The Long Sword (47 page)

I beg your pardon. But my new found evenness of temper was not, in fact, accompanied by a whole change of temperament. Listening to Nerio did not incline me to chastity. Nothing did.

At any rate, the admiral was reserved but courteous. He was in his chair on the command deck until the sails went up after we passed Sounion, and then he went below. The next day, and the next, he remained aloof, and I was sorry to lose his regard.

We ran north and east on an empty sea in light airs. Word of our victory had sent every ship into the nearest safe port. The captains of the Ionian felt about our fleet exactly as the peasants of Thessaly had felt about our landing – they feared us as much as they feared the Turks. We didn’t site a fishing boat until we were on the Aeolian shore, or at least what Nerio assured me was Aeolia. I was receiving a second-hand classical education, combined with an endless volley of erotica, from every conversation.

And what of my Turk? As I have mentioned, the Hospitaller knights had taken him aboard their galleys. We were on the beaches of Lesvos, the isle, I am assured, of a brilliant and beautiful poetess whose descendants Nerio was pursuing closely, when I had time to go visit my Turk. The Hospitallers were drawn up close to us on the long golden beach under a tall and equally golden headland. They had a number of brothers who were very good doctors, and Fra Jacob, an older German doctor, had taken him in hand. He spoke to my man for some time and then turned to me.

‘He’s not a Turk – did you know that? He says he is a Kipchak. Do you know the word? The Genoese sell them to the Egyptians as slave soldiers. Superb archers.’ He rolled back the sleeve on the man’s linen shirt to show me a host of tribal tattoos.

‘Moslem?’ I asked.

They talked in low tones. Eventually Fra Jacob shrugged. ‘More Moslem than anything else, though I think his notions of spirits would puzzle the Caliph.’

I told him of meeting the Kipchaks – the ambassador – at the court of the Emperor at Krakow.

Fra Jacob raised an eyebrow, said a few words to my captive, and the man groaned and then laughed. He was not dead, and that was something, but he could not be troubled long. I sent him fruit from the town, and a chicken, and some wine – which I should have known no Moslem would drink.

The town was crowned with a fortress so ancient that the peasants claimed it featured in
The Iliad
, and the hill was called ‘Watchful’ in the local tongue. The fortress at the top was commanded by an English knight who had served at Poitiers, and we had good cheer for three days while the fleet scraped their hulls and loaded water and food. I was surprised to find an Englishman on the coast of Asia – I began to think that we were everywhere.

Sir John laughed. ‘The Gattelussi – you know them? Lord Francis is prince of this island and a good friend of the Emperor.’ He nodded, enjoying his master’s reflected glory. ‘He hires us in Italy.’

Indeed, Sir John Partner had as many Genoese and Pisans and Bretons as he did Britons, but for all that his little garrison had an English air. There were men there I knew, at least by sight, and it was pleasant to speak English, although less so to climb to the fortress.

The last day in Lesvos, Fra Jacob led me to the man again. ‘He’s making a good recovery,’ Fra Jacob said. ‘Which I attribute to sea air and divine intervention. There should have been the usual sepsis followed by death, but in this case, a week on, and with the original lesion closing? I have to believe he may recover.’ Fra Jacob paused. ‘He has indicated to me that if he recovers, he will convert.’

I grinned. A soul saved is a soul saved, and it is always a benison to have a good deed rewarded.

‘Will you keep him?’ Fra Jacob asked.

I shrugged. ‘I assume he knows horses. I could use a page. So yes. I won’t make him a slave – I’m not a Genoese.’ I laughed.

Jacob spoke to the Turk – I thought of him as a Turk, and they were speaking Turkish. The man grinned and nodded at me.

‘He offers you two years and two days of his life as ransom,’ Fra Jacob said.

I gripped his hand.

Fra Jacob nodded. ‘I’ll keep him in this hammock until we reach Rhodos. We’ll baptise him if he lives, and by the time we raise the island, I’ll have taught him a little Italian.’ He nodded. ‘You are one of our volunteers?’ he asked.

I bowed and agreed that I was.

He smiled. ‘Enjoy Rhodes,’ he said. ‘You’ve had an encounter with Fra Daniele?’ he asked carefully.

I nodded.

‘His kind is not rare,’ Fra Jacob said. ‘Listen, I am a doctor, trained in Italy. I have been a brother of this Order since my wife died in the Black Death.’ He took a cold cloth and ran it over my Turk’s face. He met my eyes. His were mild; in the low orlop of a Hospitaller galley, his eyes seemed very dark. He smiled, apparently without malice. ‘My father is a nobleman and my birth perfectly decent. But I have never been allowed to dine with the knights, nor offered accommodation, despite the Order’s vows or my own skills.’ He shrugged. ‘I am less resentful than perhaps I sound, but your reputation is as a man of blood.’

It was my turn to shrug. ‘I serve the legate,’ I said.

He nodded and his brow wrinkled. ‘You may find that there are many in the Order who have little respect for your legate.’ He paused. ‘Or none. He was born a serf – a peasant.’

I laughed. ‘I am warned. But I grew to manhood being excluded by the English court – I won’t be broken by aristocratic airs.’

While I was speaking, he got a Greek lamp, lit with olive oil, which smelled so much better than the whale oil you find in the north. By its light I could see my man. ‘What is his name?’ I asked.

We went back and forth, and the best I could reckon, his name was something like Kili Salmud.

He tried to bow, lying in a hammock with his hands together. He flinched as the movement reached his stomach muscles.

‘Let’s get him baptised with a Christian name,’ I said.

Fra Jacob frowned. ‘You might feel differently, were your situations reversed,’ he said.

I think I grinned. ‘But they are not,’ I said, or something equally glib.

South of Chios, we spread our line wide, a dragnet fishing for Turkish vessels, and we snapped a dozen of them up – fishing smacks, a lateen-rigged merchant, a three-masted tub that proved to be a pirate-taken Genoese. We ran her down ourselves in light airs, with the whole crew rowing triple banked, and Fiore and I led the boarders – Nerio was down with the flux. The crew fought to the last; the last being a man that Fiore beheaded with his false edge strategy
,
the showy bastard. Their resistance was pointless, as my friends and I were in full harness despite the heat, and with the two Venetian men-at-arms, all the dying was done by the crew of the round ship. In the hold we found the rotting bodies of the Italian crew, and saw why the Turks – really, as it proved, the merest Levantine pirates of no race whatsoever – had fought to the end, as the cargo was worth a pile of gold, being all silk, and the crew had been ill-used to the point of horror: tortured and humiliated before being killed like sheep with their throats opened, youngest to oldest.

The old admiral, who had scarcely spoken a word to me since our argument on his quarterdeck, came below when summoned by his marines. He didn’t avert his eyes, but merely shook his head.

‘You killed the bastards too quickly,’ he said. But he flashed me a smile. ‘Pirates – animals. They prey on Christian and Moslem alike, and are the enemies of all men.’ He nodded at one young man. ‘That’s a bad way to die, eh?’

And later, he had malmsey served to all of us, and he said, ‘It is easy to prate of the foul religion of the infidel and all that, but when you look at what those pirates did – to Genoese, my natural enemies – you know that it is
those
bastards who are the enemy. And they live in the seams and fissures between the rivals and ply their horrid trade because the lawful powers are busy fighting.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sure I’ll go to hell for saying it, Sir Knight, but I’d rather clear the fucking pirates off the sea than conquer Jerusalem. I can go to Jerusalem any time I want, just for paying a fee to the Sultan in Cairo, who is a lawful man with normal appetites. And when we take Tyre, or Jaffa, or whatever unlucky town we storm …’ He shrugged. ‘I’ve said too much.’

You see these horrors at the fringe of war. Routiers rob and rape, and worse, and I’ve known men who eventually go dead inside, and rouse themselves by inflicting horror. I’ve heard Camus say that raped nuns make the best whores, and the Levantine pirates were of the same breed – men dead to anything but the false feeling of power. But when I looked around that afternoon, the dead Italians very fresh in my head, I saw that Nerio and Juan agreed with the admiral, whatever they might say. They did not believe in the crusade.

Perhaps no one did.

We raised Rhodos at the first breath of autumn. I didn’t know the Mediterranean then as I do now, but I knew a storm when it came, and we rowed, sailed under a scrap of brailed-up lateen on a short yard, and rowed again until our hold was awash with waves breaking over bulwarks amidships and the rowers were sitting in water and every man not rowing was bailing or manning the pumps. We were three days and two nights somewhere north and west of Rhodos, and when the oarsmen were exhausted and the water was gone, the admiral conned the ship himself, got into the lee of an islet and rested us in calm water until we were strong enough to beach stern first on a beach of gravel.

The Venetians are superb seamen. We didn’t lose a ship. I will spare you my thoughts, except to say I feared death more every moment during that storm than I ever had in mortal combat. I think that is because we fear that with is foreign, and not that which is familiar. The storm terrified me, so that when the sky was black and rent with fire, the timoneer struck me with his rope and pushed me to an oar. And I went.

Nor did I hold it against him.

At any rate, we raised Rhodos, and entered the ancient harbour – everything east of Venice is ancient. Rhodes had a great navy when Rome ruled the world, and now she does again: the ships of the Hospital are few, but well feared.

The harbour was packed with shipping the way a Bristol keg is packed with mackerel. Or perhaps the way Sherwood Forest is packed with trees – aye, that’s more apt, because their masts stood like a forest. There were more than a hundred ships in the harbour or on the beaches outside. There were forty fighting ships: from the Order, from Cyprus, from Genoa, from the Gattelussi. There were even two from the Emperor at Constantinople. With the Venetian galleys, there were almost sixty fighting sail, and another hundred round ships to carry the army and their horses.

And the horses! All Rhodos was covered in a carpet of warhorses. We had almost five thousand knights and men-at-arms, and most of them were mounted. The Order’s chancellor told me one night after Mass that he was feeding near four thousand chargers out of the Order’s farms and byres.

I didn’t see the horses at once, because as soon as we beached I went with my friends to see the legate. Marc-Antonio waited on me; his inflammation had gone down at sea, and the storm had, of all things, cured his fever. We found the legate in the English
langue
, the tavern devoted to the needs of English knights and squires within the Order.

I haven’t said as much as I might about the Order. When they found me, I was as uncritical as a man can be. I loved everything about the Order: the sense of community, the brotherhood, the religious devotion, the discipline, the training in arms. When I came to the Order, they seemed to me the very antithesis of the routiers, who had no spirit, no driving purpose beyond greed, no training, and no discipline. Who sold their own members for money.

By the crusade summer, I was more critical. Juan di Heredia’s combination of competence, intense ambition, lax morals and amoral piety had, despite my respect for the man, cost me something of my idealism. The realities of preparing the crusade – even my beloved Father Pierre’s open questioning of the uses of violence – all made me look more deeply at the Order. Fra Daniele didn’t shock me – his ilk existed in Avignon – but he helped insure that I would look at Rhodes with a careful eye.

At any rate, the Order – on Rhodes, and in any commanderie with multiple ‘nations’ or ‘languages’ – had inns to house and support them. In the earliest days in Jerusalem, I suspect this had been to comfort new knights, so that they could hear their own language spoken. By the crusade summer, some of the languages no longer had as many adherents, and other, new divisions had grown to divide
langues
and inns that formerly had been pillars of the Order. The French
langue
was deeply divided between French and Burgundian and Hainault; the Italian
langue
was bitterly divided between the knights of Genoa and the knights of Venice, with the Florentine and Neapolitan and Sianese and Veronese knights as a sort of third ‘side’. There was a German
langue
, and an English
langue
that included Scottish and Irish knights – two groups who did not view themselves as English any more than a Provençal knight was French or a Catalan knight was ‘Spanish’.

Despite these divisions, --perhaps even because of them, the Order was a solid fabric. The Order could be petty and bureaucratic; it had whole slaughterhouses of parchment scrolls dedicated to knight’s’ genealogies and land holdings and registered rents and leases, but the Order provided inns, hospital care, and in some cases, transportation for pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land from all of Europe. From your front door in London or Aix-la-Chappelle or Nijmegen or Nuremberg or Prague or Verona or Barcelona or Nájera or Paris or Bordeaux you could travel all the way to Jerusalem guarded, supported, and cared for by the Order.

The decision to guard the pilgrim routes and to provide care for the sick, whether pilgrims or not, had been one of the earliest, defining moment in the Order’s history. Unlike the rival Templars, the Hospitallers had not defined themselves solely as warriors. With the fall of the Holy Land, about a hundred years before my time there, the Templars had lost their purpose, but the Order continued to provide caravans to Jerusalem.