I thought of him, opened a scroll and began to read, in courtly French, through a list of the achievements and encounters of the tournament and the jousts that had come before. I’ll give the judges this much: they had sharp eyes for the encounters. The King of Cyprus was adjudged the best lance, and he went forward humbly to receive his prize, a hawk with gold jesses and bells. The hawk was magnificent — a true Icelandic peregrine. The victor in the foot encounters was none other than my Bohemian friend, who was showered with applause and kisses from a great many beautiful women, and who bore away his prize, an axe inlaid in gold with verses from Luke. There were prizes for archery, which I had not seen; for riding and for courteous behaviour and even a prize for the man who had been unhorsed the most times, given by the King of Poland to a German knight who bore the good-natured laughter with a sanguine air and seemed pleased to go away with a pretty gold-clasped purse and a velvet cushion which he flourished amidst laughter.

And then the Frenchman began on the events of the melee, naming the participants. The room fell silent. The Emperor was referred to as the ‘Count of Luxembourg’, which was, I gathered, part of an elaborate fiction by which a great lord might fight under a lesser title so as not to discomfit his opponents — a very courteous act.

I feel I have to mention, for Monsieur Froissart’s delectation, that the King of Cyprus and the Count of Luxembourg bore the exact same arms — did you know that? What a herald’s nightmare that must have been. But for the duration of our time in Krakow, the king displayed only his arms as King of Jerusalem — white and gold — and never the arms of the house of Lusignan.

I have strayed from my point like a courser leaving the lists. As my Frenchman described the melee, he and the other judges had it dead to rights, and in fact, my own description here owes a great deal to their observations. Heh, messieurs, you know that when the visors closes, you see little but the man in front of you! But they had seen it all, and every man received his due.

Even me.

I was surprised to hear the man I’d loathed in the morning mention my role, and my name kept coming up — Chevalier d’Or — and I began to grow uncomfortable as men around me looked at me. Well, I had been the first to put my sword on the Count of Luxembourg, and I had captured two horses, these things were true …

And then they were cheering!

By God, messieurs, that was one of the proudest moments of my life. I was chosen as the best man of the melee. Me! I suppose I should have seen it coming, and Nerio and Fiore say they knew all evening, but in truth — in truth, I felt more than a pang of guilt, my friends. I think that either Nerio or Fiore was the better man — and certes, it was Fiore who taught me how to throw men to the ground from the saddle.

I blushed so hard that my skin felt as if it was on fire. Nerio told me later I was as red as an apple from head to toe when I went and knelt before the Emperor and the judges. Men cheered and applauded, and women curtsied and looked at me under their eyes.

The Emperor was seated on a throne of wood and ivory. While the cheering went on, he said, ‘I understand that you were knighted by Hannekin Baumgarten?’

‘At Florence,’ I said, in something of a daze.

He touched my shoulder with a sword. ‘Let no man ever doubt your knighting,’ he said. His smile may have been a bit grim, but he was a good king, a good lord, and he played his role. He laid the sword he’d just used across my hands.

It was a miracle of red and gold that sword, and it had a belt and scabbard to match. It was a king’s sword — I couldn’t tear my eyes off it, and my right hand ached to grasp the hilt, but even a bumpkin like me knew that was lese majesty of the worst kind.

It was one of the finest swords I have ever owned. Eventually I’ll tell you how I came to lose it, but for the moment, I can only assure you that I would show it to you gentleman if I still had it. A Tartar has it now, I’m fairly certain.

There is probably a sermon in what came next; there I was, with a magnificent new sword across my hands, burning to look at it, to draw it, to make it sing through the air; but, by the iron-clad laws of courtoise, I could do none of these things, but instead I stood patiently, accepting the plaudits of my peers, the good-natured insults of my friends, and the downcast eyes, lingering glances, and soft fingers of the maids of court, who gathered around me like moths to a summer candle.

Did I say patiently? I lie. I had Emile’s favour pinned to my shoulder like a talisman, and I was acutely conscious that I had not spent the hour before the fight on my knees, or even considering God’s existence. Instead, I had lain — well, swum — with a bathhouse girl.

Certes, messieurs, don’t trouble yourselves on my account. It did not worry me unduly, except that I felt no urge to any of the fine ladies who surrounded me. And I was unprepared for the open friendliness of the knights. They praised me lavishly.

May I be frank? I was tempted to cry. It was so much the opposite of everything I had experienced with the Prince of Wales.

At some point, my Bohemian knight came and offered his hand and we embraced. He began a somewhat formulaic praise of my martial virtues, and my feelings must have shown on my face, because he smiled and paused.

‘You dropped me like the butcher fells the ox,’ I said. ‘Why aren’t you the best knight?’

He laughed. ‘You and your friends won the game for your king, and no mistake. But no false pride. May I say a true thing? If you fight as long as I have fought, you will be the best man in a dozen tournaments, and then they’ll never give you the prize. This one will have it because he is a king’s son, and that one will have it because they don’t like you, and a third will have it because the marshals didn’t see the brilliant blow you threw.’

I laughed. I was new to the tournament, and I could already see the justice of his remarks.

‘And then, when the judges see you as better, it is even harder to win. And men fight you differently; they do extravagant things to score on you, or they turn into hedgehogs and turtles to avoid taking blows, and they make it impossible for you to win. Yes?’

I nodded. Nerio nodded. Even Fiore nodded.

Sir Herman shrugged. ‘So, today, at a great tourney, you took the prize. I, who am a great knight, say you deserve it, but I also say — take it! The next time you are the best, Lady Fortuna may not be so kind.’

I sat with him at dinner. His lady was a beauty — her name was Kunka, a Bohemian name, and she had long dark hair and great beauty of manners as well as of figure, making small motions with her hands as she talked, that looked like dance. Indeed, the Bohemians were some of the most elegant men and women I’ve ever seen, easily the rivals of the Italians or the French for courtly manners and sumptuous clothes, beautiful ladies and magnificent horses — and fighting. I would not like to face an army of Bohemians in the field.

His lady leaned over to me and ran her hand over Emile’s somewhat frayed blue favour. ‘This belongs to your lady?’ she asked. She was the first woman to ask about it.

‘Yes,’ I said, or something equally short. I was not at my best; a pinnacle of knightly fame, and I was reduced to monosyllables. Especially in Latin.

She glowed with satisfaction. ‘You love her?’ she asked.

I grinned. ‘Always,’ I said.

‘But she is not anyone here?’ Kunka asked.

I shook my head. ‘No. She is very far away. She is from Savoy.’

‘Like those gentlemen who cannot take their eyes off you?’ my Bohemian gentleman asked. ‘They are all Savoyards. From Geneva.’

Well, I was dull-witted, but not so very dull-witted as that. ‘Yes, she is from Savoy. But not, I think, with any of those gentlemen.’

Kunka put a warm hand on mine. ‘And your lady … will you be faithful to her tonight? With every girl at court ready to throw herself in your lap?’

I was looking for something courtly to say, but her eyes smouldered.

‘Listen, Englishman. I am the very Queen of Love of this tourney, and I challenge you as you are a knight to remember your lady.’ So the smoulder was not lust, but anger.

I bowed at the table. ‘Lady, you are so wholly in the right that I can only swear on my honour to abide your challenge.’

She smiled, and her knight smiled.

Later in the evening, when my sword was still undrawn, and I was surrounded — indeed, I was cornered as thoroughly as a stag of fourteen tines is backed into a cliff by hounds and hunters; there I was, alone, with fifteen women about me. Their bodies were young and beautiful, their eyes open and shining. Their hair was uncovered, delicious to smell. Nerio had stood by my side all too briefly, engaged one fair maid in conversation and taken her hand, leading her away to discuss poetry, or so he claimed. Fiore was nowhere to be seen. My Savoyards were not even in the same hall, and I suspect I’d forgotten them.

Kunka appeared at my side, and all the ladies bowed — she was, after all, the Queen of Love for the tourney. Her husband unfolded a stool and she sat.

‘Come, Sir William!’ she said, and her smile was as wanton as any of the girls about me. ‘Choose one of my handmaids to sit closest to you.’

I bowed. I was right willing to choose, and chose a young woman with jet-black hair and lips so red I wanted to see if they had paint on them. I didn’t think they did. She blushed to her hair and into her gown, but she sat by me.

Kunka smiled. The wantonness was gone, replaced by a harder edge, and I thought that perhaps she was also a mother; she knew how to give orders as well as take them.

‘Now, Sir William, welcome to the Court of Love.’ Kunka laughed, and squeezed her husband’s hand.

All the maids sighed. There were some poisonous looks for my raven-tressed choice. ‘Before we dance, Sir William will amuse us by telling us of his Lady. He loves a lady par amour, and wears her favour on his shoulder.’

The maids looked abashed. I confess I was abashed myself, so soon had I forgotten her challenge and my promise.

I thought of Emile, and in truth — oh, this cuts me like a Turk’s sword — I had trouble recalling her face. So many years. I could see her arrogant husband well enough in my mind’s eye, but her face swam in a haze of associations.

But Kunka had every right to ask, as Queen of Love. And she was setting me a penance as well as recognising me as the knight who had won the prize, and I was being challenged. Chivalry is more than hitting men with a sword. Chivalry is there in every dealing with a woman, from the bath girl to the Queen of Love.

I thought of Father Pierre’s strictures about the farm girl, and it made me blush, and the maids giggled.

‘The lady I love must remain locked in my heart,’ I said. ‘But I will say that she is beautiful as — as …’ Once started, I could not be seen to stop, and yet no fresh image leaped to my head. A summer’s day? A pox on that one. A flower? A rose?

I still had my longsword in both hands. I raised it so that it formed a cross. ‘As beautiful as this sword — as beautiful to see, and yet as beautiful in her soul, strong as the steel and-’

‘Your lady is as beautiful as a sword?’ Kunka asked.

They were laughing at me.

I looked at the Bohemian knight, who shook his head and left me to my fate. ‘Perhaps I must beg you to understand how beautiful I find this sword,’ I said, hoping to win a smile, but the women all rolled their eyes and prodded one another with their elbows.

‘Is she red and gold, this lady?’ Kunka asked.

‘No, blue and white like snow and the sky,’ I answered, too quickly. Emile’s arms were blue and white. I thought of her that way — I had been too open.

Kunka smiled, though. ‘Now that was prettier, Sir Knight, and I think it possible that you are more than a boor. No more swords. Tell us what it is about her that won your heart, so that we poor women may strive to emulate that and rise in your opinion.’

‘Courage,’ I said.

‘Ma foi,’ Kunka said ‘That is a fine thing for a knight to love in a lady. And far better than comparing her beauty to a sword. Let me tell you, monsieur, when you compare me to a sword, all I hear is that I am sharp and pointy.’ She laughed, and all the maids laughed with her. ‘But when you offer me courage as a woman’s virtue, then I feel hope that a knight might see me as more than a leman and a mother. Can you tell us of her courage?’

I thought of her coming to my room in Normandy, during the siege, dealing with her husband …

I thought hard, wanting to avoid revealing anything, and yet caught up in the game that was courtly love. And the girls were watching me differently, now, and in the distance, I heard the music begin.

‘It is not that she fears nothing. It is that, when fearing, she acts despite her fears. Ask any man-at-arms where courage lies. It is not the fearless knight who wins our respect, but the one who, full of fear, carries on.’ I shrugged, to end my little sermon.

Sir Herman gave me a small nod of appreciation.

Kunka put her hand on mine. ‘As Queen of Love, I say to all that you are a true knight and worthy of your lady. Now I love her courage too.’ She rose, and I kissed her hand, and she made a motion to the maids to attend her. ‘It is my express command that none of you may dance with Sir William more than once. Or any other thing. Does anyone doubt my word?’

She swept away from me with a smile, having made sure that I would sleep alone.

But, like many of my other teachers, Fiore and Father Pierre and Sir Peter and Arnaud and more, she showed me something about myself.

Why is it that there is always so much to learn?

By our Lady! I danced three times, once with the Lady Kunka, and then, at last, I walked out under the stars, out the great gilded doors of the King of Poland’s great hall, and into the cool of a Polish August night. I thought I was alone, but Fiore was at my shoulder.

He grinned like a boy. ‘The sword?’ he asked.

He was as eager as I.

We walked off into a garden, the two of us like secret lovers, and stumbled in the dark until we found what we sought: a little light from a lantern, probably left by real lovers earlier in the evening. And then I drew the sword from her red leather-and-wood scabbard, and her blade shimmered like Arabian silk in the candlelight.

She was broader than any blade I’d ever owned, as broad as a lady’s wrist, and even broader. She had a different taper from most swords, and a flatter cross-section than the other longswords I’d owned, flatter and shorter. Had I seen her in a bladesmith’s stall, I would not even have asked her down to put her hilt in my hand.

Listen: once I took a lady — we were both the worse for wine — who was, let us say, less than beautiful. Dumpy, short, a little overweight, I thought in my pride and lust. But when I undressed her, I found her body as beautiful as Venus herself. As that lady, so with the sword.

In my hand, she was quick and light and yet strong as a branch of oak.

Somewhat jealously, I handed her to Fiore. He brought her smartly to his shoulder and cut once. There was nothing showy or spectacular about his cut, but I felt like a man who has just watched his lady give a chaste kiss to a friend. Of course it is allowed, and yet … why is she smiling so much?

‘Yes,’ Fiore said. ‘Yes!’

The next morning, my Frenchman’s squire — the courtier, not the Savoyards — was at the door of our inn. Two hours later, I sat on Jacques with my helmet laced, and Lady Kunka was there, as were a dozen of the Empress’s maids and ladies, and many of the Bohemian and Polish gentlemen, despite hard heads and the early hour. I had time to say my beads and to realise that if I had lain with one of the lilies of the court, I would be muzzy with lack of sleep and perhaps still little drunk. As it was, I was fresh.

The Frenchman said nothing to me, nor did his squire chat with Marc-Antonio. And Marc-Antonio was all but transformed by finding that I was the great man of the tourney, and I caught him, more than once, pointing me out and claiming me for his own.

You might think I anticipated a murder attempt or some such, but my Frenchman didn’t seem the type, and none of the Savoyards were to be seen. Despite which, I checked every element of my harness and my tack for damage and interference.

We were riding along the barriers, which I had never done before. It keeps the horses straight, but requires some surprisingly false manoeuvres of the lance — common enough now, but new to me in the year sixty-five.

The first encounter was almost my undoing. My man could joust. His lance swooped like a stooping hawk, the point coming down from the heavens, and had his horse not faltered by a heartbeat in its course, his lance point would have taken me in the throat or left shoulder, but luck — Fortuna — was with me, and his point at my shoulder. I felt the impact on my shoulder, and I broke my lance on his shield.

He saluted me.

That changed the tenor of the contest. As we swapped ends, I returned the salute, galloped back to my place, and set myself. The salute meant, to me, that we were behaving like gentlemen.

The second course was accounted pretty by the crowd. My lance tore his left pauldron off his shoulder, and his — a beautiful strike, by God’s grace — tore the visor off my bassinet. It did me no injury, but his point penetrated my visor almost a full inch. Yes, we were fighting a l’outrance, with weapons of war, unabated.

The heralds and marshals had to have a conference, as we had both scored.

Ser Nerio rather sportingly offered me his beautiful helm. I accepted gratefully; I didn’t own a spare, and my bassinet had just met its end. Weakened by the Bohemian the day before, it now had two gaping holes where the visor pivots ought to have been.

Nerio grinned at me. ‘That was a good course,’ he said.

‘Any advice?’ I asked.

‘Don’t flinch. And don’t miss. He’s a better jouster than you, but not by much.’ Nerio smiled wolfishly. ‘If he kills you, I’ll kill him.’

Fiore shook his head. ‘No, he is very good, but you can take him. Remember what we practiced at Avignon, the lance low?’

I looked back and forth. ‘A parry with a lance? In a joust?’ I asked.

Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Too professional,’ he said with a little of his old disdain for Fiore. But he softened it with a smile. ‘For me, at any rate.’

Fiore shrugged. ‘It is not against any rule.’

Nerio put a hand on Fiore’s shoulder. ‘My friend, there are rules that are not written down.’

Fiore frowned. ‘If there is not a rule against it written down, it is not a rule,’ he said.

I got the new helmet seated and the chinstrap buckled, and rode down the lists, still undecided.

Word of our tilt had spread, and other knights and squires were coming for their scheduled bouts. The ‘great’ men had had five days, and now the lesser knights, men like me and Fiore, were to be allowed three days of jousting and foot combat, and their own melee.

And all along one side of the list stood a troop of horsemen. I had never seen anything like them, and they were distracting me. They wore long coats, buttoned at the shoulder and edged in fur, even the least of them. Two of them carried hawks, and all had lances and bows.

I had never seen men with such deep lines on their faces. They looked like killers, every one of them.

I took deep breaths and took them out of my head, and then I set my thoughts on the lists and my opponent. He flicked his lance head at me. I returned the compliment, if indeed it was such.

When the marshal’s white wand dropped, I put spurs to Jacques, and he blew forward with his usual explosive grace. Before his third stride, though, I had my lance in its rest — so different from my first years with the weapon — and I let the head fall low.

Lowering your lance head is bad practice. It is terrifying. A low blow, a blow to your opponent’s horse, forfeits not just the run but your own horse and armour. It is considered cheating. With my lance across my body, under my right arm and couched against my lance rest on the right of my breast plate, but pointing to the left side of my horse’s head and across the barrier, and now aimed down, almost at the ground, it looked as if I’d lost control of my lance. This happens sometimes in the joust.

My opponent still had his lance tip high in the air. He didn’t couch until the last possible moment, just the way, let me add, that Boucicault used his lance.

We had heartbeats to impact.

His lance tip stooped towards my face and I did as Fiore had taught me and flipped my lance up, using my saddle bow as a fulcrum and my lance as a lever. It came up very fast, and our lances crossed, still in the air. But weight and the power of his lance on mine slapped them down again.

He missed his lance rest. With all the pressure my lance was putting on his lance, torqueing it, he’d have had to be Lancelot himself to maintain control.

My hit was unspectacular, just barely clipping his shield. But my lance-staff snapped cleanly with the impact, and he lost control of his lance three strides later and it fell to the earth.

The foreigners with the hawks were laughing and slapping their long whips against their thighs. One waved to me.

The judges all clustered at the centre of the lists.

Fiore slapped my back. ‘That was nicely done,’ he said, rare praise indeed. Then, ‘We need to practice your seat and how it relates to your control of the lance, but otherwise — good.’ He looked at Nerio. ‘I wish some Frenchman would challenge me.’

‘Find the man’s wife and sleep with her!’ Nerio said with a sneer.

‘Why?’ Fiore asked, genuinely puzzled.

Even Marc-Antonio laughed.

‘They are calling for you,’ Nerio said, and I rode down the lists to where my French adversary sat on his destrier. He had his helm off and looked as sweaty as I felt.

I had forgotten he was a judge. But he was smiling, not grinning, and his eyes met mine.

So, just by way of experiment, I returned his smile.

We were an arm’s length apart.

‘Is your honour served?’ he asked me.

Well. That was the question, wasn’t it?

I bowed, like one gentleman meeting another when mounted. ‘Very well, monsieur. My honour is served very well.’

He urged his horse forward one single step. ‘Sometimes, a gentleman is only doing what his liege bids him do. Eh bien?’ He gave me a casual wave, and turned his horse, and rode away, neither angry nor afraid.

The judges held that I had been the victor, but on balance, I think he gave me the lesson.

Later that day, Fiore ran some courses, unhorsing men to the right and left until the judges forbade the use of his spear-crossing parry. Then he unhorsed more men.

He was spectacular to watch, and yet, at the same time, dull. He made one Polish knight very angry by unhorsing him on the first pass, and the man raged, claimed that Fiore had cheated, and looked like a fool.

Nerio, without my knowing, challenged one of the Savoyards to fight on horse and foot. I hate to think who was foolish enough to loan the Savoyard a horse. But Nerio took it.

The Savoyards had been loud in denouncing us to no avail, and after Nerio knocked their champion in the dirt on three straight passes and the man declined to fight on foot, no one would listen to them.

King Peter announced that we would leave for Venice after matins on the Friday, two days hence.

The two days passed in a haze of audiences, music, poetry, sweat and fighting. A few moments surface in memory. I remember giving Marc-Antonio my riding sword, and belting it on him, and Nerio and Fiore pounding him on the shoulders with their fists. Nerio bought him a pretty pair of iron spurs, and Fiore began to give him lessons. As of that moment, he was a squire. For a few days, he carried himself like a great lord and was very difficult, and then he had a fight — I never found out with whom. His mouth was cut, one of his eyes was black, and he became a much milder man.

I paid him his wages so that he could shop in the magnificent market, and he bought, of all things, a book. And a dagger. He was an odd boy, but he’d won my love in the matter of Emile’s favour and a hundred other ways, and I was ready to tolerate him.

The other two encounters were just as pleasant. The first was meeting the Tartar lord who had laughed at me after the joust. He spoke no French and only a little Latin, but he had a Franciscan with him, booted and spurred, and the Franciscan translated.

The Tartar’s name was Jean-Christ, or something like that. He was a commander of a thousand in the great army known to the Poles as the Golden ones or the Golden Horde. He had come as an ambassador to the court of the Emperor.

We were packing to leave: King Peter was travelling with only six knights, their squires, a dozen priests and servants, and my friends, and leaving the rest of his ‘court’ to follow after. At the time I didn’t understand that the King of Cyprus was not the richest man in the world; that he did not desire to command the crusade as much as de Mezzieres and the Pope wanted him to command it; that, indeed, the command was a massive imposition on the king. Nor did I understand that he travelled Europe with only a handful of his own knights; that most of his ‘courtiers’ were relations — French relations — of Cypriote lords, there only to make weight, so to speak. To give his entourage the appearance of riches.

I was an old hand at making war, but this was an entirely new game. The game of kings and princes and cardinals and popes.

At any rate, the Tartar duke rode up with a dozen of his soldiers and his Franciscan.

‘My son, the Duke Jean-Christ wishes to address you,’ the priest said. ‘I am Father Simon, his confessor.’

I bowed, dismounted — after all, the foreigner was a Christian and a duke — and bowed. Father Simon blessed me.

‘He asks, why do you dismount like a churl? And I tell him that you respect his rank.’

Father Simon spoke and the language was like the twittering of birds. Father Simon himself looked like a bird, a plain brown robin. He was as English as I am, and that made him easy to talk with. He had brown hair and deep creases in his face.

The duke threw back his head and laughed. He spoke straight at me, and his eyes twinkled like a jugglers.

‘He says that if this is true, you are the first man north of the Volga to behave in such a way. But he says “be easy”.’ Father Simon smiled. ‘For my part, I thank you. He is a great man, and has had but little respect here.’

I smiled at the foreign duke.

He spoke at length, and Father Simon followed as best he could. ‘He says you are good at the lance. And this trick you do — pardon me, Sir Knight, but I really don’t know quite what he’s saying — this trick is not like any other Latin trick. But that all the People do it. By which he means his people, the Mongols and Tartars and the Kipchaks.’ Father Simon shrugged ruefully. ‘He said a great deal more than that, but I fear I don’t understand the fighting words.’

‘Fiore!’ I called. Ser Fiore, as he now liked to be addressed, was packing his threadbare harness in wicker panniers for mules to carry. He came out into the yard, popped his eyes at the Tartar lord, and I repeated Father Simon’s comments.

Before the next set of hours rang on all of Krakow’s hundred bells, the two were riding up and down the street, demonstrating. Fiore picked twigs off the street with his lance point, and the Tartar Duke loosed his bow three times into a shield, striking with each arrow, and then flipping his lance off his back, striking a straw dummy with the point, rolling the thing over his head like a mountebank and placing it under his left arm and striking again against a target on the other side.

While he executed this deadly trick, Philippe de Mezzieres appeared with two more mules and the king’s compliments and two servants to help us pack. He watched the Tartar for a few breathes and then frowned.

‘That is how the Mamluks fight,’ he said.

‘This man is a Christian and a lord,’ I said with a polite bow. De Mezzieres had fought at my side, but he’d been careful not to bespeak me. ‘Yon Franciscan is his confessor and his chaplain.’

De Mezzieres brightened. ‘Come, that is glad news,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine the world we might make, if every man and woman might be brought to Jesus Christ?

I had never given it much thought. I belonged to a crusading Order that was content to provide the protection of pilgrims to and from the Holy Places. I think that like practical warriors, the Knights of St John had surrendered any notion of the conquest of the Holy Land.

But I managed a smile.

De Mezzieres met my eye. ‘We must travel together,’ he said suddenly. ‘You have behaved well here, and to my liege lord, who holds you high.’ His eyes bored into mine.

I think he rocked me back in the saddle as hard as my French opponent had done.

‘I am at your lordship’s service,’ I said. ‘On horse and foot.’

‘I would like nothing better,’ he said. ‘But my lord has forbidden me to fight you. So I will withhold my hand.’

I’m an Englishman. Hating Frenchmen comes easily to me, but de Mezzieres seemed both cautious and capable. And not a man I’d want as an enemy.

He clearly wanted a piece of me. I flushed, assuming he hated my low birth. As I remembered, his first dislike had arisen when I said I’d been knighted on the battlefield.

Of course it never occurred to me to just ask why he hated me.

At any rate, my usual reaction — anger — rose to choke me. ‘I care nothing whether you withhold your hand or not,’ I spat with all my usual restraint.

‘That is the difference between us,’ he said calmly, and rode away.

The other encounter was very different. I met the merchant who had brought the king’s prize, the falcon. I was in the market shopping for something to send my sister, and perhaps something for Emile, since I might hope to see her soon. The king’s new bird had stopped eating, and it was such a magnificent animal that we were all in a state trying to preserve it, and I said that as I was going to the great market, I would find the merchant and ask for his aid.

He was not a big man, but as broad as he was tall, formed as if from oak, fair-skinned and fair-headed and with one of the greatest beards it has ever been my pleasure to see. I could see, also, that he was a rich man, and a mariner. He wore clothes of blue and black, with furs even in a Polish August, and a magnificent hood, and carried an astrolabe around his neck. That’s how they knew him throughout the fair: as Master Astrolabe. He was from the Kingdom of Denmark, which was as exotic in those days as saying the Kingdom of Heaven, and he had a scar across his face where it appeared that a finger’s breadth of skin had been peeled away. I have seen some horrible things and I had a guess that he had been tortured. And lived. And for all that, his face was jolly, and his demeanour open and bluff.

I explained my troubles to one of his red-haired apprentices — we tend to hang together, we copper heads — and the apprentice led me to the great man. ‘He’s the only one who understands them,’ the boy said.

Master Astrolabe, Carl Markmanson, as he was called by Danes, grinned and tried to break my hand. ‘Ah, the English knight. Are the ladies through with you, zur? Have you fathered a hundred bastards yet?’ He laughed.

I told him the king’s problems, and he came immediately to the inn, and saw the bird, and fed it and talked to it. He spent a few minutes closeted with the king, and then I walked him back to the fair.

‘Always best it is to council the great in private,’ he said with his wide smile. ‘Great men resent being taught, and yet no one needs teaching more, eh? Remember that when you are a great man, Englishman.’

I laughed.

But he fed me stew and wine by his wagons, and he and his journeymen told me about sailing to Iceland for birds. And how they had seen the Faroes, how they had come on Ireland from every direction under God’s sun, and how they had seen great monsters and whales on the sea, and fought with Skraelings.

I may have looked doubtful. They told more tall tales in an hour than a roomful of Venetians in a day, and that’s saying something.

But Master Carl put his finger to his forehead. ‘I was taken,’ he said. ‘We had a fight on a beach, and my armour saved me, but the Skraelings took me.’ He shrugged. ‘They peeled an inch off my forehead, and a man in paint stood over me with a stone axe, and he raised it.’

I leaned forward. It was so real.

‘And I was so afraid I began to sing. All I could think of was the Kyrie, you know?’

We all sang the Kyrie together.

‘And the painted devil smiled. He smiled, and tossed the axe in the air.’ Master Carl shrugged. ‘So perhaps I was in the Kingdom of Prester John, and they were all Christian men. The next day they fed me and took me to another beach and left me.’

‘Gospel truth,’ said the tall journeyman. ‘I plucked him off that beach in fear of my life and mortal soul, but we never saw a one of them again.’ He looked shamefaced. ‘We were off course — we thought we’d make a profit by taking a few as slaves.’

Master Carl shrugged. ‘I’d wager they’d make terrible slaves,’ he said.

I spoke more with them; they were all shipmen as well as traders, and they had adventures that would fill a good-sized book.

All I gathered from their stories was that the world was very broad indeed, and more full of adventure than a hundred tales of King Arthur.

We rode back west via Prague. Prague was, and probably still is, one of the most beautiful places in the west, with magnificent palaces and churches. Even the burghers’ houses are as fine as those of Venice. But we stayed only one night, and then we were away west.

At Nuremberg, King Peter sent me to Avignon with his dispatches. I was loathe to leave him by then. Despite his mercurial moods, he was a natural leader and a fine lord, generous with praise and with money, even when he had very little himself.

I’ll add that we cleared the road of bandits for the next several years, or so I’ve been told. King Peter would ask at every inn, and twice we left the road to hunt the robbers as if they were stags. One cold afternoon in the Tyrol, we caught a band that proved to be more like human scarecrows than like the demons of Satan we’d been led to expect. We surprised them, despite the late hour in the day, scattered them off their smoking fires and began to kill them.

There were only about a dozen of them. We were as many knights and then as many again — all the squires were mounted and armed by then. They had no chance, and a boy of perhaps twelve years old threw down his notched falchion and knelt at my feet.

I cut off his head.

I can still see it today. He was trying to surrender, and I had just fought another, older man, his father, perhaps. I saw his posture of surrender, but I didn’t change my mind. My new sword severed his head as easily as a lady cuts pork at dinner with her eating knife.

He fell forward over his own lap. His head made an odd sound as it struck the sword he’d dropped. And it didn’t roll anywhere.

I saw his eyes move.

I pray for his soul, even to this day. I had not meant to kill him. It was a wrong act, a murder, the sort of thing I used to do, when I was a routier.

When I was, in fact, like his father and his brothers. A brigand, if a better armed one. They didn’t even try to rob us. They simply died.

I’m sorry if I cannot make a better story of that empris. It was, and is a lesson I have had to face many times. The line between knight and brigand is the width of the edge of the sword.

I left the king at Nuremberg. I took only Marc-Antonio, who was, after two months in the saddle, a decent blade and a good companion. He could cook a little, although I did most of it; he could make a camp and tend to horses; and if he tended to speak a little too loudly to his social superiors? Why, so did I. He couldn’t sew to save his soul, and I did all the sharpening, but he was already a tolerable squire, and he was interested in learning more … most of the time. But I noted that almost anything could distract him: a pretty face, an interesting song, a new poem, a handsome horse. I would ride along, piously enjoining him to something that seemed important to me that day — by our sweet Saviour, what a hypocrite I have been, and no doubt will be again — and I would look back and see on him that look that meant he was a thousand miles away. He was also a glutton. He ate constantly, and while I was following the Queen of Love’s instructions and refraining from lechery, he made up for my chastity with a noisy relish that I came to resent. He was so soft-faced and angelic that girls trusted him — that’s the only explanation I can offer.

We lay the night in Pont Saint Esprit, a day’s ride from Avignon. The place reminded me of worse times, and it seemed odd to have the man at the gate salute me and bow to my surcoat. I dreamed badly: of the taking of the town and the rape of Janet. And the Bourc.

Dreams have purposes. Ah, Boethius — you have read him too, eh? That dream was a warning and, thanks be to God, I took it as one.

I entered Avignon as alertly as I had entered Krakow, and to better reason. Marc-Antonio watched my back, and I rode to the Hospital. The gate warden embraced me as if I was a prodigal son, and Fra Juan di Heredia embraced me and took all my messages. I had all King Peter’s letters, as well as a dozen parchment scrolls from Polish and Imperial prelates, even one, the last added to my satchel, from the Archbishop of Nuremberg.

Fra Juan shocked me by opening and reading every letter.

He shrugged and raised his eyebrows. ‘Welcome to the service of the Church of Christ,’ he said. ‘We have some mean bastards in my Father’s house.’

I had never heard Fra Juan, or any other Hospitaller, refer to any churchman with anything but reverence. But the daggers were out in Avignon.

When he’d read through all the letters and scrolls and called in a pair of Hospitaller sisters who carefully — and expertly — repaired the seals he’d broken, he turned to me.

‘Tell me of your trip,’ he said. ‘Tell me everything. Leave nothing out.’

Fra Peter had never cautioned me against Fra Juan in any way, and he was my superior. So I told him the whole story, as fully as I could: Bologna, Venice, Prague, Krakow and back, not leaving out a small encounter in a square east of Nuremberg.

He steepled his fingers like Father Pierre and nodded, but he didn’t interrupt.

When I was done, he scratched his beard. ‘Very complete. You won a tournament under the eyes of the Emperor? You know that our Order is expressly forbidden to fight in such affairs? Eh?’

I sat back, stricken. ‘I-’

‘Please don’t tell me you didn’t know. I believe I have taught you the Rule myself.’ Fra Juan, for all his ambition and occasional venality, was a commanding figure.

I stuttered like a boy caught stealing.

He waved. ‘A minor sin next to the fame you won us. I will get you a pardon and a light penance, I promise you, but as long as you are on duty and wear the Order’s habit, it is forbidden. Yes?’

I swallowed.

‘Sometimes, in this Order, we do things that are forbidden for the good of all. You know what the good Fra Peter says: it is possible that we will go to Hell? And that is a worthy thing for a knight to give his soul for others that they may see heaven. So much for the sin of pride. Are you strong, my son? In your faith? In your belief in God?’ He frowned.

I sat very still.

He handed me a large square of parchment. It was stained brown.

As I bent it, it cracked.

‘This came wrapped around some meat,’ Fra Juan said. His eyes met mine. ‘It was addressed to you.’

I swallowed again. My mouth was full of salt.

‘The letter is in Latin, and it was easier to read before the blood dried,’ Fra Juan said. ‘Did you know a young woman named Anne?’

In a moment, I couldn’t hear him. Instead, I was seeing the ginger-bearded man who had followed me and watched me with Anne.

I may be a damned fool when I have been hit in the head, but I’m accounted quick enough to do sums and audit the accounts of the Order, or to carry a message between cardinals. Or command armies.

‘… dead,’ Fra di Heredia said. ‘I believe that this was to have held her heart.’

I was shaking.

Fra Juan leaned forward. He spoke very slowly, as if I was a child, and very quietly. ‘These are bad men, even by my standards, Sir William. And very, very powerful men.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Their intention was to force you to meet with them. To turn you to their will.’

A small area of the parchment was legible, and in neat copyist’s Latin it said, ‘meet’ and then ‘To your advantage’ and later ‘unfortunate’.

‘This wasn’t the first letter,’ I said heavily.

Fra Juan pursed his lips. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There was a letter the same day you left. And when you did not attend their meeting, they meant to kill her.’ He looked at me.

‘You are killing me, my lord. Is she alive?’ I asked.

‘And very far away.’ Heredia nodded. ‘You owe me for this — understand?’

I fell to my knees, as the Order’s spymaster no doubt intended. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care that he had two mistresses and more ambition than the entire college of cardinals.

‘I took her from them. It is not important how.’ He shrugged, and in his long, ascetic Spanish face I saw a man as dangerous as any I had known. He permitted himself a small smile of satisfaction, and then the smile was gone. His eyes were bland — and blank. ‘I like you, Sir William. We have many things in common. You owe me one. That is all, except that the Bishop of Geneva means our legate harm, and this was but a small battle in that war.’ The Spanish knight tapped his teeth with his thumb. ‘Do not, I pray, offer this man or his minions any more hostages.’ He leaned back. ‘How is my … nephew?’ he asked.

At the time, I barely noticed his hesitation. ‘An excellent man, my lord, and ready for knighthood.’

‘Ah!’ Fra Juan nodded. ‘It is that time — indeed, the Crusade is a noble occasion. Thank you for the reminder.’

I went to my cell, lay full length on the cold floor, and prayed.

When I went down to eat with my brothers, I felt better, and that lasted for some hours, until I realised that Marc-Antonio was missing.

The Hospital was almost empty of knights and donats and even mercenary men-at-arms. They were all headed to Venice for the Passagium Generale and any knight worthy of his habit was with them except di Heredia, who was the Pope’s commander in Avignon.

I went to him first, instead of running through the streets like a fool.

‘I will send a message,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘Expect the worst.’

With the Bourc and d’Herblay, the worst was bad indeed. ‘I will kill them,’ I said. ‘The Bourc Camus.’ I paused. ‘The Comte d’Herblay.’

Di Heredia shrugged. ‘Just do not ask my permission,’ he said. ‘I command you not to leave the environs of the Hospital.’

While I fretted in my cell and tried to pray, I realised a number of things. I realised that Emile was a Savoyard, and that she lived somewhere in the debatable counties between Geneva and Burgundy. Her husband had served with the Savoyards at Brignais.

Her husband, who hated her, and knew the Bourc Camus.

Yet even in my panic, and as I began to understand the power of the coalition against Father Pierre and how I could be used against him, I was deep in panic. Still, I knew that Emile was a practical woman with a talent for controlling her husband. And that she would not have a will that would allow him a brass farthing if she were kidnapped and killed. I had to credit her with that much sense.

And further, it is difficult to protect a woman you have not seen in two years and more.

I prayed. It is one of the times that I’d say prayer helped me the most, in that with prayer came the clarity, sent, I think, by that fine soldier Saint Maurice: the clarity to see that my first duty lay to my squire.

And as I rose from my knees, a Turkish slave fetched me to attend Fra Juan.

‘My friend Robert, Bishop of Geneva, has been polite enough to say that there has been some misunderstanding, that Marc-Antonio was rescued from some brigands and is safe, and will be returned to you unharmed. And all you have to do is go and fetch him.’ Di Heredia tapped his teeth with his thumbnail. ‘I am almost sure that they do not mean to kill you. But almost sure is separated from sure by the length of a dagger … You know that expression?’

‘I can handle myself,’ I said, or something equally foolish and untrue.

He nodded. ‘They can kill you. My question is: what can they offer you to turn you? Would you betray Father Pierre?’

‘No!’ I said, hotly.

‘Good,’ Fra Juan said. ‘Try to remember that. If I don’t see you in three hours, I’ll pay them a visit.’

I rode to the bishop’s palace and dismounted, leaving my riding horse with servants. The Bishop of Geneva had a palace as large as most of the cardinals, and larger than the Hospital. I wore the Emperor’s sword — it was like a talisman, and it made me brave, but in truth, I was terrified. Battle is one thing. This was another.

The major-domo, a deacon, escorted me to the great hall. The bishop sat on a low throne, with men standing around him. The hall was hung in tapestries, magnificent weavings of war and the chase and scenes from the chansons. The blues were vibrant and alive, the reds stark. A hart bled out, and its blood pooled in scarlet silk almost to the floor.

I wore my surcoat of the Order, a little travel stained. It was, I thought, the best armour I had.

The bishop raised an arm from where he sat on a low dais. ‘Sir William!’ he called. His voice was a trifle high, but so is mine. His slightly protuberant eyes locked on mine. He smiled. ‘Please grace us with your presence.’

The Bourc Camus was standing at his right side. D’Herblay was nowhere to be seen. Marc-Antonio was with them; he had a cut across his face and a black eye, but he was well dressed and he was smiling. I didn’t know the other men.

I bowed, fully and respectfully. ‘My lord, I came as soon as I received your message.’ This was the tack that di Heredia and I had determined on. ‘I am so relieved to see my squire in good spirits.’

The bishop smiled. It transformed his long, narrow face, pleasant enough to be considered handsome, to a devil’s. If he had had fangs, I couldn’t have been more shocked. ‘And for my part, Sir William, I am so glad you could come, as my last invitation …’ he glanced at Camus, ‘went awry.’

Camus glared at me.

‘I hope your shoulder is better,’ I said sweetly. ‘Fiore can be hasty.’

Camus’s mouth worked. But no sound emerged.

‘The Bourc has been forbidden to speak,’ the bishop said. ‘Because between his hatred and your adolescent posturing, I would be moved to haste. Please confine yourself to speaking to me.’

I bowed my head. ‘My lord, that is too great a privilege. I will take my squire and go, leaving you with my thanks and saving you-’

‘Shut up.’ The bishop snapped his fingers at me. ‘Do not speak until I ask you to.’ He waved at the two men by him. ‘Take the boy to the solar until we are done.’

I share with Marc-Antonio a certain willingness to spit at my superiors, but as they had him and I didn’t, I thought I’d be meek. I bowed my head. My sword was already loose in my sheath and they hadn’t taken it from me. Marc-Antonio threw me a glance as they escorted him down the hall and into a small room that opened off the great fireplace.

‘The last time I summoned you, you chose not to come. This time you have come, and this is the wiser course. Agree?’ His voice snapped like a silk flag in the wind.

‘Yes, my lord,’ I said.

‘You suffer from weaknesses of the flesh. Many do. If I eradicate them, you will be a better man, will you not? Agree?’

‘I agree that I suffer from weakness, my lord, I am a sinful-’ I tried to sound contrite — and stupid.

‘Save your false piety, Gold. You are a dog of a killer like the mongrel at my elbow. I know your kind. You have more loyalty than most, although I am not surprised that a man and not a woman brought you running. He’s quite pretty and Camus wants him. Don’t you?’

Camus spat something.

‘You are forbidden to speak, monsieur,’ the bishop said.

‘I am not a sodomite!’ Camus said.

The bishop laughed, and his ringed hand struck Camus — hard. The Bourc went a livid red-brown. Blood emerged from where the bishop’s amethyst ring had cut him. ‘Please do not speak,’ the bishop said.

Camus mastered himself.

The bishop went on, ‘I know your kind, as I was saying. I want you to understand that, and to understand that if you do what I tell you, you will be rich and well-contented, and if you do not, you will be dead and so will everyone you value. I am spending the time to speak to you in person because men like you and John Hawkwood are becoming very valuable. But not because you are valuable enough to me to make bargains. I give the commands, you obey. Clear?’

I met his eyes. Sadly, they were not mad. Not crazed. I had seen the poor creatures in London and Paris and Venice who are mad clear through, who believe they are Prester John. I saw one, caught in London, who had killed four women with a knife.

The Bishop of Geneva looked at me with the eyes of a banker, or a clever merchant. Or a bad priest. Or a great lord.

‘No, my lord,’ I said. ‘I will not obey you.’ I gathered courage and spoke. ‘My spiritual lord is Father Pierre Thomas-’

‘Spare me the recitation of your devotion to that penniless adventurer. He has no see and no hope of every commanding one. Patriarch of Constantinople — I wish he would go there and martyr himself with the schismatics!’ His spit flecked me. Mention of Father Pierre made him angry.

‘He is my lord,’ I said.

The bishop smiled and squirmed in his throne, resettling himself. ‘How much would it cost me to have you kill him?’ he asked. ‘Would a hundred ducats cover it?’

I made myself breathe. I was scared, but he had taken too long. My terror was past the point of incoherence. And I had my sword, given me by the Emperor. I stood. My knees hurt, and I had been kneeling in front of the bishop all through our interview. Camus stepped back — and drew.

I did not. Camus was too far from me to strike in one step. ‘You have spent too much time with the carrion crow you employ,’ I said. ‘You imagine things that are untrue, my lord. I ignored your first summons, as you call it, because I was not here at all-’

‘Please shut up,’ the bishop said.

‘I came this time to retrieve my squire, who I will now take, and if you, my lord, or the Bourc, your slave, crosses my path, I’ll kill you right here.’

I’ll give the bishop this much, he merely waved his hand at my threat, as if bored. ‘Take your Ganymede and take the consequences,’ he said. ‘I enjoy punishing sinners. You will be fully punished, I think, for not knowing your place. You are a cook, not a knight. And God hates adultery, cook’s boy.’

I still hadn’t drawn, and I allowed my left hand to caress my hilt. ‘The Emperor thought differently,’ I said. I was ten steps from the Bourc, and my hand went to the door. ‘Send for my horse, my lord,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘You are a bold rascal. You think you can just walk away?’

I looked about me carefully. ‘If you had a dozen men with arbalests wound, I would see the odds as long.’ I met his eyes. ‘But even if you had them, I promise you that the first man to die would be you.’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said easily.

‘Keep telling yourself that. My lord.’ I pushed the solar door open. ‘Come, Marc-Antonio,’ I said, and turned and began to walk towards the bishop on his dais.

Camus, sword drawn, stepped between us.

Three steps from him, I flicked my eyes and saw Marc-Antonio emerge from the solar. I altered course, stepping to the right. Camus turned.

‘Ah, Bourc. He has you leashed and muzzled, like the dog you are!’ I said, and smiled. I licked my lips at him.

Marc-Antonio passed behind me, headed for the door of the great hall.

Camus’s face worked and muscles bulged. I stepped backwards towards the door.

‘You have no idea,’ whispered the Bourc.

In a way, that was more frightening than any other part of the interview.

I backed out the door with my sword still in the scabbard. Because I knew that if I drew, I would kill, and I was old enough to know the consequences.

I heard the bishop laugh. ‘Tell Madame d’Herblay to say her prayers,’ he called. ‘False as Jezebel, doomed to hell. Eternity in hell — for fucking a cook’s boy!’

Camus slammed the oak door in my face.

I went to the stables and got my riding horse, still saddled, thanks to Saint George and Saint John and all the saints. My hands were shaking. In fact, I’ll admit I could scarcely stand, and to this day I’m proud of the badinage I made with that devil, the Bishop. I got Marc-Antonio up behind me, and we rode at a gallop through the streets as if the Legion of Hell was behind us.

As soon as we were through the gate of the Hospital, di Heredia sent for us. He embraced me and sent me to my cell and took Marc-Antonio.

He interrogated my squire for more than two hours. I heard all about it over the next few weeks. He was not kind: he treated Marc-Antonio as if the boy was hostile, an enemy.

Then, without allowing me to see my squire, he sent for me.

‘He bought you?’ di Heredia asked, his voice heavy with contempt.

I shot to my feet. ‘Crap! Merde. Nothing of the kind.’

He spent thirty minutes on me. He told me that Marc-Antonio had turned on me; he told me that I’d promised to kill Father Pierre.

At one point, I wept. It was so unfair and I went from rage to humiliation to anger to sorrow. I was wretched.

In half an hour.

The bells rang for Vespers, and di Heredia put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come, come, my son. Let us go sing the divine offices.’

I looked up at him.

He frowned. ‘I had to be sure.,’ he said.

I sobbed a bit — relief, mostly. I’m not proud of that part. Finally, when I was master of myself, I dried my eyes. ‘What in God’s name is this about?’ I asked. ‘I can’t make sense of it!’

Juan di Heredia smiled his thin smile. He got his beads off a hook, and pulled a full robe on over his arming clothes, which he wore all the time. He sat and tapped his teeth with his thumb. ‘That you cannot make sense of it speaks only to your youth,’ he said. ‘It is about power.’

‘Power?’ I asked.

Di Heredia nodded. ‘If the crusade succeeds, the man who is legate will be the Pope. Even if it fails, that man will probably be Pope. The bishop of Geneva and his friends need the papacy to remain as it is.’ He made a sign I didn’t know. ‘Come, let us sing.’

I shook my head and followed him.

He paused. ‘Do you know the gospels, my young knight?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not by heart.’

He nodded. A lay brother passed him, and a sergeant, too old for service, smiled at me and beckoned me to come faster. The chapel was half empty.

‘If I told you all I knew, you would scourge me with whips of fire,’ di Heredia said.

After chapel, I grabbed Marc-Antonio by the hand and led him to my cell.

‘Pack!’ I ordered.

He wept a little and swore he had not betrayed me.

I hardened my heart — not that hard, for me — and gave orders. Then I went down to the scriptorium and took a scrap of parchment (the strips from the edge that are of no use to God or man) and I wrote Fra Juan di Heredia a letter.

I told him that I had to go. That I would rejoin Father Pierre in Venice, and that I had a duty outside the Order that I had to fulfil.

By the time I returned to my cell, my malle was packed, my harness was in baskets, and my white-faced squire had buckled on his dagger.

The ‘bandits’ had taken his sword.

‘I’ll solve that for you later,’ I said. ‘Wear your mail.’

Di Heredia was waiting for me in the stable. He was armed. I have occasionally got the better of him, but not often.

‘You are not making this easy for me,’ he said.

I shrugged and saddled my riding horse.

‘I would rather you were where I could see you for a couple of days. The guilty flee where no man pursueth.’ His hand was on his sword hilt.

I understood then, as never before, that this was all very, very serious. That di Heredia didn’t trust me.

‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I have put someone’s life in danger. I have no choice.’ I shrugged.

‘Who?’ di Heredia asked.

I shook my head.

‘Tell me,’ he ordered. ‘Guillaume! I do not care whose knees you push apart. This is war. And a nasty kind of war.’

My face went hot, but I got my girth done up.

‘Guillaume!’ di Heredia said, and he was coming around my horse.

‘She’s called Madame d’Herblay!’ Marc-Antonio said. ‘I’m sorry, Sir William!’

We three — four, with my horse — stood like a painting of saints for a long time. Di Heredia had his sword drawn.

That’s how it was.

Finally, he sheathed it. ‘I voted for you to enter the Order. I saved your little whore. If you betray Father Pierre and our Order, I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do.’

This did not sound like an empty threat from the Spaniard.

I went down on one knee in the straw. ‘I swear on the Emperor’s sword and on the wounds of Christ that I will not betray Father Pierre. Or you.’

Fra Juan raised me and gave me a squeeze. ‘Go with God, then. I will not ask who this Madame d’Herblay is. But I will ask you to carry the order’s letters to the legate. And a letter of passage.’

When I looked sullen, he slapped my arm. ‘You may do all the errantry you like, my young ingrate, but I suspect you’ll find a letter of passage helpful.’ He looked at me. ‘You know the Count d’Herblay’s wife?’

I was angry and afraid. My face was as red as my hair. ‘I do,’ I admitted.

‘God save us all,’ di Heredia said.

Marc-Antonio and I rode out through the most vicious of autumn weather, and if I say we were not faster than the wind, it is only because it blew as if all the devils in hell wished to slow us.

In truth, I didn’t know where I was going. My love owned vast estates in Burgundy and I knew from making war there that Burgundy extended over half a continent. Further, I knew her husband had ridden in the van of the army of Savoy at Brignais, and Emile had described herself as a Savoyard.

The obvious place to start was Turin, and I went there. I knew the road, and I knew the inns.

The first night on the road, we were in the steep hills east of Avignon and we stopped in a tiny town, Saint-Marie d’en-Haut, or some such. Marc-Antonio was so scared he didn’t even want to go to Mass, but the church supposedly had the relics of Mary Magdalene and we went to see them, armed as if for war, and we heard the sermon and took communion too, rare enough even then and probably the only reason I remember it,

After Mass I hired a linkboy on the church steps and we were still on the steps when I saw a man’s head appear around the corner of the convent that fronted the tiny square. He put me on high alert: he was watching for someone, and I assumed it was me.

We made our way back through streets so narrow they were more like goat tracks, so sloped that you could lose a shoe going uphill and the streets were already dark. Twice at turnings, I glimpsed men moving parallel on other streets.

I tapped Marc-Antonio and gave him the Order’s ‘danger’ sign.

He flushed and drew his dagger. The linkboy turned to see why we were stopped — and the sword bit deeply into his neck, and blood sprayed. He dropped his torch and screamed.

They were coming from both ends of the alley.

The closest man was one long pace behind me and coming fast. I raised my scabbarded sword, blocking the first downward blow of a club, and stabbed overhand, putting the gilded iron point of my beautiful red scabbard into the first man’s face. In fact, I got his eye more by luck than skill, and killed him instantly. I pulled the scabbard off the sword with my left hand and threw it in the second man’s face as he tripped over his dead comrade, turned on my hips without changing the placement of my feet, which can be chancy as hell in the dark, and thrust over Marc-Antonio’s shoulder one-handed. I hit his adversary, pivoted back and ripped the sword out of my second kill and powered it forward in a strong overhand cut at the man who had tangled with my scabbard.

It’s very, very hard to face a longsword in the dark. I had no compunction about killing these men — the odds were too long. They could only come at me from two directions, and I had the reach. And the training. I don’t remember having a thought in my head, either: I killed, turned and killed, pivoted back and cut. My cut landed on a dagger and my blow blew through the man’s guard and into his head.

It stuck. By a glint of light from a house’s horn window, I saw that this victim was still alive with my sword two inches deep in his scalp even as I rotated my weight and kicked him off my sword so that a piece of his head came off his skull.

The other men to my front were now hanging back.

I could feel Marc-Antonio, still up and breathing, against my back. I flicked a glance back. He was holding his own.

Audacity is everything, in the dark. I abandoned Marc-Antonio and charged the men in the traboule — a tunnel through a house — behind me.

Two of them failed to turn and run, and they stayed there in their blood. The place stank like an abattoir, the copper smell of blood and the ordure smell of guts and I probably didn’t even notice it until I had to go back to get Marc-Antonio and my precious scabbard.

He was shaking, I was not. I dragged him through the tunnel of dead men and we ran across the cobbles, lost in the streets of a very small town.

We went two streets over, or three — I was in a state of near-panic, which can happen to any man after a fight is over and Marc-Antonio was following me — and I ran full on into a man in mail.

‘Where is he?’ he asked in Gascon French.

I must have teetered stupidly, trying to work it out. Marc-Antonio got there first and put his dagger in the bastard. Then we huddled under the eaves of a low house and listened.

The town was full of men. There were shouts behind us.

In the dark, audacity is everything.

I got up on the roof of the house — it was not much higher than my head. From there, I saw the church spire and the tall, narrow roof of the auberge in which we were staying.

The alleys were very narrow, the roofs were low, and mostly finished in slate, with some thatch. Most houses had stone chimneys. ‘Get up here,’ I hissed at Marc-Antonio, and extended him a hand.

None too soon. A dozen brigands — or perhaps men-at-arms — came tearing down our alley. They turned at the base and ran off towards the church. We went over the roofs toward the inn.

I won’t belabour it. I’m not good at being up high, and neither was Marc-Antonio, but we made it, roof to roof, stepping across the alleys and jumping the wider streets on to thatch. I suppose it was less harrowing than it feels now, but the streets were packed with mercenaries, and they were there to kill me. The roofs were safer, but they didn’t feel that way.

We reached the roof across from the stable of the inn. There were no men at the inn yard, and I dropped into the street and caught Marc-Antonio down and we slipped into the stables and began saddling our animals.

‘Baggage!’ I hissed.

Leaving my armour behind would be tantamount to ruin. I left Marc-Antonio and crept out into the yard, moving from shadow to shadow. The auberge was really just a private house with a large kitchen and extra rooms, and I gained the kitchen unseen, slipped up the servant’s stair to the main door, and threw the beam across. Then I went up the main steps to the top floor and pushed into the room in which we’d left our belongings.

God was truly with me, because the man my enemies had left to watch the room was asleep. I hesitated a moment, and then made his sleep last forever, and may God have mercy on him. I remember that he stank, and that I moved his head to keep his blood off my luggage.

I got my harness and our leather trunk, and ran down the steps just as there was a pounding at the door of the inn. In the street, a Gascon was shouting that the devil was loose.

I got our bags into the yard even as Marc-Antonio brought out our horses. I mounted my warhorse, and my fears were calmed. Mounted on Jacques, I was worth ten brigands. I got my bassinet and my gauntlets on as Marc-Antonio tied the baskets on our mule.

‘All I want you to do is mind the mule,’ I said.

Marc-Antonio nodded.

‘You are doing very well,’ I said, or some similar platitude, but really, he was doing well. His hands still functioned, he was alive, he’d put a man or two down, and we were on the last stretch of our escape.

‘They’re right outside the gate,’ he whispered. His tone gave away his fear.

‘Open it,’ I said.

He slid back the bar on the stable gate, and there was a torch-lit crowd outside — at first glance, they appeared to be a hundred men.

One man said, ‘Is that him?’

And then I was on them.

Jacques exploded into them and I might have killed them all, but one man knew how to fight a knight. Someone cut my girth and down I went.

That, my friends, ought to have been the end of this story. I fell heavily, and my helmet protected me from being knocked senseless, but I had no armour and I should have been meat.

Marc-Antonio and the mule had followed me out into the night and by luck and skill and the will of God, Marc-Antonio slammed his riding horse into the routier who’d put me down, staggering the man. I was already scrambling in the dark for my sword.

I was damned if I was going to lose the Emperor’s sword.

I took a blow to the helmet that sharpened my perception of the threat. Jacques was still fighting — that’s what a trained horse does. He bought me a moment and then another moment, and I still couldn’t find my sword, and then I was fighting in the dark. My opponent had a dagger, and another man had a sword, and I had a helmet and gauntlets, which proved by far the best armament.

I found my sword with my booted foot, and cut myself badly. There’s ancient satire there, something Petrarch might have appreciated. I thought it worth the blood to find the sword, and when Jacques rallied to my side I knelt and got a hand on the hilt.

I clutched it.

The night was full of shouts, and there were men running in all directions, and Marc-Antonio was shouting my name like a war cry. Jacques came up right beside me and I was up on his bare back in the time it takes to say ‘pater noster’ and we were away, our hooves echoing off the stone buildings.

For some reason I thought it was the Bourc Camus and his men, so I was shocked when I saw a man-at-arms by the gate in blue and white blazon. But he was badly mounted and his horse wouldn’t face Jacques, and I put my pommel between his arms and broke his teeth. I had his sword arm by the left wrist, and I stripped his sword in the moment of shock, and I still had it in my left hand when we burst out on to the steep mountain road below the town. We rode hard for the time it takes to hear Mass, but if anyone pursued us, it was on foot, and not for very long. We could see every foot of road in the clear moonlight, and I changed to my riding horse after checking Jacques for wounds. The loss of my war saddle was a sore blow to my finances, but we’d escaped.

I handed the sword I’d taken to Marc-Antonio. He giggled nervously and pushed it through his belt.

And so we passed into the night.

We rode for three days without sleeping. We stank, and we didn’t care. We stole a pair of riding horses from two monks in fur habits and riding boots, wandering mendicants who claimed a vow of poverty, and probably as much brigands as I can be myself. With spare horses, we could move all the time.

In the foothills of the Alps, Marc-Antonio reined in. ‘Lord, I have to halt,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’

I shook my head. Fatigue and fear play strange tricks on a man, and the evils I had imagined and dismissed in Avignon now loomed as certainties in the light of day. I could no longer see Emile as a capable woman at no risk. I saw her now as the ultimate target of my enemies. D’Herblay was going to kill her — horribly. I could feel it, and dreaded that it had already happened.

‘If you dismount, I’ll leave you,’ I snapped.

‘Fuck you,’ my erstwhile squire said, but it was more of a moan of protest than a curse. Marc-Antonio made me smile, and that’s a good thing when you have fear all the way to the marrow of your bones.

‘No one ever died of lack of sleep, lad,’ I said. ‘Change horses.’

Twenty leagues short of Turin, a day’s ride past the abandoned chapel where I’d slept twice, there is a Benedictine house high in a mountain pass. We were allowed into the guest house after I showed my pass on the order and let in with a swirl of snow at the very close of day when there was only enough light in the sky for owls. We were wet through, so tired we must have seemed like drunkards, so cold that my hands and feet hurt like torture as they warmed.

Marc-Antonio was asleep as soon as he sat to take off my boots. I put a damp wool cloak over him and undressed and a monk brought me water.

I shocked the monk by stripping naked in front of him, and shocked him more by bathing with a sword by my hand. He brought me good wine, good bread, and a bowl of something with rabbit in it that was superb. Or perhaps hunger and fatigue rendered it superb. I ate that bowl and another and drank the wine and fell asleep in the bath, and the monk awoke me silently — he had some vow or other — and got me on to a pallet in a cell.

That’s all I remember, except that I kept my sword by me.

Emile had a town house in Geneva. I learned as much from the monastery’s abbot, and as soon as he said it, I realised that I was a fool, for I’d heard her speak of it as the place she spent the autumn and winter and lay in with her babies. More comfortable than her damp castles, she had said with her laugh that hid pain and pleasure equally. Few knights go to battle as well armoured as my Emile is in her laughter.

But the passes were closing with snow …

I left Marc-Antonio with money and all my letters except those for local men, and I left my riding horse and took Jacques. I rode for Geneva.

I was three days too late.

That said, remember that it was Emile’s courage — well, and her beautiful body — that first attracted me, and her good sense that held me. I was three day’s too late to stop her abduction: luckily, she never needed me to save her.

I arrived at the door of her town house in as pretty a town as ever you need see, on the shores of the most beautiful lake in the world. The door had been hacked about.

The steward himself was in half-harness, and he only showed his face through a grill at first. I suppose that shaving might have helped me, but I looked like a routier after three days on the road, except for my scarlet surcoat. That got the gate open. Her steward still didn’t like the look of me, and behind him in the entry way, I could see a brown blood-splash on the whitewashed stone.

‘You say you are a knight of the order-’ he said.

‘Emile!’ I roared. Or perhaps I squeaked it. I don’t know. I got past the man in half-armour, roaring her name.

I might have expected that her husband was there or had let the attackers into the house.

I made it as far as the solar above the entryway, and I saw her.

She was wearing a breast and back, and had a sword in her hand. And the ice-cold feel of a sword pricked the back of my neck, too.

Some princesses rescue themselves.

It is very unsatisfying when two people in armour embrace. There is no warmth to it.

We managed.

I put my lips on hers and she turned her head away so that I kissed the nape of her neck clumsily. I stepped back.

‘Emile!’ I said. I’m still not sure what I felt: hope, fear, delight, despair? Why was she not kissing me? But she was alive.

‘We were attacked,’ she said, indicating the sword she’d dropped to embrace me. ‘Oh, William. You came.’

‘I’m late,’ I admitted.

She shrugged. ‘My esteemed husband gave himself away, and we were prepared. This is my house, the servants are mine.’ She smiled gently over my shoulder. ‘He’s not an assassin, Amadeus. He is my loyal servante, Sir William Gold.’

I turned and saw the steward. He was as mad as an angry bull, and his sword was drawn. I had, of course, knocked him down. He was sputtering.

Well, there’s comedy to be found in most situations, and I bowed to him and begged his forgiveness, which shocked him so much that he forgave me on the spot.

‘M’amoure,’ I said, ‘you must leave. Now.’

‘Do not call me that,’ Emile said. Her smile said a great deal; injured and injuring too.

I took that wound like a blow. But I shook it off. ‘Do you know the Bishop of Cambrai?’ I asked. ‘The Bishop, now, of Geneva?’

‘The Lord of Geneva’s younger brother? I should think so — I grew up with him,’ she said. ‘He pulled legs off flies,’ she went on. ‘Picked his nose and ate it.’

‘He is my enemy and he means to harm you to force me to serve him,’ I said.

She put a hand on my arm, and the gesture was warmer than her words had been. ‘He may intend to harm me and then to harm you,’ she said. ‘But he won’t care about the consequence. He is not the kind to make a deep and subtle plan. He’s more the kind to wreak havoc and claim later it was part of a plan.’ Her smile was the same difficult glimpse of the inner woman I’d seen when she told me of her husband. Not a smile so much as a defence. ‘I grew up with this man, William. I know him.’

‘Then he will not harm you — if you shared-’ I imagine I stammered.

She sneered. ‘Robert would sell his mother into slavery to advance his ends or satisfy his will.’

‘Someone should put him down like a dog, then’ I said.

She laughed, a true laugh, a hearty one. ‘I promised myself I would harden my heart,’ she muttered. ‘But by God, William, it gladdens me to see you. Alive. A knight.’ She shrugged. ‘Even if you have forgotten me.’

I bowed. ‘I wore your favour at the Emperor’s tournament in Krakow!’ I said. ‘I have worn your favour in battle in France and Italy.’

‘Did you wear it while you swived half the maidens of Europe?’ she asked, and her eyes were blank, and I suspect I stepped back. I knew her well enough to know that she was angry.

Then she turned her head away. ‘Pay me no heed, William.’ She put on a false smile. ‘We shall be friends and not talk of the past.’

Hot replies, defences and apologies bubbled to the top of my head, but I ignored them. By God, love can be like combat in this, that sometimes you must take a dangerous decision and live or die by the consequences.

‘We must leave,’ I said.

She looked at me.

‘Emile, believe as you like. Three months ago, you were going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with the Passagium Generale.’

She shrugged. ‘A beautiful dream of another time.’

I shook my head vehemently. ‘The Passagium is still active. My lord Pierre Thomas is the legate, and the King of Cyprus is to command us. I have only left him these two fortnights ago at Vienna. He will be in Venice by now.’

She looked at her steward.

He looked at me. ‘I suppose it is possible that the bishop’s brother is lying,’ he said.

‘We have virtually been under siege in this house for three weeks,’ Emile admitted.

‘Why would I lie?’ I asked. ‘There are four thousand men-at-arms in and around Venice. We will cut our way to Jerusalem or die trying.’

She smiled. ‘You really have not changed, have you?’

‘Come with me!’ I said insistently.

She looked at me. ‘I was attacked in my home,’ she said carefully. ‘If I leave, I will forfeit my right to bring my attackers to trial in the courts. This is my home. My people have owned a piece of this rock for six hundred years, William. I do not intend to leave that to Bishop Robert and his thugs.’

I had not considered that she was, in fact, of the haute noblesse. ‘How could he imagine he could have you killed?’ I wondered — that’s how fickle the mind can be.

‘He tried to have the bishop killed so that he could have the See of Geneva,’ the steward said. ‘That’s how all this started. The old bishop was the count’s enemy.’ He turned to his mistress. ‘I think you should go. If you trust this man, go.’

She blinked. ‘Ah, Amadeus, I long for Jerusalem with all my soul, but I am a daughter of these mountains, and I will not be beaten.’

Amadeus shook his head. ‘Take your children and go. If there are none of you left as potential hostages, we will be safe. I will get a notary, some fine plump black cock, to try your case.’ He raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Will your legate write us an indemnity?’

‘Of course!’ I said. It was against the law to seize or despoil a pilgrim or a crusader or their land or moveable property.

He looked down his long German nose at me. ‘See to it that I receive a copy with a seal,’ he said. ‘Lady, take some men-at-arms and go.’

Emile looked at me a moment. ‘Leave us,’ she said. ‘I thank you for your council, but I need a moment with Sir William.’

Amadeus withdrew.

When the door was closed, Emile looked at me under her lashes. ‘With my children,’ she said, ‘I will have no scandal.’

I bowed and, I suspect, protested.

‘Please give me my favour,’ she said.

I was stricken. ‘My love!’

She tapped her foot impatiently. ‘You are a fool, William. Do you imagine that I, a countess, will ride to Venice in the company of a man who openly wears a favour I gave in my misspent youth? Do you know what a reputation as a wanton I had at Jean le Bel’s court? I have two sons and a daughter to defend. I will not have them besmirched with foolishness.’ She wore a look — a smile that included anger. ‘You wore my favour at Krakow. People who know me were there.’

‘Was it all foolishness?’ I asked. ‘I love you, Madame.’ Then it struck me — what she had said. ‘Oh, sweet Christ.’

‘Were you thinking of me when you made love to your Italian girl? She figures prominently in tales of your amours,’ she snapped. ‘Pamfila di Frangioni?’ She extended her hand. ‘Nay, William, it will not wash. You are a fine knight and a bad lover, and I am no prize either. So help me get to Venice and we will be friends.’

Again, I might have complained, or set her down with a rebuke — surely she had slept with her husband often enough!

But age brings a little wisdom, and my battle sense was on me. I reached under my scarlet surcoat and unpinned the worn blue scrap and knelt. ‘I am sorry I have been unworthy,’ I said, and I meant it.

She took it and laughed. ‘You really are too good to be true, William,’ she said softly.

I was old enough not to berate her, but not old enough to do what I should have done.

She called for her servants to pack. I had a two hour nap, and when I woke and bathed, two of her men servants shaved me and dressed me in beautiful clean clothes and a pair of deerskin boots worth as much as a good riding horse.

I would like to tell you that the loss of Emile cut like a sword, but I was too tired and too sure that we were in immediate danger. And perhaps I was a cocksure young man who thought he could have his way with his woman in the end.

Bah. We’re all fools with love, are we not?

The sun was high in the sky when six men-at-arms rode out of the alley behind her little palace — for her ‘town house’ had more rooms than half London. She wore her harness and we had no pack mule. We had a wet nurse with a baby boy, mounted on a donkey and wrapped in a dozen blankets, and two young children in the panniers of a second animal, a large Spanish mule with a nun mounted on it. She was the children’s governess.

Her captain, Jean-Francois, told the gate we were bound with the children for the abbey on the heights above. It was a fair story, as we had no baggage and darkness was a mere four hours away.

The gate accepted the story at face value and we were away into the snow of late autumn in the Alps.

I longed for an ambush in which I could prove my love with my sword, but none eventuated. Men underestimate women constantly, and I’ll guess now that Robert of Geneva never believed that a mere woman would take her babies and ride through the snow. I’m sure her husband didn’t even see her as human. But she was. In truth, she would have been a great captain, had she been born a man. Did I not say that audacity is everything, in the dark? Hah! Audacity is everything all the time. And she had it.

We rode over the mountains and down the French side of the passes as far as Turin, and we were unmolested; indeed, we were virtually unnoticed. I had time to be jealous of my lady’s attention to everyone but me and I had time to get to know her children. I was the odd man out: while I was forced to live with her men-at-arms, I was not one of them. They were professional, but not like my comrades in Italy nor yet like my comrades in the order. I suppose I was an arrogant prick, but they were scarcely friendly.

And not a single bandit showed his face.

An hour’s ride north of Turin, I made my decision. I rode up to Emile in a shower of snow and bowed in the saddle. ‘My lady countess,’ I said.

She offered me a cold little smile. ‘Monsieur?’ she asked.

‘I left my squire to recuperate in an abbey above the western gates of Turin,’ I said. ‘I should go and reclaim him.’

She nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said.

Well, par dieu, I could tell she was angry, but I was sufficiently a fool to not understand why.

‘May I catch you south of Turin?’ I asked.

She shrugged. ‘I may stay in Turin some days,’ she said. Her eyes met mine, and there was the rage again. ‘But I imagine that you are none too anxious to meet Sir Richard Musard.’

That made no sense to me at all. ‘I have no fear of Sir Richard,’ I said.

‘Really?’ she asked. Her eyes touched mine again, and they were hot and full of the emotion she kept out of her voice. She had her youngest wrapped against her, and she looked down at her baby and smoothed his hair before pulling the wool wrappings carefully around the little head. ‘My understanding is that he has sworn to kill you?’

I lowered my voice. ‘Richard Musard was my best friend,’ I said hotly. ‘He betrayed me to the Bourc Camus and your husband, Madame. They sold me to the French authorities.’

‘And when you escaped, you avenged yourself on him by taking his wife,’ Emile said. ‘Yes, I know it all full well.’

She rode on.

One by one, her men-at-arms passed me on the narrow trail. I thought of a dozen responses.

Par dieu, gentles, of course that’s how Richard told the story. But I hadn’t seen it coming and had no defence.

It took me a day of riding through the mountains to realise that when Emile reached Venice, I might be able to send for Milady. And then Emile might change her mind.

Because, in the meantime, I had hours to think about just what my love had heard of me. And even to consider those things I had actually done. I can remember riding, and wincing, physically, to think of the times I’d been unfaithful. Writhing in the saddle, cold and weary and mortified.

I have always been a fool for a fair lady, and no mistake.

Marc-Antonio was eager to go, having spent too much time on his knees and too much time eating gruel and, I gathered later, too much time defending his virtue from one of the more lecherous monks. Well, close a hundred men in a small box, and see what happens. But I had had time to think of many things, and I was profuse in my thanks to him for saving me in the village fight, and he was, perhaps unsurprisingly, delighted at my praise. When we camped, I made him go through the postures of defence, and we traded a few blows — gently, as our swords were sharp and he was inexperienced. But the sword I’d taken from the blue and white was a good one and all those days in the saddle were habituating my squire to life with and on horses.

At any rate, we made good time out the gate, and with the help of a pair of shepherds, we cut south and east, bypassing Turin on the plain below us and riding through an early snowfall. I was wary: we were no longer ahead of our foes, or so I reckoned. But we made the passes unharmed, and high in Saint Bernard we caught up with Emile and her party in a monastery. She was withdrawn, and in fact I saw her only at a distance. She was avoiding me, and that was yet another blow.

For the next four days, we travelled like two separate groups, the two of us, and the nine of them.

We were well over the pass, and on our descent, dismounted to lead our horses, when I fell. I was showing off every minute, I now confess, riding too hard, scouting too far, wearing all my harness all the time, trying to earn back her good opinion in the foolish ways boys woo girls. But high above the plains of Lombardy, I tried to ride over the narrow remnants of a bridge instead of crossing lower down at the temporary ford. I was driven by no nobler motive than that Jean-Francois, her captain, had ordered his men not to try the bridge as being too dangerous.

Three steps across and my riding horse paused, lost his footing on the icy logs, scrambled, and then we were in the rushing water. Autumn is not as bad as spring in the passes, but the water rises, and trickles of meltwater from summer can be swollen by rain to raging torrents.

I went all the way under, and my riding horse came down atop me driving my hips into the stone bed of the stream.

The shock of the cold stole my wits, and my full harness held me under for a long time, long enough that I might have screamed for breath; long enough to repent my sins, and wish that God had granted me time to commit more of them.

And then Raoul, my riding horse, shook himself and rose to his feet and his weight was gone, and the stream was narrow enough that I got my head above water by getting my elbows on a rock before the current swept me away. I went a horse-length downstream and was thrown on a sloping boulder. And there I might well have drowned except that Jean-Francois was there with a spear. He wrestled me from the grip of the icy stream. Water ran out of my harness, my helmet drained down my back, and my helmet liner was soaked through, all my arming clothes were inundated, and I was very cold.

Jean-Francois got me to the far bank, and Marc-Antonio had my horse. I was almost in another world: I had come so close to being dead, and I had the oddest view of the world.

Emile came up while I was mounting. ‘We have to get him to a fire,’ she said with her devastating practicality.

Perhaps I made some feeble protest. I felt terrible; terrible as a man who led men, and terrible in that the cold was like a vice on my feet, my head, my hands. Only the warmth of the horse between my legs steadied me, and when the wind blew I groaned.

‘Thanks,’ I managed to Jean-Francois.

He smiled, the first time I’d seen him smile. ‘Bah! ce n’est pas rien, monsieur,’ he said. ‘If you are not from these valleys, it is a simple mistake to make.’

An hour later I was all but inside the fireplace in a wealthy farmer’s house at the top of the valley, and warmth began to make it into my hands and feet, but the cold had settled deeply and I was sick.

I do not remember much of that illness, except that I woke to find my head in Emile’s lap. She looked into my eyes.

‘You are a fool,’ she said.

It was the nicest thing she’d said to me in two years.

Or perhaps I dreamed that.

When I returned to consciousness, it was to find that we were snowbound. The snow lasted two more days, and we played cards and sang and I became friends with Jean-Francois and his men, close enough to exchange a few blows with them in the stable yard. They were very good for country trained men, and Jean-Francois had a cut to the hands with a feint that caught me again and again.

Thanks to Fiore, though, I had things to show them, as well.

And Marc-Antonio got better every day. He was still fleshy, but no longer plump by any means, and his angelic face now had a harder line to it. He’d been in the saddle for three months.

Where the Alps were in winter, Lombardy might almost have been in late summer. There was plague around Padua, or so we were told by frightened refugees, and I avoided Verona as if it had the plague. We had heard south of Turin that there were avalanches due to the sudden thaw, and I had a notion that if we were pursued, we had a respite. But I was cautious.

Despite my tomfoolery with the stream, by the time we left our snug farmhouse south of Turin, Jean-Francois and his silent companion Bernard were no longer sullen companions, and when I suggested a plan of march, they were perfectly willing to accede to my wishes, with due courtesy to their mistress. We made our way south of Verona, and it was almost painful to watch Emile bloom: sun, good food and wine and freedom conspired to make her almost luminous.

By Saint George, gentlemen. I loved her full well. And every moment brought me more to love. She was a mature woman now, grown strong, I think, in motherhood and ruling good estate. And yet sometimes she was still the young woman I had known in France — playful, determined, audacious.

And there was the matter of her children. She had three: a boy, Edouard, and two girls, one just a babe in arms, Isabelle, and one a little older, named Magdalene. At first, she was scrupulous about keeping them clear of me. Or rather, the nun seemed to have them whenever I approached the countess, and when she had care of her children, I was clearly not welcome. But then, one afternoon in the countryside south of Verona, I came upon her on the lawn behind an inn, sitting on the sheep-cropped grass in a kirtle like the embodiment of beauty. She had the older girl in her arms and the boy sat watching Bernard on the close-cropped turf and Bernard was whittling — he was a preux cavalier, but he was always making something — toys, dolls, wooden knights for the boy. I could already see the shape of the cavalier’s great helm coming out of the billet of wood.

I could hear Sister Catherine calling her in her Savoyard French from a window of the inn. She shouted something about the child she had — Isabelle, as I remember — and something about blood. Emile leaped to her feet. Her eyes met mine — it’s difficult to describe her look. Questioning? And yet — they held some promise …

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 Niccolo 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-Francois 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-Francois’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 tres riches, with three-storey stone facades 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-Francois 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-Francois 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 served 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 rousee’ 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 she 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.

When I spoke of leaving the king, Father Pierre winced and steepled his hands.

When I spoke of Bishop Robert, Father Pierre put his face in his hands for a moment and then exchanged a long look with Fra Peter.

Fra Peter was playing with his beard and staring out the elegant window at the lagoon.

‘And this lady you escorted south — the Pope ordered this?’ Father Pierre asked.

‘No, my lord,’ I said.

‘Fra Juan di Heredia? He ordered you?’ my legate asked. His eyes met mine.

Listen. Father Pierre was not of this world — he was then a living saint. But while he was above many worldly considerations, he was at the same time deeply knowledgeable of the world. Fiore liked to brag that in the whole of his youth he’d never got away with one trick on his mother — I suspect that Father Pierre would have made a frightening parent.

I knew that his look was neither angry nor amused. It was the look he kept for the condition of man. Which gave him pain.

‘No, my lord,’ I said. ‘She is a friend. I had occasion to render her a service during the Jacquerie. And I had heard she intended to make the pilgrimage.’

‘So you rode two days out of your way to greet her,’ Father Pierre said.

Friends, I was a small boy with a nasty piece of work as an uncle — I can lie with the best of them. And as Emile and I had committed no sin — well, not outwardly — I had the feeling of somewhat hypocritical indignation that sinners get when accused of a sin they have not committed.

‘Yes, my lord,’ I said.

Our eyes locked.

He nodded thoughtfully. ‘She is a very rich woman, and very powerful,’ he said. ‘And she brings six good knights.’

‘Which is good, because we’re bleeding men at arms like a beheaded traitor gushes blood,’ Fra Peter put in.

Father Pierre winced again. ‘My son-’

‘If the King of Cyprus doesn’t get here soon, we’ll have no army, and it will all be for nothing,’ Fra Peter said. I’d seldom seen him angry, but the last four months had aged him. And tired him.

‘Surely the legate can hold the men at arms?’ I asked carefully.

Father Pierre raised both eyebrows. ‘I might,’ he admitted. ‘But our Holy Father the Pope has ordered me to suspend use of church revenues until the whereabouts of the king have been determined. So I have no money.’

No commander and no money. Most of the men gathered around Venice and living in peasant’s houses, squalid, windswept camps and expensive lodgings were mercenaries. Men like me. Our purses are not bottomless and many had come to make a profit — well, to be fair, to make a profit and to save their souls.

‘Tell him about the Genoese!’ Fra Peter said.

Father Pierre smiled at me. ‘I don’t want to overburden his spirit,’ he said.

Fra Peter laughed. ‘I do. He runs about fighting in tournaments and winning beautiful swords and I get paperwork in Venice?’ He glared at me, a mocking glare. ‘Genoa has all but declared war on Cyprus.’

Since Genoa, Cyprus, Venice and Constantinople — the Eastern empire — were the supports of the crusade, war between Genoa and Cyprus would kill the Passagium Generale as thoroughly as a poleaxe blow to the head of an unarmoured man. ‘Why? What for?’ I could vaguely remember discussions about this — hadn’t someone been killed on the docks in Cyprus?

Father Pierre looked away, almost as if he was disassociating himself from Fra Peter’s answer.

‘The charges against Cyprus are trumped-up forgeries. It is all tinsel and make-believe — but Genoa has a fleet in home waters for the crusade, and they are threatening to use it against Cyprus.’ Fra Peter sat back, his nose showing white spots. He was angry.

I leaned forward. ‘Are they in league with the paynim?’ I asked.

Father Pierre laughed. ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost also — Genoa trades with the Hagarenes. So does Venice, as the Doge never tires of telling me, even when I tell him of the traffic in Christian slaves, of the Greek boys and the Venetian gentlemen sold to the cruellest of masters … My sons, Cyprus herself trades with the infidel.’ He shook his head, not in sorrow but in rueful appreciation of the world. ‘We are as God made us, and the world must be as it is,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this is a false doctrine, but for the moment I am content with it. Venice, Genoa and Cyprus are all engaged in trade with the Saracens, despite which I am charged with this crusade and I will see it through. I need to travel to Genoa and force them to peace, but I cannot go until the king comes here, to reassure the soldiers.’

‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Fra Peter said.

We all prayed together, and Fra Peter walked me out to the guardroom.

‘Do we have beds?’ I asked.

‘I doubt that there’s a bed in this city,’ Fra Peter said.

Marc-Antonio found us both rooms in a decaying Byzantine structure near the new fish market. On the ground floor was a scriptorium where illuminated manuscripts were produced, and just walking through it was a dazzling experience for every sense with its gold leaf and size and resin and ink and lapis and turpentine and parchment. It was one of the smells of my youth: the monastery in London had a scriptorium, although neither this lavish nor this commercial, and I felt at home. The second storey rooms were in the hands of a prosperous grocer and his family: five daughters, a wife, and the wife’s mother — a sort of commercial nunnery. They owned the building and the one next to it, where the grocery was on the ground floor.

Donna Bemba demanded twenty gold ducats for a month’s rent, paid in advance. I’d like you to note that this represented about five years’ wages for a peasant in England with his own farm; the cost of a good helmet made by a good armourer and half the cost of a decent warhorse over on the mainland. This, for two small rooms which were damp and whose windows sagged on their sashes.

‘Just pay,’ Marc-Antonio advised me. ‘My father knows them a little. It is a fair price.’

‘A fair price!’ I all but shouted. I was down to the last of my money. Remember, I was not paid. The word ‘donat’ implies donation — a man donating his time and his body to the order. I had made a fortune in Lombardy and Tuscany, and now I was spending it on a failed crusade.

Had spent it. When I paid for the fodder for my horses and gave another month in advance and covered my debt to the tailor who had made up my clothes for the trip to Poland, my purse was empty.

Venice is a dreadful city in which to be poor. Food is expensive, trinkets are magnificent — and expensive — and everyone knows the value of everything to the last farthing. I needed a new helmet if I was to fight Saracens or really anyone except small children, and when I had a rower take me to the streets where the armourers plied their trade — that is, where both armourers and merchants dealing in Milanese or Pavian armour resided — I saw a dozen helmets I liked and two I adored, but the prices were now beyond me.

My favourite armourer was a Bohemian, a tall, handsome man with a fashionable forked beard who had earned his citizenship fighting for Venice in Dalmatia. I liked his work and I liked him, and we drank a cup of wine together while he tried to sell me a full harness in the new style, breast and back together, matching arms and legs. He had a helmet after which I lusted like a young man following a young woman, a cervelliere, or skull cap, in the new hard steel with a fine, light aventail lined in silk, and a separate helm, beautifully rounded and sloped so that it was all glancing surfaces, with a moveable visor. The best feature of the helm was that it slid on to the skull cap on little rails and locked into place.

My Bohemian, Jiri, nodded when I had it on. ‘Not my work,’ he admitted. ‘But a good fit and it would keep anyone alive in a melee, eh?

He also had gauntlets that were lighter and stronger than anything I’d ever worn. Of course, they cost three months’ rent on my third-storey hovel.

‘Pawn the sword,’ Marc-Antonio suggested.

I didn’t.

I had been two days in Venice, and I had landed Juan to share my palace above the grocers, when Father Pierre sent me to Terra Firma to review the men-at-arms at Mestra and north around the lagoon. He sent Fra Peter north the same day despite the cold weather to see if the king was coming over the passes.

I visited Sir Walter Leslie and his brother, who were festering in Mestre and growing impatient. They had two thousand men, many of whom I knew, and I received a good deal of heckling while riding through the cold and muddy camp.

I have seen a troupe of prostitutes turn on one of their number who has married, screaming at her about the men she’s had and the services she provided, as if these things should bar her from marriage. So too with some of my former comrades.

I noticed, though, that none of my lances was with Sir Walter. I saw this with mixed emotions; I would have liked to see friends, and have swords at my back that were closer than family. Yet, it meant they were still together and with Sir John, and I rather fancied that, too.

I visited the English and the Gascons, too, Among the Gascons I met was Florimont, Sire de Lesparre. He had served the King of Cyprus before, but he’d also served the King of England. He had a famous name as a fighter, and an infamous one as a knight. I had been ordered to visit him in the legate’s name and a squire pointed him out to me.

He was sitting under an awning in front of a great pavilion, playing chess with one of the King of Cyprus’s nobles, when I rode up. I had a very small tail; just Marc-Antonio and Juan, both in the scarlet surcoats of the Order. Marc-Antonio was a penniless bastard and Juan was the scion of a brilliantly old and wealthy Catalan family, but luck, and some of my money, had given Marc-Antonio a fine horse and saddle and a good sword, and Juan had donated some ‘old’ clothes to the cause so that we did no shame to our order.

At any rate, Lesparre glanced up from his chess game and made a little moue with his mouth. ‘By the Virgin’s Holy cunt,’ he swore. ‘Some nuns have come to visit us.’

I have lived in military camps since I was fifteen and I had never heard a man refer in such a way to the Virgin, not even the Bourc. Juan’s face flushed.

Marc-Antonio giggled.

Lesparre saw my stare. ‘Eh, little nun? Does my bad language disturb you?’ he roared. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make me shut up?’

I slid from my saddle. When you most desire to make a good entrance, that is, of course, when your spurs get stuck in the mud under your heels. It never fails.

‘Perhaps she has never worn spurs before, the pretty thing,’ Lesparre said.

His companion laughed.

But I had spent years at this sort of thing and then been with the order for more. So when I’d sorted out my spurs, I said a little prayer to Saint George, put out my inner fire, and squelched my way to the awning and bowed.

‘We are to be favoured with some-’ Lesparre began.

I nodded and cut him off. ‘If you want to fight, all you have to do is ask,’ I said. It was, to be fair, Richard Musard’s line — he’d trot it out when he was taxed for his colour. I always admired it.

Lesparre’s mouth shut.

‘In the meantime, the legate is solicitous for your comfort, and sends his greetings and blessing,’ I went on. ‘You are, I assume, Monsieur Florimont de Lesparre?’ I took a small twist of parchment with the legate’s seal from my purse.

‘Did you just challenge me?’ he asked, and when he stood, he was a head taller than I.

‘No, my lord,’ I answered. ‘I am forbidden to challenge while I wear this coat, but if you insist, I will be delighted to oblige you.’

He nodded. And as he drew, he stepped out into the drizzle from under the awning.

Marc-Antonio reached out my sword hilt — he was carrying my sword over the crook of his arm. I took it and drew, cut the air once, and rolled the sword over the back of my hand.

‘You have beautiful eyes, sweet,’ he said, and a dozen other fanfaronades to distract me.

When he struck, he meant business. He flicked his sword up from a low guard, back over his shoulder, and cut at my head.

Have I mentioned how much I hate facing big men? I’m as large as a man needs to be, par dieu! I caught his sword over my head on mine, near the hilts, and let it slide off like rain off a steep roof, but I felt his strength in my wrists.

I counter cut a mezzano, a middle cut, at his cheek, and he parried. He was fast, as fast as me, and strong like a wild animal, and he’d been well trained somewhere — he made his covers with the kind of precision that announces the trained man in or out of armour.

He tried to wind on my head cut, and after the rapid exchange we switched places and he flicked a tip cut at me to cover his retreat. I stopped his blade but failed to catch it with my left hand and got my fingers cut for my pains — not badly, but enough pain to distract me if I let it.

He raised his sword up over his head. It’s German posture, although I’ve seen Englishmen do it, too. He strode forward, I stepped off his line, fora di strada, and I cut at his cut.

Our blades met with the oddest sound, and the resistance told me that I’d misjudged and his cut was a feint, the whole of his power slipping away from mine, and then I hit him. It’s hard to describe, but my blade encountered some resistance but not enough, and my point slapped down on his right shoulder, cutting through his gambeson into his shoulder.

His blade had snapped. I’d never seen anything like it — it must have had a flaw near the hilt, because at our second crossing, with both of us powering our blades together, his had simply failed, and I was one push on my pommel from killing or maiming him. Even as it was, my point was two fingers deep in his shoulder.

He looked at his sword blade and said, ‘Fuck me.’

I raised my sword and touched my knee to the ground in salute.

He was bleeding quite a bit by then, and a pair of squires sat him down. But he had no trouble meeting my eye. ‘We must do that again, when this heals. A broken blade doesn’t decide a fight.’

I shrugged. ‘I remain at your service,’ I said. ‘Do you have any messages for the legate?’

Perhaps not my finest hour, but I felt I behaved with restraint.

I was only on the mainland a week, but I missed the arrival of the king and his magnificent entry. I might as well have been there, as Maestro Altichiero da Verona put me in the painting — it hangs in the Doge’s Palace yet, I believe. But that’s another story.

The King of Cyprus received an entire wing of the Doge’s working palace. All of his nobles — those too poor to follow him around Europe, or too old or young to serve on his tournament team and embassy, now rallied to him from the towns around Venice and had their offices confirmed and set up for him a sort of government in exile to handle his business and the business of the Passagium Generale before we sailed. His appearance engendered respect; he looked rich, young, debonair and very competent. The Venetians liked him, and he loved Father Pierre, and suddenly, once again, the crusade seemed real.

I was delighted to have Nerio and Fiore back. With Miles Stapleton and Juan and our servants, we made a small company of ourselves. They all took sections of my little roost above the scriptorium, despite the fact that by then we knew that our grocers quarrelled every night, screaming like fishmongers about unpaid rents, bad debts, and infidelity. The process of reconciliation could also be loud, and the daughters were generally able to keep up with their parents, and the ringing battle cry of the youngest: ‘I hate you! You want to ruin my life!’ was so insistent and so frequent that we took to calling it along with her in our newly learned Veneziano, and on one famous occasion, when her mother called her a whore for wearing her hair down with a fillet to Mass, Marc-Antonio roared it out before the maiden thought to say it herself. We all dissolved into laughter, even Miles Stapleton, who was the strictest stick to ever be thrust into mud.

It is odd how company can change a man. Among John Hawkwood’s men, I was the mildest, the most chivalrous; the only man-at-arms in the company given to reading Aquinas or Malmonides or even Aristotle. But with Ser Nerio, Juan, Fiore, and Miles, I was the most adventurous, with the possible exception of Nerio, and the most raucous, and it made me see myself in a different way.

Venice is a city with a thousand adventures but a great deal of law. Perhaps too much law for my liking. Men are forbidden to bear arms in public, but there are a dozen exceptions to that law — the Arsenali, the guilds of ship’s carpenters, shipwrights and caulkers in the arsenal where they build the great galleys for war, are allowed to wear swords, rather like London apprentices and for much the same reason; they are the militia. And the noblemen of the city are allowed to bear arms in public.

We, as members of the order, were perhaps not allowed to wear our swords. Or perhaps we were, but I did, and Ser Nerio, who had taken the donat’s coat, did as well. Because we did, the rest did. Perhaps we swaggered a bit too much, but we were in a rich city, packed to the rafters with vicious cut-throats, seasoned by the shopkeepers, who instead of being soft-handed bourgeois, were in fact tough little bastards who cut an empire out of the guts of the Greeks and the Turks.

If it hadn’t been for poverty, I’d have had the time of my life; well, poverty and the knowledge that Emile was a league away across the lagoon.

Like many good times, the scenes blur together, but I know that we were preparing for the Doge’s Christmas court and the great masses at Saint Mark’s. The city was covering many of the crusade’s costs, invisible, inglorious costs, and in return they seemed to feel that the legate and his men, most especially the Order of St John, were at their personal service.

Beggars cannot be choosers, and the service was not so very onerous. We practiced for various processions in armour and I declined invitations from other knights because I couldn’t return them, and ate what I could afford — fish.

Nerio took time to notice. I was too proud to ask him for money, although he seemed to have enough for us all. And I was busy planning Juan’s knighting, which was to be included in the great Mass of the Eve of our Saviour’s birth. I suppose that by that time I had heard, from Nerio, that Juan was actually Juan di Heredia’s son, not his nephew, by one of the great ladies of Spain, to be forever unnamed. Once Nerio told me, it was so obvious as to need no hint — I can be a fool.

At any rate, it was in the days before the festival of Christmas. Every guild in Venice was working at full capacity to satisfy every customer and to prepare for their own roles in processions, passion plays, mimes and dances and feasts.

Venice was like an army on the eve of battle, except that everyone was happy.

I was searching the streets for an ecclesiastical vestment maker who would run up a new surcoat for Juan. Fra Peter and Father Pierre had left this to me, and I had been busy. My friend’s knighting was ten days away, or that’s how I remember it, perhaps less. Marc-Antonio was searching the tailors of the Judaica while I walked along the Rialto. Money was no longer an object, I was that desperate. I needed a tailor who would finish the garment by Christmas eve.

I had Nerio by me, and I was at a stand in a street so narrow that passers-by, apprentices and servants and great ladies in Byzantine turbans all had to press against the wall to avoid the four feet of steel that stuck out behind me like a scarlet tail. I’d just been laughed out of an establishment so squalid that I couldn’t imagine how to proceed.

I was standing in front of a toy shop. Really, it was the shop of a fine leather worker, but his window displayed items he’d made that best showed off his skills, and one of them was a beautiful girl’s doll wearing a fine gown of wool over a kirtle of real silk, some fancy eastern stuff with a pattern. The face of the doll was leather, and while not, strictly speaking, lifelike, it had a vivacity to it that most girl’s dolls lack: the eyes seemed almost to cross, the lips to laugh. The body of the doll was cloth, and I shocked Nerio by striding into the shop, scabbarded sword bouncing off the lintel, and asking for the doll.

The master came out to wait on me, and he laughed to see my face when he told me the price. ‘I thought you foreign nobles were all rich,’ he said.

I shook my head.

Back on the street, Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’ he asked.

‘Too much,’ I said. ‘Too dear.’

Nerio walked several steps beside me. ‘Give me your purse, brother,’ he said.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t come out with any money.’

He held out his hand and I unhooked my purse and handed it to him.

He used most of my worldly fortune to purchase a saffron-laced street pie with beef, and we walked along the Grand Canal. He was kind enough to give me a bite. Then he used the rest of my money to buy us a cup of wine from a very pretty girl whose wine was scarcely her only commodity. He let his fingers linger on hers when he passed her back the cup and she seemed to tolerate the familiarity with good humour.

He said something and she laughed and looked away, and Nerio came and grabbed my shoulder and we walked on.

He still had my purse, and as we crossed the narrow bridge over a side canal, he folded back the cover and emptied it into the canal — or rather, he up-ended it and nothing happened.

‘Broke?’ he asked. ‘Destitute?’ He tossed me the purse and went back to walking.

I shrugged.

‘Why the doll?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Who is it for? You should have seen your face, my friend.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Bah! The disappointment of love.’ He pointed at me. ‘You have no money and you are in love. Every banker knows the symptoms!’

I don’t know whether I glared or cringed or denied.

He walked off again, lengthening his stride as we crossed a tiny square with enough room for a man to walk fast. I followed him back to the leatherworker’s shop. He walked in, exchanged a few sentences in rapid-fire Veneziano, and bought my doll for a third what I’d be told. He tossed it to me on the step. ‘Don’t play with it where the other mercenaries can see,’ he said with a grin. ‘You need money? Let me put some in your hands.’

Rich men borrow money. They are rich, so they get into debt. This is the rule of the street — no one loans money to the poor. And the poor know better than to borrow. I was used to pawning armour, pawning horses, but I was unwilling to pawn armour in Venice and besides, the army of the Passagium Generale had caused a glut of used armour in the shops. The value was practically nil.

My point is that I was, mostly, unwilling to borrow, even from Nerio and his father. He spent the rest of our walk trying to convince me that I was a good business risk. I took him to the armourer’s quarter, and introduced him to my Bohemian.

He looked at the helmet and heard out the Bohemian’s pitch on a full harness of new Milanese altered to fit, and Nerio shrugged. ‘If you are going to keep me alive going to Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘come, what does this amount to, five hundred ducats?’

He wrote the Bohemian a note of hand.

I tried to thank him, and he declined. ‘Listen, my friend, my father is the banker, not I. But I will not see a friend starve in Venice of all places. Here, he did it all for four hundred and seventy ducats. Take these thirty, and call it five hundred.’

I embraced him, and bought him wine. But I still hadn’t found a tailor who would make a surcoat by Christmas eve.

I had, however, found an excuse to visit Emile.

‘Where are you off to?’ Nerio demanded.

‘I have an errand,’ I said.

‘To the mother of a child who wants a doll?’ Nerio asked. ‘How very Italian of you, William. My mother used to tell me, when I was young and amorous, only lie with matrons and never virgins, and no damage is done. Eh?’

I suppose I flushed. I’m a redhead with a vicious temper and my face often gives me the lie.

‘Well, be back by tonight,’ he said. ‘Remember Juan!’

Which made me feel a guilty fool, a bad friend. We had all decided to throw Juan a little feast before he was knighted — Nerio thought it would be amusing to make the Spanish boy drunk.

‘I’ll be back,’ I insisted. In fact, I was too fond of Juan to want to make him drunk and foolish.

In the end, I had to ask Sister Marie for help. It was she who provided me with the visiting hours of the convento, although she did so with a wry look that told me that I’d intrigued her a little too much. Or that she saw right through me.

It cost me six solidi I could ill-afford to get a gondola to the island, but my gondolier was young, tough, talented, had a fine singing voice and new many of the newest songs. I gave him wine from my canteen and we had a fine trip out from Saint Mark’s.

Landing at the convent’s brick pier gave me pause. But Jean-Francois rescued me from a sense of sacrilege by greeting me like a long-lost brother. Escorted by a silent sister, we walked past the great convent church to the two dormitories as I regaled Jean-Francois and Bernard with my doings.

I invited them to join me — and my brothers — for a dinner.

‘We’re all of us ready to die from boredom,’ Jean-Francois allowed. ‘I went to Mass three times yesterday.’ He rolled his eyes, and our escort glared at the brick walkway.

Bernard smiled his soft smile. ‘What brings you, messire?’ he asked.

I produced the doll, and both men clapped their hands. ‘Par dieu!’ Jean-Francois said. ‘Perhaps we’ll have some quiet out of miss yet! Where’d you find such a treasure?’

I was part way through my story and had got to the tale of the search for Juan’s surcoat as we reached the dormitory receiving room. I must explain: this was a convent for well-bred Venetian girls, and most of the sisters were from the best families of the lagoon. No one was sworn to silence, and some novitiates wore fashionable clothes and had servants. Each dormitory had a fine parlour with good oak panels and paintings or frescoes as fine as the piano nobile in a Venetian palazzo for receiving brothers and fathers — and lovers.

Our escort blushed and didn’t look at me, but she bobbed her head for my attention. ‘Perhaps my lord has been led here,’ she said. ‘My sisters and I make ecclesiastic vestments. Indeed, we have just made a chasuble for the new Bishop of Aquila, even though he is no friend of ours.’

I unlaced my own and the nun sat down and turned it over. She wrinkled her nose, but smiled, and I imagined her as someone’s sister.

‘You wish a line of gold edging the cross, perhaps?’ she asked.

‘It is for his formal knighting,’ I said.

Emile came in through a barred door. I felt her enter the room, turned, and bowed.

‘So,’ she said. With the smile for which I would die.

She was happy I had come. What more did I need to know?

‘Are you the same size?’ my nun asked. ‘Oh, my lady countess, I did not mean to intrude.’

I grinned — Emile was so prettily confused. ‘Countess, this pearl among Christ’s brides thinks that she and her sisters might solve my pressing duty to have a surcoat made for my friend’s knighting.’ Emboldened, I said, ‘It is on Christmas Eve, at Saint Mark’s. You should attend!’

Emile laughed. ‘Indeed, my people would accept an invitation from Satan to get off this island, although we have been treated with every courtesy.’

I produced the doll. She pounced.

‘You didn’t forget!’

I confessed. ‘I did forget, madonna. My lord sent me on a mission, and it is only this morning that I found this. But I came as soon as I could.’

She wasn’t listening. She swept out, and there were peals of laughter, giggles, a shriek!

And then nothing for so long that I feared that I had lost her again. I filled the time explaining to the sister that yes, I was very much of a size with Juan.

She went out and came back with an older woman.

‘For the Order of St John?’ she asked. Her voice was flat, and a little shrill.

‘Yes, my lady,’ I said in my best Italian.

She unbent a little. ‘This is an impossible task, but all my little reprobates love a knight. Very well. Thirty ducats in a single donation on completion, and ten for me to dispense as I see fit.’

A month’s rent. But I had no choice; it was cheaper than some of the tailors.

‘We’ll have to keep this,’ the older lady said, holding up my surcoat. She sniffed. ‘Perhaps we’ll return it clean.’

Emile came back with Magdalene at her apron strings, clutching the doll. The little girl wouldn’t meet my eyes and kept turning away, but she managed to mumble her thanks for ‘Lady Guinevere’ very prettily. I bowed my very best bow to a lady.

Then I made bold enough to meet her mother’s eye. ‘May I expect you on Christmas Eve, Countess?’ I asked.

She half-smiled. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. She looked at me with a little of her old self. ‘We are so very busy.’

Strong in the knowledge that I had saved Juan’s knighting, I helped my gondolier to pull over the choppy water of the lagoon. There was rain, a cold rain, with a little sleep mixed in.

I came back to my cramped rooms by the fish market to find Juan on the wooden steps with a young Moslem girl in a red shawl — a slave-prostitute of the kind favoured by the gangs that ran the waterfront brothels and wine-houses for foreign sailors. Behind them on the steps was Marc Antonio, wearing a heavy cloak.

He read my expression and bridled. ‘I’m a grown man and can sin as I like,’ he said. His voice was thick with angry wine.

‘Where did you get her?’ I asked.

He wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘I …’

Marc-Antonio’s eyes gave him away.

I turned on him. ‘You? You went and bought-’

Juan shoved the girl down the steps and put a hand on his sword. ‘I will take no moralising from you, Sir William. You have a doxy in every town.’

‘You’ve paid her?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow.

Juan’s cheeks flushed. ‘Of course I’ve paid!’

I turned to the girl. ‘Run along, now,’ I said, and she bolted.

‘You fucking hypocrite,’ Juan said. He said more, in Spanish, about my affair with a notorious married woman.

Nerio, called forth from his den — he paid the most, and in return he’d arranged for our room to be divided by panels so that he could have his own snug chamber — stood in his shirt and hose on the landing. ‘Can you children be a little less noisy?’ he asked. ‘Juan, come back to your party!’

‘I was taking my ease with my friend-’ Juan said.

‘He arranged to have my squire buy him a strumpet on the docks,’ I said. ‘Juan …’ I thought of a thousand things to say: about the life of a Moslem slave in Venice, about women, about prostitutes.

Nerio laughed. ‘For a fornicating adventurer, William has a fine sense of moral outrage.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow at me. Juan brightened, and Nerio turned on him, ‘But gentlemen — at least, gentlemen in Italy — do not hand over coin for access to a whore. At least, not in such a way as their friends can mock them for it.’

Juan, caught between us on the steps — it was almost like one of Dante’s poems — looked up and down, and his rage returned. ‘You have some bitch in your room this minute!’ he spat at Nerio. His use of language, the way he spoke — he was very drunk. I’d never seen the younger Spaniard as a man dedicated to any of his appetites and I’m not sure I’d ever heard him use foul language. He lived like a monk and his piety was proverbial, even if he was less a priest in armour than Miles.

‘How long have you all been drinking?’ I asked.

‘You thought we’d wait for you?’ Juan snapped. ‘I assumed you’d be stuffing your baggage all night.’ He looked back at Nerio. ‘You are all the same!’ he shouted. ‘Liars and hypocrites!’

Nerio laughed. ‘But mine is not paid, and comes there of her own free will, my dear caballero, and if you call her further names, I will be forced to-’

Fiore appeared behind Nerio and said something which included the words ‘not helping’.

Nerio winced and withdrew, and Fiore came down the stairs. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s take Juan out for a walk.’ He looked at me. ‘Can’t you tell something is wrong?’

This from a man who thought that swordplay was a form of human communication.

We walked most of the way around Venice that night, and discovered nothing except that Juan was very unhappy, and in some ways very naive.

‘You all have your loves,’ he said. ‘I have nothing. And no one.’

He had been quite smitten with a girl in the company the year before, but the plague had taken her. I didn’t think of Juan as inexperienced; he had been a year or more with the companies, and two years with the order. But before that, he’d been raised mostly by religion, and as we slopped our way from bridge to bridge in the icy rain and fog of a Venetian winter night, I heard a great deal about growing to manhood in a Spanish monastery.

Ascetic monks, fanatical monks, and sexually predatory monks in equal doses; an automatic hatred of all things Moslem, and a healthy dose of pride and the fear of his true parentage, his bastardy — itself a sin.

I had known him eighteen months, and I truly had no idea. Until that night, he had always seemed young, courteous, a fine blade and a virtuous man. But the thin ice of virtue sat atop a steaming pile of dung: mistreatment, abuse, and two busy, arrogant parents pursuing worldly careers — a knight of the order and an abbess, neither interested in acknowledging a child.

Fiore proved himself as a friend that night, not that he needed to prove himself to me. But he listened, and in the end it was our ability to listen rather than speak that measured our friendship and worked what healing there was. Juan vomited his childhood like a man spewing bad wine, and we listened.

‘‘I’m not fit to be a knight,’ he said in the grim first light of day. A tailless cat rubbed against our boots, sensing a trio of soft touches who might provide food.

Aha I thought. At last we are to the essential wound. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. He was sobering up. ‘No one is worthy of knighthood. Think of all the bad men who are priests.’

Juan looked at Fiore.

Fiore looked at me.

‘None of us is Galahad,’ I said, all too conscious that I had just returned from a day spent with Emile.

‘I am afraid, all the time!’ Juan said.

‘So am I,’ I said.

Fiore looked at me across the back of Juan’s head and raised his eyebrows. Well, I suspect that Fiore was so very much himself that he was not afraid most of the time.

We walked Juan around and fed him a little more wine, and by the time the cocks were crowing on the islands, we undressed him and put him in bed.

Nerio had one of the grocer’s daughters in his room, I discovered, and she emerged, shy but triumphant, to display her cooking skills.

Triumphant, and certain her mother would never catch her.

Nerio grinned with masculine accomplishment. Anna was, in fact, very pretty, with a round face and dark curls that were, I think, genuine and not the product of fiddling with an iron, and they had certainly survived a night’s athletic entertainment with Nerio.

She began to heat milk for us to break our fasts, and Nerio and Fiore sat with Miles at the table. Miles looked distant, as if he was pretending not to be there at all. Fiore was untroubled. He was repairing a shirt.

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 Mezzieres. But none of them were overtly rude; Monsieur de Mezzieres 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, Bremond de la Voulte, who was serving King Peter as a volunteer with ten men-at-arms. Bremond 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 Bremond 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 Bremond, 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-Francois 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 Bremond. 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-Francois 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 assume 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-Francois, Bernard, Ser Bremond 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.

‘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 Maitre 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 yourself,’ 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 podesta 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 armour 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 podesta’s horse was nervous. It was the smell of blood that was worrying the animal: the podesta’s men-at-arms had killed a dozen of the beggars. Just behind the podesta, 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 podesta. 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 podesta 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 podesta, two more beggars tried to run to safety behind us, risking our warhorse’s legs to get away from the podesta’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.

The leper got away — no one likes to catch a leper — but the mite was trapped by the man with the bloody mace. He caught the little man in the corner where two warehouses came together in a jumble of garbage and old roofing, and he grinned.

‘Watch this, messieurs!’ he shouted with glee, and the mace rose-

Fiore stripped it out of his hand. His horse pranced out of our line, he flowed through the other mounted man and dumped him in the gutter and backed his horse to our line before the podesta’s men, still milling about like a stag hunt at the kill, could react.

The podesta’s face grew red-purple. He pointed at Fiore. ‘Arrest that-’

I put a hand on his reins. ‘It is bad manners to attack people during Mass, my lord. You have just attacked these poor people while the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Ambassador of the King of Jerusalem, was saying Mass.’ While in my head I applauded Fiore’s action, I would have traded the life of a beggar for a little peace.

The podesta opened his mouth. Some men despise anything that brooks their authority and this was one such. He didn’t hate me as a Milanese or as the podesta — he just hated me for not cringing.

‘We are knight-volunteers of the Order of St John, if you are too fucking ignorant of the habit of the Order to know.’ I’d had it with trying to be polite. ‘Unless you want to see your whole city under interdict, kindly clear the way.’

The podesta glared at me, but short of ordering his men to attack mine, there wasn’t much he could do.

The man-at-arms in the mud got to his feet cursing. He stomped to his horse and called to Fiore, ‘I’ll know you again, fuckhead!’

Nerio laughed. ‘And we will know you by the smell.’ His contempt was beautiful. It hurt the podesta’s thugs more than our blows might have.

And I was sure that we could take them. Just at that moment, I would cheerfully have made the streets of Genoa run with their blood.

Sometimes I think I am the wrong man to command an escort for a living saint.

On the other hand, we got to our inn alive.

I had nothing to do with the negotiations, which is probably for the best. I had developed an instant contempt for Genoa and I’ve never changed my mind.

Everywhere in Genoa, there are slaves. In Venice there are a few, mostly Moslems. In Genoa, there are thousands. They displace the working poor — anyone of any power has slaves, not servants. Men have slave mistresses and when the slave woman bears children to the master, they are also slaves. Our innkeeper told his wife that every time he fucked their servants, he was making them money.

Need I go on? Slavery rotted their families, undermined their morals, and made them petty tyrants. To say nothing of the sins it engendered in the slaves themselves. I have seen slavery in many places — God knows that Moslems themselves will enslave anything that moves — but a Christian slave in Egypt has every possibility of freeing himself by work and is protected by laws even as a slave.

Bah! I’ve been told that it is worse elsewhere, and that my hatred of the Genoese is as foolish as any other hate. Perhaps. But I hate them the way most Englishmen hate the French — they are a nation of slavers and tyrants, with the morals of merchants and the courage of assassins. False, treacherous, cunning without wisdom, vulgar in display, ignorant, utterly without honour!

You can see why it was best I had nothing to do with negotiations.

The legate met with their senators for eight days. During those eight days, we guarded our inn and fought the podesta’s men.

They never stopped coming at us. Their honour, or whatever honour they felt they had after careers attacking the weak, had been threatened, and every man-at-arms on the city payroll made it his business to gather near our inn and make comments. By the fifth day we were threatened with outright attack.

The innkeeper wept and wrung his hands and said they’d burn the inn. I distrusted him utterly, and while I was off escorting Father Pierre, Sabraham knocked him on the head and locked him in the basement.

After that, we were under siege. The difficult part was getting the legate through the streets to the palace each day. Sabraham and his men scouted routes every night, after dark, and I began to go out with the man; he clearly knew things I didn’t, and I was eager to learn.

I learned a great deal about roofs, and how to climb them; about ambush sites in a city, and about stealth.

And about ruthlessness.

I think it was the fifth night; we were prowling near the market, looking for a safer route to get the legate to the northern part of the city. I climbed across a board that had been left over an alley by one of Sabraham’s men, got my feet under me — heights are not my best thing — to find one of Sabraham’s soldiers, Maurice, cutting a man’s throat. The man died hard — terrified, pissing himself, with a look of horrified unbelief on his face.

‘Thief?’ I asked.

Sabraham spread his hands. The motion said more clearly than words that Sabraham didn’t care a damn who the man was. ‘We cannot be observed,’ he said.

Later, as we went up the corbels of a church with a rope, Sabraham said ‘One of the podesta’s men.’

On the sixth day, we got the legate through the streets by misdirection, using Sister Marie’s apprentice as our bait. The French monk was hit with a rock and brought back unconscious. I’d been with him, as part of the misdirection, and my beautiful surcoat was smeared in excrement.

By mid-afternoon, they were all around our inn, and threatening to burn it. The arsonists were the podesta’s men, of course — responsible for keeping order.

We were all in full harness. Juan was with the legate, as was his new squire, a Catalan boy of good family, who had relatives in Athens. Nerio had found him for Juan, but that’s another story.

Sabraham was out with his killers, and I had Nerio and Fiore and Marc-Antonio and Alessandro and a dozen unarmed clerics to protect.

We’d shuttered the windows. The yard was defensible, but we needed a garrison twice the numbers we had.

‘What can we do?’ Marc-Antonio asked. He was in his breast and back, formerly my armour, now his. He’d lost so much weight that he could fit my old harness. I was in my new stuff.

Nerio was, for once, at a loss and we could hear them clamouring outside.

‘They burn the inn, and then what?’ Fiore said.

‘Then there’s no one to defend the legate. They invite him to stay at the palace. He sickens and dies.’ I shrugged. That was Sabraham’s scenario.

Nerio’s eyes met mine.

‘Anyone you can buy?’ I asked.

He smiled. ‘I wish. This is Genoa. They hate Florence.’

‘And they hate the Church,’ I added. ‘At least, the Guelfs do, and they seem to be in power right now.’

A window broke.

I had a moment of clarity. I asked myself how John Hawkwood would deal with the situation, and the whole thing revealed itself to me. It unrolled like a carpet.

It may have been the first pickaxe of the first pioneer undermining my devotion to the order, but at the time-

‘I have it. Are you with me, gentlemen? It won’t be nice.’ I looked around. ‘It is a routier’s solution.’

Fiore grinned.

Ser Nerio laughed aloud. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve about had it with doing the right thing.’

I went out the main gate of the inn with one of the matron’s caps tied to a roasting spit. Fiore was at my shoulder, looking humble, and Sister Marie followed us, demure and harmless.

We were mocked, and yet, in the process of telling us that we were sons of whores and mere children and various forms of sexual deviants, our tormentors emerged from their cover. I knew the man across the street immediately, and so did Fiore — the whoreson Fiore had dropped in the muck.

I leaned out. ‘Send someone to talk!’ I roared.

Whoreson laughed. ‘Come out and surrender.’

I shook my head. ‘I have priests and nuns here. Tell us what you want.’

Whoreson swaggered towards me, master of the situation, and slapped his gauntleted hand against his cuisse. ‘What I want is that catamite right there!’ He stepped to the right to get a better view of Fiore, ignoring Sister Marie.

She tripped him, Fiore slammed a fist into his head, and we had him. But I wanted more, and I took a long stride into the confused rabble, kicked a man in the knee, got a hand under his aventail and dragged him back.

Fiore put Whoreson on the ground with a knife-tip at his temple.

Now the little square in front of the inn gate was as silent as a tomb. I pushed my prisoner through the gate and Nerio slammed him into the gatepost and then dropped him.

‘Go away,’ I shouted. ‘Or come at us, and see what happens.’

Naturally, I said nothing of all this to Father Pierre, but there was no hiding the two men bound to chairs in the common room.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Let them go. I have what I came for. I would like to leave as soon as possible.’

I pushed them out the gate with good humour. They had heard nothing of our planning, and we were free to go. Sabraham and I had made a plan — not an elaborate plan, but one that would have appealed to every routier I knew — in the kitchen.

Back with the legate, I said, ‘No dinner at the guildhall? No solemn Mass to mark the occasion?’

Father Pierre looked away. He was shattered; I could see his eyes full of tears. I had missed the signs, and I was frightened. You have to understand, he was a pillar, a tower. I don’t think I had ever seen him so used up, and so unhappy.

‘I have paid a high price for the crusade,’ he said. ‘These men …’ His eyes met mine. He was struggling against saying what he felt. Father Pierre’s lapses of hot-blooded humanity were both a relief to us — and a terror. But he knelt down on the inn floor and prayed for guidance, and then he rose. ‘Let us leave this place,’ he said.

I found Nicolas Sabraham looking at me from the kitchen door.

We smiled at each other.

Our smug self-assurance lasted as long as it took to draw a breath, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.

Marc-Antonio ran for the stairs, but he was too late.

The innkeeper had escaped.

I was the third man into his room, and I instantly realised two things — that his room was over the kitchen, and that someone had unlocked his shutter. There was no other way he could have got out the window.

He’d jumped on to the stable roof and then was gone.

‘I think he knows what we plan,’ I said to Sabraham.

He frowned. ‘If we’re quick-’

‘True as the cross,’ I said.

It took long minutes to get the horses saddled. Sabraham and his men went out the back of the tavern. We’d lost our hostages and our plan was betrayed — someone had let the innkeeper go. Who?

Before the legate’s horse was out in the yard, I could see men in harness moving in the alleys.

But I had two cards to play, as well. No, to be fair, Sabraham had the cards.

In Genoa, every free man has a crossbow. It is their favourite weapon; silent, mechanical, good at sea or on land. Every free man from Monaco to Liguria has one, and my greatest fear was a storm of bolts. It was evening in winter, already full dark. That had to cut the odds a little.

And the podesta’s men were overawed. They gave us space, and they were not well-organised. I’m going to guess that their Milanese master didn’t trust his lieutenants, so, as he could not appear himself, they were rudderless.

The quarter hour struck in the neighbourhood church. We had ten mules with all the legate’s goods, mostly desks and a portable altar and other necessaries.

We kept the gate closed.

Father Pierre looked at me. His face was pale and he was deeply unhappy.

‘I must ask you what you have been driven to do,’ he said.

As if in answer, the first part of Sabraham’s plan came to fruition. Down on the docks, a warehouse burst into flame.

Bah. Arson has an ugly name, but war without fire is like sausage without mustard, eh?

The same free citizens who own all the crossbows are the same men who fight the fires — and own the cloth. They left us, if they’d ever been watching us, and ran to fight the fire on their waterfront.

We opened the gate to the inn and started through the streets.

The podesta’s men didn’t fight the fires. They were still out there, and the innkeeper had spoiled our surprise for them. We’d planned to start a nice little riot between the local Guelfs and Ghibbelines, but the podesta got there first, or so a panting Sabraham reported to me as we cut north.

It was Verona all over again, except that I had my doubts that we’d be allowed out the gate.

Two streets north of the cathedral, we had our first fight. A mounted fight in the dark is no joy at all — the noise of the steel-shod hooves on the cobbles is so loud that you cannot hear commands, or screams, and the sparks from the horseshoes and the swords give the whole thing a hellish feeling. We were hampered by a long tale of mules and non-combatants. Our opponents were not hampered by the least notion of honour, as they demonstrated by killing Father Hector at the first encounter — a priest, and he unarmed.

The second attack occurred a few streets from the northern gate. Of course, by then, my legate and most of his people were gone. Fiore took them to the left suddenly, so that the legate would not know that we’d divided our efforts in the darkness. I was willing to lose a few priests and deacons, to be sure.

I had a few second’s warning as my opponent’s horse caught a lantern’s light and I felt the vibration as he charged.

I killed his horse.

It’s not done in polite circles, and I’m sure it is the last thing the bastard expected from a knight of the order, but I was down to the training that lets a man survive the hell of France. I put the Emperor’s sword through the horse’s head and down he went. The rider behind him tangled with the first man’s dying mount, and I was backing. I gave them a moment, and then I attacked. I think I killed them both — I certainly left some marks. This in an alley so narrow I couldn’t turn Jacques. But a good horse is the best weapon; I backed all the way to the mouth of the alley even as crossbow bolts began to rattle against the stone walls.

The whole time I had been fighting, Ser Nerio had taken the rest of our feint, our pretend convoy, north to the wall. I saw motion in the right direction — my visor was down, and when your visor is down at night, you almost might as well close your eyes.

But I’d bought time.

I had bought time, but when I turned Jacques, I’d lost my bearings. One scout, even with someone as professional as Sabraham, is not enough to ensure real knowledge. I got the visor open — my new helmet had a wonderful visor.

Nothing. Except that my foes in the alley were coming, and a crossbow bolt — thanks to God, some of its force spent against the alley wall — slammed into my shoulder and ripped the pauldron away.

There were armoured men on horse coming from behind me.

Time to go I said to myself. I picked a direction and put Jacques at it.

It must have been the wrong direction. Or rather, not the direction that Nerio and Marc-Antonio and the Italian Carmelite had taken, but I was too desperate to care over much. I rode as fast as the alleys and streets would allow. Once I burst through a crowd of footmen — for all I know they were innocents just out of vespers, but I was through them and into the mouth of another street.

It was only when I emerged into the central square that I realised where I was, and how desperate my cause had become. I was almost a mile from our gate and I had a good idea what capture would mean.

A dozen of the podesta’s men-at-arms burst from another street, fifty paces away. They weren’t chasing me, unless they could see in the dark like cats.

Off to my left, by the cathedral, I heard a war cry.

The podesta’s men reined in.

I had no idea what was going on, but I sat on my horse, letting poor Jacques draw a breath while I did the same. Under my very eyes, two groups of footmen rushed each other with clubs and swords. In less time than it takes to tell it, a man was down, another lost his hand, and the first group broke and ran for the cathedral, hotly pursued.

I had my bearings. I turned my horse, picked the archway that looked right in the shadows, and trotted poor Jacques up a narrow street that turned twice before running almost straight uphill. We went up and up, the houses growing narrower and more crowded, and twice I had a glimpse of the gate towers in the moonlight. I stopped in front of a fountain — really, no more than a spring in the naked rock — and let Jacques drink, but not for long. I couldn’t let him get a cramp in the middle of this.

I heard shouts, muffled by my helmet liner. I backed Jacques. It may sound foolish, but you can hide a warhorse and a knight around a corner, at least in the dark. Two men fled past me, on horseback. They could have been the Pope and Father Pierre for all I saw of them, and then they were gone, their hoof beats ringing like the sound of hammers on anvils.

I went the other way, up the hill and around one last corner-

There was an open square in front of the gate, no wider than a bowling green. Men were fighting.

None of them were mine.

Far below me in the dockyards was a red glow where the fire still burned.

It illuminated Genoa with the sort of flickering red that monks and nuns put into manuscript pictures of Hell, and made the armour of the men fighting in the little square seem as if made of liquid metal.

I consoled myself that in the dark they were all Genoese, and put Jacques at the gate. It was open — I could see the lower tips of the portcullis drawn up above us. Jacque’s hooves slammed into soft flesh and hard armour and we were through the square and out the gate, and I was uninjured.

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.

After ten more minutes of his fidgeting Emile raised an eyebrow.

‘Have you no conversation, Ser Fiore?’ she asked, a little too bluntly, I fear.

Fiore recoiled in fear. He stammered, and retreated, a man who was unbeatable with a sword, worsted in moments by a beautiful woman.

The last visitor in the rotation was Juan.

Seeing Juan was somehow very like seeing Emile — or like wearing your best old shirt, the one that fits perfectly and is worn to uniform comfort. He did not hem or haw, he did not stammer, nor preen.

‘Your lady is very beautiful,’ he said, sitting on my bed. His Catalan accent made his French charming.

Emile flushed, which made me love Juan for ever.

He leaned over me. ‘I have prepared a complete chronicle of our lives without you,’ he said with the tone, the exact tone, of the old priest who read to us during meals in the commanderie of Avignon.

Emile smiled. ‘I must feed Isabelle,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me, gentlemen.’ She curtseyed, and Juan bowed graciously. Emile reached out and touched my hand, and departed.

Juan watched her go. ‘Par dieu,’ he said and grinned at me. ‘Let me see … where was I? Ah, Nerio Acciaioli has taken a new mistress! And she, defying convention, is young and beautiful!’

I must have snorted.

‘He has also managed to forget her name only once,’ Juan went on, ‘and — well, no more should be said.’ He pretended to roll up a scroll and toss it over his shoulder. ‘We leave aside the hunts, the ridings abroad, the secret visits, and the new clothes as of no interest.’ He mimed the opening of a second scroll. ‘Ser Fiore has stunned the company by spending his days, not in frivolous conversation, but in the practice of arms. Suddenly this appears to be his consuming passion.’ He went on until I was convulsed with laughter, the knitting bones of my ribs grating together until tears came to my eyes and suddenly he was holding both my hands.

‘Oh, my friend, I’m so sorry!’ He shook his head. ‘In truth, I’m bored to death without you. Hurry and get well — we’ll ride abroad, slaughter your enemies and …’ he laughed, ‘and doubtless borrow money from Nerio. Is it true? That it was the fine lady’s husband?’

I wheezed. But some secrets were not mine. I shook my head.

He shook his. ‘I think you are a liar. Listen, if you die, we will rip off his balls and make him eat them. We have sworn it.’ He leaned close. ‘They say he is at Mestre, with the army. We’ll kill him, yes?’

This from one of my brothers in the order. Juan was always my favourite.

I wish I had told him so.

A beautiful pair of galleys were fitting out across a narrow arm of the lagoon. Because I watched them every day, I learned a great deal.

Listen, much of the rest of this story is tied up in ships. I grew to manhood in London, with one foot in the sea, and yet I knew almost nothing of its ways. I had been to sea; I’ve crossed the channel a hundred times in everything from the royal flagship to various fishing busses and smugglers with a pair of oars and six sticks that float.

But life as animate cargo does not a sailor make.

Thanks, however, to the old monk Fra Andrea, I learned much of the terminology from the comfort of my bed. I learned that the two low, sleek predators fitting out across the lagoon from my window at St Katerina’s were galia sottil or ‘light’ galleys. Fra Andrea pointed out that if I rose from my bed and hobbled as far as his rose garden, I could see the massive elegance of a galia grossa towering over the narrow streets of Mazzorbo, the small town on the back side of our island.

The galia sottil was not like any ship I had seen in England. We have galleys — King Edward had a dozen — but they are simpler vessels and built smaller. Even the ordinary galley had twenty ‘banks’ of oars a side. Each bank is in fact a bench, set slightly diagonal to the keel of the ship, where the rowers sit. In a Venetian galley, there are three rowers on a bench, and all of them have oars, but save in the direst emergencies, only two men row at any time, which allows a constant rotation of manpower.

English galleys also lack the apostis, which is a shelf, an outrigger that extends the width of the deck and the corresponding bulwark or fence to allow the oars to sit well out and pivot at just the right distance for the weight and length of the oar. In English galleys, without an apostis, the rower can never balance his oar, and has to use his main strength at all times just to support the weight. Fra Andrea told me that the apostis was a new invention. Fra Peter told me later that it had been well known in antiquity and was rediscovered by Petrarch, cementing the serenissima’s love of that difficult gentleman.

I say difficult, because as I improved, he came to visit me, not once but several times. Each time he would sit and read to me, which was a delight — but he would cast Emile out of the room. He was, apparently, no lover of children, or bright sunlight, or strong red wine, or Ser Fiore, with whom he had a quarrel, sotto voce, down the hall from my cell.

He read to me from an Historia he was composing, which was quite brilliant, called, I think, De Viris Illustribus. It cheered me to hear tales of heroism from the past; nor were his tales of patience rewarded lost on me. And who does not take pleasure from having one of the lights of the age wait upon you? He must have come ten times, and when he came with Philippe de Mezzieres, I discovered that it was the Cypriote chancellor who had arranged for him to come. When spring made the lagoon easier to navigate, de Mezzieres came with an equerry.

De Mezzieres sat stiffly; the sun was shining on a Venetian April, and the nuns were singing and I was allowed to sit in the garden. His equerry looked familiar — a strikingly handsome man in a plain dark jupon.

‘I have heard a great deal about you since Krakow,’ he said carefully.

Emile was sitting by me, doing embroidery. We had not so much as touched, except perhaps as she adjusted a pillow, in three months, and yet we knew each other better, I think, than we ever had. One of our jokes was that she, who had spurned embroidery utterly in her youth for the pleasures of flirtation, was now growing quite accomplished at it while other women walked the same path in the opposite direction.

At any rate, I looked at her, and met her eye as she bit a thread. She glanced at the equerry, looked back at me, and winked.

‘I confess to having taken a deep dislike to you, and having been mistaken,’ de Mezzieres said. I was still smiling at Emile’s wink, and de Mezzieres’ words wiped the smile off my face.

But I had managed five minutes with a waster that day, and had not flinched even when Fiore struck my hand. I had Emile to watch and smile with and all was right with the world. So I rose — I was much stronger by April — and bowed. ‘I suppose it was the manner of my knighting,’ I said. I could remember clearly his face when I related my battlefield dubbing.

He frowned. ‘Not at all, far from it. I was made knight on the battlefield myself, at Smyrna.’ He shrugged. ‘My father could never have afforded to have me knighted.’

He smiled, his eyes on some event far in the past. Then they focused on me.

‘You killed de Charny,’ he said. ‘He was my friend — my mentor.’ His eyes were like daggers, like the blows of my tormentors. ‘He made me a knight.’

Well.

Emile shifted, put her work aside, and stood. ‘Gentlemen …’ she said. She was a noblewomen and she’d had a lifetime of listening to men start the dance that leads to blood. She knew exactly how the opening notes sounded.

‘He was a great knight,’ I said. ‘I met him in London during the peace, when he was a prisoner.’

De Mezzieres shrugged. ‘I would have been in the Holy Land, I fear.’

‘He was kind to me when I was a shop boy. In fact, he encouraged me to — to be a knight.’ Just thinking of it made my voice tremble.

I know men who flinch from steel, and others from memories of steel. I am not one to carry the bad dreams, I have not been so cursed. But that day, in the spring sun in the rose garden, speaking of the great Sieur de Charny conjured him, and there he was, killing my knight, Sir Edward, with a single blow of his spear. Every muscle in my neck and back tensed.

‘Tell me of his end,’ de Mezzieres said.

I told it simply. ‘There were many of us, squires, mostly. The Gascons and some English knights were trying to take the king — King John of France.’ I frowned. ‘The English were all fighting to take the richest ransoms, and the French …’ I shrugged.

Emile looked away.

She was a Frenchwoman to her finger’s ends. Janet is, too — talk of Poitiers and they bridle. But to be fair, Emile lost a brother in the red-washed mud, and Janet lost two uncles.

‘Monsieur de Charny had the Oriflamme.’ Well, I told it as I’ve told you: I got him around the knees and helped bring him down.

De Mezzieres locked his eyes in mine. ‘Is that how you would want to die?’ he asked.

Now I took a breath. ‘On a stricken field, with my sovereign’s banner in my fist, feared by every foe and loved by every knight? Taking twenty men with me?’ I grinned, and for a moment, I was not a man who had been beaten to a pulp by brigands. I was Sir William Gold. ‘By God, sir, give me such a death and I will embrace it.’

De Mezzieres rose and bowed. ‘I mistook you for another kind of man entirely. The king, who is your admirer — and I — pray daily for your recovery.’ He glanced at his squire, who grinned.

Now we were all standing. ‘I would rather not have killed him,’ I said. ‘I can only say that he would not let himself be taken.’

De Mezzieres looked away. ‘No. He would not.’

Emile put a hand on his arm, her face still full of concern. ‘Please, the waiting has gone on so long. What of the crusade?’

De Mezzieres frowned.

Emile smiled at me. ‘I think we could all sit,’ she said. The squire, a bold rascal, smiled with her.

We sat again. De Mezzieres had so much dignity that he found sitting difficult. His back was so straight it never touched the back of the wooden chair that had been brought for him.

But he sighed, looked at Emile, and shook his head. ‘Genoa has done everything in their power to block this expedition,’ he said. ‘Nor has the Pope been forward, precisely, with the promised money.’

Emile nodded. ‘My chamberlain in Geneva says that the money collected in Savoy will not come here, and that the Green Count and the Savoyards will mount their own crusade.’

De Mezzieres shrugged. ‘The worldly vanity of the great lords is past anything I could ever have imagined. Sometimes I must admire the Turks and the Sultan in Egypt. Islam is not divided as we are. Nevertheless, the issue is money. Genoa has demanded enormous reparations for our supposed faults, and Venice will not loan the king money that will go directly into her rivals coffers for the war we all know is coming.’

‘What war?’ I asked.

De Mezzieres sighed. ‘The war between Venice and Genoa. Next to which, this crusade is but a sideshow.’ He nodded. ‘Few enough of the men-at-arms we raised managed to hang on through the winter and those that did ate their leathers and sold their armour. We will not sail before June, at best. We need money. We need Venice to settle their revolt on Crete. We need to have our own warships repaired, and we need Venice to complete her fleet.’ He waved a hand at the two galia sottil hulls fitting out.

‘June!’ Emile said. ‘I will be a pauper!’

De Mezzieres bowed in his seat. ‘My esteemed lady, the king is already a pauper. This crusade has cost him three years of the complete revenue of his kingdom.’

The equerry sat back, his attitude anything but servile. ‘I didn’t want the job in the first place,’ he said.

I’d guessed, somewhere in the muddle of telling them of de Charny, that the equerry was King Peter incognito. He didn’t have the posture of a squire, and he was too old. But I might have known him — and I didn’t.

Emile had known all along. What did her wink mean?

But King Peter stood and began to walk among the rose bushes. ‘I wanted the Pope to confirm me in my kingdom so that I would not have to deal with Hugh and his claims for the rest of my life.’ He looked at me. ‘And now look — I will be allowed to ruin my kingdom and I’ll involve my subjects in a war they cannot win with the Sultan and his ally Genoa.’

When the king stands, you stand. We were all up again. He looked back. ‘Please sit. I am not really here. Please do not listen, either. I am full of poison today.’

De Mezzieres raised a hand and stepped towards the king. ‘Sire,’ he began.

The king frowned. ‘I know that you desire this thing,’ he said. ‘If I were allowed, I would board the first ship that could float, take my household, and sail for Cyprus, where on arrival I would kiss the ground and would never leave again. Let the Pope and Venice and Genoa have their own wars without me.’

He looked at me. ‘I liked what you said,’ he admitted. ‘I too would die that death.’

‘You are willing enough to fight the Turks, your Grace!’ de Mezzieres said, with an intensity that sounded to me like the remnants of an old argument, often rehashed.

‘The Turks!’ the king said. ‘Not Egypt! Not the Sultan!’

Emile looked confused. ‘Are they different?’

You must remember that most of us in England and in France called the Saracens ‘Turks’ and ‘Hagarenes’ and made little distinction among them.

The king smiled at her. ‘Sweet Emile,’ he said, ‘the Egyptians have the richest port in our ocean, and trade. The Turks are pirates and scoundrels and slavers — the very Genoese of the Moslem world.’

‘Are not all the paynim equally our enemy?’ Emile asked. She glanced at me. I was very glad, just then, to receive her glance. The king’s attitude toward her told me that, at the very least, I had a rival. His visit here, incognito — what was I to think? There are men who can share a woman and other men are happy to share a woman with a king. And perhaps you might say I shared her with her husband, but par dieu, gentles, she hated him as much as I. She did not hate King Peter.

De Mezzieres began to speak, and the king spoke over him. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Only the fools west of Italy think so.’ He frowned. Then he shook his head. ‘I am not myself today. Sir William, are you enjoying Messire Petrarch?’

I bowed. ‘With all my heart, sire,’ I said. ‘But not half as much as I enjoy the company of this lady.’

Just for a moment, I was eye to eye with the King of Cyprus.

So. And so.

I saw him, and I saw her — in one glance.

What I saw filled me with joy.

He frowned, then managed a smile. ‘How fortunate, that you may see her every day!’ he said, with forced chivalry. ‘And how fortunate for us all that her husband keeps his distance. What a fool he must be,’ the king said.

She looked away.

Thanks to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, it was then that the bells rang for Mass.

The knowledge that the King of Jerusalem was my rival for Emile put something into me that had been beaten out. And perhaps to the power of adulterous love might be added some excitement for the crusade. I had been sure, until de Mezzieres came, that the ships would sail without me. Easter saw me just able to go to Mass and return to my room without fainting, to swagger blunt swords with Fiore for a few minutes.

But after de Mezzieres’ visit — and the king’s, of course — I began to gain ground.

Fra Andrea must have granted some permission or other, too, because suddenly all my friends were there. Miles Stapleton came and taught me to play chess — which is to say that I had played chess, but Miles taught me to play well. And he taught Emile as well. No man I ever met did aught but enjoy her company, and she was full of life that spring.

Ser Nerio came so often that I suspected him of a liaison with a novice or a nun; nor was I alone in my suspicions.

Juan came with Fiore. In fact, they all came together after a few scouting missions. They would sit in the nun’s parlour, and they would join Emile’s men-at-arms behind the convent where the novices and the servants hung the laundry, and we would fence. As I grew stronger, I would wrestle, box, try a spear or a staff.

I remember one golden day, late April, I think, perhaps the fourth Sunday after Easter. I hit Fiore with a spear thrust after a cavazione — a feint. He laughed, although he’d have a bruise. He thrust back at me, and I made my cover — and he pushed it aside and ran the pole-end into my gut.

As I picked myself up, I whined.

‘I suppose I’ll never be the knight I was,’ I said. I was cursedly weak.

Fiore grinned. ‘You will be my thesis,’ he said.

Perhaps it was that night, or the next. The Abbess of St Katherine had delivered an ultimatum and an offer, and we took dinner together with the handful of monks who had their own dormitory.

The Abbess had offered my friends free passage into her kingdom, in exchange for nothing but their words of honour that they would not outrage, seduce, charm, or even flirt with her charges.

Ser Nerio drank off a glass of a local wine and raised an eyebrow. ‘I would be giving up a great deal,’ he said.

Miles Stapleton raised his eyes and sighed. ‘We are soldiers of Christ, not seducers.’

Nerio ruffled Stapleton’s hair, which the younger man hated. ‘No one seduces a novice,’ he said. ‘You lie back and let them seduce you.’

Juan blushed. ‘I would very much like to — to help Guillermo to make his recovery.’

Nerio sighed theatrically. ‘Well, I will prove that I’m the best knight among us by making my knee bend to the Tigress. Although I suspect I’m the only one making any real sacrifice.’ He leaned over. ‘You don’t suppose she just needs a good fuck herself?’

Fra Andrea laughed aloud. ‘You are brave,’ he said. ‘Listen, young pup. Go suggest it to her. I will stand here and take wagers on how long you live.’

Nerio’s sense of his own place in the world did not accept much derision. ‘I’m sure I can outlast the old witch.’

Fra Andrea shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen anyone slain by raw scorn, but I imagine that it desiccates the corpse.’ The other monks were laughing. Nerio frowned.

Nerio did not like to be told ‘no’.

I think it was that same evening that Juan was complimenting me on how well I was recovering. I shrugged off the praise: I did not want their pity and Fiore laughed.

‘I am making you anew,’ he said.

‘How so?’ I asked. ‘Teaching me not to flinch?’

‘Teaching you everything. Listen, every swordsman is a blob, a sticky mass of all his own flaws and all the bad teaching of his masters and the injuries he has and all the errors of thought and decision and control. Even I am riddled with these flaws.’

‘Even you?’ Nerio quipped. ‘I can’t imagine that you have any flaws.’

‘Yes, I admit it is difficult to imagine,’ Fiore said without so much as a smile. ‘Yet I have them. Nerio leans forward when he is excited, Juan stamps his foot like a small boy, Miles bears the marks of a noble upbringing, and has a tell which guarantees that he will never, ever hit me until he rids himself of that foul error. I could name others, gentlemen. Dozens. In the end, we are a bundle of flaws.’

‘Man is but a fleshy doll packed full of sin,’ Fra Andrea said.

Fiore shrugged. ‘Sin is not my business,’ he said. ‘But with William, his misfortune will be his fortune. The men who broke him changed his body. Fra Andrea and I have brought him back from the dead like Lazarus, with better training.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Nerio said. ‘You mean to say Sir William will be without sin?’ He grinned at me.

‘I would like to be stronger than Emile’s daughter, however,’ I said. ‘Right now, I would lose a tug-of-war with a kitten.’

Fiore just looked smug. ‘I am making of you my thesis,’ he said again. ‘And tomorrow we start in earnest.’

By Saint George, the Friulian meant what he said.

Every day except the Sabbath, the nun’s laundry yard rang with the sound of blades. We ran around the island; we fought with sticks and clubs and blades; we fenced with sharp blades. I swung at a pell and boxed with my shadow and sometimes I did this while Fiore lay full length on the wall. Once, I remember that he went to sleep while I was jumping like some antic mime.

I would like to say that he, as the master of the blade, never took his eyes off me, but he was human. And the novices began to congregate in the laundry yard. They would wash their hair and dry it in the new sun; they would wash laundry outside, and they would raise their hands above their heads and stretch to the heavens — I swear there is something in what Nerio said.

I have known many worthy women with a deep passion for the calling, and a real profession. But in Venice, many a penniless younger daughter was forced into the order at Saint Katherine; many a wayward young thing was sent to the island until her scandal was no longer a nine-day wonder among the canals. Or to have her baby.

At any rate, I was not allowed to pause and wonder at the lilies of the field, nor to appreciate the cleanliness of their linen. I was driven until I could not hold myself up. I couldn’t have managed fornication if Aphrodite had risen from the waves at my feet or if Emile had pulled her gown over her head and leapt upon me. I was exercised all day — my hands, my feet, the placement of my feet, my shoulders, my posture. It was endless, like some sort of torment in hell.

And as endlessly corrected — my posture, my feet, the way in which I stepped, the distance I stepped, and angle of my toes. Nay! I am not enlarging! Fiore was insistent on the way in which my feet pointed, and for five long days I wore a rope between my feet to limit my stride to a particular length.

I didn’t argue.

Because I assumed that Emile was watching.

Perhaps she was and perhaps she wasn’t. But I assumed that she was, and I know she did, from time to time. I knew, too, that I was in a struggle for her esteem — at least — with the King of Jerusalem. Rumour had it that he loved his wife, and that she was less than faithful to him and that he, too, was a lovesome man and had lovers in revenge.

He was a king, and not used to being gainsaid. He came at least once a week, and each time he would work to be alone with Emile.

Each time, she would thwart him, usually with me.

And despite this or, by God, because of it, I came to admire him. He was a fine man, and he accepted his lot as commander of the crusade with a humility that I admired. He loved Father Pierre as much as any of us and he admired Emile.

Perhaps you gentlemen would have me hate him as my rival, but is that the way of a knight? We admired the same woman, because she was made to be admired. In beauty and in courage she had no peer and it would have been as unjust to hate the king because he loved Father Pierre.

At any rate, it is because of our unspoken rivalry for the Countess d’Herblay that I began to be included in the king’s private council.

At the end of April, we had word from Genoa that they had agreed to the stipulations signed by Father Pierre in January and that the indemnity, a grotesque payment from Cyprus to Genoa for alleged injuries, had been paid.

The king, in concert with Father Pierre, set a sailing date and a rendezvous off Rhodes, where the Order had its headquarters.

As the Venetians made their final preparations, so I was stronger and stronger, and so I had to face my poverty.

I had neither horse nor arms. In fact, I didn’t even own a sword. The crusade was a month from making sail, and I lacked the tools of my trade.

My first rescuer was my Bohemian armourer. I went to him and he fitted me for another complete harness; not, I am saddened to say, as pretty as the first one, now broken up among thugs. But pretty enough.

I wrote him a bill, promising payment even in the event of my death, but after a few days, I took the note to Nerio, sat him down with wine in his hand, and asked for a loan.

He read my note of hand to Master Jiri and sneered. ‘You are a fool, Sir Knight. How often have I told you that I can loan you money?’ He shrugged.

‘If I die on crusade-’ I said.

‘Pah! I’ve taken worse risks with dice. Here is a note on our house for a thousand ducats — let us hear no more!’ He waved at me airily.

A thousand ducats!

‘Could you purchase us a ship?’ I asked.

Ser Nerio leaned back. His eyes were already on a fetching young woman with carmine lips who wore the red dress of her profession very tight indeed. We were in the wine-arcade by the Grand Canal.

‘Oh, brother in arms, I have done better. The Corner family has built and manned a warship-a new galia grossa. They intend to put her in the pilgrim trade after we take Jerusalem.’ He shrugged. ‘Whether we take Jerusalem or not, I suspect.’ His eyes flashed, and the scarlet girl began to make her way towards us.

Now that he had her, Nerio turned back to me. ‘We will be aboard that ship, and not stacked in the hold, either. The Corners almost worship you. And they are fond of money.’

The scarlet girl came and put her hands on his shoulders. I smiled at him. ‘Have you ever been in love?’ I asked.

Nerio smiled. ‘Every hour, brother.’

I paid Jiri in full. He loaned me a sword and a dagger — good plain work from Germany.

Fra Ricardo — less close-mouthed about the sins of others then Fra Peter — had let me know that it was King Peter who was keeping the Count d’Herblay ten miles from his wife. ‘He has libelled the Count to the Doge,’ Fra Ricardo said with a disapproving frown, ‘so that to the sin of adultery he adds the sin of bearing false witness.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Gossip links your name with hers as well. No good will come of your attachment to such a woman.’

‘I hold the Countess d’Herblay in the highest esteem as a true lady.’ I met his eye. The beating had changed more than just my face. ‘The Count d’Herblay is a coward, a poltroon, and an enemy of Father Pierre and the crusade.’

Fra Ricardo was not a worldly man, but he was no fool and he fair worshipped Father Pierre. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Is he so?’

‘The lady brought us six knights and is eager to go to Jerusalem,’ I said.

‘Going to Jerusalem …’ mused Fra Ricardo. In Venice, the phrase ‘going to Jerusalem’ suggested the accomplishment of an impossible task — or perhaps living in a dream world.

‘The count had me beaten,’ I said.

Fra Ricardo pursed his lips. ‘Very well, William,’ he said. ‘The legate wishes to see you.’

Tired in spirit and injured in body, I went to see the legate. He was sitting in his own scriptorium, at a table covered in scrolls. Sister Marie sat by him on a stool.

He looked up and smiled warmly. ‘My son,’ he said. He rose and I knelt, and he blessed me.

Then he scared me by sending Sister Marie from the room.

‘William,’ he said. ‘For as long as I have known you, your name has been paired with this woman’s. This Emile d’Herblay.’

I looked away.

‘Fra Peter has told me about the count.’ Father Pierre’s eyes were kind. But not deceived. ‘I forbid you to avenge yourself on him.’

I might have choked.

‘You, my son, have sinned against him — and his marriage.’ His eyes bored into mine. ‘I’m told he is a bad man. Does that justify your actions?’

‘He serves your enemy!’ I said.

Father Pierre shook his head impatiently. ‘I have no enemies,’ he said. ‘I serve only Christ. I am not important enough to have enemies.’

‘Robert of Geneva seeks to destroy you and d’Herblay is his tool!’ I said, with some heat.

‘His death would suit you very well,’ Father Pierre said. ‘It is easy to rationalise sin, is it not? I tell you, my well-beloved William — if you kill this man, I will send you away.’

I looked at the floor, the magnificent parquetry floor.

‘I will obey,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Yes. And now,’ he took my hand, ‘I must give my thanks for saving us in Genoa.’

‘Sabraham saved us,’ I said with some asperity. Nothing is worse than to have one’s sins known.

‘Sabraham says that, but for you, we would all have died. I have thanked him anyway. William, saving you from the tree was one of the best days work I’ve ever done.’ He met my eye again, and though he smiled, his eyes were as hard as any killers. ‘Don’t make me send you away.’

A few days after, when the Hungarian horse dealers came to the camp at Mestre to sell warhorses to the men who’d wintered over, I took a barge to the mainland with my friends. I was past needing the convent, but I was utterly unwilling to leave Emile, and I loved it there, to be honest. I played chess with the abbess, who had less use for men than any woman I ever met but seemed nonetheless to like me, and I was swimming with Fra Andrea, and swimming better than I ever had before. And I was learning to enjoy children. I will not fill this annal with tales of parenting, but I spent any time that was allowed with the three of them, and as the spring improved, that became hours every day. Nor did I confine myself to Edouard. Emile’s other children were, I discovered, no less entertaining, nor could the three be separated easily, and as I played with them, I thought of d’Herblay. He was at Mestre, and I was not to kill him.

What a tangle.

At any rate, we went to the camp at Mestre, and after a day with the horse thieves, I chose a fine big bay of indeterminate ancestry. He had been well trained, and that was his greatest selling point. He lacked Jacques’ great heart — and I admit, I walked the lines the first morning, hoping against hope that Jacques had come to Mestre. After all, we had the greatest accumulation of men-at-arms in Europe that spring. Hawkwood, defeated at Cascina, had nonetheless held Pisa together. Pisa had a new tyrant, Lord Agnello, who sounded at least as brutal as the della Scala lord of Verona. All over the rest of Tuscany and Lombardy, the Pope’s Italian war with Milan dwindled away and contracts ended, and the market was flooded with out-of-work men-at-arms and soldiers. Many turned brigand and many came trudging across the late spring roads to the terra firma of Venice, looking for work.

I hoped to catch my enemies there.

But that bastard who took Jacques was not there, and I bought my bay and called him Gawain for my favourite knight of romance. He was a better horse than he looked. In fact, I suspect he was Jacques rival. But at the time I saw him as a poor second for he had none of Jacques beauty.

I missed Jacques. I purchased Gawain.

Having spent an entire day prowling the camp for my foes, on the second day I was off my guard. I had collected Gawain and needed a saddle, preferably used. I was counting my ducats and florins, walking towards the horse market, when I looked up and found the Emperor’s sword, walking along, the scabbard considerably the worse for wear. It hung from a belt a few men in front of me, and the scrofulous fellow wearing it was the same who’d taken it from the pile by the road. I didn’t know him at first — I confess, I wouldn’t have known any of them by sight.

But when he turned to talk to his mate, I knew his voice and the odd, sing-song Gascon-Catalan. I motioned to Marc-Antonio and chased them.

I suppose that I might have gone to the master of the camp, but I had something to prove to myself. Nor could I bear to let them from my sight.

I followed them into the tent lines and pressed closer as they slowed. The shorter man had de Charny’s dagger in his belt. Just beyond him, and to my joy, I saw Juan with Marc-Antonio.

Thank God, I thought about what I was doing. A knight has the right of justice, but justice is not the same as revenge. I knew the one man but not the other; his voice was not the voice of the brigand who took the dagger.

‘Messieurs!’ I called out.

Heads turned for fifty yards, and both men turned to face me.

The man with the sword knew me in an instant.

The other frowned. He had a heavy moustache — an Easterner, I thought. He had a riding whip in his hand, and he pointed it at me and said something.

I didn’t slow. ‘That’s my sword and my dagger,’ I said. Juan was coming from the other direction.

The man with the sword smiled. He didn’t have many teeth. He was old, forty or more, and he had on a worn, padded jupon with the stuffing leaking out. It didn’t go with the Emperor’s sword, although six months of bad care had helped the scabbard to match his style better.

His Hungarian mate was shouting for his friends. Hungarians are easy to spot in a crowd — long hair, sometimes in braids, and nobles wear pearls in their hair.

Every Hungarian in the tent row came at us at a run.

That didn’t slow me, either.

I think my lust for that sword — the completeness of my desire — shut out fear. I should have been afraid. A beating can break a man, and if I wasn’t broken, I was surely bent a long way.

But I saw nothing beyond my gap-toothed adversary. I walked towards him, and he drew his sword and stood there in the sunshine.

Everything seemed to still. Perhaps this is only memory playing tricks on me, but I think the crowd fell silent and the running Hungarians slowed and stopped.

Far off, one woman was singing.

Gap-tooth raised his sword in a poor imitation of the middle guard, posta breva.

The woman’s voice rose.

Three paces away, I drew. My sword swept up from the scabbard even as his fell. Up and up, covering me, and back along the same line, and he fell, dead. I’d slammed his sword out of line, up into the air with my rising stroke and then cut about two inches into his head and ripped the point all the way from his temple to his jaw with my descent, and then continued down into my first guard.

He fell without a cry.

The Hungarian stepped away from the body.

Gap-tooth’s hand twitched and I put my point through his neck into the ground, knelt, and retrieved the Emperor’s sword from his not-quite-dead hand.

At my back, Nerio, Juan, Marc-Antonio, Davide, Miles and Fiore all stood with their blades in their hands. Despite the blood and the flies that began to gather immediately, it is one of my favourite memories: I knew we could not be beaten, not all together.

And I knew I had never been so good.

And I admit, a little revenge can be like a drug.

I pointed the Emperor’s sword at the Hungarian. ‘Monsieur has my dagger,’ I said. ‘I am Sir William Gold, and I can prove my ownership if required.’

My Hungarian untied the dagger from his belt without outward fear or flourish. He bowed and handed it to me. ‘I believe I have just had all the proof any gentleman requires,’ he said in good French. ‘A pity. A fine weapon. I wondered why I had it so cheap.’

I offered to cover his purchase, and he grinned and shouted something in Hungarian, and twenty longhairs faded back into the camp.

‘Perhaps we can discuss a price if we meet again,’ he said.

He walked away, unruffled.

I bent and began to retrieve the scabbard from the dead man’s belt. I know he’d ruined it, but it had a bye knife and a pricker in the scabbard and pretty furniture, and I was sure that Bernard and I could run up a new scabbard on the old wooden core.

So naturally, I was kneeling in the spring mud robbing a corpse when I saw d’Herblay.

Well — the Bourc thought he’d killed me, and now d’Herblay had the same experience.

He recovered well. ‘Satan had given you more lives than a cat,’ he said. He had a dozen of his blue and white men-at-arms with him, and I knew one of them immediately. He was a Gascon and I knew him from my days as a routier, but his name wouldn’t come.

I had the belt undone. The dead man had tied it in a lose knot rather than take the time to buckle it. I rose to my feet.

‘You would know Satan better than I,’ I said. I had the sword in my hand again. And Father Pierre was a long way away.

I’m only human.

The man-at-arms was one of the de Badefols. That’s how I knew him. He took his master’s shoulder.

At my back, I had six of the best swords in the world. And our weapons were all drawn.

D’Herblay’s men closed around him.

‘Now who will be the first to reach Hell, Monsieur le Comte?’ I asked. I began to walk towards them, and all my friends and our squires walked forward with the nonchalance of bloody-minded young men.

The count’s Savoyards and Gascons were not wilting flowers. They were knights. They drew — half a dozen of them — while the others pulled at their master.

He turned and allowed himself to be led away, even as the camp’s marshal appeared.

‘Sheath!’ he roared. ‘Sheath or I’ll fine the lot of you.’

That’s how you control routiers. With fines and money.

Nerio ripped his purse off the hooks on his belt and tossed it at the marshal’s feet.

‘That will cover our fines,’ he said.

It was a fine flourish, but none of us needed to kill Savoyards or Gascons. I wanted d’Herblay, and he was already a bowshot away.

‘Your master has a fine notion of courage,’ I taunted.

Nerio — really, he would have made anyone a bad enemy, leaned past me. ‘Is he a difficult man to follow?’ he called. ‘He moves so fast.’

But the marshal’s men were in half-armour, and had poleaxes. They took up positions between us.

‘Aren’t you the legate’s officer?’ the marshal said to me, incredulous.

I sighed. I had a cooling corpse at my feet and a dead man’s sword in my hand. I bowed. ‘I’m sure this is all a misunderstanding,’ I said.

Nerio laughed. ‘You could be a banker,’ he said.

Sabraham told me later that I should have caught Gap-tooth and held him, put him to the question and handed him to the Venetian authorities. I suppose that might have helped me in my struggle with d’Herblay, with the Bourc, with the Bishop of Geneva.

Sabraham asked me many questions about the Hungarian, too.

Perhaps. But that day, our one blow duel helped me a great deal. And God have mercy on his unshriven soul.

I began to consider what action I might take against d’Herblay. Or rather, I began to consider how exactly I would reach him to kill him.

June. We went to Mestre and practiced unloading the galleys on the beach over the sterns and we practiced fighting from the galleys, and a young Provencal knight fell into the sea and drowned, a warning to us all. If d’Herblay was there, I never saw him.

I went to Mass with my brethren, and I confessed to Father Pierre, who was obviously delighted that I had so little to confess. I was perhaps less delighted; I might pretend that a chaste love for Emile was enough for me, but as my body returned to health, it expressed itself more forcefully than I might have liked. And there is some terrible urge on me, I admit, that after killing the brigand who had my sword, I would have lain with any woman available. It is always thus with me. But a barge from Mestre to a convent is not full of tools of Satan. And an evening chess game with the abbess was surprisingly free of temptation, as well.

At any rate, it can’t have been three days before I was on my knees in the legate’s office at the Doge’s palace, confessing my desire to kill d’Herblay.

After confession, I had a private interview with the legate. It may seem antic that I could go from my knees to a comfortable stool with my confessor, but he was the best priest I ever knew, and even the act of contrition was a shared thing, almost pleasant, despite the shame. At any rate, I sat with him while he wrote out orders, mostly to do with money and the accumulation of supplies for the summer. I learned from him that we still did not have a particular target for the crusade.

‘How do we make a war whose intention is the triumph of the Prince of Peace?’ he asked.

I confess that I had no answer to that.

When the business of my interview — the ordering of the volunteers — was done, the legate took off his spectacles. These were round, horn rimmed devices of ground glass that allowed him to read documents more quickly and gave him a look of slightly comic, owl-eyed wisdom. He polished them on the sleeve of his robe.

‘And what of you, William?’ he asked.

I suppose I said something about being healed and eager for duty. What one says to a superior in such situations.

He nodded. His eyes were elsewhere, on, I think, the crucifix at my back that dominated the room he used as his office. But then his eyes focused on me. ‘You are giving thought to revenge,’ he said.

Remember that I had just confessed; remember, too, that revenge is not one of the sacraments of the church. Nevertheless, I did not lie to Father Pierre if I could help it. ‘I will, in time, avenge myself on the Count d’Herblay,’ I admitted.

‘I might tell you that wrath is a sin, and that the future is in God’s hands.’ Father Pierre smiled without cynicism. ‘But I will instead tell you that by my order, the count has been taken at Mestre and is to be tried in an ecclesiastical court for a blatant assault on a crusader.’ He held up a hand. ‘It occurred to me that no matter what I might say, your first act on reaching full recovery would be to ride to Mestre and find d’Herblay. And that you will kill him, in time. I need you, Sir Knight. The church needs you, and further, has first call on your time and life. You have been valiant in changing your actions, in penance and in contrition. Despite which, you owe the Order for your salvation — not just in heaven, but from a noose and a shameful death.’ He raised an eye brow. ‘I hope I’m making myself clear.’

He leaned forward. ‘I’m sure that every soul is of value to God. But my son, I hold him worth less than a fig seed compared to you, and I beg you to treat him with the same indifference. Let him go. Such men punish themselves.’

From that moment I subordinated any consideration of revenge. He was right; he usually was. Beyond religion, piety, faith, I owed Father Pierre and Fra Peter a debt of honour. I was not going to desert them to kill d’Herblay.

I nodded. I think I said something foolish about changing my mind.

The legate laughed. ‘Listen, Sir William. The crusade’s various enemies have made a number of attempts to kill me while you were dallying in bed. And agents of various powers have spent a small fortune luring away the bands of cut-throats that form the bulk of our crusaders.’ He shrugged. ‘Now I must woo them back. And remain alive to do it. May I trust that you will be at my back, William?’

I bowed my deepest bow. By Christ, I loved that man, even when he reminded me of my sin. Or perhaps because of it.

Mind you, after Father Pierre was done with me, I went to Fra Peter — out of the frying pan and into the fire. Fra Peter sat me down and filled me with dread about the legate. From him I learned the truth: that there had been two serious attempts on Father Pierre’s life over the winter. One had come from a hired assassin in the street who had been cut down by one of the Order’s brother-knights, Fra Robert de Juillac. The other had been a poison so strong that it killed a page named Clemento Balbi, a young noble of Venice who was waiting on the high table at a dinner given by the Ten for the Genoese ambassadors. As far as Fra Peter could make out, the boy, like pages the world over, drank a few sips from Father Pierre’s cup and died in agony.

I mention this because all of us, the thirty Knights of the Order gathered in Venice and the dozen or so volunteers who served with them, all practiced together in June; we practiced defending the legate on foot and on horseback, in streets and in fields and on the deck of a ship. It was a very different kind of fighting, and I was but a single oarsman, if you will, on a very well-coordinated ship. I think we trained together twenty or thirty times, which was more group fighting than I think I had ever trained for since I was first a man-at-arms. We all tried different weapons — spears, mostly, and poleaxes, although Lord de Grey seemed to fancy a heavy mace and one of the Provencal brother-knights fought with an axe, and I came to know the spear all over again.

Fra Peter was our captain. He worked us hard, and then served us wine with his own hands and it was during those evenings in the Venetian Baillie’s house that we discussed the threat to the legate, the Genoese, the various factions at Avignon …

In many ways, Europe was a cesspool and I was not the only man who longed for a good fight against an enemy I could see.

I have perhaps given you the impression that we were a band of brothers; indeed, in my memory, we are always those seven swordsmen standing in the spring air, facing down the Hungarians at the horse fair. But it was not always like that. I loved Miles Stapleton like the younger brother I didn’t have, but he could be a stick. His piety was greater even than Juan’s: he talked no bawdy, he didn’t look at women, much less ride them in alleys, he was slow to anger and quick to forgive; his conversation was almost entirely about religion and weapons; he was dull at the best of times, and his relentless good cheer could increase the burdens of an early morning and a hard head.

One evening, while I was still living at St Katherine’s, I remember preparing to leave my friends to go back to the island. There was wine on the table, and Nerio’s latest conquest was serving it. I rose, gave them all a half-smile, and bowed. ‘Friends, I must leave you,’ I said, or something equally witty.

‘To go back to your private nunnery,’ Nerio said. In Italian, as among us nunnery can be used to mean brothel.

I bridled. Nerio’s casual blasphemy and arch misogyny could pall.

He laughed in my face. ‘I suppose it frees you from sin that it isn’t a novice you’re tupping,’ he said with a superior smile.

I may even have reached for my sword.

Nerio put his hands on his hips and laughed derisively. ‘You know why it is so valuable to all of us to keep young Miles about us?’ he asked the room.

Miles blushed, as usual.

‘Because without him, Sir William would seem a prude,’ he went on.

So … Miles was holy. He was also more than a little superior about his holiness, which could at times be grating.

Nerio’s abiding sin was arrogance. His endless venery was more comic than tragic, and his success, while legendary, was itself so fraught with complications as to render him more human. The evening he met his former mistress, the grocer’s daughter, on the street while strolling with a courtesan he’d hired remains indelibly printed on my thoughts. The courtesan, terrified for her looks, proved a coward, and the grocer’s daughter proved to have a full Venetian command of the language as well as a fast right hand. She was the victor of the encounter, leaving her rival stretched full length in the street, and Nerio was so inconstant and so obliging that he instantly restored the grocer’s daughter to her former position — and so charming that she accepted his blandishments.

He did these things because he believed that he could escape the consequences. And he usually could; good birth, brilliant good looks, skill at arms, classical education and vast riches gave him every advantage. His riches made him insensitive, and he could be the worst friend imaginable.

Gloves were a constant issue among us. In Venice, no gentleman could be seen without gloves. And good gloves were expensive; they take hours to make, the makers are expert, and the materials themselves are costly. To make matters worse, gentlemen’s gloves were expected to be clean.

And yet, as swordsmen who trained each day, we wore good gloves, chamois, or stag skin, for fencing. And wearing gloves for such work stretches and discolours them.

Now, we were poor. Or rather, Fiore was very poor, but cared little about dress; Miles had an allowance; I had no money at all but good credit, and Juan seemed to have money all the time, but seldom spent any. Only Nerio had all the money he required. And his money was always at our service — he would buy us whatever we asked, and never request repayment. And yet, this paragon of generosity never seemed to own a pair of his own gloves. He wouldn’t get fitted for them, or purchase them.

And it happened that he and Fiore had hands exactly of a size. Now Fiore was not a pillar of courtly dress — in fact, he cared very little for his appearance. But two things he fancied, because he felt they contributed to his Art; shoes, and gloves. He would spend half a day being fitted for the plainest shoes, fine slippers with minimal toes at a time when all of us sported poulaines with toes outrageously endowed; and he would linger like a lover in a glove-makers.

He was poor as a dock rat, though, and he hated to borrow money — any money. He never borrowed from Nerio. Instead, he would scrape together a few ducats and resort to a brothel that had cards and dice, from which, sometimes, he would emerge as poor as a shaved dock rat, but at other times, he would be as rich as Croesus. One evening he went with Juan, of all people, and returned laughing. He had lost all his throws but the last, and his fool of an opponent had accused him of cheating. The two of them had retreated to the alley, where Fiore had relieved the man of his life, and then his purse — such things were thought perfectly honourable.

And he used his winnings — by the sword or the dice cup — to buy his gloves. He always kept one pair inviolate: virgin, as we all called them. One pair of perfect chamois gloves sat on top of his portmanteaux, and he would wear them in his belt, clean, uncreased, unstretched.

Nerio, who never purchased gloves, had a tendency to pick up Fiore’s virgin pair as if by right. He would lift them off the Friulian’s trunk and put his hands into them before poor Fiore could speak.

Fiore would scrunch up his face in rage.

This happened several times, until it threatened to return them to the state of enmity from which they had begun. And Nerio never did understand why because he could replace Fiore’s gloves and his horse, sword, purse, and all his clothes if he wanted. Every time, he’d say ‘For Christ’s sake, I’ll pay for them!’

And Fiore would shriek, ‘Buy your own gloves, you whoremaster!’

The story had a happier ending that shows, perhaps, the utility of having your friends in fives. We were sitting in our tower — it might have been May or June — and I was reading a bit of Petrarch from a manuscript I had borrowed from de Mezzieres. Juan was reading the gospels, and Miles was sharpening a dagger, and Fiore was staring off into space. I think it was the day we met the Vernonese artist Altichiero and he had sketched Fiore in some of his postures of fence; anyway, Nerio was going out to church with the grocer’s daughter and he snapped up Fiore’s gloves. He didn’t even think about it; he took them and thrust his left hand deep into the virgin chamois, and Fiore screamed and lunged at him.

Nerio had his dagger in his hand — without thinking, I expect. Fiore grappled for the dagger hand and made his cover, of course.

Miles leapt between them. That was a braver action than it sounds and Miles did it without a thought. He smothered the dagger. When he rolled away, Juan had Nerio, and I had Fiore.

‘Whoremaster!’ Fiore roared. ‘Sodomite! Banker!’

Nerio was white and red with anger. He struggled. ‘You idiot,’ he said. ‘They’re only gloves! I’ll buy you a pair!’

The bell was ringing for Mass.

‘I want my own gloves,’ Fiore bellowed.

Of course it makes no sense.

Juan stepped between them. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘it is time to go to church. But I propose, to solve this problem, that Ser Nerio give Ser Fiore one hundred ducats, and Ser Fiore, of his courtesy, take him to the glovers and get him ten or fifteen pairs of these gloves. And that he takes half for himself, for a penalty of Nerio’s poaching. And that Ser Nerio take the other pairs for his own, stack them in a drawer, and use them, and not Ser Fiore’s.’

I laughed. Nerio and Fiore were still full of fight, but we got them to agree to Juan’s plan. Indeed, Nerio eventually referred to it as ‘The judgment of Solomon’.

My point is that Nerio had little respect for the possessions of others. He could be a bad friend, but by God, he was a worse enemy, as I discovered. He would use the full power of his father’s house against any rival, however pitiful and he would not stint to bribe or threaten. After I began to recover, he informed me one evening of the steps he’d taken to ruin d’Herblay.

He laughed. ‘You’ll be pleased at one of my little stratagems,’ he said. ‘Do you remember forming a society for sharing ransoms?’

‘After Brignais? In sixty-two?’ I asked. He nodded, and I said something like ‘Of course. I’ve told you-’

‘And you recall that my father bought your account from the Bardi,’ he went on.

I struggled not to feel a little humiliated, but they were bankers. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘With that purchase came the documents on your unpaid shares of the society and your share was collected by Sir John Creswell, an Englishman. He in turn divided the money with the Count d’Herblay and the Bourc Camus — I have a witness statement, signed.’ Nerio smiled.

I writhed. I had known it, and yet at another level, to hear it this way …

‘So I’m suing them in a French court, and again in a Savoyard court, and again in a Genoese court.’ Nerio laughed. ‘I have a suit against the Bourc and d’Herblay in Avignon that’s making him smart as if he’d been stung. The irony is that Father Pierre had d’Herblay taken up for attacking a man on vow of crusade — that’s you. And because he’s held at Mestre, he cannot escape my suit for debt!’ Nerio roared. This pleased him inordinately.

I wanted d’Herblay’s neck between my hands and I said so.

But Nerio said I was a barbarian. ‘Or do you want the rich widow?’ he asked.

I put my hand on my dagger, but I bowed.

‘Bless you, your account was worth two thousand ducats when I bought it, and I’ll make five thousand off your court cases. You can borrow all you like from me. And I can punish your enemies. Isn’t it droll?’ He smiled. ‘I’ll break d’Herblay financially.’

I shook my head. ‘He’s very rich. I don’t think five thousand ducats will break him.’

Nerio played with a rich ruby on his finger. ‘It will cost him three times that to fight the case, and he’s enough a fool to fight.’ He shrugged. ‘Pater owns the college of cardinals, or at least, he should. He’s paid them enough. Perhaps not enough to get everything the Queen of Naples wants, but certainly enough to ruin a little French nobleman.’

It was a little like kissing a beautiful maid and finding that she had the eyes of a serpent. Nerio was too fond of money and power.

And Juan — Juan was more nearly the perfect knight than any. He was a perfect jouster, a cool swordsman, a deadly hand. He rode better than any of us, and he had the eye for horses that makes a great rider even better. He, too, had riches, but he had a childish temper that too often got the better of him, especially when there was wine involved. With three cups of wine inside him, he could suddenly turn to a waspish pedant given to telling the rest of us about our failings. And he hated to be compared to Miles Stapleton. Just as Nerio detested, or affected to detest, Fiore.

And Fiore? Petty, self-aggrandising, foolhardy and miserly. He hated poverty and dreamed and schemed for worldly fame and fortune in a way that Juan and Nerio found tiresome, even infantile, the more especially as they sometimes paid his bills in secret. He resented their money and breeding, and as his fame as a master of arms spread and more men came to him for lessons, he used his money to buy clothes and cheap jewels. But — and I hate to say this of a friend, but it still makes me laugh: his taste was on a level with his talent for wooing, and just as he could ignore a comely girl to discourse on a lance blow, so he could wear a jupon of the most virulent orange with hose of a deep scarlet, simply because each individually had been expensive and fashionable.

And second-hand. He never bought anything new. He and Nerio almost came to a fight one night when Nerio accused him of following coffins to get dead men’s clothes.

They were not perfect, and none of us always loved the others. But taken all together-brawling, playing dice, praying, going to Mass, in the street or in the Doge’s palace or going into action by sea or land, they were my comrades. For every display of rancour or selfishness, I can name ten of selfless friendship.

Which was all to the good, because we were to be sorely tested.

It was a good time. I have seldom known a better. And about that time, I had a meeting with Nicolas Sabraham.

He was a strange man: an Englishman who spoke ten languages, a well-travelled man who seemed to know everyone and yet often passed unnoticed. He often served the legate as a courier, and he was often away.

Some men disliked him. He could be very slippery — he was often guilty of agreeing with other men merely to escape controversy or debate, which bored him. He once pulled me away from a fight and told me that I could not kill everyone I disliked. I never had better advice.

But in June, he sat across a chessboard and a pitcher of wine from me. He was dressed for riding, in thigh-high boots and a deerskin doublet. He’d been away, all the way to Avignon, or so Fra Peter said.

‘So, is the Countess d’Herblay your lover?’ he asked.

What do you say?

He leaned forward. ‘It’s palpably obvious, to those who can read faces. Listen, my friend, I took note when d’Herblay acted against you. Even if no one else did. Eh? I had a look at some letters — best not to ask. And I had the briefest of discussions with one of the lads who had taken you. If you take my meaning.’

I suppose I looked away. I knew I couldn’t meet his eyes.

He grabbed my hand. ‘Listen, Sir William, you love life, and the state of your mortal soul is nothing to me. Have her every day — on the altar, for all I care. But this is crossed with the legate, and that makes it my business.’

I was speechless, filled with anger, shame, panic, rage.

‘D’Herblay was supposed to take and kill the legate at Genoa, yes?’ Sabraham nodded. ‘I wondered how on earth we escaped. I begged the legate not to go. I find that we escaped because d’Herblay put all his energy into taking and killing you.’ Sabraham leaned forward. ‘D’Herblay is out of the game for a while. Off the board.’ He lifted a knight — a red knight — and took him off the board.

‘Camus hates you, you know this?’ he asked. He smiled a nasty smile. ‘Quite the piece of work, the Bourc. Fra di Heredia sends his regards, Sir William, and says that Camus is toothless, for the moment.’ He took another red knight off the board.

‘Do you know who the king is, Sir William?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Robert of Geneva,’ I said.

‘Soon to be Archbishop of Geneva. His brother, the Count of Turenne, is coming on crusade with us.’ He picked up a red knight. ‘I want you to imagine this piece transformed to have all the powers of a queen. But appearing only to be a humble knight.’

‘Turenne?’ I asked.

‘Turenne is a fool. Possibly a coward.’ Sabraham shrugged. He put the red knight back on the board. ‘But in his retinue is d’Herblay. And a Hungarian.’ Sabraham smiled. ‘A man like me. Do you understand?’

I thought of the Hungarian with the pearls in his hair, standing coolly over the corpse of the man who’d stolen the Emperor’s sword. ‘I think I’ve met him.’

‘He has been paid to kill the legate,’ Sabraham said. ‘And you, of course.’

My friendships with men were not the only relationships being strained.

One evening I returned to the convent and Fra Andrea let me in the wicket. He led me silently through the rose garden and then walked silently away.

Emile was there. She was with the King of Jerusalem and he was on one knee, kissing her hand. She was looking out over the lagoon.

She turned and saw me. She didn’t start or flinch, but merely smiled and gently tugged at her hand.

The king would not release it. ‘How long will you make me wait?’ he asked.

She stepped back, and he rose suddenly and collected her in his arms.

I allowed my spurs to ring on the stone steps.

The king turned but did not see me. ‘Begone! This is not for you, Mezzieres,’ he spat over his shoulder.

I cleared my throat. There was plenty of light left in the sky to see Emile’s relief.

‘Your Grace,’ I said.

‘You may walk on,’ he said without turning.

‘Your Grace, I live here,’ I said.

‘Your presence is not wanted,’ he said quietly. He looked at me, then. An expression crossed his face, an indignation annexed by a secret amusement.

‘Countess?’ I asked. Of course I was pray to rage and jealousy, but also to good sense. Was she the king’s lover? I would have to fight for him, either way. And her look …

‘Sir Knight,’ she said. ‘I would be most pleased … if you joined us.’

The king backed away as if I had struck him.

But I’ll give him this, he did not lack grace. ‘Ah … my lady countess, I had mistaken you,’ he said. ‘And truly wish you every happiness.’ He bowed to her, touching his knee to the ground.

She turned her head away, obviously mortified.

The king glanced at me.

I shrugged — a very small shrug.

He shook his head, a slow smile crossing his face. ‘I suppose,’ he allowed, ‘that I will have wine with the abbess as a consolation.’

He walked away and in that moment, he reminded me of Nerio. He was not defeated. And he turned his own disappointment to amusement, as Nerio did on the infrequent occasions he was balked.

Emile slumped back against the brick wall. ‘Oh, my God,’ she said.

I watched the king. ‘Shall I go?’ I said.

She put a hand to her face. ‘Do as you like,’ she said.

Then she burst into tears. They weren’t the loud tears women and children use to get their way, nor the sobs you hear with heartbreak. They were quiet tears, and they sparkled in the last light, which is the only way I knew for sure she was weeping.

I summoned my courage. Let me tell you, I can stand the charge of cavalry better than face a woman in tears, and I knew what I had to do without apparently being able to will my limbs to move.

Step by step I walked to her.

If I tried and failed …

I saw, in a levin-flash of the mind, that I had enjoyed my spring with her because it had no tension. Because I didn’t have to engage or risk her good opinion, or discover what she really thought, or what, or whom, she loved.

One more step.

It is one of the hardest moments in the Art of Arms, to make yourself step forward into a blow. Every sinew cries out for a retreat, with its guarantee of safety — a pass back, and the opponent’s sword whistles harmlessly through the air.

But you will seldom win a passage of arms by retreating.

If you pass forward and make your cover, you have your adversary at abrazare, the wrestling distance. The close distance.

I suppose it is risible to you gentleman that I saw that last step as a combat pass, but I drove forward on to my left leg with the same effort of will that I would make to face Fiore’s sword. I felt the tension in the muscles, and I raised my arms, and I put them around her shoulders, enveloping her.

She raised her eyes. Took a breath. And her head snapped round, so that she was looking, not at me, but out over the lagoon. ‘If you hadn’t come,’ she said with bitter self-knowledge, ‘I would now be in his arms.’

By the suffering of Christ, she was soft. Hard and soft against me.

For some time, we only breathed.

I was supposed to say something. As a knight, it was my duty to avenge my honour. But I was unmoved. I wasn’t without jealousy, but … she was in my arms.

Bah! I was not unmoved. I was uninterested in her life with the king.

‘Do you understand me, William?’ she asked.

I shrugged.

I tried to kiss her, and her lips brushed mine, but then they were gone. And yet her hands crossed behind my head and she leaned back to look at me.

‘When I was young, I was quite the wanton,’ she said.

‘So you have said,’ I put in, which may have been ungallant and was certainly unnecessary. She frowned.

‘No, listen, if you wish to kiss me. Listen.’ She stepped back, out of my arms. ‘I would kiss any boy who put his lips on mine. Any one of them who wanted me. It was enough … merely to be wanted.’

In a way, it was like the blows in the village square. Not because it should have hurt me, but only because it hurt her. She hated saying these things.

‘I had the reputation of a slut, and I was almost proud of it, or pretended so.’ She laughed, but the laugh was wild. ‘But my father was rich, and powerful, and made me a good marriage. To a man who held me in contempt, because I came as soiled goods to his bed.’ Now I had her eyes on me in the dying light, and now I could feel every blow as she stuck herself with words. ‘His contempt spurred me to greater efforts.’

I wish I might have thought of something clever to say.

‘And then I met you,’ she said. She bit her lip. Slowly, she said, ‘William, I would like to say that after you … but no. I have had other lovers.’ She looked me in the eye. ‘I did not come to constancy in a single leap,’ she said with her old humour. She narrowed her eyes. ‘I find it … difficult,’ she said.

She turned away. ‘You know what would be easy? It would be easy to be your mistress. Or the king’s! Par dieu, I’ve never climbed such heights.’ She turned. ‘Perhaps both of you at once.’

Oh, I writhed. Women were not allowed to speak this way of love. But she was angry. I think now — but no. I will take some secrets with me.

At any rate, she smiled. ‘But at some point I had babies. And babies make changes. Do you know?’

‘Know what?’ I asked.

‘Edouard — my son.’ She smiled. ‘He is yours. D’Herblay has no idea.’ She laughed and she leaned back against the brick wall, and I didn’t care about any of it. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever known.

I had, in fact, counted months and seen a certain hint of freckles in Edouard.

‘So?’ I asked.

In a fight, there’s a moment when you throw the blow. The blow. And long before it hits, you savour it. When your opponent’s sword reaches for it and fails to find it, you have time, long indivisible aeons of not-time to savour the blow.

Mind you, sometimes your opponent makes his parry, and you are shocked to have such a perfect blow stolen from you.

But my studied nonchalance was the equal of her self-anger.

She turned. Slapped me playfully. ‘I’m pouring out my soul!’ she said.

I looked out over the waters. ‘Just tell me when I can kiss you,’ I said. ‘I’ll listen until then.’

She choked. I can’t say whether she sobbed or laughed. Perhaps both.

Then she shook her head. ‘I think that I am asking you not to kiss me,’ she said. ‘I believe my choices resolve down to none, or many. I choose none.’ She looked at me under her lashes. ‘Why are you not disgusted? The king would be disgusted.’

‘Only after he was finished,’ I said. I smiled. ‘At least, if he’s like Nerio.’

‘Yes,’ Emile said. She smiled slowly. ‘You understand? Truly?’

I shrugged. ‘I have been some dark places. All I hear you say is that you, too, have been to them.’

She shuddered. ‘And you?’

I frowned. ‘Emile, I have killed men for money.’ I turned, getting my back to the wall. As if it was a fight. Perhaps it was. ‘You know what I have gained from Father Pierre? A sense of my own sin.’ I smiled. ‘And I’m mortally certain that if you put the bastard who took my horse in front of me tomorrow, I’d cut his throat.’

Her mouth twitched.

‘So what penance shall I assign myself, when I know the next sin is just at the end of my sword?’ I asked and took a chance. I put my lips on hers, left them long enough to be sure, and then stepped back. ‘I love you. Would you prefer to wait for marriage?’

‘You’ll kill my husband so that you might marry me?’ she asked. She met my eye with her head half turned, and I think her amusement was genuine. ‘I don’t think we will be able to count on Father Pierre for that wedding.’

She made me laugh. Christ as my Saviour.

Because the answer was — yes.

The next day, after training with the Order, I was summoned by de Mezzieres. As I expected, I was left alone with the king.

He motioned to me to rise from my deep bow. ‘Is a certain lady under your protection?’ he asked.

I think I laughed. ‘I doubt that she needs my protection,’ I said.

The king grinned. ‘Par dieu, monsieur, you are a man after my own heart. When this is done, come to Cyprus. I will give you lands and men, and you can one of my lords.’

You still won’t get Emile in your bed, I thought.