Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes

by Christian Cameron

  He was ashamed of his weakness. But that only made him sob. He choked.

  Fra Tommaso clutched him to his chest – steel to steel. Torches illuminated the charnel house – seven dead men, all looking as if they’d been savaged by demons or wolves.

  ‘Ave Maria!’ muttered Sir John Kendal.

  Swan couldn’t speak. The man with the crushed skull had been Salim. He had time to see that before he vomited.

  ‘He’s bleeding,’ said Fra Tommaso.

  It took them an hour to get him above ground, and in the end, he lost consciousness.

  Swan dreamed about it and awoke, screaming. And Fra Tommaso comforted him.

  Either this happened many times, or it was all part of the same nightmare. The dark. The choking heat, the faceplate, the smell of blood, the pressure of a man on his breastplate and the feel of the face caving in under his knife. Again, and again.

  And again.

  And again.

  When Swan recovered himself, he had a moment of extreme disorientation as the man at the end of his narrow bed was Fra Domenico Angelo, known the length and breadth of the Inner Sea as Fra Diablo. The conqueror’s ring burned on his finger like the fire of God.

  Swan tried to remember where he was. It probably said something about him that he knew the ring – and felt lust for it – before he came to the conclusion that he was in the Hospital of Rhodos.

  He could taste the opium in his mouth. His left leg was wrapped like an Egyptian mummy’s.

  The slightest flick of thought and he was in the dark with the weight of a man on his chest and—

  ‘The conquering hero,’ Fra Domenico said.

  Down the ward, a man screamed.

  Swan’s body spasmed. And he leaned over the bed and vomited into a basin.

  Fra Domenico sat on his bed and kept his long hair out of his chamber pot. ‘Ahh,’ he said, in his disturbingly gentle voice. ‘It was bad, under the earth, wasn’t it, boy?’

  Swan felt a disobedient temptation to punch the brother knight.

  ‘Listen, lad,’ the other man said. ‘That’s what it is like. And will be like, in your dreams, for many nights.’

  Swan flashed on … darkness. Hot darkness. A skull bursting under his weight like a hot chestnut on the frozen Thames. He got hold of himself. ‘Sir …’ he panted. ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Pray,’ Fra Dominco suggested. He knelt, and began to pray – simple words; the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria.

  Two days passed. The bandages came off, and Fra Tommaso and Fra John came to take him to the English Langue. Peter came with clothes. Swan was so far from himself that he didn’t feel dirty and didn’t feel any need to shave. He simply put on the clothes.

  Swan walked between them like a prisoner. He didn’t look around himself, and he didn’t have much of a sense of where he was. Sometimes he had trouble breathing.

  Fra John Kendal brought him along the main street to the English tower, and together they climbed the internal stairs to the second floor, where the knight had his command post.

  He sat. Swan sat opposite him with Fra Tommaso. Even Peter sat.

  ‘Talk,’ John Kendal said. ‘Tell it.’

  Swan looked at the darkness for a long time. ‘Can’t,’ he said.

  Peter leaned forward. ‘Sooner you tell it. Sooner it stops eating you.’

  A cup of wine was put in front of him. He drank it without tasting it, and another, while the others talked.

  Suddenly – without even intending to speak – he said, ‘It was hot and it stank and I liked Salim.’ He sobbed the last.

  Peter sloshed wine into the cup. ‘Tell us.’

  Swan swallowed wine. ‘I fought them. You know,’ he said. He made a motion.

  The other two knights sat, silently. Tommaso leaned forward and put a hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘We all know,’ he said. ‘Now you know, too.’

  ‘Who was Salim?’ Kendal asked.

  Swan took a deep breath and steadied himself. ‘An African slave – a prisoner of war. He showed me the tunnels. Weeks ago. And he – I think he was the one – betrayed them to the Turks.’

  Fra Tommaso splashed some of the wine into his own cup. ‘Hardly a betrayal,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘He was the last man I killed,’ Swan said. And then it began to come tumbling out of him – phrase by phrase, like pus leaving a wound. The waiting. The fight.

  And then the long nightmare in the dark, listening to them die.

  Tommaso drank more. ‘Some of them got away,’ he said. ‘We saw them come out of the opening. Peter showed us. They had torches, and there was a sally. They threw a feint against the walls.’

  Swan’s brain was beginning to function. ‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘When some of them charged me – some ran.’

  He drank more wine. ‘They couldn’t see me in the dark,’ he said. Almost as if he felt for them.

  Peter frowned. ‘Polished armour is almost invisible in the dark,’ he said.

  ‘None of them had any armour,’ Swan added.

  ‘Several of them didn’t have weapons,’ Fra John Kendal said. ‘Young man, no one denies your courage. Then or now. Tell the story.’

  After several false starts, Swan did his best. He was drunk by the end, and Peter carried him to his bed.

  ‘In a year, it will be a tale to amuse the ladies, eh?’ Peter said.

  ‘Never,’ Swan spat. ‘Sweet Jesus saviour of the world, let me sleep without dreams.’

  While he fought with dead men, the Turks buried their dead and sailed away empty handed. The next day, with the worst hangover of his adult life, Swan stood in the pounding sunshine and looked at the empty beach with the refuse of war—barrel staves and human excrement and an old sail flapping noisily. He felt dirty. He bathed, and shaved, and laced all the laces on his clothing. It felt like improvement. And then, obedient to orders, he sailed with both Fra Domenico and Fra Tommaso for Chios.

  He managed to walk on board the galley, and he made himself take a turn rowing. When he was done, he drank down a gallon of delicious fresh water tinged with lemon, and threw up over the side. His left leg was weak. But his head was beginning to clear – both from the hangover and from the fight underground. He stumbled along the deck, drank more water, made sure he was clean, and presented himself to the two knights in the stern cabin.

  ‘You look better,’ Fra Tommaso said.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Swan asked. ‘Sir?’ he added, as respectfully as he could manage.

  ‘We’re bound for Chios,’ Fra Domenico said.

  Swan swallowed his reply and tried to look eager.

  Fra Tommaso pointed out of the stern windows.

  There in the sun lay six more galleys – five of them the order’s entire fleet, and the sixth bearing the banner of Genoa.

  ‘The Turks have gone to attack Kos,’ Tommaso said. ‘We have information that their real target is Chios, and their attacks on us were to keep us pinned at home while they looted the most valuable Christian possessions left in this sea.’

  ‘I have been appointed the order’s admiral,’ Fra Domenico said. ‘There should be a Genoese squadron at Chios and perhaps a few ships at Mytilini. I intend to gather them, and force the Turks to fight at sea.’

  ‘And God help us all,’ Fra Tommaso said.

  The sea was clean, and it was sunny, and very different from the stinking heat under the earth, and Swan felt better every day – better when he practised with a spear, and his left leg held under him, and better when he drank three cups of wine and ate a little opium to get himself straight to sleep. He created little ways to protect himself. He didn’t go below decks. He avoided being alone in the dark.

  They were two days going to Chios. They ran into an empty harbour, and left an hour later, sadder and wiser about the Genoese empire.

  Swan was accepted aboard as an officer, and was invited to the command meeting held in the stern cabin. A dozen knights sat along the low benches under the
great silver oil lamp, which Swan suspected had been looted from a Greek church, and watched Chios fall away astern.

  ‘You’d think they’d have kept their fleet in these waters,’ Fra Tommaso said quietly.

  Fra Domenico shook his head. ‘Incredible. The fleet sailed home? Because the danger was too high? What danger are we speaking of, here?’

  Fra Antonio – a Genoese knight – puffed air out of his lips and poured himself a cup of wine. ‘The Venetians, of course – with all respect to my brothers,’ he said, inclining his head to Fra Silvestre and Fra Giovanni, two Venetian knights across the table.

  Fra Sylvestre sighed. ‘Brother, I wish I could protest that Venice would never attack Genoa while she was fighting the Turk.’ He shrugged. And reached for the wine. ‘But we both know that she would.’

  Fra Domenico snorted in contempt. ‘This is surely more important than the petty contests of trade!’

  ‘This from the greatest pirate on the seas?’ spat Fra Sylvestre. He glared at Fra Domenico.

  Fra Tommaso – the oldest man aboard – rose carefully to his feet to avoid smacking his head on the deck beams. ‘Brothers – this is not the place to fight among ourselves. Domenico, is it still your intention to sail for Mytilini?’

  ‘We can be there by nightfall,’ Domenico said. ‘Listen, brothers – piracy has given me some insights into war at sea from which perhaps the order might benefit.’ Fra Sylvestre appeared ready to remonstrate, but Fra Tommaso pressed him down with his right hand.

  ‘The best way to relieve Chios is to attack Turkish shipping along the coast,’ Fra Domenico said.

  ‘Really, you are no better than the Turks!’ Sylvestre spat.

  ‘Perhaps you think we might take them on, ship to ship? Perhaps we could challenge them to single combat?’ Domenico was derisive. ‘We have enough ships to wreck their commerce for two hundred leagues. And nothing will make the Sultan angrier.’

  Swan looked at his hands.

  Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘Make the Sultan angrier? That will certainly help.’

  Mytilini had one of the largest fortresses Swan had seen in the whole of the Mediterranean Sea. The fortress stood on the city’s ancient acropolis, a headland towering above the lower town and the Genoese quarter on the hillside, and it had guns which could dominate the anchorages and beaches on either side.

  To Swan, it looked more defensible than any place he’d ever seen, except perhaps Monemvasia.

  The sun was setting red in the west when they glided inside the fortified breakwater and the rowers folded their heavy oars away, raising them out of the oar ports and feeding them along the central catwalks or into the racks along the ship’s sides. Mytilini cheered them as they landed – seven Christian galleys – and the cheers from the garrison high above met the cheers of the Greek populace lining the beach. On Lesvos, the Genoese – at least, in the guise of the Gattelusi, the ruling family – were well beloved. The Gattelusi had married into the imperial family of Byzantium more than once, and they shared the good looks of the Paleologi and some of their indolence. But their marriages, their powerful private army and their occasional rescues of the Byzantine emperors – some financial, and some military – had earned them the love of their Greek subjects – who also paid the lightest taxes in the eastern Mediterranean.

  Swan leaped over the stern to the beach and Peter tossed him the leather bag that held his own clothes and then the leather portmanteau that held Swan’s kit – and then leaped down himself. They walked up the beach, teetering slightly after days at sea. A pair of Greek men came and took their bags with wide smiles.

  ‘It is nice to be so popular,’ Swan said, smiling at a very pretty Greek girl. She smiled – then blushed and dropped her eyes. And clutched an older woman standing near by, who gave a sniff.

  Fra Tommaso landed on the sand with a thump. The oarsmen were all off – most of them already pushing through the crowd. They weren’t going to the brothels and tavernas that lined the waterfront. In this port, they went first up the hill, towards the fortress, in a long and disorderly line.

  Swan saw that his kit had joined the line. Fra Tommaso waited until Fra Domenico joined him on the sand, and the two knights went up the hill. The older knight paused and waved. ‘Coming, young scapegrace?’

  Swan followed the knights. The line took for ever to move – it started at the edge of the beach, and wound between the lower gates of the fortress and then up to a point that vanished in the dusk on the side of the hill.

  The tavernas along the waterfront served wine to the oarsmen in the line – heavy ceramic beakers full of strong red wine that was delicious after salt air. Swan was on his second cup as he passed through the gate.

  The soldier there wore a fine, velvet-covered brigandine and had a heavy war bow in his hand. He smiled constantly, but his eyes moved everywhere.

  ‘You’re English, I think,’ Swan said.

  The man smiled. ‘My da was English,’ he said. ‘I’m Greek.’

  ‘Seems a long way from London,’ Swan said.

  The archer shrugged. ‘My pater was from Cumbria. He came out here after Agincourt.’ His eyes went over Swan’s shoulder, and then flicked back.

  Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘The Gattelusi hire a great many English,’ he said. ‘They always have.’

  ‘Englishmen make fine pirates,’ Fra Domenico said. He stooped to scratch a stray cat. Mytilini was full of them.

  The line moved on – past the guardpost, and up into the rocks. Swan breathed deeply, just to enjoy the smell. And examined the stonework of the redoubt above him. In the last light of the sun, he could see round stones the size of wagon wheels set into the fabric of the fortification. He tried to imagine why anyone would shape round stones to fit into a fort wall.

  He thought – all too often – of the fight in the dark. Of the torches of the Turks revealing the fallen column that half-blocked the passageway.

  Three slow steps forward later, and despite his heartbeat soaring and his breath coming hard, he had it, and he said ‘εύρηκα!’

  The two knights and his servant all turned on him as if he were a madman.

  ‘They’re columns! Ancient columns from temples!’ he shouted excitedly. He was all but bouncing on his toes. ‘Those round stones are column drums – ancient ones!’

  ‘You speak Greek?’ asked a man at his elbow. The man was still smiling, despite half an hour on the hill carrying Swan’s portmanteau.

  ‘A little, brother,’ Swan said. ‘Those are columns, yes?’

  ‘From the pagan times,’ agreed the Greek. ‘Over by Kalloni, there are temples.’

  ‘Like the Parthenon?’ Swan asked.

  The Greek shrugged.

  Swan waved at a middle-aged woman with a tray full of wine cups. ‘Ο άνθρωπος έχει μια δίψα για το κρασί! This man has a thirst for wine.’

  The Greek nodded. ‘Very kind,’ he said in a voice that suggested – politely – that men did not carry heavy leather trunks purely from public spiritedness.

  Swan paid the woman and tried a flirtatious smile. She responded with a look that suggested that a life of serving wine to fishermen and pirates had given her some fairly effective armour.

  Swan put his smile away for easier prey. And inched up the hillside.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  The timoneer, who was next in line behind Swan, grinned. ‘Ancient tradition here. When a galley comes in, we go to the shrine and take mass.’

  ‘How ancient?’ Swan asked.

  He went up three steps. The steps were very old – smooth as glass.

  The line moved again. Now he could see there was a heavy wood and iron door – right in the hillside. A party of men came out of it and squeezed down the steps, all smiles – and headed towards the beach and the tavernas.

  Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘They think that taking mass protects them against the sins they have yet to commit,’ he said. But he watched his oarsmen with the fondness
of a parent for his children. ‘Speaking of sin, Master Swan – we are invited to the palace. Tonight, we are to be received, and tomorrow, there is some sort of fete in our honour.’

  ‘We will stay?’ Swan asked, hope springing eternal. The word ‘palace’ alone offered more hope than anything he’d heard since Alexandria.

  ‘I want the hulls to dry,’ Fra Domenico said. He was looking at Asia across the strait – only a few leagues wide. ‘Faster ships take more prizes.’

  Fra Tommaso took Swan’s hand. ‘Listen. We are men of God – you are a volunteer. So we will send you to this festivity tomorrow. As our representative. Yes? And you will not do the order any dishonour. Hmm?’

  Swan sighed.

  They climbed a few more steps and the deck officers squeezed by them, pausing to embrace the old knight, who blessed each of them. And then the door opened, and Swan could smell incense.

  ‘Come on,’ Fra Tommaso said, starting down steep steps into the dark interior.

  Swan got one step down before he froze.

  He felt the man’s neck go just as he pounded the blade into his skull. The skull cracked like an egg and then the whole head collapsed under his weight. Then he felt himself repeat the blow, even though he knew the man had to be dead.

  He tried to rise off the new corpse, but his leg failed him and he sank back – now kneeling on both knees.

  He was kneeling on cold stone. Someone was trying to pull him, and he got his arm around the man’s neck and jerked him off balance …

  ‘It’s me! Christ on the cross, are ye wode!’ shouted Peter in his ear.

  Fra Domenico caught Peter and pushed him away. ‘He’s fighting under the city! On Rhodos! Let him be!’ Hands seized Swan around the waist and turned him – so that he could see stars, and the shocked faces of the timoneer and the man carrying his trunk.

  He took a shuddering breath.

  Fra Domenico turned his head. ‘Smell the incense, my son. See the candles and feel God’s holy presence. There is nothing here for you to fear. This is a holy place.’ His voice was very gentle – very calm. And it ran on, and on.