The Long Sword(17)

            ‘I’ll kill you all,’ Camus said. ‘I’ll kill you and then I’ll flay your souls in hell.’

            Father Pierre shook his head, his mild eyes unmoved. ‘No, my son, you will not.’

            ‘I am not your son!’ roared Camus. Even then, his right shoulder dislocated, a swarm of men-at-arms around him, he went for his dagger.

            I was too slow.

            Fiore dei Liberi was not. He stripped the dagger from Camus’s left hand as if he was taking a pie from a street seller. Fra Peter picked up the oak staff that Camus had dropped and held it high.

            The Savoyard prelate was just watching. He wore his gown with long black gloves so that he appeared entirely black except his head, where his ferocious, inquisitive, bulging eyes and his narrow, chinless face made him look more like a cat than was quite right. If he cared at all that one of the captains of his escort was lying flat with his arms pinned and his own dagger at his throat, he betrayed nothing but an intense interest, as if we were a troupe of travelling players performing something vaguely obscene. Those eyes of his!

            Fra Peter gave Father Pierre a gentle but very commanding shove away from the Bishop’s men and towards the open steps to our left. ‘Move, Excellency,’ he said.

            Now the blue and white men-at-arms were also moving, working their way to block the ends of the street. Robert of Geneva leaned down from his chair to speak to his cousin d’Herblay.

            Father Pierre was not used to being called ‘Excellency’ and he didn’t react at once.

            ‘By Satan, I will find the peasants who are your father and mother and flay them alive,’ the Bourc Camus spat at Father Pierre. This, let me say again, on the steps of the papal palace.

            ‘You are like a child,’ Father Pierre said. ‘You seek to break things—’

            ‘Don’t patronise me, you low-born hypocrite. You were born on the dung heap, and I will fling you back to it.’ Camus’s voice had taken on an odd, sing-song chant and a sibilant hiss.

            Father Hector had his crucifix in Camus’s face, and Liberi had the man pinned, despite his demonic strength – demons, for all the aid of the netherworld, have a hard time with one shoulder dislocated and the other locked by an expert man-at-arms.

            Fra Peter stopped talking, caught Father Pierre around the waist and carried him away.

            I found that I was standing over the nun. Her face was white and her left arm was clearly broken, but she got to her feet without using either hand, rolling forward over her hips like a knight. She tucked the broken arm into the cord that bound her habit and met my eye. I moved my head, indicating that she should follow Father Pierre and then I looked past her at Liberi.

            He had the tiniest smile on his face. With a look of pleasure on his narrow face, he rolled Camus off his hip and threw him down the steps and into his own men-at-arms.

            Chaos ensued – shrieks, bellows of pain – and under their cover we slipped away to the left, moving fast. Juan was one step ahead of me. None of us had drawn our swords.

            ‘At them!’ shouted d’Herblay. But Fra Peter had chosen an alley, not the street itself. The sacrifice of our dignity gained us ten valuable steps on our enemies, and their horses only hampered them in the press.

            At the base of the steps, I saw that Fra Peter was already running – in full armour, carrying a grown man – to the left into an alley, as I said, the Rue des Mons. The two priests followed, and then Juan and Fiore and the nun. I paused and looked back, ready to make a fight at the narrow mouth of the side street.

            D’Herblay was coming.

            I drew my sword. Father Pierre was no longer there to stop me.