Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Six

by Christian Cameron

  Swan assembled all his company and all the carpenters on the beach as they vanished to the east and south.

  ‘That’s a Turkish galley,’ he said. ‘No guns.’

  ‘Packed with men,’ Columbino said.

  ‘We’ll have better armour,’ Swan said.

  ‘We’ll be four feet lower in the water,’ Ser Orietto said. He’d fought at sea.

  Swan frowned. ‘I can’t build these little cockleshells four feet higher,’ he said. ‘They’ll all turn turtle.’

  Orietto shrugged. ‘Ladders?’ he asked.

  The next day was Saturday, and eight of their gunboats were fully framed on the hard-packed dirt and wheat stubble inside the fort. Six more were close, and boards – mostly pine – were pouring out of the saw pits.

  He sawed with Willoughby for a while.

  ‘The Turks have been moving in around Belgrade. That’s what the peasants say,’ Willoughby said. He was the top man. ‘They say the Sultan’s army is huge.’

  Swan spat sawdust. ‘That’s what an army looks like,’ he said cheerfully. In fact, what he felt was more akin to relief than despair. The Turkish army was so big that he assumed that Hunyadi would march away and leave Belgrade to make terms. No one could say that Swan hadn’t done his part.

  In fact, he all but glowed with pride as his little flotilla grew. By noon, the first strakes were on the frames of ten boats, and while his dozen boatbuilders each took a frame, they trained men as they went, board by board.

  Just as the sun reached its height in the sky, Swan took a dozen of his officers and men-at-arms downriver to see the Turkish fleet that the Serbs had reported to be anchored off Belgrade.

  They had no trouble finding it.

  Swan counted fourteen galleys. They were not great galleys – in fact, all but two of them were too small to stand in the line of battle, at least against a Venetian gallia sotil. But they were far and away the biggest ships on the river, and as they lay at anchor, nine of them in a mighty crescent guarding the vanguard of fifty supply ships, Swan thought of the carpenters and saw-workers and soldiers working on their boats. His little gunboats were too small to face this.

  Swan stood with Orietto counting actual warships.

  ‘Thirty-seven,’ Swan said, when they had passed them. It took the Turkish fleet almost three hours of daylight to arrange themselves and make anchor in a new formation – scarlet sails, and green, with magnificent crescents in white, or verses of the Koran painted across a whole sail; merchant ships loaded with munitions and food, painted in vermillion or scarlet or deep blue. If the army had been reported as magnificent, the fleet appeared both opulent and puissant.

  ‘I do not see any way we can defeat these ships,’ Orietto said. ‘They will be faster and more manoeuvrable. They will be full of men – janissaries – the best infantry on earth.’ Orietto shrugged. ‘Except perhaps the Swiss.’

  ‘Archers,’ Swan added. ‘They’re all excellent archers.’ His voice was very quiet.

  Sunday dawned, as hot as the rest. Swan heard mass with Father Pietro and László Hunyadi. When mass was over, the younger Hunyadi put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I begin to believe in your boats,’ he said. ‘Listen, there is news. My Serbs say the north bank is empty as far as they could ride, and on our bank the Turks are wary. I cannot promise, but I think that Wallachia has a new voivode.’ He smiled crookedly. ‘He is a strange man, Dracula. My father killed his father. I fear he hates us in his heart. But this summer, he is vital.’

  The two men walked down across the grass inside the new fort to look at the boats. Six were nearly complete, wanting only seats and decks. Six more were close, in various stages, and another dozen were being framed.

  Swan scratched under his chin. ‘We need good gunners,’ he said.

  ‘We need to practise boarding,’ Hunyadi said. ‘I assume my father intends my knights and yours for this. We have good armour. We can’t very well fight through the Turkish fleet to load troops at Barcsa.’ He shrugged. ‘So – how can we practise boarding?’

  Swan sent for Ser Orietto.

  Father Pietro blessed the workers and encouraged them to plank the frames even on the Sabbath, and they responded with more will than Swan had expected. Pietro preached a sermon to the saw pits on redemption – Swan admired his rhetoric and its results.

  Old George had gashed his hand with an adze cutting a new stem post, and stood with Swan while one of the Hungarian girls bandaged it.

  ‘I could be the richest man in Hungary if I could build boats this fast when the grain is ripe,’ he said. ‘You build six of oak?’

  ‘They’ll stand gunfire better,’ Swan said. ‘They go first.’

  Old George grunted. ‘If we win …’ he began.

  Swan smiled just to hear someone mention winning. ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘If we win,’ Old George said, ‘I want some of these boats. Everyone – all the builders – will want one. Or two.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Let’s see what we can do,’ he said. ‘And what they look like when we are done.’

  Out in the fields, Ser Orietto had men armed with wooden swords – sticks, in many cases – assaulting four-foot-high walls of earth and wood. Lines of stakes delineated the boats.

  Swan went back to work.

  An hour later, at a swap in the saw pit, he discovered that the bastard above him, showering him in sawdust – how they all loved putting the capitano in the saw pit – was none other than his nightly companion, Šárka.

  ‘You have taken to sawing,’ he called up, and ate sawdust for his pains.

  She laughed. ‘Father Pietro came and preached to the whores,’ she said.

  Later, he stood with her – both of them covered in fine grit and sawdust, and sweat, watching the work. There were now three hundred men and women working on the boats – the frames looking like anthills, the saw pits crawling with people, men and women. Every camp follower, every wife or maid or trull or whore in camp, was in the pits or on the frames.

  ‘Why is it …’ Šárka flicked her eyes at him, and turned away.

  ‘Why is what?’ he asked fondly, reaching for her.

  She didn’t respond, but she did not push him away. They were standing on the earthwork walls in full view.

  ‘I was going to be foolish,’ she said.

  ‘You were going to speak of love?’ Swan asked, laughing.

  She all but spat at him, and turned, spiralling out of his arm. ‘No. I was going to ask why it is that when everything is imperilled, when only a miracle can save Christendom, then the priests will preach to whores, and men will work with women, and we are like people to you. And we, the poor women, we are so happy to be accepted as something other than your whores, that we will work until we fall dead – and love you for it. It was like this in the Orphans when I was girl. When we were the last bands fighting the Catholics – then women were the equal of men.’

  Swan didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I want to fight the Turks!’ she spat. ‘I want to save Christendom with something other than my looks and my hips. Eh, English knight? Can you handle that?’

  She walked off into the fortress – back down to the saw pits.

  Ser Columbino joined him and watched her go. ‘She is angry?’ he asked.

  Swan shrugged.

  ‘It is impossible to understand women,’ Ser Columbino said.

  Swan was still watching the Bohemian woman. ‘Not always,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it is very easy to understand women.’

  ‘Really?’ Columbino asked.

  Monday came. Swan had slept alone, and he wasn’t quite sure what he should do – or what he had done.

  But three hundred people can do an incredible amount of work. Swan threw himself into it. Time was marked by breaks – food, and drill. Swan realised that he would have to lead the fighting, with Hunyadi – and that working in the saw pits would not make him better on a scaling ladder.

  Twenty men were assembling light
ladders that could be pegged quickly into the bows – eight feet wide, with steps going up almost five feet. Steps, not rungs.

  Swan spent the day running up those steps in full armour and feeling the sticks of the defenders descend on his head and shoulders. It was almost fun, except that his vivid imagination painted his death in lurid colours – in one attack he tripped and fell off the steps into the deep wheat and ‘drowned’ in his armour, and in another his rotella drooped in fatigue and three sharp jabs rammed into his hips and groin, and he lay on the ground surrounded by apologetic Turks for long minutes while his vision tunnelled and the world went by in spirals.

  László Hunyadi’s men did the same drills, but the basic rivalries that motivate every soldier in every army made it too dangerous to send the two companies against each other, although a week together in camp had begun to weld them into firm allies if not fast friends.

  László Hunyadi vanished in the early afternoon, and before the sun had really begun to turn red, he returned and sent for Swan.

  He was sitting in his own pavilion with the walls rolled almost all the way back, and the faintest breeze wandered fitfully over the wheat fields and crept into the camp. Swan was still in his harness, and he felt as if he’d been oiled, he was so wet. He drank down a pitcher of watered wine.

  Then he collapsed on to a stool, and heard thunder in the distance – summer thunder, a dull rumble.

  ‘Rain at last?’ Swan asked. ‘Maybe it will cool off.’ He took a towel from one of young Hunyadi’s servants and wiped his forehead.

  ‘Those are the Turkish guns,’ Hunyadi said. ‘Belgrade is burning.’

  ‘Burning?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Mehmet has brought more than forty big guns,’ Hunyadi said, looking off towards the distant city, as if he could see the Turkish battery in the distance. In fact, even on the clearest day, the towers of the fortress could not be seen from Kovin. But it was not so far, either. ‘They opened fire this morning, according to my father’s message, and they have already levelled most of the outer wall.’

  Swan had nothing to say to that.

  ‘My father wants to see us,’ Hunyadi said.

  Tuesday dawned. Swan rose and bathed in the river and dressed in his second-best Venetian suit and mounted his riding horse. He took Clemente, and left Orietto and Columbino directing the drills while Old George seemed to have absolute authority in the yard. Although it was curious to see how often he would turn not to Nicolai or Little George but to Marco the Venetian adolescent, who clearly knew a thing or two.

  Swan took one more look. A dozen hulls were complete. They couldn’t get any more work done on them until they were launched. In fact, the men had started to build a slipway as far as the gates.

  Another dozen were within a few days of completion, although a few were not even skeletons yet. The disparity between the best boatbuilders – or perhaps the best teachers – and the worst was growing, so that the German, whose language barrier was greater than his skills, was still finishing his first boat while Little George was getting close to completing his second.

  Riding to Barcsa into the rising sun after crossing the river, Swan ticked off his own crises.

  ‘I need thirty helmsmen,’ he said. ‘I need at least thirty crews of rowers, even if they also fight. By God, László, I know we have to keep this secret, but at some point we need to row around or these men will never get us to the Turks.’

  As they rode, the sound of the Turkish guns came more and more clearly, and when they came over the last ridge and Barcsa was clear at their feet, so was the great fortress across the river.

  Swan had never seen Belgrade before. And it was not easy to see, even then. As he sat on his horse, looking through the clear morning air, he could see smoke and flame over the old city, and the fortress – more squat, heavy and rectilinear than anything in Italy – was taking a terrible pounding. Even as he watched, a great tower on the south face seemed to sag, although it did not fall. The walls themselves looked as if they’d been eroded by the sea – or perhaps scarred by some dreadful disease.

  The Turkish guns sounded more clearly.

  ‘Every gun served and commanded by our brothers in Christ,’ László said bitterly. ‘Italians and Hungarians and Germans. Or so our spies say.’

  A huge gun fired, less than a mile away. Swan saw the smoke from the discharge. He saw the wall fracture on the south side. Then, long afterwards, the gun made a heavy ‘thud’ across a mile of open ground and river.

  ‘That’s his great gun,’ László said. ‘It only fires twice a day, thanks be to God. Come.’

  He led the way down the shallow slope, and with their escort they rode down into the sprawling town that was the Southwark of Belgrade, or so Swan couldn’t help thinking. It had many things in common – streets of mud, brothels, tanneries and fewer churches, and warehouses – several of which had been burned by enterprising Turkish captains.

  Swan was able to look out over the river. He saw instantly that the Sultan had solved the problem of the current.

  He’d extended his fleet across the river – and either with a chain or a huge hawser, he’d built what appeared to be an armed pontoon bridge. The ships were all anchored, some full of men. They totally prevented passage up and down the river, but more importantly, they made it impossible for anyone to get in or out of the fortress by boat. They had seized a small portion of the Christian bank, built an earthwork, and there guarded the end of the chain.

  Swan found Hunyadi the Elder, the Ban, sitting under his scarlet awning. His court was smaller.

  László bowed deeply, and Swan imitated him.

  Lord Hunyadi rose and welcomed them both. ‘Sit,’ he said. ‘We are beyond formality.’

  Swan noted that Capistrano was nowhere to be seen, although the whole town was packed with his ‘crusaders’.

  But there were a half-dozen of Hunyadi’s knights, and a man in a decent Florentine doublet.

  ‘This is Maestro Capalitti,’ Hunyadi said. ‘I will laugh if it is Italians who save us. Maestro Capalitti is a master gunner.’

  He exchanged bows with Swan.

  ‘Our good friar is in the city,’ Hunyadi said. ‘Which is why I choose to have this meeting today. He thinks of nothing but God, which is pious of him, but he will not understand the realities.’

  One of Hunyadi’s captains shook his head. ‘He demands, every day, that we launch an assault across the river with every man, and trust to God,’ he said.

  ‘My brother-in-law will enjoy his company for a few days,’ Hunyadi said, sounding remarkably like an Italian tyrant. Just for a moment, Swan imagined the Dominican throttled and dumped in an oubliette – Malatesta, the Wolf, would do it.

  But then the Hungarian lord shook his head. ‘He’s too powerful to touch. He’s no fool – until you touch on God.’ He frowned. ‘How is my fleet?’ he asked.

  ‘I have twelve gunboats ready,’ Swan said. ‘Another dozen in three days. Perhaps another dozen five days after that.’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ Hunyadi said. He hung his head. ‘I need them now.’ He looked at his son. ‘The Sultan said he will enjoy Ramadan in Buda.’

  It occurred to Swan that he had letters for the Sultan. He mentioned this. Hunyadi looked thoughtful, but said nothing.

  László bowed his head. ‘As Ser Suane is too polite to say, Pater, not only do we need a few days to finish our hulls – we must have a chance to practise. To row. Or it will all be for nothing.’

  ‘Belgrade will not last a week,’ Hunyadi said. ‘Already, men speak of surrender. The towers are shaken; the walls are already broken. In two days.’

  Men crossed themselves.

  ‘I told them,’ Hunyadi growled. ‘The Emperor and the Pope and the cardinals and the King of Hungary and the Duke of Burgundy and all the great ones. I told them that we needed to stop him before he set his guns before the walls. That we needed to cut his supply lines and defeat him without a direct confrontation. The Turk is too might
y. Why does God punish us so?’

  No one answered him.

  ‘Tell me, friends – shall I die here? Is this my end? Shall I die here as a martyr to the foolishness of the west? Or slink away, beaten again?’ Hunyadi glared at Swan.

  Swan turned the ring of the Conqueror on his finger. He thought thoughts, but he did not speak his mind.

  The gunner, Capalitti, raised an eyebrow. ‘You cannot take your little fleet to sea?’ he asked.

  Quietly, Swan said, ‘We fear being caught at it. We do not have any kind of overwhelming force. We have a little fleet of river barges, and it will only have one shot at victory.’

  Capalitti frowned. ‘The Turks are very arrogant,’ he said. ‘My lord, their fleet is far too close to our bank, as if they imagine we have no guns on this bank – eh? I could sink one of their galleys. Perhaps two.’ He squinted. ‘Give me all the guns for two hours and I’ll take that little fort they’ve built.’

  Hunyadi shrugged. ‘Every bit helps.’

  But László saw the possibility. ‘You mean they’d have to withdraw upriver and shorten their line,’ he said. ‘Move their chain or barricade.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Capalitti said. ‘I’ll guess there’d be a full day where they were fully involved.’

  Hunyadi the Elder didn’t brighten. ‘Try it,’ he said.

  László shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Let Maestro Capalitti do it when the boats attack.’

  The Ban shrugged. ‘Certainly,’ he said, his voice resigned.

  Swan tried not to show what he thought he’d just heard.

  But on the ride back, László said, ‘I have never seen my father like this.’

  Swan looked off into the middle distance. ‘He is withdrawn.’

  ‘He has no hope,’ László said. ‘What do you expect? We begged the west for aid, and they sent us, begging your pardon, a hundred lances, some gold, and a horde of peasants led by an idiot.’

  ‘He brought us some good carpenters,’ Swan said.