Fra Peter stretched his booted feet towards the fire and leaned back. ‘William has just favoured me with an explanation of events which would stretch to fit the Genoese business.’
For the second time in an hour, I found myself explaining Robert of Geneva’s role in Avignon, and his family stake in the bishopric of Geneva and the papacy and the crusade.
‘Genoa is a pawn of France,’ Fra Peter said.
‘France and Egypt,’ Father Pierre said. He looked at me, and his eyes told me that he had read my thought, and that his love of man included an understanding of how much the animal man could be. ‘Imagine: a hundred years ago, Saint Louis led a crusade to Cairo, but now the King of France conspires with the Sultan in Cairo to stop a crusade.’
I looked at my feet and ran my fingers though my hair. ‘Does the King of France even know what’s afoot?’ I asked.
Fra Peter looked at me, then the fire. ‘Probably not; it is enough for him to get a Frenchman as the next Pope. He won’t trouble himself about the ways and means.’
‘Fra di Heredia said you might be the next Pope,’ I said. I knew it was bold.
Father Pierre’s wide eyes met mine. ‘If they make me Pope, I will fling the moneylenders from the temple,’ he said. ‘I will burn their fingers on their own ingots of gold.’ He smiled.
Fra Peter laughed. ‘I pray I may live to see the moment you receive Saint Peter’s crown,’ he said. ‘I for one would like to see what you will make of Mother Church.’
Father Pierre raised an eyebrow. ‘Enough. I will go to Genoa.’
Fra Peter nodded to me. ‘After complete impasse, and some very underhanded dealing, suddenly Genoa invites Father Pierre to address her great council and make a case for peace.’
I suppose we should have seen the connection, but we did not.
Nor were we fools. Fra Peter ordered me to take a few volunteers. We thought we would be gone just three weeks, back in time for Juan’s knighting. King Peter intended to keep Christmas court in Venice; there was to be a tournament and a foot combat in the square of Saint Mark’s. We had three weeks to get the legate over the rain-swept roads of northern Italy, to an inimical city, to make a treaty.
A week passed, and we still hadn’t left. These things happen; the legate was held up every day by the press of business, and now that we had the king in person, it was increasingly likely that there would, indeed, be a crusade.
There were further letters from Avignon. The letters told the legate that the Pope was still interested in the expedition, but they told me that the passes above Turin had opened again, however briefly, and that Robert of Geneva’s agents would be abroad.
I attended King Peter. The Venetians had moved him from the Doge’s palace and now housed him magnificently in a private one, and he kept court. Many of his men who hadn’t had the coin to travel Europe had come this far, and now he was surrounded by a phalanx of noble Franco-Cypriotes. Jehan de Morphou led them — he was the best dressed and the most arrogant. The admiral, Jean de Monstry, had been on the king’s team at the tournament of Krakow, and I knew him a little, and of course there was Phillipe de Mezzieres. But none of them were overtly rude; Monsieur de Mezzieres was distant but courteous enough, although I didn’t much like the way he watched me, and Morphou was full of praise for my exploits with the king at Krakow — praise that I found as insubstantial as a pimp’s promises of a wedding.
However, I invited all of them to Juan’s knighting. I was determined to pack his ceremony with good knights.
It was also while visiting the king’s court that I first met Nicolas Sabraham. He was older than I, grey-bearded and as plainly dressed as a monk, but he wore a heavy sword and spurs. I was briefly introduced by a French knight, Bremond de la Voulte, who was serving King Peter as a volunteer with ten men-at-arms. Bremond and I had crossed lances on several occasions, or at least, we’d been within yards of each other in fights in France, especially Brignais, and we probably bored a number of Cypriote knights to tears with our reminiscence, but we were instant comrades, and swore to each other to go to Jerusalem come what may. He knew Sabraham, who often served with the order. I had never met him. Sire Bremond walked off and left us in order to flash his Poitevan smile at a Venetian lady, and left me with Sabraham.
‘You’re English,’ he said.
His English was as good as mine, and pure Northerner, like John Hughes.
I suppose that I grinned. ‘I would never have taken you for a Londoner, sir,’ I allowed. He was dark-skinned and dark-haired under his grey.
‘Nor should you,’ he said. ‘My family is from the north.’ He smiled and tugged at his beard. ‘Or do you mean I’m dark? It serves me in good stead here.’ He shrugged. ‘Men say our forefathers were Jews in York.’
He said it with such simplicity — listen, I have not, myself, ever held with those who attaint the whole of the race of Jews with the death of Christ. Father Pierre said once in a sermon that we should never mind the Jews, that we kill Christ ourselves, every time we sin against another man, and I take that as a gospel. But Sabraham’s easy admission marked a kind of courage — or indifference — and yet instantly educated me about the man: he was surrounded by a circle of emptiness. A few men, like Sire Bremond, were not afraid of whatever taint might stick to such a man, but most of the Cypriotes left him a wide berth.
It was their loss. He was a witty man when he spoke, yet careful and dignified. In ten minutes, I had learned that he had read the Koran in Arabic and the Bible in Hebrew and Greek, that he had travelled all over the Holy Land, and that he knew Juan di Heredia.
I invited him to Juan the younger’s knighting, and he smiled. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, eyebrows pausing as if to check my intentions independently from his eyes.
I wanted to tell him that I had no truck with the Jew-haters, but that might offend him doubly — perhaps from a convert family he was, himself, one of them? Men are hard creatures to know.
About the same time, we were joined by two schismatic converts who served as knights with Father Pierre. They’d been on a mission for him to Constantinople, and they returned with Imperial bulls written in gold on purple parchment. Father Pierre had spent a great deal of time out in the East while we were fighting the French, and he knew the Emperor, John V, and many members of his court, and he had converted two of the Emperor’s noblemen — Syr Giannis Lascarus Calopherus and Syr Giorgos Angelus of the Imperial family. They were darker than Sabraham, as dark as Moors, with curling black beards and dark brows, but they were good men-at-arms. I had never really met any of the Greek Stradiotes, although there were already a few serving with the Hungarians and Venetians in the wars. These two were the first Catholic Greeks I met, and they spoke as many languages as Sabraham. And of course, the three of them knew each other — Venice is full of Greeks, and they attend the same churches and drink wine in the same houses and probably use the same brothels; and Sabraham was more readily accepted by the Greeks than by the Cypriotes.
At any rate, we played dice with them and they taught us card games and we all practiced at arms together. The Greeks were a revelation, even to Fiore; they, too, had a martial tradition, and as Venice was afire for anything even obliquely Classical, and as Greeks claim a classical ancestry to anything they do, Fiore was at first amazed, and later at least interested, by their exercises, which they claimed to come from Galen, and their swordsmanship, which they claimed came from Roman manuals.
In private, Fiore practised some of their exercises and mocked others. ‘The Romans never had the longsword,’ he said. ‘It is an invention of this age. Yet they both wear them, and their teacher was a High German, or I’m a Moslem.’
Whatever their martial antecedents, they were good swordsmen, and they were amazing horse-archers, as we had cause to see in a little display they put on for the men-at-arms at Mestre. Fra Peter and the legate and the king all wanted the mercenaries and volunteers to see what the Turks and Saracens could do, and he used our Byzantine gentlemen to act as Turks. Later, when I saw real Turks, I realised that they were pretty good imitations, although Giorgos never rode as well as Giannis, much less as well as a Turk bred to it from birth. But I digress.