‘Who the devil are you?’ he swore.
I pointed to the man in a brown habit, apparently impervious to the vicious wind. ‘This is the papal legate for the Crusade. He has come to negotiate with your lords.’
The podestà’s horse was nervous. It was the smell of blood that was worrying the animal: the podestà’s men-at-arms had killed a dozen of the beggars. Just behind the podestà, a small woman was pounded to the ground by a man in armour with a steel mace, the sort I grew accustomed to seeing in the hands of Turks, later.
She was fifty, or even older, with no teeth and wisps of white hair and he caved in her skull with a whoop.
‘This thing is fucking perfect!’ he shouted, and tossed his bloody mace in the air.
Some of the other men-at-arms had the good grace to look away.
Some laughed.
At my back, Marc-Antonio had the legate mounted.
‘I’d thank you for an escort through the streets,’ I said to the podestà. In powerful Italian cities, the officer who commands the garrison is usually a foreigner. That way, he can’t get mixed up in the endless internal quarrels of house against house that divide the Italians as much as money unites them. Looking at this man’s hat, his gleaming harness and his sword, I guessed he was Milanese.
He frowned. ‘Papal legate? Never heard of him, but if he makes another riot …’
One of Sabraham’s men appeared by my left boot, on foot. He tugged at my stirrup to get my attention. When I looked at him, he gave me the Order’s sign for a direction and I nodded.
‘Your men cannot be armed in the city,’ the podestà said.
I bowed. I made no answer, but hoped that my bow would cover the exigencies of the situation.
Even as I spoke to the podestà, two more beggars tried to run to safety behind us, risking our warhorse’s legs to get away from the podestà’s men. Both were men – one a leper, with no lips and no nose, and the other a poor deformed mite, a very small man or even a boy with something awry with his face.
The leper got away – no one likes to catch a leper – but the mite was trapped by the man with the bloody mace. He caught the little man in the corner where two warehouses came together in a jumble of garbage and old roofing, and he grinned.
‘Watch this, messieurs!’ he shouted with glee, and the mace rose—
Fiore stripped it out of his hand. His horse pranced out of our line, he flowed through the other mounted man and dumped him in the gutter and backed his horse to our line before the podestà’s men, still milling about like a stag hunt at the kill, could react.
The podestà’s face grew red-purple. He pointed at Fiore. ‘Arrest that—’
I put a hand on his reins. ‘It is bad manners to attack people during Mass, my lord. You have just attacked these poor people while the Patriarch of Constantinople, the Ambassador of the King of Jerusalem, was saying Mass.’ While in my head I applauded Fiore’s action, I would have traded the life of a beggar for a little peace.
The podestà opened his mouth. Some men despise anything that brooks their authority and this was one such. He didn’t hate me as a Milanese or as the podestà – he just hated me for not cringing.
‘We are knight-volunteers of the Order of St John, if you are too fucking ignorant of the habit of the Order to know.’ I’d had it with trying to be polite. ‘Unless you want to see your whole city under interdict, kindly clear the way.’
The podestà glared at me, but short of ordering his men to attack mine, there wasn’t much he could do.