The Long Sword(27)

            She narrowed her eyes. But she followed me.

            At the saddlers, we had to wait while the apprentices tried the saddles on our mounts and then worked on the saddles, spreading the tree of my knight’s and narrowing the tree on Sister Marie’s. The shop had a wonderful smell of beautiful leather, wax, and oil and gilding and resin. The apprentices were well fed and cheerful, and I listened to the banter. My Italian was good by then, and I laughed when one young man let flow a stream of invective so pure and so malicious in response to a slip of his round knife that the swearing itself was an art.

            I found Sister Marie looking at me.

            I had no idea what I’d done to offend her, but as I felt guiltless, I answered her look with a smile. ‘Sister?’ I asked.

            She frowned and looked away.

            Her saddle was fitted first, and she took it and her animal and hurried away. I lingered, exchanged a few careful barbs with the witty apprentice, learned a little about leatherwork, and scrounged some leather thong and some scraps for future repairs. Leather work is a basic skill of arms, like wrestling. I imagine Geoffrey de Charny knew how to sew a good chain stitch, and I know for certain that Jehan le Maingre and John Chandos were both capable of touching up their own horse tack. A morning in a leather shop was not ill-spent. A few silver coins got me two new awls and a packet of steel needles better than any I’d ever used.

            Back at the university, Fiore and Juan and Miles and I worked in the stable yard. Almost no one went there, and we had it to ourselves. Like every other part of the university, the stable yard was magnificent: bands of bricks and pale marble on two sides, with oak supports for the wooden roofing on the third and a great cobblestone yard comfortably padded in old dung. When we had all the horses seen to and all the new tack stored and all the repaired tack hung, Fiore grinned and produced a pair of blunted spears and a poleaxe.

            We had been playing with spears all summer, but toward the end of our time in Avignon, Fiore purchased an English axe. The English have always been great ones for axes – the English Guard in Constantinople have carried them since King William’s time, or so I’ve been told. But just about the time of Poitiers, many of our men-at-arms gave up the spear or the shortened lance for a long-handled axe, and many of them had a back spike and sometimes a spear point. Some men viewed the poleaxe as un-knightly, and others saw it as ‘typically English’. In fact, one of the first men I knew to own one and wield it was Bertrand du Guesclin, and he was anything but ‘typically English’. Hah! At any rate, Fiore had fallen in love with the thing. So we took turns with it, and as we had no pell, we used one of the support pillars of the stables, an oak beam two handbreadths on a side. We left some fine marks in it, I promise you.

            I showed Miles the basic postures of fighting with a spear. He was a careful, quiet young man. He listened. But he was not impressed.

            When we had practiced various motions, most of which had to do with changing guards from right to left, which was one of Fiore’s doctrines, we stripped to our shirts and hose and fought with sharp swords. I know that today men sometimes use blunts, but we were neither rich enough nor cowardly enough to fence with special swords. By then, I had ceased to be a contemptible opponent for Fiore, and we swaggered our longswords up and down the yard, stubbing our toes on cobbles, covering our hose in old dung, and enjoying ourselves hugely.

            I had learned an enormous amount of postures and simple doctrines from Fiore. But he was still my master with the sword, and I remember that morning he finished me with a sharp tap to the side of my head that drew no blood.

            At some point I realised that we had spectators. One of them was Sister Marie, and she beckoned to me.

            ‘Do you know that the university has a law against public use of swords?’ she asked softly.

            The stable boys were on our side, so we organised them as a watch, and went back to our play after None. Fiore fenced with Juan, and pinked him through the doublet, which seemed funny enough at the time, although Sister Marie frowned.