Even Marc-Antonio laughed.
‘They are calling for you,’ Nerio said, and I rode down the lists to where my French adversary sat on his destrier. He had his helm off and looked as sweaty as I felt.
I had forgotten he was a judge. But he was smiling, not grinning, and his eyes met mine.
So, just by way of experiment, I returned his smile.
We were an arm’s length apart.
‘Is your honour served?’ he asked me.
Well. That was the question, wasn’t it?
I bowed, like one gentleman meeting another when mounted. ‘Very well, monsieur. My honour is served very well.’
He urged his horse forward one single step. ‘Sometimes, a gentleman is only doing what his liege bids him do. Eh bien?’ He gave me a casual wave, and turned his horse, and rode away, neither angry nor afraid.
The judges held that I had been the victor, but on balance, I think he gave me the lesson.
Later that day, Fiore ran some courses, unhorsing men to the right and left until the judges forbade the use of his spear-crossing parry. Then he unhorsed more men.
He was spectacular to watch, and yet, at the same time, dull. He made one Polish knight very angry by unhorsing him on the first pass, and the man raged, claimed that Fiore had cheated, and looked like a fool.
Nerio, without my knowing, challenged one of the Savoyards to fight on horse and foot. I hate to think who was foolish enough to loan the Savoyard a horse. But Nerio took it.
The Savoyards had been loud in denouncing us to no avail, and after Nerio knocked their champion in the dirt on three straight passes and the man declined to fight on foot, no one would listen to them.
King Peter announced that we would leave for Venice after matins on the Friday, two days hence.
The two days passed in a haze of audiences, music, poetry, sweat and fighting. A few moments surface in memory. I remember giving Marc-Antonio my riding sword, and belting it on him, and Nerio and Fiore pounding him on the shoulders with their fists. Nerio bought him a pretty pair of iron spurs, and Fiore began to give him lessons. As of that moment, he was a squire. For a few days, he carried himself like a great lord and was very difficult, and then he had a fight – I never found out with whom. His mouth was cut, one of his eyes was black, and he became a much milder man.
I paid him his wages so that he could shop in the magnificent market, and he bought, of all things, a book. And a dagger. He was an odd boy, but he’d won my love in the matter of Emile’s favour and a hundred other ways, and I was ready to tolerate him.
The other two encounters were just as pleasant. The first was meeting the Tartar lord who had laughed at me after the joust. He spoke no French and only a little Latin, but he had a Franciscan with him, booted and spurred, and the Franciscan translated.
The Tartar’s name was Jean-Christ, or something like that. He was a commander of a thousand in the great army known to the Poles as the Golden ones or the Golden Horde. He had come as an ambassador to the court of the Emperor.
We were packing to leave: King Peter was travelling with only six knights, their squires, a dozen priests and servants, and my friends, and leaving the rest of his ‘court’ to follow after. At the time I didn’t understand that the King of Cyprus was not the richest man in the world; that he did not desire to command the crusade as much as de Mézzières and the Pope wanted him to command it; that, indeed, the command was a massive imposition on the king. Nor did I understand that he travelled Europe with only a handful of his own knights; that most of his ‘courtiers’ were relations – French relations – of Cypriote lords, there only to make weight, so to speak. To give his entourage the appearance of riches.