He could not ward his horse, and the spear went in by the horse’s neck and the big horse stumbled and blew blood from its nostrils. I had my arming sword out; Ship Knight hadn’t grasped what was happening and had no momentum, no forward speed, and my sword slipped unerringly along his lance shaft and flipped it aside. This, too, was the product of a spring of intense drill. Close in, my left hand closed on the haft of his lance, dragging it across his body and putting torque on his waist, and I dragged him from the saddle by his own lance. As his back struck the cobbled street, the lance finally came away from his lance rest and bounced once on the stones, and then I swung it by the haft, spun it in the air with a flourish – and turned my horse to face the other three.
Fiore trotted up by my side. ‘Helmet?’ he asked, and handed me my bassinet.
He covered me while I dropped it on my head.
‘Caitiff! Coward! You killed his horse!’ shouted another man, who I remember as the Knight of Coins.
Nerio reined in on my other side. ‘I couldn’t let Liberi have all the fun,’ he said.
Liberi frowned. ‘I don’t need you to defeat these riff-raff,’ he said.
‘Could you two save the fight for the enemy?’ I muttered.
We charged them.
I can seldom remember a fight that I enjoyed so much. We were better; simply, better men. Better trained. I think the best moment of the fight was that I hit my opponent squarely on his shield, having deceived his lance, and I rocked him flat across his crupper, so that his feet came up in his stirrups, and Liberi caught one going by and threw him to the street as if he’d planned this little manoeuvre all his life.
Truly, the only thing better than being a good knight is being one of a team of good knights. To have comrades …
Nerio, who was a fine jouster, put his man down, horse and all. Then his horse kicked the downed man. Their superior horses and armour were of no importance, and in seconds they were all lying in the dung-streaked stones of the square while Fiore collected their horses.
I rode straight to their squires and pages, who scattered. I shamelessly ripped through their pack horses, and I tipped a leather bag full of wallets into the muck, looking for letters, but I found nothing.
Nerio curled a lip in distaste. ‘Is this your mercenary’s chivalry?’ he asked.
‘I want to know if they are hired men,’ I said. ‘They are French knights and they attacked my squire. I suspect they are not what they appear.’
‘Oho!’ exclaimed Nerio, or words to that effect. ‘This is more like Florence than I had expected.’
Then I checked on Marc-Antonio. He was deeply unconscious, and already had an egg on his head big enough for a duck. I got him over his horse, and Fiore had all the knight’s destriers.
‘Right of arms,’ I called at the squires of my adversaries.
Nerio was for staying, perhaps to see if any of the downed knights was dead or needed a doctor.
‘Let’s move, before someone appears with a crossbow,’ I said.
Two days later I wished that I’d ignored Nerio’s aristocratic ways and scooped the purses out of the muck. Three destriers cost the earth and the moon to feed, and they were eating our travel money. However, they were beautiful horses, far better than those Fiore or I would usually have owned or ridden. We’d left our warhorses back in Venice – a perfectly sensible decision, given the cost of maintaining a warhorse on the road. Unless you have to fight, the warhorse is a useless mouth that consumes money.
We continued to speculate on who our late adversaries might have been, and then rode hard for Prague, crossing some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen – as rich as northern Italy. It was August, and the crops were coming; peasants stood in their fields, sickles in hand, to watch us pass their grain fields, which stretched away like a golden promise of heaven in the red light of the setting sun. Beautiful young women, the better for a sheen of sweat, wiped their faces and curtsied even as their fathers and mothers closed in on them protectively; indeed, some lay down and hid at the edge of the road so that we wouldn’t see them, but we were old soldiers and we knew where to look.