The Long Sword(109)

            ‘He arranged to have my squire buy him a strumpet on the docks,’ I said. ‘Juan …’ I thought of a thousand things to say: about the life of a Moslem slave in Venice, about women, about prostitutes.

            Nerio laughed. ‘For a fornicating adventurer, William has a fine sense of moral outrage.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow at me. Juan brightened, and Nerio turned on him, ‘But gentlemen – at least, gentlemen in Italy – do not hand over coin for access to a whore. At least, not in such a way as their friends can mock them for it.’

            Juan, caught between us on the steps – it was almost like one of Dante’s poems – looked up and down, and his rage returned. ‘You have some bitch in your room this minute!’ he spat at Nerio. His use of language, the way he spoke – he was very drunk. I’d never seen the younger Spaniard as a man dedicated to any of his appetites and I’m not sure I’d ever heard him use foul language. He lived like a monk and his piety was proverbial, even if he was less a priest in armour than Miles.

            ‘How long have you all been drinking?’ I asked.

            ‘You thought we’d wait for you?’ Juan snapped. ‘I assumed you’d be stuffing your baggage all night.’ He looked back at Nerio. ‘You are all the same!’ he shouted. ‘Liars and hypocrites!’

            Nerio laughed. ‘But mine is not paid, and comes there of her own free will, my dear caballero, and if you call her further names, I will be forced to—’

            Fiore appeared behind Nerio and said something which included the words ‘not helping’.

            Nerio winced and withdrew, and Fiore came down the stairs. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Let’s take Juan out for a walk.’ He looked at me. ‘Can’t you tell something is wrong?’

            This from a man who thought that swordplay was a form of human communication.

            We walked most of the way around Venice that night, and discovered nothing except that Juan was very unhappy, and in some ways very naive.

            ‘You all have your loves,’ he said. ‘I have nothing. And no one.’

            He had been quite smitten with a girl in the company the year before, but the plague had taken her. I didn’t think of Juan as inexperienced; he had been a year or more with the companies, and two years with the order. But before that, he’d been raised mostly by religion, and as we slopped our way from bridge to bridge in the icy rain and fog of a Venetian winter night, I heard a great deal about growing to manhood in a Spanish monastery.

            Ascetic monks, fanatical monks, and sexually predatory monks in equal doses; an automatic hatred of all things Moslem, and a healthy dose of pride and the fear of his true parentage, his bastardy – itself a sin.

            I had known him eighteen months, and I truly had no idea. Until that night, he had always seemed young, courteous, a fine blade and a virtuous man. But the thin ice of virtue sat atop a steaming pile of dung: mistreatment, abuse, and two busy, arrogant parents pursuing worldly careers – a knight of the order and an abbess, neither interested in acknowledging a child.

            Fiore proved himself as a friend that night, not that he needed to prove himself to me. But he listened, and in the end it was our ability to listen rather than speak that measured our friendship and worked what healing there was. Juan vomited his childhood like a man spewing bad wine, and we listened.

            ‘‘I’m not fit to be a knight,’ he said in the grim first light of day. A tailless cat rubbed against our boots, sensing a trio of soft touches who might provide food.

            Aha I thought. At last we are to the essential wound. ‘Don’t be a fool,’ I said. He was sobering up. ‘No one is worthy of knighthood. Think of all the bad men who are priests.’

            Juan looked at Fiore.