Fra Peter was playing with his beard and staring out the elegant window at the lagoon.
‘And this lady you escorted south — the Pope ordered this?’ Father Pierre asked.
‘No, my lord,’ I said.
‘Fra Juan di Heredia? He ordered you?’ my legate asked. His eyes met mine.
Listen. Father Pierre was not of this world — he was then a living saint. But while he was above many worldly considerations, he was at the same time deeply knowledgeable of the world. Fiore liked to brag that in the whole of his youth he’d never got away with one trick on his mother — I suspect that Father Pierre would have made a frightening parent.
I knew that his look was neither angry nor amused. It was the look he kept for the condition of man. Which gave him pain.
‘No, my lord,’ I said. ‘She is a friend. I had occasion to render her a service during the Jacquerie. And I had heard she intended to make the pilgrimage.’
‘So you rode two days out of your way to greet her,’ Father Pierre said.
Friends, I was a small boy with a nasty piece of work as an uncle — I can lie with the best of them. And as Emile and I had committed no sin — well, not outwardly — I had the feeling of somewhat hypocritical indignation that sinners get when accused of a sin they have not committed.
‘Yes, my lord,’ I said.
Our eyes locked.
He nodded thoughtfully. ‘She is a very rich woman, and very powerful,’ he said. ‘And she brings six good knights.’
‘Which is good, because we’re bleeding men at arms like a beheaded traitor gushes blood,’ Fra Peter put in.
Father Pierre winced again. ‘My son-’
‘If the King of Cyprus doesn’t get here soon, we’ll have no army, and it will all be for nothing,’ Fra Peter said. I’d seldom seen him angry, but the last four months had aged him. And tired him.
‘Surely the legate can hold the men at arms?’ I asked carefully.
Father Pierre raised both eyebrows. ‘I might,’ he admitted. ‘But our Holy Father the Pope has ordered me to suspend use of church revenues until the whereabouts of the king have been determined. So I have no money.’
No commander and no money. Most of the men gathered around Venice and living in peasant’s houses, squalid, windswept camps and expensive lodgings were mercenaries. Men like me. Our purses are not bottomless and many had come to make a profit — well, to be fair, to make a profit and to save their souls.
‘Tell him about the Genoese!’ Fra Peter said.
Father Pierre smiled at me. ‘I don’t want to overburden his spirit,’ he said.
Fra Peter laughed. ‘I do. He runs about fighting in tournaments and winning beautiful swords and I get paperwork in Venice?’ He glared at me, a mocking glare. ‘Genoa has all but declared war on Cyprus.’
Since Genoa, Cyprus, Venice and Constantinople — the Eastern empire — were the supports of the crusade, war between Genoa and Cyprus would kill the Passagium Generale as thoroughly as a poleaxe blow to the head of an unarmoured man. ‘Why? What for?’ I could vaguely remember discussions about this — hadn’t someone been killed on the docks in Cyprus?
Father Pierre looked away, almost as if he was disassociating himself from Fra Peter’s answer.
‘The charges against Cyprus are trumped-up forgeries. It is all tinsel and make-believe — but Genoa has a fleet in home waters for the crusade, and they are threatening to use it against Cyprus.’ Fra Peter sat back, his nose showing white spots. He was angry.
I leaned forward. ‘Are they in league with the paynim?’ I asked.
Father Pierre laughed. ‘In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost also — Genoa trades with the Hagarenes. So does Venice, as the Doge never tires of telling me, even when I tell him of the traffic in Christian slaves, of the Greek boys and the Venetian gentlemen sold to the cruellest of masters … My sons, Cyprus herself trades with the infidel.’ He shook his head, not in sorrow but in rueful appreciation of the world. ‘We are as God made us, and the world must be as it is,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this is a false doctrine, but for the moment I am content with it. Venice, Genoa and Cyprus are all engaged in trade with the Saracens, despite which I am charged with this crusade and I will see it through. I need to travel to Genoa and force them to peace, but I cannot go until the king comes here, to reassure the soldiers.’
‘The Lord works in mysterious ways,’ Fra Peter said.
We all prayed together, and Fra Peter walked me out to the guardroom.
‘Do we have beds?’ I asked.
‘I doubt that there’s a bed in this city,’ Fra Peter said.
Marc-Antonio found us both rooms in a decaying Byzantine structure near the new fish market. On the ground floor was a scriptorium where illuminated manuscripts were produced, and just walking through it was a dazzling experience for every sense with its gold leaf and size and resin and ink and lapis and turpentine and parchment. It was one of the smells of my youth: the monastery in London had a scriptorium, although neither this lavish nor this commercial, and I felt at home. The second storey rooms were in the hands of a prosperous grocer and his family: five daughters, a wife, and the wife’s mother — a sort of commercial nunnery. They owned the building and the one next to it, where the grocery was on the ground floor.
Donna Bemba demanded twenty gold ducats for a month’s rent, paid in advance. I’d like you to note that this represented about five years’ wages for a peasant in England with his own farm; the cost of a good helmet made by a good armourer and half the cost of a decent warhorse over on the mainland. This, for two small rooms which were damp and whose windows sagged on their sashes.
‘Just pay,’ Marc-Antonio advised me. ‘My father knows them a little. It is a fair price.’
‘A fair price!’ I all but shouted. I was down to the last of my money. Remember, I was not paid. The word ‘donat’ implies donation — a man donating his time and his body to the order. I had made a fortune in Lombardy and Tuscany, and now I was spending it on a failed crusade.
Had spent it. When I paid for the fodder for my horses and gave another month in advance and covered my debt to the tailor who had made up my clothes for the trip to Poland, my purse was empty.
Venice is a dreadful city in which to be poor. Food is expensive, trinkets are magnificent — and expensive — and everyone knows the value of everything to the last farthing. I needed a new helmet if I was to fight Saracens or really anyone except small children, and when I had a rower take me to the streets where the armourers plied their trade — that is, where both armourers and merchants dealing in Milanese or Pavian armour resided — I saw a dozen helmets I liked and two I adored, but the prices were now beyond me.
My favourite armourer was a Bohemian, a tall, handsome man with a fashionable forked beard who had earned his citizenship fighting for Venice in Dalmatia. I liked his work and I liked him, and we drank a cup of wine together while he tried to sell me a full harness in the new style, breast and back together, matching arms and legs. He had a helmet after which I lusted like a young man following a young woman, a cervelliere, or skull cap, in the new hard steel with a fine, light aventail lined in silk, and a separate helm, beautifully rounded and sloped so that it was all glancing surfaces, with a moveable visor. The best feature of the helm was that it slid on to the skull cap on little rails and locked into place.
My Bohemian, Jiri, nodded when I had it on. ‘Not my work,’ he admitted. ‘But a good fit and it would keep anyone alive in a melee, eh?
He also had gauntlets that were lighter and stronger than anything I’d ever worn. Of course, they cost three months’ rent on my third-storey hovel.