The prior reread the Pope’s document and frowned. ‘I suppose …’ he said.
Swan took his oaths from an older knight, and the man — clad in a black gown with the eight-pointed star and wearing a black knitted cap so old that the black was fading to grey-blue — had iron-hard hands and a steady grip on Swan’s shoulder, and Swan liked him immediately. He took Swan into the chapel of the priory, made him kneel, and left him there for an hour.
Swan knelt. He assumed it was a test.
The elderly knight came back and lit candles — seven candles. For each one he prayed a string of prayers, and then he came and knelt by Swan.
‘I make all the rich bastards kneel, to make sure they have an inkling of what this is about,’ he said. ‘See the candles? My friends. All killed facing the foe.’
‘The Turks?’ Swan whispered.
The old man shook his head. ‘Jean-Baptiste died fighting. The rest — plague, leprosy, the cough, the black fever — it’s the hospital that kills us. No armour against disease.’
Swan crossed himself. ‘I see,’ he said carefully.
The old knight helped him to his feet, and he could scarcely walk. ‘You are going to a galley, I gather,’ he said.
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Call me brother. Or sir. Welcome to the order, boy. Do us no disgrace.’ The old man led him to a podium desk, where he signed a document and sealed it. ‘Take this to our bursar and have it countersigned. And then go and get yourself a ring.’ He smiled. ‘Do you love God?’
Swan hesitated.
‘Good for you, boy. Tell the truth. But have a go — see if you come to love him while you wash some beggar’s feet and feed some poor women with leprosy. Or sweat in your armour on a pitching deck while the red-hot sand is flung at you by infidels. See what follows.’ He nodded. ‘You’re a bastard?’
‘I am,’ Swan admitted.
The old knight laughed. ‘Welcome to the club,’ he said.
Swan wandered into the Jewish ghetto as if directed by his feet. But here he met no ill-will, and after several attempts he found a pawn shop that specialised in religious rings. He saw magnificent episcopal rings, and small profession rings, and one massive thumb ring that might have graced a cardinal.
The shopkeeper brought them out willingly enough. ‘What are you looking for, young gentleman?’ he asked.
Swan lifted a ring that had to be three hundred years old and admired it. ‘I’m looking for a profession ring for a Donat of the Order of St John,’ he said.
The owner’s eyebrows fluttered. ‘Oh — oh,’ he said as he picked up a tray, placed it back in a wooden clothes press, and pulled out another. ‘Oh — oh,’ he said again. ‘I have one — my wife, you know — I’m sure I have one. Oh — oh.’
Swan opened a manuscript on the main counter and found that it was an illuminated Torah. He was annoyed at how little Hebrew he remembered. He turned a page, and the owner snatched it from under his hands.
He didn’t say anything. He merely looked at Swan with something very like hate.
Swan took a step back and spread his hands. ‘I meant no harm,’ he said. ‘I-’
‘Go,’ said the man. ‘I won’t sell to you.’
In the end, Swan bought his ring from a jeweller, a middle-aged man whose daughters were his apprentices. The elder girl made his ring up while he waited — engraved garnet in gilded silver. The jeweller’s was in the same street as four swordsmiths and a vast suite of armourers who shared work space and sheds, but all of the armour looked clumsy, and Swan knew that Di Brachio never bought weapons in Rome. Gaudy stuff for the pilgrim trade, covered in crosses and encrusted in jewels. He poked about, saw nothing he wanted, and returned to the jeweller in time to have hippocras served while the elder girl tried the ring on him and then tapped it gently on to an anvil stake until she liked the fit on his finger.
Back in his rooms, he packed a pair of valises and a big leather malle, or horse-sack. It was early afternoon. He checked in the stables and secured four riding horses and a pack animal and a mule.
Giannis was currying his favourite horse. ‘You are leading an army?’ he asked.
Swan shrugged. ‘I’m off east,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the new Frenchman.’
‘Antoine?’ Giannis asked. ‘He’s not a soldier, he’s a cook. But he’s a good cook, as we all learned at breakfast.’
‘Take care of Di Brachio,’ Swan said. He found that he was embracing the Greek. He wanted to say something like ‘I’m not sure I can do this alone’. But he didn’t.
He promised to have dinner with his friends, and then he went back to his room and changed into plain workman’s clothes.
Swan crossed the city carefully. He was by himself, and wasn’t even wearing a sword. He was dressed like a labourer, applying some of the lessons he’d learned in Constantinople. He moved from street to street like a man in enemy country, and when he saw a party in red and yellow he avoided them even when he saw that they were escorting two women. He was pleased to see some puffy faces and some bandages.
Madame Lucrescia’s was closed. Swan went to the servants’ entrance and watched until he saw three workmen carrying something heavy, and then he joined them. It was a heavy marble altar top. Swan admired it while it tore at his fingers. It had the curled shape of Greek temple capitals on columns — it weighed four hundred pounds, and even with four strong men and a small wheeled cart, it took everything they had to get it in through the kitchen and into the main room.
The great room looked different, empty, and the erotic paintings and mosaics, bereft of both customers and courtesans, looked showy and tawdry, perhaps even vulgar. Flaws in art and execution showed up more readily.
They moved the thing to the back of the room while a housekeeper chided them to be quick. The smallest man, a redhead, was clearly their foreman, and he began to argue with the housekeeper about what would happen next.
‘I’d like to come here,’ said the biggest workman. He looked at the walls. ‘Think these fancy bitches are worth the money?’
The other man spat. ‘Whores. Tools of Satan to snare men.’
‘I can’t be snared by what I can’t afford,’ said the first man. ‘Anyway, who gets his pump primed behind Saint Paul’s every feast day?’
Swan nodded agreeably as the two started what sounded like an old and well-established quarrel. He walked out of the great room and went straight up the staircase. Then along the corridor, counting doors. The rooms weren’t much wider than the beds inside them, and he counted — sixteen.
He looked both ways — there was movement in the other rooms, he could hear it — then he turned her door handle and slipped in.
She was asleep.
He watched her for a moment. Smiled, leaned over, and kissed her awake.
She tasted like old wine and too much sleep, but as wonderful as ever, and her eyes opened.
‘Want to go to Ancona?’ he said.
The winter ride across the spine of Italy to the east coast was so brutal that the pleasure of having a pretty young wife was mostly drowned in sleet and buried in snow. The Frenchman cursed his ill luck and looked after the horses with remarkable skill, reminding Swan each day of how many skills he still hadn’t mastered. The Frenchman could start a fire and maintain it, and he could find straw under snow.
And he had a name — Antoine — just as Giannis had said. ‘I had another name,’ he said with his shrug. He shrugged almost every sentence. ‘Mostly, they call me Le Coq.’
‘The cock?’ Violetta asked. She was bundled like a painting of the Virgin Mary, nothing feminine about her but the slope of her smooth forehead. They were in a barn, wearing every item of clothing they owned, and the Frenchman was pressing Violetta as hard from her left as Swan did from the right. Deep in a pile of straw.
‘Ah, no, madame. That is, I think, your Italian or your innate woman’s lechery,’ Antoine said ‘In French, I am the cook.’