Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Three

by Christian Cameron

  ‘He’s lost more battles than he’s won,’ Ser Zane said. And shrugged. ‘I’m not against it! A good enterprise, and a crusade! My soul needs remission of sins as much as the next man, I’d say, and perhaps more.’ He laughed.

  Constantine scratched his beard. ‘That is a long ride,’ he said. ‘We need a farrier.’

  Swan shrugged. ‘I don’t have one.’

  The Greek captain nodded. ‘I might. When do you think we will ride?’

  Swan had to shrug again. ‘I have to wait on the Serenissima,’ he said. ‘They must agree – to certain undertakings. When the Doge has signed, we will go.’

  A collective sigh went up from all the soldiers, Italians and Greeks together. ‘So it could never happen,’ Willoughby called out in English from the shadows. ‘And then we’re out of a contract.’

  Swan held up his hands. ‘Please, gentlemen. This is my business. The Serenissima will sign. Any one of the stradiotes can tell you that the Arsenal is working around the clock to prepare a fleet for Eastern waters.’

  ‘So how long do we have?’ asked Constantine Graitzas. He looked apologetic. ‘Our families – you know.’

  Swan shook his head. ‘A week?’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry – but as you are being paid to be with your families, you must hold yourselves ready to move.’

  Ser Columbino smiled. ‘Well – we’re in Venice and you, my friend, are paying. I can spend a week or two here, getting warm, before I face the high passes of the Alps. Brr!’

  Alessandro smiled when Swan sat. ‘With all your education, that’s the best speech you can manage? Where were the flights of rhetoric? Cesare could have written you something if your powers of invention were so very poor.’

  Swan frowned. ‘I mentioned loot,’ he said. ‘That’s all the poetry soldiers need.’

  Alessandro shook his head. ‘No. You are wrong. Soldiers pretend to be hard men, but they are mostly dreamers. They will care more for the crusade then for the loot. Trust me on this. Do not forget to call them crusaders.’

  But despite Swan’s speech – or even because of it – the evening was a happy one, and men went back to their homes and their inns in high spirits. The next day Swan was pleased to see most of his company at work on their animals in the inn yards, and he joined them, currying his warhorse with his own hands. His charger was a tall bay with darker hindquarters and legs, and the fineness of the big beast’s head suggested that, despite his great size, he had an Arab or two in his bloodline. If he had been black, or white, the two fashionable colours in warhorses, he would have been worth a thousand ducats. He was Hungarian, and Swan had won him in Vienna at cards. He was the first warhorse Swan had ever liked. He’d considered a hundred dashing, romantic names, but the one that had stuck was ‘Giovanni’. Swan and Petr spoke to, and about, Giovanni as if he were a not-very-bright young man who followed them around, and Clemente had fallen easily into this habit. Indeed, Swan’s only worry about Giovanni was that his cheerful disposition would render him useless as a warhorse. He was superb in a joust, but Swan could not imagine the big horse fighting another horse with hoof and teeth, much less injuring a person. Giovanni loved people – all people, and especially women.

  Giovanni also ate a great deal. Swan had to pay for him and the other warhorses, and he wondered – seeing that the other Malatesta men-at-arms were still in their hostels – who was paying for their horses.

  That morning after the dinner, there were many hard heads, and Swan got to pay the tabs. He paid for the furniture his Englishmen had broken, and he paid for the grain the horses ate and the small beer everyone had for breakfast. Indeed, the men cost ten ducats and the horses twice as much again.

  Swan sighed and hoped that the Council of Ten would hurry, before he ran out of money.

  He had errands of his own in Venice, and when Giovanni was curried and all the company’s food paid for, Swan went with Alessandro to the Medici bank, where Bessarion did most of his foreign business. Alessandro deposited a great belt and another bag of florins and ducats – a small fortune, almost a thousand gold coins in all. Then the two of them countersigned for a number of financial instruments – one set allowing Swan to collect money in Vienna and any point east where the Medici or their agents had a bank, and another that would allow Alessandro to use Bessarion’s money anywhere in the Adriatic or the Ionian Sea. The range of the bank’s connections was marvellous, and the two young men they spoke to, Antonio and Lorenzo, were delighted to show off their connections. The Medici bank had an office in Vienna; in Buda he was given the name of a German banking house, but for Belgrade the Florentines just shook their heads.

  ‘Doomed,’ Messire Antonio said. ‘The Sultan has forty great guns and another hundred lesser guns – the largest siege train in the world. He has a fleet on the Danube, he has six thousand wheeled carts for his baggage—’

  ‘Stop, stop, or I’ll lose all my courage!’ Swan said.

  The Florentines both laughed. ‘Genoa is providing Mehmet with money and ships,’ Messire Lorenzo said. ‘It is supposed to be a great secret, but it is not. Genoa …’ He shrugged. ‘Genoa is using the Sultan to fight the Pope. And Venice.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Despite all of that, I may need money in Belgrade,’ he said.

  Antonio made a face. ‘There are Jews,’ he said. ‘Most of them will accept our bills.’

  Out in the street, Alessandro shook his head. ‘Do you think they roll in the money at night?’ he asked. ‘What’s it for? How can grown men take money so seriously?’

  But back at the inn, Alessandro – with his best gown on, ready to accompany his father to mass – paused in the inn’s doorway. ‘You know some Jews here, I think,’ he said.

  Swan shrugged. ‘I think I lost their friendship in Constantinople,’ he replied. In fact, it still stung.

  ‘I think perhaps you mistake Hebrew caution for dislike,’ Alessandro said. ‘My father knows the Rabbi Aaron. I will make enquiries.’

  ‘You are getting on well with your father,’ Swan said, mostly to tease his friend.

  But Alessandro took him seriously. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am reckoned to have done good service the last time we were in the East together. If this expedition is successful, I am not just Bessarion’s representative, but a Venetian officer.’ He shrugged. ‘My father may see his way to making me legitimate.’

  Swan put a hand to his chest. ‘You would leave Bessarion?’ he asked.

  ‘I have his blessing,’ Alessandro said. He put a brotherly hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘You are ready to be the capitano.’ He laughed. ‘I am ready to grow a thick waist and have a wife.’

  ‘You are?’ Swan asked.

  ‘No,’ Alessandro said. He smiled. ‘I love my pater, though.’

  Swan spent the afternoon going to mass at St Mark’s. He loved St Mark’s – the place was dark and magical, and filled with a spirit that was as much alchemical as it was Christian. He paid a silver coin to see the horses close up, and he put a hand on one – merely to have touched such magnificent symbols of the older world.

  ‘Greece, Rome, Constantinople, Venice,’ he said.

  In the crowd, as mass let out, he saw a man he thought he knew. Or rather, he saw a faded black doublet he thought he knew, and the doublet stuck out as being far too light a garment for a chilly, rainy day in the Venetian spring. Swan crossed the first bridge he came to and walked down the narrow alley along a side canal and then crossed back on the next arched bridge, looking to his left to see …

  Black Doublet crossed the first bridge as if on cue.

  Swan sighed.

  He took a circuitous route back to his inn, by way of the street of swordsmiths. Most of them were merely shops for masters who worked out of Brescia, where Venice kept its arms industry. Swan spent an hour going from stall to stall and handling as many swords as he could. He swished them through the air, struck guards and poses, and cut at invisible men, twisted and turned, and watched the world around him carefully. />
  He didn’t see Black Doublet again. But he was sobered. He also fell in love with one of the new swords, a quick, narrow-bladed weapon with a complex hilt in the new style. He left it in its shop as too fancy for him, and went carefully back to his inn through the rain.

  The common room stank of wet wool and horse manure, but the hot spiced wine cut through the rain. Swan sat by the windows with his code book, ciphering. After he’d written a report for Bessarion, he wrote a duplicate copy to be sent with Di Bracchio. Then, for the first time in two weeks, he had the time to look at Alberti’s code.

  He played with it as the grey light faded outside over the lagoon. He got ink on his fingers as he figured away.

  In the end, Swan decided that he could not trust Alberti, but the man had built a superb code. Swan’s mathematical mind saw the utility of the changing values of the vowels.

  But he couldn’t use a cipher provided by a man he didn’t trust. He stared at it.

  ‘You’re getting ink on your mouth,’ Giovanna said. She had her skirts kirtled up and her legs showed to the knee. They were good legs – strong, well-muscled and young. Giovanna – Swan still thought of her as ‘Joanna’ from a time when he had not thought in Italian – was the inn’s maid of work and sometime whore. Not really a whore. And she’d both nursed Swan when he was wounded and saved his life, so she had some call on him.

  All that in one breath – that, and the realization that he had, in fact, been chewing on his pen. ‘God’s curse on it,’ he said, flinging down his pen.

  ‘Is it worth God’s curse?’ Giovanna asked. She reached out and poured him a cup of wine from the pitcher on the table – and then drank off about half his cup. She smiled.

  Swan wasn’t much at resisting women in general, and he was particularly bad at resisting Giovanna. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘But in Venice I try to look like a gentleman.’

  She laughed. She was getting lines around her eyes and the beginning of lines around her mouth.

  ‘I remember you when you were nobody,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘Now you are a soldier. Or a courier. Or something.’

  Swan sat back, and raised his cup to her. ‘Or something,’ he said. She wasn’t beautiful. But she was quick witted, amusing and tough.

  ‘I liked your dinner,’ she said. ‘I’m not usually invited to guild functions. There isn’t a tavern wenches’ guild.’

  ‘Perhaps there ought to be one,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t you be married by now?’

  She laughed. ‘Do I strike you as the marrying type?’ she asked. ‘I’ve lost two perfectly good boys to the Turks.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m too old, and everyone knows …’ She shrugged again.

  Swan looked at her – slim and muscular, pretty in her tough way – and he saw what age would do. ‘What happened to the old woman down at the pier?’ he asked.

  ‘The old whore? She died in the winter.’ Giovanna crossed herself. ‘I’d have let her in the kitchen, but she was too proud.’ She looked down. ‘I should go work,’ she said.

  Swan reached out a hand. ‘She saved me, once. You and she together.’

  ‘Pity you weren’t here to save her,’ Giovanna said. She shook her head. ‘No – I don’t mean that. She made her own bad choices. Just like me. Isn’t that what you are thinking? And you so fancy you don’t want ink on you.’

  Swan looked at her, trying to frame a reply, as Will Kendal came in out of the rain. His eyes lit up when he saw Giovanna, and in passable Italian he said, ‘Who’s the prettiest girl in Venice, then?’ and kissed her.

  She laughed into his kiss, and the two of them walked away.

  Swan looked down at his cipher and wondered how he would die. And who would care.

  Very carefully, he turned the cipher so it caught the dying light.

  After three tries, he found a way to make it work backwards.

  He was working by candlelight when Alessandro came in. Outside, the rain was blowing in sheets.

  ‘Ah, Tommaso!’ Alessandro plunked himself down on the chair opposite. ‘My pater sends his respects and asks you to pay a call. In fact, he invites you to dinner. And he says to tell you that the Rabbi Aaron will almost certainly receive you.’

  Swan was downcast by his encounter with Giovanna – for no good reason. He shrugged.

  ‘What is the matter, my friend?’ Alessandro asked.

  Swan shrugged again.

  Alessandro shook his head. ‘Shall we go and play cards?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Swan said.

  ‘Listen to music?’ Alessandro said.

  Swan’s head came up. He loved music – he seldom had time to hear any.

  ‘Friends of mine – friends of my youth. They are having an … evening. It is so wet – I wasn’t going to go, but I prescribe music for you. Have you been unlucky in love?’ Alessandro asked with his usual damning accuracy.

  Swan shook his head, but he did go for his cloak. Giovanna came downstairs humming, and she laughed at him. ‘I hung it in the kitchen, you fool,’ she said. ‘So that it would be warm and dry.’ She stuck out her tongue.

  Above her on the stairs, Kendal froze. Swan saw his face and knew that Giovanna’s tendency to flirt with all her conquests was not going to play well with this one. So he didn’t return a retort. He went to the kitchen and fetched his cloak and a broad hat.

  ‘I’d wear a boat if someone could make one light enough,’ he said. Alessandro laughed.

  Both men took swords under their cloaks.

  Swan looked at Clemente and took pity. ‘You stay here,’ he said. ‘Put my letters away. Lock them in my case. Here.’ He had tested Clemente for two solid weeks and the boy showed no sign of being a secret spy for Malatesta or Alberti, but Swan was still careful.

  Then he and Di Bracchio swept out into the rain. They moved quickly, and Alessandro, usually as miserly as any aristocratic Venetian, ran down the steps to a boat and dived under the shelter. The bottom of the boat had an inch of water in it, and it stank, but Swan pushed in behind him.

  The gondolier stood patiently in the downpour and poled them along. He didn’t touch his long oar, as the canals were empty and he could move faster with the pole, and after a journey that was dark and in which all sound was drowned by the rain, they ‘arrived’. The boat tapped against a piling and the boatman made it fast.

  Swan was the first man out. He had no idea whatsoever where he was. Di Bracchio rose from the boat’s shelter, leapt to the walkway and then led him up the steps to the riva of a small palazzo, the arched and covered landing place every house in Venice had on the canals.

  ‘Palazzo Contarini. Not the rich ones. The poor ones.’ Di Bracchio grinned. The poverty of the ‘poor Contarinis’ did not leap to the eye. The riva was almost at water level and the flagstones were wet, but the floor of the main building was two marble steps up, and the floor itself was a remarkable parquetry in marble and porphyry. There was the usual dark wood furniture – just a few heavy trunks and an enormous chair. Far away – above them somewhere – a woman was singing.

  Di Bracchio led the way as if he knew the house well. The ground floor was almost totally dark – it smelled slightly of fish. The two men walked out into the stairwell at the back and climbed two flights to the top floor and then went towards the front of the house. On this floor there was light – servants lounged in alcoves. One man in livery looked up from a book. He gestured, and Di Bracchio stepped over to him and they whispered together. The servant ignored Swan, and Alessandro took his arm.

  ‘There is a man here …’ Alessandro said. He looked at Swan. ‘He is a spy-catcher. And worse than that. An agent of the Ten. He can make people disappear. He had me exiled, once.’ Alessandro looked away. ‘For myself, I can stand him, but he might be trouble for you. Perhaps we should go.’

  Swan laughed – a genuine laugh. ‘My noble and illustrious, soon-to-be-legitimate Bembo,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to hide, for once. Let the spy-catcher play with me!’

  Di Bracchio looked at
him. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘On your head be it.’ He started forward and then paused. ‘But I do wonder why he’s here.’

  Swan had heard the music as soon as they entered the building, but now it was loud, and he was drawn to it the way some men were drawn to gold. A pair of footmen opened the great doors of the piano nobile and suddenly they were surrounded by light and sound. Gone was the dark Gothic furniture of the lower floors. Here the furniture was light. Polished bronze gleamed on every side.

  A young woman in a mask was singing. Two men in well-cut doublets and scantily cut hose were playing lutes and two more were accompanying the woman on flutes.

  But no one was listening to the music. Instead, a dozen young men were talking, all at the same time – all except one man in black velvet. He was watching with a detached air, and as Swan looked at him he made a note with a beautiful golden stylus on his folding wax tablets in ivory frames and then clicked them shut and turned back to the singers.

  ‘Bembo!’ shouted a young man in a magnificent, if unbuttoned, red velvet doublet. He embraced Di Bracchio and then turned and began to talk quickly. Swan felt an outsider – indeed, he was the worst-dressed man present.

  Behind the man in the red velvet doublet stood another in a purple doublet and black hose of wool that were embroidered in pearls. The hose were magnificent. The man looked familiar to Swan.

  Alessandro rallied to his side and began introductions. They were from all the great noble families – Contarini and Dandalo and Zeno and Cornari. Swan bowed and bowed. No one found him particularly interesting, nor outrageous, but as Alessandro reached the man in the pearl-encrusted hose, Swan gave him a hard smile.

  ‘The Most Noble and Illustrious Foscari,’ he said.

  Alessandro looked at him and laughed as Foscari frowned. ‘You remember!’

  ‘How could I forget?’ Swan said. ‘I was going to kill him, and you told me not to.’

  Foscari shrugged. ‘Alessandro, I really don’t need to meet all your catamites.’

  Swan stepped forward into Foscari’s space. ‘I could still kill you.’