Crusade (2 page)

Much love to all my friends who allowed me to share this incredible journey with them. In particular I want to thank Jo, Niall, Mark, Bridie, Clare, Liz, Monica, Patrik, Becky and Charley for their generosity, both in terms of help with the creative process and their friendship. Also, hats off to Ali for being a star.

My gratitude to David Boyle for great reading suggestions, who I must also credit for the fantastic chapter on Acre in his book
Blondel’s Song
, which gave me a real insight into the city. Thanks to staff at the language department of the British Library for their help with the “code” issue and to Charles Davies for checking it over. And my sincere thanks to Dr. Mark Philpott at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Keble College, Oxford, for casting an expert eye over the manuscript. Any mistakes remain my own.

Many, many thanks as ever to my agent, Rupert Heath, for generally being a superstar and for guiding me around the corners.

I am greatly indebted to everyone at Hodder & Stoughton for their amazing support and commitment. Special thanks go to my editor, Nick Sayers, for pearls of wisdom; his assistant, Anne Clarke, for keeping everything running smoothly; and also to Emma Knight, Kelly Edgson-Wright, Antonia Lance and Lucy Hale. But there are many others, particularly those in the art department, foreign rights, sales, marketing and publicity who I cannot fit onto this page, but whose hard work is nonetheless enormously appreciated.

Huge thanks also to my fantastic American publishers at Dutton, especially my editor, Julie Doughty, for her insightful suggestions.

Last, but in no sense least, my love goes to Lee. Without him none of this would have been possible . . . or half as much fun.

PART ONE

1

The Venetian Quarter, Acre, The Kingdom of Jerusalem 28 SEPTEMBER A.D. 1274

The swords arced, then swung in and slammed together. Steel met steel with harsh ringing clangs, again and again. Each blow was fiercer than 
the last, the brutal concussion almost wrenching the weapons from the hands of the wielders. The sun baked the courtyard’s dusty red stones and beat down on the heads of the two men who stamped and lunged, back and forth.

The smaller of the two was sweating profusely, his white hair plastered to his head, lips curled back in fierce concentration. His shirt was drenched and stuck to his back. Neither he nor his opponent wore armor. He was initiating more of the attacks, stepping forward after several whip-quick parries to thrust a lethal jab at the other man’s chest. But the strokes were becoming desperate. It was as if each one had been designed to be the last—precise, powerful—and he hadn’t expected to have to force another. He couldn’t keep up such a barrage. He was exhausted, and his tall, athletic opponent kept blocking, with imperturbable ease, each and every blow. And the more frustrated and frantic the small man became, the more his opponent grinned. It was the kind of grin a shark might flash when opening its razor-lined jaws for the killing bite. It was a little strained—more bared, gritted teeth than smile—but Angelo Vitturi was clearly enjoying himself.

After several more thrusts, however, which he snapped aside with savage, blocking cuts of his sword, Angelo grew bored. It was hot, and he could feel a blister forming on the ridge of his palm where his skin had rubbed against the leather grip of the slender, narrow-edged blade, the pommel of which was a chunk of translucent rock crystal. As the small man lunged in again, Angelo sidestepped him, grabbed hold of his wrist and turned his hand viciously aside, bringing the edge of his own blade up to the man’s throat. The man let out a yelp, part in frustration, part at the pain in his wrist.

Angelo’s face, wet with perspiration and set with boyish, scornful pleasure, hardened with contempt. “Get out.” Dropping the man’s wrist, he lowered his blade and leaned it against a low wall that ringed a square of grass.

The white-haired man stood there agape, sweat dripping from his nose as Angelo strode over to a servant, standing rigid as the statues that decorated the palazzo’s courtyard. The servant handed Angelo a goblet of watered-down wine from the silver tray he carried. Angelo drained it, then turned to the gaping man. “I told you to leave.”

The man seemed to collect himself. “My money, sir?”

“Money?”

“For my tuition, sir,” said the man, unable to meet Angelo’s unwavering, black-eyed stare.

Angelo laughed. “And what would I be paying for? What new skills have you taught me today? What has this lesson given me that is worth a single sequin?” He arched an eyebrow. “The amusement perhaps?” He set the goblet on the servant’s tray. “Leave, before I decide to finish the duel. You’ll lose more than your wages if I do.” Turning his back on the instructor, he picked up a black velvet cloak trimmed with sable that was draped over the wall and shrugged it on.

The sword instructor, utterly defeated, snatched up his own coat and headed across the courtyard, his face a mottled red.

Angelo was fastening a belt of silver rings around his waist when a girl appeared through one of the doors that led into the grand building behind him. Like the other household slaves, she wore a filmy white gown, girdled at the waist with stiff gold braid. A coif covered her hair. She saw Angelo and headed over, eyes downcast, expression carefully blank.

“My lord ask me tell you his guests arrive.” Her words were hard to understand, clipped and strained with the still unfamiliar language she forced her tongue around. “He asks you join them, sir.”

With a forceful stab that made the girl start, Angelo sheathed his sword in the scabbard that hung from his belt. Without acknowledging her, he walked toward the palazzo, the girl flinching from him as he passed.

At twenty-eight, Angelo was the eldest son of Venerio Vitturi and heir to the family business, established prior to the Third Crusade by his great-grandfather, Vittorio. Angelo was a regular sight in Acre’s slave market, where he sold off any surplus his father had acquired before helping to ship the bulk back to Venice. When the business was in its heyday, at a time when the Venetians controlled trade around the Black Sea, the Vitturi family had dominated the slave markets on the borders of the Mongol Empire. They supplied the prettiest girls to Western nobles in Outremer and Venice, and the strongest boys to the Mamluk Army in Egypt. But then Genoa, the second of the three great Italian merchant states, wrested control of the Black Sea trade and forced Venice out. The Vitturis were one of only a few Venetian families who still trafficked in humans, and they now had to rely on trade coming north from the Red Sea for their supply.

The girls Angelo’s father kept for the household were always the best of the crop. Aged between eleven and sixteen, they were mostly petite Mongolians, with oval eyes and glossy black hair, and Circassians whose youthful faces already showed signs of the handsome, strong-boned lines characteristic of their race. Venerio’s family had grown rapidly over the past ten years, and Angelo resented every darkly pretty sibling that was presented to the household, none of whom looked anything like his plump mother. Though the girls who bore his father’s accidental offspring remained slaves, their own children were brought up as free citizens, baptized and educated. Angelo could understand his father being unable to resist the temptations of such young, exotic flesh; he himself had sampled it and had found it pleasing. But he couldn’t comprehend how Venerio could raise the products of these low women in the same way he did his own. Things, Angelo had long ago decided, would change when he ran the business. If, that was, he still had a business to inherit. The way the last year had gone, it was looking increasingly uncertain. But he refused to fully consider that possibility. And if all went according to plan today, he wouldn’t have to.

Angelo walked down a wide passage decorated with blue and white mosaics. As he pushed open a set of dark wood doors, four men looked up from where they were seated around a large octagonal table positioned centrally in the spacious, airy reception room.

Angelo regarded the men as he approached the table. There was the armorer, Renaud de Tours, a balding man of middle years, who had clad King Louis IX and his elite French knights during both of the sovereign’s ill-fated Crusades. Beside Renaud, hands clasped tightly on the table, was Michael Pisani, a dark, slender Pisan specializing in the exportation of Damascene swords, some of the strongest blades in the known world, who also supplied nobles of the West for war. He was much feared by his competitors, whom he had been known to force out of deals, using mercenaries to intimidate his rivals into capitulating, leaving him to secure the contracts. The third man, sunburned and sandy-haired, was Conradt von Bremen, whose home city was affiliated to the Hanseatic League, the powerful confederation of German cities that ruled the Baltic Sea. Conradt’s business, favored by a lucrative contract with the Teutonic Knights, was the breeding and shipping of warhorses. The German’s flat blue eyes and lazy smile concealed a potentially more sinister nature, for it was rumored he had ordered the murders of two of his own brothers to seize control of the family business, although this was perhaps malicious gossip put about by his competitors to discredit him. No one knew for sure. The bulky, sweating man trussed up in a heavy, brocaded coat despite his obvious warmth was Guido Soranzo, an affluent Genoese shipbuilder. Angelo knew them all, most merchants in Acre did, for they were four of the most successful Western traders in the Holy Land, his father excluded.

As Angelo sat, a fifth man came into view from an adjacent room, followed by three slave girls in white, who trailed him like the wispy tail of a comet. They carried silver trays on which were jugs of rose-colored wine, goblets and pewter dishes laden with black grapes, purple figs and almonds dusted white with sugar. “My son,” said Venerio in greeting as he spotted Angelo. His voice was deep and gritty. Though a solidly built man, he moved with a gracefulness acquired from years of instruction with the sword. Knighted by the doge of Venice, and a former governor of the republic, Venerio was a fourth-generation noble with all the schooling and military training that went with the title. “How was your lesson?” he asked, as the girls fanned out around him, waiting until he sat before placing the platters and jugs on the table.

“I need a new instructor.”

“Already? That is the second you have been through in as many days. Perhaps you no longer require training.”

“Not from the dregs I have fought this week.”

“Still,” said Venerio, smiling a cool, expansive welcome at the silent men around the table, “these are matters for another time. We have rather more grave concerns to discuss today.”

Angelo smiled to himself as he took in the merchants’ expressions. Behind those carefully composed exteriors he detected confusion, impatience and, from Guido Soranzo at least, barely concealed anger. None of them knew why they had been invited here. But they were about to find out.

Wiping his brow with a crumpled silk cloth that he snatched from the sleeve of his brocaded coat, Guido was the first to speak. “And what are these grave concerns?” He fixed Venerio with a truculent stare. “Why have you called us here, Vitturi?”

“First, let us drink,” replied Venerio, slipping with ease into the Genoese dialect. Two slave girls came forward at a snap of his fingers and began to pour the wine.

Guido, however, wasn’t ready to dance to his host’s tune. Not bothering to do Venerio the courtesy of speaking the Venetian tongue, he continued in his native Genoese. “I have no desire to drink your wine until I know why I have been summoned.” He extended a meaty hand to the luxurious chamber. “Did you bring me here to gloat?”

“Nothing quite so petty, I assure you.”

Guido erupted at Venerio’s calm. “You sit in a palace of my kinsmen like a barbarian who wears the adornments of his victims as trophies!”

“Venice did not start the battle that resulted in Genoa’s expulsion from Acre, Guido.”

“The monastery of St. Sabas was rightfully ours! We were protecting our property!”

Venerio’s jaw twitched with the first sign of irritation. “Is that what you were doing after you seized the monastery? When you broke into our quarter, overran homes, killed men and women, burned scores of our ships in the harbor? Protecting your property?” His face relaxed, his voice sinking back to its normal level. “You kept your own palace, did you not? You benefited from the war as much as I did, Guido. Unlike the majority of your people, you retained your business in Acre. Besides, the Genoese have now been allowed back into their quarter.”