It is odd how company can change a man. Among John Hawkwood’s men, I was the mildest, the most chivalrous; the only man-at-arms in the company given to reading Aquinas or Malmonides or even Aristotle. But with Ser Nerio, Juan, Fiore, and Miles, I was the most adventurous, with the possible exception of Nerio, and the most raucous, and it made me see myself in a different way.
Venice is a city with a thousand adventures but a great deal of law. Perhaps too much law for my liking. Men are forbidden to bear arms in public, but there are a dozen exceptions to that law — the Arsenali, the guilds of ship’s carpenters, shipwrights and caulkers in the arsenal where they build the great galleys for war, are allowed to wear swords, rather like London apprentices and for much the same reason; they are the militia. And the noblemen of the city are allowed to bear arms in public.
We, as members of the order, were perhaps not allowed to wear our swords. Or perhaps we were, but I did, and Ser Nerio, who had taken the donat’s coat, did as well. Because we did, the rest did. Perhaps we swaggered a bit too much, but we were in a rich city, packed to the rafters with vicious cut-throats, seasoned by the shopkeepers, who instead of being soft-handed bourgeois, were in fact tough little bastards who cut an empire out of the guts of the Greeks and the Turks.
If it hadn’t been for poverty, I’d have had the time of my life; well, poverty and the knowledge that Emile was a league away across the lagoon.
Like many good times, the scenes blur together, but I know that we were preparing for the Doge’s Christmas court and the great masses at Saint Mark’s. The city was covering many of the crusade’s costs, invisible, inglorious costs, and in return they seemed to feel that the legate and his men, most especially the Order of St John, were at their personal service.
Beggars cannot be choosers, and the service was not so very onerous. We practiced for various processions in armour and I declined invitations from other knights because I couldn’t return them, and ate what I could afford — fish.
Nerio took time to notice. I was too proud to ask him for money, although he seemed to have enough for us all. And I was busy planning Juan’s knighting, which was to be included in the great Mass of the Eve of our Saviour’s birth. I suppose that by that time I had heard, from Nerio, that Juan was actually Juan di Heredia’s son, not his nephew, by one of the great ladies of Spain, to be forever unnamed. Once Nerio told me, it was so obvious as to need no hint — I can be a fool.
At any rate, it was in the days before the festival of Christmas. Every guild in Venice was working at full capacity to satisfy every customer and to prepare for their own roles in processions, passion plays, mimes and dances and feasts.
Venice was like an army on the eve of battle, except that everyone was happy.
I was searching the streets for an ecclesiastical vestment maker who would run up a new surcoat for Juan. Fra Peter and Father Pierre had left this to me, and I had been busy. My friend’s knighting was ten days away, or that’s how I remember it, perhaps less. Marc-Antonio was searching the tailors of the Judaica while I walked along the Rialto. Money was no longer an object, I was that desperate. I needed a tailor who would finish the garment by Christmas eve.
I had Nerio by me, and I was at a stand in a street so narrow that passers-by, apprentices and servants and great ladies in Byzantine turbans all had to press against the wall to avoid the four feet of steel that stuck out behind me like a scarlet tail. I’d just been laughed out of an establishment so squalid that I couldn’t imagine how to proceed.
I was standing in front of a toy shop. Really, it was the shop of a fine leather worker, but his window displayed items he’d made that best showed off his skills, and one of them was a beautiful girl’s doll wearing a fine gown of wool over a kirtle of real silk, some fancy eastern stuff with a pattern. The face of the doll was leather, and while not, strictly speaking, lifelike, it had a vivacity to it that most girl’s dolls lack: the eyes seemed almost to cross, the lips to laugh. The body of the doll was cloth, and I shocked Nerio by striding into the shop, scabbarded sword bouncing off the lintel, and asking for the doll.
The master came out to wait on me, and he laughed to see my face when he told me the price. ‘I thought you foreign nobles were all rich,’ he said.
I shook my head.
Back on the street, Nerio raised an eyebrow. ‘Well?’ he asked.
‘Too much,’ I said. ‘Too dear.’
Nerio walked several steps beside me. ‘Give me your purse, brother,’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘I didn’t come out with any money.’
He held out his hand and I unhooked my purse and handed it to him.
He used most of my worldly fortune to purchase a saffron-laced street pie with beef, and we walked along the Grand Canal. He was kind enough to give me a bite. Then he used the rest of my money to buy us a cup of wine from a very pretty girl whose wine was scarcely her only commodity. He let his fingers linger on hers when he passed her back the cup and she seemed to tolerate the familiarity with good humour.
He said something and she laughed and looked away, and Nerio came and grabbed my shoulder and we walked on.
He still had my purse, and as we crossed the narrow bridge over a side canal, he folded back the cover and emptied it into the canal — or rather, he up-ended it and nothing happened.
‘Broke?’ he asked. ‘Destitute?’ He tossed me the purse and went back to walking.
I shrugged.
‘Why the doll?’ he asked suddenly. ‘Who is it for? You should have seen your face, my friend.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Bah! The disappointment of love.’ He pointed at me. ‘You have no money and you are in love. Every banker knows the symptoms!’
I don’t know whether I glared or cringed or denied.
He walked off again, lengthening his stride as we crossed a tiny square with enough room for a man to walk fast. I followed him back to the leatherworker’s shop. He walked in, exchanged a few sentences in rapid-fire Veneziano, and bought my doll for a third what I’d be told. He tossed it to me on the step. ‘Don’t play with it where the other mercenaries can see,’ he said with a grin. ‘You need money? Let me put some in your hands.’
Rich men borrow money. They are rich, so they get into debt. This is the rule of the street — no one loans money to the poor. And the poor know better than to borrow. I was used to pawning armour, pawning horses, but I was unwilling to pawn armour in Venice and besides, the army of the Passagium Generale had caused a glut of used armour in the shops. The value was practically nil.
My point is that I was, mostly, unwilling to borrow, even from Nerio and his father. He spent the rest of our walk trying to convince me that I was a good business risk. I took him to the armourer’s quarter, and introduced him to my Bohemian.
He looked at the helmet and heard out the Bohemian’s pitch on a full harness of new Milanese altered to fit, and Nerio shrugged. ‘If you are going to keep me alive going to Jerusalem,’ he said, ‘come, what does this amount to, five hundred ducats?’
He wrote the Bohemian a note of hand.
I tried to thank him, and he declined. ‘Listen, my friend, my father is the banker, not I. But I will not see a friend starve in Venice of all places. Here, he did it all for four hundred and seventy ducats. Take these thirty, and call it five hundred.’
I embraced him, and bought him wine. But I still hadn’t found a tailor who would make a surcoat by Christmas eve.
I had, however, found an excuse to visit Emile.
‘Where are you off to?’ Nerio demanded.
‘I have an errand,’ I said.