Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [49]
Simon said, “It may not be my quarrel, but this is, I must assure you, my blood. Captain Lionetto, you and captain Astorre are great leaders, whose lives are precious to kings and republics. What excuse could Bruges give, if the world should lose such men over an idle quarrel? It was I who flung the goblet overboard. It was the lout here who broke it. Why not let me fight on your behalf, and the youth for the Charetty captain? As it is, honour demands that I should chastise him.”
He paused, looking around with a half-smile pulling his lips.
“And unless you think it unfitting, because of the difference in our degrees, I would assure you that I will not take a gentleman’s weapon against an apprentice. He may choose what he is used to. A stick, a baton, a pole – I will engage to match him with anything.”
There was a rumble of approval. Beside Julius, Astorre said, “That’s fair enough, considering the Scotsman has to fight with a hole in him.”
Julius said, “It was nothing. Look. It isn’t even bleeding now. Astorre, Claes doesn’t fight.”
“Everyone fights,” said the captain irritably. “He’s twice the width of this pretty fellow, and younger. Anyway, he dropped my goblet.”
So Astorre wasn’t going to help. And there was no one else to stop it. The noblemen and chief officers of the galleys had long since prudently absented themselves; the bowmen had no orders and therefore only the avid interest of any layman in a forthcoming fight. There were no officials remaining from Sluys or Damme or Bruges to see justice done, and only Julius to keep badgering Astorre, and Felix to harangue Lionetto in an unavailing effort to dissuade them.
For Lionetto and Astorre, being professional soldiers, had every wish to kill, injure or otherwise dispose of a rival, but not in single combat, like schoolboys. For that, one became a laughing-stock. There were other, more adult ways of attaining that object.
So it suited each to perfection to seat himself, Astorre on the landward side and Lionetto by the wharf edge with their côteries, while a space between them was cleared of sacks and boxes, and two broken oars found, and made equal in length, to serve as quarterstaffs in the Picardy fashion.
It was not the sort of match worth a wager, but good enough to pass an afternoon, such as men in camp were well used to. Lionetto had no particular interest in the Scotsman, whom he thought too stuck up about his own looks, especially when, as now, he was stripped to hose and under-doublet and thin, fancy shirt, and made a finer figure, Lionetto was aware, than Lionetto himself.
However, there was no doubt he, Lionetto, had a better champion than that pig Astorre, whose man was this paint-spreading artisan with his toes sticking out of his leg-covers. The fellow was nothing but eyes. He reminded you of an owl in a tree, with five men with longbows beneath it.
Someone yelled, “Go to!” and they started, with no special ceremony. Their weapons were six feet long, and heavy. The Scotsman wore an amused smile.
He had cause. With no advantage of reach or of height, and with a build infinitely more slender, he had all the trained skills of the fighting-man which the labourer lacked. It was as it had been in the canal water. One performed like a thoroughbred, and one like a boor. Claes would open his powerful shoulders, but before the pole had swung through its arc, the other man would have slipped through his guard to buffet his thigh or crack the hard wood against shoulder or elbow.
These, indeed, were Simon’s first targets: the means by which Claes gripped and guided the pole. Those and the calloused blue hands, grasping it.
Perfectly fed, perfectly exercised, the nobleman Simon was fit as a lion. The muscles of his shoulders and back rose and sank beneath the fine cloth. His sleeves, loosely rolled, showed the developed forearms of a swordsman, and beneath the whipping cords of his hose, the contours of thigh and