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.