After the dinner for Lord Grey, I knew most of the English knights and squires, whether they were donats, brothers, or crusaders. Through Nerio, I quickly came to know the Italians in the Order; Fra Ferlino di Airasca was a Savoyard. He was the Order’s admiral, as senior as Fra William Midleton, and as easy to know. He had the beautiful manners of the Savoyard court, and his family were friends of Emile’s father’s family. He was a fine swordsman, and he and Fiore made an immediate and close acquaintance. Fra Palamedo di Giovanni was commanding one of the Order’s galleys, and Nerio visited him frequently.
Each day on Rhodes, after matins, we’d eat a light meal — hard bread and cider, perhaps a little cheese, some sausage, whatever was left in the kitchens — and then we’d debouch into the yard and train. We’d stand at the pell with Fiore yelling at us, and we’d engage each other. The Order believed in the English game of sword and buckler, with sharps, and we’d swagger our good swords, first left- and then right-handed. And then spend hours taking out the nicks. I was careful of the Emperor’s longsword, and used my spare.
By the summer of the crusade year, Ser Fiore had begun to codify many of his notions of sword and spear play. He had a theory, much like the way the theologians with whom we discoursed had theories on the divinity of Christ, or the Virgin Birth, or the nature of the Host, or the nature of blessings administered by priests. If I dwell on the profession of arms, it is because I was not a priest, but on Rhodes, as in Avignon, we were surrounded by the profession of Christ, so to speak, and we would have had to be far more ignorant men then we were not to imbibe some of their wisdom and their style.
So with Fiore’s theory. One of them was that the forming of the first cross in a fight determined all the actions that followed until the two combatants broke apart, or one was hit. And the process by which the combatants came together — in a fight, you never think of these things, but Ser Fiore did, all the time. He would stand watching us, purse his lips, shake his head, and I’d think what am I doing wrong? And it would prove later that he was thinking of making us fight to music.
Because fighting has a rhythm to be exploited, of course.
In the yard and in the squares and on the parade of the fortress we trained and trained. Fra Peter led my company, in which, to all effects, I was a corporal. It was the only time I saw him, except occasionally at dinner. When not training, Fra Peter attended constantly on the legate and sometimes on the Grand Master. I missed him.
We formed lines and squares, we formed wedges on foot and mounted, we fought alone, as pairs, as teams of five and as units of fifty, and we practised with spears and swords. A few men had axes or poleaxes — a difficult weapon with which to train, believe me. A good man can ruin a pell with an axe cut. Fiore installed a line of springy saplings — very different from our heavy oak pells — to give us a more rapid, more flowing ‘opponent’. But the axe men could lop them to pieces, and sometimes did.
Fra William used a very small axe on a long handle, a weapon he’d taken from a Turk. With a mischievous gleam on his face, he appeared one afternoon and worked his way down our saplings, turning them into kindling with his little axe.
Fiore watched him and then picked up a victim, a thin branch, no thicker than my thumb. It was cut through and almost polished. The cut ran straight.
Fiore nodded and looked at the turcopolier. ‘He is very good,’ Fiore admitted.
I was amazed that a man so big was so capable, but the man was amazing.
My Turk was also amazing. We baptised him on the feast of Saint John, and he took the name John. Everyone called him John the Turk — Iannis Turkos, in the local tongue. By the time the hospital released him, his Italian was acceptable, although he was not good at tense or time and his idea of the agreement of numbers could be very difficult.
‘I am very honoured to being so many knight,’ he said with a bow to my friends. ‘All with Christ now.’
It is easy to make a man sound like a fool with bad speech and John the Turk was no fool. He could ride anything, and he was impossibly generous — his understanding of Christ’s word shamed the rest of us. I gave him some coins to drink my health one day, and watched him the next day give all of it to a beggar.
‘Does He not say, give all you have and follow Me?’ John asked.
Nerio slapped him on the shoulder. ‘He didn’t mean a horse or arms,’ he said.
John laughed. ‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘Christ no fool.’
John also thought I was a priest because, at his baptism, I read the Gospel. From John I learned that an imam, a Moslem priest, was a reader first and foremost. I discovered that imams are not disbarred from being warriors or having wives, which led me to suspect that the Saracens might have certain advantages.
Be that as it may, John was the first real servant I ever had. He was both a wonderful and terrible servant. He had no notion of subservience: that is, he had respect for my rank, and my friends, but he, too, was a professional warrior, and he didn’t expect to be treated any differently. He was happy to lay out my kit, polish my armour, sharpen my weapons, and especially care for my horse but he refused to have anything to do with the serving of food or the cleaning or maintenance of clothes, all of which he described with withering contempt as ‘women’s work’. He handed all of them to Marc-Antonio.
One day they appeared before me, Marc-Antonio with two black eyes and a long gash on the back of his right hand, and John virtually unmarked — but whatever was settled between them, Marc-Antonio was no longer referred to as the ‘woman’.
It is odd, to me, that some men have such opinions of women. Women, to me, are brave, careful, smart, and delightful. I would cheerfully do laundry to have an hour with a woman, and I’d think nothing of sewing clothes for anyone I like. And the Blessed Virgin was a woman. I defy any gentleman anywhere to offer her insult, and I offer that cartel without restriction to any defamer of women.
But my Turk, my Kipchak, saw the roles of women and men as separate streams. If we are held here long enough, perhaps I’ll tell you how John came to change his spots. But as the weeks passed, and we trained and trained, and our horses fattened and recovered their muscle, so John became one of us. And one day we watched him shoot his bow.
First, he was given a bow by Fra William. He thanked the turcopolier profusely — and then, when the man’s back was turned, he fumed. He ridiculed the bow as too weak, badly made, with a cast. He strung it and unstrung it.
He took the quiver of arrows he’d been given and went through them one by one.
‘A bow for slaves. And arrows to match,’ he all but spat. He upended the quiver, an English arrow bag, really, and in it was a mixed bag — literally — with arrows of every colour and nine or ten different fletching styles: round vanes, elliptical vanes, and pointed vanes like our own arrows. He fetched a stool (we were in the yard) and began sorting them into piles, staring down the length, holding them to the sun, and running his thumb down the vanes.
One of our crossbowmen, the Order’s, I mean, came out with an English ale in his fist. ‘I hate to see them apes given arms,’ he said in Genoese-Italian. ‘But they’re born to bows like little centaurs.’ He watched the Turk. ‘Almost intelligent, eh? Good bow, eh?’ he said to the Turk.’
‘Bow is craps. Arrows are turd every one,’ John said. ‘Made in Genoa.’