The Long Sword(79)

            ‘I would like nothing better,’ he said. ‘But my lord has forbidden me to fight you. So I will withhold my hand.’

            I’m an Englishman. Hating Frenchmen comes easily to me, but de Mézzières seemed both cautious and capable. And not a man I’d want as an enemy.

            He clearly wanted a piece of me. I flushed, assuming he hated my low birth. As I remembered, his first dislike had arisen when I said I’d been knighted on the battlefield.

            Of course it never occurred to me to just ask why he hated me.

            At any rate, my usual reaction – anger – rose to choke me. ‘I care nothing whether you withhold your hand or not,’ I spat with all my usual restraint.

            ‘That is the difference between us,’ he said calmly, and rode away.



            The other encounter was very different. I met the merchant who had brought the king’s prize, the falcon. I was in the market shopping for something to send my sister, and perhaps something for Emile, since I might hope to see her soon. The king’s new bird had stopped eating, and it was such a magnificent animal that we were all in a state trying to preserve it, and I said that as I was going to the great market, I would find the merchant and ask for his aid.

            He was not a big man, but as broad as he was tall, formed as if from oak, fair-skinned and fair-headed and with one of the greatest beards it has ever been my pleasure to see. I could see, also, that he was a rich man, and a mariner. He wore clothes of blue and black, with furs even in a Polish August, and a magnificent hood, and carried an astrolabe around his neck. That’s how they knew him throughout the fair: as Master Astrolabe. He was from the Kingdom of Denmark, which was as exotic in those days as saying the Kingdom of Heaven, and he had a scar across his face where it appeared that a finger’s breadth of skin had been peeled away. I have seen some horrible things and I had a guess that he had been tortured. And lived. And for all that, his face was jolly, and his demeanour open and bluff.

            I explained my troubles to one of his red-haired apprentices – we tend to hang together, we copper heads – and the apprentice led me to the great man. ‘He’s the only one who understands them,’ the boy said.

            Master Astrolabe, Carl Markmanson, as he was called by Danes, grinned and tried to break my hand. ‘Ah, the English knight. Are the ladies through with you, zur? Have you fathered a hundred bastards yet?’ He laughed.

            I told him the king’s problems, and he came immediately to the inn, and saw the bird, and fed it and talked to it. He spent a few minutes closeted with the king, and then I walked him back to the fair.

            ‘Always best it is to council the great in private,’ he said with his wide smile. ‘Great men resent being taught, and yet no one needs teaching more, eh? Remember that when you are a great man, Englishman.’

            I laughed.

            But he fed me stew and wine by his wagons, and he and his journeymen told me about sailing to Iceland for birds. And how they had seen the Faroes, how they had come on Ireland from every direction under God’s sun, and how they had seen great monsters and whales on the sea, and fought with Skraelings.

            I may have looked doubtful. They told more tall tales in an hour than a roomful of Venetians in a day, and that’s saying something.

            But Master Carl put his finger to his forehead. ‘I was taken,’ he said. ‘We had a fight on a beach, and my armour saved me, but the Skraelings took me.’ He shrugged. ‘They peeled an inch off my forehead, and a man in paint stood over me with a stone axe, and he raised it.’

            I leaned forward. It was so real.

            ‘And I was so afraid I began to sing. All I could think of was the Kyrie, you know?’

            We all sang the Kyrie together.