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.