Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Five

by Christian Cameron

  … But the habit of caution was becoming ingrained.

  ‘Cat got your tongue?’ Admiral Corner asked. ‘I heard that you were quite talkative.’

  Swan smiled. ‘I agree that he is cautious,’ he said. ‘But surely the Gatelussi will insist that Mithymna be saved.’

  Corner shook his head. ‘I fear not, young man. Even the chivalric spectacle of a woman in distress, the desperate Caterina di Orsini holding the citadel alone with no man to protect her, could not rouse the cardinal. I think that women do not move him.’

  Bembo glared at Corner.

  ‘Ah, I have misstepped,’ Corner said. He waved to his page to bring him more wine. ‘I’m sorry, Bembo. I’m sure he’s a fine man …’

  ‘No, he’s a stiff prig and a cautious fool, but it has nothing to do with his taste in women,’ Bembo snapped.

  Corner nodded slowly. ‘Sometimes I think it might benefit you to remember which one of us is admiral,’ he said.

  Swan smiled, and his smile caused both of them to laugh.

  Swan sipped his wine. ‘Mithymna is not far,’ he said. ‘And the Turks will hardly put to sea in weather like this.’

  Corner nodded.

  Swan looked at the dark sky all the way to Asia. He was thinking of Theodora. Of temptation, and its avoidance. Of sin, and redemption. And the silversmith.

  ‘I might just consider going to Mithymna, over the mountains,’ he said.

  Bembo all but spat his wine.

  Corner shook his head. ‘I hadn’t even asked yet,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Swan said.

  ‘Because she is a woman?’ Corner asked.

  ‘Because she is an Orsini?’ Bembo asked. ‘You want to kill her yourself?’

  Swan nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘All of those things.’

  Bembo shook his head theatrically. ‘Dannazione, English. You have become a subtle, ambiguous bastard.’

  ‘I learned from a master,’ Swan said.

  When Bembo was gone, accompanied by Clemente into the soaking rain, Swan went across the street to have his silver cloak clasp repaired.

  The silversmith waited on him, took the brooch, and said he could fix it in a few hours.

  ‘What news from Mithymna?’ Swan asked. The shop was empty.

  The silversmith looked sideways, as if making sure no one could overhear him. ‘My brother came out night before last,’ he said. ‘He brought off two women, a dye-seller, and a child.’

  ‘He is a brave man,’ Swan said.

  ‘He is getting rich,’ the silversmith said. He shrugged. ‘The Turks are coming, whether he makes money off them or not.’

  Swan nodded, because he remembered the silversmith’s brother. ‘How much to be taken into Mithymna?’ he asked.

  Later that night, Swan was late for dinner, an unpardonable sin in gentle society, but one for which he was forgiven because both Theodora and Dorino knew him. He was dressed as well as circumstances allowed, and his peacock plume was a pale shadow of its former splendour.

  Prince Dorino steepled his hands. ‘You are, I find, unchanged.’

  Swan bowed. ‘May I introduce my friend, Alessandro Bembo of Venice.’

  ‘You may,’ Prince Dorino said. He didn’t rise; instead, he extended a limp hand, and Bembo bowed over it. ‘You command one of the galleys?’ he asked.

  Bembo smiled. ‘For my sins,’ he said.

  Dorino made a moue. ‘Can either of you tell me what the devil the Pope is playing at, here?’ he asked. ‘He sends a cautious old man to command a fleet that is too small to dominate the Turk and too big to lend aid to isolated outposts. The loss of that fleet would be a catastrophe, but its presence tempts the Turk to rashness.’ He sat back.

  Bembo looked blank, and Swan favoured him with a smile. Swan knew Prince Dorino of old; the man’s apparent effeminacy hid a deep and very tough mind, and he liked to surprise people. And he was both ruthless and deadly.

  Bembo took a sip of wine to cover his confusion. ‘Your Grace,’ he said. ‘Trevisan is an unknown quantity in Venice. I cannot speak for the Serenissima, but I will venture that the fleet as constituted represents the best effort of Christendom, not a calculated effort.’

  ‘Saints and martyrs,’ Dorino said, raising his hands to heaven. ‘Forty-two galleys is the best effort of Christendom? Perhaps we should all convert to Islam? Saint Peter’s might make an attractive mosque, with a good minaret.’

  Swan cleared his throat. He was having a hard time taking his eyes off Theodora.

  ‘I think I can promise you,’ he said softly, ‘that Alessandro’s words are true words, Your Grace. The Holy Father has neither more money nor more ships. The princes of the West offer nothing but their usual obligations, and often not even those.’ And the Pope stole the money to build the fleet, Swan was tempted to say, just to shock everyone present, but he kept his poisonous views to himself. He was in a black mood, and a reckless one; but not so reckless that he would disclose everything.

  ‘Genoa has a hundred ships alone,’ Dorino said, suddenly pettish.

  ‘So does Venice,’ Bembo said. ‘So does Aragon.’

  ‘So does Naples,’ Swan said.

  Theodora sighed. ‘We are abandoned, then,’ she said.

  Bembo spread his hands on the table. ‘Ma donna, I am a Venetian; often, too often, an enemy. But I think that perhaps I can comment on the politics of Genoa as an outsider. Genoa no longer looks east. The loss of Constantinople was a shattering blow; Genoa has access to Cyprus, but the most valuable cargo is now sugar, and Genoa and Aragon and Portugal are all competing for a sugar trade that no longer runs this far east.’

  ‘Portugal,’ she said. ‘Almost Thule.’

  ‘Yet I am from England,’ Swan said, ‘and my friend Juan di Silva, drinking in a taverna this moment, is from Portugal.’

  Bembo sat back as the first course was served; a magnificent sea bream, baked with saffron. ‘I fear that the East was actually lost fifty years ago, when Venice and Genoa fought to the bitter end for Tenedos.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a foolish war. It bankrupted both states. And they, and only they, cared about what happened in the East.’

  Theodora’s head came up. ‘We cared,’ she said. ‘For a thousand years and more, we held the line against the infidel. And you only visited us to sack our cities.’

  Bembo could not meet her eyes. ‘Venice’s record is not so very good,’ he admitted.

  Swan blinked. ‘Your Grace, I will go to Mithymna tonight,’ he said. He willed them to change the subject.

  Theodora looked at him and flushed. ‘You will not stay the night?’ she asked, and then cast her eyes down.

  Alessandro shook his head. ‘This seems precipitate, even for you,’ he said.

  Swan shrugged. ‘Fra Tommaso cannot make the trip,’ he said, ‘and the Turks will be alert to the sea, even if they fear the storm.’

  ‘What can you hope to accomplish?’ Dorino asked. He was genuinely curious.

  Swan nodded. ‘You were going to send someone, were you not, Your Grace?’ he asked.

  Dorino barked a laugh. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of asking you.’

  Swan smiled. ‘And Admiral Corner thought the same. Is it so surprising that I should guess that I will be asked? Give me any messages you have. Do you have any troops to relieve the town? I am curious. Looking for a lever to move the cardinal.’

  ‘My firman from the Sultan allows me two hundred soldiers,’ the prince said. ‘I have almost twice that; not enough to relieve a barn, much less a city. Omar Reis, for it is he, has eighty ships and almost ten thousand men, and more again on the mainland.’

  Swan nodded. ‘You know,’ he said, his recklessness surfacing, ‘I have, myself, defeated the Turks in the last year. And with the Despot of the Morea and the Lord of Corinth, we defeated the Turks again; and I was at Belgrade when we almost killed the Sultan. Far from being giants, terrible and unbeatable foes, I find the Turks to be men like me; brave and cowardly, cleve
r and foolish, every bit as apt to be asleep on watch or follow the wrong trail. They are excellent soldiers because they practise constantly and they have little time for incompetence; something the princes of the West might do well to emulate. But most of all, above all other things, they are daring. They take risks.’ He looked around. ‘Trevisan takes no risks, and the Pope takes few risks, and Prince Dorino takes no risks, and we will, in the end, be swallowed by the Turks, not because they are so very fearsome, but because we cede them the initiative in everything.’

  Prince Dorino smiled. ‘You chide me with cowardice?’ he asked.

  Swan shook his head. ‘Never. I chide you with caution. You will have to fight for every inch of your possessions all the rest of your life. This looks like a bitter struggle; easier to make peace and pay. That is the whole of the Turkish strategy.’

  Dorino nodded. ‘I think you forget which one of us is a prince, and which one a paid killer,’ he said.

  Swan smiled. The darkness rose almost like joy. ‘I think you forget that you need me to go to Mithymna.’

  Theodora laughed, and so did Bembo. He clapped his hands. ‘Your Grace, my admiral chided me with the very same words earlier today, and I confess that intimacy tempts a gentleman to reveal himself.’

  Prince Dorino snapped his fingers and wine was poured. ‘I do not mind straight talk. But Ser Suane, I do not think you can imagine how much we risk, when we fight. I think you speak with the bravado of the young.’

  Swan sat back. ‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘But if I am young, so are the Turks; young and daring, and they will not stop coming. It will be like blackmail; every time you concede, there will be a new demand.’

  Prince Dorino nodded graciously. ‘I agree with your assessment of the strategy of the Turks; if I did not, no Christian fleet would find harbour here. Lesvos is the easternmost possession of Christendom, and one of the most beautiful. If the Pope wants my support, if he wants me to open my harbours, he needs to send more troops, more money, and more ships. No, no more; I drink to your health. Let me tell my chamberlain what to write; we will send messages of hope into Mithymna, and maybe it will hold. My brother’s wife is a good chatelaine. You know she owns her own armour, and fights like an Amazon?’

  ‘I had heard as much,’ Bembo said.

  ‘I remember her as Diana when there was a play,’ Swan said.

  Theodora smiled. ‘Those were beautiful times,’ she said.

  Swan deceived both Kendal and Clemente, because he wanted no hostages to fortune. He set out in the pouring rain of a dark night, following Stefanos, the silversmith’s ‘brother’. He’d paid the man fifty gold ducats in advance, with double that as a reward if they made it back to Mytilene. He had hours of walking in the rainy dark to think of the insanity of his actions; going almost alone into the camp of his enemies, where he could be captured, tortured horribly, and killed.

  He was afraid of being afraid. That is, something had happened in the pit in Mistra, and now he needed to prove to himself that he was still the sort of man who would dare to take on such a mission. Or at least, when he was soaked to the skin stumbling along a rocky road that ran along the beaches of northern Lesvos, his own fears were as close to an explanation for his reckless behaviour as he could vouchsafe.

  ‘I am a fool,’ he said aloud, and Stefanos whirled and silenced him with an admonishing finger, even though the rain covered any noise they could make; would have covered them if they had been mounted on tournament steeds and wearing armour.

  When the day came up, a slow bleeding of light into a grey landscape, they walked along the coast, left the road, and crossed a beach. Four men were sitting under the upturned wooden hull of a small fishing boat. Stefanos waved, the four men crawled out, righted the boat with a single heave, and began to put her gear aboard. Stefanos and Swan crossed the soft sand to the hard sand; the wind was blowing as if all the furies in the world were blowing together, but there were patches of blue visible in the storm-tossed sky.

  They boarded the boat without a word from the crew and Swan, wet and fairly miserable inside and out, huddled in the bow as they left the beach and the full wind in the channel struck them, but despite the weather, the four men raised a scrap of the lateen sail and the little boat raced along, seeming to fly more than sail, skimming the wave tops and racing the clouds.

  Stefanos looked at Swan, and Swan discovered that he was standing in the bow, heedless of the spray, and grinning.

  ‘You like the sea,’ Stefanos said, as if it was the first normal thing he’d seen in Swan.

  ‘I do,’ Swan agreed. ‘And this is like flying.’

  They entered a rain squall, ran downwind for a while, the boat running free for the coast of Asia, and then came so close before they tacked that Swan thought he might just get to visit Ephesus after all. But then they came about, all the fishermen bending sharply so that the boom could snap over their heads, and Stefanos holding Swan down as if afraid a foreigner might be too stupid to notice the boom.

  They made another long run, across the wind, close-hauled. The fishing boat pointed much closer to the wind with a lateen than Swan had imagined.

  The fishermen were fishing, even at this speed; not with nets, but with lines. Fish after fish was landed; a fine red snapper, a big gold-head. The pilot-helmsman gutted them, the tiller under his arm as his sharp knife worked. When he looked up and met Swan’s eye, he grinned. He had a beard like a patriarch and an ancient Italian wool hat that might once have been red, and he seemed to know the coast of Lesvos without looking over the side.

  Mid-morning they went about again, and the bow was pointed at Asia. Swan took a turn on one of the heavy rods, trolling a weighted baitfish on a heavy hook. He got a fish that he didn’t recognise; the other fishermen congratulated him, and he drank some wine with the pilot. He was offered bread and goat’s cheese; he found that he was hungry and in a much lighter mood than he had been the night before; the whole thing seemed insane now, but he was committed. He ate the damp bread with gusto, drank a little more wine, and was shocked to see the coast of Asia so close he might have hit it with the last of his bread.

  The pilot pulled him down and the fishing boat put about like a dolphin and then they were running back, close-hauled again, the lateen pulled as tight as four strong men could arrange.

  ‘We will land on the beach at Sikamineas,’ his guide said, the first words of explanation he’d offered. ‘You bring them luck. They like us. We will spread nets when we are off the beach. Please be patient.’

  On and on, and the rain started again and blew into them from the side. Swan was soaked and cold, but the speed was exhilarating even through his fatigue.

  When they were perhaps half a mile from the land, a deeply indented beach with a red-roofed town high above, the fishermen dropped the sail, set a broad scrap of canvas to catch a little of the strong wind, and began to cast their nets. Swan had grown up on the Thames; small fishing boats had a certain similarity, and Swan could cast a corner of the net by the weights, and he pitched in. The smell of rotting fish filled his nostrils as the nets were taken from the little hold, and it was, all in all, a smell with happy memories of youth; he threw, and pulled, and they hauled in a net of varied Aegean fish even as the next rain squall was chasing them down the shallow bay. They landed with a hearty thump and the rain hit them ten breaths later, but by then all six men had dragged the little hull well up out of the surf and stood breathing hard.

  ‘Welcome to Skala Sikamineas,’ Stefanos said. ‘My home village is up above.’ He glanced around. ‘We will go into Mithymna tonight. First, we’ll eat a big meal.’

  Swan ate fish, slept, ate more fish, and had a nap. A toothless older woman dried his clothes and shared some arak with him; later, she made him a little cup of quaveh and he learned her name, Andromache, which struck him as an odd and masculine name for a woman, but no doubt had classical antecedents.

  After his quaveh, Stefanos joined him and took his clothes. ‘
Here,’ he said. ‘Look like a peasant.’

  He joined Stefanos in loose, dry clothes that were soaked in an hour of climbing an old cobbled road into the hills above the beach, which loomed like the Alps but proved to be constructed on a more human scale, although Swan was breathless enough when they crested the last of them on the slick cobbles.

  ‘Who built the roads?’ Swan asked.

  Stefanos shrugged. ‘Pericles, for all I know,’ he jested. ‘The ancient people. Men repair them every spring; the donkeys go better on the cobbles, and some tinkers have wagons.’

  Swan felt that he was seeing an entire world that he missed when he was a knight and a soldier; small men and women living normal lives.

  Midnight and they were passing over the shoulder of Lepedymnos, the tallest of the local mountains, and there below them twinkled the lights of Mithymna, which looked cheerful enough at a distance. Until an ugly orange light flashed; a gun firing in the darkness.

  Stefanos led them to a well-roofed shepherd’s cot, and started a very small fire. Then both men ate a bowl of fish stew and put on packs full of carefully wrapped dried fish.

  Swan had no weapon other than a sharp fish knife on a thong around his neck. Anything else would give them away instantly, and Stefanos had insisted; not even a fighting knife, not so much as a saint’s medallion would he allow.

  Going down the last shoulder of mountain was terrible; the sky was dark, the stars hidden, and the combination of gravel, loose rock, open, wet rock faces and scrubby pine trees made the going both dangerous and noisy.

  ‘Hurry,’ Stefanos said. ‘We are late.’

  Late for what? Swan wondered, but he did his best, tumbling down what proved to be a short cliff and landing on sand; a miracle or a tribute to the goddess Fortuna, who seemed to protect Swan at all times.

  He trotted on behind Stefanos, and they were moving quickly in the near-total darkness when they blundered into a Turkish patrol, or rather, a Turkish looting party.

  A heavy spear was pointed at Swan and a closed lantern opened. ‘What is in that basket?’ a heavy Albanian voice asked.

  Swan had no trouble looking terrified. He took the basket off his shoulders and put it on the ground.