The Long Sword Read online

  Talleyrand, no friend of mine, was reputed to be the richest man in the world. And perhaps the most venal priest ever born.

  Then he told us how he had spent the winter with Father Pierre, holding the city of Bologna to its allegiance for the Pope. In truth, I’d heard nothing of it, even though it had all happened two hundred leagues from me.

  ‘You needed good men-at-arms,’ I said.

  ‘I fear the day that Father Pierre needs an escort,’ Fra Peter said. ‘He rides in among his enemies – at Bologna, he rode boldly in among men sent to take him, unarmed, holding aloft a cross. I thought we were dead or taken, but God supported his saint, and the mercenaries were moved to their knees.’

  We murmured appreciatively. We all knew him: the force of his genuine conviction was like one of Fiore’s smashing sword blows.

  ‘And he made peace between the Pope and the Duke of Milan, where the King of France had failed. To some of us, it was a miracle come from God – one day, the Duke was threatening to hang us all, and the next day, he signed the peace. And the Pope held Bologna, despite all threats. Friends, I will not hide from you that the Pope had already sent letters to command a renewed campaign against Milan and a cancellation of the crusade.’ He looked around at us. ‘Even now, there is a powerful party at the papal court that attempts to cancel the crusade or to have it declared against Milan.’

  Fiore recoiled. ‘Infamous!’ he said. ‘A crusade against a Christian duke?’

  Fra Peter nodded agreement. ‘It would, to you and me, make a mockery of everything we hold dear about Christian knighthood and the crusade. But there are men in Avignon who hold the papal authority is the higher good – the true cause.’

  Well, we were Pierre Thomas’s men, and Fra Peter Mortimer’s. We all shook our heads, or spat, or frowned. Even John Hughes. And he spoke for many men when he swore.

  ‘By our Lady,’ he said. ‘The priests and the popes will be the ruin of the church. A crusade against Milan? It’s like declaring a crusade against England.’

  Fra Peter met Hughes’s eye. ‘It could come to that, if the papacy continues on this path.’ He shrugged. ‘Our Father Pierre has worked without pause for two years to make the Passigium Generale a reality. He made peace between the Pope and the Duke, and he’s helped settle the Cretan Revolt. Now we’re gathering knights and in two months, the army will meet us in Venice.’ He looked from one to another. ‘It’s real, lads. We’re off on crusade.’

  Ah, Monsieur Froissart, since you treasure tales of deeds of arms, let me say that through that entire passage to Avignon, Messire dei Liberi and Juan Hernedez and I exchanged many blows, indeed, some evenings, if we had made enough miles, Fra Peter would join us. My new delight was fighting with the heavy spear, and Fiore loved it too, and where he might be blind to the glances of a pretty farm girl and deaf to the offers of a merchant looking for a guard, he was as avid for arms as a young priest in a university is for his theology. And he approached his study in much the same way, so that on that trip he began to sketch out a theory of – well, it is hard to describe. A theory of fighting, a theory of how to train.

  North of the Alps, few men know of Master Fiore. But south of the Alps, we think him the best sword that ever was. And that summer, he was just coming into his own, growing in confidence in his own methods, and experimenting in how to teach them. He made us do the oddest things: we wrestled on horseback, of which you’ll hear more, and we jousted, and we fenced with spear and sword and we wrestled and fought with sticks and fought with daggers.

  One evening in Lombardy, with the mountains clear on the northern horizon, still snow-capped in late May, he and I were fencing with spears in harness in the yard of yet another farm. Let me add that my squire, Edward, was back with John Hawkwood, and that meant that all three of us were back to scrubbing our own harnesses – and Fra Peter’s – like boys of fifteen. And that meant that getting thrown in the rain-soaked dung of an Italian farmyard was not just a petty humiliation – it represented the reality of an hour’s work.

  And in answer to your question, we fought with sharp spears. By our Saviour, gentles! We didn’t carry blunts on campaign, and it is only by playing with sharp weapons that a man loses his fear of them.

  Nor were we playing in visors. Truly, it is a miracle we made it to Avignon alive.

  Now, when I met Fiore, I thought myself a good man of arms. After he disabused me of this, with many of the same lessons I’d had to learn in pain with Jean le Maingre and du Guesclin and others, I learned from him mostly by simple emulation. Fiore didn’t teach in the way a master-at-arms teaches. He simply stood in different ways – some subtly different, like his version of the Woman’s Guard, and some startlingly different, like his low guard which he called ‘The Boar’s Tusk’.

  But it was in spear fighting that he departed most from the established manner. Yes? This interests you, messieur? I thought it might. So I’ll say this. Most men who fight with a spear fight with the long spear; they vary in length, but in Italy we usually had them nine or ten feet long. But long spears break easily, and have only a temporary advantage over swordsmen.

  Fiore preferred a shorter spear, just six or seven feet with a stout shaft, octagonal in cross section. We talked about such weapons, but it was not until we had a day in Milan that we were able to purchase a pair, and then he was avid to fight with them.

  And he refused to fight as other men did – and still do. Most men, even trained men, face each other with their points crossed. On the battlefield, men will advance until the spears cross, and then fence with them as if they were long, stiff swords.

  Fiore had different words for everything and he made us learn them. He called this tactic the ‘Point in line’. He meant that it kept your point in line with the body and head of your opponent. It made sense to me, for this was the best defence against a spear, kept my weapon in the middle of the fight, and allowed me to push with my superior strength against the shaft of most of my adversaries.

  Enough digression. That evening north of Milan, the light was fading, we were in harness, and there were six pretty farm girls pressed along the edge of the yard watching the knights duel with spears.

  Fiore sprang into the yard and took up one of his fantastic positions – the boar’s tusk, in fact – with the spear point low to the ground in front of him, right foot forward, spear on his left hip. I had mine up high across my body in two hands, right foot forward and spear point level with Fiore’s unvisored face.

  ‘Try to hit me,’ he said. From another man, it would have been a taunt, but Fiore never taunted. He merely said what he thought.

  I aimed my blow for the centre of his breastplate. Fiore was the fastest man I ever faced – thanks be to God for the mercy of never facing a man like him in mortal combat! – but not enough faster than me to have a decisive advantage.

  I thrust.

  He snapped his spearhead up from its low position, exactly like a Tuscan boar tossing its head to gore you. He slapped my spear out of line, and while I tried to recover, he stabbed me with the spearhead through the cheek.

  I spat a tooth and sat down, blood pouring out of my mouth, and Fiore flung his spear down and started a steady stream of apologies.

  I had been a single inch from death, and the shock of it was as bitter as the copper taste in my mouth. The cheek wound took a week to close and left me with this little twist on my mouth. And there are few things as hard to get off armour as blood! Sweet Jesu, it etches steel faster than acid! And of course, I sat in the wet dung.

  On the other hand, Fiore was pitifully sorry to have hurt me, and yet from that moment he had his theory: the theory of the weapon ‘off ’ line versus the weapon ‘in’ line, and the theory of the shorter versus the longer. I can say all this better in Italian. The phrase ‘off line’ sounds like something a scribe would say, but fora di strada conveys more. As if a common fight happens on a r
oad, and you have had the courage to step off the road.

  And, of course, there were the young women who had been watching. I have observed this many times: some girls relish the sight of blood, and some do not. Some desire the man who sheds the blood, and some seek to care for the one bleeding.

  I compounded blood loss and trauma with fatigue by staying awake all night.

  Fra Peter was not amused; not amused by my injury, and not amused by my lechery.

  For three nights running, I was ordered to wash the dishes. And I was given several forms of penance, including standing with my sword by the pommel, held out at arm’s length, while Juan prayed some rapid pater nosters and tried not to laugh at me.

  The third day, my cut cheek hurt like an imp of Satan had it in fiery tongs, and my hips hurt, and my arms hurt, and I’d had enough of Fra Peter.

  He came to see how I was doing. In fact, I could barely stand, and I was kneeling by the hot water in a tin basin, trying to wash his handsome Prague glass while keeping my hair out of the puss and blood coming out of my cheek.

  ‘Let me see your cheek,’ he said. He played with it, none too gently, and then smeared honey over the wound, which burned all over again.

  ‘Fuck, that hurts,’ I said, or something equally English.

  He sighed.

  That was enough to set me off.

  ‘By Saint George!’ I swore. ‘I am a knight, not a squire! I don’t polish armour and carry dishes! I fight! I do as I will!’

  ‘Hush, you will split your cheek – ah, there, you’ve done it again.’ He looked at me. ‘Truly, William, perhaps it would be best if you went back to Sir John.’

  ‘Sweet Christ, because I tupped a lass? I did her no harm, I assure you. Nor did I take her maidenhead.’ I leered, as the young are wont to do when they know perfectly well that they are in the wrong.

  ‘Really?’ he asked. He sat back. ‘And if she kindles, what kind of life will your red-haired bastard have, got on a serving wench in a barn? Is that the life you want to give to God?’

  A thousand hot answers entered my head. ‘She will not kindle,’ I said. ‘She knew her courses.’

  ‘But you don’t care, do you, Sir William?’ he asked quietly, and his use of my title of knighthood hit me like a lance. ‘I mean, whether she kindles or no is her loss, not yours.’

  By God, I’d thought of those very words and almost said them to him.

  ‘She should guard herself from lust, if she doesn’t want to pay the consequence, eh, Sir Knight?’ he said.

  I was breathing as hard as a man in a fight.

  ‘After all, knighthood does not lie in protecting the weak, does it?’ he asked quietly. ‘It lies in taking whatever you will. Does it not?’

  He didn’t threaten to send me back to Italy, where I would be rich, famous, and where pretty girls were available to me at any time. He didn’t ask me to do any more peasant work; any more, that is, than we all did to get through the day.

  In fact, he embraced me. ‘It is hard,’ he said. ‘Please stay with us.’

  I think I struggled against his embrace for a moment. Indeed, just then, I hated him more than the Bourc Camus. There is nothing worse than knowing that you have done wrong, and been seen to do it. Nothing.

  Well, I still have the scar. Eh?

  We were twenty days to Avignon, and mostly it was a wasted trip. But my cheek healed, to my relief and I saw my sin and my disfigurement together, and I swore a great oath to never fornicate again – an oath which I confess I’ve broken more than once or twice. When my cheek knitted we were high in the Savoyard passes, and I stopped at a roadside chapel and left a gold florin and a small silver cross.

  We jousted. The weather was good, and I was a better lance than I had been, and Fiore was experimenting with lances and swords on horseback. He spent days trying to use his low guard with a lance against my lance, and I dropped him on one Savoyard field a dozen times before he snorted and agreed that his technique did not apply on horseback.

  We arrived at Avignon and it, too, was like a home. The four of us had lived there almost a year, after all, and we got good rooms in the Hospital this time because most of the garrison had been dismissed. My room had a lovely glass window, a fine desk, a bed and a magnificent applewood and ivory crucifix of our lord in his passion that I admired so much that I took to using it as a focus for meditation. Fiore was excited by breathing that summer – breathing exercises, of course – and he taught us how to breathe in his own peculiar way as a sidelight to prayer, and the three of us practised it a great deal, because there was little else for us to do.

  Father Pierre Thomas was there, too. He was in apartments at the palace, as if he was a great prelate, and indeed, I discovered that my spiritual father was now a powerful bishop with a magnificent amethyst on his thumb. When I met him, I kissed it, and he laughed.

  ‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘I’ve lost it twice?’

  ‘It is blessed by God!’ I said.

  He looked away. ‘I could feed twenty poor women for a year on this ring,’ he said. ‘That is its value.’ His eyes met mine.

  I have heard of men with burning eyes – fanatics. Pierre Thomas was not one such. His eyes were brown and large and held nothing but love – all the time. But that summer he was deep in the matters of the Court of Avignon – the papal curia. The death of King John had thrown yet another blow at his crusade project, and again he had to repair the rent fabric of the church, cajole men to do their duties … Indeed, it was at times difficult to watch. He was so absolutely humble that he would accept what we, his knights, saw as insults; would accept them with bent head and a smile.

  At any rate, after my audience with him, he introduced me to his squire, Miles Stapleton. Miles was also a donat of the Order, younger than me, and far better born. And deeply pious, like Juan more than me. He was my size, with broad shoulders, blue eyes, and light-brown hair, another of Father Pierre’s Englishmen, as they called us.

  He had a smile as solid as his shoulders. ‘Father Pierre has spoken of you,’ he said, as if that was the highest praise a man could receive. Well, I suspect I shared that view, at least while I was in his presence.

  Miles joined our little group – Fiore, Juan, and Miles and I. I was the worldly one, and a belted knight. Juan and Miles were better born, far richer, and far, far more religious. Fiore – well, he was what he was: tall, odd, and difficult to have around.

  Unless you happened to be fighting.

  We’d been a week or two in Avignon and nothing seemed to be happening. The rumour was that the crusade was cancelled because the King of France was dead. Peter of Cyprus – it was the summer of Peters, as far as I was concerned – was supposed to be in Avignon, but he’d stayed in Rheims to see the new king of France crowned and to persuade him to take the cross.

  We were sitting in my favourite inn in Avignon, drinking wine.

  ‘That coward won’t take the cross. He’ll make some excuse and send King Peter packing,’ I said. Of course, at twenty-four, you know virtually everything there is to know.

  ‘King Charles is a coward?’ Juan was looking at a girl … come to think of it, that girl looked familiar, and when she caught my eye, her face burst into a smile the way a sunflower faces the sun.

  Truly, it is nice to be remembered. Her name was Anne, and she brought us wine, touched the back of my neck lightly with the back of her hand, and went off to avoid the attentions of other patrons.

  Her touch caused me to lose the chain of my thoughts for a moment, and then I shrugged. I was watching Anne. ‘I saw him run at Poitiers. In truth, if he had stood his ground, I think his father would have finished us.’

  And I thought of the terrified man we’d seen at the Louvre in fifty-eight. Remember, Geoffrey?

  Aye.

  But the others wouldn’t have it, that a king could be a coward.


  We were having this conversation, and it led to another about Poitiers, and two young Scottish priests joined us. I remember all this because I wasn’t too drunk, and since they were bound for Scotland, I thought of Kenneth’s letters, and I rose, bowed, and ran to the Hospital.

  And this whole incident only stays in my head because three men tried to rob me. I probably looked unarmed, and because I was running I looked like easy prey.

  I had gone to the Hospital and bounded up the steps, barging into Fra Peter in his robes. He grinned.

  ‘I’ve found some Scottish priests,’ I said, as if that excused everything.

  He went off to hear Mass, and I went to my little cell. I collected the letters and jogged out the gate, down the same alley …

  I saw the movement out of the corner of my right eye.

  The smaller one had a heavy dagger in his right fist, point down, the way most men use a dagger, and he thrust at my head as he leaped. But he’d played this game before – he was a leering bastard with scars, and I saw all that by the flicker of the torches on the Hospital gate.

  As I ducked and pivoted to face him, I raised my left hand to ward the blow, and he flowed around it, changing his blow to the other side, a backhand, descending blow at my right temple.

  And four weeks practice on the road paid off in one heartbeat.

  Unbidden, my right hand rose and covered his right wrist as my left hand passed close to my face, warding me from his point, and in fact he struck his point into the palm of my right hand because I was slow and it was dark, but I was already flowing on, ignoring the pain. My right hand gripped his, and my left rose, the point slipped out of my flesh, and I grabbed the blade and pushed at it, my fingers clumsy with blood and pain, but the grapple on his right wrist and the turning motion did its work and he let go the dagger as I spun him out and to my left, passing my left foot behind his, breaking his arm at the elbow and then throwing him to the ground, a foot on his arm, and his own dagger into his throat.