‘Pawn the sword,’ Marc-Antonio suggested.
I didn’t.
I had been two days in Venice, and I had landed Juan to share my palace above the grocers, when Father Pierre sent me to Terra Firma to review the men-at-arms at Mestra and north around the lagoon. He sent Fra Peter north the same day despite the cold weather to see if the king was coming over the passes.
I visited Sir Walter Leslie and his brother, who were festering in Mestre and growing impatient. They had two thousand men, many of whom I knew, and I received a good deal of heckling while riding through the cold and muddy camp.
I have seen a troupe of prostitutes turn on one of their number who has married, screaming at her about the men she’s had and the services she provided, as if these things should bar her from marriage. So too with some of my former comrades.
I noticed, though, that none of my lances was with Sir Walter. I saw this with mixed emotions; I would have liked to see friends, and have swords at my back that were closer than family. Yet, it meant they were still together and with Sir John, and I rather fancied that, too.
I visited the English and the Gascons, too, Among the Gascons I met was Florimont, Sire de Lesparre. He had served the King of Cyprus before, but he’d also served the King of England. He had a famous name as a fighter, and an infamous one as a knight. I had been ordered to visit him in the legate’s name and a squire pointed him out to me.
He was sitting under an awning in front of a great pavilion, playing chess with one of the King of Cyprus’s nobles, when I rode up. I had a very small tail; just Marc-Antonio and Juan, both in the scarlet surcoats of the Order. Marc-Antonio was a penniless bastard and Juan was the scion of a brilliantly old and wealthy Catalan family, but luck, and some of my money, had given Marc-Antonio a fine horse and saddle and a good sword, and Juan had donated some ‘old’ clothes to the cause so that we did no shame to our order.
At any rate, Lesparre glanced up from his chess game and made a little moue with his mouth. ‘By the Virgin’s Holy cunt,’ he swore. ‘Some nuns have come to visit us.’
I have lived in military camps since I was fifteen and I had never heard a man refer in such a way to the Virgin, not even the Bourc. Juan’s face flushed.
Marc-Antonio giggled.
Lesparre saw my stare. ‘Eh, little nun? Does my bad language disturb you?’ he roared. ‘Perhaps you’d like to make me shut up?’
I slid from my saddle. When you most desire to make a good entrance, that is, of course, when your spurs get stuck in the mud under your heels. It never fails.
‘Perhaps she has never worn spurs before, the pretty thing,’ Lesparre said.
His companion laughed.
But I had spent years at this sort of thing and then been with the order for more. So when I’d sorted out my spurs, I said a little prayer to Saint George, put out my inner fire, and squelched my way to the awning and bowed.
‘We are to be favoured with some-’ Lesparre began.
I nodded and cut him off. ‘If you want to fight, all you have to do is ask,’ I said. It was, to be fair, Richard Musard’s line — he’d trot it out when he was taxed for his colour. I always admired it.
Lesparre’s mouth shut.
‘In the meantime, the legate is solicitous for your comfort, and sends his greetings and blessing,’ I went on. ‘You are, I assume, Monsieur Florimont de Lesparre?’ I took a small twist of parchment with the legate’s seal from my purse.
‘Did you just challenge me?’ he asked, and when he stood, he was a head taller than I.
‘No, my lord,’ I answered. ‘I am forbidden to challenge while I wear this coat, but if you insist, I will be delighted to oblige you.’
He nodded. And as he drew, he stepped out into the drizzle from under the awning.
Marc-Antonio reached out my sword hilt — he was carrying my sword over the crook of his arm. I took it and drew, cut the air once, and rolled the sword over the back of my hand.
‘You have beautiful eyes, sweet,’ he said, and a dozen other fanfaronades to distract me.
When he struck, he meant business. He flicked his sword up from a low guard, back over his shoulder, and cut at my head.
Have I mentioned how much I hate facing big men? I’m as large as a man needs to be, par dieu! I caught his sword over my head on mine, near the hilts, and let it slide off like rain off a steep roof, but I felt his strength in my wrists.
I counter cut a mezzano, a middle cut, at his cheek, and he parried. He was fast, as fast as me, and strong like a wild animal, and he’d been well trained somewhere — he made his covers with the kind of precision that announces the trained man in or out of armour.
He tried to wind on my head cut, and after the rapid exchange we switched places and he flicked a tip cut at me to cover his retreat. I stopped his blade but failed to catch it with my left hand and got my fingers cut for my pains — not badly, but enough pain to distract me if I let it.
He raised his sword up over his head. It’s German posture, although I’ve seen Englishmen do it, too. He strode forward, I stepped off his line, fora di strada, and I cut at his cut.
Our blades met with the oddest sound, and the resistance told me that I’d misjudged and his cut was a feint, the whole of his power slipping away from mine, and then I hit him. It’s hard to describe, but my blade encountered some resistance but not enough, and my point slapped down on his right shoulder, cutting through his gambeson into his shoulder.
His blade had snapped. I’d never seen anything like it — it must have had a flaw near the hilt, because at our second crossing, with both of us powering our blades together, his had simply failed, and I was one push on my pommel from killing or maiming him. Even as it was, my point was two fingers deep in his shoulder.
He looked at his sword blade and said, ‘Fuck me.’
I raised my sword and touched my knee to the ground in salute.
He was bleeding quite a bit by then, and a pair of squires sat him down. But he had no trouble meeting my eye. ‘We must do that again, when this heals. A broken blade doesn’t decide a fight.’
I shrugged. ‘I remain at your service,’ I said. ‘Do you have any messages for the legate?’
Perhaps not my finest hour, but I felt I behaved with restraint.
I was only on the mainland a week, but I missed the arrival of the king and his magnificent entry. I might as well have been there, as Maestro Altichiero da Verona put me in the painting — it hangs in the Doge’s Palace yet, I believe. But that’s another story.
The King of Cyprus received an entire wing of the Doge’s working palace. All of his nobles — those too poor to follow him around Europe, or too old or young to serve on his tournament team and embassy, now rallied to him from the towns around Venice and had their offices confirmed and set up for him a sort of government in exile to handle his business and the business of the Passagium Generale before we sailed. His appearance engendered respect; he looked rich, young, debonair and very competent. The Venetians liked him, and he loved Father Pierre, and suddenly, once again, the crusade seemed real.
I was delighted to have Nerio and Fiore back. With Miles Stapleton and Juan and our servants, we made a small company of ourselves. They all took sections of my little roost above the scriptorium, despite the fact that by then we knew that our grocers quarrelled every night, screaming like fishmongers about unpaid rents, bad debts, and infidelity. The process of reconciliation could also be loud, and the daughters were generally able to keep up with their parents, and the ringing battle cry of the youngest: ‘I hate you! You want to ruin my life!’ was so insistent and so frequent that we took to calling it along with her in our newly learned Veneziano, and on one famous occasion, when her mother called her a whore for wearing her hair down with a fillet to Mass, Marc-Antonio roared it out before the maiden thought to say it herself. We all dissolved into laughter, even Miles Stapleton, who was the strictest stick to ever be thrust into mud.