Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Four

by Christian Cameron

  Swan shook his head. ‘Something in my briefing, I suppose,’ he said. He didn’t want to expose Clemente at all. Even to Accudi.

  ‘I would prefer you not do anything to Master Hergen,’ Accudi said. ‘I have to live here.’

  Swan nodded. ‘I know,’ he said sadly.

  Before Swan could leave the inn, a messenger came from the cardinal with a summons, and Swan left with Clemente and two men-at-arms in attendance, dressed to be the Knight of St Mark he was, in fine clothes and mounted on his best horse. The rain rendered them all less impressive, and Swan’s best ostrich plume was not improved by it.

  There was some irony to proceeding through parts of the Imperial palace to meet the cardinal. Swan was tense, and the two men-at-arms behind him – Ser Zane and Ser Juan – clanked along in half-armour, ready for action in the heart of Imperial splendour.

  Swan knelt and kissed the cardinal’s ring. ‘Excellency,’ he murmured.

  Carvajal frowned. Then his eyes caught Don Juan’s, and a slight smile replaced it. He spoke briefly in Spanish and the Spaniard replied, came forward with a rattle and knelt quickly on the marble floor. The cardinal blessed him.

  In Latin, the cardinal said, ‘You are a long way from Barcelona, my son.’

  Don Juan laughed. ‘It is good to hear the sound of home, Excellency.’

  The cardinal glanced at Swan. ‘The Emperor has demanded that I “restore” to him the whole of the papal tithe. For “safe-keeping”. And because he believes that I have broken our agreement.’

  Swan thought, And you blame me, naturally.

  The cardinal continued, ‘I gather that men died.’

  Swan nodded silently. Then, carefully, he said, ‘The Emperor’s men attacked us in the street.’

  Carvajal sighed. ‘Sometimes, I would rather work with the cursed Bohemian heretics then with this man who is supposedly God’s anointed temporal master.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Before I surrender and hand over the tithe, do you have anything to suggest?’

  ‘Handing over the tithe would break the Medici bank here – and perhaps in Florence, too,’ Swan said. ‘Not to mention that it would mean that my … friend died for nothing.’ He paused, gaining control of his breathing. ‘Excellency.’

  Carvajal nodded. ‘A small price to prevent the murders of all the rest of you. That was, to all intents, the threat.’

  Swan looked away. ‘Excellency, is the Dauphin of France here in Vienna?’

  Carvajal shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘He sent us word he was coming with a hundred men-at-arms, but he has not come.’

  At the words ‘a hundred men-at-arms’ Swan thought he understood. ‘Blessed Saint Mark,’ he swore. ‘Excellency, I beg you to give me a day before you consider handing over the tithe.’ Swan bowed deeply.

  ‘And you will use this day to do what?’ Carvajal asked.

  Swan happened to be looking at Don Juan, who nodded – a very small nod. He understood already.

  Swan couldn’t smile. He was still too angry, and too hurt. So he merely nodded. ‘The situation may change dramatically,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it is best if you do not ask how.’

  Carvajal had the good grace to look truly troubled. ‘Ser Tommaso, it is only money.’

  ‘It is the lifeblood of the crusade.’ Swan wasn’t sure that he cared a jot for the crusade, but the plan was settling in his mind. It required one bold gamble and some luck. It allowed a certain latitude for vengeance.

  He bowed and took his leave.

  He sent a note to his inn, for Accudi.

  It said only ‘Find the Frenchmen’.

  At the Bohemian’s, Swan tried on his new breastplate. It was perfect, beautiful in its simplicity, a breast and back in the newer Milanese fashion with a pair of arms that matched his and shoulders that were as light as feathers despite their size and somewhat outlandish shape. Swan tried it all – arms and legs, even the shoe-shaped sabatons – in the shop, and before he was done with a piece, it would be stripped off him, the temporary copper rivets pounded out by apprentices and the polishing process begun when something fit, or alterations got under way if there had been a problem – for one, his greaves were too short, and Master Jiri rolled his eyes in disgust.

  ‘How can a normal man have such long legs?’ he asked the gods of armouring, and then the strokes began to fall on the anvil.

  Swan had somehow expected to see him throw the greaves aside – they were fully a half-finger’s width too small. Instead, the smith heated them briefly and began to shape the metal with rapid, sure strokes. It was deafening, and yet musical – a painful pleasure.

  But before his eyes the greave grew longer.

  ‘Plenty of metal here,’ the master said between bouts of strokes. ‘And the lower lames of the knee will cover this anyway. But it must fit.’ He gave the metal a dozen more strokes so fast that his hammer blurred in the air, and then he quenched the top – no longer hot enough to raise steam – and an apprentice held up the result to Swan – and it fitted perfectly.

  ‘Fetch me a riveting hammer,’ the master said to his boy, who attempted to protest that the master had one right behind him on the bench.

  ‘A small riveting hammer,’ the master said with iron in his voice, and the boy paled in the ruddy forge-light and ran.

  Master Jiri smiled. ‘That will take him a while. You are having trouble with the Emperor?’ he asked.

  Swan frowned.

  Master Jiri shook his head. ‘They killed your man Peter,’ he said. ‘I know. It is common knowledge that they are after the papal tithe, and you took it away. My … friends do not want the Emperor to have that money.’

  Swan laughed bitterly. ‘You don’t want to help Hunyadi beat the Turks, but you don’t want the Emperor to attack Prague?’

  Master Jiri nodded. ‘We understand each other.’ He paused. ‘We have friends inside the Imperial services. The word is they intend to take you – and hold you for the tithe.’

  ‘They greatly overvalue me,’ Swan said.

  ‘Word is that you are some English prince in disguise. Or perhaps the Dauphin.’

  ‘Hence your testing my French, when we met,’ Swan said.

  ‘You all seem the same, to us,’ Master Jiri admitted.

  Swan laughed to imagine that there was a place where the French and English seemed the same – but then, he’d heard it in Turkey and Greece. And Jiri’s comments fitted with the cardinal’s observations.

  A rich man with a hundred lances. And a papal protection.

  ‘Damn me to hell,’ Swan muttered. Now he was sure.

  ‘I’m sorry to say I need two full days to finish this,’ Master Jiri said.

  Swan nodded. ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘So do I.’

  At the inn, he was confronted by Accudi. ‘You want to tell me what you are doing, Englishman?’ Accudi asked.

  ‘No,’ Swan said. ‘You have to live here. Tell me about the French.’

  Accudi raised an eyebrow. ‘I liked Peter too.’

  ‘Good,’ Swan said. His voice was dead flat. ‘Tell me about the French.’

  ‘The Sieur de Houdanin and his party of five are staying in a fine little inn for rich visitors, more like an ambassador’s residence – the Two Leopards west of Koenigstrasse. He’s got the entire second floor for his own – every room. But his are a parlour and two bedrooms at the south end. He seems to be distraught. I think he’s searching for the man who was killed – looking hard, in fact. But I can’t be sure and I don’t have enough watchers to stay with him and still watch the Imperials.’

  Swan was pulling off his gloves. ‘Yes – what are they up to?’

  Accudi sighed. ‘They are gathering every bravo and thug in this town and moving to surround the inn where you are dining.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Swan said. ‘Giovanni, I owe you. With a little luck, we will vanish for a few hours and when we reappear, we’ll … change the game. Don’t ask.’

  ‘You cannot fight the Emperor on his own fields,�
�� Accudi said.

  Swan raised an eyebrow – very like Alessandro. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘One more question. What kind of weapon does Hauzdaun use?’

  Accudi’s whole face contracted as his eyebrows lowered. ‘A mace – a Turkish mace. He likes to leave his mark.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Swan said. ‘Well now, I think this might work.’

  Swan worried most about the moments during which his men, most of them in full kit or armour, mounted their horses and rode to form in a spacious square lined in fine stone houses a few streets from their inn. If there was going to be a pre-emptive attack …

  And then most of his company was riding through the streets of Vienna, by the cathedral of St Stephan in all its Gothic majesty, and then out through the southern gate and back along the road towards Udine and Venice for a mile until he reached a sort of hunting-lodge-cum-inn that he’d noted on the way into town and had sent the Stone Barn to investigate.

  Clemente shook his head. ‘My lord, this is not the inn to which I went – where you sent me.’ The boy seemed on the verge of tears.

  ‘Pace,’ Swan said, with a benediction, as if he were a priest.

  The Greeks and the archers went in through the kitchen and the barns. There was some squawking from the kitchen, and then the keeper and his wife came out into the torchlit courtyard. By then the inn’s yard gate had been shut, and Will Kendal had scaled the inn’s stone tower and taken post there.

  Hugh Willoughby grinned his snaggle-toothed grin. ‘Nothing I dislike,’ he said. ‘And lots to like, eh, lads?’

  Other archers appeared at windows, giving various signs.

  Grazias waved from the tree line across the low valley to indicate that the nearby woods were clear.

  Swan nodded briskly to the innkeeper.

  ‘I need dinner for a hundred men and more,’ he said. ‘I can pay gold. I imagine we’ll drink a certain amount, as well.’

  The innkeeper muttered something about road thieves.

  Swan nodded patiently. ‘Yes – under other circumstances, perhaps, we could be bad men. But tonight we will pay. Feed us.’ He tried to sound like Alessandro. He thought perhaps he had succeeded when the inn leapt into action.

  Then he waved a hand at his officers. ‘We need to have a conversation,’ he said. ‘Then we pay them.’

  At the word ‘pay’, there was a chorus of whoops that would not have been so alien to road thieves and common bandits.

  An hour later, Swan was leaning back in a comfortable, heavy wooden chair, tipping it against the dark wood panelling. The inside of the inn had high ceilings in a firelit smoky darkness with glimpses of the heads of dead animals and dozens of old shields whose bright paint was nearly black with old smoke.

  ‘We will be watched all the time. So from now we consider ourselves at war. In an hour – two at most – our enemy will know we have moved here, and will put watchers into place to see to us. By moving, in fact, we have given away that we know.’ Swan paused. ‘The other choice is to be attacked in our inn, or somewhere worse.’ He looked around. Di Vecchio sat with his friend Orietto, and Columbino of Sienna sat with Constantine Grazias and Zane and Willoughby. Swan sat between them.

  ‘These men have the local government on their side, and as many watchers as they can bribe or intimidate.’ Swan looked around. ‘In two days, we need to ride for Belgrade.’

  Zane laughed his scary laugh. ‘Where all we have to do is fight the Turks, and not shadows.’

  Grazias pursed his lips. ‘So?’ he asked. He made a hand motion.

  Swan nodded. ‘I intend to avenge Peter,’ he said. ‘We will not involve Messer Accudi. As he says himself, he has to live here.’ He looked around. ‘We have one great advantage – there are a lot of us, and we are armed.’

  Zane looked puzzled. ‘If that’s the way it is, why haven’t they struck you yet?’ he asked.

  Swan nodded. ‘Well, they made the attack on the convoy – not very competently. But I think … I think they’re as confused about us as we are about them. I think someone told them that I’m someone I am not.’ He shrugged. ‘I think that the French embassy told them that I’m the King’s son. The Dauphin.’ He took in a deep breath and then puffed out his cheeks. ‘Don’t imagine the enemy is a giant ten feet tall. They are as much in the dark as we.’

  ‘Be that as it may.’ Ser Columbino frowned. ‘How do we avenge the good Master Peter?’

  Swan told them.

  Willoughby nodded approvingly.

  Ser Columbino shook his head. ‘This is … evil,’ he said.

  Di Vecchio leaned back his chair. ‘You begin to grow on me,’ he said.

  Swan began the evening by making an ex gratia payment from the bags that he and Peter had stolen from the papal tithe. The innkeeper had set tables – just boards on movable legs – on the uneven packed earth and old manure of the inn yard. The inn had three main buildings and a high porch ran all the way around the inner sides, so that the men-at-arms sat like gentlemen at tables on the low balconies. There were good torches that burned with no smoke and a powerful spruce scent, and the powerful smell of roast boar emerged from the kitchens.

  Swan cleared one table, sat at it on a borrowed stool, and paid every man. He paid them all the same, from senior men-at-arms to pages who were the merest boys – and even Clemente.

  Then he counted out more coins – to the extent of Peter’s pay. ‘Peter is buying us all dinner tonight,’ he said. ‘It is your duty to eat and drink to him.’

  No one cheered, but it was not a sullen silence.

  ‘Tomorrow we will serve those who killed him the same dish they served him,’ Swan continued. ‘Play your parts as you are told, and we will triumph against a subtle, malicious foe. And after Vienna, Belgrade will be nothing but a military exercise.’

  Many men cheered – a surprising number. No one looked sullen. Swan thought of what he would have said to Peter. He could almost hear the man reply.

  He hurt his fist slamming it down on the table, and the pain comforted him.

  ‘The Imperials will pick us up either when I enter the city gates or when I return to my inn – or at worst when I visit the Frenchmen. Probably the latter, because no one can predict what gate we’ll come in at. They may even think we’ve fled.’ Swan had said the words the night before, and now he rode in through the great southern gate, with its mouldering wall a couple of centuries old and grass growing out of every joint and crack. He strained his neck muscles to keep from looking to the right and left for signs of the band he’d seen before.

  But he was nothing but bait, and he rode calmly, dressed in his best Venetian clothes, along the broad and curving main avenue of the city and then west along the Koenigstrasse until he came to the old town hall.

  No one had been told not to admit him, or not to show him the body of the young Frenchman killed two nights before in a street brawl. The dead man was little more than a boy, pudgy and blond and a sad sight in death – and beginning to smell.

  They wrapped him in a winding sheet and rode to the Inn of the Two Leopards, where, according to Accudi’s report, the French party with the Sieur de Houdanin was staying.

  Swan dismounted at the door, and Clemente took his charger’s head. Swan himself walked straight in. He looked neither right nor left, leaving it to Zane and Columbino to watch his back as he went up the steps to the right. He walked to the south end of the hallway and knocked briskly at the door there.

  ‘Entrez!’ called a cultured voice.

  Swan opened the door and stepped in.

  ‘Good afternoon, my lord,’ he said in good Norman French. ‘I’m Sir Thomas Swan, an Englishman. You seem to think I’m the Dauphin. I’m here to disabuse you of that notion.’

  Houdanin was tall – two cloth yards tall or more, with sandy fair hair and a velvet doublet in a surprising tone of pink. He had a dark blue velvet cap in his right hand with a pair of immaculate chamois gloves folded inside. He put a hand to his sword and then
saw Columbino in full armour and frowned.

  ‘You have the advantage of me, sir,’ he said in passable English.

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘You told Hauzdaun that I was the Dauphin. But he killed one of your men the other night. A handsome young blond man.’

  Houdanin froze. Then he pursed his lips. ‘You move too fast for me. Who is this Hauzdaun?’

  Swan rolled his eyes. ‘Alors – if you will have it so, very well.’ He began to back through the door.

  Houdanin paused. ‘You … know my page is dead?’ he asked. There was no quaver in his voice.

  Swan nodded. ‘We have his body,’ he said. ‘Which we just retrieved from what passes for a magistrate here.’

  Houdanin shot to his feet. ‘Why didn’t you say so?’ he said. He followed Swan down the stairs very quickly.

  No one looks good hanging upside down from a horse and wrapped in five yards of white linen. Swan opened the shroud to show the face. Clemente made a sign to avert Satan.

  The Frenchman breathed out, suddenly, in the moment of recognition. The work of the flanged mace had not been kind.

  Houdanin’s face was a rigid mask. The man was too professional to give full vent to his feelings. But he was deeply moved, and he took three slow breaths.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. He is … of me.’

  Swan knew when a man was emotionally involved. The Frenchman was doing his best to cover it, but Swan imagined he had looked thus, in the moments after Peter’s death. Loss, and hope turned to despair.

  He wondered whether the young page was his son, or nephew, or lover, or a friend’s son. It made no difference.

  ‘My Greeks found him,’ Swan said. ‘I give you my word, we did not kill him.’

  ‘Bon Dieu,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Gervaise!’ he shouted, and a door slammed.

  Swan was looking up. He had done so since he saw Hugh Willoughby on a rooftop, moving crabwise across the slates, almost a street away. Willoughby gave him a signal.

  Swan’s heart began to beat very fast.

  The inn’s doorway filled with the largest African Swan had ever seen. The man was as tall as Ser Zane and as broad, so that, for a few heartbeats, the two men were eye to eye. Gervaise was not in armour, but in a fine black arming doublet with silver points glinting, and red hose as good as Swan’s own. He had fifty inches of steel in his hands, a long German sword that shone like the wrath of a particularly militant angel.