Later that day, Fiore ran some courses, unhorsing men to the right and left until the judges forbade the use of his spear-crossing parry. Then he unhorsed more men.
He was spectacular to watch, and yet, at the same time, dull. He made one Polish knight very angry by unhorsing him on the first pass, and the man raged, claimed that Fiore had cheated, and looked like a fool.
Nerio, without my knowing, challenged one of the Savoyards to fight on horse and foot. I hate to think who was foolish enough to loan the Savoyard a horse. But Nerio took it.
The Savoyards had been loud in denouncing us to no avail, and after Nerio knocked their champion in the dirt on three straight passes and the man declined to fight on foot, no one would listen to them.
King Peter announced that we would leave for Venice after matins on the Friday, two days hence.
The two days passed in a haze of audiences, music, poetry, sweat and fighting. A few moments surface in memory. I remember giving Marc-Antonio my riding sword, and belting it on him, and Nerio and Fiore pounding him on the shoulders with their fists. Nerio bought him a pretty pair of iron spurs, and Fiore began to give him lessons. As of that moment, he was a squire. For a few days, he carried himself like a great lord and was very difficult, and then he had a fight — I never found out with whom. His mouth was cut, one of his eyes was black, and he became a much milder man.
I paid him his wages so that he could shop in the magnificent market, and he bought, of all things, a book. And a dagger. He was an odd boy, but he’d won my love in the matter of Emile’s favour and a hundred other ways, and I was ready to tolerate him.
The other two encounters were just as pleasant. The first was meeting the Tartar lord who had laughed at me after the joust. He spoke no French and only a little Latin, but he had a Franciscan with him, booted and spurred, and the Franciscan translated.
The Tartar’s name was Jean-Christ, or something like that. He was a commander of a thousand in the great army known to the Poles as the Golden ones or the Golden Horde. He had come as an ambassador to the court of the Emperor.
We were packing to leave: King Peter was travelling with only six knights, their squires, a dozen priests and servants, and my friends, and leaving the rest of his ‘court’ to follow after. At the time I didn’t understand that the King of Cyprus was not the richest man in the world; that he did not desire to command the crusade as much as de Mezzieres and the Pope wanted him to command it; that, indeed, the command was a massive imposition on the king. Nor did I understand that he travelled Europe with only a handful of his own knights; that most of his ‘courtiers’ were relations — French relations — of Cypriote lords, there only to make weight, so to speak. To give his entourage the appearance of riches.
I was an old hand at making war, but this was an entirely new game. The game of kings and princes and cardinals and popes.
At any rate, the Tartar duke rode up with a dozen of his soldiers and his Franciscan.
‘My son, the Duke Jean-Christ wishes to address you,’ the priest said. ‘I am Father Simon, his confessor.’
I bowed, dismounted — after all, the foreigner was a Christian and a duke — and bowed. Father Simon blessed me.
‘He asks, why do you dismount like a churl? And I tell him that you respect his rank.’
Father Simon spoke and the language was like the twittering of birds. Father Simon himself looked like a bird, a plain brown robin. He was as English as I am, and that made him easy to talk with. He had brown hair and deep creases in his face.
The duke threw back his head and laughed. He spoke straight at me, and his eyes twinkled like a jugglers.
‘He says that if this is true, you are the first man north of the Volga to behave in such a way. But he says “be easy”.’ Father Simon smiled. ‘For my part, I thank you. He is a great man, and has had but little respect here.’
I smiled at the foreign duke.
He spoke at length, and Father Simon followed as best he could. ‘He says you are good at the lance. And this trick you do — pardon me, Sir Knight, but I really don’t know quite what he’s saying — this trick is not like any other Latin trick. But that all the People do it. By which he means his people, the Mongols and Tartars and the Kipchaks.’ Father Simon shrugged ruefully. ‘He said a great deal more than that, but I fear I don’t understand the fighting words.’
‘Fiore!’ I called. Ser Fiore, as he now liked to be addressed, was packing his threadbare harness in wicker panniers for mules to carry. He came out into the yard, popped his eyes at the Tartar lord, and I repeated Father Simon’s comments.
Before the next set of hours rang on all of Krakow’s hundred bells, the two were riding up and down the street, demonstrating. Fiore picked twigs off the street with his lance point, and the Tartar Duke loosed his bow three times into a shield, striking with each arrow, and then flipping his lance off his back, striking a straw dummy with the point, rolling the thing over his head like a mountebank and placing it under his left arm and striking again against a target on the other side.
While he executed this deadly trick, Philippe de Mezzieres appeared with two more mules and the king’s compliments and two servants to help us pack. He watched the Tartar for a few breathes and then frowned.
‘That is how the Mamluks fight,’ he said.
‘This man is a Christian and a lord,’ I said with a polite bow. De Mezzieres had fought at my side, but he’d been careful not to bespeak me. ‘Yon Franciscan is his confessor and his chaplain.’
De Mezzieres brightened. ‘Come, that is glad news,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine the world we might make, if every man and woman might be brought to Jesus Christ?
I had never given it much thought. I belonged to a crusading Order that was content to provide the protection of pilgrims to and from the Holy Places. I think that like practical warriors, the Knights of St John had surrendered any notion of the conquest of the Holy Land.
But I managed a smile.
De Mezzieres met my eye. ‘We must travel together,’ he said suddenly. ‘You have behaved well here, and to my liege lord, who holds you high.’ His eyes bored into mine.
I think he rocked me back in the saddle as hard as my French opponent had done.
‘I am at your lordship’s service,’ I said. ‘On horse and foot.’
‘I would like nothing better,’ he said. ‘But my lord has forbidden me to fight you. So I will withhold my hand.’
I’m an Englishman. Hating Frenchmen comes easily to me, but de Mezzieres seemed both cautious and capable. And not a man I’d want as an enemy.
He clearly wanted a piece of me. I flushed, assuming he hated my low birth. As I remembered, his first dislike had arisen when I said I’d been knighted on the battlefield.
Of course it never occurred to me to just ask why he hated me.
At any rate, my usual reaction — anger — rose to choke me. ‘I care nothing whether you withhold your hand or not,’ I spat with all my usual restraint.
‘That is the difference between us,’ he said calmly, and rode away.
The other encounter was very different. I met the merchant who had brought the king’s prize, the falcon. I was in the market shopping for something to send my sister, and perhaps something for Emile, since I might hope to see her soon. The king’s new bird had stopped eating, and it was such a magnificent animal that we were all in a state trying to preserve it, and I said that as I was going to the great market, I would find the merchant and ask for his aid.
He was not a big man, but as broad as he was tall, formed as if from oak, fair-skinned and fair-headed and with one of the greatest beards it has ever been my pleasure to see. I could see, also, that he was a rich man, and a mariner. He wore clothes of blue and black, with furs even in a Polish August, and a magnificent hood, and carried an astrolabe around his neck. That’s how they knew him throughout the fair: as Master Astrolabe. He was from the Kingdom of Denmark, which was as exotic in those days as saying the Kingdom of Heaven, and he had a scar across his face where it appeared that a finger’s breadth of skin had been peeled away. I have seen some horrible things and I had a guess that he had been tortured. And lived. And for all that, his face was jolly, and his demeanour open and bluff.