The Long Sword(58)

            Then the king turned the full sun of his smile on me. ‘By Saint Maurice and the Holy Passion, monsieur, that was well said.’ He nodded. ‘I ask you, Sir Knight, to rally your friends and join us here; display your arms at my window, and serve with me this day.’



            Yes, I fought in the Grand Tournament of Krakow.

            Now, if you gentlemen have been listening carefully, you know that I had never actually participated in a tournament. I had certainly practised for them, and several times in my career I had the honour of fighting in deeds of arms, but I was – and am – a soldier, and tournaments are for the richest and most powerful lords.

            I do not need to explain this to you, gentles – but Aemilie has never served in arms, have you, my sweet? So let me tell you how it is. To participate in a great tournament, you must first of all be invited. In the romances, of course, knights on errantry simply arrive at the tournament field, lance in hand, already armed – but that is pure fantasy. In this world, tournaments are very expensive affairs, with thousands of ducats spent on building the stands, on decorating an entire town, on the costumes of the knights, and on actors, jongleurs, bards, and food – and that’s before a single course is run.

            To participate, a man needs the bluest of blood and friends in the highest places and most tournaments are held by a team, who share the expense, usually led by a prince or a very great nobleman. To be invited to serve on the prince’s team was a very, very great honour, and if you have been listening, you’ll recall that I was going to fight on my own prince’s team at Calais back in the year sixty, at the time of the great truce. But in the end, I was thrown off.

            Tournaments are both socially and physically dangerous. Reputations are won and lost in a tourney. Chivalry is, indeed, tested. In fact, I think it is worth saying that, short of battle, the tournament, a great tournament, with kings and queens and great ladies watching, is the greatest test of a knight’s virtues that there is. The whole empris is difficult, dangerous, expensive, and public. Bad conduct is instantly seen. Thousands of people, high born and low, are watching everything: the arming, the horses, the quality of harness, the techniques employed – everything.

            The church has a very ambiguous view of the tournament, too. Most priests see the tournament as a sink of iniquity, where lechery, pride, and gluttony triumph and where the virtues of chivalry are seen to overwhelm the Christian pieties. Yet many churchmen come from noble families. And many churchmen see the tournament as a relatively harmless way to harness the men-at-arms without war. In some countries, men who fight in tournaments are considered to be outside the church for the duration of the deed and men who die in a tournament are considered unshriven. In some places, they cannot be buried in hallowed ground.

            But, ma petit, there are jousts, and there are tourneys, and then there are deeds of arms, foot combats, encommensailles and bohorts. I could weary you with the language of arms, and truly, it differs from country to country. But in brief – a joust is two men with lances, tilting at one another. And in a greater deed of arms, the encommensailles may be jousts or even foot combats; they proceed the tourney, sometimes as many as three or four days of them.

            But the tourney, the true tournament, is a different thing. It is a battle of equals, a team of horsemen on either side. I have been told that in King Arthur’s time, men fought with lances in the tourney, but we are smaller, weaker men, and we fight with swords on horseback, and it is illegal to use the point. Indeed, in many tourneys the participants much use a special sword with a blunted point. In such a game, each team has a goal post – a heavy post, usually with a flag atop it. And the desire of every knight is to unhorse his opponent, take his horse, and lead it to the post. Once the horse is at the post, it is the property of the knight who took it.

            You can make a fortune in minutes, taking warhorses from the great lords. And you can make a mortal enemy who will hate you all your life.

            Well. I nearly burst with excitement, and I raced to our inn where I found Marc-Antonio eating in the kitchen.