The Long Sword(113)

            I invited him to Juan the younger’s knighting, and he smiled. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, eyebrows pausing as if to check my intentions independently from his eyes.

            I wanted to tell him that I had no truck with the Jew-haters, but that might offend him doubly – perhaps from a convert family he was, himself, one of them? Men are hard creatures to know.

            About the same time, we were joined by two schismatic converts who served as knights with Father Pierre. They’d been on a mission for him to Constantinople, and they returned with Imperial bulls written in gold on purple parchment. Father Pierre had spent a great deal of time out in the East while we were fighting the French, and he knew the Emperor, John V, and many members of his court, and he had converted two of the Emperor’s noblemen – Syr Giannis Lascarus Calopherus and Syr Giorgos Angelus of the Imperial family. They were darker than Sabraham, as dark as Moors, with curling black beards and dark brows, but they were good men-at-arms. I had never really met any of the Greek Stradiotes, although there were already a few serving with the Hungarians and Venetians in the wars. These two were the first Catholic Greeks I met, and they spoke as many languages as Sabraham. And of course, the three of them knew each other – Venice is full of Greeks, and they attend the same churches and drink wine in the same houses and probably use the same brothels; and Sabraham was more readily accepted by the Greeks than by the Cypriotes.

            At any rate, we played dice with them and they taught us card games and we all practiced at arms together. The Greeks were a revelation, even to Fiore; they, too, had a martial tradition, and as Venice was afire for anything even obliquely Classical, and as Greeks claim a classical ancestry to anything they do, Fiore was at first amazed, and later at least interested, by their exercises, which they claimed to come from Galen, and their swordsmanship, which they claimed came from Roman manuals.

            In private, Fiore practised some of their exercises and mocked others. ‘The Romans never had the longsword,’ he said. ‘It is an invention of this age. Yet they both wear them, and their teacher was a High German, or I’m a Moslem.’

            Whatever their martial antecedents, they were good swordsmen, and they were amazing horse-archers, as we had cause to see in a little display they put on for the men-at-arms at Mestre. Fra Peter and the legate and the king all wanted the mercenaries and volunteers to see what the Turks and Saracens could do, and he used our Byzantine gentlemen to act as Turks. Later, when I saw real Turks, I realised that they were pretty good imitations, although Giorgos never rode as well as Giannis, much less as well as a Turk bred to it from birth. But I digress.

            Twice I had notes from Emile. Jean-François and Bernard joined us, and we had a feast in an inn, with a dozen Knights of the Order and another dozen volunteers, with Sabraham and the two Greeks and Sire Brémond. We drank and told lies and promised each other we’d kill all the Saracens on the face of the earth, which made Sabraham wince.

            ‘Why so solemn, Sir Nicolas?’ I asked. ‘We all go to fight the paynim together.’

            I think he shrugged. I was more than a little drunk and he was not. ‘They are all as God made them,’ he said.

            The only thing worth noting about that evening, beside the quality of the wine, was that we all agreed to share the cost of renting a small warehouse with a dry sand floor, well along the Rialto, for the balance of the winter, so that Fiore could exercise us. We had twenty knights and almost as many squires. I mention this because I’m quite sure it was the foundation of his fame as a teacher. We subscribed to pay for the warehouse and wood for wasters and a few ducats for Fiore’s time.

            And at dinner, Giannis leaned past Juan and informed me that he was taking letters for Avignon, and did I have any messages?

            I took the time to write the situation as carefully as I knew it, and send it to Fra Juan di Heredia. I had imagined that he would come to Venice for his ‘nephew’s’ knighting, but I reckoned without the man. He didn’t come.