We went two streets over, or three — I was in a state of near-panic, which can happen to any man after a fight is over and Marc-Antonio was following me — and I ran full on into a man in mail.
‘Where is he?’ he asked in Gascon French.
I must have teetered stupidly, trying to work it out. Marc-Antonio got there first and put his dagger in the bastard. Then we huddled under the eaves of a low house and listened.
The town was full of men. There were shouts behind us.
In the dark, audacity is everything.
I got up on the roof of the house — it was not much higher than my head. From there, I saw the church spire and the tall, narrow roof of the auberge in which we were staying.
The alleys were very narrow, the roofs were low, and mostly finished in slate, with some thatch. Most houses had stone chimneys. ‘Get up here,’ I hissed at Marc-Antonio, and extended him a hand.
None too soon. A dozen brigands — or perhaps men-at-arms — came tearing down our alley. They turned at the base and ran off towards the church. We went over the roofs toward the inn.
I won’t belabour it. I’m not good at being up high, and neither was Marc-Antonio, but we made it, roof to roof, stepping across the alleys and jumping the wider streets on to thatch. I suppose it was less harrowing than it feels now, but the streets were packed with mercenaries, and they were there to kill me. The roofs were safer, but they didn’t feel that way.
We reached the roof across from the stable of the inn. There were no men at the inn yard, and I dropped into the street and caught Marc-Antonio down and we slipped into the stables and began saddling our animals.
‘Baggage!’ I hissed.
Leaving my armour behind would be tantamount to ruin. I left Marc-Antonio and crept out into the yard, moving from shadow to shadow. The auberge was really just a private house with a large kitchen and extra rooms, and I gained the kitchen unseen, slipped up the servant’s stair to the main door, and threw the beam across. Then I went up the main steps to the top floor and pushed into the room in which we’d left our belongings.
God was truly with me, because the man my enemies had left to watch the room was asleep. I hesitated a moment, and then made his sleep last forever, and may God have mercy on him. I remember that he stank, and that I moved his head to keep his blood off my luggage.
I got my harness and our leather trunk, and ran down the steps just as there was a pounding at the door of the inn. In the street, a Gascon was shouting that the devil was loose.
I got our bags into the yard even as Marc-Antonio brought out our horses. I mounted my warhorse, and my fears were calmed. Mounted on Jacques, I was worth ten brigands. I got my bassinet and my gauntlets on as Marc-Antonio tied the baskets on our mule.
‘All I want you to do is mind the mule,’ I said.
Marc-Antonio nodded.
‘You are doing very well,’ I said, or some similar platitude, but really, he was doing well. His hands still functioned, he was alive, he’d put a man or two down, and we were on the last stretch of our escape.
‘They’re right outside the gate,’ he whispered. His tone gave away his fear.
‘Open it,’ I said.
He slid back the bar on the stable gate, and there was a torch-lit crowd outside — at first glance, they appeared to be a hundred men.
One man said, ‘Is that him?’
And then I was on them.
Jacques exploded into them and I might have killed them all, but one man knew how to fight a knight. Someone cut my girth and down I went.
That, my friends, ought to have been the end of this story. I fell heavily, and my helmet protected me from being knocked senseless, but I had no armour and I should have been meat.
Marc-Antonio and the mule had followed me out into the night and by luck and skill and the will of God, Marc-Antonio slammed his riding horse into the routier who’d put me down, staggering the man. I was already scrambling in the dark for my sword.
I was damned if I was going to lose the Emperor’s sword.
I took a blow to the helmet that sharpened my perception of the threat. Jacques was still fighting — that’s what a trained horse does. He bought me a moment and then another moment, and I still couldn’t find my sword, and then I was fighting in the dark. My opponent had a dagger, and another man had a sword, and I had a helmet and gauntlets, which proved by far the best armament.
I found my sword with my booted foot, and cut myself badly. There’s ancient satire there, something Petrarch might have appreciated. I thought it worth the blood to find the sword, and when Jacques rallied to my side I knelt and got a hand on the hilt.
I clutched it.
The night was full of shouts, and there were men running in all directions, and Marc-Antonio was shouting my name like a war cry. Jacques came up right beside me and I was up on his bare back in the time it takes to say ‘pater noster’ and we were away, our hooves echoing off the stone buildings.
For some reason I thought it was the Bourc Camus and his men, so I was shocked when I saw a man-at-arms by the gate in blue and white blazon. But he was badly mounted and his horse wouldn’t face Jacques, and I put my pommel between his arms and broke his teeth. I had his sword arm by the left wrist, and I stripped his sword in the moment of shock, and I still had it in my left hand when we burst out on to the steep mountain road below the town. We rode hard for the time it takes to hear Mass, but if anyone pursued us, it was on foot, and not for very long. We could see every foot of road in the clear moonlight, and I changed to my riding horse after checking Jacques for wounds. The loss of my war saddle was a sore blow to my finances, but we’d escaped.
I handed the sword I’d taken to Marc-Antonio. He giggled nervously and pushed it through his belt.
And so we passed into the night.
We rode for three days without sleeping. We stank, and we didn’t care. We stole a pair of riding horses from two monks in fur habits and riding boots, wandering mendicants who claimed a vow of poverty, and probably as much brigands as I can be myself. With spare horses, we could move all the time.
In the foothills of the Alps, Marc-Antonio reined in. ‘Lord, I have to halt,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’
I shook my head. Fatigue and fear play strange tricks on a man, and the evils I had imagined and dismissed in Avignon now loomed as certainties in the light of day. I could no longer see Emile as a capable woman at no risk. I saw her now as the ultimate target of my enemies. D’Herblay was going to kill her — horribly. I could feel it, and dreaded that it had already happened.
‘If you dismount, I’ll leave you,’ I snapped.
‘Fuck you,’ my erstwhile squire said, but it was more of a moan of protest than a curse. Marc-Antonio made me smile, and that’s a good thing when you have fear all the way to the marrow of your bones.
‘No one ever died of lack of sleep, lad,’ I said. ‘Change horses.’
Twenty leagues short of Turin, a day’s ride past the abandoned chapel where I’d slept twice, there is a Benedictine house high in a mountain pass. We were allowed into the guest house after I showed my pass on the order and let in with a swirl of snow at the very close of day when there was only enough light in the sky for owls. We were wet through, so tired we must have seemed like drunkards, so cold that my hands and feet hurt like torture as they warmed.
Marc-Antonio was asleep as soon as he sat to take off my boots. I put a damp wool cloak over him and undressed and a monk brought me water.
I shocked the monk by stripping naked in front of him, and shocked him more by bathing with a sword by my hand. He brought me good wine, good bread, and a bowl of something with rabbit in it that was superb. Or perhaps hunger and fatigue rendered it superb. I ate that bowl and another and drank the wine and fell asleep in the bath, and the monk awoke me silently — he had some vow or other — and got me on to a pallet in a cell.