‘What do you want out of life?’ I asked.
He glowered the way only a very young man can glower. ‘I want to be a knight,’ he said. He deflated.
I sat down on a bale of cloth. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but it was illegal Sicilian cotton, smuggled from Genoa.
But that’s another story. I looked at him carefully. ‘Listen, Marc-Antonio,’ I said. ‘Will you obey me as if I was Christ come to earth?’
He looked at me with his head tilted to one side, as if I was a madman. ‘Why?’ he asked.
I took a deep breath. ‘If you obey me, and serve me, I swear I’ll do my best to form you as a knight,’ I said. ‘But it is a long road, and there’s a great deal of work.’
Marc-Antonio nodded seriously. ‘There’s always a lot of work,’ he agreed. It was the most likeable thing he’d said.
The next day, we caught a pair of small barques for Venice. Each had room for a dozen animals and twenty people, and the two small ships swore to return as many times as was required to get the whole party to Venice. Most of the party’s horses made the short trip over to the Lidos, the barrier islands across the whole of the Venetian lagoon from Pellestrina to Lido itself, from which they would trans-ship for Venice. As it proved, we kept most of our horses on the grass and grain of Lido for months. But a few of us were ordered to keep our mounts to hand – I was, and so were Fiore and Juan and Stapleton. And Nerio.
From Chioggia to Venice is no great distance, and by midday, the dome of Saint Mark’s was visible above the glassy surface of the lagoon as we rowed up along the Lido from the south, as people used to do in those days. As the city grew closer, my awe deepened. I had imagined that Venice would be like Chioggia writ large. Indeed, Fra Peter had been prosaic enough to say so, and the reality took my breath away. I had never seen so many stone houses all together in all my life.
If every noble palace and great stone house and church in London and York were placed side by each, and then we added all the best houses of Paris and Avignon, the resulting city would not be as magnificent as Venice. And a city with canals! No ditches, no stream of urine, no horse manure, no human excrement floating in muddy brown water. None of that. The sea washes Venice clean at high tide twice a day, and carries her effluvium out into the marshes that surround her.
Venice smells of nothing worse than the sea. She has a hundred stone churches and the greatest square in the world; the Doge’s palace is one of the noblest structures in Italy, and the church of Saint Mark’s is the rival of Hagia Sofia in Constantinople.
Hmm. Perhaps not. But I hadn’t seen Hagia Sophia yet.
And let us not forget the forest of her ships. Every street is a wharf and all along the outer rim of the city, and indeed, up the Rialto and along the Grand Canal there were ships: round ships and great ships and galleys – more galleys than I’d ever seen. As our barge brought us to the steps by Saint Mark’s and the Doge’s palace, I counted sixty fighting galleys I’d seen.
Riches indeed. Spare me your counting houses and warehouses. Show me your galleys.
I admit I fell in love at once. And I have never fallen out of love, my friends. Venice has a hold on my heart the way London has, and England. My second country, though I did not yet know it. And truly, Venetians are more like Englishmen than any other people I have met. Perhaps it is the sea. Perhaps it’s pig-headedness. Or a little liberty. But by God, the city of Saint Mark is a fine place.
We wasted no time: the barge took us to the Doge’s steps, and we were welcomed into the palace.
I swear, the Doge winced when he saw Father Pierre. I knew from Fra Peter that there had been months of negotiations with the Doge and his council about the fleet that would carry the crusade to the Holy Land, and that, in the end, Father Pierre had had his way.