The Long Sword(127)

            So he cut my throat, and I died.



            And blessed Saint George came in all his glory and raised me to heaven.

            Bless you, friends, it was not quite like that.

            In fact, he knelt for a long time. Long enough for my hope to ebb and flow a dozen times. I mumbled things, and he listened or didn’t. I couldn’t see.

            ‘Somewhere, you must be worth a fuck of a lot of money,’ he said quietly.

            I nodded.

            ‘In your place, I’d say the same,’ he agreed. ‘Still, that was a nice harness. And a horse to match.’

            He slung me over his horse. Thanks be to God, I passed out.



            Greed. There is something wonderful in God’s will, that I was saved by the greed of a dozen hard men. Mind you, in their place, I suspect I’d have done the same.

            I never learned my captor’s name. And I never got to thank him, because three days later, he sprouted a crossbow bolt in the chest and fell off his horse, stone dead, without another word. I saw that, but then there passed a period of waiting, and then something spooked the rouncey over which I was thrown, and I was gone again.

            When I came too, the man leaning over me was Sabraham.



            Nerio Acciaioli got the legate back to Venice. He had the money and the authority, and he gave orders and was obeyed. He ran south, almost to Florence, and hired fifty English men-at-arms from the break-up of the White Company – Sir John had been badly defeated in the south. But the Englishmen got the legate home to Venice alive. Juan rode with him so that one of them was awake at all times.

            Fiore and Sabraham doubled back to find me. I can’t bless them enough. I had missed the road – in fact, as best any of us can make it, I left Genoa by the wrong gate, and my finding the pack animal was a miracle of bad navigation. But the road I chose was the one that the innkeeper had thought we meant. Later I learned why. I’d ruin the story by telling you now.

            Sabraham and his henchmen killed my captors, of whom there were two. I never saw the other, but that doesn’t mean anything. My left eye has never been quite right since then but my right recovered well enough. I’m told it gives me a good stare, eh?

            Sabraham splinted my broken bones. He was ruthless – I’ve said that before – but he had the sense and the guts to re-break my arm and set it straight, otherwise I’d still have a ruined left arm. Christ, it makes me shake to think of it.

            They wrapped my hands. Most of my fingers were broken and so swollen they were like puffballs, those giant mushrooms. They got a tinsmith to make little channels to hold my fingers and Fiore reset my nose with a break and a twist.

            It was a little like being tortured again.

            Every time I surfaced to consciousness, it was to realise that d’Herblay would get to Emile ahead of me. Was already there. Emile must be dead …

            I find I have spoken too much of pain, and you gentlemen are appalled.

            Very well.

            Sabraham got me across the Lombardy plain. He didn’t do it in one go, but in little sprints and legs that I remember as days of pain and nights of cold ache. We went as pilgrims and sometimes I was a plague victim. Usually I was unconscious when we were on the road.

            Bless Nicolas Sabraham. He took me all the way to Venice where Father Pierre sent me to the monks. And then I had doctors and drugs, opium, good wine, and broth. Warmth, and no movement, and a warm bed, deep and white, or so I remember it.

            I really remember very little.

            And one day there was the sun, and I was awake, looking out over the lagoon, and it was beautiful. And the beauty made me cry.