Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Four

by Christian Cameron

  There was silence for a long time.

  Kendal couldn’t hold it in. ‘The Holy Father ordered a banker killed?’ he asked, incredulous.

  Swan was looking at the priest, his eyes narrowed. ‘No,’ he said.

  Orietto put a hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘You know what is going on?’

  Swan nodded. ‘Almost everything, yes. But only now, this minute, and there’s still two huge parts of the puzzle I don’t understand.’

  Di Silva shook his head. ‘You are as enigmatic as Bembo,’ he said.

  Orietto nodded. ‘Should we know?’ he asked.

  Swan sat heavily. He looked at his officers. His friends.

  ‘I am going to write the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I will leave a copy with Clemente and another will go to Alessandro. I do not think any of you will benefit from knowing. And as I say, there are two things I still do not know. And frankly, I have followed this plot from the moment I was assigned to find Spinelli, and I’ve been wrong at every turn.’

  He watched the priest, and when he said, ‘Spinelli,’ the priest made a sound.

  When the rest of them had gone off to their wine and their own tents, the priest remained.

  ‘Anything you’d like to confess?’ Swan asked.

  The priest sighed. ‘I think you have done me a very great favour,’ he said. ‘Despite which, I cannot help you. I have sworn an oath.’

  ‘That’s fine, then. But please tell your cardinal and your Forteguerri that I did everything I could to help you. And we both know what I’m talking about. Yes?’ Swan said.

  The Franciscan bowed his head. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The next morning, the whole company, including a small herd of Turkish horses and some nice Albanian mares recently added, some recovering Greek former prisoners, forty-seven Albanian women well mounted, a courtesan, and her young daughter on a stolen pony, departed Mistra. The banner of St Mary Magdalene snapped in the spring breeze. Flowers bloomed as far as the eye could see; the plains were a riot of colour that blended into a pinkish grey out towards the horizon. The sun sparkled on spears and armour.

  The company’s archers dismounted from the great gates of the city, and the Bohemian covered them, a burning match in his hand, until the last archer was on his horse. Then the falconet – still loaded – was hitched to the back of the baggage wagon with eight horses, and the whole company went down the road at a brisk mounted walk. The roads were dry.

  The company went north and west, along the ancient road to Elis and Olympia. The road was studded with memory; not direct memories like the darkness that awaited Swan under Mistras, but memories of learning; lines from Herodotus and Pausanias. He had a scroll, possibly even an original scroll, of Pausanias in his saddle-bag, taken from one of the monasteries of the city behind him, and the Greek letters, all in a single hand, told of the ancient world at its height, when all the temples of Olympia were open and the games still played. Swan travelled north, and dreamed of a long-dead past, and only realised when he was lying on his camp bed that a day had passed and he had not felt the terrible darkness.

  The next morning was clear; magnificent. Three eagles circled far away on the right as he emerged from his tent, although he had some doubts about the power of augury. The mountain air was clear and cool; the carpet of flowers was already fading, and there was new grass; the tinkle of goat bells sounded. In a small field at his feet, the former prisoners were choosing horses from the company’s herd. They shouted back and forth in Greek, and Grazias and the Other Demetrios watched them, taking notes on wax tablets. Swan sat in the sun as his pavilion was struck, reading Pausanias. The manuscript was very difficult to read; as on the ancient monuments, the letters were all in the old form, and all together, with no word breaks, no spaces, and no punctuation whatsoever.

  He looked at Marie. ‘It is the greatest treasure map ever written,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘I thought that you would like it. But my friend the abbot wanted it to go to the West. I have a dozen more.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Of course you do. Will Catacuzenos stay loyal to me?’

  She shrugged. ‘Me, I cannot predict the future, or I would be married to a handsome knight and not a courtesan. But you have his whole family. You settle them in Venice … why should he ever betray you? And soon enough, he will want a home for himself and his wife; his wife is quite pretty, by the way. She’s a Komnena.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Swan asked.

  Marie frowned. ‘A comfortable old age,’ she said. ‘Maybe as a nun in a very nice nunnery.’

  ‘With your help here and a dozen classical manuscripts, I suspect we can buy you such a life,’ Swan said.

  She smiled. ‘The thing is, much as I love God and I love to read …’ She looked out at the Greeks, who were now all mounted, and were playing some sort of game with a leather bundle and swords. ‘I love this. I have always loved camps. And men.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’d be a terrible nun.’

  Swan was beginning to see the basis of his future network. ‘What if I suggested that you could have both,’ he said.

  That afternoon, there was an ambush. The ambush struck the head of the column, triggered by the aggressive scouting of Grazias’s outriders. Two men were killed from the company; one was the Englishman, John Drake; the other an Albanian that Grazias had recruited, what seemed like years before. Clemente took a wound, a light crossbow bolt through his right forearm; the ambushers had a dense cavalry column, a hundred men strong, that made a dedicated attack in the standards.

  Swan’s men were ready, but perhaps not ready enough for the ferocity of the attack and the numbers.

  Swan had to fight, hand to hand, with a wild-eyed young man in a Turkish kaftan, a long maille shirt and a round hat full of plumes. He looked like a modern Achilles and his scimitar moved like lightning.

  Swan was wearing a small fortune in the best Bohemian plate armour. The scimitar was useless, and Sophia’s sword eventually bound the curved sword, rolled over it, flat to flat, and slid home into the brilliant young man’s eye, killing him instantly.

  All along the column, training and better armour and bigger horses defeated ferocity and impetus. Orietto led a dozen armoured men in a counter-charge that rolled ponderously along the column’s left flank, overthrowing attacker after attacker until the whole mob broke away like a flock of starlings and flew for the hills, pursued instantly by Grazias and also by the Catacuzenoi.

  A German knight who had been with them since Belgrade died despite his armour; one of the Catacuzenoi died in the pursuit. Four dead and eight wounded, for nothing, at the very edge of the Despot’s territory. The attackers left twenty men dead and as many again wounded.

  Swan shook his head.

  ‘Trapezetos?’ he asked Grazias.

  The Other Demetrios shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, which might have had a variety of meanings.

  ‘Pick up the wounded and let’s take them with us,’ Swan said.

  ‘Wagons will be heavy,’ Orietto said. ‘But sure, the ground is dry.’

  The column marched all night under a new moon. It would soon be Easter, whether one was Catholic or Orthodox.

  As the sun rose, they came to the river that divided the Despot Demetrios’s land from his brother Thomas’s western Morea. There were forty stradiotes waiting.

  And the Despot Thomas in person.

  Swan dismounted and knelt, and the Despot gave him a blessing.

  ‘Majesty,’ Swan said.

  Thomas smiled. Like all of the Paleologi, the man was very handsome, with tanned brown skin and pale eyes. ‘You have more soldiers than I have,’ the Despot Thomas said. ‘So it seems a little foolish for you to pretend that I am the Emperor. Has my brother claimed that he is Emperor yet?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Swan said.

  ‘He will.’ Thomas sighed. ‘When he breaks with his master in Edirne. Well; welcome to the last free part of the Roman Empire that was, Ser Suane. All that is left of Plethon i
n Mistra is his corpse.’

  Swan wanted to believe. Thomas was slightly smaller than his brother; his shoulders stooped, but his eyes were bright and alert and he was engaging, which Demetrios was not.

  ‘We will, if it pleases you, ride to Glarenza,’ the Despot Thomas said.

  ‘My lord, let us ride if we must,’ Swan said. ‘We had a fight yesterday, and I have wounded men in my wagons. And we rode all night so that we would not have to fight again.’

  The Despot nodded. ‘You have infuriated my brother, no doubt,’ he said, clearly pleased.

  Swan nodded. ‘My lord, we had a misunderstanding.’

  Thomas rubbed his beard. ‘We can make camp in the bend of the river, right there. Are you pursued?’

  ‘No, my lord.’ Swan was trying not to like the younger brother, but the man had a manner that was hard to ignore. He had an openness to him that men told Swan his oldest brother had had; Constantine IX, who had died on the walls of Constantinople, fighting to the last.

  Like Leonidas.

  And the Despot Thomas went with Swan to visit the wounded, some of whom were awed by his presence. When they were done, Swan sent wine to the prisoners and his own wounded, and then they sat in the evening light outside Swan’s pavilion, and Clemente waited directly on the Despot of the West.

  ‘What will you do with your prisoners?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Recruit them,’ Swan said, with a significant glace at Grazias. ‘Good light cavalry are more valuable than gold in Italy. I assume my company will go back to Italy now.’

  ‘You do not want to stay and fight the Turks for me?’ Thomas asked.

  Swan bowed. ‘That will depend on you, my lord. I was told to take my company to Mistra. To be … frank, I suspect that the Pope thought that you, and not your Turkophile brother, was Despot of Mistra. Regardless, I cannot serve there. Whether the Pope will pay to keep us here, in the western Morea, I do not know. That will almost certainly be up to Cardinal Trevisan, the papal legate in Outremer, to whom I have communicated all my …’ Swan shrugged. ‘Problems.’

  ‘When we heard of Belgrade,’ Thomas said, ‘we stopped paying our tribute to the Sultan.’

  Swan nodded. ‘More wine, Majesty?’ he said.

  ‘Mehmed bin Murad will come this summer. I cannot say where.’

  Swan smiled grimly. ‘I suspect he will be very angry with your brother. Who appears to have murdered his envoys.’

  Thomas started. ‘What? My brother loves Mehmed better than he loves me. Why did he murder the Turkish envoys? He must be mad.’

  Clemente smiled as grimly as Swan. And poured more wine.

  ‘So …’ Thomas said. He fingered his beard. ‘So you think Mehmed will attack Demetrios.’

  Swan shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Majesty, but I have had a very fatiguing week.’

  Thomas suddenly sat back. ‘You murdered the Turkish envoys!’ he said.

  One of his officers, standing close by, stepped up to his master, hand on his sword.

  Swan shook his head. ‘I assure you that I did not,’ he said.

  Thomas laughed. ‘Demetrios really made you angry.’

  ‘Yes,’ Swan admitted.

  The younger despot rose to his feet. ‘I will endeavour to make you a friend,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’ He paused. ‘But listen. My brother is a fool. He betrays automatically, because, I am sorry to say, he was badly raised. He saw too much betrayal. I will say no more. I had the better childhood; I was never a hostage.’ He shrugged. ‘But listen to me, Frank. I will not let Demetrios lose it all. He has Nafplion and Monemvasia and Mistra; I have some beautiful ruins. He has all the men trained by Plethon; I have a handful of goatherds. Despite the unfairness of the division, I try not to fight him. Fighting only squanders our strength. But if Mehmed attacks him … then, perhaps, he will see reason, and we will have a chance to reclaim our own.’

  Swan nodded. ‘I do not think there is the strength in the Peloponnese to face the Turks.’

  ‘No,’ Thomas the Despot said. ‘No, we will need Venice and Milan. And you, Ser Thomas. I see hope that we share a common name.’

  Swan smiled, thinking of Thomas Spinelli. ‘And yet, those named Thomas are prone to doubt,’ Swan said.

  In Glarenza, there were letters. There was one from Cardinal Trevisan, dated only a week before, from Negroponte; a letter from Alexander Bembo at Nafplion, and a letter from Loredan at Venice.

  Trevisan ordered him to use all possible dispatch to join the papal fleet at Lemnos or Negroponte.

  Loredan begged him to use his company to help hold the western Morea against Mehmed’s spring campaign.

  Bembo told him that there was a Venetian squadron coming out of the Adriatic to join Trevisan. Swan saw no sign in any of the letters that anyone had received his reports on the situation in Mistra, and his deliberate provocation of the Sultan and Omar Reis now appeared to him a foolish piece of cruel bravado and not the brilliant coup he’d imagined at the time.

  Swan read his letters twice and took Columbino with him to the ‘palace’, which was a fine old Frankish castle of Clarence, or ‘Glarenza’, as the Greeks said, two centuries old and in good repair. It looked out over the blue waters of the Ionian, with Zakynthos and Cephalonia almost close enough to touch.

  He set Clemente to watch the Franciscan, who’d come with them from Mistras; he assigned Kendal to watch the Florentine factor, with three archers to support him. There was a small Latin convent; a memory of Frankish Greece. Swan escorted Marie there, gave her a clandestine kiss, and left her with the abbess, a middle-aged Italian woman of unimpeachable quarterings who obviously possessed a lot of energy. She welcomed Marie-Eve as well; the two women vanished inside the nunnery and the great iron-studded gate rang shut behind them.

  Swan missed Marie immediately, but he was weaning himself from her. In her arms, he had begun to lose the man who would marry Sophia; that man had received many blows lately. But Swan had learned a thing or two from all that gospel reading, and he aimed to finish Lent in a state of denial and see whether he could win back a little of himself; the cheerful, open self he’d shed in the hole in Mistra.

  He received word that Mehmed was stirring from Edirne in the east, and then, on Holy Saturday for Latins, Alexander Bembo stepped off a tiny galliot in the harbour as if that was perfectly normal, and threw his arms around Swan.

  ‘How bad was it?’ he asked that night. Swan had moved into the guest rooms of the Latin monastery, as if he was a great nobleman. His company was in tents on the plain, because that was both safer and more hygienic. There was some plague in the town.

  ‘Terrible,’ Swan said. He grimaced, despite his attempt to keep his face straight. Over four cups of wine, he told the entire story.

  Bembo shook his head. ‘Fucking Greeks,’ he said. ‘As bad as Italians, really.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, brother.’

  ‘I still can’t imagine that I was so weak; so broken, so quickly.’ He looked out of the window over the darkening sea.

  Bembo’s eyes were dark. ‘I was tortured once, in Rome,’ he said. ‘It is terrible, when you have no hope and no power.’ He made a little movement of his hands.

  ‘Someone saved you?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Bessarion,’ Bembo said.

  They sat in silence for a while.

  ‘I have conflicting orders,’ Swan said. ‘Loredan wants me to help the Despot face the Turks. Trevisan, who is, I think, a Venetian military cardinal, nonetheless wants me to join his fleet.’

  Bembo nodded. ‘Do what Loredan requires,’ he said. ‘Listen, I will be back in a month with a squadron. Then you can come and join Trevisan. But for the next month, if Mehmed goes for Corinth, you are all the force we have.’

  ‘We, the monarchs of the West? We, the Pope?’ Swan was sarcastic.

  ‘We, the Senate and the people of Venice,’ Bembo said. ‘The Pope knows nothing, and, pardon me, Bessarion’s interest in saving Mistra is personal and not strategic. Corinth is the prize.’r />
  ‘For Venice,’ Swan said.

  ‘For everyone,’ Bembo said. ‘I need to go to bed; I need to leave with the first breeze of the morning. If you will take my advice, go and get Thomas to support Michael Aten; together, they have the force to keep Omar Reis out of the Peloponnese this summer while Trevisan picks off some islands and annoys the Turks in the Aegean.’

  ‘Whose strategy is this?’ Swan asked, laughing.

  ‘Mine!’ Bembo said. ‘It is all like the tinsel and paint actors use to pretend to be kings and queens. We don’t have a real army or a real fleet. So? We pretend. Perhaps Mehmed is fooled. One summer at a time.’

  ‘Blessed Saint George,’ Swan swore. ‘All right. Corinth. And you swear you will come with a squadron.’

  ‘I swear,’ Bembo said.

  Only after Bembo’s galliot was a pinprick on the distant blue horizon did Swan realise that he had not told his friend about the dead banker, the assassin and the Pope.

  The Despot Thomas was a very different patrone from Demetrios. He didn’t suggest any Albanian chieftains he wanted to dispossess, and he was immediately interested in Swan’s stated desire to support Michael Aten at Corinth. And he began, like a professional, by questioning Swan’s sources of information.

  Swan bowed. ‘My source is Venetian,’ he admitted. ‘But it appears to me that in this, the interests of Venice, of Mistra and of Glarenza all converge. If Corinth holds, the Peloponnese is relatively safe, as we showed last autumn when we beat Omar Reis. If Corinth falls …’

  ‘We have nowhere to make a stand,’ Thomas said. He was standing in his own great hall; a hall less than half the size of the hall of Mistra, and nowhere near as richly decorated. Despite which, it was full of people; farmers coming for legal resolutions and Italian merchants paying taxes.

  ‘Do you pay a tithe to the Latin church?’ Swan asked. ‘Majesty?’

  The Despot nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t publicise this, but I do pay. I collect the tithes as one of the conditions for the Latins staying. I need them. I try to be a good lord, in the French way.’

  Swan nodded.

  ‘Who collects the tithes?’ Swan asked.