The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  ‘They sprout ships like mushrooms in a rainy winter,’ he said. ‘If we beat them, they will be back directly. If we lose?’ He looked up from the rail. ‘I’m ruined, and so is every man who outfitted a ship.’

  I learned a great deal from him, and from listening to him discourse to Nerio. He often forgot we were not Venetians and he freely discussed his orders and his reasoning. Not, I suspect, because he sought our opinions: in terms of naval tactics, none of us had anything useful to offer. But as I have found since, it is often useful to speak to intelligent men – ay, and women! – if only to clarify your own point of view.

  I had little experience of the sea, beyond, as I have said, crossing the channel, running up and down the Thames, and the recent voyage out to Greece from Venice. Yet now that the Venetians had left the king and the crusade behind, I discovered a whole new level of hurry, of hard-pressed sail, and hard-pressed mariners.

  Admiral Contarini might have been hesitant about meeting the Turks in battle, but he was in a great hurry to reach the point where the decision would have to be made, and he pressed us hard. We had the great lateen sails rigged on both the foremast and the mainmast. When the wind was right, on her quarter, we could rig a lateen to the stubby stern mast. When the wind was dead astern, we’d rig ‘gull winged’ with one great lateen out over each side. The great galleys were odd cross-breeds, with heavy masts and a sail rig, yet the long hulls and oar banks of a galley, and I lacked the knowledge of ships that would allow me to know if they were good ships or not. The passage of time has made me a better sailor, aye, and a better judge of ships, and now, of course, I know that the great galleys of Venice are one of the handiest and most dangerous warships afloat, but they looked so little like the King of England’s warships that I had my doubts.

  You may imagine that I did not express those doubts. Instead, I accepted orders and instructions and listened to the irascible old man scold his subordinates, curse his sailors and woo his oarsmen through two long weeks of Ionian summer. During that time we learned that on a Venetian galley, in a long row, the gentlemen are expected to put in their time at the great oars, and we rowed almost every day. It was excellent exercise, and the hard bellies and heavily muscled arms of the Venetian courtiers I knew were explained.

  Often, Venetian gentlemen-marines are also men in training to command galleys, and as the admiral tended to forget that we were foreigners, we received instruction every day on the rudiments of navigation and operations at sea. I learned a little about taking the helm and steering the ship, enough to know that it would require a lifetime of practice to be proficient. Still, in two weeks, the group of us learned a fair amount, all except Fiore, who had at last found an element that was not his own. The sea defeated him, and he didn’t stir from his hammock except to lose his latest attempt at a meal over the side.

  During these lessons I got to know Contarini’s Venetian gentlemen better. His captain was Messire Vettor Pisani, a famous sailor and merchant. Pisani had a great name as a fighting sailor, and we heard tales from the sailors about his exploits against the Turks, the Egyptians, and most especially against the Genoese. He was in his forties, tall and weather-beaten, with a great nose like the prow of a ship and cheekbones so high and sharp he might have been a Tartar. He had a vast dignity, for a man of his age; he seldom spoke unless he had something to say, and his silence was sometimes more effective than Contarini’s diatribes.

  I learned about him and his history from Carlo Zeno, one of the Venetian gentlemen. Zeno didn’t like me when I came aboard, and I heard him, at meals, make slighting reference to my poor Italian. I might have bridled, but I was working very hard on my temper, and Pisani gave me yet another example of a dignified chivalry. So I smiled at Zeno whenever we met, and refused to accept his ill humour. When the officers began my sea education, he mocked my ignorance.

  I was, I confess, angry. I’m sure I showed it, and his mockery continued. I bit my lips and tried to listen when Messire Pisani showed me how best to grasp the tiller and taught me some of the Italian words of command. A galley is strange animal, which is a country of its own. It speaks Italian, but does so with both Greek and Arabic words thrown atop the Italian.

  I walked about the ship after exercise each day, chanting my new words to myself. I’d say them to Marc-Antonio when we wrestled, or to Fiore when we fenced. Zeno would walk along the corsia, the central gangway, with his hands behind his back, saying the same words – aping me, in other words, while the oarsmen laughed.

  I bit the insides of my cheeks.

  Nerio laughed at me. ‘Smack him,’ he said. ‘He’s a Venetian – he’ll resent it the rest of his life, but that will be the end of this.’ Nerio grinned. ‘Venetians are good haters.’

  Fiore was no use; he was virtually prostrate with seasickness.

  Use, however, made him master, and by the time we reached Piraeus under the magnificent hill of ancient Athens, Fiore was at least able to keep his feet at sea and could engage in some practice of arms. The Venetian gentlemen, Carlo Zeno and Gianni di Testa, were both young men, but they had each served in a sea fight, and had participated in many drills and exercises at sea, and with their help we practiced clearing the central gangway, repelling boarders, clearing the little poop behind the ram – the spur – and protecting the helmsman’s station.

  The Venetian marines both used spears in sea fights. We practiced with spears and with longswords. As far as we could tell, each weapons offered some advantages. The spear gave you reach, and offered no threat to your oarsmen – remember, in a fight on a galley, your own motive power is sitting in vulnerable rows not more than a few inches on either side of where you set your feet. On the Christ the King the rowers were set low, so that the benches were below the height of the gangway and the rowers’ heads came up to the marines’ knees or slightly higher. This required a man using a longsword to be judicious in wielding his sword from the lower guards.

  I know this, as I clipped a rower in the head with a wooden waster one afternoon off the Hand, south of the Peloponnesus. He was quite kind about it when he came to, but the incident made me more wary of heavy blows from low guards. And of course, Messire Zeno mimed my bad sword cut and made the rowers laugh.

  It was not all bad. Several times Zeno held forth, very intelligently, on matters of navigation, or on history, ancient or modern. He knew the Levant well, having served all over for Venice or as a mercenary for the Turks, who he rather admired. He’d been an exile for some time. I had a hard time hating him, even when he was mocking me.

  It was also during this voyage that I fell in love with the stars. At sea, you can see them all, thousands and thousands of them. It is not like watching the stars on land. It is, instead, like communing with God. At first I dreaded night watches, but I fell in love with stars, and then the watches passed in learning their names.

  At Athens we paused to take on water and dried food, and the admiral had most of the Venetian ships sell off their heavy cargo, if indeed they had shipped any. We were told to take a few days to rest.

  Nerio explained that the Duke of Athens – also the King of Sicily – was not always a Venetian ally, but that summer, with the crusade at sea and the Venetian fleet supporting the Achaean lords in their attempts to stem the Turkish tide, the Duke of Athens was very friendly to Venice indeed.

  We had the pleasure of riding up to the great and ancient citadel of the Acropolis, which some men call ‘the castle of Athens’. Many of the antiquities are in ruins, of course, but the magnificent church of Saint Mary is in the ancient temple of the Virgin Goddess of the Greeks, and part of it is now the ducal palace.

  I had never seen anything so moving in my life. I have seen Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople and my beloved London, Venice and Baghdad and Vienna and Krakow and Prague, and to me, none of them have the ancient majesty of the citadel of Athens, which seems to me to be as ancient as man’s presence on the
world of sin. And it makes me feel odd … small, and somehow weak, to imagine that this was built by men like me, so long ago that we have lost the crafts by which it was made.

  Bah! My views on ancient architecture bore you. So be it. The King of Sicily was, at that time, the Duke of Athens, and the city was held by the bishop – an Italian. He was, to all intents, at war with the Duke of Thebes, who was French: Roger de Luria, of whom I might say more later. Suffice it to say that this man, the Marshal of Achaea, was, despite his high-sounding title, a routier, and was in league with the Turks. Nerio seemed to know everything about Greece and I learned from him many a curious fact, not least of which was that his father already owned land all over Romania (as we call it) or Greece.

  He gave his lopsided smile. ‘I am myself the Baron of Vostitza,’ he said, waving a hand airily toward the Morea.

  I wanted to ride farther afield. Greece is rich; the farms on the plain behind Athens are magnificent and well-tilled, yet a third of them stood fallow and the castle at the edge of the plain was burned.

  Nerio shrugged. ‘Romania is falling apart,’ he said. ‘Bad government, greed – mostly our own greed.’ He looked at me. ‘My father has strong views on how Greece should be ruled. You should ask him.’ He looked out over the plains. ‘For myself, I love it,’ he said.

  I was falling in love myself. The air was so clear, and the overwhelming sense of the ancient was very beautiful to me.

  It must have been that night – I suppose we were only in Piraeus three days – when we went up to the town of Athens that nestles under the castle. Everywhere you can see the ancient city, like bones of soldiers long dead on an old battlefield. Some bones were well preserved – a Greek priest told us that the temple with a church that we admired had once been dedicated to Hephaestus, the smith god of the ancients. But the town was very small, with fewer than five thousand people. Nerio said it was so small for the same reason that the castle on the plain was burned – the constant state of war.

  ‘The Frankish lords fight each other,’ he said. ‘And the Franks fight the Despot at Mistra. And the Greeks fight among themselves, and fight the Vlachs and the Albanians. The Genoese fight the Venetians. The Turks attack everyone, but no one fights them.’ He spread his hands. He might have said more, but we were climbing in the last light into the occupied parts of the town on the slope of the acropolis, and he saw a girl leaning over the door of her house, and he smiled at her, and she probably smiled back and I lost him.

  I might not even remember that evening, except that Fiore felt better and my friends ordered a dinner from a big taverna, perhaps the only taverna, almost directly under the walls. It was a pleasant building and had tables out on the roof of the next building down the steep slope, and we seemed to be sitting among the stars while we ate lamb and rice. The local wine was good, but Nerio was anxious to be away; we all knew him by then, and Miles smiled at me.

  ‘He wants to get to church,’ I said.

  There was, in fact, a pretty little church, a Greek church, but we were not so choosy in those days, and the Greek priest rang the bell himself and welcomed us to compline. Nerio had chosen the taverna and seemed very eager to be at Mass.

  I had never been in a Greek church before. Everyone calls them schismatics and heretics – I once asked Father Pierre to explain how they were heretics, and he laughed.

  ‘My son, it is all too possible, that it is we who are the heretics. Peter wrote letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalians, but none whatsoever to the French, the Italians, or the English.’ He laughed his lovely laugh and then looked directly at me. ‘Don’t tell the Pope,’ he said. And changed the subject.

  At any rate, we all had dispensations, from Father Pierre as legate, to hear Mass under the Greek rite, and I had never done so, so we went to Mass. The singing was very different from our own, but beautiful, and Fiore said it was like masses he had heard in Venice.

  We were in the church just long enough to admire the lamp, a magnificent hanging lamp of silver, when Nerio’s sudden burst of religious enthusiasm was explained by the arrival of the girl from the doorway down the hill, wearing a veil. I didn’t know her, but Nerio beamed at her – oh, that man!

  At any rate, immediately after Mass, all the Greeks went out into the tiny square and drank wine, and Nerio sat with his lady. He had a little Greek and she had a little Latin, and they conversed with long looks that smoked and smouldered.

  We heard the shouts and did nothing, because we were a little drunk and the Greeks were being very friendly, but when one of the shouts became a scream, Fiore was on his feet, sword in hand. I suppose I should say that, in Romania, men openly wore swords, even longswords, and all of us had ours by our sides.

  I followed Fiore when he ran past the church and plunged into the darkness. The streets were narrow, wound like a tangled skein of yarn, and were as steep as a mountain. As we ran, we heard shouting again. This time, we could clearly perceive that the shouting was Italian and the screaming was from a woman. We cut down another street and came out above a round tower and found four men fighting one while another fumbled at a screaming woman’s clothes. He had her on her back.

  There was another man down, but in the darkness, it was very difficult to make out who was who.

  The single man fighting four had his back to the tower – they call it the ‘Tower of the Winds’ – and he would charge out into them, swing wildly, and then back away. The four were cowards: they would not close with him.

  I became convinced that the single man was Carlo Zeno. Some combination of movement and the tone of the shouts.

  Zeno – if it was he – was trying to cut his way through to the woman. She, in turn, was resisting her would-be rapist with spirit. She kicked him in the head, and when he tried to raise her skirts, she got them over his head and stabbed him with a knife. I know this, because by then I was upon them, running full tilt. I gave him the pommel of my sword in the back of his head and left him to his tender victim.

  I passed them and pressed into the back of Zeno’s mêlée. He was beside himself, and he used his sword two-handed, sweeping it back and forth, trying to make a hole in the four men facing him.

  I kicked one in the back of the knee. He went down and I stamped on him while thrusting at a second man, and Fiore passed his blade over the head of a third and threw the man into the wall of the tower so hard that he died.

  The fourth man fell to his knees. He wept and begged – attacker to victim in a matter of moments.

  Zeno stabbed him through the mouth as he begged. It was a pretty thrust.

  The failed rapist was thrashing his heels on the ground in his death throes. His intended victim had cut his throat.

  Miles Stapleton ran up behind us, but it was done.

  Gianni di Testa was lying at the foot of the tower, his head broken by an iron club. We carried him to the priest’s house and then bought wine for the woman. She was Greek, and possibly a prostitute. The men were foreign scum, waterfront workers from Piraeus. If anyone knew them, no one claimed their corpses.

  The rest of the evening was not very pleasant.

  The next day, we received further news of the presence of the Turkish fleet, which had raided Negroponte for twenty days, so that the smoke of the Turkish fires could be seen in the north. The Venetian lords in the area and their feudal subordinates, as well as the bishop of Athens and his allies, had rallied a dozen galleys of the smaller size, and there were two Greek galleys in Piraeus. Syr Giannis Lascarus Calopherus and Syr Giorgos Angelus had accompanied us from Corfu, aboard the Corner galley, and they came aboard to inform us that these were Katakouzenos galleys from Mistra and not to be trusted.

  The politics of the schismatic are as depressingly convolute as our own, and it transpired that the current Emperor had been ruled as a child by a regent, John Kantakouzenos, who had as so often happens, taken the throne for himself. Wh
en he abdicated in favour of his lawful charge, he had granted to his own children the Despotate of the Morea, a string of Greek states carved out of the Latin dominions in western Greece. Despite which, Lord Contarini was delighted to accept their service: the two Greek galleys were large and well-built, and well-crewed.

  I watched Lord Contarini spend all his effort on food and water, and I learned much. War at sea is like war on land, except more so. A general can allow himself to believe that his men can live off the land, and most armies can do so for a few days at least, although the results can be catastrophic for discipline. But an admiral cannot believe any such thing – there is neither food nor fresh water at sea, and an admiral must carry every scrap of food and water his men will consume; and he can count the number of days his men will be able to maintain the campaign before a single arrow is loosed or his ships have even left the beach.

  Any road, by the end of three days we put to sea with thirty-one galleys. The Venetians were the core of the alliance, but provided slightly fewer than half the ships.

  At the south end of the strait between Negroponte and the mainland, we found, not the Turks – though we spent the better part of a day creeping over the ocean to reach them as stealthily as possible – but a pair of galleys belonging to my own order. They were part of the Christian League squadron that covered Smyrna, and they had shadowed the Turkish squadron for twenty days, doing what damage they could.

  The commander of the galleys was an Italian, Fra Daniele Caretto. I sent my respects to him by a note when the admiral sent Messire Zeno aboard his ship, but he didn’t send a response. He knew, of course, that the crusade was at sea. He said the Turks were equally aware, and that their campaign on Negroponte was probably an attempt to pre-empt our attack and force us on the defensive.