The Long Sword(3)

            I won’t prose on. He’d had word that his sister had died of plague and that he was needed at home, which was a village called Kentmere near Kendall where the green cloth comes from.

            Milady Janet glared at me with her cat’s eyes. ‘If you leave, Hawkwood will treat me like a woman.’

            I sighed. ‘Janet, ma vieux, I have sworn.’

            ‘Men and their oaths,’ she said. She had her arming coat on, and her squire was trying arm harnesses on her. She was not the only armed woman among the English, but she was the only one who didn’t make a secret of it. ‘You leave, and John Hughes leaves. Mark my words, I’ll end up married to some loutly lordling.’ But she smiled, and she also embraced me.

            That was odd, too, because Janet and I never touched. But there are few things less like lovemaking than rubbing steel breastplates together, and the moment passed. ‘Andy Belmont—’ I began.

            ‘That cowardly shit,’ she hissed. In fact, they had been lovers – at least, I thought they had been lovers. But now Andy had run off to fight for Florence.

            She shook her head. ‘At least you’re taking Fiore,’ she said. ‘His love oppresses me.’

            Indeed, I had to watch him kneel and swear his eternal devotion to her before we rode away.

            There were too many goodbyes. This was, as I learned by leaving it, my home, and I was abandoning fame and fortune to return to lower rank with the Order. On the last night, we all shared wine, and John Courtney gave me letters from a lot of the Englishmen for Avignon, and Kenneth MacDonald, who now looked as Italian as the rest of us in fine hose and a silk jupon, gave me a packet of letters from all the Scots and Irish. Olivier de la Motte had letters for the Gascons and Normans. Avignon is a great clearing house for letters – priests come and go from there to every part of Europe, even Hyperborea.

            At any rate, the next morning, with a hard head and an empty heart, I rode for Avignon. Listen, it is all very well to have a letter from your long-lost lady love, but it is damned hard to leave your friends.

            We stopped on the old Roman road north of Sienna, well along toward Lombardy, for the evening, at a fine farm that has since been burned eight or ten times, I’ll warrant. We sat at the farmer’s table and ate his chickens and paid handsomely for the privilege.

            After supper, Fra Peter prayed, and when we had joined him and said the office of compline, and when he’d looked at the two boys and the girl of the house and found nothing worse than some scrapes and some lice, then we sat under the grape arbour outside.

            ‘You boys are too polite to ask me what’s happening,’ he said, leaning back against the stone wall of the house.

            Fiore – that’s Fiore dei Liberi, a tall, strong man of twenty with good manners and an ascetic manner and a tendency to forget anything that didn’t involve fighting – Fiore raised both eyebrows. ‘You did say there would be no crusade for five years,’ he allowed. Fiore had the terrible habit of remembering everything you said; accurately. Unforgivable, in a friend.

            Fra Peter laughed, though. ‘Did any of you meet the King of Cyprus last autumn?’ he asked.

            We all shook out heads, and Fra Peter nodded. ‘He came to the Pope and to King John of France too, and King Edward of England, looking for help against the Turks and the Mamluks of Egypt.’ He took a sip of wine and smacked his lips. ‘Italy, land of wine. At any rate, he’s a good soldier and a fine man-at-arms, but the Pope thought him too young and of too little consequence to lead a crusade, so he chose King John of France.’

            I snorted. So did John Hughes. Fra Peter was not much on social distinctions, and John was a senior archer.

            Fra Peter raised an eyebrow at John and John shrugged innocently. ‘Which he did so well, fighting us,’ Hughes said in his Lakeland accent.