I think my dislike – nay, hatred – of Genoa began on the docks. Par dieu, docks are heartless places. The same vices rule every set in the world, from Southwark in London to the stews in Constantinople: prostitution of girls and boys too young to even know what their trade is about, drunkenness and dangerous drugs that rob a man of his senses, and thieves to take the rest; sheer greed, so that workers are underpaid and merchants are fat. Lust, gluttony, greed, pride –dockyards are, in most cities, nastier places than battlefields, and that’s saying something.
Venice’s docks had Moslem slaves and tired stevedores. But the stevedores were mostly citizens and the slaves – well, they ate.
The Genoese docks were peopled by men and women at the end of despair. It was the middle of winter, and there were beggars in women’s cast-off shifts and no shoes, backs hunched to carry bundles of rags. They looked as bad as the poorest French peasants, or refugees from the height of our war in France, when our armies burned a hundred hamlets a day and drove the villeins to the fields and forests.
Father Pierre stopped on the quay, in a cold wind and light rain that cut through my harness and my arming clothes and froze the marrow in my bones. He began by blessing the poor, and to my great shame, I shifted from one foot to another, worried about my warhorse and wishing he would move on, my eyes scanning the crowd.
I needn’t have feared the poor and the desperate. They were not my foes or his.
The Pisan captain got our horses unloaded with professional competence, and I paid him with the legate’s money, having almost none of my own. He spat. Pisans hate Genoa, for good reason, and we had been lucky with him. ‘I may have to jump in the ocean to get clean,’ he said, when my Jacques was out of the cradle of the winch. ‘You would do well not to linger here.’
Indeed, as soon as he had our florins in his purse and a small cargo of hides he picked up on the foreshore, he was away, his sons poling his small ship off the quay. I’d only known him two days, and I felt as you do when you have a sortie outside the walls in a siege and you see them lock the gate behind you.
Father Pierre was saying Mass for the beggars on the docks.
I gathered my knights and ordered them out into the crowd. In full harness, with a longsword, every knight was worth any ten attackers. Marc-Antonio and Nerio’s squire Davide held the horses. Sabraham nodded to me and vanished with his two henchmen, and I was, if anything, more comfortable for knowing that I didn’t know where he was.
The legate’s religious retinue helped him with Mass. They were steady, reliable men. Father Antonio was another Carmelite from Naples; Father Hector was an Scottish Isleman, and there were nigh on a dozen others, mostly servants, all of whom had religious offices as deacons and sextons and the like. Sister Marie had by that time acquired an assistant secretary, a young Frenchman from the University of Paris named Adhemar. He never spoke; his eyes were always downcast, and I scarcely noticed him, but he was clearly well born and he wrote beautifully.
At any rate, we got through Mass. I dare say it was beautiful, to the clerics, but to me it was a nightmare, as I was all too aware by then that the legate’s life was threatened, and there he was surrounded by riff-raff. Truly, I tried to see them as men and women. I have heard the sermons, that there is Christ in every man – but I looked into the open sores, the missing teeth, the black rot, and the hard, closed faces, the malignant cunning that comes of a life lived at the edge of death, the false humility of the professional beggar and I knew Christ was there, because Father Pierre had told me many times. But I saw a thousand criminals, any one of who could be bought for a copper, close enough to put a dagger in my lord.
No one did, however.
We did create a bread riot. The podestà turned out his army of thugs and drove the poor back under the piers and into the chicken coops and barns and sewers where they lived. I met him in person; I had mounted my friends and our squires and we made a living wall of armour and horseflesh that covered the legate and his people as they served Mass to the last stragglers of the poor.