Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Three
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‘I’m sick of it. You and Kendal and Grazias; you all find me so amusing …’
Swan was ready to speak his mind, even though something inside him screamed stop! He was breaking every rule he had for behaviour. But it was like the day of the battle; he’d never been so angry. He felt that he might explode, that no one understood him, that Bembo was a fool, and so was Will Kendal, and so, in fact, was Constantine Grazias …
Bembo swung his legs over the bed. ‘Perhaps I should not tell you this,’ he said. His smile was grim. ‘But I’m tired of putting up with your ill-humours. Crespi has replaced your opium dose with sugar for the last eight days. You are not in the bowels of the blackest mood since Achilles sulked in his tent – you are opium sick. Kindly think before you speak.’
Swan took a breath to speak, but swallowed his words as the import of what had been said hit him. The bad sleep, the bad moods, the anger, the hopelessness. He took a deep breath, and let it go.
‘Have you had too much opium?’ Swan asked.
‘Never,’ Alessandro admitted. ‘And you make me very glad, as I’m ten times the bitch you are. But for the love of god, Tommaso, please shut up.’
Swan bridled. And then clamped his mouth shut.
He managed to get through the next five days on willpower and Bembo’s sneers; he rode back to Nafplion, collected his company, by then spread over half of Greece, and, without wrecking the negotiation, vented a little of his savagery on a factor of the Bank of St Mark who imagined that he could buy all the loot of the Turkish baggage in a single low-cost deal. He was so slippery that Swan’s eyes slid off him, and Bembo gave him a gracious nod to allow him to speak his mind.
‘I’m not in a hurry,’ Swan said to the first offer. ‘I can sell it all myself.’
‘I doubt it,’ said the factor, with a smug self-assurance that cannot have made him many friends in the banking business. Swan reminded himself that this young man was in virtual exile; no Venetian wanted to live in Nafplion, no matter that Swan found it one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen.
He was in a small tavern, near the port; a shabby, comfortable place where Di Silva was recuperating and many of the men-at-arms were at home. At the next table, there were a dozen men and a few women; a loud English soldier with no hair was holding a bottle of Italian wine and talking about it, and a Flemish archer with a pointed beard was mocking him while a red-haired woman laughed unrestrainedly. A beautiful Greek woman held her child in the air and laughed too, and her husband, one of the stradiotes, watched them with something near adoration. A big man made cuts with his sword, and a small woman counted the money on the table while she watched him. An African, perhaps a mercenary mamluk, stood with his arm around a lanky English archer and a woman holding an arming sword and smiling at the world. She was waving vaguely at a tower outside.
It was quite aparty.
Swan watched them for a moment and turned back to the banker. He shrugged. ‘Well, then,’ he said, and stood.
‘My round, Steph!’ called another Englishman, this one as a big as a house. The noise that one table made seemed to fill the tavern; the Moorish archer slammed his fist on the table, not in anger but in agreement, and another tide of laughter rolled in.
The banker looked at the loud table with distaste. ‘My offer will not last. I will offer less tomorrow,’ he said.
Swan looked at Bembo. ‘Goodbye, then.’
The man didn’t even have the good grace to walk out in a huff.
‘Fine,’ he said, as if put out. ‘Make me an offer.’
‘No,’ Swan said. ‘You are a fool. I’ll sell it all myself.’
Bembo laughed. ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘I will. Nonetheless.’
The banker folded his arms. ‘Fool, am I?’ He sneered. ‘Good luck buying provisions or anything else here, condotierre.’
Bembo frowned. ‘Are you a providitore?’
‘No,’ the banker said. He hesitated. ‘And you are?’
Bembo smiled. ‘No one you know,’ he said sweetly. ‘Yet.’
As it proved, they found a representative of a small Florentine banking house who was happy to pay them a fair price for all the silk in the train. There was already a lawsuit about the cask of pearls they’d taken; it had come out of a shipment taken by a Turkish cruiser only the year before, and probably had a definitive Venetian owner.
But Swan knew the law too; he made a bargain with the owner’s agent and took a smaller cask of gold in exchange, and then sold all the animals save the best horses to a Nafplion merchant who took caravans into the Morea. The total was a tidy sum; Swan sent a quarter to Mathew Asan, who’d already returned to his impregnable fortress at Corinth, and hoped that the Greek commander was honest enough to divide it among his men. The rest Swan divided into shares, according to the company’s tradition, and he paid it out from a table laid across two barrels in the courtyard between Di Silva’s tavern and the little Latin church. The total came to almost twenty gold ducats a man; twice that for a stradiote or a man-at-arms; half again as much for an archer. Half a year’s pay for many men, in gold and not promises. Nafplion had seldom seen such a party.
Almost twenty of Asan’s cut-throats had stayed with Grazias; this seemed natural to them. Swan paid them from the Turkish loot and kept back almost an eighth against future expenses, and had new iron tyres put on the all his wagon wheels, and new tents made to replace those destroyed by the Turks. He bought an armload of very fine antiquities in the market; a sword hilt of solid gold, a small bronze animal that might have been a helmet crest, and a bronze knife inlaid with silver, as well as four magnificent seals in a marvellous red stone that glowed as if alive and full of blood, each carved with scenes from a world more ancient even than Greece; a boy jumped over a bull, a bare-breasted woman raised her arms in supplication. There was also a full Greek helmet of a later period, and an Egyptian faience bottle and some other curiosities. Swan paid with his share of the loot, and sent the whole by ship to Rome, for Bessarion. He kept one of the rings; a heavy gold thumb ring that fitted him, which showed a warrior in a chariot.
They had two pleasant weeks in Nafplion; the town was growing tired of their heroism when Swan’s entire company paraded, some men still visibly the worse for drink, in the town square, and then marched out through the gates and over the high ridge behind the town before heading inland. They marched right past the place where they’d fought the Turks; Swan, a much happier and lighter Swan, rode up the hill to the ancient gate, where the two headless lions supported a column carved in stone. It was breathtaking; so were the enormous, inhuman stones of the gate that surrounded it.
‘Perhaps they truly were greater than we,’ Swan said.
Bembo laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You know what the Iliad is about? Loot. I watched you serve it out to your people. Nothing has changed, I promise you. Kill the men, take the gold, perhaps the women as well.’
‘I’m sorry, is it your turn to be a cynic?’ Swan asked. ‘I am looking at the historical survival of a piece of the Trojan War, and you want to complain about looting.’
Bembo laughed. ‘I put up with weeks of this. Listen – my time with you is drawing to an end.’
Swan turned in the saddle. ‘No,’ he said.
Bembo shrugged. ‘I think our small war with the Sultan is at an end, and my presence will only cause embarrassment. Or just perhaps, the despot Thomas will not like to see a Venetian paymaster.’
‘Everyone knows that I work for Venice,’ Swan said.
‘You are deniable. I am a Bembo.’ Alessandro shrugged. ‘I have enjoyed this last few weeks more than I can say. It was far better than a papal election, for example.’
‘You only say that because I was in command and you had nothing better to do than mock me,’ Swan said.
‘And your point would be?’ Bembo asked. He turned his horse. ‘I will remain here for at least a month; in fact, I bought most of the Turkish loot.’ He smiled beatifically. ‘I will m
ake a healthy profit and the loot will cover my time here. Good luck with the despot Thomas. I wish I was coming. I long to see Mistras.’
‘You have armour,’ Swan said. ‘Come as a man-at-arms. Come, Alessandro!’
Bembo shrugged. ‘I have duties.’
Swan nodded.
They embraced.
‘I suppose you have a letter for me?’ Swan asked.
Bembo shook his head.
‘You had word from Loredan and no letter for me?’ Swan asked.
‘I am not joking this time. I have no letter for you. In fact, my orders come not from Loredan, who is no doubt still in Albania, but from the Ten.’ Bembo lowered his voice to say ‘Ten’ even in the midst of the ruins of Mycenae. ‘And this banking thing …’
‘That idiot,’ Swan said
‘No, not the young fool. Sinelli. The crown. And the Medici. There is money missing; no one told me not to tell you, so I will tell you. The Medici are not happy; factors have been recalled from four of their offices, and they are not going to have a man at the Frankfurt fair; some say their solvency is at risk.’
‘Sweet Christ,’ Swan said, and then looked around. ‘And you are going …’
‘If I succeed here, I will go to Rome,’ Bembo said. ‘For Loredan.’
Swan’s stomach flipped. ‘While I nursemaid the Despot,’ he said.
Bembo shrugged. ‘There’s a rumour that one of the Medici factors has defected to the Turks,’ he said.
Swan shook his head. They’d both met renegades; there were dozens if not hundreds of them.
‘Ever wonder why there are so many renegade Italians and Spaniards, and so few renegade Turks?’ Swan asked.
Bembo looked off towards the sea. ‘If Turks had the individual liberty to defect, they would,’ he said. ‘It is as if education and liberality loosen ties … perhaps they do.’
‘Too deep for me today,’ Swan said. ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘Don’t miss me too much,’ Bembo said.
Ten days of riding; two long rainstorms, and the loss of twenty horses. Swan’s Greek was better, and he had begun to learn Albanian. But the Vale of Sparta was magnificent on a sunny day in December, and by then Swan had a dozen guides, pronoia cavalrymen who served the Despot. They were all but reverential when Swan displayed Bessarion’s banner, now somewhat worn, and they mixed well enough with Grazias and his troopers, although Swan could tell that they thought themselves more aristocratic than the northern Greeks.
Sparta had not a single monument to show for its magnificent reputation, beyond a deep depression in the middle of the plain that local farmers said was the ancient amphitheatre, and it was less than half the size of the one at Epidaurus.
Swan remounted his Arab and cantered along his column. Men saluted or laughed; they were in good spirits despite the rain. He caught up with the vanguard as it wound its way up a series of switchbacks on the western side of the valley, and above them loomed a magnificent city; layers of walls like a fancy Italian cake, and the golden glow of what appeared to be the domes of hundreds of churches.
The officer of the Despot’s cavalrymen, Michael Catacuzenos, smiled. ‘It is good to see that foreigners can still be impressed by us,’ he said. ‘Here at the very end.’
‘The very end?’ Swan asked.
‘Constantinople is gone,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘It is only a matter of time before we are gone, too. This is the very last flowering; the very end, and when we are gone, there will be only Latins and barbarians and Turks.’
Swan smiled. He was English; everyone thought he was a barbarian.
‘And that is why you think you are so much better men than Grazias and my other stradiotes?’ Swan asked.
Catacuzenos shrugged, looking at the magnificent array of golden domes above them on the mountainside; level after level, and a citadel rising above them all, and lower down, a palace greater than Blachernae. The whole view was staggering, in the sun. Swan had seldom been struck with awe by the hand of man. Mistras rose above him and was as much a surprise as Venice would be if suddenly encountered amidst desolation.
‘They are fine men,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘But Plethon taught us that we are Spartans. The last Spartans. I hope that when the end comes, we will fall like Leonidas, and not pass into the east like Themistocles or Pausanias.’
Swan nodded in tribute to the man’s erudition. ‘You know Herodotus,’ he said.
Catacuzenos smiled. ‘I am a Spartan,’ he said. ‘I know the history of my people. Come, Foreigner from Thule. Enter my city. Welcome to Sparta.’
Also by Christian Cameron
The Chivalry Series
The Ill-Made Knight
The Long Sword
The Green Count
The Tyrant Series
Tyrant
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows
Tyrant: Funeral Games
Tyrant: King of the Bosporus
Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities
Tyrant: Force of Kings
The Long War Series
Killer of Men
Marathon
Poseidon’s Spear
The Great King
Salamis
Rage of Ares
Tom Swan and the Head of St George Parts One–Six
Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade Parts One–Seven
Tom Swan and the Last Spartans Parts One–Five
Other Novels
Washington and Caesar
Alexander: God of War
Writing as Miles Cameron
The Traitor Son Cycle
The Red Knight
The Fell Sword
The Dread Wyrm
A Plague of Swords
The Fall of Dragons
Copyright
An Orion ebook
First published as an ebook in Great Britain in 2017 by Orion Books
Copyright © Christian Cameron 2017
The right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 6587 3
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