Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Four

by Christian Cameron

  Not that that prevented a few seconds of sheer terror as the whole wall of Turks crashed into the front of the company and tried to overcome armour and advantage with sheer courage. The Turks managed to push the company men-at-arms back almost three feet at impact. Swan almost fell, kept his footing, took a savage blow to the top of his helmet, got his pommel into someone’s face and found himself gripping his sword by the blade and using the quillons as a pole hammer, his left palm cut and bleeding, and the Turks gone.

  Men were looking at him.

  They wanted to go forward.

  Di Silva opened his mouth.

  ‘Hold!’ Swan roared.

  The line actually swayed.

  Arrows came out of the dust and rattled on armour.

  Above him, the two guns fired; slam, slam.

  Di Silva looked sheepish, and sank to one knee. Marco Corner, in the front rank despite having only half-armour, leaned over as if he was going to vomit, but he only heaved.

  Heavy English shafts began to fly over the line from above them.

  ‘When did Kendal go to look for me?’ Swan asked Da Silva. He looked past Di Silva to where Orietto was standing by the standard, which was in the hands of one of the old Malatesta men-at-arms, Servino, who had been Di Vecchio’s squire. Servino had blood leaking through his fingers under his arm, and looked white.

  ‘Sound rally,’ Swan told Clemente.

  ‘But we’re all …’

  ‘Sound rally!’ Swan ordered.

  Clemente played the notes, three times.

  The Turks were out there in the dust. Another volley of arrows came in and rattled on armour. Many went over their heads, and there was a scream from above them where an artillery server was hit.

  Swan wished he had water. He wished he knew anything about what was happening elsewhere. Their plan had failed; he had no idea whether they were in a major battle or not. It felt like a battle.

  But Kendal was out there in the dust. Swan had just been there. He knew what it was like, in the dust. He addressed the men around him. ‘I want to find Kendal,’ he said. ‘We are going forward a hundred paces, no more. Where is Grazias?’

  Men pushed and shoved out of the way so that he could see their stradiotes, fresh, with maces in their hands, sitting on their small horses at the top of the breach.

  It took more effort than he thought he had in him to turn and walk up the breach, his feet burning like two dull fires, to where Grazias waited. But he knew, from experience, how bad it would be if he didn’t think this through.

  ‘I want to go out into the open ground,’ Swan said. ‘I need you to cover our flanks and find Kendal.’

  Grazias raised an eyebrow.

  The Other Demetrios nodded. ‘Kendal. Ne. He’d do it for us.’

  Other stradiotes nodded. Kendal was a popular man.

  Swan went down the rubble to the line, which looked very small. Three hundred men can pack into a very small space. The rolling dust of the melee was vast.

  ‘Ready?’ Swan called.

  The line growled.

  ‘Guns?’ he called.

  ‘Firing!’ shouted the Bohemian.

  An eternity passed. It seemed that everything moved very slowly, and Swan’s thighs were like lead.

  Slam.

  Screams from the dust.

  Slam.

  ‘Forward,’ Swan called, and the line went forward, their order bad, men jostling for balance and for position. They went forward ten paces, and then another ten, and Swan already felt naked, unprotected. Arrows whistled overhead and then he could see figures with tall hats and turbans.

  His line growled.

  The Turkish line seemed to shudder. A ripple of arrows whispered overhead, and then the Turks seemed to waver like candlelight on a windy night, their metal winking in the dusty half-light.

  ‘Charge!’ Swan ordered. He was running forward without thought, his sword in his right hand.

  The Turks ran. They ran as far as a patch of scrubby olive trees and made a stand, or just stopped running from fatigue; by then, Swan was barely jogging, and so was Orietto next to him. He had all the time left in his life to see a Turkish archer raise his bow, point his arrow at Swan’s face, and release. He saw the flex of the arrow in the air, like a salmon leaping in the Lea at home, and then the arrow struck him in the breastplate and shattered, and a splinter of cane went into his cheek, and he cut. His sword went into the cotton of the man’s turban and the man fell, and behind him another Turk thrust at Swan with a spear. Swan got his left hand on the shaft of the spear and the point of his slender sword cut through the spearman’s fingers and plunged into his abdomen. The man fell off the sword, eyes rolling in his head, and the little olive grove was full of corpses.

  ‘Suane! Suane!’ someone was calling. Swan was having trouble seeing; he fell to one knee without intending to, stayed there for a time, and got to his feet to find Michael Aten towering over him on a big black horse.

  ‘We must go forward! Ser Suane! Order your men forward! The Turks are running!’ Aten was yelling, his helmet dented, his scimitar bloody to the hilt.

  Swan got to his feet. Clemente was blowing rally, and the rally was thin; perhaps two hundred men, and the fully armoured men moved like automatons, too tired to move well.

  ‘Now! Now!’ yelled Grazias coming out of the dust.

  The line started forward. Swan didn’t think he’d given the order; he was too tired to think, and he worried …

  They came to the edge of the dust.

  Three hundred paces away, the Turkish spahis were remounting. The man in the golden helmet was already mounted; he was pointing right at Swan with a horsehair whip.

  ‘Close up!’ Swan screamed shrilly.

  Grazias pounded past with fifty stradiotes at his back, headed for the spahis. Aten cursed and roared an order in Greek, and more Greek horse passed the company and went forward at a gallop, but they were too late. The Turkish cavalry was riding away, and behind them was a second line. The second line was the inferior troops who had led the attack, but they were rallied, and a desultory shower of arrows fell on the stradiotes, emptying a few saddles, and the Greek cavalry turned and trotted out of range.

  The Turkish cavalry retreated through their infantry, raising a new curtain of dust off the dry plain.

  Aten rode back, a mace in his hand. He smiled. ‘The will of God,’ he said. ‘Almost, we had a great victory. Instead we have a small one.’ He saluted.

  Swan’s men sagged.

  Swan stepped out in front of them. ‘You fought brilliantly,’ he shouted. He took a canteen from Clemente, rinsed his mouth and handed the water on. ‘Now finish as you started. We will withdraw in good order to the wall. Collapse then.’

  Someone told him to fuck off.

  Most of the men straightened up.

  Swan made himself stand straight in his harness, ignore the stones that were like a torture rack in his shoes, and point. ‘March!’ he called.

  And with a sigh, they began to withdraw, not perfectly, but well enough; wounded men were dragged along; men in armour shuffled, but viewed from the Turkish lines it was an impressive performance. The banner stayed up, the armoured men withdrew into the dust, and the sun hadn’t moved a hand span across the sky since the first charge.

  Swan waved to Grazias. ‘Kendal?’ he panted.

  Grazias just shook his head.

  They’d lost thirty men. It was the worst day they’d had since Belgrade, and the men were tired, surly, mouthy. Swan was old enough in war not to challenge them about anything. Stripped of his armour, he went out below the wall and started to haul dead men back inside, and Clemente went with him, and some gunners, and soon enough there were fifty of them. The Greek peasant he’d saved came. He followed Swan everywhere.

  ‘Theodor,’ he said. He had the worst breath Swan had ever encountered, and his teeth were rotting, but he was big and very strong and he helped pull the bodies.

  ‘Sign him up,’ Swan told
Clemente. The boy was too tired to smile, but he patted the Greek like a good dog. The Greek worked more like a horse.

  But they didn’t find Kendal.

  Later, towards evening, Grazias rode in to say that the Turks were gone, their camp abandoned.

  He made a wry face. ‘It was only ever a raid to them,’ he said. ‘They tried us and left. They won’t even rate this a battle.’

  Swan was having trouble forming coherent thoughts.

  ‘Could Kendal have been captured?’ he asked.

  Grazias frowned. ‘I don’t think they were taking prisoners,’ he said.

  Finally all the dead were found and buried, and the only missing man was Kendal, and the moon was rising, a sickle moon. Swan had stumbled over the same dead Turks three or four times. Other men helped him look; Di Silva, Columbino. Servino. Theodor. Most of the English archers led by Bigelow.

  Finally he had to admit that the man was not there.

  He called them all in, to the breach. ‘Go and sleep,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’ll come in the morning.’

  No one thought that very likely.

  He went back to his pavilion and lay down in his sweat-soaked arming clothes and was cold. He lay there, freezing, aware that if he stripped, he’d be warm instantly, but too tired to move.

  He had a terrible dream of Kendal, obviously dead, his abdomen slit and entrails dragging on the ground, walking under the sickle moon. He awoke so cold he couldn’t imagine he’d been asleep, made himself get up with his joints aching and his legs like dead mutton below his hips, and he fumbled with laces, cursed, and fumbled again until he had his damp arming clothes off, and then his linens. He wrapped himself in a wool blanket and shivered, and wondered about his exhausted men and how they were faring. He was back in the hole. Under the earth in Rhodes.

  He fought it.

  Clemente had left him a water bottle and he drained it and went outside, warmer now, and pissed on the ground. The moon was high; there was mist over towards the Gulf of Corinth, and the stars seemed to flicker.

  ‘You lookin’ for me, Cap’n?’ said a voice. It floated there.

  Swan turned, and there was a dark shape, and another hurrying up behind. Moonlight hides many things, and accentuates others.

  Swan moaned.

  ‘Ser?’ asked the figure. ‘I got lost.’

  Swan took a breath. The ghost’s breath steamed in the cold night.

  He was real. It was Kendal. Not Kendal’s ghost. Just for a moment …

  ‘You bastard,’ he said. He grabbed the Englishman and threw his arms around him.

  Clemente’s voice said, ‘It is really him!’

  Kendal laughed. ‘By the Trinity, Cap’n!’ he said. ‘You’re naked as a worm.’

  Swan picked up the blanket. And shook his head. ‘Lost?’ he asked, as the supernatural slipped away from his fatigue-sodden brain.

  ‘I got in with the Despot’s cavalry and we pursued the Turks all the way to the sea,’ Kendal said. ‘Never caught a one of ’em.’ He sighed. ‘I’m about dead,’ he went on. ‘Time for my blanket.’

  But by then there were twenty men pressed around Kendal; Orietto took his hand, and Di Silva embraced him as warmly as Swan had.

  Swan shook his head, which was suddenly clear. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

  He went in and fell asleep.

  In the morning, the Greeks mostly marched away. A few hundred peasants stayed under their own leaders to work on the wall. Theodor had a Turkish scimitar and Clemente had him on the spare horse. His bare legs hung far down the horse’s flanks.

  Swan was surprised, but Grazias was not. ‘The Turks are gone,’ he said. ‘They won’t come back this year. Before we even fought, they heard that Scanderbeg is loose in Serbia; that’s a threat. The Venetians and Genoese are both at sea.’ Grazias smiled at his captain. ‘It is good to be on the winning side, but almost all these men are farmers.’

  ‘We are the only full-time soldiers here,’ the Other Demetrios said.

  Alexei laughed. ‘I guess that makes us the Spartans,’ he said. ‘We are three hundred.’

  Marching back to Glarenza, Swan rode with the Despot Thomas, who seemed elated.

  ‘A fine victory,’ the Despot said. ‘I will see that your men are rewarded.’

  Swan bowed politely. One of the dead was young Morbioli, who’d been with him a long time. Two English archers. The Albanian woman who’d served the guns.

  The problem with leading a company of three hundred was that you knew everyone so well.

  ‘You do not seem content with it,’ the Despot said.

  ‘I have seen many pointless victories,’ Swan said. He thought he’d heard the same from Hunyadi, or perhaps Bessarion.

  Thomas smiled bitterly. ‘It is the only kind of victory I have ever known,’ he said. ‘When we lose, we are destroyed. When we win, we buy only time to breathe a little. The fight at Corinth will buy my people a year; perhaps two. Mehmed will come with a real army as soon as Scanderbeg retreats and the Pope’s fleet sails home. He will bring heavy guns and two hundred thousand men. The Hexamilion cannot be held. You saw that.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Not without every king and prince in Europe contributing men,’ he said.

  The Despot Thomas looked out to sea and then back at Swan. ‘And we all know how likely that is, do we not?’ he said. ‘I do not blame them. We are no better. I go to fight beside Aten, and his brother and my brother plot behind our backs. And the same in Wallachia and Albania and Hungary. Even now, they say, the Cilli and the King of Bohemia are pulling down the Hunyadis, architects of every victory in the West since I was a boy.’ He looked at Swan. ‘Sometimes I am tempted to bow my head to the obvious will of God.’

  Swan had a thought that was out of step with the seriousness of the conversation. He thought, quite suddenly, of kissing Sophia on the bench of the nunnery in the Venetian Lagoon, and how carefully she had arranged it all. He looked down at the sword she’d bought him; a sword which had kept him alive.

  Swan shrugged. ‘Despite it all,’ he said, ‘I find it difficult to be sad on such a day.’

  Beyond his outstretched hand, the sun sparkled on the Gulf of Corinth, and there, across the bay, the town of Naupactis rose above the sea and wavered in the sun-dazzle. The hills were beautiful in their rocky elegance and the sea was blue, and the last of the jasmine covered the army’s other scents. Beside the road lay an ancient marble. Swan dismounted and knelt by it.

  ‘You can read the old Greek?’ the Despot asked. ‘Dukas says you can.’

  Swan ran his finger along the edge of the marble where it emerged from the dirt. ‘Whoever he was, he was a priest of Apollo and he won a race at Olympia,’ Swan said. ‘The name is under the ground.’

  ‘Forgotten,’ Thomas said.

  Swan shrugged. ‘I think, in my current mood, I would argue that the Ancients are far from forgotten. We think their thoughts in books; we admire their art; we use their fortresses. We admire them. And do we not, alive, seek to be admired?’

  Thomas nodded. ‘I feel there is an obvious flaw in your philosophy, Ser Suane,’ he said. ‘But I confess that the idea pleases me that some day men will look at Mistra and Glarenza, and say that good men, brave men, made them and that they did their best and were noble and thought great thoughts. We are near our end.’

  Swan remounted. His new horse was another fine Arab mare, taken from the spoil of the battle; every spahi seemed to have a pair of them. The new mare was bigger; not as pretty, but dark and lithe. Swan called her Eve.

  ‘Sparta lasted hundreds of years after Thermopylae and Plataea,’ Swan said. ‘The wars with Persia were not the moment of Sparta’s decline but perhaps her finest hour.’

  The Despot reined in. They were just at the jutting point where the fortress of Patras stood out into the gulf. From there, the two men, and the army behind them, could see all the way to Delphi to the left, and all the way to the Ionian sea to the right. And way out, almost to the Ionian, there were gal
leys; big military galleys, under sail with their huge lateens rigged.

  ‘Venice,’ Swan said.

  Thomas looked at him. ‘If my wife had told me that I would be lectured on the history of ancient Greece by a barbarian mercenary after a victory over the Turks, I’d have had to laugh.’

  ‘Your wife?’ Swan said.

  ‘She is a seer. A prophetess. And Italian, of course.’ The Despot shook his head. ‘I do not hold out so much hope for our last Spartans, or New Spartans, or call them what you will. But it is pleasant to win a victory, however small, and imagine for an afternoon that we are saved, and a Venetian fleet is going against the infidel.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, later I will find that the Venetians are taking guns to the Turks, and that the Genoese are demanding a new tax and my brother will attack me.’ He laughed.

  Swan laughed with him.

  Alessandro Bembo had his own Galea Sotilla, which made Swan smile, because he could remember when his friend was not even allowed to serve as a noble marine on a Venetian ship. But Bembo had more – news; letters from home; six thousand Venetian ducats to pay the company and cover expenses.

  ‘Give me your paper from the Pope,’ he said.

  Swan handed over the draft for two thousand florins which no one could cash.

  Bembo folded it and put it in his purse. ‘The Medici are tottering,’ he said. ‘The Sforza of Milan have loaned them money to keep the bank from going under. Loredan has gone to Rome. Something terrible is happening, and I begin to think there is a conspiracy to undo the Peace of Lodi by undermining the banks in the north.’

  Swan was interested in what his friend was saying, but he had a letter from Sophia, and he was reading it.

  ‘Jesus Christ the righteous,’ Bembo said. ‘Can we deal with serious things?’

  Swan glanced at him. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘You are such a boy, English,’ Bembo said.

  Swan nodded. He was reading a very good part. But he managed to tear himself away, grinning like a fool, and he motioned to Clemente.