Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Four

by Christian Cameron

  ‘It’s Marc,’ Houdanin said.

  Gervaise sheathed his great sword and looked at Swan. The anger in the black man’s eyes was enough to cause Swan to fall back a pace. The African brushed back the linen shroud and took a long look at the dead man.

  ‘An axe or a mace,’ he said, and lifted the body effortlessly from the horse. There was a sickening noise and the smell of death filled the air. Men-at-arms gagged.

  ‘Someone told me that you were …’ Houdanin paused, a professional aware that he was about to give away information for free.

  ‘The Dauphin. I know,’ Swan said. ‘I work for Cardinal Bessarion, and to the best of my knowledge, the Dauphin is at home on his estates, sending embassies to his father, the King of France.’

  Houdanin pursed his lips. ‘And now?’ he asked.

  ‘Now that Master Hauzdaun has seen us together, I imagine you may be in some danger,’ Swan said. He was affecting Alessandro again, aping the man’s delivery, suave and dangerous. ‘From which I will protect you.’

  ‘I do not usually need protection, even from Englishmen,’ Houdanin said. He paused and looked up to where Will Kendal was stringing a bow. ‘But for the sake of argument, monsieur, what would your protection cost me?’

  ‘The name of the source of the tip that told you I was the Dauphin,’ Swan said. ‘And perhaps your willingness to withdraw from the field when this is over, and let the crusade move on. Without your Dauphin.’

  ‘Eh bien,’ Houdanin said. ‘It is always a pleasure to deal with a professional. I have no trouble with the crusade beyond obedience to my master, who I will not name. Under other circumstances, I might take the vow myself.’ He looked at Swan. ‘You are laying an ambush.’

  Swan shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

  Gervaise came back through the door.

  ‘They killed my best friend,’ Swan said. It was true – Peter was no servant, and never had been really. ‘I mean to return the favour. You need do nothing, but if you wish to participate, you have only to get a horse and ride with me.’

  Houdanin allowed a little emotion to come to his face. He coloured, and his chin set. ‘Enchanté. Gervaise, my body squire, will feel the same.’ He looked at Swan. ‘They are not used to street violence here.’

  ‘I count on that,’ Swan said.

  Swan turned to Clemente. ‘I need you to go to Master Accudi while milord arms.’ Swan’s note was already written – he looked at a church clock and wrote the time with a stylus on the wax.

  Clemente nodded. He dismounted, gave his nag to Andrea, Columbino’s page, and shed his livery coat. Then, another nameless brown-clad urchin, he vanished into an alley like a badger into a hole.

  He was back before Gervaise mounted his horse. ‘Master Giovanni sends his best compliments,’ he said with a sketchy eleven-year-old bow. ‘Our inn’s surrounded by thugs. They didn’t get me.’

  ‘You are a hero,’ Swan said, and handed the boy a gold ducat. He flipped open his wax tablet and read Accudi’s note – in code, the new code from Alberti, backwards. It was easy, because it said what he expected, and he smiled the way a hunter smiles when the deer are in the lie he expects.

  The two Frenchmen had great circle cloaks over their armour. Swan was unarmoured. It made him more than a little afraid. But he knew the game now, and he had all the loaded dice.

  He wished he had Peter to talk to. Just to review …

  ‘Now we ride to the Hofburg Palace,’ he said. ‘As if we are going to the Emperor.’

  The Sieur de Houdanin smiled crookedly. ‘I begin to understand,’ he said. ‘Is this to be a bloodbath?’

  Swan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  They were a street south of the Koenigstrasse when the Imperial party came at them – hooded, masked men in brown and grey and black, with staves and swords – quite a crowd of them. It was still not midday, and the streets were full of people going to the city market or servants shopping. A few horse lengths away, a party of nuns led by a priest moved with dignity along the drier side of the narrow street, headed as pilgrims for the cathedral across the square.

  One man went to Swan’s horse’s head and dropped his hood. ‘Get off your horse,’ he said in passable Italian. ‘Or I’ll break your knees.’ He had a steel mace in his hand.

  Swan winced – it was a good threat.

  ‘Lay down your weapons,’ Swan said loudly. ‘Anyone with a stave or a sword will be killed. Do it now.’

  The Frenchmen backed their horses. Hauzdaun – it had to be him – looked at his men and growled.

  A man in a grey, coarse hood grabbed for Gervaise’s bridle. His horse lashed out – front feet, back feet. Men were hit by iron hooves.

  The nuns screamed.

  Swan rolled off the back of his crupper the way the Greeks taught. He was in a low-back riding saddle, and he should have done it well, but his sword became tangled in his cloak and he hung for one awful heartbeat the wrong way, and then was dropped on his back on the cobbles. It hurt.

  The screams of the nuns were now mixed with the despairing cries of men with arrows in them. Of the original crowd of bravos, at least five were down, transfixed. Men-at-arms were flooding over the cobbles from all around the square like a rising tide over sand. Di Vecchio pommelled a man, caving in his skull. Columbino slipped his long sword in and out of one, and then another.

  It was not a fight. It was a massacre, as Swan had intended. And Clemente …

  The boy was cutting the throats of the fallen men.

  Swan got to his feet. He drew his sword, a long measure from Hauzdaun, who stood almost alone.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ the man said. He was incredulous. ‘You can’t … the Emperor …’

  There were ten dead men on the cobbles. There were no wounded. The rest of the thugs – disarmed – stood in a huddle by the street to the cathedral. The nuns were gone. Swan saw with relief that there were no women lying in pools of blood on the cobbles.

  He had done this. His orders – his word.

  He set his jaw and thought of Peter.

  He motioned to Di Vecchio. ‘You speak German?’

  The man bowed.

  ‘Tell them that we will let them go. But that we will keep Hauzdaun against their good behaviour.’ Swan looked at the dead men and the surprising quantity of blood on the cobbles and in the gutter. It was horribly fascinating – the colour of the blood and its texture.

  He shook himself. Houdanin had relieved Hauzdaun of his mace. The Greeks were moving among the dead, cutting their arrows free, leaving no trace of the archery. That was ugly, too. The Greeks were very efficient. But they let Clemente do the killing.

  Houdanin looked at Swan, and for a moment they were brothers in some awful fraternity – of professional revenge, perhaps. Nothing of which the Church would approve.

  ‘Tell them that if we must, we’ll come back and kill the rest of them, too.’ Swan nodded to Di Vecchio.

  Di Vecchio repeated his words.

  Hauzdaun said something, and Houdanin slapped him hard. He didn’t like it – the Austrian was clearly more comfortable causing pain than enduring it. It made him angry. He came back with his fists up, and Houdanin dropped him with a single punch. And then nursed his knuckles.

  Gervaise walked over and kicked the writhing man between the legs, very hard.

  The bravos ran.

  Swan and his party rode through the streets, took the French back to their inn.

  Houdanin nodded at the Austrian, who was tied across a saddle. ‘I want him when you are done,’ he said.

  Swan looked at Columbino and spoke quietly. ‘I will be leaving town in the morning,’ he said. ‘I didn’t intend Hauzdaun to survive my departure.’

  ‘I will come to wish you goodbye, then,’ the Frenchman said.

  Accudi just shook his head. ‘You cannot do this!’ he said for the third time.

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘The Burgomeister will bring the watch—’

  Swa
n smiled. ‘I gave the name of this gentleman as the murderer of the French envoy,’ he said. ‘The French envoy agreed. And witnesses saw these men attack us in the street.’ He shrugged. ‘I am a crusader. I have already sent Di Vecchio to the Burgomeister with our account of the attack, and the French nobleman will be adding his own.’

  Accudi rubbed his beard.

  Swan pushed Hauzdaun towards Accudi. ‘I’m sure he knows a great many things we wish to know,’ Swan said. ‘He’s all yours.’

  ‘Here? In Vienna?’ Accudi shook his head. ‘You are insane. Like Alessandro. This is something Bembo would do.’

  Swan smiled again. ‘That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard all day.

  The armour fitted brilliantly. It was polished to a fine sheen, and Swan admired the steel buckles, the neat straps with steel caps to protect them from sword cuts, the flush rivets that would not catch a sword blade.

  It was so plain, it had a beauty of form that was almost Platonic.

  ‘You have Hauzdaun,’ Master Jiri said.

  Swan nodded, admiring himself in the glass.

  ‘We would like him,’ Master Jiri said.

  Swan sighed. ‘I’m afraid that’s not possible,’ he said. ‘However, if you were to speak to Master Giovanni Accudi, who is working as secretary to His Eminence, the Cardinal Carvajal, he might be willing to pass you a few tidbits.’

  Master Jiri nodded. ‘You have put the cat among the pigeons here. They are not used to death in the streets. They are … paralysed.’ He met Swan’s eye. ‘I did not suspect you of being such a man of blood,’ he said. He sounded disappointed.

  Swan did not allow his face to change. And he played his Alessandro to the hilt, and shrugged. ‘Eh?’ he said. ‘A lesson was needed.’

  They parted without cordiality.

  The next morning, very early, Swan’s column formed on the road to Belgrade. Cardinal Carvajal was there with a dozen of his own retainers, and the Sieur de Houdanin, too, with four men. And a dozen Medici retainers, and two of the brothers themselves, beautifully mounted. They slipped a cart into the column with the skill of a mountebank at a fair.

  Swan dismounted in his new armour. Columbino was forming a dozen new German knights recruited in the last two days with the crusaders who had joined them on the road north. They now had a baggage train as long as their column.

  Houzdaun lolled on his horse, head down, slumped abjectly in the early morning rain. He had been badly beaten, and he didn’t look around.

  Swan went to the cardinal, and went down on one knee. ‘I beg your leave, Eminence,’ he said.

  Carvajal narrowed his eyes. ‘You have done a great deal of harm,’ he said. ‘And some good,’ he admitted. ‘I cannot condone what you have done,’ he said. ‘I cannot give you my blessing.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Then bless my men, who go on crusade,’ he said. ‘In the Order of Saint John, they ask us whether we would fight the infidel if the reward for our service was eternity in Hell.’ He met the cardinal’s eyes. ‘Sometimes these things must be done.’

  The cardinal set his jaw. ‘I do not agree. What will happen to Hauzdaun? The Emperor has already disowned him.’

  Swan nodded, his eyes almost closed. The rain was going through his hair and running down the back of his neck. He thought briefly of Hauzdaun, who had to know he had only a little while to live.

  ‘Your secretary will have some new material for you in working with the heretics of Bohemia,’ Swan said. ‘And even perhaps with the Emperor.’

  Suddenly it was all too much for Swan.

  Carvajal nodded. ‘And I will use it – and the papal tithe you saved. But my son – I sense you did not do this – this massacre – lightly. So I say to you – beware. If you go on you will become a man like that one.’ He pointed at Hauzdaun. ‘And you will end like him, too.’

  Swan swallowed. Carvajal spoke with utter conviction. It hit home.

  Swan looked away. And then looked back and met the cardinal’s mild eyes. ‘You diplomats never like the blood,’ he said flatly. ‘But you seem to need it shed.’

  Carvajal recoiled as if from a blow. But then he sighed. ‘I find that I cannot refuse a crusader my blessing,’ he said. He put a hand on Swan’s head – and without his bidding, Swan wept. He didn’t know where it came from. And it passed like a summer storm.

  When he had mastered himself, Swan pointed at Hauzdaun. ‘Will you send a priest to shrive him?’ he said.

  Carvajal turned his head away in disgust or anger, but he motioned to a priest in his train.

  Swan rode down his column, checking his men. The rain was warm enough, and slowing. The road south shone in the rising sun. Swan spoke briefly with the Medici, and gave them a pair of letters for Rome and another for Venice; he noted that in his column, every man had his armour well-buckled, his girths done up.

  Swan cantered to the head of the column, where Clemente had unfurled his small standard and Columbino, now his gonfalonier, had unfurled Bessarion’s standard. He saluted with the back of his hand, and Constantine Grazias waved, and the stradiotes rode away, their smaller horses beautiful in the grey on grey of the morning.

  Lastly he rode to Houdanin with his black squire by his side. The priest was done with Hauzdaun and appeared shaken.

  ‘I always pay my debts,’ Houdanin said. He handed Swan a letter. He let Swan see it for only a moment, and glance at the signature, and then he plucked it back. Swan had time to see the words ‘friend of the Pope’ and ‘son of the King’ and ‘travelling with a hundred lances by way of Udine and Graz’.

  Swan didn’t curse when he saw the signature. He merely raised his head and looked the Frenchman in the eye.

  Houdanin shrugged. ‘You know the name?’

  ‘Par dieu,’ Swan replied. ‘Ah, another problem that will have to await resolution. Thanks for all your help in this matter.’

  Houdanin’s horse sidled forward and then was still. ‘I suspect we may not always be allies,’ he said. ‘But I must say – you have a way with you. Go with God, or the Devil, as may best help you beat the Turks.’

  Then Houdanin – knight, French nobleman, accredited diplomat, in his brilliant pink and blue – rode to Houzdaun. He said something and the Austrian raised his head.

  Swan saw the Frenchman’s hand move. He had a small eating knife – it slipped in between the Austrian’s legs.

  The Austrian’s horse gave a great scream and plunged away. Hauzdaun lolled forward, his face already in his horse’s sopping mane.

  Blood – a veritable sheet of blood – was pouring over the saddle’s skirts and down over the horse’s belly. Then the horse bolted, galloping out into the rainy fields south and east of Vienna.

  The African squire handed the French knight a square of linen, with which he wiped his hands and knife fastidiously. ‘For Marc,’ he said to his squire.

  Gervaise nodded. He bowed his head, and then he spat. And then crossed himself.

  Swan knew he was seeing something he wasn’t supposed to see – the end of someone else’s story. But he and the Frenchman exchanged hand clasps, and Swan rode to the head of his column. Off to the west, one of the Greeks had stopped Hauzdaun’s riderless horse. The man himself was lying in a tangle in a field of new flax.

  Columbino spoke with an unaccustomed sneer. ‘Trying to escape?’ he asked.

  ‘Just so,’ Swan said. ‘Let’s go to Belgrade.’

  All around him, men nodded, and the column started into motion.

  Also by Christian Cameron

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George

  Volume One: Castillon

  Volume Two: Venice

  Volume Three: Constantinople

  Volume Four: Rome

  Volume Five: Rhodes

  Volume Six: Chios

  Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade

  Volume One

  Volume Two

  Volume Three

  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 Killer of Men Series

  Killer of Men

  Marathon

  Poseidon’s Spear

  Other Novels

  Washington and Caesar

  God of War

  The Ill-Made Knight

  Copyright

  An Orion eBook

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books

  This eBook first published in 2015 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Christian Cameron 2015

  The moral 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 characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  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 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.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 5632 1

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