The Long Sword(89)

            ‘All I want you to do is mind the mule,’ I said.

            Marc-Antonio nodded.

            ‘You are doing very well,’ I said, or some similar platitude, but really, he was doing well. His hands still functioned, he was alive, he’d put a man or two down, and we were on the last stretch of our escape.

            ‘They’re right outside the gate,’ he whispered. His tone gave away his fear.

            ‘Open it,’ I said.

            He slid back the bar on the stable gate, and there was a torch-lit crowd outside – at first glance, they appeared to be a hundred men.

            One man said, ‘Is that him?’

            And then I was on them.

            Jacques exploded into them and I might have killed them all, but one man knew how to fight a knight. Someone cut my girth and down I went.

            That, my friends, ought to have been the end of this story. I fell heavily, and my helmet protected me from being knocked senseless, but I had no armour and I should have been meat.

            Marc-Antonio and the mule had followed me out into the night and by luck and skill and the will of God, Marc-Antonio slammed his riding horse into the routier who’d put me down, staggering the man. I was already scrambling in the dark for my sword.

            I was damned if I was going to lose the Emperor’s sword.

            I took a blow to the helmet that sharpened my perception of the threat. Jacques was still fighting – that’s what a trained horse does. He bought me a moment and then another moment, and I still couldn’t find my sword, and then I was fighting in the dark. My opponent had a dagger, and another man had a sword, and I had a helmet and gauntlets, which proved by far the best armament.

            I found my sword with my booted foot, and cut myself badly. There’s ancient satire there, something Petrarch might have appreciated. I thought it worth the blood to find the sword, and when Jacques rallied to my side I knelt and got a hand on the hilt.

            I clutched it.

            The night was full of shouts, and there were men running in all directions, and Marc-Antonio was shouting my name like a war cry. Jacques came up right beside me and I was up on his bare back in the time it takes to say ‘pater noster’ and we were away, our hooves echoing off the stone buildings.

            For some reason I thought it was the Bourc Camus and his men, so I was shocked when I saw a man-at-arms by the gate in blue and white blazon. But he was badly mounted and his horse wouldn’t face Jacques, and I put my pommel between his arms and broke his teeth. I had his sword arm by the left wrist, and I stripped his sword in the moment of shock, and I still had it in my left hand when we burst out on to the steep mountain road below the town. We rode hard for the time it takes to hear Mass, but if anyone pursued us, it was on foot, and not for very long. We could see every foot of road in the clear moonlight, and I changed to my riding horse after checking Jacques for wounds. The loss of my war saddle was a sore blow to my finances, but we’d escaped.

            I handed the sword I’d taken to Marc-Antonio. He giggled nervously and pushed it through his belt.

            And so we passed into the night.



            We rode for three days without sleeping. We stank, and we didn’t care. We stole a pair of riding horses from two monks in fur habits and riding boots, wandering mendicants who claimed a vow of poverty, and probably as much brigands as I can be myself. With spare horses, we could move all the time.

            In the foothills of the Alps, Marc-Antonio reined in. ‘Lord, I have to halt,’ he said. ‘I beg you.’

            I shook my head. Fatigue and fear play strange tricks on a man, and the evils I had imagined and dismissed in Avignon now loomed as certainties in the light of day. I could no longer see Emile as a capable woman at no risk. I saw her now as the ultimate target of my enemies. D’Herblay was going to kill her – horribly. I could feel it, and dreaded that it had already happened.