I was an old hand at making war, but this was an entirely new game. The game of kings and princes and cardinals and popes.
At any rate, the Tartar duke rode up with a dozen of his soldiers and his Franciscan.
‘My son, the Duke Jean-Christ wishes to address you,’ the priest said. ‘I am Father Simon, his confessor.’
I bowed, dismounted – after all, the foreigner was a Christian and a duke – and bowed. Father Simon blessed me.
‘He asks, why do you dismount like a churl? And I tell him that you respect his rank.’
Father Simon spoke and the language was like the twittering of birds. Father Simon himself looked like a bird, a plain brown robin. He was as English as I am, and that made him easy to talk with. He had brown hair and deep creases in his face.
The duke threw back his head and laughed. He spoke straight at me, and his eyes twinkled like a jugglers.
‘He says that if this is true, you are the first man north of the Volga to behave in such a way. But he says “be easy”.’ Father Simon smiled. ‘For my part, I thank you. He is a great man, and has had but little respect here.’
I smiled at the foreign duke.
He spoke at length, and Father Simon followed as best he could. ‘He says you are good at the lance. And this trick you do – pardon me, Sir Knight, but I really don’t know quite what he’s saying – this trick is not like any other Latin trick. But that all the People do it. By which he means his people, the Mongols and Tartars and the Kipchaks.’ Father Simon shrugged ruefully. ‘He said a great deal more than that, but I fear I don’t understand the fighting words.’
‘Fiore!’ I called. Ser Fiore, as he now liked to be addressed, was packing his threadbare harness in wicker panniers for mules to carry. He came out into the yard, popped his eyes at the Tartar lord, and I repeated Father Simon’s comments.
Before the next set of hours rang on all of Krakow’s hundred bells, the two were riding up and down the street, demonstrating. Fiore picked twigs off the street with his lance point, and the Tartar Duke loosed his bow three times into a shield, striking with each arrow, and then flipping his lance off his back, striking a straw dummy with the point, rolling the thing over his head like a mountebank and placing it under his left arm and striking again against a target on the other side.
While he executed this deadly trick, Philippe de Mézzières appeared with two more mules and the king’s compliments and two servants to help us pack. He watched the Tartar for a few breathes and then frowned.
‘That is how the Mamluks fight,’ he said.
‘This man is a Christian and a lord,’ I said with a polite bow. De Mézzières had fought at my side, but he’d been careful not to bespeak me. ‘Yon Franciscan is his confessor and his chaplain.’
De Mézzières brightened. ‘Come, that is glad news,’ he said. ‘Can you imagine the world we might make, if every man and woman might be brought to Jesus Christ?
I had never given it much thought. I belonged to a crusading Order that was content to provide the protection of pilgrims to and from the Holy Places. I think that like practical warriors, the Knights of St John had surrendered any notion of the conquest of the Holy Land.
But I managed a smile.
De Mézzières met my eye. ‘We must travel together,’ he said suddenly. ‘You have behaved well here, and to my liege lord, who holds you high.’ His eyes bored into mine.
I think he rocked me back in the saddle as hard as my French opponent had done.
‘I am at your lordship’s service,’ I said. ‘On horse and foot.’