‘Come on!’ Swan yelled. ‘Push, damn you! Round and round!’
The bars began to turn more freely as more men crowded into them, sweeps abandoned over the side. Swan ran – now cursing his leg harnesses and the splinter in his leg – and began to pull the oars in.
He knew that if the cable parted, they’d need the sweeps.
He made the mistake of looking over the side.
There, fifty feet away, was the bank. On the bank was half the Turkish army. Only the high sides of the hoy saved them – and the lack of hand gunners among the Turks. Arrows shot from below whickered overhead and vanished in the firelit darkness. One slammed into his helmet – a heavy arrow from a heavy bow.
There were thousands of men waiting to take them.
But they were moving upstream. It was palpable.
The Turkish falconet fired again – and the projectile passed so close to Swan’s head that it sounded like paper being torn.
He must be backlit against the fires on the north shore. They were shooting at him.
He shook his fist and ducked.
They were coming closer to the riverbank.
Like a pendulum, of course. Swan could see it in his mind – they were swinging in the current and, without the pressure of the oars, the pull of the rope would tend to force them ashore.
He didn’t have sufficient fit men to both work the capstan and the oars.
‘Oars!’ he called. ‘Leave go. The ratchet will take the strain!’
A better-trained crew would have known to set the capstan against the ratchet, but the men-at-arms did not, and Ser Columbino almost broke his shoulder when the capstan turned back a half-rotation and the bars slammed into him. But his plate armour and his large Italianate spaulders saved him.
Then they were at their sweeps – down two men. Swan sprang – or rather, dragged himself – to the tiller, and pulled it hard to port, and gradually the sweeps moved the heavy ship out into the current again, away from the shore, even as the Turkish gun fired again. The ball smashed in the stern bulwark but Swan’s armour deflected the splinters.
The tiller was smashed.
They were a hundred paces offshore.
Without the tiller …
‘Capstan!’ Swan sang out. He, too, pushed forward to get to the bars. They had one hundred paces of sea room in which to get the stern of the ship closer to the castle – close enough to weather the entrance to the harbour, stern first.
Twelve men at the bars, and they went around. The first turn was the hardest, at the speed of a toddler, but in two more turns the toddler was a playful boy running, and by the fifth turn the men were going around as fast as their legs could carry them.
Swan ran – crawled – aft, grabbing a boarding pike as he went, but he needn’t have bothered. A dozen Hungarian soldiers with torches stood at the edge of the fortress harbour, and they fended the heavy ship off with rolled carpets and heavy barge poles – the air full of arrows and handgun shots, but the Hungarians seemed to have no fear, and the Turkish capture was pulled around the shallow corner by men winding her anchor cable from both ends.
Swan slumped to his knees, and quite spontaneously began to pray.
Then he dragged himself to his feet and tottered down to the main deck, to where Di Silva was slumped on an upended barrel.
‘We’re in,’ he said. ‘Di Silva! We’re saved!’
The Spaniard seemed, for a moment, dead. But then one eye opened, almost lazily, and then the other. The Spaniard shook himself, and rose carefully to his feet.
The Hungarians were cheering. Turkish arrows were feathering the deck, and a Turkish officer, or lord, or pasha was shaking his fist against the fading light. Swan thought the man looked familiar. Like … Omar Reis.
Swan’s blood from the splinter wound was pooling on the deck.
‘Santiago!’ Di Silva said. ‘We’re not saved. We’re in fucking Belgrade.’
Also by Christian Cameron
Tom Swan and the Head of St George
Volume One: Castillon
Volume Two: Venice
Volume Three: Constantinople
Volume Four: Rome
Volume Five: Rhodes
Volume Six: Chios
Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade
Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three
Volume Four
Volume Five
The Tyrant Series
Tyrant
Tyrant: Storm of Arrows
Tyrant: Funeral Games
Tyrant: King of the Bosporus
Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities
Tyrant: Force of Kings
The Killer of Men Series
Killer of Men
Marathon
Poseidon’s Spear
Other Novels
Washington and Caesar
God of War
The Ill-Made Knight
Copyright
An Orion eBook
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books
This eBook first published in 2015 by Orion Books
Copyright © Christian Cameron 2015
The moral right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 5634 5
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Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Six Page 9