The Green Count Read online

  Nerio, who was never anything but amused (or angry), was … shattered. He was pale, and he actually swayed at the news that his father was dead.

  I rose and threw my arms around him. ‘He was a great man,’ I said, and some other twaddle. He was a great man, and no mistake, but I’d only known him a few days.

  I was once no great hand at comforting man or woman, but I have learned that a hug cures a great deal. Miles was even better; whatever he murmured, it was deeply felt, immediate, and Nerio burst into tears, which was an epochal event. Miles just held him, which tells you who Miles was, too.

  It was such a shock to have Nerio in tears that when Fiore came in, he paused in the entrance way, frozen in surprise. Even when he started to move, his face was still registering surprise.

  ‘He’s crying,’ Fiore said, or something equally obvious. The day-to-day life of mere human beings puzzled Fiore, unless they had weapons in their hands. He walked around us, watching us the way a cat watches a mouse hole, until Nerio broke out of Stapleton’s embrace.

  ‘I wasn’t even there,’ Nerio said bitterly.

  ‘Why is he crying?’ Fiore asked.

  Sabraham caught his shoulder and pulled him away. ‘Someone close to him died,’ he said.

  I poured Nerio a cup of wine and handed him a square of linen that I kept in my purse for cleaning my sword. He blew his nose, drank the wine, and frowned at Liberi.

  Fiore raised both eyebrows. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Of course!’ He stepped forward and threw his arms around Nerio as if we all embraced each other every day.

  Nerio grinned, wept again, and his hands feebly pounded Fiore’s back.

  The young recover quickly. In an hour we had a dozen handbills written out, and all of us went down to the camp of the crusaders, where we paid a pair of ribauds, masterless men with threadbare cotes and hose worn to having no feet, to walk the camp and cry our ‘wares’.

  And the next day, as soon as the inn opened its heavy, iron-bound doors, a succession of men came into the yard to sign for Jerusalem.

  They were quite a collection. There were knights, and men-at-arms, and men who claimed to be men-at-arms, and men who claimed to be squires or archers, and a couple of actual archers, and even the two ribauds we’d paid to do our recruiting. All told, there were nearly a hundred men, and most of them were soldiers of one stamp or another.

  It’s a funny thing, the word ‘routier.’ I’ll note that to this day, it is a word men always use about someone else and never about themselves. Of course it is an unkind word, and conjures brigands and thieves and rapists, which, to be fair, most of our new recruits were. Arsonists too, I suspect. But every man of them considered himself a soldier of Christ. It was the other men who were false crusaders.

  And did not my beloved Father Pierre Thomas always used to say ‘My church is full of sinners’?

  Sabraham stood with me, his thumbs in his belt, and watched them as they came to our table and placed their names on a roll. The men who claimed to be archers were sent with John. The rest were served some watered wine and asked to wait.

  Fiore had rigged a brand-new pell in the courtyard. He stood by it with a heavy wooden waster, a wood sword, in his hand. Nerio would summon men forward by name, and they’d be asked to swing at the pell.

  A few were like antic jesters, and one man was somehow afraid of the pell, or of the opinion of his fellows; he handed the wooden sword back to Fiore and fled the yard. Some took a few hacks at the wooden pole and gave over; some seemed bent on cutting it in half, and a few demonstrated style and skill, fencing with the inanimate wood as if it was a living man.

  I was still at the table as the soldiers started demonstrating their skills, dealing with a trio of latecomers, all Gascons. The smallest was a surly lout.

  ‘What’s the pay?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps you save your soul,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck that,’ he said. ‘Pay me in coin or I walk.’

  ‘Walk,’ I said.

  Several men looked at me. I shrugged. ‘We’ll do our best to keep you fed,’ I said, ‘but this is a pilgrimage and not a military adventure. No one will be paid.’

  More than a dozen men agreed with the Gascon and left. On the other hand, more were arriving every minute, and men on their way out paused to mock those coming in. The turcopolier looked into the yard and shook his head.

  We told every man that we’d summon them when the empris was ready. Some were satisfied, and some clearly felt that this was all wind.

  The next morning, Sabraham woke me. It was still dark.

  ‘I am ordered to return to Cyprus. There will be a delay.’ I rose and embraced him, and he was gone into the darkness with his men, George and Maurice, at his shoulder like falcons on a fist.

  Rhodes is a great fortress. It is also a small community of knights and monks and priests with a handful of nobly born women, most of whom are outbound or returning from pilgrimage.

  The gossip is virulent, and constant. Hence, I seldom saw Emile, and she was wise to fear it, as events proved, but the separation was killing me. It is curious, and probably a dreadful comment on man, that when she refused to acknowledge my love, and demanded her favour returned to her, I bore the knowledge that she was close by with equanimity. Now that we were all but betrothed, I missed her, and I was jealous, I confess it. She went riding with Nerio or Fiore, but not with me, and she attended a different church. She had a supper with the Grand Master and a dozen senior knights; no great matter, and an honour usually accorded to noble pilgrims, but I was jealous. Of fourteen men all old enough to be my father.

  So much for the virtues of chivalry and courtly love.

  But on Sundays, we usually arranged to attend High Mass together, and my friends would mix with her knights. Jean-François and Bernard had not gone to Alexandria, and we reassured them that they hadn’t missed anything but horror. Ser Jason had gone with the count, as a volunteer, and when I saw him the first Sunday he was tight-lipped and angry, although he grew more resigned to what he had seen, as you will hear.

  At any rate, it was the first Sunday in Advent, I expect. We met outside her lodgings, near the French langue, and I knelt to her, and she smiled, and all my jealousy fell away as it always did.

  Her knights all bowed, and Bernard, the smallest and yet the most debonair, saluted each of us and fell in with Fiore, Jason with Nerio, and Jean-François with Miles. We were well matched, and our squires and servants filled out our little train. Emile wore something blue – I remember the hue but not the garment.

  ‘I hear that we are going to Jerusalem in earnest,’ Emile said, putting her hand on mine. Oh, the touch of her fingers! I would trade my slim hopes of Heaven for another touch of her, my friends.

  I nodded, trying not to snatch at her hand or act the boor. ‘Madame,’ I said, all correct. ‘It may be that we will go to Jerusalem armed. Monsieur Sabraham reports that the Egyptian government have withdrawn their soldiers.’ I looked back at Monsieur Jason. ‘It could be quite dangerous,’ I said.

  Ordinarily, he’d have met my comment with a quip. He was a different man since Alexandria, and he shrugged and looked at Nerio.

  ‘Will you escort pilgrims?’ she asked, and she was eager, and my heart soared.

  ‘Madame, in truth, it will not be my expedition. I am merely recruiting routiers and crusaders who wish to fulfil their vows. But Monsieur Sabraham has given me to understand that – perhaps – we might escort pilgrims.’

  She nodded. Our time together was already almost at an end. The cathedral’s doors were yawning like the gates of Heaven and hundreds of priests and soldiers were entering, but Emile was one of perhaps five women and most men looked at her. And why not? She was beautiful – in the full growth of womanhood, my age or a little older, with her children walking behind her, dressed in blue velvet, and a great lady from her plucked forehead to
her dark red leather shoes. Her light brown hair was neatly coiled atop her head and covered in her sheer linen veil. She looked like a portrait of the Queen of Heaven.

  And every eye that was not on her was on me.

  And tongues would wag. I knew, in my head, that this is why she avoided me the rest of the week. To give them no reason for poison. But it irked me.

  ‘I will have to go to Famagusta soon,’ I said. ‘May I send word when I know about pilgrims?’

  She favoured me with a discreet smile that still had a hint of something, a promise, around the corners of her lips …

  The life of arms can be terrifying, exhilarating, or ferociously boring. Sadly, the next two weeks were the latter. After Sabraham’s initial admonition and our enthusiasm, nothing happened. There was no summons from the Grand Master, although I caught him looking at me one day in the tiltyard when I was playing against Fiore – swords on horseback.

  I have to say that Fiore loved Rhodes, a place where there was nothing to do but practise at arms, and where such practice was much praised and encouraged. I think he might have been better fulfilled had he taken the vows and become a knight.

  At any rate, I had the Grand Master’s attention, but he didn’t say anything; and I asked about, and no one had heard of such an expedition except from us. Sabraham was gone again – back to Famagusta, he had said, without a word of explanation.

  As an aside, I remember that I spent the next weeks scribing with some of the brother sergeants and a handful of knights. My hand wasn’t good enough to copy manuscripts, but I sat with the turcopolier and his officers and made copies of accounts, and I took notes on meetings, and signed a contract with a small company of crossbowmen out from Genoa. The Order hired the best men at a fair wage, but no mercenary got rich fighting for the Order; mostly they defended fortresses, with little opportunity for plunder. It was good to feel a pen in my hand, and it was then that I started the book of hours you mocked, Master Chaucer. I began by copying out prayers to Saint Michael, and then the Pater Noster …

  It passed the time.

  I practised at arms, my body and my mind healed from the brutality of Alexandria, and most evenings I sat in the English inn with a dozen other Englishmen – often with Jean-François and Jason de Bruges or Bernard le Hardi, sometimes with Nerio. It was not a hard life, but we were all waiting, and it quickly palled.

  I learned a great deal about the way cards fell. Cards were new then; some men say that Franciscans brought the idea back from India – cards with printed scenes from the Gospels. They were meant to educate illiterates. Soldiers found a way to gamble with them. I doubt it took a pair of routiers an hour to work out a game.

  Bah. I have missed my mark again.

  On Christmas Eve, Sabraham returned, daring winter storms in an Order galley. He came in after we’d all been to vespers. The English keep Christmas with a little more boisterousness than most, although the Germans have some quaint customs of their own, as I’ll share in time. But we were drinking some carefully hoarded good English ale and eating a fine game pie and laughing when Sabraham came in out of the cold.

  Everyone in the common room fell silent.

  ‘It is good to be home,’ he said. We welcomed him, and he drank off a tall tankard of ale, and we all toasted King Edward. Even John.

  At midnight we walked across the town to hear Mass. And then back to our inn to feast. I love Christmas.

  And indeed, Emile sent me a message, which said nothing save ‘amor vincit omnia’ in fine Gothic letters. I daresay my limbs trembled. And Sabraham, as his Christmas gift, brought a pass from the king of Cyprus to make a passage to Jerusalem.

  ‘The king despairs that he will ever move his army to attack the enemy again, but there are some new lords lately come with fresh soldiers,’ he said. ‘Some names I had not heard before, who come too late for Alexandria and now press the king to fresh adventures.’ Sabraham shrugged.

  The turcopolier, William de Midelton, sat back. ‘He must have drained his treasury and then some,’ he said.

  ‘They say in Famagusta that he has mortgaged the next seven years of incomes,’ Sabraham said. He looked at me. ‘Father Pierre Thomas is very sick,’ he said.

  That struck me like a hammer.

  ‘I could not even get to his bedside. Your Fra Peter Mortimer is there, and a dozen other prelates. Even the Orthodox bishop is praying for him.’ Sabraham looked sober. ‘I did not see him, but rumour is that he is in a very bad way. And speaking of rumour … I heard your name mentioned several times at court,’ he said.

  ‘Oh?’ I asked, prepared to be flattered, and desperately worried about Father Pierre Thomas, the papal legate of the Crusade and the finest human being I have ever known.

  ‘There’s a Gascon knight recently come, and he claims to know that you murdered a Savoyard noble during the sack. He’s very forward about it.’ Sabraham’s eyes fell on me, and his gaze bored into me. Quietly he added, ‘A certain lady’s name is mixed into this ugly story.’

  I froze.

  ‘At court?’ I asked.

  ‘Often, and loudly,’ Sabraham said. ‘That rumour will come here, soon enough.’

  I looked at Nerio, who was close enough to overhear.

  He just laughed. ‘Someone says you killed d’Herblay?’ he asked. ‘There are twenty knights of the Order who know you did not. Who cares, any road?’ He gave an elaborate, Italianate shrug. ‘He died like a dog. Someone had to put him down.’

  I knew perfectly well whose butt-spike had killed d’Herblay in the fire-lit rubble of an Alexandria night. When I found his corpse, it had a diamond-shaped puncture wound in the forehead, a neat thrust through heavy bone with a long sword.

  ‘Gossip like that can do a great deal of damage to reputations,’ Sabraham said. ‘Little men care nothing for the truth. And you, my young friend, have climbed high, and quickly, and there are a good many men who do not like you or your success.’

  ‘Who is this Gascon?’ I asked.

  ‘Florimont de Lesparre,’ Sabraham said. ‘He claims to be a friend of the dead Comte d’Herblay. He certainly knows the Count de Turenne.’

  It didn’t seem that dire to me. ‘Oh, Turenne,’ I said, or something equally banal. After all, the count, for all his pretensions, had not been a paladin in the assault, and had been one of the first to advocate that the Crusade withdraw. I thought of him as a man of no consequence.

  I forgot that he had mighty relations. I forgot the Savoyards, and their Green Count.

  We virtually had to raise our little crusade again; in the three weeks since we’d held our review in the inn yard, a third of the men we’d engaged had wandered off to other work, or sailed for home, or gone to take service with the king of Cyprus, who was rebuilding his garrisons on the Turkish Main. But with one more effort we passed a hundred men, and before we’d digested our Christmas beef, we paraded them all outside the walls and mustered them, examining armour and weapons. Few of them had horses, and their armour needed a great deal of work, but Emile gave me money, and so did Nerio. And we had some money; John and Marc-Antonio had not hesitated to loot at Alexandria, and so I was probably richer than I’d ever been, at least in coin.

  We had permission to use the Order’s armourers, and we proceeded to spend a week training a hundred men. Most of them, almost eighty, were men-at-arms. Ten of them were knights, and, with the Grand Master’s permission, we added Emile’s knights and retainers. The Savoyard knights had better armour and better training than almost anyone else.

  By the fourth day of Christmas, we had as many men as we were likely to have, armed well enough. The Order was sending six knights and twenty brother sergeants as a ‘caravan’. We sailed in four Order galleys, with a Genoese round ship carrying some horses and almost two hundred pilgrims.

  Despite the time of year, we made fair time, had only one bad night at sea, an
d landed four days later at Famagusta. The king and his court were at Nicosia, and we already had his licence. It didn’t occur to me to go and attend the king in person, especially as Lord Grey, nicely recovered, was there on the beach to embrace me and tell the news. Which was a mix; he had another dozen knights, mostly Englishmen, who wanted to go to Jerusalem, and he’d raised as many men as we had ourselves, including a few old friends whose presence delighted me: Ewan the Scot, Ned Cooper, Rob Stone, all archers, and two dozen more like them. Added to the twenty archers that John the Turk had approved, we had as fine a body of archers as Hawkwood had in Italy; although some were Scots or Welsh or Irish, and two were Flemings and one an Italian. And one Kipchak, of course. Archery, like swordsmanship, is an international language.

  But there was a note from Fra Peter, ordering me to attend him. I stayed only to see Gawain unloaded from the round ship, to catch the eye of my lady and bow to her, and then I took a riding horse and galloped for Fra Peter. Because he said that Father Pierre Thomas was dying.

  ‘I am not dying,’ Father Pierre Thomas said. He was lying in a fine bed, dressed in a wretched leather vest over a hair shirt and scapular. He was thinner than I had ever seen him, but his voice was strong.

  Philippe de Mézzières was there, booted and spurred as if for travel. ‘I came as quickly as I heard,’ he said.

  ‘Your role, my friend, is to prepare the letters to go to the Holy Father,’ Father Pierre Thomas said. ‘I will be ready to travel on Tuesday, I promise.’

  Fra Peter Mortimer, the knight who, with Father Pierre Thomas, saved me from both death and a life of pure sin, coughed into his hand and looked at me. ‘When I found him on Saturday,’ he said, ‘he was barefoot in the rain and cold.’