‘Where are they?’ I demanded.
He took his time chewing.
I was fit to burst.
‘Bathhouse,’ he managed.
I ran in all my finery to the bathhouse.
The fat man laughed when I came in. ‘Not got enough, eh?’ he asked in his slow, accurate Latin.
‘I need my two friends,’ I said.
‘Two?’ he asked, and slapped his great thighs so that they wobbled like jellies. ‘We’re that busy this morning, my lord, I’m not sure I can spare you two.’ He roared at his own wit.
I moved past him into the baths – you must see this, me, dripping self-importance, wearing a fortune in scarlet and black, pushing into the damp heat of a brothel-bathhouse.
‘Fiore!’ I called out. The bathhouse had twenty tubs and each was partitioned from the others by screens of birch bark or parchment.
Various Polish comments were shouted by male voices. Someone suggested how I might use my virility in a particularly offensive way – in French.
Fiore’s voice carried perfectly. ‘I am here, William,’ he called.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked, unmindful of my friend’s somewhat literal cast.
‘I am in the very act of copulation,’ he replied.
Only Fiore would explain that he was in the very act. I suppose I’m lucky he didn’t elaborate on the mechanics of the thing. The sound of laughter and some very exact comments, more like coaching than anything else, favoured us from the other partitions.
‘The King of Jerusalem has invited us to fight on his team. In the tournament!’ I shouted.
A girl squawked, and cursed. I don’t know what she said, but it wasn’t nice.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Fiore said in Italian. I was at his screen, holding his towel.
‘Where’s Nerio?’ I asked, while Fiore blushed and his girl cursed him. I had my purse on my belt – a nasty piece of poor leatherwork, my temporary replacement for the purse that had been lifted in Bohemia. I tossed her two silver pennies, and she was mollified.
‘We are to serve?’ Nerio asked, a trifle rhythmically. ‘In the tournament? Against the Emperor?’
‘Yes!’ I said through his screen.
‘Splendid,’ Nerio said. ‘I – shall – be – with – you – dir-ec-tly.’
I got the two of them back to the inn; collected our harness and our warhorses, our shields and our somewhat bedraggled papal banner, and transported them to the king’s inn. By this time the morning was well advanced, and the king was none too pleased with us for the time we’d taken; he and eight of his knights were fully armed save only their helmets and gauntlets, and they were sitting on stools out in front of the inn, on the loggia.
But every squire present leaped to arm us. It was chaos for a few minutes, as the armour was laid out on the floor of the loggia and my harness and Fiore’s were hopelessly intermixed. But Marc-Antonio had been paying attention as we travelled, and Nerio’s squire Davide marshalled his master’s harness, and then the steel fairly flew on to our bodies while the Sieur de Mézzières, resplendent in good Milanese and wearing a fine brigandine in dark blue leather, stood by us and explained.
‘The king is an expert jouster, and he has borne away every prize these last four weeks – in Low Germany, in Prague, and now here. The Emperor has tired of seeing his best knights get tumbled, and has challenged the king to tourney – to a mêlée.’