Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Seven

by Christian Cameron

  But he was. He thought about it, and then dismissed the thought as unimportant.

  The line of men-at-arms and pages was suprisingly crisp. Swan looked left and right, his sabatons crushing the wheat of what had once been a farm field, and felt … huge. He felt as if he was all of them, and they were all him. The feeling was so sudden, so powerful, that tears came to his eyes and in his head he mocked himself for all this raw emotion.

  I’m so tired I can’t think, he told himself, but his legs powered him forward, and then men on either side of him, Balthazar Pico of Ferrara, one of the Malatesta men-at-arms, and Raimondo Amato, a southerner, grinned at him.

  Off to their right, the German crusaders under Von Ewald and Von Bulow came down off the wall. They too came forward, their crossbowmen trailing behind.

  And dozens of the vilani, the Hungarian peasants, were running ahead of them, calling out to each other, some with bows and more with farm tools, shovels, picks and spears, as if this was a great attack, and the Turks were beaten. Swan daydreamt for a moment, and then their short sweep across the wheat and grass ended in a dirty climb up the front face of the Turkish redoubt. It was high, and strong, timbered, the labour of countless Christian slaves.

  Swan was badly winded when he got to the top, and the world spun a little, and he hadn’t had to fight anyone. Off to his right, Will Kendal whistled.

  ‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the fucking saints. Look at that.’

  Swan didn’t immediately turn his head to look at Kendal, even though he spoke in English, and his Cumbrian penetrated Swan’s tired head immediately. Because he was arrested by the sight of the Turkish camp, hidden, until that moment, by the height of the low ridge and the massive earthwork. Now it was close. Very, very close. And it was not dead. Swan had nursed a tiny hope that it was abandoned, the fighting done. But there were a great many Turks, and they glittered with steel.

  Morbioli caught his shoulder. ‘Here comes your boy again,’ he said. ‘That boy is running his guts out. Is there water here?’

  Ladislav was already in among the guns, head down with Willoughby. The Germans had more sense than the Italians … they hadn’t come up the front face of the redoubt, but had walked around it and were coming up the path on the back face.

  Swan was still taking it in.

  ‘Officers on me. Now.’ Swan panted the order as if he was a real captain. It was growing to be a habit.

  None of the ‘officers’ had more than ten paces to cover. And they came with alacrity.

  Swan looked around – Willoughby, Kendal, Ladislav, Von Ewald, Di Silva and Columbino and finally Morbioli, who had been pissing down the back wall and was lacing his hose. Morbioli was still acting for Orietto, who was recovering. They hoped.

  Swan looked at the Turkish lines.

  ‘Whoever sited this redoubt has made a terrible error,’ he said. ‘It is defensible from either direction.’

  No one spoke.

  ‘Ladislav, could you turn the lighter guns on the Turks?’ he asked.

  Ladislav laughed. Not a pretty laugh. ‘I will see if I can find the time,’ he said. ‘Give me all these peasants. I will do something … good.’

  Swan nodded, and Ladislav and the other Bohemians began to call out in Hungarian and other languages; Latin, and Wallachian, Swan guessed. And Serb.

  Kendal leaned forward into the circle. ‘Ser Thomas – you must see this.’

  Swan held up his hand. ‘A moment, Will. I think we’re all of the same mind. To do something – something to remember.’

  This time, there was no answering argument. They all nodded. Some smiled.

  ‘Well, then. We have the best knights in Christendom, and a battery of Turkish guns, and fifty good archers.’ Swan looked around. ‘It would be something if we could not make a mark for ourselves, eh? Hein?’

  No one spoke.

  Swan sighed. They all wanted to be heroes.

  ‘Now will you look?’ Kendal asked.

  As Swan turned, one of the archers, looking a little sheepish, unfurled a large, cheap, painted canvas cross of St George. The archers had no doubt made it themselves. They were English, and as the only Englishmen for a thousand miles, they needed everyone to know they were English.

  The blood-red cross flapped once in the fitful morning breeze. It was easy to see, fifty feet above the flat plain of Hungary.

  From the walls behind them there came a cheer. It wasn’t a great cheer, but it was audible. It rolled over the plain.

  And then, from the banks of the Sava, there came another cheer. It was a great cheer. It was like the sound of thunder. The warning of a great storm to come, the sound that makes wise women pull in their washing, and wise men look for an indoor project.

  Swan’s head went to the north, to the Sava.

  ‘Told you,’ Kendal spat.

  Swan’s heart pounded, and his throat tightened.

  The banks of the Sava were crowded. Packed. The whole ‘army’ of the crusaders was out of their camp and pressing down to the very margin of the Sava. Swan was high enough to see it all, and he could see thirty thousand crusaders, some already knee deep in the Sava. Indeed, he could see the low mud islands on which he had been so very sick, and men were pushing through the mud.

  And they shouted again. This was better coordinated, a rampart of sound that swept to the Turkish camp.

  ‘Ready to fire,’ Ladislav said with a cackle.

  In almost no time, he and the jobaggi had turned four Turkish guns, a falcon and three falconets. In front of the muzzles, two dozen more jobaggi were digging like men possessed, filling wickerwork baskets as high as a man and as broad, left for repairs by the Christian slaves. Even as Swan watched, the gabions were filling. Six more were brought up from the cache at the base of the redoubt – they were weightless until filled. A back wall was coming up at the speed of a proud peasant’s spade.

  And more peasants were coming out of the fortress.

  Clemente pulled himself up the front face, disdaining to run to the rear. He fell to one knee by Swan.

  ‘The voivode says …’ he panted. ‘Oh,’ he groaned, and Cornazzano gave him water.

  ‘Clear away, there,’ Ladislav called in Hungarian. Peasants scrambled, but they were all grinning, and they put their hands to their ears and watched like boys playing.

  Clemente took a deep breath. ‘The voivode … Hunyadi says,’ he snatched a breath, ‘do nothing …’

  ‘Fire in the hole!’ Ladislav called to his mates.

  ‘Do nothing to provoke the Turks!’ Clemente got out.

  The falcon fired. The sound was decisive, as loud as anything Swan had ever heard so close. One deadly bark.

  The day was too bright to mark the fall of the shot until it hit.

  The first falconet fired with a high-pitched bark – sharper, and somehow angrier.

  The second falconet fired. Men were screaming in the Turkish camp.

  The third falconet fired. By luck, or the will of God, the last ball struck a tent pole in the Sultan’s re-built palace tent, smashing it, and the whole left side of the great silken edifice collapsed like a dancer bowing in her skirts, slowly, with grace and a certain dignity.

  Swan closed his eyes and opened them again. And for the first time since the cavalry fight on the plain, he enjoyed being in command. It was like a giant prank.

  ‘The voivode says he is forbidding any attacks on the Turks whatsoever. He says that we have won, and there is no need to take any risk. That’s what he says.’ Clemente was watching the gradual collapse of the Sultan’s tent. The heavy tent lines were snapping, and now the right cone was also collapsing.

  All the Bohemians were reloading the falcon. Twenty Hungarians were turning a demi-cannon, with a flat bed, lifting it by simple force. The rest were back to filling gabions.

  Swan’s grin was threatening to break his face.

  Von Ewald laughed. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Some might say this was a little pr
ovoking.’

  Another thunderous cheer swept over the Sava.

  There were people swimming in the river.

  And boats. Many, many boats.

  Men were swimming horses across, too. A hundred – two hundred.

  ‘Ready!’ called a happy Bohemian.

  Two of the former Hussites were training Hungarian peasants as gunners on the spot. The demi-cannon was turned, end for end. The peasants were resting, spitting on their hands, while another dozen cut space for the bigger gun on the Turkish side of the redoubt.

  Swan looked at the other two Turkish batteries, the great gun battery on its own pedestal of earth and the smaller battery closer to the Danube.

  There were no gunners and no Turks in either.

  Far distant, half a mile away, there was activity at the back of the Turkish camp. And closer in, a mob of mixed infantry – or perhaps just a mob – was being harangued by an officer on a horse.

  Sam Cressy dropped him. It was the shot of a lifetime – the man’s second magnificent shot in two days.

  The mob hesitated.

  Turkish archers, not the elite janissaries but peasant archers like the Hungarian jobaggi archers, came forward hesitantly, killed a few Hungarians, and were caught on the killing ground by the pages and the English. One wave of arrows and bolts passed over them and they ran, leaving a dozen corpses.

  ‘Ready to fire,’ Ladislav said. The Bohemians served the guns like demons serving the devils of hell; they were loaded faster than Swan had ever seen it done by Turks or Greeks or the knights of St John.

  He realised, with a feeling of foolishness, that Ladislav was waiting on his word. He nodded. ‘Fire,’ he said, almost casually.

  The four guns went off in rhythm, one – two – three – four. Four furrows were dug in the mob that had hesitated at the edge of the Turkish camp. Tents provided no cover, and every ball carved a path like a malicious plough. The furrows were red.

  The Hungarians, already experts, ran back to their places and continued filling the gabions on the rear face.

  Swan was fully aware that he had caught the Turks with their baggy trousers around their ankles and that he was burning a lifetime’s worth of luck standing here and throwing iron balls into the Turkish camp. He knew it was time to go, the gesture made, the jest triggered, the prank a thing of legend.

  But it was fun. And for the first time in two weeks, he was completely enjoying himself. He couldn’t even find his usual empathy for his foes.

  One of the younger Englishmen jumped up on a newly filled gabion to help pack the earth down, and then, inspired, whipped down the tails of his hose and shone his buttocks at the Turks. He managed, by luck or training, to loose a tremendous fart.

  The laughter carried.

  Men on the walls of the fortress above and behind them were cheering steadily.

  ‘We should go,’ Swan said to Di Silva.

  Di Silva looked at him as parents look at children who don’t understand a simple task.

  ‘Why?’ the Portuguese knight asked. ‘We should die here.’

  His words chilled Swan.

  But Di Silva had a faraway look in his eye. ‘Ever since Constantinople fell, they have been invincible,’ he said. ‘Now we mock them.’

  It had never fully occurred to Swan – not, by birth, a warrior – that to these men – the fighting men of Christendom – the last four years of defeat and degradation had been a humiliation for the whole class. The whole order of chivalry. Every defeat a knife in their guts. In that moment, when the usually practical Portuguese knight lit up with determination to die, Swan saw what he had missed even with the Order – that the loss of the great city had taken the heart from many men. And they wanted that heart back.

  He looked at them, and none of them, not a peasant, not a knight, was looking over his shoulder or begging with his eyes for retreat.

  Swan thought of the woman in brown. The slave girl.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It is our saint’s day.’

  A party of light horse cantered up around the camp, sweeping in from the Sava side. Ladislav laid and fired one falconet, and three horses seemed to explode, the two-inch ball ploughing through all three animals.

  The cavalry froze.

  ‘This is what I tell you,’ Ladislav said, head bobbing in enthusiasm. ‘Reload,’ he called, and went for a drink of water.

  Swan noted that they swabbed the guns with water every shot – the Bohemians did. And that men were drinking water from the two great pottery pithoi that the Turks had set into the dirt and gravel of the redoubt’s floor.

  ‘We’re going to need water,’ he said. ‘If we are staying,’ he added, experimentally.

  Two of the young Hungarians were pushed away by their mates. They didn’t want to go, but they did.

  The light cavalry trotted back around the edge of the camp to get out of range of the light guns.

  Swan shook his head. ‘What the hell is wrong with them?’ he asked God, the dead Di Vecchio, and anyone near by. ‘Why the hell are they not reacting?’

  Redoubts under enemy fire – and there were now good Turkish archers lofting arrows from an incredible range – are very informal places. Hugh Willoughby was resting from serving a gun, his face black with powder smoke. He met Swan’s eye. ‘We pastes ’em last night an’ too many lords died,’ he guessed. ‘I seen it happen in France, to us. Men like me – we knew ’ow to beat the French. But no one will obey me. I say, all the order-givers is down. Dead, wounded, too fuckin’ tired to move an arm.’

  Swan thought of his audience with the Sultan. ‘And too terrified of the Sultan to take a chance.’

  ‘Ready to fire,’ Ladislav said.

  This time the whole battery fired. The two great cannon were useful as a viewing point, if a little hot, and Swan had his best view of the targets standing on the breech of the largest, but both were already spiked. They lay on enormous beds of wood, tied down with ropes and great iron bands, and there was no number of peasants in the world, no matter how enthusiastic, that could turn them.

  The black barrels were hot. So hot that when Swan pushed his weary legs to climb on the breech again and watch the fall of the shot, the black iron began to burn his feet through his fighting shoes.

  But he missed the impact of the balls, because of the cheers that greeted the bloom of smoke from his guns. It was closer.

  On the near bank of the Sava, practically at his feet, a horde of little boats, and most of the river fleet, had landed.

  One man was out of his boat first. He had a white robe and a cowl thrown back, and a great cross in his hand.

  Swan cursed.

  Even as he watched, the man began to climb the bank. He was a half-mile away, or a little less, and he was walking straight at Swan, and behind him came more Dominicans, and then a crowd of black dots.

  ‘Oh, Christ Jesus,’ Swan said.

  The whole crusader ‘army’, thirty thousand virtually unarmed peasants, was coming over the Sava. Into the waiting arms of the Turkish wolf.

  Swan had had many pranks go wrong. The time he’d filled his father’s red hat with mice sprang to mind. Lying under his mother’s great bed to surprise her … that had been particularly ill-planned.

  ‘I am snatching defeat from the very jaws of victory,’ Swan muttered.

  ‘Have a little faith,’ Di Silva growled. ‘You are watching a miracle.’

  ‘I am?’ Swan asked. He wanted to. He very much wanted to watch a miracle, and get home to tell of it. He thought of Sophia, in far Venice, or wherever she was, and he thought, just for a moment, what a magical thing it would be to come home with news of such a miracle. A victory.

  The Turkish horse emerged from behind their camp at a gallop. They were heedless of the Christian forces on the plain and crossing the Sava, determined to brush the defenders aside and scout the battery. Even two hundred paces away, their screams drowned the Christian cheers, and their arrows began to kill.

  The Turks
were that good.

  Hugh Willoughby died first, standing, as was his wont, in the redoubt to make his arrows count. He was hit three times as he fell, and dead before he struck the ground.

  Men died, but the Turkish light horse had made an unaccustomed mistake – a childish error, in their rage and perhaps their humiliation. They missed, or ignored, the three hundred horsemen who had just swum across the Sava.

  Three hundred men – Greeks, Albanians and Serbs – charged up the riverbank and into the rear of the Turks.

  Constantine Grazias was going to avenge Constantinople, beneath the walls of Belgrade.

  Swan watched it happen with … awe.

  The Turks – probably the finest light cavalry in the world – were no fools. They broke at contact, trusting to their superior horses to get them clear, breaking into small groups, shooting over the rumps of their horses. A hundred men were down in fifty beats of a calm man’s heart. The largest group went straight into the camp, only to find themselves trapped by a crowd of their own disorganised infantry, and the rest, better led, cut their way clear and rode back the way they’d come.

  The lone white figure with the cross kept walking up from the riverbank. Swan watched in horror as the Turks rode north, aimed at him like a swallowtail arrowhead of horseflesh, spreading as they rode. Grazias and his stradiotes, unaware of the impending disaster, ignored the smaller group and began methodically cutting the larger group, trapped against the camp, to ribbons.

  Swan wanted to turn his head away.

  The white-robed figure walked forward, the cross raised before him. If the Turks were aware, they gave no sign.

  A gun fired from the fortress. Someone was trying to warn the men on the plain.

  Swan loathed Capistrano, but he knew what was about to happen – the friar’s death would be the beginning of a massacre.

  Below him in the battery, Ladislav waved his portfire like a conjuror with a magic wand. ‘Ready!’ he called.

  Swan really wanted to look away.

  And then the dust of the galloping Turks obscured them. The plain was dry, the dust rose, and he could no longer see the Turks or the Dominicans. Beyond them he could make out an immense crowd of crusaders coming up the bank of the river, and they were singing.