The Long Sword(164)
Sometimes our finest moments are lost in the black and the fatigue. It may be the best fight we all had together.
Well, the fighting was over.
War at sea is the hell of squires. My harness had been drenched in seawater and covered in blood, scorched with fire – I have no idea where the fire happened, but I had burns and scorch marks and all the straps on my left cuisse had to be replaced. Oh, and then I rolled in wet sand.
Marc-Antonio, with the best will in the world, was hurt far worse than I. His right arm was all bandages and they were red with blood, and he’d stayed on his feet and used a sword left-handed – a truly knightly act. But there on the beach, when the Turks broke and ran – to the tender mercies of the local Greek peasants, a tough bunch if ever I saw one – when we’d slumped to our knees, breathed like bellows, and gradually dropped most of our priceless harness in the blood-soaked strand, Marc-Antonio shook his head.
‘You’d better clean that and get some oil on it,’ he said. He grinned, so I didn’t kill him. And I knew he was right.
This is what you are trained for, in the order. Not just so that you can triumph on the day of battle, but to have the will to conquer your own body and the listlessness that comes with survival. Oarsmen were sitting among the dead, passing bottles of wine and water. Crossbowmen were coming ashore to loot.
My four brothers and I began to clean our armour. The Venetian marines knew tricks we didn’t – that one stain could clean another. Under their instruction we waded into the sea and cleaned our sabatons and our greaves of the ordure stuck to them, and while Fiore and I washed the pieces of harness, Miles and Juan dried them and oiled them with sheepskin and whale oil.
Nerio drank wine while Alessandro worked, and then he shook himself like a dog and handed his wine to Marc-Antonio. ‘Sometimes I’m an arse,’ he admitted, and set to work.
The two Venetians joined us, and one by one the looters stopped and fell in, too, washing their maille in seawater before scrubbing it with oiled lambswool and wrapping the dried shirt in a dry fleece full of old lanolin.
Eventually I was clean from wading in and out of the sea, my shoes ruined, my cut foot a burning anvil of pain only then beginning to intrude on me.
‘By Saint Mark, if you and your friends hadn’t made such a slaughterhouse of the beach, we could get our cook fires lit,’ said the admiral at my back. But his smile belied his tone. ‘Sit! You’ve earned it, and so have I.’
Slaves and oarsmen cleared most of the dead off the beach, though the rocks were full of corpses and leaving the fire for a piss could raise a ghost, I can tell you, but there was a wind rising, and the admiral refused to leave the site of his victory.
‘I won’t lose one hull,’ he said. ‘We’re in for a two-day blow. And not a man of us will be worth a shit in the morning.’
There was one more incident. Alessandro and Marc-Antonio did their best to prepare a meal, but firewood became the last crisis of the day, and suddenly every man on the beach was so utterly tired that many let their fires die rather than walk up the headland for wood. Nor were the local peasants especially gracious, but I forgive them. They had daughters and coins and unburned farms and they probably feared us as much as they feared the Turks.
At any rate, Juan and I managed to get to our feet and walk up the beach, and then, after some desultory searching, we found a whole tree that had floated ashore as driftwood, dry as a bone and ready to be three fires. I managed to walk back down the beach to get the dead Turk’s axe, and then back to limb the tree. The wood was strong and hard and well-seasoned, and it took all my strength, hobbling on a badly cut foot, let me add.
You might think I’d have been too tired, and perhaps I was, but those of you who have stood the blows of the enemy know that something to do – something, anything to occupy your mind is preferable to nothing. Or perhaps to considering how close one was to nothing.