The Green Count

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Richard,’ I said.

  But he turned and clambered down the ladder to the midships catwalk.

  I stood there, watching the bow cut the water. Just below me, one of the oarsmen laughed ruefully. I had forgotten they were even there.

  ‘Take his woman, did ye?’ he said in accented Italian.

  Another oarsmen below me laughed. ‘Mayhap she’d had eno’ of his temper.’

  Well. You forget that there are men all around you, servants and soldiers. But they know things.

  Eventually I curled up by John. The deck hurt my hip.

  I lay there, thinking about how right Richard was about one thing; that I was somehow a different man on board Zeno’s little ship than I was leading a company in the presence of my wife. I thought some dark thoughts, too, about who I was; routier, knight, soldier of Christ, mercenary. Husband, lover. I thought of Anne, in Avignon. I said a prayer for her; for the girls who’d been our whores in France.

  I thought of de Charny, dying – making a great death. Is it that we respect the manner of death so much because it shows us the true inner man, stripped of all the trappings of status and family and wealth?

  And it seemed to me that Richard wanted me to be the monster of his dreams; a mad routier. The Bourc Camus, in fact.

  And that led me to wonder if my hatred for Camus wasn’t in some part my recognition of what we had in common.

  Uncomfortable thoughts for an uncomfortable deck.

  The third day we raised Tenedos, and just as he said he would, Zeno snapped up not one but two fishing boats in the dawn of the fourth day out of Jonc, and we questioned them separately, but they were small men, terrified, and yet happy enough to tell us the news. Yes, the Turks had closed the Straits. They had turned back a Genoese cargo vessel which was in the port of Tenedos that moment, and they had seized a Catalonian trader.

  The fishermen knew nothing of the politics, although they said that there was a ‘great army’ at Gallipoli, and that the Turks were ferrying men every day from Asia to Europe.

  Zeno consulted me openly, and didn’t invite Richard. But I insisted, gently, and was rewarded with Zeno’s cautious acceptance.

  Richard must have slept better than I, both nights, and he came with a bounce in his step. Zeno outlined the problem; Richard listened attentively, like the good soldier I knew he was.

  ‘So sailing up the channel is not an option?’ he said.

  Zeno picked his teeth. ‘I don’t think so,’ he admitted. I knew it was the sort of adventure he’d enjoy telling about in Saint Mark’s Square.

  ‘Let me have one of these fishing boats and a handful of oarsmen,’ I said. ‘John can speak all the Turk for us.’

  ‘I speak Turkish,’ Zeno said. ‘And Sir Richard, if I may beg his pardon, looks like any jihadi or ghazi from North Africa.’

  I expected an explosion from Richard. But he just shrugged. ‘I do, at that,’ he said.

  ‘I know a little Turkish,’ I said.

  ‘And you can pass for a Turk with that red hair,’ Zeno said. ‘We’ll be fine.’ He bought us all Turkish clothing, or rather, nondescript clothing – soft trousers, bare feet like any sailor, kaftans belted with old leather belts, soft felt hats.

  Fine, it turned out, was eight men in a tiny open boat, tacking out of Tenedos into a stiff wind, soaking wet all the time. I learned more of small boat-handling in those two days than I had learned from Contarini in six weeks; the tiller was alive under my hand, the spray was annoying, the salt got into everything, and when I referred to the weather as a storm, Zeno laughed.

  ‘This is just rain with a little wind,’ he said. ‘You really are a lubber.’

  Two days. Even the bread was wet; the water was as bad as water in a city under siege, and I got to know our oarsmen as well as I knew Zeno. Richard and I had no way of avoiding each other. John gave us all lessons in Turkish as we rowed, and my hands bled, but then, so did Zeno’s, and he laughed his evil laugh.

  ‘I’m out of shape,’ he said.

  ‘How do you get used to this?’ I asked.

  He was rowing, so he didn’t shrug. ‘Musard! Keep the tiller straight!’

  Then he glanced at me. ‘I was a galley slave for the fucking Aragonese for two years,’ he said. ‘I hate them. And the Genoese.’

  ‘That’s a lot of hate,’ I said.

  Zeno’s eyes were slits. ‘I have plenty,’ he said.

  The wind was always against us. It varied between so directly against us that we could only row into it, and lightly against us, so we could tack. Zeno showed us all how there was a counter-current at the shores of the Dardanelles.

  Perhaps I need to explain. The Dardanelles are more like a great salt river than like a sea. There is a flow to the whole body, from the Euxine, the Dark Sea to the north where the Russe live and the steppes begin, down past Constantinople, through the Sea of Marmara, and out into the Mediterranean. The current runs about two knots and sometimes a little more, but close inshore on either bank there is a little bit of a counter-current. With skilful boat handling – only Zeno could do it, and one of the oarsmen – we could coast, creeping along, without doing any work.

  But a change in the wind, or a steering error, and we were out of the counter-current and rowing, or tacking in a long, long reach across the whole strait. I got to know those looming ridges pretty well, and then towards late afternoon we came to the great bend in the strait. As we crossed from east to west, we opened the next arm of the Dardanelles, and there we saw six galleys, low to the water, clustered on the Asian shore by Carnak. They were well hidden there, and no merchant ship would be able to flee them once committed to the tack.

  They saw us, right enough. And despite our best efforts, we were alone; there was no other shipping in the great dark river of salt water – no fishing boats, no pleasure boats.

  Two galleys crossed their lateens.

  ‘Shit,’ Zeno said. ‘I wanted to do this in the darkness,’ he added.

  It was true. We’d made better time than he expected, despite the stiff breeze, and we’d all lost track of the sun in the haze of fatigue.

  I was rowing, so I could see every part of the drama play out. ‘Run for the bank?’ I asked.

  Zeno spat over the side. ‘Let them board us,’ he said. ‘We’re a boat full of bad men, and we were trying a little piracy down towards Tenedos. And we are lying – we pretend first we want to go fishing.’

  John nodded. ‘I like this,’ he said. ‘Many tents on the Asian bank. No Turkish emir can know all the men.’

  ‘Our oarsmen are obviously Venetian,’ Musard said.

  ‘You haven’t been out in Outremer very long, have you?’ Zeno said. ‘Plenty of Italians in that host. Aye, and Franks and Berbers, too. Greed and violence have no borders, eh?’ he laughed.

  John said, ‘I must be in command.’

  We all looked at him.

  He shrugged.

  Zeno nodded. ‘He’s right. By Christ’s beard, Turk. You take the helm.’

  John skipped along the benches. He took the tiller from Musard, who took the oar John had abandoned, the one next to me.

  And then John turned our little boat to meet the oncoming galleys.

  They were alongside us in ten minutes. We never had a chance, running. They knew their business, and were sprightly and well-handled, full of men.

  A Turk hailed us, and John roared back. There was laughter.

  The nearer galley took in her oars and the farther crossed our bow. It was almost laughable; there were nigh on five hundred men to our eight.

  They’d had a dull day, I could tell.

  But John was unsinkable. He roared out his answers, and men on the galleys laughed.

  Zeno translated.

  ‘He says we are fishermen, and the galley asks, where are our nets? And he says, they
got lost over the side. And the galley asks, what are we fishing for? And your man says, gold. And everyone laughs. A good answer. And John says there is a Venetian galley at Tenedos, too big for these cowards. And the galley’s master says, almost anything is too big for that cockleshell. And he tells John to get his wet arse back to his unit.

  ‘And your John says, all he wants on earth, with Allah’s help, is to put his wet arse on the rump of a horse and never touch an oar again.

  ‘All the Turks laugh.’

  Musard coughed.

  I turned and looked over my shoulder, and the galley off our bow was already under way, her oars going.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ Zeno said.

  There was a stir on the nearer galley.

  ‘Look up at me, number four oar!’ called a strong voice in Italian.

  I had no idea who was number four. I looked up.

  ‘Not you, you Judas! The bugger next to you. Look at me, whoreson!’

  ‘Fuck,’ Zeno said.

  He looked up.

  John cursed.

  In twenty heartbeats, our little boat was chained fore and aft to the Turkish galley, and we were taken, sitting placidly under the stares of a hundred archers.

  ‘Carlo Zeno,’ said a voice above us. ‘What a pleasure.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Zeno.

  They stripped us. They still didn’t know what to make of us; John was obviously a Kipchak, and they took Musard for a Mamluk or a Moor, and I growled in Turkish and was taken for a Turk.

  As soon as they got Zeno up the side, the bastard who had identified him tripped him, put him down, and kicked him in the guts.

  ‘There you are, messire,’ he said with satisfaction. ‘How’s that? And that?’

  He cocked back his leg for another kick and I caught his foot and dropped him.

  One of the archers slammed me in the head with his bow. It was almost casual; I saw the staff coming …

  The advantage of being knocked unconscious was that I was taken for a Turk. Red hair and bad manners, I suppose. I never went all the way out; I was aware of a good deal, but I wasn’t going anywhere on an enemy galley, and I didn’t want to be made to talk. And my act had, in fact, changed the situation; the galley’s capitano came down amidships and began yelling in Turkish that Zeno was his prisoner, and valuable. And that Sultan Murad was not at war with Venice.

  God works in mysterious ways.

  They carried me to the bow and dropped me; that was John and Richard carrying me. And one of our oarsmen was called Aldo, and he turned out to have a fine turn of Arabic, and he apparently professed to love Allah and was put with the three of us in the bow.

  You may laugh, but when my head stopped hurting, I relaxed. I’d taken some blows to the head in my time, and I was more interested in avoiding sleep than in worrying about captivity. I’ve been taken before; I didn’t see this as any worse, so far.

  John growled at our captors from time to time, and then alternated between an obsequious humility and a brash arrogance, and one of the galley’s under-officers told him to shut up, he’d be sent back to his Ordo.

  That had to do for us. The galley rowed across the strait to the Asian shore, near Carnak, and there we were disembarked. I saw Zeno taken ashore, surrounded by Turks, and our other two oarsmen were already at oars. In chains.

  The four of us, who were taken for locals, weren’t even questioned. An agha, or officer, came and took us in charge. He asked John one question, and John said something like ‘Fucking Turks’ in Turkish, and the officer laughed. He had the same wrinkled face as John.

  He ordered us to follow him.

  He asked John a dozen questions. John answered him readily enough. We passed some tents, and Musard almost had to carry me as a wave of nausea hit me; I had trouble walking. The agha snapped a question – asking, I thought, if I was sick. I mumbled ‘Yes, Lord’ and ‘No, Lord’ which must have been acceptable.

  John barked a laugh and said a long, monotonous speech in a language that was not Turkish.

  The agha nodded. The two men clasped hands, and the officer waved us to a wagon and walked away.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, John turned.

  ‘He is … of my people. Listen. I tell pack of lies. He know I lie. He hates Turks but needs horses. So it is with my people. So I say, we criminals maybe, maybe muu khün. But he help me. Yes?’ John spread his hands. ‘Work, do what I say, what he say, what any Turk say. Maybe tomorrow we walk, or run. Yes?’

  No one was offering a better deal.

  I spent the next two days with a raging headache, currying horses, shovelling horse manure, and carrying fodder and feed. I was astonished at the level of organisation among the Turks. This was not a tribal horde; this was a better army than most I’d served in, and most of the administration and logistics was supplied by Greeks. Nor were they slaves.

  I thought of Adalia.

  My Turkish was tested to its limits every hour, but the commander of the baggage was not that bright himself – somebody’s second son, I’ll guess, and he thought me a fool and said so. Red hair is always humorous, at least to those who do not have it, and they mocked me. They mocked Musard, too for his dark skin. We worked side by side, and said nothing to each other. Richard knew a little bit of Berber from his childhood, and a little Arabic, and no Turkish, so I did my best to cover for him.

  But frankly, no one was looking for spies on the eastern shore of the Dardanelles. No one quizzed us, and no one watched us work, either. In fact, on the second day, one of the other horse boys told me to do less work, and John punched him in the head, and an hour later, John was head horse boy.

  By my count it was the first of August. We were prisoners, or slaves; I found myself working to make a little steppe pony’s flanks shine for some Turkish ghulam who would ride about burning monasteries, like as not.

  And Richard and I worked together as if we’d never been apart. There was no place for whispered denunciations or anger.

  We worked.

  The morning of the third day in camp, a pair of Turkish ghulami came to choose remounts. One dropped his quiver and his sword, all on the same belt, and went to do his business with one of the Greek whores who were everywhere with their children in the baggage train – the flotsam and misery of war. He pointed at one and was stripping his trousers before he got to her tent.

  John snapped up his quiver belt as if it was his own and waved to me, and the four of us trotted on to the far horse lines, where other baggage men were working. It was that easy. And later that day, I got a quiver with a good knife on it; it was lying in the grass.

  I was hungry all the time. They didn’t really feed us – they expected us to ‘forage’, by which our officer clearly meant that we should steal food from the same Greek families who were supporting his expedition with taxes. By that time, I probably knew as much about Murad’s plans as his inner council. I knew that he intended to keep the Venetians from reinforcing Constantinople, and he intended to take it while the emperor was a hostage in Hungary or Bulgaria, thus betraying the emperor’s son Andronicus, who all the Turks thought was a fool.

  I want you to think of me and Richard, arguing on the foredeck while a hundred rowers were within six feet. The Turkish officers talked about everything. John got most of it, but I heard some too. And I saw Zeno; his nose looked bad, but he was upright, walking between two guards at nightfall. I nodded to John, and John raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Foraging’ gave us a chance to talk. We went well out from the army. Their transports were late – very late. They were expecting Genoese merchant ships to carry them over from Carnak to Gallipoli so that they could take Constantinople.

  The Genoese were apparently sending a fleet to support the Ottamanids, even while they supported the Green Count. Make of that what you will.

  Or so I had heard. At any rate, we roa
med up into Asia, maybe four leagues out of camp, on borrowed horses. We were, to all effects, free. I doubted that anyone would look for us. Various refugees poured into the camp looking for work.

  ‘I want to rescue Zeno,’ I said. ‘We know what we need to know, otherwise.’

  Richard looked wistfully at Gallipoli on the far shore. ‘We should go there,’ he said. ‘At least scout the gates and approaches.’

  I looked at John. ‘Richard is correct, John,’ I said.

  John shrugged. ‘Take Zeno and ride,’ he said. ‘Ride east a little and then south. Find fisherfolk, take boat. Or ride to Karamanids peoples. Ten days.’

  I tried to look at this as a sailor would. The current ran south. ‘The Turks can’t keep the fishing boats here tied up for weeks, can they?’ I asked.

  Our oarsman shrugged. ‘Venice couldn’t,’ he said. ‘Arsenali would down tools. Don’t know about fuckin’ Turks.’ He was Aldo Bendetti, and he looked more Moorish than Richard. He was also the only sailor with three cavalrymen. He sucked his teeth for a while and then pointed north. ‘Must be boats up north,’ he said. ‘Stands to reason. We could float down in the dark.’

  ‘How do we rescue Maestro Zeno?’ I asked.

  No one had an answer.

  ‘Genoa sent the Green Count a dozen heavy galleys,’ I said. ‘Would they also send transports to move a Turkish army?’

  Bendetti spat. ‘Only God and Christ know what a Genoese would do,’ he said.

  ‘The Genoese are better servants of Christ than you godless Venetians,’ Richard said.

  I suspect I rolled my eyes. But we found some sausage and a small pig, and we cooked them in secret – the worst Moslems who ever lived – and drank some stolen wine.

  ‘Like old times,’ I said to Richard over the fire.

  He smiled, and his teeth glinted. ‘I was just thinking the same,’ he said.

  We walked back to camp, and made our preparations. We meant to go the next night, taking Zeno from his guards, and we chose horses and an escape route into the hills.

  But while I was standing, looking at a horse, a pair of Turks grabbed me and threw me to the ground.