Why did I doubt her?
When I had been a month in that bed, I was able to walk. And move my arms. My hands hurt all the time. And everything was stiff — so stiff that I thought at one point I’d never be able to swing my arms again. And then the old monk came.
He didn’t say anything for the first two days.
I was just learning to speak again. My mouth hurt, and my teeth hurt — everything hurt, really, and something in my head was just beginning to heal.
I looked over, hoping it was Emile breathing, and it was the old monk. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.
He smiled toothlessly.
He was perhaps the most devoted torturer I have ever known.
He worked for the abbey, and he trained men and women to go back to their lives. He was a man of few words; not from vows, I think, but inclination, and at some point, when he swore at me in frustration, I knew he’d been a knight. He knew a great deal about pain, and about the way muscles worked.
And at some later point, he appeared with Fiore.
I burst into tears. I was ruined, as a knight. I had no hands, no muscles. My hands were splayed claws with no grip — indeed, I could not close the left at all, the right would not make a fist. Neither hand could hold a sword.
No armour, and no spurs and no horse.
But Fiore, who often missed social cues, held me in his arms for as long as I moaned, and then put me back on my feet.
And the next time he came, he brought two wooden wasters.
The first time, I couldn’t hold one. But the old monk kept it and made me bend my stiff, painful hands around it — some days he dipped my hands in hot wax, some days he nearly boiled them in water: he had a thousand ways to torment me, but he got my right hand closed on the waster’s hilt.
So the second time Fiore came, I could just barely hold one. And as soon as I did, which took another few visits, we stood on guard, Fiore swung — and I flinched.
Fiore pursed his lips, as he did sometimes. ‘Um-hmm,’ he said.
I had learned physical fear in a way that I had never learned it as a boy. I cringed when a hand was raised, and I turned my head away instead of covering a blow. I would break my posture to back away rather than swinging. Fiore would purse his lips and continue, with endless, damningly gentle patience. Often he would talk with the monk.
Sometimes he would speak to Emile.
And this went on for a month. The sun began to grow warmer. There was a hint of green outside the window and my friends came. They came one at a time; later I heard that this was the stricture of the abbess and Fra Andreo. Nerio came and I was happy, for a little while, but his sanguine good humour, his handsome profile and his vanity in his own appearance — a fine velvet gown embroidered with his arms, an embroidered purse to match and a pair of gloves that I recognised with a pang as my own, borrowed, no doubt, from my portmanteau — all conspired to make me feel the more my own lacks.
Miles came. He brought a chess set. Miles didn’t have a great deal of conversation at the best of times — he was younger than any of the rest of us, and less … experienced. He knelt by my bed and prayed, and held my hand. He, too, made me feel worse. His concern and his piety only made me feel fragile.
Fiore came. His visits were in some ways the worst of all. He’d memorised two subjects to discuss, both foolish, and he stared out the window and muttered to himself. Then he sat and fidgeted. After half an hour, Emile, dressed in almost clerical black, came with her embroidery and sat with us. She had all three of her children with her. They always made me feel better. Edouard, the eldest, was not yet old enough to notice that I was badly injured or even out of sorts, and he would make me laugh by bringing in a frog or a butterfly. The girls, Magdalene and Isabelle, would curtsey, or at least attempt to do so — Isabelle was adept at falling plop on her bottom while assaying the curtsey.
At any rate, Fiore spoke neither to Emile nor to her children. He stared at his sword hilt, looked at me, and said a cursory prayer.
Please don’t imagine I couldn’t speak. By that time, I could talk, with some difficulty. It took time for my voice to recover because the ligaments that control speech had been damaged. So mostly I would smile and wave, trying to encourage people to speak. This worked on some adults, and was marvellous to children — what adult gives a child unlimited license to speak? But for Fiore, it was torture.
After ten more minutes of his fidgeting Emile raised an eyebrow.
‘Have you no conversation, Ser Fiore?’ she asked, a little too bluntly, I fear.
Fiore recoiled in fear. He stammered, and retreated, a man who was unbeatable with a sword, worsted in moments by a beautiful woman.
The last visitor in the rotation was Juan.
Seeing Juan was somehow very like seeing Emile — or like wearing your best old shirt, the one that fits perfectly and is worn to uniform comfort. He did not hem or haw, he did not stammer, nor preen.
‘Your lady is very beautiful,’ he said, sitting on my bed. His Catalan accent made his French charming.
Emile flushed, which made me love Juan for ever.
He leaned over me. ‘I have prepared a complete chronicle of our lives without you,’ he said with the tone, the exact tone, of the old priest who read to us during meals in the commanderie of Avignon.
Emile smiled. ‘I must feed Isabelle,’ she said. ‘Please excuse me, gentlemen.’ She curtseyed, and Juan bowed graciously. Emile reached out and touched my hand, and departed.
Juan watched her go. ‘Par dieu,’ he said and grinned at me. ‘Let me see … where was I? Ah, Nerio Acciaioli has taken a new mistress! And she, defying convention, is young and beautiful!’
I must have snorted.
‘He has also managed to forget her name only once,’ Juan went on, ‘and — well, no more should be said.’ He pretended to roll up a scroll and toss it over his shoulder. ‘We leave aside the hunts, the ridings abroad, the secret visits, and the new clothes as of no interest.’ He mimed the opening of a second scroll. ‘Ser Fiore has stunned the company by spending his days, not in frivolous conversation, but in the practice of arms. Suddenly this appears to be his consuming passion.’ He went on until I was convulsed with laughter, the knitting bones of my ribs grating together until tears came to my eyes and suddenly he was holding both my hands.
‘Oh, my friend, I’m so sorry!’ He shook his head. ‘In truth, I’m bored to death without you. Hurry and get well — we’ll ride abroad, slaughter your enemies and …’ he laughed, ‘and doubtless borrow money from Nerio. Is it true? That it was the fine lady’s husband?’
I wheezed. But some secrets were not mine. I shook my head.
He shook his. ‘I think you are a liar. Listen, if you die, we will rip off his balls and make him eat them. We have sworn it.’ He leaned close. ‘They say he is at Mestre, with the army. We’ll kill him, yes?’
This from one of my brothers in the order. Juan was always my favourite.
I wish I had told him so.
A beautiful pair of galleys were fitting out across a narrow arm of the lagoon. Because I watched them every day, I learned a great deal.
Listen, much of the rest of this story is tied up in ships. I grew to manhood in London, with one foot in the sea, and yet I knew almost nothing of its ways. I had been to sea; I’ve crossed the channel a hundred times in everything from the royal flagship to various fishing busses and smugglers with a pair of oars and six sticks that float.
But life as animate cargo does not a sailor make.
Thanks, however, to the old monk Fra Andrea, I learned much of the terminology from the comfort of my bed. I learned that the two low, sleek predators fitting out across the lagoon from my window at St Katerina’s were galia sottil or ‘light’ galleys. Fra Andrea pointed out that if I rose from my bed and hobbled as far as his rose garden, I could see the massive elegance of a galia grossa towering over the narrow streets of Mazzorbo, the small town on the back side of our island.