The man-at-arms in the mud got to his feet cursing. He stomped to his horse and called to Fiore, ‘I’ll know you again, fuckhead!’
Nerio laughed. ‘And we will know you by the smell.’ His contempt was beautiful. It hurt the podestà’s thugs more than our blows might have.
And I was sure that we could take them. Just at that moment, I would cheerfully have made the streets of Genoa run with their blood.
Sometimes I think I am the wrong man to command an escort for a living saint.
On the other hand, we got to our inn alive.
I had nothing to do with the negotiations, which is probably for the best. I had developed an instant contempt for Genoa and I’ve never changed my mind.
Everywhere in Genoa, there are slaves. In Venice there are a few, mostly Moslems. In Genoa, there are thousands. They displace the working poor – anyone of any power has slaves, not servants. Men have slave mistresses and when the slave woman bears children to the master, they are also slaves. Our innkeeper told his wife that every time he fucked their servants, he was making them money.
Need I go on? Slavery rotted their families, undermined their morals, and made them petty tyrants. To say nothing of the sins it engendered in the slaves themselves. I have seen slavery in many places – God knows that Moslems themselves will enslave anything that moves – but a Christian slave in Egypt has every possibility of freeing himself by work and is protected by laws even as a slave.
Bah! I’ve been told that it is worse elsewhere, and that my hatred of the Genoese is as foolish as any other hate. Perhaps. But I hate them the way most Englishmen hate the French – they are a nation of slavers and tyrants, with the morals of merchants and the courage of assassins. False, treacherous, cunning without wisdom, vulgar in display, ignorant, utterly without honour!
You can see why it was best I had nothing to do with negotiations.
The legate met with their senators for eight days. During those eight days, we guarded our inn and fought the podestà’s men.
They never stopped coming at us. Their honour, or whatever honour they felt they had after careers attacking the weak, had been threatened, and every man-at-arms on the city payroll made it his business to gather near our inn and make comments. By the fifth day we were threatened with outright attack.
The innkeeper wept and wrung his hands and said they’d burn the inn. I distrusted him utterly, and while I was off escorting Father Pierre, Sabraham knocked him on the head and locked him in the basement.
After that, we were under siege. The difficult part was getting the legate through the streets to the palace each day. Sabraham and his men scouted routes every night, after dark, and I began to go out with the man; he clearly knew things I didn’t, and I was eager to learn.
I learned a great deal about roofs, and how to climb them; about ambush sites in a city, and about stealth.
And about ruthlessness.
I think it was the fifth night; we were prowling near the market, looking for a safer route to get the legate to the northern part of the city. I climbed across a board that had been left over an alley by one of Sabraham’s men, got my feet under me – heights are not my best thing – to find one of Sabraham’s soldiers, Maurice, cutting a man’s throat. The man died hard – terrified, pissing himself, with a look of horrified unbelief on his face.
‘Thief ?’ I asked.
Sabraham spread his hands. The motion said more clearly than words that Sabraham didn’t care a damn who the man was. ‘We cannot be observed,’ he said.
Later, as we went up the corbels of a church with a rope, Sabraham said ‘One of the podestà’s men.’