Estas muestras están en camino. La edición en español se publicará coincidiendo con el lanzamiento de la campaña en Kickstarter, y la encontrarás aquí en cuanto esté lista. Hasta entonces, te invitamos a leer los originales en inglés: se pueden descargar gratis y cuentan exactamente las mismas historias, en la lengua en que fueron escritas.
The lime kilns woke before the city did. Their smoke crawled across the Fustiers quarter in a yellow pall, settling over the half-built shells of chapels and hostels and curial offices that lined the streets. Arnaud de Vaucluse walked through it with his mouth shut and his eyes on the road, tasting the chalk at the back of his throat. It never left this place. The dust of Avignon’s ambitions had settled into every surface. Into stone, into cloth, into the lungs of anyone fool enough to breathe it.
Dawn had not yet broken, but the Tuscan masons were already at work. He could hear them up on the scaffolding that clung to the nave of the new collegiate church, hammering pins into freshly cut ashlar, calling to one another in a Florentine dialect he caught only in fragments. They worked fast, these Italians. They had to. Pope Clement’s architect changed his mind the way other men changed shirts, and what was drawn in September was torn down by March. Half the city was scaffolding. The other half rubble.
Arnaud crossed the Exchange, where the money changers were already setting their tables despite the hour. Their voices cut through the murk. Rates shouted in French, Italian, Flemish, Catalan. A liturgy of exchange more fervent than anything heard in the churches they were building.
A dealer in a fur-trimmed cap caught his eye and looked away. Wise instinct. The brigandine Arnaud wore beneath his cloak was not the garb of a man who had come to change coin.
Underfoot the street was a churned mess of frozen ruts and horse dung, and where the drainage failed, puddles of grey water sat stinking in the cold. A boy drove a pair of goats past him, switching at their haunches with a willow rod. The animals bleated their misery. The boy looked no happier. Avignon was generous to those who could afford its generosity, and merciless to those who could not.
Further on, past the tanneries where the Sorguette Canal ran thick and brown, a knot of women stood in a doorway near the papal palace. They were not yet painted for the evening trade but recognisable all the same, taxed, tolerated, and entered in the Camera’s ledgers like any other source of revenue.
The moneylender’s house stood in the Old Town south of the palace, where the streets narrowed and the upper storeys leaned toward one another as though sharing confidences. It was a good house; stone-built at the ground floor, timber above, with iron-barred shutters and a door that had been replaced recently enough to still smell of fresh oak. Giraud the Lombard had done well for himself. And so the Church would have its due.
Arnaud was here on behalf of Bishop Guillaume de Mornay, Apostolic Legate and servant of the Camera Apostolica. A quarterly stipend had not been rendered, and late payment was never tolerated. He had collected from Giraud before, twice in the past year, and both times the matter had concluded with nothing more dramatic than an exchange of coin. The errand was routine, the sort of task that required no thought and less conscience. Only presence. And presence was the one commodity Arnaud had never been short of.
He stopped at the door and adjusted the buckler at his hip, out of habit, not need. The small round shield sat where it always sat, paired with the arming sword on his left. The brigandine’s plates shifted across his chest as he rolled his shoulders. It fitted him the way bark fits a tree, layered and dense. He filled the doorway when he stood in it. He had always filled doorways. It was among his more admirable qualities.
Arnaud knocked. Three deliberate strikes with the heel of his hand. The door opened to a servant, a thin man with a receding chin who looked as though he had been expecting someone else entirely.
‘The master of the house is not receiving visitors before–’
He stopped. His gaze travelled upward from Arnaud’s chest to his jaw to his eyes, the way a man might regard a cathedral wall he’d been asked to climb.
‘I’ll just go and fetch him,’ he said, and was gone before the sentence had finished leaving his mouth.
Giraud appeared a few moments later, descending the stairs with his hands already spread in a gesture of welcome. ‘Sir Arnaud. My friend. You honour me.’ The moneylender’s French was good, those Piedmontese vowels worn smooth by years in Avignon, and he wielded that voice like a tool of his trade, designed to put a man at ease. ‘Come in, come in. I was only just saying to my wife – was it not last month? – I said, it has been too long since our friend Arnaud has visited.’
‘The bishop’s stipend is overdue,’ Arnaud said. He did not enter.
Giraud’s smile stiffened a fraction.
‘Of course. Of course it is. These things… you understand, the difficulties of the season. Please.’ He stepped back from the threshold, gesturing toward the interior. ‘Some wine? I have a Burgundy so decadent it would make a bishop weep. A poor joke, forgive me. Come. Sit. Let us discuss this like civilised men.’
Arnaud stepped inside. The house was well appointed, with a Flemish tapestry on the wall of the receiving room, good beeswax candles rather than tallow, Turkish rugs covering every inch of floorboard. Giraud poured wine from an earthenware jug and placed it on the table. Arnaud did not touch it.
‘You must understand my position,’ Giraud said, circling behind his desk and settling into the leather chair. ‘The Camera demands its share, yes, but the Camera does not appreciate how difficult it is to do business in this climate. We are all under the whip hand of circumstance. A Genoese shipment sitting idle at Marseille for three weeks because some harbourmaster wants his palm greased, delays payment here. Compiègne oak at twice the price it was last autumn, reduces payment there. You know what oak costs now, Sir Arnaud?’
‘No.’
‘Neither does the Bishop, I assure you. Nobody does, because nobody cares. They simply demand their money and send…’ He caught himself, smiled, spread his hands. ‘Forgive me. They send their most trusted men to collect. The winter has been cruel for trade this year. Cruel to all of us. I am a man of commerce, who lends to other men of commerce. But when they do not profit, I do not profit. And if I do not profit… well, you understand how it works. So, surely there is some arrangement we might–’
‘There is no arrangement.’
Giraud’s eyes moved to the doorway behind Arnaud. It was brief, a flicker nothing more, but Arnaud caught it. He also caught the faint creak of a floorboard overhead, and the scuff of leather on stone from the passage.
‘Perhaps more wine,’ Giraud said, reaching for the jug again. ‘You have not touched yours. It really is exceptional. A man I know in Auxerre sends it directly. None of your merchant’s swill, this is from the–’
The first of them came through the doorway to the kitchen. A thick-necked man with a cudgel, who positioned himself against the wall. The second appeared from the next room, taller, leaner, carrying a short blade unsheathed and held low against his thigh. Two more followed from the stairs, filling the hallway. A fifth man stepped in from the street behind Arnaud, blocking the front door.
Five, then. Giraud’s face had changed. The warmth was still there, but beneath it, something harder had set. Confidence, knowing the room had shifted in his favour.
‘You see my difficulty, Sir Arnaud,’ Giraud said, spreading his hands upon the table. ‘The Church asks much. Too much. And I am only a man of modest means, trying to conduct honest business in difficult times. Surely you can understand this. Surely you can carry a message back to his Grace. A message of goodwill, of–’
‘The bishop does not accept messages,’ Arnaud said. ‘He only accepts what he is owed.’
Giraud sighed. ‘Then I am sorry you have wasted your morning.’
Arnaud did not move. He stood and read the room. The man at the kitchen doorway was the largest but stood too close to the wall. He would need a full step into the room before he could swing. The one with the short blade had positioned himself better, but he held the weapon too tightly, his knuckles pale against the grip. Afraid, or angry, or both. The two in the hall were an unknown quantity, but the doorway was narrow. They would come one at a time or not at all. The fifth, behind him at the door, breathed through his mouth. Arnaud could hear it, shallow and quick, a man who was preparing for something he was not fully committed to.
None of them were soldiers. They were muscle, men hired to stand in rooms and look menacing, and they had arranged themselves for intimidation rather than function. Too close together. Blocking each other’s attack when they all rushed at once. Against a merchant, against some trembling shopkeeper who owed three months on a loan, it would have been sufficient.
They were not facing a shopkeeper.
Arnaud pivoted on his left foot, the buckler already free of his hip, and drove its iron rim into the bridge of the mouth breather’s nose. Cartilage gave with a sound like a branch snapping. The man staggered, hands flying to his face, and Arnaud was already past him. The one with the short blade was the real threat, and he was coming.
Arnaud caught the blade on his buckler’s face, turning it wide, and stepped in, closing the distance to nothing. His arming sword cleared the scabbard in a draw-cut that opened the man’s forearm to the bone. The knife clattered to the floor. Before the scream had finished forming, Arnaud’s buckler rim found his jaw, and he folded.
Two down.
The big man with the cudgel came off the wall with a roar, swinging overhand. Arnaud stepped inside the arc, took the impact of the man’s forearm against his shoulder rather than the weapon against his skull, and drove his pommel into the soft hollow beneath the sternum. Air left the man in a rush. Arnaud followed with a half-sword grip, left hand on the blade, and punched the cross-guard into his throat. The cudgel dropped. Its owner followed, clutching at his neck and making that choking sound they all made after their windpipe was crushed.
The two in the hall came together, their first mistake. The doorway funnelled them into a space where only one man could swing, and the first was met with a buckler strike to the temple before he could enter the room. He sat down hard, his eyes vacant. The second checked his rush, realising he’d have to jump over his friend to get to the fight. And now he was the last man standing.
Arnaud let him reconsider. It took the man two heartbeats to decide that Giraud’s coin was not worth what was being asked, and he bolted back along the hall with a clatter of boots.
The one with the broken nose had crawled to the door, trailing blood across Giraud’s Turkish rugs. He managed to wrench it open and stumbled into the street. The big man still writhed on the floor, his breath coming in thin, desperate whistles. The knifeman was out cold.
Giraud had not moved from his chair. His hands were still on the table, though they had clenched into fists at some point during proceedings and had not yet unclenched. His face carried the sick recognition that his investment in hired muscle had failed, and the loss must now be absorbed.
Arnaud sheathed his blade and returned the buckler to his hip. ‘Do you know my name?’
Giraud blinked. ‘Arnaud. Sir Arnaud de Vaucluse.’
‘No. What do they call me?’
The moneylender’s throat moved, his gaze dropping to the groaning men on his floor, the ruin of his counting house, and when he looked up there was real fear in those eyes.
‘Le Bouvier,’ he said quietly.
‘And do you know what that means?’
‘The Drover. It is named after the sheepdog.’
‘Why the sheepdog, Giraud?’
The moneylender swallowed. ‘Because it drives other animals to do the bidding of its master?’
Arnaud held his gaze for a moment longer than was necessary. Then he nodded, as though a pupil had answered his tutor correctly.
‘The stipend,’ he said.
Giraud’s mouth worked, as though words were forming and dying behind his teeth, none of them adequate. Then, he rose, crossed to the iron-bound chest in the corner of the room, and opened it. His hands shook as he dropped silver deniers into a leather purse, one after another, after another, while the big man on the floor continued his thin, desperate moaning. When he was done, Giraud handed over the purse.
Arnaud weighed it in his palm, then stowed it inside his brigandine. ‘The bishop thanks you for your continued contribution to the works of the Holy See.’
He didn’t wait for Giraud to offer anything further, before he turned and left the moneylender to clean his mess.
Avignon was fully awake now, and the noise of it washed over him as he walked from the house. The hammering of masons, the braying of mules in the Teinturiers Quarter, a Franciscan brother arguing with a fish seller over the price of eels, the rhythmic chanting of labourers hauling stone on timber sledges toward the palace.
Overhead, the bells of Notre-Dame des Doms began to toll for Angelus. Arnaud counted them out of habit, marking the call to morning prayer the way he marked everything; precisely and faithfully. He did not slow his pace. The bishop would be waiting for his coin, and the bishop did not like to wait.
