Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Three

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I had thought to take my company to Mistras. This was Bessarion’s order. From there I would be in contact with Rome.’ Swan shrugged.

  Scanderberg nodded. His face was ruddy in the firelight; his eyes sparkled with intelligence. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘In Morea all these knights might be some use. Here, they are like tits on a bull. You understand?’

  Swan was too tired to fight. ‘All too well,’ he said.

  ‘How much of this money do you keep for yourself?’ Scanderberg asked.

  Swan raised an eyebrow.

  Bembo leaned forward. ‘Your Excellency, it is not our money to keep, or even to disperse without word from our masters.’

  Scanderberg gave Swan a twisted smile. ‘So if I have Sasha here cut your throat and search your purse, I will not find that you have half the money there?’

  Swan tugged at his beard. ‘I’d need a much bigger purse, to start with,’ he said.

  Scanderberg laughed.

  Swan reached into his shirt and produced a single financial instrument on the Medici Bank; the value was a little more than a thousand Venetian ducats. ‘All I have is paper, on the Pope’s banks,’ Swan said.

  Scanderberg handed the sheet of close-written parchment unread to his Catholic priest, who put wood-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of his nose and began to read.

  ‘Are there any Turks in the field now?’ Alessandro asked.

  Scanderberg asked one of his men the same question in Turkish. Swan knew Turkish; he was fairly cautious of who he told about his knowledge, and he carefully kept his face blank.

  The man, addressed as Suleyman, looked like Satan incarnate in a pointed beard, bushy eyebrows and a long, curling moustache. He played with the ends of his moustache, considered, and then told his master, in Turkish, that Mehmet had a force in the field already; that they had ridden from Edirne just ten days before, and they would raid down into Corinth and beyond if no one stopped them.

  Swan looked at Scanderberg. ‘And can we get a message to Venice?’ he asked.

  Scanderberg asked another of his men, and there was a long discussion in Albanian, a language in which Swan had no fluency at all. Eventually Scanderberg nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Give Stefan here a letter tomorrow and it will be in Venice in a week.’

  Alessandro smiled. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I could be in Venice in a week.’

  Scanderberg nodded.

  Swan brightened. ‘And perhaps I …’ he began.

  Alessandro laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘You’re the captain. Far too important.’

  ‘Damn you,’ Swan said.

  Bembo smiled. ‘I might even come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the list, shall I?’

  Bembo was still smiling when Scanderberg nodded at him. ‘What did you do with your Turkish prisoner?’ he asked.

  Bembo shrugged. ‘I let him go,’ he said.

  Scanderberg, who had ordered a man tortured to death to educate his troops, nodded. ‘It is good to have men who owe you a life, on the other side.’ He looked at Swan. ‘If you are captured, you would do well to have friends.’

  Just the word ‘captured’ felt to Swan like a kick in the stomach. His limbs felt nerveless. He had trouble breathing.

  ‘I’ll leave you to your lists,’ Scanderberg said. ‘Don’t forget to bring me money.’

  An hour later, in their shared pavilion, the two of them were going over the list; over and over.

  ‘At least two ordinary galleys to get the men over to the Peloponnese,’ Bembo said, musing. ‘And a horse transport.’

  Swan nodded. ‘The only profit these men have made is in horseflesh,’ he said.

  Bembo nodded. ‘Even if I can gather these things, this is a heavy bill. Four thousand English arrows? Six hundred brass and iron buckles, all sizes? An armourer?’ He shrugged.

  Swan shrugged back. ‘If we cannot have all this, then best you arrange shipping and we sail home,’ he said.

  Bembo picked his teeth. ‘Well … Venice is the best armed city in the world; I suspect I can supply most of this straight out of the Arsenal, or rather, Loredan can. The question is whether Venice and Bessarion actually want to do so, and in a timely manner.’ He frowned, warmed his hands over the brazier and looked at Swan. ‘Rope?’

  ‘Of course rope. War runs on rope – even Xenophon knew that.’

  Swan was under no illusion that his supply of horse fodder depended on his willingness to hand over the Pope’s money. On the other hand, he also understood that Scanderberg needed the alliance with Venice; the old bandit knew he could either fight the Serenissima or the Sublime Porte but not both at once.

  Swan signed over three thousand ducats, and the supplies of fodder and food flowed. Scanderberg was a little apologetic.

  ‘I do not have so much food that I have some to give away,’ he said. ‘You do not want to see what we do to the peasants to get the sausage,’ he added.

  ‘No one likes how sausage is made,’ Swan said, translating an English aphorism into Italian and then into Latin.

  Scanderberg roared. ‘You are good,’ he said. ‘Amusing. Funny. God help you if the Sultan captures you, though.’ The man leaned close. ‘Listen, Suanabeg. I have a liking for you. Go home to Italy. You do not want to die the way Omar Reis says he will kill you.’

  Swan shut that out of his mind. His men were building huts; the weather had got colder, and the English archers and some of the Italian pages were showing the men-at-arms how to make a hurdle and how to stack them to make warm, dry tents. The rest of the day was spent cutting fodder and collecting firewood for the nights, and making bedding for the sick horses.

  An Italian mountebank offered to try physicking the horses. Swan offered to let him try one, a gelding who couldn’t stand. The man rolled his eyes and spent the day and ensuing night with the horse, which stood well enough and began to eat after the end of the ‘doctor’s’ ministrations. His name was Benedetto Crespi, and he was tall, gangly and had come with a Neapolitan company, or so he said, and married an Albanian.

  Swan gave him some money and he began to work with Kendal and a dozen other men interested in horses.

  ‘He knows what he’s about,’ Kendal said. ‘An’ he talks to ’em. My da’ used to talk to horses.’

  Crespi settled in to the extent of moving his tent, his wife and their son Ettore into the company camp.

  Rest and food worked their own miracles. Most of the men of the company had been in the field since they left Venice in May; two months of pursuit and hard lying in difficult terrain had injured as many men as the Turks had during the siege. Four days of rain found them well encamped; Crespi led the whole company in constructing temporary shelters to keep the direct rain off the horses; fires were built, and the horse herd continued its recovery despite the weather.

  ‘Pay that man anything he asks,’ Columbino said. ‘I have never seen anyone do more with horses under such conditions.’

  Indeed, given that warhorses were irreplaceable in Albania and worth fifty florins or more apiece even in northern Italy, the man’s skills verged on the demonic and his work in saving just a handful of horses would have been worth hundreds of ducats. He was modest about his talents, and admitted that he had learned a great deal from the Albanians themselves.

  ‘They work magic with horses, but much of it is good sense,’ he said. ‘And some they say they learn from the Turks and some from the Romani. And some I bring from Napoli, eh?’

  ‘What shall I pay you, Messire Dottore?’ Swan asked.

  ‘I am not a dottore of Padua,’ Crespi admitted. ‘I only call myself dottore when no one will stop me.’ He shrugged. ‘What does a corporal make?’

  ‘A man who leads five lances?’ Swan asked. ‘Depends on the contract. Twenty ducats a month, perhaps.’

  ‘I would ask that you pay me the same,’ the horse doctor said.

  Swan nodded. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, his heart singing. When yet another of their prize Arabi
ans rose from the mud the next day and began to walk about and take food, Swan sought out the horse doctor and shook his hand. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘You will be paid as a corporal.’

  Di Silva, whose shoulders still ached from wounds at Belgrade, nodded when the horse doctor was gone. ‘Now we need a man-leech as good as the horse doctor,’ he said.

  And in the second week after Bembo left them, the fights started. Will Kendal was first; he wrestled with a big Albanian, threw him, and then walked away to collect bets.

  The man took a knife from one of his mates and went for Kendal.

  Swan wasn’t there to see it, but he heard about it from Columbino, and then he had to explain the whole killing to Scanderberg, who merely shrugged.

  ‘If women become involved,’ he said, ‘there will be even more killing.’

  And that proved true. As the second week wore into the third, several local women appeared in the company camp, and almost immediately both the frequency and intensity of conflict increased.

  Di Silva worked it out. ‘We’re rich,’ he said. ‘They’re poor.’

  Kendal shook his head. ‘I’ve never been rich anywhere,’ he said.

  Ser Columbino scratched under his chin. ‘We need to get out of here before this gets ugly,’ he said.

  Kendal looked wistfully at the latest pair of honey-haired Albanian women to ‘wander’ into the camp. ‘I need to be shot of yon before I do something I enjoy,’ he said.

  Swan and Kendal exchanged a look.

  He tried setting their own watch; he had the manpower, and he put together a watch bill of four watches with a quarter guard. They were to stop any civilian from entering the camp.

  That was a spectacular failure.

  Clemente, a remarkable lecher by any standard, wrinkled his nose. ‘They turn the guard post into a knocking shop,’ he said.

  Swan rolled his eyes and sent Constantine Grazias to deal with the recreants.

  In the end it was Di Orietto who told Swan that it could not be done.

  ‘The women want the money,’ he said. ‘The men want the women. There’s no way to stop them, short of building a palisade and digging in.’

  Swan laughed, imagining that they might be under siege. ‘The monstrous regiment of women,’ he muttered, but then he shook his head. ‘Never mind. You are right. Any thoughts?’

  Orietto shook his head wearily. ‘I would not care at all, except that the fighting grows worse, and two Albanians are dead today, and my page is badly wounded.’

  Swan swore, and went to see Scanderberg.

  Scanderberg nodded. ‘I agree that it is time for you to go,’ he said. ‘Farmers say you will have a week of good weather now. The rain is past for a few days. Perhaps you should leave tomorrow. Because some of my people are openly speaking of burning your camp. They say the honour of the Albanian nation is at stake.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘We would conquer the world, if only we could conquer ourselves,’ he said.

  Swan nodded. He had wanted to wait for Bembo’s return, but he couldn’t see any point in waiting. And a week’s good weather could save them.

  He gave the orders. He was aware that Columbino and Orietto both thought he was insane. And Di Silva pulled at his now-luxurious beard and frowned.

  ‘Messires, I do not think we can winter here,’ Swan said. ‘And I do believe we can make Mistras, if we are quick.’

  ‘It took us seven days to come fifty leagues,’ Kendal said.

  ‘We’ll have to do better than that,’ Swan said.

  ‘And if Messire Bembo doesn’t come? Di Silva asked. He shrugged. ‘Listen, Tommaso. I love the man like you do, but we are dealing with Venetians. With the best will in the world, he could be in Venice until Christmas. Or for ever. He could be arrested for something. Who can understand why a Venetian does anything?’

  Swan sighed. ‘I understand what you gentlemen are saying. I agree with all of it. Despite which, tomorrow at dawn, we will march.’

  They had Albanian guides, and Swan didn’t trust them. Swan had come to distrust his Albanian allies, and so he placed a pair of stradiotes with every Albanian and he kept them separated and compared their directions himself before making any decision.

  And from the very first, he had them travel in fighting order; armour buckled on, weapons handy.

  ‘That will slow us,’ Orietto said.

  ‘Not as much as being dead,’ Di Silva quipped. ‘I agree. There are Albanians who would either kill us themselves or sell us to the Turks.’

  And Swan also had time to worry about the Sultan and his officers. He was painfully aware that the moment they left Scanderberg’s camp, he was vulnerable; a single ambush, and he would be taken a prisoner to Constantinople or Edirne, where his life would be short and very, very bad.

  There was far too much time to think, really. The weather was beautiful; cloudless blue sky, a pleasant sun that warmed at noon and kept off the chill towards evening. But the days were very short, and only by pushing very hard could they make the distances they needed. The first day they made more than ten leagues; the second, by Swan’s reckoning, almost twice that, flying along over a stretch of what appeared to be Roman road. If heavy wagons could be said to fly.

  The third day, and they were out of soft tack and bacon. Swan felt as if he’d lived his entire life in the woods; there were no peasants, and no possibility of getting either good fodder or food for two hundred men.

  The fourth day, and there was no wine, even for officers, and only flour and a little oil as ration. The stradiotes, some of the Venetians and the English went hunting, and came back with two wild boar and two deer, and Swan was unsurprised in the dawn of the fifth day to see the carcasses picked as clean as wolves would have done. Almost a thousand English pounds of meat and fat and gristle; gone in one night.

  The fifth day their column rode into the ruins of the Roman town of Apollonia. The sea was so close they could smell it, and Swan looked at the ruins of a temple of Minerva while he ate a dish of beans that was the more delicious for being something he hadn’t eaten for days. His foragers collected food from the peasants and they camped in the Roman ruins, the horses munching contentedly on the closest approximation to oats they’d had in weeks.

  Orietto was derisive. ‘If this is the best we can do, we are doomed,’ he said.

  Swan was disposed to agree. He was also disposed, as men are, to be angry that the others had been right. In five days of glorious weather, they’d come less than a hundred and fifty Roman miles, and even then, they’d had the benefit of a stem of the great Roman road that ran, in ancient times, and even more recently, from Durazzo in the west all the way to Constantinople in the east, the major east–west highway of Crusaders and Turks, too. Without the Via Egnatia to speed their travel, they would go even more slowly, and run the risk of being lost.

  Constantly.

  ‘It is still farther from here to the Venetian post at Naupactis than it is from here to Venice,’ Di Silva said. ‘Or so I make it.’

  ‘We can follow the Viosa river …’ Swan said, cursing the tentative sound of his voice. He agreed with them.

  ‘Through the mountains?’ Kendal asked, openly derisive. ‘There’s snow on ’em. I can see it from here. An’ I ain’t ’Annibal.’

  Swan had to smile, inwardly, at the second-hand classical education that Kendal was getting.

  ‘If we make for the coast, there must be a Roman port city that corresponds to this,’ Swan said. His knowledge of the local geography had expired a hundred miles away or more. Even in Venice, they didn’t have good maps of the interior of Albania; merely the coast. He tried to remember what he had seen. ‘Aulona; Avalon, I suppose. It should be close.’

  ‘Turks have it,’ Grazias said. ‘No garrison. Just a local warlord.’

  ‘You know it?’ Swan asked, incredulous.

  ‘Our Albanian guide mentioned it as a place to avoid,’ Grazias said with a nasty smile. ‘I took an immediate interest. I’m sure Venice would like it b
ack, if we took it.’

  ‘Took it?’ Kendal, usually up for anything, had the wide eyes of outraged innocence.

  ‘Took it?’ Orietto asked. But his hand went to his beard.

  ‘Took it?’ Di Silva asked, but he was eyeing the falconet.

  ‘How far is it?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Less than twenty Roman miles,’ Grazias reported the next morning. ‘No great garrison. Two iron artillery pieces on the main tower. Four gates to the lower town, which is a sieve, and two big towers; one holds the garrison, and one looks like a ruin. There are holes in the curtain wall I could drive a horse herd through.’

  All heads turned to Swan, who nodded. ‘We take it tonight by coup de main,’ he said. ‘Word spreads, and Venice knows in two weeks. Bembo comes and fetches us, and we slip away, nobody the wiser.’

  Di Silva raised not one but both eyebrows. ‘Or the Turks send an army,’ he said. ‘In which case, we are nobody indeed.’

  Swan looked at the four empty wagons and the increasingly bony horses. ‘I agree that it’s a nearly insane risk,’ he said. ‘Anyone have a better plan?’

  Di Silva laughed. ‘Damn my eyes,’ he said. ‘I missed you. You make life so much more …’

  Orietto glanced at the Portuguese knight. ‘So English?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Di Silva said. He was looking west.

  As it proved, the most complicated part of the plan to seize the citadel of Avalon was Swan’s insistence that they have a heavy picket around their own camp all day to prevent any peasant from slipping away and selling their position to the Turks. He had no reason to believe that anyone would.

  In fact, the pickets seized not one but two wagons carrying only young men, and no supplies of any kind, both attempting to take the old Roman road to the west, and later Grazias brought in two young men in Albanian clothes who had two good horses apiece.

  ‘String them up,’ Orietto said.

  Swan shook his head. The dice were cast; he was, for him, almost silent. ‘No,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Bring them along.’

  The captured wagons were added to their own four, and the prisoners were stripped and given fairly worn Italian clothing. In exchange, young Marco and Swan himself and three of the smallest men, including one of the English archers, Ben Nettle, and Clemente, all dressed in the Albanian clothes, and Stephan, the youngest of the stradiotes, who spoke both Greek and Albanian as well as Italian and a little Turkish, acted as their interpreter. They filled one of the Albanian wagons with loaded crossbows and swords, and threw a tarp over the whole.