‘No, Great Lord,’ Swan said. ‘It is from the Pope. There are letters I do not open, and masters it is best to serve with care.’
‘In this you are wise,’ the Sultan said. ‘Indeed, this is the first thing that you have said that finds favour with me. I detest men who are bought, and love men who are simple servants.’
Swan said nothing. The heavy parchment was unfolded and laid out flat, four densely written sheets. The parchment crackled, and the whole was handed to the Sultan.
He read one line and looked up. Swan tried to keep his eyes veiled.
‘You are no friend to my servant Omar Reis,’ he said suddenly.
‘I saved his son’s life,’ Swan said.
‘Mmm,’ the Sultan commented. He went back to reading.
The whole great tented reception hall fell silent as the Sultan read the Pope’s letter.
Swan found it difficult to breathe.
He couldn’t help himself. He raised his eyes and saw Omar Reis. The Turkish officer was smiling softly, as if gazing at something of enormous value and beauty.
Swan made himself breathe.
For the first time, he willed himself to think of the fight with the man in the darkness under the walls of Rhodos. He made himself imagine it. So visceral was the image in his mind that the Sultan fell away, and Omar Reis, and for an eternity of seconds Swan was struggling in the dark with a man and a knife.
When he drove the image away, he was sweating, but his hands were not shaking. He recovered his breathing and he looked at Omar Reis and right through him.
The Sultan looked up from the letter. He spoke very quietly to the chamberlain.
‘The Sultan grants private audience to the emissary of Venice,’ said the chamberlain.
‘The Pope,’ Swan corrected with resignation.
The Sultan made a small sign with his fingers. The chamberlain flinched. ‘The Pope’s ambassador will have private audience with the sword of the Prophet Muhammad, on his name be reverence and peace,’ he said. He looked to be Greek – Swan wondered whether he had been one of the imperial chamberlains at Blacharnae, newly converted to Islam.
Men began to shuffle out of the three doors – one behind the Sultan, and the other two behind Swan. The Sultan’s eyes were locked on Swan’s, and Swan tried not to acknowledge that he knew this, keeping his eyes cast down. He did manage a glance at the dais behind the Sultan.
Omar Reis was gone.
Swan took a deep breath, like a man who has been drowning deep under water.
This is insane, he thought.
Last, but by no means least, the chamberlain bowed and withdrew.
The Sultan followed him with his eyes. He beckoned Swan closer.
Swan had been careful not to fully meet the Sultan’s eyes. He had heard from a number of men, Jews, Venetians and Turks, that when the Sultan was in a difficult mood, he had men killed for meeting his eyes. But closer in, it was difficult not to look at him.
He was of middling height, and of course sat on a cushion, on a raised dais so that his eye level was still above Swan’s. He wore a magnificent white silk turban and in the middle of it glowed the largest diamond Swan had ever seen on a golden stalk that supported a single, perfect peacock plume. When the Sultan tilted his head, the plume moved distractingly. Swan assumed he did it on purpose.
In those eyes, intelligence burned as passion burns in a young lover. Swan caught that in a flash, and then averted his eyes from the lord of most of the Middle Sea.
‘Do you have it?’ the Sultan asked hungrily.
Swan took a deep breath and let it out. ‘Are we speaking of a ring, Great Lord?’ he asked. ‘Truly, I do not know the contents of the Holy Father’s missive.’
‘The ring,’ the Sultan said.
‘I do not have it,’ Swan admitted. ‘I can get it.’
‘You can send for it,’ the Sultan said.
‘I think I would rather fetch it myself,’ Swan said.
‘Tell me of it,’ the Sultan said.
‘It is red-gold, and has in it a diamond almost as great as the one that graces Your Majesty’s turban,’ Swan said. ‘Into the face of the diamond is carved the likeness of Herakles, or Hercules, the Greek demigod.’
‘Spare me a description of Herakles, whose image I have known since I was a boy,’ the Sultan snapped. ‘I am a follower of the Prophet, not an ignorant fool.’ But his voice softened. ‘Carved in diamond? How?’
Swan shrugged. ‘The ancients knew a way. Perhaps carved with another diamond?’
The Sultan nodded. ‘And?’
‘It was the ring worn by Alexander, King of Macedon. I wore it for many months,’ Swan said. ‘It is potent.’
‘I thought as much,’ the Sultan said. ‘I thought you had it on even now.’
‘It is in Belgrade,’ Swan said.
The Sultan nodded. ‘Of course, I could have you tormented until you wrote a letter to have it brought to me,’ he said.
Swan tried not to wince. ‘And yet …’ he said softly.
‘Yes. You are brave and crafty, Inglis. And a bit of a fool, too, which I confess I like. Tell me, have you truly lain with Omar Reis’s daughter?’ The Sultan leaned forward, as if they were comrades.
Swan knew that sultans and emperors have no comrades. ‘That would be a foolish, ugly boast,’ Swan said. ‘I met her once, and rescued her falcon from a tree.’
Then he raised his eyes for the first time, and met the Sultan’s blue eyes looking down at him. There was a ferocious, predatory intelligence there – and amusement.
‘I can have the ring simply by taking Belgrade,’ the Sultan said. ‘And give you to Omar Reis to do with as he pleases.’
Swan tried to keep breathing. ‘But of course,’ he said, and he knew there was a touch of panic in his voice, ‘I am an ambassador of His Holiness. Nor, if you will pardon me, Great Lord, are you so very sure of taking Belgrade.’
The Sultan’s hand came down like that of a swordsman striking, and the parchment cracked like a whip. ‘You lie, Christian dog. I hold Belgrade in the palm of my hand.’
Swan was looking at the floor, waiting for the mutes with bowstrings to come and kill him – which would be the very best end he was likely to have, at this rate. But he knew the story of Scheherazade, and he knew his role, even if he was to assume that Omar Reis was in the tent chamber behind the Sultan, listening.
‘There is plague in your camp,’ Swan said.
The Sultan’s face gave him away.
‘Do they not dare to tell you?’ Swan asked. ‘I dare. There is plague in your camp, your engineers have mis-sited the new battery, and you have lost your fleet.’
Having delivered all the information he had, most of it guesswork, Swan had no dice left to throw. A calm came over him – he breathed like a swordsman breaths between parries.
The Sultan put his chin in his hand and looked at Swan, head cocked at an oddly coquettish angle. ‘Plague?’
‘They were laying corpses out by the slave camp,’ Swan said. ‘I know what plague looks like, Great King.’
And then, for a remarkable time, both men were silent.
The Sultan suddenly nodded as if someone had spoken. ‘Ser Suane,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in astrology?’
‘Of course,’ Swan answered.
The Sultan scratched his beard. ‘Your Pope bids me convert to Christianity, and you will give me this ring.’ He shook his head. ‘I confess to a fascination with the tripartite god, but I would not betray my fathers. I will have the ring. What would you – personally – accept to fetch it for me? I can offer many good things.’
A thousand thousand thoughts came to Swan – betrayals, promises of betrayal, plots and counter-plots. But in the end, he knew he was being toyed with, and there was no point. So he shrugged.
‘Great King, flower of felicity and pearl of wisdom, I might tell you lies, and you would see through them. Let me save us both time. You do not mean to make me Grand Vizier in exchange for the ring, but only t
ake it from my corpse, and I, I confess, do not mean to fetch it for you.’ He bowed.
The Sultan chuckled. ‘An honourable rogue,’ he said. ‘I will have the ring when Belgrade falls.’
Swan bowed. ‘Perhaps.’
‘So – if I am perhaps to have this bauble, you may perhaps have your life.’ The Sultan nodded and snapped the fingers of his right hand, and the chamberlain appeared instantly. ‘Have this man taken under guard to a lodging of my providing,’ he said.
‘There are military couriers demanding audience, my lord,’ said the chamberlain. ‘Some disturbance by the river.’
Swan guessed that the Sultan meant to use him as a pawn later – a hostage. Although it was just possible that, drunk with power as he was, he was giving Swan a genuine chance at life – a turn of the dice.
Swan had never had a plan, per se. But he had been prepared to capitalise if Fortuna allowed. He followed the chamberlain, even as two janissary officers were led in by another entrance.
Swan could guess from their expressions what they were going to say, even as a very large janissary, with his yataghan drawn, fell into step beside him.
The chamberlain didn’t raise his voice. ‘This is Salim,’ he said, ‘who will escort you to your lodgings.’
It sounded like a death sentence to Swan.
The janissary was to Swan’s right. He didn’t grab Swan or manhandle him, but Swan was within easy reach of the sword, and unarmed. The enormous tent was well lit, the silk carrying light from lamps and even torches, and the edge of the yataghan looked razor sharp.
They were moving along a corridor of silk, about twenty paces long. Swan had come this way and knew it. His mind ran like a horse in a great race …
He couldn’t count on them letting him live, and the way the janissary held his sword led Swan to believe that the Sultan’s gift was to be a clean death, just outside the tent. By Turkish standards, this was a gift.
It was possible that he was being taken to a tent or actual lodgings – but he could not take the risk. Or rather, he had to take an enormous risk – just …
Two women in veils and not much else emerged from the silk hangings to the right – the sword side – of the janissary.
Now.
Swan sidestepped behind the janissary as the Turk sidestepped to his left to avoid the two women. Swan’s timing was exact – the man had a fraction of a heartbeat to realise his prisoner was moving, and then Swan had his left hand on the janissary’s sword-elbow, and he drove his eating pricker through the man’s skull and into his brain with an open-palmed slap that had all his fear, all his tension, all his trembling and sweat and anger in it, and then his left hand went down the dead janissary’s right arm to the wrist and held it even as his now empty right hand wrapped itself around the dead man’s hand to strip the sword from it.
One of the women put her hand to her mouth.
Swan glanced at them, and in Greek said, ‘Please, be silent a little longer,’ and then, with one pass forward and a roll of his hips, cut through the wall of the tent from head height to the floor, and stepped out into the darkness.
Perhaps they were not Greek. One of them screamed.
Swan spared one glance at the roof of the tent to orient himself. Then he began to move quickly to his right, while his sword began to sever the great guy ropes holding the Sultan’s palace upright.
Another scream cut the night. He was almost night blind, but the light from the tent – it was itself like a great lantern – showed the ropes clearly enough, and the yataghan was so sharp that Swan had only to drag it along a rope to cut it. He missed several, but he knew from raising pavilions that there were just a few that held the weight of the great cross-poles.
He heard them – palace guards and janissaries – arguing. It was always handy that men tended to want to place blame before acting. He cut two more ropes and ran a few paces, cut another, and another.
He was running out of time, but he now had a plan he loved, and he intended to try it. He ran south, away from the siege lines. They would expect him to make for the city, he had decided.
He cut a heavy rope that he hoped was one of the supports for the main beam, and he felt the tent move. It was forty feet high at the central ridge, with towers opening at either end like a Burgundian tent, except on a grand scale. Swan had seen the wagon-wheel supports for the towers and the central beam. He understood the design.
His vandalism had purpose. And as he cut another side rope, and another, he saw two more fly out of the ground as the weight of the whole edifice was brought to bear on the few survivors on the east side of the pavilion.
He pivoted at full stride and ran south, towards Omar Reis’s camp. Behind him the Sultan’s palace gave a shudder as if it was alive, and the whole massive pavilion began to subside to the west, pulled by the ropes Swan had left there. Men screamed, and women. The silk of the tent caught fire from one of the hanging lamps and of course, in falling, all the lamps spilled their lamp oil.
Men ran for the Sultan’s tent. But Swan was already by Omar Reis’s silken palace, and he cut no ropes. Instead, he moved cautiously along the back street behind the palace where the cook tents were until he came to the regiment’s laundry. Even as a dozen men ran past, scimitars drawn, Swan was stealing clothes from the lines at the back of the servants’ tents.
He plucked up a pair of curly-toed boots that sat in the moonlight before an officer’s tent, and ran, sword in hand, across the last clear space.
Straight to the tent assigned him by Omar Reis. He watched the tent for a hundred rapid beats of his heart, but as he had expected, it was not watched, and he dived in.
Never in his life had he taken so long to change, nor ever cursed the laces and buttons that decorated all dress, east and west. It seemed to take hours to get free of his tight Venetian hose and the skin-tight doublet that laced to them, and more hours passed as he fumbled with less familiar fastenings and got his baggy trousers tucked into boots that fitted, but not comfortably. The kaftan at least he understood, and he buttoned a few buttons and left the rest, and then wound his turban as Idris had taught him in Constantinople. The irony was not lost on him.
Swan, who had been afire with fear and impatience since he got into the safe darkness, now calmly took the time to arrange his European clothes on the bed.
He wound the sash around his waist, tucked the naked sword through it, and walked into the darkness. He had only walked a few paces when the black powder with which he had filled two pottery canteens in his leather bag exploded in the ruins of the Sultan’s tent.
He laughed. The two bombs had been part of another plan, but the explosions suited him well enough now, and as yet more Turks ran towards the confusion and fire in the Sultan’s palace, Swan walked briskly away.
In some not-quite-sane part of his head, Swan wondered whether Khatun Bengül was somewhere in her father’s palace. It appealed to him to cut his way through the wall …
He shook his head and kept walking. No one challenged him, and he walked down to the bank of the river – the Sava – almost alone. There, he stripped to his braes and his shirt, but he kept the yataghan.
He leapt in, and started to swim.
It was much harder to cross, and the current and the darkness so much more disorienting than he expected, that he took in a mouthful of water and almost lost the sword and his life both. But the same fortune which had stood by him all evening did not desert him, and even as he sputtered, his shoulder struck a tree root. He grabbed at the shore as the current moved him along. The water smelled and tasted of human sewage and he retched, but he managed to get ashore and heaved himself up on a muddy bank. He spat and spat to clear his mouth, and then rose to begin walking to the Christian camp, and found that he had swum to an island.
He was too tired to face the water again. He lay in the warm air on the grass of the low island and watched the chaos in the Turkish camp. Quickly enough, the chaos became order.
With a r
oar, the Turkish guns began to fire again. They had been silent and Swan had forgotten them – but the truce was over, broken or simply expired, and the guns lit the night like red lightning. In each flash, the towers of the citadel loomed over the plain, and the Turkish camp looked like a graveyard.
Swan’s stomach began to rumble, and long strings of bubbles seemed to form in his gut, and then, when he might have safely celebrated his glorious escape, he began instead to pay the forfeit of drinking fouled water.
Day came, and Swan was fevered. He was alone on a very small island of mud, grass and four trees in the middle of the Sava, and he was feverishly aware that if he was not careful, he would be spotted by the Turkish camp. In fact, cavalry patrols were out at dawn, while his diarrhoea was just beginning to rule him, and they passed no more than thirty yards – easy bowshot – away, and he could do nothing but lie in squalid discomfort and pray.
He did a fair amount of praying that day and the ensuing night. He awoke to find himself moaning at one point – his fever gripped him completely. He had dreams of being tortured, and dreams of fighting, of killing, of drowning in a river of shit. The sun beat down on him and he had no water, and at one point he thought that Omar Reis had indeed captured him and this was his torment.
The cavalry patrols moved back and forth along the river. And the level of the Sava dropped a hand’s breadth during the day, and Swan watched the Christian side when he was awake and aware enough to do something useful, but after a while the lack of water and the state of his innards made his suffering too acute to allow him any room for planning.
At last, after what seemed like the longest day of his life, night fell. Swan waited as long as he could, but he knew that he could be seen by anyone alert enough to look – the island wasn’t high enough or wide enough to offer any cover.
As soon as the darkness was full, Swan dragged himself to the edge of the water and slipped in on the Christian side. To his relief and disgust, the water was only over his head in this channel for about twenty paces, and there was little current and even more effluvia. He got across, exhausted and parched and desperate to wash himself clean of the filth, and dragged himself ashore.
Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Seven Page 4