Fiore knew the roads of Germany, having spent time there learning from the German masters and having followed their tradition of fighting on errantry, travelling from town to town challenging strangers. Ser Nerio knew how to get good accommodations in any town, usually by showing a letter of credit and a Florentine ambassadorial letter. I truly think that we escaped harm because we had so many different letters of passage that no spy could pin down our ‘side’. Nor were we much given to chatter.
In southern Germany, they took us for knights on errantry, and by God, gentles, we lived the part. We were challenged from time to time. Fiore was disposed to fight, but I had a mission and a fine sense of my own rank; well, arrogance is the specialty of the young, I think. I would flourish my various commissions and ride on.
But a day’s ride east of Nuremberg, we passed through a small village and saw a party of knights whose colours we knew from the day before. They were obviously French; German heraldry is very different from French, and even the colours they use in a blazon are different.
I didn’t know any of them, nor did I question how they’d got ahead of us on the road. But they barred the square, and tallest man — I called him the knight of the ship for the device on his shield — raised his arms and cried a challenge.
I sent him Marc-Antonio with my papal commission; I was chary of using it, but I did not intend to be delayed. I dismounted in the yard of the town’s wine shop to have a bite with my bridle over my arm. Fra Peter had been correct — again. The Emperor had indeed moved his court east to Prague.
I was considering all this when the Ship Knight struck my squire to the ground with his spear.
I was not fully armed. In fact, I had on a habergeon and a good brigandine of many plates, my ‘riding armour’. I had no leg harness and nothing on my arms, and wore only a light sword. Fiore was wearing even less — just a haubergeon. Germany is far too civilised a place to require a man to ride abroad in harness, and ours was packed in straw baskets on the panniers of our spare horses.
‘Don’t send me a peasant. Come and fight like a man,’ Ship Knight shouted.
He meant business.
I drank off the wine in my cup — sheer bravado — and vaulted into my saddle. Fiore was two ells away, negotiating for a sausage, but he was alert and he knew we were attacked. With the ease of long practice, he reached on to the pack horse, extracted a spear, and threw it to me overhand.
The Ship Knight had his lance couched against me, set in his lance rest. He wore good armour on all his limbs and a heavy breastplate under a full helm. His heavy warhorse was half again the size of my riding horse.
Behind him, his friends lowered their visors.
Very chivalrous.
I rode at the Ship Knight, and as he put spurs to his horse, I shifted my weight as du Guesclin had taught me, and my horse sidestepped, the mounted equivalent of stepping fora di strada in a foot combat. His big horse leaped forward and I stood in my stirrups and threw my spear. It wasn’t a full-length lance, but instead one of the six-foot spears we used to fight on foot, with a long, sharp head.
He could not ward his horse, and the spear went in by the horse’s neck and the big horse stumbled and blew blood from its nostrils. I had my arming sword out; Ship Knight hadn’t grasped what was happening and had no momentum, no forward speed, and my sword slipped unerringly along his lance shaft and flipped it aside. This, too, was the product of a spring of intense drill. Close in, my left hand closed on the haft of his lance, dragging it across his body and putting torque on his waist, and I dragged him from the saddle by his own lance. As his back struck the cobbled street, the lance finally came away from his lance rest and bounced once on the stones, and then I swung it by the haft, spun it in the air with a flourish — and turned my horse to face the other three.
Fiore trotted up by my side. ‘Helmet?’ he asked, and handed me my bassinet.
He covered me while I dropped it on my head.
‘Caitiff! Coward! You killed his horse!’ shouted another man, who I remember as the Knight of Coins.
Nerio reined in on my other side. ‘I couldn’t let Liberi have all the fun,’ he said.
Liberi frowned. ‘I don’t need you to defeat these riff-raff,’ he said.
‘Could you two save the fight for the enemy?’ I muttered.
We charged them.
I can seldom remember a fight that I enjoyed so much. We were better; simply, better men. Better trained. I think the best moment of the fight was that I hit my opponent squarely on his shield, having deceived his lance, and I rocked him flat across his crupper, so that his feet came up in his stirrups, and Liberi caught one going by and threw him to the street as if he’d planned this little manoeuvre all his life.
Truly, the only thing better than being a good knight is being one of a team of good knights. To have comrades …
Nerio, who was a fine jouster, put his man down, horse and all. Then his horse kicked the downed man. Their superior horses and armour were of no importance, and in seconds they were all lying in the dung-streaked stones of the square while Fiore collected their horses.
I rode straight to their squires and pages, who scattered. I shamelessly ripped through their pack horses, and I tipped a leather bag full of wallets into the muck, looking for letters, but I found nothing.
Nerio curled a lip in distaste. ‘Is this your mercenary’s chivalry?’ he asked.
‘I want to know if they are hired men,’ I said. ‘They are French knights and they attacked my squire. I suspect they are not what they appear.’
‘Oho!’ exclaimed Nerio, or words to that effect. ‘This is more like Florence than I had expected.’
Then I checked on Marc-Antonio. He was deeply unconscious, and already had an egg on his head big enough for a duck. I got him over his horse, and Fiore had all the knight’s destriers.
‘Right of arms,’ I called at the squires of my adversaries.
Nerio was for staying, perhaps to see if any of the downed knights was dead or needed a doctor.
‘Let’s move, before someone appears with a crossbow,’ I said.
Two days later I wished that I’d ignored Nerio’s aristocratic ways and scooped the purses out of the muck. Three destriers cost the earth and the moon to feed, and they were eating our travel money. However, they were beautiful horses, far better than those Fiore or I would usually have owned or ridden. We’d left our warhorses back in Venice — a perfectly sensible decision, given the cost of maintaining a warhorse on the road. Unless you have to fight, the warhorse is a useless mouth that consumes money.
We continued to speculate on who our late adversaries might have been, and then rode hard for Prague, crossing some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen — as rich as northern Italy. It was August, and the crops were coming; peasants stood in their fields, sickles in hand, to watch us pass their grain fields, which stretched away like a golden promise of heaven in the red light of the setting sun. Beautiful young women, the better for a sheen of sweat, wiped their faces and curtsied even as their fathers and mothers closed in on them protectively; indeed, some lay down and hid at the edge of the road so that we wouldn’t see them, but we were old soldiers and we knew where to look.
What we couldn’t fail to see was the lack of war. There were no burned towns and no crowds of starving beggars. Twice we passed roadside gibbets with men rotting in chains, but we never saw the tell-tales of regular banditry — sly informers, churned earth and heavy horse droppings on the roads like those left by a military column, columns of smoke on the horizon. Fire is the hoof print of brigandage.
Marc-Antonio took two days to recover, and then he was sick on horseback for two more and had real trouble speaking, so that I despaired of his wits. But by the sixth day from Nuremberg, he had again begun his litany of complaints in passable French, and devastating Italian. His riding improved drastically, and it appeared to us that the blow to his head had made him a better rider — a joke that didn’t appeal to him for some reason.