He looked at the horse. And at me. ‘Men like Fra Peter reassure me that not all violence is towards destruction. That some men must fight to cauterize the wounds that Satan makes on the earth.’ He shrugged. ‘I do not need a war horse. But you will.’
He leaned forward and breathed into my horse’s nostrils. ‘I was born a serf. My father is still a serf,’ he said. ‘We helped raise this horse. I know the dam and the sire. As there are horses, raised by hand with love for man’s purpose to fight well, so may there be men, trained with love, to fight well for God’s purpose.’
I asked no questions. It really was as if I’d died. I simply rode away with them and headed south. We rode through the ruptured landscape, and I was forced, through eyes just opened, to see what the last six years of war had done to the richest province in France.
Ah! You don’t want to hear about it? Eh?
War destroys, my friends. Sometimes, the builder must knock down the old foundations to build anew, but otherwise, we call a man who knocks down a house an arsonist, or worse. Eh?
We’d raped France a hundred times by then. We rode along roads choked with fallen branches and weeds. We rode through villages without a single roof, and we passed fifty churches whose stones were cracked and burned, like the teeth of a charred corpse. We saw vacant-eyed people on the roads. Some wore ragged finery. Had they been gentry, brigands or peasants?
You couldn’t tell. They all had the same empty eyes.
Once we were into Provence, the roads improved, and so did the scenery. The towns were walled, and most of them had destroyed their suburbs and walled up all their gates but one, which made entering and exiting a laborious process.
One of the curious aspects of donning a Hospitaller robe is that suddenly I was admitted to these towns without further question. I was served cheerfully at tables by young men and women who would have cringed to see me, or fled at the rumour of my approach.
Some days passed in a haze. It was, truly, as if I had been reborn. I’ll pass over that now.
We were south of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in country I’d never seen. I think it must have been our last night before Avignon. Fra Peter, Juan and I were to sleep on the floor of the common room of an auberge just inside the gate of the town — a small place, really just a house, recently converted to an inn by a young man and his wife, eager to benefit from the increase in trade from pilgrims travelling south. We had a leek soup that was delicious, and then Fra Peter sat back, unbuckled his sword and leaned it against the wall. He waved to the good wife, who appeared delighted to serve us.
‘My lord?’ she asked.
Fra Peter nodded. ‘How’s the wine hereabouts?’ he asked.
She nodded, eyes wide and serious. ‘My father has his own vines,’ she said. ‘Our wine is very good. A cardinal told me so.’
‘Well,’ Fra Peter said. He barked his odd laugh. ‘He’d know. Pour us a pitcher and bring us some cups.’
She curtsied and reappeared with wine.
I hadn’t had wine since I was hanged. I drank off my first cup rather quickly, and I looked up to find the squire and the knight watching me. Fra Peter was smiling.
‘Our Lord loved good wine, too,’ he said. ‘Never forget the Feast of Canaan.’
Juan drank his with relish. The pitcher was vast and deep, good red clay and nicely glazed. We poured our second cups.
‘You can’t wear my habit in Avignon,’ Fra Peter said. ‘Nor is it my intent to make you a brother knight. I can’t see it.’ He smiled down into his cup. ‘But that may just be my own arrogance.’
I said nothing. I confess I felt some disappointment. Odd, as vows of chastity and poverty would not have suited me at any time.
‘But you have sworn to accompany Father Pierre Thomas on crusade.’ He looked at me. ‘I wonder if you would wear the red habit.’
Juan smiled. ‘As I do,’ he said.
I had never seen Juan wear any habit at all. I said as much, and they both laughed.
‘Donats,’ they said together, and then Juan returned to his usual silence. Fra Peter nodded. ‘Young men of noble birth pay a large sum to the order to be trained. They owe some service later, and are called ‘Donats’. In battle, they wear a red habit.’
I sighed. ‘I have no money,’ I said.
‘Ah,’ said Sir Thomas. ‘I believe that in fact you have some thousands of gold ducats due you.’ He drank more wine. ‘Money you have from taking ransoms in battle.’ He swallowed. ‘Better, at least, than money looted from peasants paying patis to keep their daughters from being raped.’
‘I have never raped,’ I said hotly.
He nodded. ‘Father Pierre Thomas would say that every woman you took, because she had no other choice, was rape.’ He sighed. ‘Father Pierre Thomas is a saint, and I am not. So I’ll confine myself to the reality of the man-at-arms. Few women can protect themelves. Will you protect them?’
‘I will,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Have some more wine,’ he said.
The next day we reached Avignon. I’m a Londoner, and to me, London defines what a city should be, but Avignon was a fine city. A little hag-ridden with priests, I confess, and more whores than all of Southwark ten times over, which says something about the state of the church, no doubt, but they were pretty and well-paid, and the churchmen were, for the most part, well-educated and clean. The palaces were magnificent, and the streets were well laid out, narrow but comparatively clean. There were influences that I learned later were Arab or Saracen — for instance, some of the streets had trees trained to run up the shop walls and cover the street from rain or sun.
You could buy anything in Avignon: a beautiful woman, a fine musical instrument, magnificent armour, a horse, the death of a cardinal. You could buy most of those things in London, but they were more expensive and harder to find.
My new-found Christian idealism received some near-mortal wounds. In Avignon, you could sit in a tavern drinking fine wine and watch a monk fondle a child too young to be in school while a priest and a nun embraced in a closed booth. Discussions of philosophy and theology could result in daggers drawn — and used. The Cardinals plotted for power and exercised what they had with a naked purpose that was at least more discreet among merchants and nobles in London and Paris.
That said, though, the new Pope, Urban V, was widely reputed to be the best man to hold the throne of St Peter in two generations, and he was advocating crusade on the one hand and church-wide reform on the other.
We were a week in Avignon before Father Pierre Thomas received an audience. To my shock, I was taken along — clean and clothed decently, in well-tailored dull-red hose and a matching cote with a short brown gown. There were apprentices in London who dressed better, but it was a world with a certain reversal of worldly fashion, and my clothes carefully proclaimed my status as a man-at-arms bound to a churchman. I had neither sword nor dagger. I missed de Charny’s dagger. Its loss was more real to me than the loss of armour. Like Emile’s favour, it had always been the physical embodiment of my chivalric desire.
The papal palace was both new and recently redecorated, and the paintings were as magnificent as the fabric in the hangings. I have always particularly loved gold leaf — the richness of gold, the way it looks over other colours, over leather, over wood. The papal palace at Avignon was a riot of gold leaf — there was more of the stuff than I’d ever seen before in one place in my life. The choir screen in the great cathedral was one solid mass of gold leaf, and the audience hall was decorated with two magnificent frescos, one on either wall. My memory is that one was the worthies of the church, including, of course, the last four popes, and that the other wall was the resurrection of Christ. Later, in Italy, I saw many better frescos, but that afternoon in late spring in Avignon, I had seen a few painted murals in England, but never the richness, the glow, the vitality, the gold leaf, of the frescos of Avignon. I gaped like a fish.