‘Your men cannot be armed in the city,’ the podesta said.
I bowed. I made no answer, but hoped that my bow would cover the exigencies of the situation.
Even as I spoke to the podesta, two more beggars tried to run to safety behind us, risking our warhorse’s legs to get away from the podesta’s men. Both were men — one a leper, with no lips and no nose, and the other a poor deformed mite, a very small man or even a boy with something awry with his face.
The leper got away — no one likes to catch a leper — but the mite was trapped by the man with the bloody mace. He caught the little man in the corner where two warehouses came together in a jumble of garbage and old roofing, and he grinned.
‘Watch this, messieurs!’ he shouted with glee, and the mace rose-
Fiore stripped it out of his hand. His horse pranced out of our line, he flowed through the other mounted man and dumped him in the gutter and backed his horse to our line before the podesta’s men, still milling about like a stag hunt at the kill, could react.
The podesta’s face grew red-purple. He pointed at Fiore. ‘Arrest that-’
I put a hand on his reins. ‘It is bad manners to attack people during Mass, my lord. You have just attacked these poor people while the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Ambassador of the King of Jerusalem, was saying Mass.’ While in my head I applauded Fiore’s action, I would have traded the life of a beggar for a little peace.
The podesta opened his mouth. Some men despise anything that brooks their authority and this was one such. He didn’t hate me as a Milanese or as the podesta — he just hated me for not cringing.
‘We are knight-volunteers of the Order of St John, if you are too fucking ignorant of the habit of the Order to know.’ I’d had it with trying to be polite. ‘Unless you want to see your whole city under interdict, kindly clear the way.’
The podesta glared at me, but short of ordering his men to attack mine, there wasn’t much he could do.
The man-at-arms in the mud got to his feet cursing. He stomped to his horse and called to Fiore, ‘I’ll know you again, fuckhead!’
Nerio laughed. ‘And we will know you by the smell.’ His contempt was beautiful. It hurt the podesta’s thugs more than our blows might have.
And I was sure that we could take them. Just at that moment, I would cheerfully have made the streets of Genoa run with their blood.
Sometimes I think I am the wrong man to command an escort for a living saint.
On the other hand, we got to our inn alive.
I had nothing to do with the negotiations, which is probably for the best. I had developed an instant contempt for Genoa and I’ve never changed my mind.
Everywhere in Genoa, there are slaves. In Venice there are a few, mostly Moslems. In Genoa, there are thousands. They displace the working poor — anyone of any power has slaves, not servants. Men have slave mistresses and when the slave woman bears children to the master, they are also slaves. Our innkeeper told his wife that every time he fucked their servants, he was making them money.
Need I go on? Slavery rotted their families, undermined their morals, and made them petty tyrants. To say nothing of the sins it engendered in the slaves themselves. I have seen slavery in many places — God knows that Moslems themselves will enslave anything that moves — but a Christian slave in Egypt has every possibility of freeing himself by work and is protected by laws even as a slave.
Bah! I’ve been told that it is worse elsewhere, and that my hatred of the Genoese is as foolish as any other hate. Perhaps. But I hate them the way most Englishmen hate the French — they are a nation of slavers and tyrants, with the morals of merchants and the courage of assassins. False, treacherous, cunning without wisdom, vulgar in display, ignorant, utterly without honour!
You can see why it was best I had nothing to do with negotiations.
The legate met with their senators for eight days. During those eight days, we guarded our inn and fought the podesta’s men.
They never stopped coming at us. Their honour, or whatever honour they felt they had after careers attacking the weak, had been threatened, and every man-at-arms on the city payroll made it his business to gather near our inn and make comments. By the fifth day we were threatened with outright attack.
The innkeeper wept and wrung his hands and said they’d burn the inn. I distrusted him utterly, and while I was off escorting Father Pierre, Sabraham knocked him on the head and locked him in the basement.
After that, we were under siege. The difficult part was getting the legate through the streets to the palace each day. Sabraham and his men scouted routes every night, after dark, and I began to go out with the man; he clearly knew things I didn’t, and I was eager to learn.
I learned a great deal about roofs, and how to climb them; about ambush sites in a city, and about stealth.
And about ruthlessness.
I think it was the fifth night; we were prowling near the market, looking for a safer route to get the legate to the northern part of the city. I climbed across a board that had been left over an alley by one of Sabraham’s men, got my feet under me — heights are not my best thing — to find one of Sabraham’s soldiers, Maurice, cutting a man’s throat. The man died hard — terrified, pissing himself, with a look of horrified unbelief on his face.
‘Thief?’ I asked.
Sabraham spread his hands. The motion said more clearly than words that Sabraham didn’t care a damn who the man was. ‘We cannot be observed,’ he said.
Later, as we went up the corbels of a church with a rope, Sabraham said ‘One of the podesta’s men.’
On the sixth day, we got the legate through the streets by misdirection, using Sister Marie’s apprentice as our bait. The French monk was hit with a rock and brought back unconscious. I’d been with him, as part of the misdirection, and my beautiful surcoat was smeared in excrement.
By mid-afternoon, they were all around our inn, and threatening to burn it. The arsonists were the podesta’s men, of course — responsible for keeping order.
We were all in full harness. Juan was with the legate, as was his new squire, a Catalan boy of good family, who had relatives in Athens. Nerio had found him for Juan, but that’s another story.
Sabraham was out with his killers, and I had Nerio and Fiore and Marc-Antonio and Alessandro and a dozen unarmed clerics to protect.
We’d shuttered the windows. The yard was defensible, but we needed a garrison twice the numbers we had.
‘What can we do?’ Marc-Antonio asked. He was in his breast and back, formerly my armour, now his. He’d lost so much weight that he could fit my old harness. I was in my new stuff.
Nerio was, for once, at a loss and we could hear them clamouring outside.
‘They burn the inn, and then what?’ Fiore said.
‘Then there’s no one to defend the legate. They invite him to stay at the palace. He sickens and dies.’ I shrugged. That was Sabraham’s scenario.
Nerio’s eyes met mine.
‘Anyone you can buy?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘I wish. This is Genoa. They hate Florence.’
‘And they hate the Church,’ I added. ‘At least, the Guelfs do, and they seem to be in power right now.’
A window broke.
I had a moment of clarity. I asked myself how John Hawkwood would deal with the situation, and the whole thing revealed itself to me. It unrolled like a carpet.
It may have been the first pickaxe of the first pioneer undermining my devotion to the order, but at the time-
‘I have it. Are you with me, gentlemen? It won’t be nice.’ I looked around. ‘It is a routier’s solution.’
Fiore grinned.
Ser Nerio laughed aloud. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ve about had it with doing the right thing.’