What we couldn’t fail to see was the lack of war. There were no burned towns and no crowds of starving beggars. Twice we passed roadside gibbets with men rotting in chains, but we never saw the tell-tales of regular banditry – sly informers, churned earth and heavy horse droppings on the roads like those left by a military column, columns of smoke on the horizon. Fire is the hoof print of brigandage.
Marc-Antonio took two days to recover, and then he was sick on horseback for two more and had real trouble speaking, so that I despaired of his wits. But by the sixth day from Nuremberg, he had again begun his litany of complaints in passable French, and devastating Italian. His riding improved drastically, and it appeared to us that the blow to his head had made him a better rider – a joke that didn’t appeal to him for some reason.
At the very edge of Bohemia we were robbed in an inn, and all our purses taken. That was when Marc-Antonio’s talents began to be seen; he had our travel purse under his pillow, and thanks to his preserving it, we weren’t wrecked. Nerio was mortified to have no money of his own, and tried in every village to cash a bill on the family bank, but in Bohemia, at least in the forest, no one had ever heard of the Acciaioli and their bank, or indeed even of Florence.
But par dieu, my friends, the women of Bohemia are beautiful, tall and honey haired and deep-breasted. Nor are the men any the less handsome, and the knights we saw there were big men, skilled in arms.
We arrived in Prague in late afternoon, and as the next day was the Sabbath, we went to church in the magnificent cathedrals. We knew within an hour of entering the city that the Emperor was not there, and my heart sank within me. But our letters from Father Pierre and the Pope gained me admittance at the castle, and the chamberlain, as I think he was, told me that the Emperor and the King of Cyprus had gone east to visit the King of Poland and the King of Hungary and to hold a great tournament at Krakow, in Poland and we would find him there.
As we travelled east in Bohemia the weather grew cooler and the harvest was more advanced, but the women were not any the less beautiful and the grain was like a shower of gold on the land, the very manna God promised the Israelites. The land grew flatter and flatter until we were riding across the steppes that I had heard described by Fra Peter and by other knights who had fought against the Prussians: Jean de Grailly and the Lord of the Pyrenees, Gaston de Foix. It is one thing to hear traveller’s tales, even from a courteous knight, of how flat the land of the east can be, but it is another thing to see it for yourself.
On the plains, there were no inns and few farms, and while we saw herds in the distance more than once, we were not accosted, but neither were we hosted and feasted, and we ran low on food and had to hunt antelope. Our spear throwing was up to the challenge, and I spent a happy afternoon teaching my squire to lay a snare and take a rabbit. And to cook it.
I cannot remember if I stopped to consider that I was riding across the world on a feckless errand to find the commander of a crusade that might never happen. Or why a commander would ride away from his crusade. I suspect I thought about it, but I was young enough to enjoy the adventure that was offered to me, and that day, that month, that summer, I was offered the steppes and the antelope, the golden wheat, and the matching hair of the lovely maidens of Poland and Bohemia.
We had been a month and more on the road when the spires of Krakow came into sight on the horizon, and such is the flatness of the ground that we had a full day’s ride ahead of us yet, and we lay a night in the Monastery of Saint Nicolas, well out in the country. But the abbot put us immediately at our ease and told us that our quest was fulfilled, and that both the Emperor and the King of Cyprus were at Krakow, preparing a great tournament with all the best Knights of the Empire and Poland.
The abbot was a talkative man, with excellent Latin, our only common tongue, and he told us a great deal about what had transpired, and very little of it to the credit of the Emperor. If the abbot was to be believed, the Emperor had no interest whatsoever in a crusade, but was far too politic to say so, and was holding a tournament to allow King Peter to recruit knights – but Nerio, whose Latin was as much above mine as my swordsmanship was above Marc-Antonio’s, came away with the impression that the Emperor’s hospitality was wearing thin, and that the Cypriotes were expensive and perhaps troublesome guests for the people of Krakow. I remembered that Nan had told me when I was in London that the guilds had given a feast of four kings – the King of France, the King of England, the King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, and the King of Scotland – and how much it had cost the guilds and the alderman of the city.