I do not need to explain this to you, gentles — but Aemilie has never served in arms, have you, my sweet? So let me tell you how it is. To participate in a great tournament, you must first of all be invited. In the romances, of course, knights on errantry simply arrive at the tournament field, lance in hand, already armed — but that is pure fantasy. In this world, tournaments are very expensive affairs, with thousands of ducats spent on building the stands, on decorating an entire town, on the costumes of the knights, and on actors, jongleurs, bards, and food — and that’s before a single course is run.
To participate, a man needs the bluest of blood and friends in the highest places and most tournaments are held by a team, who share the expense, usually led by a prince or a very great nobleman. To be invited to serve on the prince’s team was a very, very great honour, and if you have been listening, you’ll recall that I was going to fight on my own prince’s team at Calais back in the year sixty, at the time of the great truce. But in the end, I was thrown off.
Tournaments are both socially and physically dangerous. Reputations are won and lost in a tourney. Chivalry is, indeed, tested. In fact, I think it is worth saying that, short of battle, the tournament, a great tournament, with kings and queens and great ladies watching, is the greatest test of a knight’s virtues that there is. The whole empris is difficult, dangerous, expensive, and public. Bad conduct is instantly seen. Thousands of people, high born and low, are watching everything: the arming, the horses, the quality of harness, the techniques employed — everything.
The church has a very ambiguous view of the tournament, too. Most priests see the tournament as a sink of iniquity, where lechery, pride, and gluttony triumph and where the virtues of chivalry are seen to overwhelm the Christian pieties. Yet many churchmen come from noble families. And many churchmen see the tournament as a relatively harmless way to harness the men-at-arms without war. In some countries, men who fight in tournaments are considered to be outside the church for the duration of the deed and men who die in a tournament are considered unshriven. In some places, they cannot be buried in hallowed ground.
But, ma petit, there are jousts, and there are tourneys, and then there are deeds of arms, foot combats, encommensailles and bohorts. I could weary you with the language of arms, and truly, it differs from country to country. But in brief — a joust is two men with lances, tilting at one another. And in a greater deed of arms, the encommensailles may be jousts or even foot combats; they proceed the tourney, sometimes as many as three or four days of them.
But the tourney, the true tournament, is a different thing. It is a battle of equals, a team of horsemen on either side. I have been told that in King Arthur’s time, men fought with lances in the tourney, but we are smaller, weaker men, and we fight with swords on horseback, and it is illegal to use the point. Indeed, in many tourneys the participants much use a special sword with a blunted point. In such a game, each team has a goal post — a heavy post, usually with a flag atop it. And the desire of every knight is to unhorse his opponent, take his horse, and lead it to the post. Once the horse is at the post, it is the property of the knight who took it.
You can make a fortune in minutes, taking warhorses from the great lords. And you can make a mortal enemy who will hate you all your life.
Well. I nearly burst with excitement, and I raced to our inn where I found Marc-Antonio eating in the kitchen.
‘Where are they?’ I demanded.
He took his time chewing.
I was fit to burst.
‘Bathhouse,’ he managed.
I ran in all my finery to the bathhouse.
The fat man laughed when I came in. ‘Not got enough, eh?’ he asked in his slow, accurate Latin.
‘I need my two friends,’ I said.
‘Two?’ he asked, and slapped his great thighs so that they wobbled like jellies. ‘We’re that busy this morning, my lord, I’m not sure I can spare you two.’ He roared at his own wit.
I moved past him into the baths — you must see this, me, dripping self-importance, wearing a fortune in scarlet and black, pushing into the damp heat of a brothel-bathhouse.
‘Fiore!’ I called out. The bathhouse had twenty tubs and each was partitioned from the others by screens of birch bark or parchment.
Various Polish comments were shouted by male voices. Someone suggested how I might use my virility in a particularly offensive way — in French.
Fiore’s voice carried perfectly. ‘I am here, William,’ he called.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, unmindful of my friend’s somewhat literal cast.
‘I am in the very act of copulation,’ he replied.
Only Fiore would explain that he was in the very act. I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t elaborate on the mechanics of the thing. The sound of laughter and some very exact comments, more like coaching than anything else, favoured us from the other partitions.
‘The King of Jerusalem has invited us to fight on his team. In the tournament!’ I shouted.
A girl squawked, and cursed. I don’t know what she said, but it wasn’t nice.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Fiore said in Italian. I was at his screen, holding his towel.
‘Where’s Nerio?’ I asked, while Fiore blushed and his girl cursed him. I had my purse on my belt — a nasty piece of poor leatherwork, my temporary replacement for the purse that had been lifted in Bohemia. I tossed her two silver pennies, and she was mollified.
‘We are to serve?’ Nerio asked, a trifle rhythmically. ‘In the tournament? Against the Emperor?’
‘Yes!’ I said through his screen.
‘Splendid,’ Nerio said. ‘I — shall — be — with — you — dir-ec-tly.’
I got the two of them back to the inn; collected our harness and our warhorses, our shields and our somewhat bedraggled papal banner, and transported them to the king’s inn. By this time the morning was well advanced, and the king was none too pleased with us for the time we’d taken; he and eight of his knights were fully armed save only their helmets and gauntlets, and they were sitting on stools out in front of the inn, on the loggia.
But every squire present leaped to arm us. It was chaos for a few minutes, as the armour was laid out on the floor of the loggia and my harness and Fiore’s were hopelessly intermixed. But Marc-Antonio had been paying attention as we travelled, and Nerio’s squire Davide marshalled his master’s harness, and then the steel fairly flew on to our bodies while the Sieur de Mezzieres, resplendent in good Milanese and wearing a fine brigandine in dark blue leather, stood by us and explained.
‘The king is an expert jouster, and he has borne away every prize these last four weeks — in Low Germany, in Prague, and now here. The Emperor has tired of seeing his best knights get tumbled, and has challenged the king to tourney — to a melee.’
And you don’t like it, I thought. De Mezzieres seemed cautious and old — but he was thorough, and he had a famous name as a crusader, having been knighted at the taking of Smyrna. He’d been a friend of de Charny and he’d held Caen against us in the year fifty-nine too. He was no parchment saint: he knew the business of war.
He looked at the three of us. At that moment, we had our leg harnesses on, and I was lacing up my mail haubergeon. Fiore was ahead of me, already getting an arm laced up.
‘You are all knights?’ he asked.
‘I was dubbed on the battlefield,’ I said.
De Mezzieres paused. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sir, I mean no insult, but nothing — nothing — can be allowed to humiliate the king my master. Can this knighting be slighted or challenged?’