So now the Doge knelt and kissed the legate’s ring, embraced him, and then frowned.
‘Where’s the King of Cyprus?’ he asked without preamble. ‘Your Dogs of War are emptying my kennels of food.’
With his arm around the legate’s shoulders, the Doge escorted Father Pierre out of the loggia and up the great stairs. We were taken to a side chamber and entertained by a pair of lute players and a tenor who sang beautifully. It was in many ways the most elegant reception we’d had in Italy, and it was further reinforced with wine and cakes. Ser Nerio smiled over his glass – in Venice everything was glass.
‘Welcome to the New Rome,’ he said. ‘They lie and they drive hard bargains, but they are far easier to deal with than Neapolitans or Genoese. Don’t quote me.’
After an hour, a pair of Venetian knights came and courteously escorted us to our lodgings in the Count of Savoy’s palace. I shared with the donats; eight of us in a single room, but the room was huge, on the piano nobile and elegant and full of light from windows of glass. We all had feather beds and trunks in which to stow our clothes, and we had another room in which to place our tack and our armour. The only difficulty was our horses; Venice has fewer than fifty open fields in the whole of the city, thanks to the population on the islands and the incredibly dense building. So our horses were, as I mentioned, to be kept on the Lido, and that meant that we had to rotate a watch to look after them. I found a pair of wax tablets and began on a watch bill, then carried my work to Fra Ricardo Caracciolo, who was sitting on his own feather bed, writing a letter while Sister Marie copied another.
I remember that I started to explain to Fra Ricardo , and he shrugged.
‘Take yourself off the watch bill, Sir William,’ he said. ‘You are going to Prague.’
While we fought off assassinations and engaged in political discussions across Italy, the newly appointed commander of our crusade, the famous King of Cyprus, had not yet arrived in Venice, despite having set off from Rheims in France two full weeks ahead of the time we set out from Avignon. By the time we arrived in Venice, there were five thousand men waiting to go on crusade, eating Venetian food and drinking their precious fresh water, so that the Venetians moved many of them to the mainland at Mestre or above Treviso. They were nearly mutinous, being unemployed and unpaid. Unscrupulous or over-eager papal recruiters had promised them pay – money that the papacy didn’t have, or at least had no intention of paying out. In the north, the ‘army’ of routiers that Arnaud de Cervole had raised for the crusade and led into the Swiss passes murdered peasants, ran riot and in the end, killed the archpriest himself. It’s not my story, except to say that I have since come to believe that Arnaud de Cervole was intending to join us – and the Green Count and his minions stopped him. I mention this to say that we did not win every round, or even know what was happening out there in the lands north of the Alps.
All this news greeted us at Venice, and much more beside. If Father Pierre already knew of the state of near war that existed between the Genoese on one side and the King of Cyprus on the other, he knew more than his household, but we all learned more than we wanted in a few hours in Venice. Some Genoese sailors had been killed in a brawl, and Genoa was using the brawl as a pretext to demand that the Cypriotes cede new rights of justice and commerce to Genoa. And of course, Venice wanted no such thing.
A lesser man would have despaired. I was that lesser man, and I returned to the donats and did what I should not – I conveyed to them my sense of defeat. I cursed and complained and predicted the collapse of the crusade.
An excellent piece of leadership, let us agree. But it seemed that whatever Father Pierre did, the hand of man or fate was against him.
I was railing against the injustice of it when Juan’s face changed and Liberi became very quiet. I turned, hand still raised to make another point, and there was Father Pierre.
He smiled, as he almost always did. ‘My son,’ he said.