The Long Sword (25 page)

He laughed. ‘You are a bold rascal. You think you can just walk away?’

I looked about me carefully. ‘If you had a dozen men with arbalests wound, I would see the odds as long.’ I met his eyes. ‘But even if you had them, I promise you that the first man to die would be you.’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ he said easily.

‘Keep telling yourself that.
My lord.
’ I pushed the solar door open. ‘Come, Marc-Antonio,’ I said, and turned and began to walk towards the bishop on his dais.

Camus, sword drawn, stepped between us.

Three steps from him, I flicked my eyes and saw Marc-Antonio emerge from the solar. I altered course, stepping to the right. Camus turned.

‘Ah, Bourc. He has you leashed and muzzled, like the dog you are!’ I said, and smiled. I licked my lips at him.

Marc-Antonio passed behind me, headed for the door of the great hall.

Camus’s face worked and muscles bulged. I stepped backwards towards the door.

‘You have no idea,’ whispered the Bourc.

In a way, that was more frightening than any other part of the interview.

I backed out the door with my sword still in the scabbard. Because I knew that if I drew, I would kill, and I was old enough to know the consequences.

I heard the bishop laugh. ‘Tell Madame d’Herblay to say her prayers,’ he called. ‘False as Jezebel, doomed to hell. Eternity in hell – for fucking a cook’s boy!’

Camus slammed the oak door in my face.

I went to the stables and got my riding horse, still saddled, thanks to Saint George and Saint John and all the saints. My hands were shaking. In fact, I’ll admit I could scarcely stand, and to this day I’m proud of the badinage I made with that devil, the Bishop. I got Marc-Antonio up behind me, and we rode at a gallop through the streets as if the Legion of Hell was behind us.

As soon as we were through the gate of the Hospital, di Heredia sent for us. He embraced me and sent me to my cell and took Marc-Antonio.

He interrogated my squire for more than two hours. I heard all about it over the next few weeks. He was not kind: he treated Marc-Antonio as if the boy was hostile, an enemy.

Then, without allowing me to see my squire, he sent for me.

‘He bought you?’ di Heredia asked, his voice heavy with contempt.

I shot to my feet. ‘Crap!
Merde
. Nothing of the kind.’

He spent thirty minutes on me. He told me that Marc-Antonio had turned on me; he told me that I’d promised to kill Father Pierre.

At one point, I wept. It was so unfair and I went from rage to humiliation to anger to sorrow. I was wretched.

In half an hour.

The bells rang for Vespers, and di Heredia put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come, come, my son. Let us go sing the divine offices.’

I looked up at him.

He frowned. ‘I had to be sure.,’ he said.

I sobbed a bit – relief, mostly. I’m not proud of that part. Finally, when I was master of myself, I dried my eyes. ‘What in God’s name is this about?’ I asked. ‘I can’t make sense of it!’

Juan di Heredia smiled his thin smile. He got his beads off a hook, and pulled a full robe on over his arming clothes, which he wore all the time. He sat and tapped his teeth with his thumb. ‘That you cannot make sense of it speaks only to your youth,’ he said. ‘It is about power.’

‘Power?’ I asked.

Di Heredia nodded. ‘If the crusade succeeds, the man who is legate will be the Pope. Even if it fails, that man will probably be Pope. The bishop of Geneva and his friends need the papacy to remain as it is.’ He made a sign I didn’t know. ‘Come, let us sing.’

I shook my head and followed him.

He paused. ‘Do you know the gospels, my young knight?’ he asked.

I shook my head. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But not by heart.’

He nodded. A lay brother passed him, and a sergeant, too old for service, smiled at me and beckoned me to come faster. The chapel was half empty.

‘
If I told you all I knew, you would scourge me with whips of fire,
’ di Heredia said.

After chapel, I grabbed Marc-Antonio by the hand and led him to my cell.

‘Pack!’ I ordered.

He wept a little and swore he had not betrayed me.

I hardened my heart – not that hard, for me – and gave orders. Then I went down to the scriptorium and took a scrap of parchment (the strips from the edge that are of no use to God or man) and I wrote Fra Juan di Heredia a letter.

I told him that I had to go. That I would rejoin Father Pierre in Venice, and that I had a duty outside the Order that I had to fulfil.

By the time I returned to my cell, my malle was packed, my harness was in baskets, and my white-faced squire had buckled on his dagger.

The ‘bandits’ had taken his sword.

‘I’ll solve that for you later,’ I said. ‘Wear your mail.’

Di Heredia was waiting for me in the stable. He was armed. I have occasionally got the better of him, but not often.

‘You are not making this easy for me,’ he said.

I shrugged and saddled my riding horse.

‘I would rather you were where I could see you for a couple of days. The guilty flee where no man pursueth.’ His hand was on his sword hilt.

I understood then, as never before, that this was all very, very serious. That di Heredia didn’t trust me.

‘I must go,’ I said. ‘I have put someone’s life in danger. I have no choice.’ I shrugged.

‘Who?’ di Heredia asked.

I shook my head.

‘Tell me,’ he ordered. ‘Guillaume! I do not care whose knees you push apart. This is
war.
And a nasty kind of war.’

My face went hot, but I got my girth done up.

‘Guillaume!’ di Heredia said, and he was coming around my horse.

‘She’s called Madame d’Herblay!’ Marc-Antonio said. ‘I’m sorry, Sir William!’

We three – four, with my horse – stood like a painting of saints for a long time. Di Heredia had his sword drawn.

That’s how it was.

Finally, he sheathed it. ‘I voted for you to enter the Order. I saved your little whore. If you betray Father Pierre and our Order, I will kill you if it’s the last thing I do.’

This did not sound like an empty threat from the Spaniard.

I went down on one knee in the straw. ‘I swear on the Emperor’s sword and on the wounds of Christ that I will not betray Father Pierre. Or you.’

Fra Juan raised me and gave me a squeeze. ‘Go with God, then. I will not ask who this Madame d’Herblay is. But I will ask you to carry the order’s letters to the legate. And a letter of passage.’

When I looked sullen, he slapped my arm. ‘You may do all the errantry you like, my young ingrate, but I suspect you’ll find a letter of passage helpful.’ He looked at me. ‘You know the Count d’Herblay’s wife?’

I was angry and afraid. My face was as red as my hair. ‘I do,’ I admitted.

‘God save us all,’ di Heredia said.

Marc-Antonio and I rode out through the most vicious of autumn weather, and if I say we were not faster than the wind, it is only because it blew as if all the devils in hell wished to slow us.

In truth, I didn’t know where I was going. My love owned vast estates in Burgundy and I knew from making war there that Burgundy extended over half a continent. Further, I knew her husband had ridden in the van of the army of Savoy at Brignais, and Emile had described herself as a Savoyard.

The obvious place to start was Turin, and I went there. I knew the road, and I knew the inns.

The first night on the road, we were in the steep hills east of Avignon and we stopped in a tiny town, Saint-Marie d’en-Haut, or some such. Marc-Antonio was so scared he didn’t even want to go to Mass, but
the church supposedly had the relics of Mary Magdalene and we went to see them, armed as if for war, and we heard the sermon and took communion too, rare enough even then and probably the only reason I remember it,

After Mass I hired a linkboy on the church steps and we were still on the steps when I saw a man’s head appear around the corner of the convent that fronted the tiny square. He put me on high alert: he was watching for someone, and I assumed it was me.

We made our way back through streets so narrow they were more like goat tracks, so sloped that you could lose a shoe going uphill and the streets were already dark. Twice at turnings, I glimpsed men moving parallel on other streets.

I tapped Marc-Antonio and gave him the Order’s ‘danger’ sign.

He flushed and drew his dagger. The linkboy turned to see why we were stopped – and the sword bit deeply into his neck, and blood sprayed. He dropped his torch and screamed.

They were coming from both ends of the alley.

The closest man was one long pace behind me and coming fast. I raised my scabbarded sword, blocking the first downward blow of a club, and stabbed overhand, putting the gilded iron point of my beautiful red scabbard into the first man’s face. In fact, I got his eye more by luck than skill, and killed him instantly. I pulled the scabbard off the sword with my left hand and threw it in the second man’s face as he tripped over his dead comrade, turned on my hips without changing the placement of my feet, which can be chancy as hell in the dark, and thrust over Marc-Antonio’s shoulder one-handed. I hit his adversary, pivoted back and ripped the sword out of my second kill and powered it forward in a strong overhand cut at the man who had tangled with my scabbard.

It’s very, very hard to face a longsword in the dark. I had no compunction about killing these men – the odds were too long. They could only come at me from two directions, and I had the reach. And the training. I don’t remember having a thought in my head, either: I killed, turned and killed, pivoted back and cut. My cut landed on a dagger and my blow blew through the man’s guard and into his head.

It stuck. By a glint of light from a house’s horn window, I saw that this victim was still alive with my sword two inches deep in his scalp even as I rotated my weight and kicked him off my sword so that a piece of his head came off his skull.

The other men to my front were now hanging back.

I could feel Marc-Antonio, still up and breathing, against my back. I flicked a glance back. He was holding his own.

Audacity is everything, in the dark. I abandoned Marc-Antonio and charged the men in the
traboule
– a tunnel through a house – behind me.

Two of them failed to turn and run, and they stayed there in their blood. The place stank like an abattoir, the copper smell of blood and the ordure smell of guts and I probably didn’t even notice it until I had to go back to get Marc-Antonio and my precious scabbard.

He was shaking, I was not. I dragged him through the tunnel of dead men and we ran across the cobbles, lost in the streets of a very small town.

We went two streets over, or three – I was in a state of near-panic, which can happen to any man after a fight is over and Marc-Antonio was following me – and I ran full on into a man in mail.

‘Where is he?’ he asked in Gascon French.

I must have teetered stupidly, trying to work it out. Marc-Antonio got there first and put his dagger in the bastard. Then we huddled under the eaves of a low house and listened.

The town was full of men. There were shouts behind us.

In the dark, audacity is everything.

I got up on the roof of the house – it was not much higher than my head. From there, I saw the church spire and the tall, narrow roof of the auberge in which we were staying.

The alleys were very narrow, the roofs were low, and mostly finished in slate, with some thatch. Most houses had stone chimneys. ‘Get up here,’ I hissed at Marc-Antonio, and extended him a hand.

None too soon. A dozen brigands – or perhaps men-at-arms – came tearing down our alley. They turned at the base and ran off towards the church. We went over the roofs toward the inn.

I won’t belabour it. I’m not good at being up high, and neither was Marc-Antonio, but we made it, roof to roof, stepping across the alleys and jumping the wider streets on to thatch. I suppose it was less harrowing than it feels now, but the streets were packed with
mercenaries, and they were there to kill me. The roofs were safer, but they didn’t feel that way.

We reached the roof across from the stable of the inn. There were no men at the inn yard, and I dropped into the street and caught Marc-Antonio down and we slipped into the stables and began saddling our animals.

‘Baggage!’ I hissed.

Leaving my armour behind would be tantamount to ruin. I left Marc-Antonio and crept out into the yard, moving from shadow to shadow. The auberge was really just a private house with a large kitchen and extra rooms, and I gained the kitchen unseen, slipped up the servant’s stair to the main door, and threw the beam across. Then I went up the main steps to the top floor and pushed into the room in which we’d left our belongings.

God was truly with me, because the man my enemies had left to watch the room was asleep. I hesitated a moment, and then made his sleep last forever, and may God have mercy on him. I remember that he stank, and that I moved his head to keep his blood off my luggage.

I got my harness and our leather trunk, and ran down the steps just as there was a pounding at the door of the inn. In the street, a Gascon was shouting that the devil was loose.

I got our bags into the yard even as Marc-Antonio brought out our horses. I mounted my warhorse, and my fears were calmed. Mounted on Jacques, I was worth ten brigands. I got my bassinet and my gauntlets on as Marc-Antonio tied the baskets on our mule.

‘All I want you to do is mind the mule,’ I said.

Marc-Antonio nodded.

‘You are doing very well,’ I said, or some similar platitude, but really, he
was
doing well. His hands still functioned, he was alive, he’d put a man or two down, and we were on the last stretch of our escape.

‘They’re right outside the gate,’ he whispered. His tone gave away his fear.

‘Open it,’ I said.

He slid back the bar on the stable gate, and there was a torch-lit crowd outside – at first glance, they appeared to be a hundred men.