I hoped to catch my enemies there.
But that bastard who took Jacques was not there, and I bought my bay and called him Gawain for my favourite knight of romance. He was a better horse than he looked. In fact, I suspect he was Jacques rival. But at the time I saw him as a poor second for he had none of Jacques beauty.
I missed Jacques. I purchased Gawain.
Having spent an entire day prowling the camp for my foes, on the second day I was off my guard. I had collected Gawain and needed a saddle, preferably used. I was counting my ducats and florins, walking towards the horse market, when I looked up and found the Emperor’s sword, walking along, the scabbard considerably the worse for wear. It hung from a belt a few men in front of me, and the scrofulous fellow wearing it was the same who’d taken it from the pile by the road. I didn’t know him at first – I confess, I wouldn’t have known any of them by sight.
But when he turned to talk to his mate, I knew his voice and the odd, sing-song Gascon-Catalan. I motioned to Marc-Antonio and chased them.
I suppose that I might have gone to the master of the camp, but I had something to prove to myself. Nor could I bear to let them from my sight.
I followed them into the tent lines and pressed closer as they slowed. The shorter man had de Charny’s dagger in his belt. Just beyond him, and to my joy, I saw Juan with Marc-Antonio.
Thank God, I thought about what I was doing. A knight has the right of justice, but justice is not the same as revenge. I knew the one man but not the other; his voice was not the voice of the brigand who took the dagger.
‘Messieurs!’ I called out.
Heads turned for fifty yards, and both men turned to face me.
The man with the sword knew me in an instant.
The other frowned. He had a heavy moustache – an Easterner, I thought. He had a riding whip in his hand, and he pointed it at me and said something.
I didn’t slow. ‘That’s my sword and my dagger,’ I said. Juan was coming from the other direction.
The man with the sword smiled. He didn’t have many teeth. He was old, forty or more, and he had on a worn, padded jupon with the stuffing leaking out. It didn’t go with the Emperor’s sword, although six months of bad care had helped the scabbard to match his style better.
His Hungarian mate was shouting for his friends. Hungarians are easy to spot in a crowd – long hair, sometimes in braids, and nobles wear pearls in their hair.
Every Hungarian in the tent row came at us at a run.
That didn’t slow me, either.
I think my lust for that sword – the completeness of my desire – shut out fear. I should have been afraid. A beating can break a man, and if I wasn’t broken, I was surely bent a long way.
But I saw nothing beyond my gap-toothed adversary. I walked towards him, and he drew his sword and stood there in the sunshine.
Everything seemed to still. Perhaps this is only memory playing tricks on me, but I think the crowd fell silent and the running Hungarians slowed and stopped.
Far off, one woman was singing.
Gap-tooth raised his sword in a poor imitation of the middle guard, posta breva.
The woman’s voice rose.
Three paces away, I drew. My sword swept up from the scabbard even as his fell. Up and up, covering me, and back along the same line, and he fell, dead. I’d slammed his sword out of line, up into the air with my rising stroke and then cut about two inches into his head and ripped the point all the way from his temple to his jaw with my descent, and then continued down into my first guard.