The Green Count Read online

  And so now, in the stable, I realised that I wanted to keep fighting. I was a fighting knight; I had a decent retinue, and another one with Hawkwood, if they were still alive, and it occurred to me that while Emile might resent handing me gold for fripperies, she might not resent helping me establish myself as a captain.

  ‘I would be delighted,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll pay, of course,’ Nerio said. ‘Stapleton will be going home with Lord Grey, but if you will lead a company for me, I believe we could …’ He glanced at me. ‘I believe that my father meant me to have his estates in Achaea, and if I act soon, I can have them all. The other “nephews” don’t want the dirty work or the travel. I do.’

  I nodded. I gave Gawain a pat and he leaned into my curry brush with enough force to stagger me against the wall of the stable.

  ‘So you won’t be taking the Venetian galley home,’ I said.

  Nerio gave me a twisted smile. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have another beast in view.’

  I used my shoulder to put my horse back in the middle of the stall. ‘Just what I wanted to talk to you about,’ I said.

  ‘Dannazione, Guglielmo! Huckstering with Arabs has given you a fine sense of controlling a conversation,’ Nerio commented. ‘Did that horse bathe in dust?’

  ‘Arnaud is going to plunge a dagger into you,’ I said.

  Nerio fiddled with his dagger hilt.

  ‘I’m perfectly serious,’ he said.

  ‘She’s a princess,’ I commented.

  Nerio shrugged. ‘I’m a prince. I’m probably richer than her entire family – by the gracious God, they’ve lost most of their lands to the Turks in the last twenty years, and King Peter is taking the rest. And denying them their trade.’

  ‘So …’

  He shrugged, reached in his purse and produced an ivory toothpick. ‘She is beautifully well-born, related to everyone, and she speaks Greek.’ He picked his teeth and I changed sides and curried my horse’s off side.

  ‘And she’s beautiful,’ I commented.

  ‘And that,’ said Nerio. ‘Intelligent too – much more so than most Italian girls. She can ride, and hawk. She’s like … a person.’

  ‘So you love her,’ I asked.

  ‘Bah. Love. For children. I think she and I might make good babies and a good alliance, and if I come to be Prince of Achaea, she would be my – how can I say? My bona fides with the Greeks.’

  ‘So you don’t,’ I paused, but this was a case of in for a penny, in for a pound. ‘You don’t plan to bed her and then get killed by Arnaud?’

  Nerio shrugged again. ‘I admit, the thought has occurred to me. They’ve kept her in seclusion so long, there’s more fire to her than just red hair. Give me five minutes alone with her and the deed is done.’

  It’s an interesting slant on friendship that you can, very thoroughly, hate your friends from time to time.

  ‘You would force yourself on a virgin?’ I hissed.

  Nerio smiled in his most self-assured, asinine manner. ‘No force would be required, I promise you. I might have to fight her off.’ He laughed. ‘You have not always been such a prude. Is this an effect of marriage?’

  The curry brush made the only sound in the stall for a while. I was mastering my temper and trying to imagine what to say.

  But Nerio knew he’d gone too far. He straightened his doublet, brushed some straw from his shoulder, and shook his head. ‘I speak too broadly, I find,’ he said.

  I let the silence continue.

  ‘I find her almost … irresistible,’ Nerio said, as hesitantly as another man would confess some terrible weakness.

  I smiled. ‘I know a pretty blonde chit in Famagusta, as elastic of mind as she is of body,’ I said, quoting him.

  Nerio winced. But he nodded. ‘If I could have found a willing companion, even for a little silver, in Jerusalem, I most certainly would have tried to cure myself of this … disease.’

  I laughed. Not my best move, but I couldn’t help myself. Nerio, the inveterate womaniser, was infatuated.

  ‘You want to wed her?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d like to know if she’s on the market,’ Nerio said.

  ‘Shall I ask Arnaud?’ I asked. ‘And if you ride to Cilicia with me, my good friend, will you swear on the Virgin that you will not trifle with her?’

  ‘You are right on the edge of making me really angry,’ Nerio said.

  I came out from under my horse, who, I’m proud to say, didn’t even flinch. He was really a fine horse.

  ‘Listen, Nerio,’ I said. ‘Why do you want to hire me to lead mercenaries? Because I am your friend. But also because I do it well, yes? And the reason I lead well is that I pay attention—’

  ‘When you are not besotted with a certain Savoyard.’ He nodded. ‘Bah, I like her too.’

  ‘That’s exactly true,’ I said. ‘So, to command, you must be … aware. And I am aware of you, and Arnaud, and Eugenia.’ I paused. ‘Even while besotted,’ I said.

  Nerio cursed. In Italian. Eventually he sighed. ‘I’m quite sure you are correct,’ he admitted. ‘Now we should go drink wine with Miles, who is leaving us.’

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ I put in.

  And it proved that I was correct. Men betray their true intentions in many ways, and while Lord Grey and Sir Steven Scrope and all their men-at-arms sold their horses, I was aware that Miles and his squire had not sold theirs.

  So in an uncomfortable evening, he finally admitted to his uncle that he would not be sailing home via Venice. ‘I mean to help Sir William get the Lady Eugenia back to Armenia,’ he said with his usual pauses and starts.

  Lord Grey took me aside and offered me money – first to insist to Miles that he go home, and then to support him.

  I knew Lord Grey pretty well by then. We had been together on and off for two years. He was the kind of nobleman who genuinely believed he was better than me; he also was inclined to treat me as a good dog. And not a particularly bright one. For my part, I found him honourable, a fine man of his hands, a good knight, and no worse than a great many of his class, and often better; his servants loved him, for good reason. Nerio held him in some contempt, and Fiore looked through him as if he didn’t exist. He ruled Miles Stapleton’s life and in many ways, it seemed to me that because of him, Miles was never going to grow up.

  ‘I think the purse should go to the young man directly,’ I said. ‘He is one of my closest friends, my lord. I’ll see him home.’

  ‘It would be very much to your profit,’ Lord Grey said. ‘I would think he’d had enough errantry for three lifetimes.’

  But give him his due; Lord Grey seemed to understand that Miles needed to do something by himself. He went off and found Sir Miles, and whatever words they had, they left Miles with a smile and a purse of two hundred byzants, florins and ducats in gold.

  And Fiore – I found him outside in the pleasant evening air, waving a shepherd’s stick at a pole and muttering to himself.

  ‘Messire?’ I said softly, because from time to time, when in a state, Fiore would simply strike you in the head if you interrupted him.

  He made a fendente blow with the stick. ‘Yes, William?’ he asked.

  ‘I wonder if you will join us on the road to Cilicia, or whether—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Have I sold my horses? And why would I return to Italy?’ He looked at me. ‘Do you think that your lady would like to learn to use a sword?’

  And so it was done.

  And I went into our inn, and spent the rest of my evening with Fra Peter Mortimer, who was going back to Famagusta, and thence to Rhodes. And I’ll confess that when he boarded the great Venetian galley, something within me cried out. I had become accustomed to being his lieutenant. I liked being second or third or fourth. As soon as the drums on the galley began to beat, I was alone.r />
  In the end, we had twenty men-at-arms and more than a dozen archers. Ewan stayed with me, and his friends as well, and Pierre Lapot and l’Angars and all their people. Sir Miles had his squire, fully armed, and a servant, and I had Marc-Antonio, fully armed, and John. I had stopped calling him ‘the Turk’ now that I knew the difference between a Kipchak and a Turk. Ser Nerio had Achille, who was more a servant than a fighting squire, and Fiore finally had a squire. One of the turcopoles, a Christianised Arab named, of all things, Jesus-Maria, was so fascinated by Fiore’s theories on fighting that he put his hands between the Friulian’s and swore. He was an older man, in his late thirties, and he had the most horrible scar on his face, but he spoke Arabic and Turkish and a little Greek, and he was a remarkable man.

  In fact, he proved a godsend, but I will not get too far ahead of myself except to say that in the Holy Land, goodness and evil came in many different guises, and that I met good men who followed the Prophet and very bad men who professed Jesus.

  Of course, we also had six fine men-at-arms who served my lady, led by Ser Jason and Ser Bernard; and we had in addition the two Greek knights and their retinues of ‘stradiotes’ or turcopoles.

  Also, we had Ser Arnaud and his cousins, the Cilicians. We armed them from our spares and weapons and harness provided by men sailing home to Venice.

  So all told, we were a little more than fifty armed men and five women. My lady had two servants whom she shared with Lady Eugenia. And then we had Sister Marie.

  Sabraham and I spent the next day, after the galley left us, purchasing provisions. Sabraham wanted to be moving; we were no longer an army of two hundred men, and we were all painfully aware that a large bandit band could take us. Sabraham’s notion was that we needed to be a moving target.

  I concurred.

  But it took us an entire day to arrange the food and pack animals to make the journey, and without Jesus-Maria and John the Kipchak, we’d have been in a state. Even as it was, we only had food for three days; we had one tent for the women, and that was a Berber tent which smelled powerfully of camel.

  Regardless, Emile was delighted by everything. She was happy, and that made me happy, and we set off on the second morning since the galley departed with high hearts.

  We made our way up the coast at a good pace. Most of the coast was empty, and that was a curse with many roots. John and Jesus-Maria explained as we rode, and I learned a good deal about the recent history of the Holy Land. In short, the Mongols and the Mamluks had both sacked every town on the coast, with a few exceptions, and the population had been killed or sold into slavery.

  Twice.

  The emptiness of the countryside was suddenly explained.

  At one point, looking at the ruins of a walled town, John shrugged. ‘The old Mongols. They were not Moslem, not Christian, not anything but Mongol.’ He looked at me. ‘They destroy all cities and farms, and make all the world grass for horses.’

  That was quite a picture.

  But our stradiotes could range far ahead, and they brought us news that, just as the innkeepers in Jaffa claimed, there was an inn and stable at Caesarea. We pressed on to the edge of darkness and saw the welcome lights twinkling in the distance across the near desert that fifty years of war had created.

  The inn was small and had bugs, and despite having my wife just a few paces away, I slept in my cloak in the stable, pressed between Marc-Antonio and Nerio, while Emile slept with Lady Eugenia.

  Nerio winked at me before Achille put out the last candle. ‘I have you, and Eugenia has Emile, and there is no justice,’ he quipped.

  I prayed that Arnaud did not hear him, as he was sleeping in the straw above us.

  Caesarea was a squalid settlement, a squatter in the ruins of a great town, and we were not sorry to leave her behind the next day. I knew we had a long way to go, and I was a difficult husband, all but hauling my love from her bed to get us on the road at first light. She was not always cheerful in the first light of dawn, and Lady Eugenia all but screeched to find me beside her bed.

  But we had saddles on the beasts by the time the sun rose. It was a good company; no one but Nerio was above a little work, and when the Gascons saw the rest of us tacking up horses, they pitched in. They’re good people, Gascons, when treated fairly. Like most people.

  But the ride to Acre was hard – most difficult for the servants, who did not live in the saddle. Emile and Lady Eugenia had probably ridden as far and as fast as most knights, and it was clear to me that Lady Eugenia preferred life on horseback to life behind gauze. She raced Ser Arnaud, she dropped back in the column and rode with my wife, and as she spoke French, she began to flirt with Ser Bernard and Jean-François.

  Nerio’s French was painful and slow, and Lady Eugenia’s French, while courtly and school-learned, was fluid, and she and Emile began to chatter at a great rate. And my new wife, whose ability to flirt was legendary, had found an apt pupil.

  Nerio writhed.

  And my estimation of the lady’s intelligence went up and up. It is fascinating to watch love from a distance; I could tell that she returned Nerio’s feelings with interest, but I could tell also that she was not a slave to her feelings, and she didn’t mean to fall into his arms, which cheered me.

  Ser Arnaud watched all this with something approaching fury, and despite the demands on my skills of command during the ride to Haifa – encouraging, speeding, demanding, wheedling, up and down our column – I found time to ride with him.

  He wanted to see my sword, like any normal man, and hear the story of how I got her, and we had a long conversation about swords.

  I was worried that we were spreading out too far, and wondering if I needed to ride to the rearguard under Sir Miles, and urge him forward, when I sensed that Ser Arnaud was coming to his point, and certes he did.

  ‘What kind of man is Monsieur Nerio?’ he asked in French.

  I smiled warmly, without dissimulation. ‘One of my closest friends, monsieur,’ I said. ‘A man of great breeding and immense wealth.’

  ‘And yet he plays the knight errant in the Holy Land,’ he said.

  ‘The same might be said of a certain Prince of Armenia,’ I answered, with what I hoped was a winning smile.

  We rode on a bit.

  ‘I do not like his address to my sister,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Is your sister promised?’

  He looked at me, and his horse started; my question surprised him enough that his spurs touched his mount’s flanks.

  ‘She was promised,’ he said, ‘but he died.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘You know, the game of ruling Little Armenia is a cruel one for siblings,’ he said. ‘My father intended her for the Khan. She would have had a difficult life, and perhaps been converted to Islam. But my little country needs allies.’

  I nodded. ‘Nerio may yet be Prince of Achaea in Greece,’ I said.

  I left Ser Arnaud thoughtful, and cantered to the back of the column on my little Arab mare. When I passed Gawain, he neighed. He wanted exercise, so I switched horses and rode him.

  ‘I’m tired of eating dust,’ Miles said.

  ‘You want the advance guard?’ I said.

  Miles laughed. ‘Do you think I could get work as a mercenary?’ he asked.

  ‘Always,’ I said. ‘A belted knight with your fighting skills?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to go home,’ he said.

  I knew that I should ask him then and there what the hell was going on, but I didn’t. I was worried about my column, and having prodded Miles to push the rear forward, I got Gawain up to his lumbering gallop and rode all the way forward to where we could see the sea to our left, and slowed the front of the column. There, Syr Giorgios Angelus, the Greek knight, had the vanguard with Fiore to back him, and he was concerned about a cloud of dust w
ell off to our right, in the higher ground back from the coast.

  That was midday. I didn’t allow them to stop, and like a chevauchée, we went on, men eating sausage in the saddle or chewing on bread.

  Ayie! Bread in the Holy Land. A sore subject. They have no notion of bread – it’s all flat, and the wheat is poor and ill-ground. I’ve had better bread in Scotland.

  At any rate, I rode back to the main battle and moved all the soldiers to the right of the road, because unless a sea monster were to rise from the beach, our left flank was secure, and we kept moving.

  The sun started to go down, and we were alone on the coast road. It looked to me as if there was a Roman road under our horses’ hooves, but where we crossed the marshes north of Caesarea, the road was unrepaired, and twice the vanguard had to dismount, cut reeds and brush and fill the salt-swamp with a temporary road of fascines to join two sections. It was clear from the other fascines, rotting or simply reduced to dry twigs, that we were not the first travellers to be reduced to that expedient, but it slowed us down. It showed me, too, that while the Mamluks might claim ownership of this territory, it was more like a no-man’s-land between the rival empires.

  The sun was setting on a spring night when the scouts reported that we were within five miles of Haifa, and that there was a watch on the walls and a garrison and a Mamluk officer.

  ‘Despotes, he says he will open the gates when we arrive,’ one of the stradiotes, Giorgios, reported.

  I had worried about this; we were, after all, at war with Egypt, and I had to worry that we would be taken. Set against that, the dust cloud over the ridge was almost certainly pacing us. I didn’t want to spend the night outside walls, unless I was certain that there was no other choice.

  Sabraham was with me, or perhaps I was with him. He left the arrangement of the column to me, but I often had the feeling that he, and not I, was in command of the column, and that did not rankle, really.

  I reined in by him. ‘One of us should go with Giorgios and determine whether we will be admitted,’ I said. And run the risk of being taken prisoner, I left unsaid.