Erik snorted. “Particularly across the belly.”
It was an unfair observation. Manfred was as square as a foundation block, but he was also solid muscle. He’d been a great deal softer before Erik had started on him. He trained with Manfred from an hour before dawn until Lauds every single day. Then they’d put in at least an hour on the pells. Then they’d join the knights for morning drill.
To give the Breton squire his due, nowadays Manfred gave the training his heart and soul. At first, Erik used to have to haul him out of bed. But lately it was getting to be the other way around, despite the fact that Manfred had managed to explore the wilder aspects of Venice’s nights quite successfully. Also, he’d noticed how the squire had put on inches, particularly across the shoulders, in the months they’d been together. The boy was finishing his growing, and it certainly wasn’t around the waistline.
Erik suspected that Manfred had been genuinely shocked to discover how much more capable his Icelandic “keeper” was than he, when it came to any kind of extended fighting. Manfred’s incredible strength and athletic ability had not been matched by endurance—leaving aside the fact that he had little of Erik’s actual combat experience and the brutal skills the Icelander had learned in the island’s savage clan feuds as well as frontier skirmishes in Vinland.
One thing Erik had come to realize about his charge. For all of Manfred’s roustabout ways, the young scion of the imperial family was quite capable of learning something when he put his mind to it. And, if it accomplished nothing else, the incident in the church seemed to have finally brought a certain amount of seriousness to Manfred’s outlook on things. The big young man had brooded for days afterward, obviously ashamed of his initial reaction to Erik’s defiance of Sachs.
Erik suppressed a snort. Not that Manfred’s new-found solemnity went all that deep. If Abbot Sachs kept the Knights here much longer, he didn’t doubt that Manfred would even learn to speak the local dialect. Well enough, at least, to ask directions to any location in Venice. He’d already learned how to find the taverns and brothels.
Manfred slapped his stomach. “It’s the wine,” he said mournfully. “I need more.”
Erik shook his head, and smiled ruefully. “That is the one thing you don’t need.”
“This is a matter of opinion. Now get out of that cotte and put on a quilted shirt.”
Erik did as he was told. The chain-links were heavy and cold, despite the shirt. And while it was loose around the waist and a little tight around the chest, it fit across the shoulders.
Manfred grunted in satisfaction. “Too big I can fix. Too small would have been a problem. Stand still.”
He reached for the tools, displaying a familiarity that surprised Erik. The Icelander watched in some amazement. “I thought you were a prince, not a blacksmith.”
Manfred twitched a lockring loose with an evil-looking set of long-nosed pliers. “According to my father, the Breton chiefs were once both—blacksmiths as well as princes. This was his idea. I got to run tame in the castle smithy back in Carnac. Beat spending time with the tutors mother inflicted on me, that’s for sure.”
His thick fingers moved with expert skill. “That’s the difference between Mainz and Carnac,” he continued. “Too bookish in Mainz. The aristocracy either reads or fights. In Carnac, according to our old seneschal, my father used to do the winter slaughtering before mother got there and ‘civilized’ him. Now stand still. Old Sachs didn’t say anything about that hatchet of yours, did he?”
“The subject never came up,” said Erik, standing still as he had been told. Books were a treasure up in Iceland. Especially in winter. But he could see where sitting still with a tutor might aggravate a boy like Manfred.
Erik sighed. He was supposed to watch over him; guard him; teach him. But it seemed to Erik that Manfred’s supreme skill was slipping off to have a good time. Taking his watchdog with him, if that was the only choice, but without him if he could manage it. It had been from one of those expeditions that Erik had retrieved him from the House of the Red Cat.