Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [80]
“That’s what we heard,” said Meester Julius.
“They told me. Oh, they’ll take you on in Milan,” the other man said. “The Papal army’ll take you, or the Milanese army; or they’ll send you straight down to Naples to help King Ferrante hold out, if that’s what you fancy. Mind you, you have to watch how you go. A lot of French-lovers about, making for the Mantua congress. Don’t overtake them, if you can help it.”
It was good advice, if hard to keep in the heights where snow fell in thick felting layers, like wool in the napping and shearing-sheds, and began to choke the trodden ways. The horses’ heads hung, and men’s cheeks turned raw and blotched between their beards and their eyebrows, and when they blew their noses, their face-guards stuck to the skin of their fingers. Then, whatever company loomed through the whiteness, you caught and thankfully kept with, for there was safety in numbers.
By the time the final, multilingual cavalcade reached the monastery built by St Bernard, even its English component had unbent, and ate and drank with the rest in the steaming warmth of the refectory, and told their servants to answer when Claes tried out John Bonkle’s English on them. But next morning, it was Astorre who was first on the floor, arranging his convoy for the second and harder part of their journey. He left the roping to Claes, who had to be retrieved from some congenial courtyard where he had been effecting a repair to a pump.
The blessing Claes received from the Prior was, Astorre considered, excessive, but might possibly serve to keep the youth on his horse until they were over the mountains. Although the fool was improving. Listening to the sound of the talk, Astorre could tell that Claes was less of a butt to the soldiers, although some of rougher kind still took the chance, now and then, to play tricks with him.
A captain less experienced than Astorre might have stopped them, before an arm or a leg could get broken. But that never did any good. Men simply resented what they saw as protection and beat their victim up worse on the sly. It was up to Claes to learn fast enough to protect himself. Which he was doing. And the journey was designed by the devil to exhaust experienced men, never mind youths with a turn for trouble-making.
Astorre even said as much to Tobias who, as a former companion of Lionetto, had so far lived under the cloud of Astorre’s darkest suspicions. Time, however, had revealed the doctor surprisingly as a hard man much after Astorre’s own heart, with a tongue on him that could make a lazy trooper jump as sharply as Thomas’s. Astorre had spent some time, in fact, reconciling Thomas to the fact that the company now had four officers to it instead of two, and that no company with ambitions could manage with less.
Contracts, letter-writing, book-keeping were all part of the business, and time was too short to spend half the day scouring a town for a notary, or taking the services of your employer’s man, who would cheat you as soon as look at you. And good fighting men stayed where there was a good surgeon. Good food, good pay and good doctoring was what kept men together. And a leader who knew his business, took no foolish chances but knew how to save the best efforts for the best promise of plunder, and would divide booty fairly.
Up to now, he was willing to admit, the company had lacked organisation. It was never twice the same, for one thing. Men under contract mostly turned up when called, but not all of them. Some of them had got themselves killed. Some had formed winter bands and turned to plunder and wayside robbery to keep them in food and drink and girls through the winter as well as the arms they were supposed to be supplied with. He’d been half waylaid more than once by faces he had recognised, who had withdrawn when they saw who it was, and the number of his lances. And a lot of these were caught and hanged or cut down