‘Your brother is a friend of the Turks!’ Angelus spat.
‘Better than Turks than the Franks,’ Kantakouzenos said. ‘The Turks are honest and decent. The Venetians would sell their mothers as whores for a few ducats.’
Nerio might have been expected to take part, given his father’s record in Greece, but he had found a girl, a beautiful girl. Juan was befriended by a Greek priest and they had a conversation about theology and Juan followed him to his little Athenian church to see his icons. Fiore spent two hours debating the Roman origins of our martial tradition with Giannis and one of Kantakouzenos’s officers. Miles basked in the admiration of twenty knights and sat with the two Hospitallers, drinking in their praise.
I listened to Syr Iannis Kantakouzenos, and I worried.
Carlo Zeno never explained what he had been doing at the Tower of Winds. But he never mocked me again — well, any more than Nerio or Juan. Despite that, for one evening, Greeks and Venetians and Hospitallers were all on the same side.
And later we danced. Nerio had become the centre of attention: his name had got out among the men-at-arms, and his father was a famous figure among the Latins of Greece. People came out of their houses to see him, and the atmosphere became less constrained.
I had no idea how famous our little victory was. It was my first sea fight, and if I’ve told it well, that owes as much to hearing the old admiral tell me what had happened as anything I remember. I know that the wind changed at some point and that seemed of great moment to the sailors; of course I understand better now. And I know that the Greeks and Latins shared this — they were starved for victory. The Turks, the Serbs and the Bulgarians had beaten them over and over for twenty years, not by skill in arms but by sheer numbers. And why? For the most part, as far as I could see and by the relation of Giannis, Giorgos, Nerio and Lord Contarini, the lords of Achaea and the Morea were beaten because they were divided among themselves. I have heard it said many times that the knights of Romania, as we called it, were the best in the world, and par dieu, gentlemen, those I met were hardy, cruel men of preux and cunning, but they had not the gift of loyalty, and so they were easily bested by lesser men.
Or so I see it.
Regardless, that Sabbath eve in Piraeus and Athens, we had won a victory that gave them heart-heretics and schismatics together, so to speak.
The next day we gathered cargoes on the waterfront. I had a hard head; I had drunk too late, I think, and I was in a foul mood. I was worried for Marc-Antonio, whose wound was festering, and inclined to find my Turk, who I expected to die despite the treatment of the brothers of the Hospital. In short, my view of the world was as black as it can be for a man four days out of battle. My own wounds hurt, my head hurt, and life seemed … empty.
Usually I filled this feeling with a woman. There, ‘tis said. Taken like a drug. But chastity, and chivalric love — a terrible pair to yoke together — left me alone with my thoughts instead of abed with a soft friend. Alone, a man in dark mood can see many things … differently … and I walked the docks, tormenting myself with Emile’s words, her lack of love for me, her inclination (as I saw it in my darkness) for the king.
A man can use any tool to justify himself to sin and I was busy using my blackness to work myself to hate Emile so that I might find myself a pretty Greek. But Miles saved me from this, with a sort of deadly cheerfulness that made me vent my spleen on him. He gave me the sele of the day and enquired after my wound.
‘It pains me,’ I said. ‘I can scarcely walk.’
He dared to smile. ‘And yet you go up and down these piers as if searching for our Saviour,’ he said with gentle derision.
‘I have much on which to think!’ I said.
He laughed. ‘I am younger than you,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me a man can think while sitting down, if his foot is cut.’
‘Are you wandering about explaining to men the errors of their ways, or do you have some errand?’ I asked. I may have been even more direct. Perhaps I said, ‘What business is it of yours?’
Miles smiled. ‘In truth, the senior knight of our order was asking for you this morning, and Milord Contarini is sitting under his awning just there, awaiting your good pleasure.’
I was being mocked; knights await the good pleasure of lords, and not the other way about.
I realised that I had been pacing up and down in full view of the command structure of the fleet and no man likes to look a fool.
‘And how long have you known that I was wanted?’ I asked. In my mood, I saw him laughing at my pain and watching me pace the docks.
Miles bowed, refusing to be drawn to temper. ‘About as long as it took me to walk from the poop to this spot,’ he said.
Something in his restraint finally cracked my bad composure. ‘Miles, my apologies,’ I began.
He shook his head. ‘None needed.’ Really, he was too good to be believed. He didn’t seem to need a wench or a confessor and he had fought quite brilliantly.
I sighed, and hobbled to the gangway of the great galley. What inconsistency of the mind allowed me to walk back and forth, cursing Emile’s imagined faithlessness, without so much as a twinge from my foot-but the moment I returned to my duty, it hurt with every step?
Bah! I see both of you gentlemen are familiar with this sort of thing.
At any rate, as I limped, I watched the deck crew using the foremast’s yard as a crane to lift a bale of hides inboard. Something turned over in my head. Hides wouldn’t go outbound to Rhodes — Rhodes might have a leatherworker or two, but hides were a homebound cargo for Venice. I had been listening to Nerio and to Lord Contarini when they spoke about merchanting.
I looked down the main deck to the stern, where the command deck rose a few steps above the main deck. Lord Contarini was sitting, just as Miles had said, in a low chair. The leather battle curtains were brailed up for the breeze. He was watching the loading of the great galleys shallow hold. He saw me and his demeanour changed.
I am no fool. I had the evidence, and I assembled it. He was loading us for Venice, not Rhodes.
Let me tell you, I prefer a fight to a debate. But I had promised the legate.
I had perhaps thirty slow steps in which to marshal my arguments and make a case. And the first choice was whether to allow myself to be mastered by anger, or to be all sweet reason. The anger was right there, boiling together with the injustice of Emile’s behaviour, the perfidy of the king, d’Herblay’s cowardice, my fear of Cambrai’s long arm, my own fatigue and black mood. Anger was easy.
There are moments in life that are as definite as battle. As stark. There are moments when you see things as if they were outlined in scarlet, when truth is illuminated, when a man’s character changes because he understands something heretofore hidden, for good or ill. We remember with pleasure those moments that are achievements of some goaclass="underline" the wife, the treasure, the golden spurs, the Emperor’s sword. But in our secret mind we know that some of the red letters that mark our days were not achievements but discoveries. I have known a good woman ruined by another woman’s perfidy, ruined to dissipation by a relentless cynicism. I have seen one man turned faithless by another man’s bad faith, accidentally discovered.
In one brilliant flash as I stepped aboard and crossed myself to the crucifix at the stern, I saw that anger would serve no purpose whatever in this debate. And that, further, my anger was a bent, nicked sword in any debate. I can’t tell you by what train I arrived at this conclusion, but I saw it. This was one conversation in which I must not be governed by my black mood.
Like a man approaching a fight in the lists, I examined my opponent and tried to find an attack that would carry his conviction. That he had given his word? That our victory needed to be known on Rhodes?