Venice

by Christian Cameron

Alessandro made a face. ‘You are the only one of us getting anything done,’ he admitted. ‘See if you can keep the costume when your outing is over.’ He pinned the skullcap against Swan’s head with a dextrous finger and began to wind his turban.

  ‘These were all the rage in Venice when I was a boy,’ he said.

  The stirrups were short, the saddle virtually non-existent, and the other Turks laughed at his attempt to lengthen the leathers. A servant – a Turkish servant – slapped his hand away and motioned for him to mount, and he did, vaulting into the saddle because the stirrup was so high above him he couldn’t dream of getting a foot into it.

  Once he was up, the servant tucked his booted feet into the very light stirrups.

  Idris pulled up next to him. ‘I have ridden on one of your knight’s horses,’ he said. ‘It is like riding in a sedan chair. With us, you must actually ride the horse.’

  Swan was not a great rider – life in London offered little scope for riding, and his periodic time with his father hadn’t offered him any more than a cursory education. The small saddle made him uncomfortable, and he almost missed the ride out of the city, he was so focused on staying on the horse. The Turks were all superb horsemen, and they galloped, cantered, walked and trotted, changing gaits to suit the length of the street and the thickness of the crowd.

  On the other hand, the Arab mare he was riding was, without a doubt, the best horse anyone had ever put him up on. The horse was small by European standards – like a lady’s riding horse – but she seemed to carry him without effort, and she flowed along under his inexperienced seat without offering any protest. At one point, on a long straight stretch just before the Belgrade Gate, when the other young men were galloping and an old beggar stepped into the road, she pivoted neatly under him and then – it seemed to him – rolled her own hindquarters to keep him in the saddle.

  By the time they had crossed the great walls, heading for the farm country to the west, he was in love, and although there was no one to tell him so, he was riding better than he’d ever ridden in his life. And enjoying it.

  Idris was laughing with his friends, and servants met them – a pair of carts with a dozen hawks and two more young men. But after they had reined up and let the carts join them, Idris came back down the cavalcade to Swan. ‘Do you like her?’ he said, pointing with his jewelled crop at the mare.

  ‘I love her, Idris. She is . . . superb.’ Swan grinned.

  Idris grinned back. ‘You English are so honest!’ he said. ‘You are like Turks. You think a thing – you say it. Venetians never tell me this horse is wonderful. They are always cautious.’ He looked at the horse. ‘To us, her colour is not so good. That golden coat – we call it yellow – is . . .’ He shrugged. ‘But she is among the smartest of my horses.’ He leaned over. ‘I beg you to accept her.’ He frowned. ‘Or anything else you see that you want.’

  Swan laughed. If only you knew, he thought. ‘I love the kaftan,’ he said.

  Idris nodded. ‘All that is yours. You cannot ride without it. Indeed, all of your guards know now that we are friends. If you are found in these clothes . . .’ He smiled again. ‘Call for me.’

  ‘You are very like a prince, I find,’ Swan said.

  Idris shook his head. ‘Now you sound like a Venetian,’ he said. ‘Flatterer. Listen – of all my friends, none speaks Italian. So none of these men can speak with you, but all know that you saved my life.’ The other young men bowed from their saddles or saluted with their riding whips as they were introduced – a long string of Turkish names that even Swan had trouble understanding, much less remembering.

  Swan’s training as a royal page came in handy. He understood – intimately – that Idris was the great man here, and that he couldn’t monopolise him. So he bowed to the various Suleymans, Murids and Bazayets, and smiled at all of them, and occupied himself riding.

  Idris rode superbly, of course. He took a hawk on his wrist and offered another to Swan, who had to profess complete ignorance.

  ‘Another time I’ll teach you,’ he said. He looked grave. ‘See you at lunch.’

  And he was off. He loosed his bird at a series of ground targets, and Swan felt this was vaguely at odds with English practice, but then the prince sent his largest bird into the air after something that was a speck above them, and then the whole cavalcade galloped away across the fields of the Greek farms that ringed the fallen city.

  Swan reined his little mare in and stayed with the carts. He noted that the two men who’d joined with the carts – also obviously gentlemen, in that they had rich kaftans and jewels in their turbans – both stayed with the wagons. The nearer young man – a boy, really – flashed a smile at him, and he bowed in the saddle. His mare misinterpreted the shift in his weight forward and went directly to a gallop, stretching away over the fields to the south, towards the sea.

  It might have been exhilarating, except that, at the very moment when the horse exploded into motion, Swan’s foot slipped out of his left stirrup. He sat down, hard, and tried with increasing panic to find the stirrup under his left foot. The little mare turned in a very tight circle to the left, and suddenly he hit the ground.

  He lay there and his shoulder hurt. And he felt like a fool. His mare came and stood by him.

  After a moment, he heard hoof-beats, and suddenly one of the boys was there. He dismounted from a dead gallop, actually running alongside his horse for two or three paces, and flung himself down by Swan.

  ‘Are you alive?’ the Turk asked in a lilting Italian.

  Swan looked up into the Turk’s eyes.

  Eyes with smudges of kohl around the thick lashes. Wide-set, deep brown eyes above a slender, arching nose and a heavy, sensual mouth.

  ‘You are not a boy,’ Swan said. ‘Oh, my neck hurts.’

  She laughed good-naturedly. ‘How . . . kind of you to notice,’ she said. ‘Are you unbroken?’

  He sat up.

  The second boy was riding towards them. ‘It is – how do you Italians say this? A polite fiction that I am a boy today. Yes?’

  Swan rotated his head from side to side. ‘A fiction I will endeavour to maintain, demoiselle,’ he said gallantly. Her very palpable presence at his side – her hand on his arm – reminded him that he hadn’t talked to a woman in two weeks. The siege had emptied the great city of women – there weren’t even prostitutes in the Venetian quarter.

  She put a strong hand in his hand and hauled him to his feet. His horse was two steps away, and he mounted as efficiently as he could manage. He knew he looked like a fool to the Turks. He couldn’t help it.

  ‘My brother has given you this mare?’ she said.

  ‘Khatun Bengül!’ shouted the second ‘boy’. In Arabic.

  ‘Shush!’ the Turkish woman said. ‘I am Salim.’

  ‘You touched him.’

  ‘He was on the ground and needed help.’

  ‘And now he knows you are a woman!’

  ‘You shouted my name across the world!’

  ‘He is a Frank. They are as stupid as cattle.’ The second woman was ten years older than Khatun Bengül, and several inches shorter. Under her mantle and turban, Swan judged her to be every bit as attractive, with beautiful eyes and high cheeks. Khatun Bengül, however, had a translucent skin that Swan had seldom seen – hers was the colour of oak newly split – not white, but like slightly aged ivory – and her brows were black and strong.

  He was staring.

  ‘Now he will be besotted with you, you little witch.’ The older woman laughed.

  ‘He does not seem very stupid, Auntie,’ Khatun Bengül said.

  ‘Bah – all Franks are stupid. I’ve owned dozens. Look at him. He can’t even ride properly.’ The older woman gave him the once-over. ‘Handsome, though. Look at those lips.’

  The two women tittered together.

  Swan, who had laboured for months at Arabic, had a sudden love for the language that no amount of Rabbi Aaron’s teaching could ever give him.

&nb
sp; ‘I like his hands,’ Khatun Bengül said.

  ‘Perhaps we might ride back to the carts?’ Swan said in Italian.

  Khatun Bengül nodded.

  ‘But he rides like a sack of camel shit. Really. What do they teach Frankish boys?’ Auntie asked.

  The falconers returned an hour later, and they ate a sumptuous picnic of mutton with a dozen sweet things and some spices that Swan loved, and chicken. They all drank an odd, salty drink that Swan disliked at first taste, but grew used to with practice.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked Idris.

  ‘The drink?’ Idris asked. ‘It’s just . . . milk. Hmm. And some salt and spice and water.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a word I don’t know in Italian. When milk . . . isn’t milk any more.’

  ‘Cheese?’ Swan asked.

  Idris shook his head.

  After lunch, the falconing party rode off again, leaving Swan with the servants. He didn’t mind – he rode his mare into the fields, going more slowly then faster, changing gaits – learning to ride.

  He was resting, drinking more of the salty drink from a glass bottle provided by a servant, when he heard the auntie shriek.

  ‘You cannot, you hussy. Your father would burst himself. He’ll gut me – and you.’

  Khatun Bengül – if that was her name – appeared around the wagon, riding as if she was a satyress – the image came quite spontaneously to Swan. There was something erotic in the way she rode.

  ‘You do not fly the falcons?’ she said in her curious and, to him, very beautiful Italian.

  ‘I do not know falconry,’ he said, smiling his most ingratiating smile.

  ‘I could teach you a little,’ she said. ‘We are not . . . expected to gallop over fields. But I was going to fly my birds.’

  Her aunt rode around the side of the wagon.

  ‘Look at him – he knows you are a woman. It’s written all over him,’ said Auntie, in Arabic. ‘Listen, my little filly. I was young once, too.’

  ‘You are a coarse old woman,’ Khatun Bengül spat. ‘I want to teach him to fly a bird.’

  Auntie said something in Turkish.

  Khatun Bengül flushed.

  Swan would have given a year of his life to know what had been said. He turned the sounds over in his head – one of his special skills, and the reason he could learn languages so very fast. As fast as the two women could spit at each other, he processed the syllables. He had no idea what they meant. But he would.

  Auntie seemed to be backing down.

  ‘If you would care to ride with us,’ Khatun Bengül said, ‘my auntie will keep a very careful watch on us.’ She spat the words.

  ‘Don’t think I can’t understand when you talk love words to the dirty Frank,’ said the auntie.

  Khatun Bengül flushed red. ‘This is Italian,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with love.’

  However, despite their inauspicious beginning, the next hour was a pleasure. Khatun Bengül flew her two small birds with expertise, gossiping in Arabic and Turkish with her aunt on the one hand and coaching Swan to fly a gyrfalcon on the other in Italian. And when the gyrfalcon, tired of his inept hand motions, bated, and then slipped his jesses and flew into an oak tree, the women laughed, and Swan laughed, and when he dismounted, stripped out of his kaftan and climbed the tree, successfully retrieving the bird, the two women clapped their hands together as if he were a conjuror.

  ‘He really is handsome,’ Auntie said. ‘Pity he isn’t a slave.’

  That took the wind out of Swan’s sails. Auntie was looking at him with the sort of appraisal with which older women had been examining him since he had turned fourteen, and ordinarily he’d have arranged . . .

  But he couldn’t take his eyes off Khatun Bengül.

  Perhaps fortunately for all of them, Idris returned shortly after the adventure of the gyrfalcon and the tree.

  He clapped Swan on the back. ‘I see you have learned the first lesson of falconry – how to retrieve a lost bird,’ he said. ‘You have done this before?’

  ‘One of the boys is teaching me,’ Swan said.

  Idris laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘My father will indeed have us all killed,’ he laughed. ‘You know she’s my sister, eh?’

  Swan sighed. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘And a force of nature,’ Idris acknowledged. They had turned their horses towards home. Most of the Turks had mounted a second horse.

  ‘She was very . . . courteous to me,’ Swan said.

  Idris laughed, his head thrown back. ‘She makes boys bark at the moon,’ he said. ‘Ah, my Englishman. Do not cast languishing glances on my sister. She spits on the men who worship her.’ He took a flask out of his kaftan, drank, and handed it to Swan, who drank. Greek wine – sweet and strong.

  ‘All the good Persian poets were drunks,’ Idris said. ‘I’m working on it.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, Holy Koran forbids it. Or so my imam insists.’

  Later, after they had passed the Belgrade Gate, Idris said, ‘Listen – I owe you my life, but you must never mention that my sister was here today. When I saw her . . . never mind.’

  ‘I will swear,’ Swan promised.

  ‘It’s a hard life for her,’ Idris said. ‘In Thrace, when my father is commanding an army, she rides like a man – shoots a bow, sleeps on the ground. It is how we were raised. My mother – she was a tribal woman, you know?’

  Swan didn’t know, but he nodded.

  ‘Owned her own horses. Owns farms in Anatolia. So we were raised to the saddle. And in this cursed city, poor Khatun Bengül must pretend to be a good girl, a nice girl who stays at home and has slaves take money to the poor, who never shows her face, who never rides a horse.’ Idris shrugged. ‘We don’t always get along.’

  Khatun Bengül leaned in from Swan’s other side. ‘He uses me to protect him from Father,’ she said.

  Swan looked at her. When he breathed in, he tasted her scent over the smell of flowers and grass and horse.

  ‘She uses me to protect her from Father, too,’ Idris said.

  ‘I am a nice girl,’ Khatun Bengül protested. ‘I just like to ride.’ She shrugged. ‘And I can do anything a man can do. Better. Men are all fools.’ She tossed her head.

  Behind them, all of Idris’s friends were watching her.

  Swan took a deep, steadying breath. ‘Yes,’ he admitted. ‘Every one of us.’

  ‘Sufia will be in our stables – but available for you at any hour,’ Idris said. They rode past the great aqueduct, through the forum of Constantine, and past the north end of the Hippodrome to the great houses beyond Hagia Sophia.

  Swan breathed a sigh of relief when his horse was not stabled in the great cathedral. Sacrilege had its limits.

  They rode into the palace quarter and dismounted in the courtyard of a fine square of buildings. Workmen were facing the front of the stables with beautiful fired tiles in a rich blue with the trailing cursive of Persian script. Less than a hundred paces away, a tall minaret was being built on to a low Byzantine church.

  Swan handed his horse to a pair of slaves. He put a hand familiarly on Idris’s arm. ‘You have your friends,’ he said. ‘I should go.’

  Idris bowed. ‘You are a good guest. Will you come riding again?’

  Swan smiled. ‘My lord, the bishop will probably give birth to a cow when he hears that I spent the day with infidels.’

  Idris laughed. ‘Tell him my father will have his guts ripped out of his fat stomach if he stops you.’

  Idris meant these words as a joke, but they chilled Swan.

  Idris leaned closer. ‘Listen – you know this is all a sham? Don’t you? In the spring, my father will lead an army into the Morea and we will take everything Venice has. It’s not even a secret.’

  Swan struggled to maintain his composure.

  ‘Don’t let it come between us,’ Idris said. He smiled. ‘I treasure you. Come ride with me again tomorrow.’

  Swan bowed low. ‘I’ll try.’

  He was pleased when
several of Idris’s friends offered him casual salutes. As if he was a person. Others remained studiously aloof.

  He turned and crossed the courtyard. But Auntie blocked his route with her pony. She smiled at him.

  He smiled back at her. It was his habit to smile at any pretty woman who smiled at him.

  ‘She’d like to have you in her bed,’ Khatun Bengül said. ‘But she doesn’t know how to ask.’

  Swan, seldom at a loss for words, had none for this situation.

  Khatun Bengül laughed. ‘You flush like a girl,’ she said. ‘Will you come and fly a bird with us another time?’

  Swan bowed. ‘Perhaps, if my duties allow. The company was . . . divine.’

  ‘Divine?’ Khatun Bengül tittered. ‘Now, from one of these young men, that would be blasphemy.’

  Swan wasn’t sure whether he’d scored or not. So he smiled, bowed again, and walked out the gate.

  Despite feeling utterly smitten, he walked straight into the alley that separated Omar Reis’s palazzo from the next magnificent structure and walked south. He was disappointed that his sense of direction had failed him – he didn’t emerge into the street on which Bessarion’s house was situated. He looked behind him, and at the cross-street. He didn’t see any sign of Yellow Face or Tall Man, as he had christened them.

  So he followed the next alley south.

  There was Bessarion’s house. It rose three stories above the street, and was surrounded by a high wall. There were outbuildings – a stable, a slave or servant quarters, and perhaps a workshop.

  He walked all the way around the compound. The gates were locked. There were beggars living in the arch of the front gate.

  He paused.

  ‘Effendi!’ said one woman. ‘Do not harm us!’

  ‘Do you speak Greek?’ he asked in that language.

  All of their faces brightened. There were four of them – filthy, but well enough fed, he imagined.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ he asked.

  The old woman shrugged. ‘Some dead Frank,’ she said.

  ‘No infidel lives here?’ he asked.

  They looked fearful.

  ‘Has a Turk taken the house?’ he insisted. He was dressed as a Turk – the word infidel could go either way.