The Long Sword(131)

            He read to me from an Historia he was composing, which was quite brilliant, called, I think, De Viris Illustribus. It cheered me to hear tales of heroism from the past; nor were his tales of patience rewarded lost on me. And who does not take pleasure from having one of the lights of the age wait upon you? He must have come ten times, and when he came with Philippe de Mézzières, I discovered that it was the Cypriote chancellor who had arranged for him to come. When spring made the lagoon easier to navigate, de Mézzières came with an equerry.

            De Mézzières sat stiffly; the sun was shining on a Venetian April, and the nuns were singing and I was allowed to sit in the garden. His equerry looked familiar – a strikingly handsome man in a plain dark jupon.

            ‘I have heard a great deal about you since Krakow,’ he said carefully.

            Emile was sitting by me, doing embroidery. We had not so much as touched, except perhaps as she adjusted a pillow, in three months, and yet we knew each other better, I think, than we ever had. One of our jokes was that she, who had spurned embroidery utterly in her youth for the pleasures of flirtation, was now growing quite accomplished at it while other women walked the same path in the opposite direction.

            At any rate, I looked at her, and met her eye as she bit a thread. She glanced at the equerry, looked back at me, and winked.

            ‘I confess to having taken a deep dislike to you, and having been mistaken,’ de Mézzières said. I was still smiling at Emile’s wink, and de Mézzières’ words wiped the smile off my face.

            But I had managed five minutes with a waster that day, and had not flinched even when Fiore struck my hand. I had Emile to watch and smile with and all was right with the world. So I rose – I was much stronger by April – and bowed. ‘I suppose it was the manner of my knighting,’ I said. I could remember clearly his face when I related my battlefield dubbing.

            He frowned. ‘Not at all, far from it. I was made knight on the battlefield myself, at Smyrna.’ He shrugged. ‘My father could never have afforded to have me knighted.’

            He smiled, his eyes on some event far in the past. Then they focused on me.

            ‘You killed de Charny,’ he said. ‘He was my friend – my mentor.’ His eyes were like daggers, like the blows of my tormentors. ‘He made me a knight.’

            Well.

            Emile shifted, put her work aside, and stood. ‘Gentlemen …’ she said. She was a noblewomen and she’d had a lifetime of listening to men start the dance that leads to blood. She knew exactly how the opening notes sounded.

            ‘He was a great knight,’ I said. ‘I met him in London during the peace, when he was a prisoner.’

            De Mézzières shrugged. ‘I would have been in the Holy Land, I fear.’

            ‘He was kind to me when I was a shop boy. In fact, he encouraged me to – to be a knight.’ Just thinking of it made my voice tremble.

            I know men who flinch from steel, and others from memories of steel. I am not one to carry the bad dreams, I have not been so cursed. But that day, in the spring sun in the rose garden, speaking of the great Sieur de Charny conjured him, and there he was, killing my knight, Sir Edward, with a single blow of his spear. Every muscle in my neck and back tensed.

            ‘Tell me of his end,’ de Mézzières said.

            I told it simply. ‘There were many of us, squires, mostly. The Gascons and some English knights were trying to take the king – King John of France.’ I frowned. ‘The English were all fighting to take the richest ransoms, and the French …’ I shrugged.

            Emile looked away.