Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Three

by Christian Cameron

  Loredan grimaced. ‘I see that near-mortality has not lessened your negotiating skills,’ he said. He looked at Alessandro. ‘Messire Bembo?’

  Alessandro shook his head. ‘Ah, no, my friend,’ he said. ‘This Englishman is not going to budge; nor am I likely to get between you.’

  Swan nodded at Crespi. ‘Leave us, if you please,’ he said.

  He sat back, using the whole force of his will to overcome the desire to scratch under his bandages. The previous night, Crespi had washed his hands and under his nails. He said that he’d seen a dog infect itself from its claws.

  Swan sighed. ‘Of course I’ll sell you the town,’ he said. ‘But I need more than some supplies that I’ll use in pursuit of your goals.’

  Loredan nodded. ‘We hear in Venice that the Sultan has sent a raid, a razee, into the Morea,’ he said. ‘You are the only tool we have to stop it.’

  ‘Omar Reis,’ Bembo said.

  Swan’s heart rate increased.

  But he tried to sound like a man of the world. ‘And you cannot claim that I took the town for Venice,’ he said. ‘Because that would contravene your precious secret treaty with the Sultan.’

  ‘There is no such treaty,’ Loredan said, his face supremely inexpressive.

  ‘Of course,’ Swan said. ‘Forty thousand ducats; all in specie, to be paid to the compagnia in the event of my death, and which we will divide by shares.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Loredan.

  Swan had the sinking feeling that he’d asked for far too little money, but on the other hand, Bembo gave him a smile that suggested he’d done well enough.

  ‘And the passage and the stuff in the ships and passage back to Italy when we are done.’

  Loredan nodded. ‘I can promise that,’ he said. ‘Since Messire Bembo and his squadron will be staying with you. The Pope’s fleet is even now at Monemvasia. When the Lion flies over this town, we will almost instantly be at war with the Grand Turk.’ He looked at Swan. ‘A war we cannot win; a state of fifty thousand against a nation of millions; our allies are fools, idiots, as is the Pope; more Christians desire our destruction than value our service.’

  ‘Christ, why fight at all?’ Swan asked.

  Loredan nodded. ‘This is what the Senate debates over and over. Listen, you are a fine blade. You know how it is when you fight a bigger man?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Swan said.

  ‘He wishes to close and use his size against you; wrestle, grapple, throw you to the ground,’ Loredan said. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said.

  ‘You want to play long; cut at his hands, pink him with your superior point control. Yes?’

  ‘I understand, truly,’ Swan said.

  Loredan nodded. ‘But if your theory is really strong and you are confident, perhaps you open with a close play of your own; you half-sword and cross and push forward. Just to brush him back; just to reduce his confidence. Just to say, This will not be so easy.’

  Swan nodded. ‘I have done this,’ he said.

  ‘As have I,’ Loredan said. ‘I only hope it works, because if we play close and the Turk locks us in a grapple, we will see the crescent over Venice in my lifetime.’

  ‘You are very passionate,’ Swan said. He admired Loredan.

  Loredan shrugged. ‘Listen, I am Venetian. If you cut me, I bleed slightly dirty lagoon water. But I truly think that Venice is the only hope Europe has.’

  ‘Against the Turk?’ Swan asked.

  Loredan smiled bitterly. ‘Against ourselves,’ he said. ‘Do you admire the Turks?’

  ‘When they are not trying to kill me? Very much indeed,’ Swan said.

  Loredan nodded. ‘I feel the same. If Venice falls, imagine France, or Milan, or Rome as the arbiter of power. Or even taste. We are a republic; we work for our riches; we love God and good seafood and we build libraries.’

  ‘And the Arsenal,’ Swan said. He lay back. ‘You think Venice will fall?’

  Loredan shrugged. ‘Not in my lifetime, if I can help it.’

  The next morning, the Lion of St Mark rose over the town.

  No one cheered, but then no one looked sullen, and the markets were open. Swan’s men handed over the towers to forty Venetian marines, men of Venetian families who could absolutely be trusted.

  Another day passed. Swan awoke, and looked at the wall a while, and then lay looking out at the sea. Crespi came in and took his hand; counted out his pulse, and then unwrapped all his bandages, a deeply painful process.

  ‘Ha, hmmm,’ he said.

  Swan took a deep breath.

  ‘I think you should go with the compagnia,’ Crespi said. ‘At sea, we are healthier; this, too, I see all the time.’

  ‘Ships are filthy,’ Swan said.

  ‘Ever seen an outbreak of plague at sea?’ Crespi shot back. ‘No. Disease comes from land.’

  ‘This is the merest empiricism!’ Swan whined. ‘The classical authorities …’

  ‘Are not here. In fact, they are dead. You, so far, are alive.’ Crespi smiled in triumph.

  Swan knew he was a poor patient; demanding, difficult, whiny and afraid. He sighed, and allowed the Neapolitan to carry the day.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, and as if by magic, two doses of opium later, he was aboard a Venetian military galley; Clemente was making up his bed while he sat in very little discomfort in the coach of the galley, the great cushioned chest across the stern windows.

  ‘Did I see a cannon in the bows?’ he asked.

  Alessandro smiled. ‘You did,’ he said. ‘Our latest design; the builder is a Greek. Many of our Venetians hate him because he is so often right; my father wants him to become Admiral of the Arsenal. I have two guns in the bow.’

  ‘That seems to me a dangerous experiment,’ Swan said.

  Bembo shook his head. ‘We’ve used guns on ships since the Genoese War,’ he said.

  ‘The War of Chioggia?’ Swan asked. ‘That was almost a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Nearer seventy, English,’ Bembo said fondly. ‘I remember when you didn’t even know where Chioggia was, my lad,’ he added. ‘The horse-leech says you should live, now that we are ten days free of the arrows of Apollo.’

  Swan nodded. ‘I should be relieved,’ he said. ‘But the better I feel, the more I worry.’

  Bembo nodded. ‘Isn’t that always the way?’ he asked. ‘You scared me, Tommaso. I have never taken a wound as bad as yours. God grant I do not.’

  Swan shook his head. ‘It seemed little enough at the time; a cut that got across my guard.’

  Both men crossed themselves.

  They raised Corfu in a single day; a Turkish cruiser ran the moment it saw the three galleys and a round ship to windward, and their chase was unsuccessful; it vanished into the southern Albanian coast and they moved on to Corfu as if they’d planned the diversion.

  Corfu was a Venetian fortress, and Ser Columbino used the three days of good weather he had there to remuster the company; to issue and repair equipment, and to feed the horses and give them exercise.

  Swan, by Crespi’s order, stayed aboard the Santa Maria Magdalena in the harbour and listened to the guns fired to announce the hours. He read. He had not spent much time reading, not for a year, but he had a few books and the governor sent him more. He read the Bible in Latin; he read some Turkish poetry from a manuscript taken with the fortress, and he looked at Vegetius and grew bored. He found that his Greek had rotted away, but not completely, and the third day, while his company marched back and forth to the boredom and annoyance of every man and horse, he was translating a bit of the Iliad, puzzling at the archaic Ionian style and wishing he had a better grammar to help him with the odd verbs. ‘Polydamas’ puzzled him; he wondered whether it was opium that kept him from guessing the underlying verb, and it was late at night, in the midst of worrying about death, that he understood that Ionian must change some sounds completely; that the verb might have been ‘damazo’ and thus Hector was taming horses. Satisfied, he went to sleep at
last, fear banished by languages, and he woke to the kind of rosy-fingered dawn that most delighted him. He got off his hanging bed without too much difficulty, opened a pair of the stern windows, and looked out over the harbour with a deep feeling of thankfulness for being alive.

  That day, the compagnia re-formed and marched aboard their ships. Swan watched them, his hand shielding his eyes, from a comfortable seat on the command deck of his galley; he wore a shirt, braes and old slippers and no more, and might have been taken for a beggar, were it not for the gold chain around his neck.

  What he saw was a company new minted. The red surcoats were new wool, and shiny; every man had a pair of plumes in his helmet, and most of the armour was polished. Somewhere in Corfu, an armourer’s shop had had a water-powered polishing wheel, he guessed, because there was a star-like glitter of blue-white steel that raised his spirits.

  Alessandro had gone ashore to pay for things. Now he sat down next to Swan. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You are better.’

  ‘I am, too,’ Swan said.

  ‘Well enough to fight Omar Reis?’ Bembo said.

  ‘Not personally,’ Swan said. ‘But yes.’

  ‘Whatever happened to the nice boy who spoke Greek?’ Bembo asked.

  ‘You thought I was lying,’ Swan said.

  Bembo made a face. ‘Well, we are all wrong sometimes, and I knew you weren’t an English prince.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘There’s war in England,’ Swan said. ‘My birth may yet matter. In the meantime, I am still an Englishman who reads Greek. Let’s go and fight Omar Reis. Where is he?’

  ‘The governor says he’s raiding the northern Morea. I propose we make for Naupactis; spend a day or two there refreshing the horses, and then cross the Bay of Corinth and see what can be done.’

  ‘How many men does Omar Reis have?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo shrugged. And winced. At the same time. Swan knew what that meant.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said.

  ‘Ten thousand?’ Bembo suggested.

  ‘Christ. And Venice thinks you and I and our two hundred …’

  Bembo laughed. ‘Your ensign has recruited here, and so has your master archer, Cressy. And I have a few men of my own, my friend.’ He smiled and looked away. ‘And if we are dead, they don’t have to pay us,’ he added.

  ‘That was cynical, even for you,’ Swan said.

  ‘I just spent two straight weeks with Loredan,’ Bembo returned. ‘Which puts me in mind of something that I suspect you will like. I was in Venice.’

  ‘You saw Sophia?’ he asked.

  Bembo got up without a word and went below. He returned a few minutes later with a long, narrow box of wood and a handful of heavy letters.

  ‘Some of these are from Rome,’ he said. ‘Bessarion. Loredan opened them and read them.’ Bembo shrugged.

  ‘I would expect no less,’ Swan said. He was reaching for the others, in Sophia’s beautiful Gothic script. ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He asks more questions about Spinelli and the Medici banks,’ Bembo said. ‘I would guess that the cardinal has begun to make some of the same guesses that you and I and Loredan have made about the Medici.’

  ‘Ah,’ Swan said, and the sparkling early-winter day in Corfu harbour darkened. ‘By the saints, Alessandro, I had forgotten the whole affair.’

  ‘Five hundred thousand ducats missing?’ Bembo smiled like a cat eating cream. ‘No one is going to forget. That money is more important to Rome than any war with the infidel, Tommaso. You should know that.’

  Swan was resisting the letters from his love and skimming Bessarion’s long letter. In it, Bessarion gave him precise instructions for dealing with the despot Thomas of Mistras, and the cardinal in command of the papal fleet. Swan read that part twice.

  ‘You are joining the papal fleet?’ he asked Bembo, eyes locked on the long, narrow box.

  ‘I may,’ Bembo said with a sneer. ‘And I may not.’

  ‘Christian unity,’ Swan murmured, and went back to reading. The sailors were weighing anchor. The narrow galley rocked from their efforts.

  ‘The box goes with the lady’s letters,’ Bembo said, temptingly. ‘Wine?’

  Swan looked at Crespi, who sat separately, watching Swan like a jailer. Crespi shook his head.

  ‘My keeper says no,’ Swan said.

  Bembo poured a glass for himself. ‘It might not mix well with opium,’ he admitted.

  Swan went back to reading. The bright light was hurting his eyes, but he ploughed on to the part about Spinelli. He had to read one paragraph six times before he got the gist from the over-elegant Latin; the Milanese money was still missing. The Archbishop had recovered, but it was obvious that the money had been embezzled, and the list of possible culprits was short.

  Bessarion closed by suggesting that Swan leave the military affairs in the hands of some officer and return to Rome. ‘His Holiness will command it,’ Bessarion said.

  Swan kissed the letter in reverence, or perhaps the performance of reverence. ‘Dannazione,’ he said. ‘The Holy Father may demand that I return to Rome.’

  ‘Perhaps you should,’ Bembo said. He was looking out to sea. ‘A winter campaign in the Morea; Omar Reis has no love for you. Take ship from here to Brindisi and you can be in Rome in ten days.’

  ‘You want rid of me?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo shrugged. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just do not want you dead.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Swan agreed devoutly, and took up Sophia’s letters.

  He read the last one first. Sophia was as wise as her name, and she had dated her letters so that Swan would know in what order to read them.

  I used your own money to buy you a present, she wrote. Not long after you left, Messire Loredan presented me with the award that the Ten made to you for your report on Belgrade. You will pardon me if I spent it on something that Messire Bembo insists you need.

  He smiled.

  He skimmed through her life; it sounded not stilted but delightful; music, readings in Latin, hawking on the Lido islands; dancing with Loredan’s wife. But her closing made his blood race the way a fight did.

  But for all of it, I find my life changed by your kisses. I long for more, and wonder, perhaps for the first time, where they lead. Is this too much honestly, my Englishman? Here is more, then; hurry back and let us see what comes next. I have kissed the seal of this letter as an experiment; see if the imprint of my lips is left.

  Swan kissed the seal on her letter with a great deal more passion than he had kissed the mention of the Holy Father.

  Then with Crespi’s help he opened the box.

  Inside was the sword he’d toyed with at the Brescian cutler’s in Venice. ‘Ah, mine,’ he said, his hand closing on the hilt with a lust that he seldom showed for anything.

  Bembo laughed. ‘I was tempted myself,’ he said. ‘But my wife is now your demoiselle’s bosom friend; indeed, if they were any closer, I’d be jealous. And my wife claimed that she had the right to purchase it.’ He shrugged. ‘And I am to keep you alive. Perhaps the best way to do so is to send you to Rome.’

  ‘Wounded?’ Swan said. ‘Where Antonelli and Forteguerri both want me dead?’ Swan sat back, winced when the pain hit his shoulder, and slowly relaxed. ‘I think I’m safer fighting the Turks.’

  ‘There is truth in what you say,’ Bembo agreed.

  They spent the night at sea, and entered the Sea of Corinth in the dawn of the next day. No Turkish ships guarded the strait; no beacons were burning, and the Venetian squadron passed Patras under sail, the oarsmen chatting on their benches as if they, too, were passengers. Indeed, the only rowing required the whole day was for the entry into Naupactis towards evening. Swan had never been there before, and he looked at the upper fortress, impressed despite himself with Venice’s reckless expenditure of money on her overseas empire.

  ‘With good artillery, I could take it in a week, from the landward side,’ Bembo said.

  Swan nodded. He was
again clad only in a shirt; Crespi had forbidden him a doublet until he was sure that the entire length of the cut was closed firmly, the flesh correctly knitted. The shirts had to be laundered every day.

  The harbour of Naupactis was only big enough for two galleys at a time; the rowers were worked hard enough by the time every man and every horse was landed. The governor of the town cleared a barracks for Swan’s soldiers and they used the ground below the upper fortress to exercise horses, which took two days and gave the town’s stradiotes time to get them information.

  But in the end, they could only tell them what they already knew from Corfu and Bembo; that Omar Reis was rumoured to be across the narrow sea, in the Morea, having passed the crumbling walls of Corinth effortlessly, and that he was raiding, taking slaves and burning.

  Swan felt better each day, although his left arm lacked any strength and his shoulder hurt all the time.

  But at Crespi’s command, he continued to live in the stern cabin of the galley. His clothes were cleaned with appalling regularity and he took baths when commanded, and his scar was washed only with salt water.

  ‘Who holds Corinth?’ he asked.

  ‘Mathew Asan,’ Bembo said. ‘As good a soldier as any the Greeks have ever produced.’

  ‘You think he would aid us?’ Swan said. ‘Or accept our aid? Really, Alessandro. What are we doing here?’

  ‘Thomas! Don’t be simple. We are a compromise between a full Venetian military expedition, which would annoy the moderates in the Senate, and no expedition at all, which would anger the hawks. We have no clear orders because no one could agree what the orders ought to be, and I am in command because I am expendable. And you are all foreigners.’

  ‘But you have powers to treat with the Morean despots?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you do, for the Pope.’

  ‘You’re making that up?’ Swan asked. Then he answered himself. ‘No, you are right, it’s implicit in the command to support the Despot of Mistra.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Ten thousand men?’ he asked.

  Bembo sneered. ‘Not really. Maybe a thousand spahis and another thousand infantry, with some ghazis to gather slaves. The rest – baggage handlers and joy-girls.’