Instead of fighting the enemy, we were foraging and building fires, and that became the limit of my command. Men would wander off in the snow and vanish and we’d never see them again. Except that when it was Juan, I turned my horse’s head — still the war horse I’d taken from Father Pierre Thomas, in what seemed like a different world — and rode back along our trail until I found him.
‘I’m sleepy,’ he said.
I put him on my horse and pinned him against me until I reached Janet’s fire.
‘Some men will do anything to sleep with me,’ she quipped, and put him in her blankets while her squire piled wood on her personal fire.
He lost all the toes on his left foot.
Richard Grimlace wasn’t so lucky. He went into a stone barn and peasants killed him. We rode back to find him, and we killed the peasants — even though I knew that was wrong.
We made a fort of their barn and waited out the last of the snow there, with a fire in the corner. We had seventy men and one woman in that barn, and all of us lived to see Pisa.
I slept between Perkin and Milady. At some point in the night — you have to imagine us packed like salt herrings, so banish any salacious thought — I knew she was awake. In her ear, I said, ‘Do you ever miss Richard Mussard?’
‘No,’ she said.
I paused. ‘He wanted to marry you,’ I said. ‘I seem to remember.’
She rolled a quarter turn. ‘We did marry,’ she said. She shrugged, and John Hughes, sleeping on her other side, groaned. I suspect I groaned, too.
‘He’ll get over me,’ she said.
I thought of Richard at Turin. It occurred to me that she’d already run away from him by then — and then he’d seen me. What would he think?
When the snow cleared, we rode for Pisa. We collected another twenty men on our way, but the White Company would have lost fewer men in a heavy defeat. The snow did to us what the Germans could not. We lost 400 lances and were half the size we’d been the summer before.
There was talk of taking the command from Sir John. I had never seen him so low — he slept too much, went to meetings with Pisans and spent too little time with men like Andrew Belmont and me.
The Pisans tightened their belts and hired another famous knight — one of the most famous: Hannekin Baumgarten. He was a Knight of the Holy Roman Empire, a member of two famous orders of chivalry and a dozen well-known tournament societies. He was a big, handsome man, and his Cologne German was less offensive to the English than Swabian. He was also a fine jouster.
He brought a small army of Germans. Each ‘nation’ had about 1,000 lances.
Spring came and seemed to dispel the last of the Plague. I received a letter from Fra Peter when the passes opened, and another, from my sister, in the same packet. They made me happy. I sat and wrote back to them the same day, and spent from my dwindling store of florins to send them to Avignon and London.
We had two incidents that spring, neither of which brought me any pleasure.
We marched on Florence in mid-April, as yet unpaid. We marched as far as Pistoia with Baumgarten, but our 8,000 cavalry was too much for one web of narrow roads, so we elected to go our seperate ways. Sir John was back in command, and he sent Andrew Belmont to sieze Prato by night — the way we’d taken Pont-Saint-Esprit. We rode hard, caught them with the drawbridge down, and then everything went wrong and Andrew was badly wounded.
I got to him, pinned him to his saddle and got him clear of the crossbow bolts.
We tried again that night, but they were ready, and the only thing we could do was ride around the town, whooping like imps of Satan. While my men distracted the militia on the walls, I climbed down into the ditch and crawled to the main gate, where I stood up and pounded on it with my fists.
‘I summon this town to surrender in the name of the White Company!’ I roared.
It had no effect on the campaign, but was much talked about. When we returned to the army, Sir John summoned me.
‘I’m appointing you corporal,’ he said.
Corporals commanded fifty lances — 200 men.
I took Belmont’s division while he went back to Pisa. It was a very left-handed way to achieve command, though, and it made me uneasy.
Janet was quick to congratulate me.
I was surprised. ‘I thought you had a-’
She looked at me in such a way as to deprive me of the power of speech. ‘Gentlemen don’t say everything that comes to their minds,’ she spat. ‘Andrew Belmont is nothing to me.’
The second incident took place a few days later. It was not my day to patrol and I was in camp. A patrol of Rudolph von Hapsburg’s encountered a patrol of ours — of mine. It was led by Perkin — Master Smallwood. They met at the corner of a wood and it was a surprise to both parties. A German officer — Sir Heinrich, as the heralds reported to us — charged. He was reported to me as being a giant mounted on an elephant, but those Germans beat my men so badly I couldn’t get a straight story out of any of them.
Sir Heinrich’s lance caught Perkin in the body armour. He didn’t have a steel breastplate and the blow crushed his ribcage. He probably died when he hit the ground. Seamus died there, too, cut from the saddle by a German knight’s axe.
Kenneth had been in camp with me, and his reaction was so violent I ordered his squire to watch him every minute — I was afeared he’d desert to try and kill a German. The Irish are the most fiery men on the face of the earth.
But Seamus and Perkin didn’t die for nothing. I went with a herald and reclaimed their corpses, giving Hapsburg’s camp a careful look as I did. The Swabians were contemptuous of us, and I met the giant Heinrich in person — I’m a big man, and he over-topped me by a head. He didn’t bother to conceal his camp, and he returned my friend to me with the trappings of chivalry, but few, if any, of the essentials.
‘He was easy to put down,’ Heinrich said in his heavily accented English. ‘None of you English is any match for a knight.’ He laughed. ‘Pitiful.’
I turned to the German herald who accompanied us. ‘Is this what passes for courtesy in Swabia?’ I asked.
‘Save your tears, Englishman,’ Heinrich said. ‘None of you are knights. We know what you are: peasants who have stolen armour. We are not afraid of your White Company.’ He laughed.
Perhaps I could have said something inspired, or merely insulting, but instead, I marked their banners and penants as carefully as I might. I put Perkin and Seamus in carts, and Arnaud, who had driven a few carts in his life, helped me drive them back to our lines.
Courtesy and control. And perhaps, simply biding my time. Treating war as a business.
We buried them and our other dead that night and a priest said Mass. And then we slipped away. We retreated.
We left Rudolph von Hapsburg with nothing. He sat there for three days, waiting for us to attack him, so I’m going to guess that his Swabians weren’t as sure of themselves as Heinrich sounded.
We pounded south, back to Prato, then we drove east, along the same path as Sir Hannekin. We broke up into smaller divisions to cover more ground, looting and burning across an empty countryside. We ate well, but something had gone out of me with Perkin’s death.
I wanted to avenge him. I loved Father Pierre Thomas, but I was not going to turn the other cheek for the German bastard who’d killed my squire.
It had become more personal and less chivalrous in the Hapsburg camp.
Professional war is an odd thing, and personal animosity is not useful. As an example, when we passed through Prato the second time, we received reinforcements — both English and German. Erich von Landau joined us at Prato. The next night, at the fire, while our Italian servants cooked, Erich spoke to Fiore in German, and Fiore stood up carefully and nodded.
Erich said something in Italian.
Fiore nodded. Sadly, I think.
Erich went and shook his hand, and that was that. I don’t know that they discussed that the Friulian had killed Erich’s brother, but I assume that some accommodation was reached.