Well, I’d caught rumours of this at Turin.
‘What did Father Pierre Thomas say?’ I asked.
‘Can you guess, William?’ he asked. He smiled at me over the saddle.
‘I guess he informed the Count that the crusade was an atonement for his sins and not a matter of political advantage,’ I said.
Fra Peter snorted. ‘You really are getting the hang of this,’ he said. ‘Of course, when Father Pierre Thomas speaks that way, he means every word.’
‘But you just told Hawkwood to continue his fight against Milan,’ I said.
He looked at every lashing, and then gave me a great hug. ‘Go fight, William, but do your best to fight with honour. Protect the weak, war down the strong and help the poor.’ He sprang into the saddle like a much younger man. ‘When the order summons you, come. In the meantime, remember that you are not William Gold, mercenary bandit. You are William Gold, esquire, donat of the Order of St John the Baptist, and behave accordingly.’
I wept, but I rallied. ‘Even when my opponents lie, cheat, steal and betray me?’ I asked.
‘Especially then. We practise chivalry because it is right, not because other men can be expected to do the same. The sword of justice — tempered with mercy.’ He laughed. ‘Remember what Father Pierre Thomas said of the church? Full of sinners? Imagine that the order of chivalry is entirely full of caitiffs trying to be knights.’
Those words stuck in my head, I can tell you. That’s what we are. No one is without sin. No man is a perfect knight. We are caitiffs, but it is the striving that makes us better.
He mounted on the mounting block.
‘Stay alive! My blessing on you, William Gold.’
He laid his hand on my head and rode off into the dawn.
Juan cried that he’d missed his master leaving.
Perkin mocked him for it, and the two of them stripped to their shirts and wrestled in the tiny inn yard. I let them.
Perkin was thrown first and hit his head, but he came back at Juan, and was put down again. Juan had been practising with Fiore, who was watching.
Perkin rose, rubbing his head. ‘You have more wrestling tricks than a Cornishman,’ he said.
Fiore laughed. ‘I see I will have new students.’
We celebrated Christmas like gentlemen. It was my first proper Christmas in years, and I exchanged gifts with my friends, kissed a pretty whore under a sprig of greenery and went to Mass in a good church. I went blithely to confession, and said my beads — my new habits stuck.
We feasted with the town — Sterz had a fine notion of how to keep the townspeople on our side, and we brought in a herd of beef from the coast at our cost. Our company was now so large that we had armourers and basket-makers and butchers. This was not a nation of thieves like the Great Company of Brignais. This was an army, like the army of the Prince of Wales or the King of France. We had a seneschal and a marshal; laws and police. Men who pissed in the streets were punished. Two days after Christmas, an Englishman tried to force a girl in one of the villages — she put a knife into his thigh and escaped, and her father complained. Sir John oversaw a trial as if he was an English magistrate, and the man was found guilty, beaten with rods and his money given to the girl. Then he was dismissed from the company.
On New Year’s day, we rode for Lombardy. We travelled for two days down a long pass, and then, in bleak midwinter, we descended into the fields of Lombardy. I remember my first sight of Italy, and I thought that it couldn’t be a coincidence that we were leaving the Count of Savoy’s land.
I remember thinking, with the old ways of a routier coming back, that it was the richest country I’d ever seen — even in winter.
We rode to the gates of Milan. Milan is a magnificent city, and should, you’d think, have been well-defended. It’s well-walled, but the lords thereof are tyrants — I’ve fought for and against them, and I know whereof I speak. So they have a fortified palace inside the city to defend against their own citizens, and fortress walls to keep the likes of me out.
Our orders were exact and our discipline was excellent. We were to rob and burn our way to the gates, killing as few men as possible and outraging no women. Sterz summoned all the leading men on the night before we raided Milan, and stood by his camp table.
‘What we want is to force Visconti to make peace,’ he said. ‘What we do not want is a lot of enraged Milanese demanding further war. Murder and rape won’t get you a florin, lads. Rob them, burn them out, push their sorry arses into the walls. That’s all it will take.’ He smiled.
Sir John nodded. ‘Enough angry Milanese inside his walls,’ he said, ‘and Galleazzo might find himself overthrown.’
We had assignments and guides — towns, monastries, fortified houses. Mine was written out, and I had a Milanese exile, a bitter old man named Bernabo Pieto. He led me through the cold winter’s night, and we stormed a house full of soldiers — killed a couple, took the rest, and turned the noble family out into the cold, stripped of jewels and gold.
By morning, we’d struck to the very gates and posted the Pope’s demands there; we had twenty senior Milanese officials to ransom and we hadn’t lost a man. Milan did nothing in response — Galeazzo cowered in his palace and let his countryside burn.
If I felt a trifle dirty from the rampage, I had 300 florins in gold from my share.
He might have been slow on the battlefield, but he was quick enough, politically. Galeazzo reacted by hiring the most famous mercenary in Italy — the German captain, Konrad von Landau. That is, he was famous, but we’d never heard of him.
He brought a great company of German lances — almost 4,000. He arrived in early March, and drove us back into the hills — or perhaps Albert Sterz had always meant to retire. Certainly there was no haste to our movements.
Sterz was a good officer, but a harsh disciplinarian. When we camped, he would punish men for fouling the streets outside their tents — sensible, I confess, but not a way to win an archer’s love. He never hesitated to apply punishments, and we had the impression that not only did he like to order punishment, he liked to see it carried out, too. Some men get drunk on authority. Sterz wasn’t one of them. He merely liked the taste.
A company of Hungarians joined the Germans. Most of us had never seen a Hungarian, but we heard they had bows which they could shoot from horseback. The archers shook their heads and said they must be puny things that couldn’t penetrate armour, and the handful of men who had fought the Turks said it was all horse shit.
All the fears and angers of the days before battle.
We were badly outnumbered, but we were confident. It worried me, the casual arrogance of the English.
We had a steady stream of Milanese ambassadors coming into our camp. I became the officer responsible for meeting them and bringing them to Sir Albert, because of my good manners and genteel air. They were really emissaries, often accompanied by heralds with all the trappings of chivalry, yet they came to spy. Their intention was to count our archers and look at our entrenchments and the shape of our camp.
So we greeted them each day with the same ten lances — mine — in full armour, and we rode them into our camp by different routes. This amused us more each day. One day, I showed them men-at-arms practising on horseback in groups of 100; the whole was an elaborate stage show, like a passion play, staged by Sir John. The next day they rode through an empty camp — the army, right down to our whores, was behind the next ridge.
And I was present as the Milanese offered Sir Albert and Sir John ever more elaborate bribes. I was even offered one myself.
After a week of this, I was with Sir John after we escorted a particularly unctuous Milanese churchman back to the Milanese lines. When he was gone, I turned to Sir John. ‘If the French had offered us 20,000 florins to retreat the night before Brignais,’ I said, ‘Mechin would have taken it, split it with a half-dozen captains and ridden away.’