Then she shook her head. ‘I think that I am asking you not to kiss me,’ she said. ‘I believe my choices resolve down to none, or many. I choose none.’ She looked at me under her lashes. ‘Why are you not disgusted? The king would be disgusted.’
‘Only after he was finished,’ I said. I smiled. ‘At least, if he’s like Nerio.’
‘Yes,’ Emile said. She smiled slowly. ‘You understand? Truly?’
I shrugged. ‘I have been some dark places. All I hear you say is that you, too, have been to them.’
She shuddered. ‘And you?’
I frowned. ‘Emile, I have killed men for money.’ I turned, getting my back to the wall. As if it was a fight. Perhaps it was. ‘You know what I have gained from Father Pierre? A sense of my own sin.’ I smiled. ‘And I’m mortally certain that if you put the bastard who took my horse in front of me tomorrow, I’d cut his throat.’
Her mouth twitched.
‘So what penance shall I assign myself, when I know the next sin is just at the end of my sword?’ I asked and took a chance. I put my lips on hers, left them long enough to be sure, and then stepped back. ‘I love you. Would you prefer to wait for marriage?’
‘You’ll kill my husband so that you might marry me?’ she asked. She met my eye with her head half turned, and I think her amusement was genuine. ‘I don’t think we will be able to count on Father Pierre for that wedding.’
She made me laugh. Christ as my Saviour.
Because the answer was — yes.
The next day, after training with the Order, I was summoned by de Mezzieres. As I expected, I was left alone with the king.
He motioned to me to rise from my deep bow. ‘Is a certain lady under your protection?’ he asked.
I think I laughed. ‘I doubt that she needs my protection,’ I said.
The king grinned. ‘Par dieu, monsieur, you are a man after my own heart. When this is done, come to Cyprus. I will give you lands and men, and you can one of my lords.’
You still won’t get Emile in your bed, I thought.
ALEXANDRIA
1365
We sailed in early July. My body was healed, and I left behind me my revenge on d’Herblay, my fears for the Bishop of Geneva, my new-found love of Venice, and my hatred of Genoa. I had had this experience before, leaving London to go to France. War is always a sea voyage — if you return, everything is changed. Even you.
We had perhaps four thousand men-at-arms, the cream and the riff-raff of all the men-at-arms in Europe that summer. We had the best of the Italian knights and many of the best French professionals; there was a rumour, right until we sailed, that du Guesclin would join us, and I wished for him. We had some very good English knights, as I have said before, and a surprising number of Scots and Irish — not that I can always tell the two apart. But the Leslies had brought men from the isles west of Scotland. They were, every one of them, as good as Kenneth MacDonald and his brother and Colin Campbell.
Mostly, we had the scrapings of Poitou and Gascony, desperate men in armour whose outward rust belied the state of their souls, their purses, and their general discipline. Yet these same men were as tough as old saddle leather and as careless of danger and pain — vicious old mongrels who would bite any hand if paid. What the masters seemed to ignore is how they behaved when not paid.
But just then, between Venice, Cyprus, the Pope and the Accaioulo, we had gold.
Sabraham used some of the gold to buy informers within the brigands, so that we might work out any plots against the legate. He was thorough, and he trusted no one. Even me. Later, as you will hear, he shared some information with me, when he had no choice.
Ah, Chaucer. You know Sabraham, eh?
Later, in June, I heard that there had been a mysterious riot among the Gascons, and three men had died — with crossbow shafts in their heads. An odd sort of riot; Sabraham’s sort.
We left the lagoon, and loaded the ships, and I relaxed.
After all, we only had to fight the Saracens.
After a day at sea, it became clear to me that our hosts, the Venetians, had very different goals than the Pope, the legate, or the king. This didn’t surprise me unduly; I was a professional soldier, and I was aware that employers were often at odds with their own soldiers over strategy — but having Nerio in the next hammock on board the Saint Niccolo gave me direct access to his Florentine perspective on the Venetians and the Genoese, the Pope and the French. He knew more of Venetian policy than Ser Matteo Corner, who commanded our magnificent galley. Every night, whether we were in one of the small ports of the Adriatic or nestled stern first on a beach cooking on the hard-packed gravel, we’d debate the possible targets of the crusade.
Miles Stapleton assumed we’d go directly from the rendezvous at Rhodes to assault Jaffa, the port for Jerusalem. He described this one night, and Fra Peter laughed aloud. He was sitting on a folding stool, checking the leather straps on his harness and rubbing oil into them to protect them against the salt air.
‘Jaffa isn’t so much a port as an open beach,’ he said. ‘It’s unprotected in bad weather.’
Miles nodded. ‘Ah, but God will provide us good weather. And it is the closest port to Jerusalem.’
Fra Peter shook his head. ‘We need a good port where we can take water and food; a port that can be defended from the Egyptian fleet.’
One of the French Hospitallers looked up from his own armour. ‘Acre?’ he asked.
The older men debated Acre and Tyre, both ports that had been held by Christians, almost within living memory. Acre had fallen almost eighty years before, to the Mamluks. Tyre had been lost through infighting and sheer foolishness.
I had never even seen a map of the Holy Land. I suppose that I thought of the world as a vast plate with Jerusalem at its centre, and I assumed that, like any great city, it would be easy to reach.
Fra Peter scratched his chin and went back to his leather. But another night, in a waterfront taverna on Corfu, he sat tapping his teeth with his thumb, clearly impatient at my poor geography. He took the hulls of pistachios for cities and used wine to draw coastlines.
‘Look,’ he said, as much to me as to Miles or Lord Grey. We were all shockingly ignorant of the Levant. ‘This is Anatolia, which juts like a sore thumb out of Asia. Two hundred years ago it was all in the hands of the Greeks and many Greeks live there yet. Here’s Greece and Romania … here’s Venice.’ He drew the coastlines in broad sweeps. ‘Under Anatolia’s thumb, the coast of Syria runs almost straight south.’ He placed pistachios. ‘Here is Venice, up in the armpit of the Adriatic. Here’s old Athens, out at the end of Greece. Here’s Constantinople, where Asia and Europe meet. The Dardanelles, the Pontic Sea, the Bosporus, the Euxine, which is ruled by Genoa and the Bulgarians, these days. Here to the south of the Dardanelles are a mess of Greek islands, some held by the schismatic Greeks, some by the Genoese, and a few by our Order — Lesvos, Chios, Rhodos. South on the coast of Asia-Syria is Tyre. South of Tyre is Acre. South of Acre is the open beach of Jaffa near Jerusalem.’ Fra Peter clicked down the last city, and a silence fell.
Matteo Corner was nodding along. There were twenty of us sitting in the July heat, most of us the legate’s men. Corner put a finger on the pistachio hull for Jerusalem. ‘You have been?’ Corner asked.
‘I’ve made a dozen caravans,’ Fra Peter said. ‘It is the ultimate duty of our Order, to escort pilgrims to Jerusalem.’
Corner smiled cynically. ‘I have been as well.’ He shrugged.
His shrug was dismissive, and I was as shocked as if he’d blasphemed. ‘Surely, messire, it is a fine city?’
Fra Peter sighed. ‘Do not confuse the earthly Jerusalem with the Heavenly, young William. The earthly city is neither very large nor very holy. And it’s only trade is the pilgrim trade.’