Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Seven

by Christian Cameron

  He tried to walk east, towards where the crusader camp had to be, but he found that he couldn’t really stand. He set his face to the east and began to crawl. That seemed better. He crawled for a while, and suddenly had a terrifying thought that made him fling himself flat.

  He wasn’t sure he’d gone into the water from the correct side of the island. Suddenly it seemed possible to him that he was on the Turkish side, naked, exhausted from disease and terror and parched.

  He tried to pray.

  And then, as he raised his head, he saw wagons – a dozen wagons, German wagons, all drawn up together in a little clump. He let out a whimper, and collapsed. Beyond the wagons was a great white standard with a red cross; he was on the Christian side of the Sava.

  He cursed himself for a fool, and then prayed, and then cursed again. And then he knew he was feeling better.

  Šárka was happy enough to see him, even stinking and nearly naked, or perhaps even the more so for that. She rescued him, and they both knew it. She washed him with kind efficiency, and she held him while he walked to the jakes and back, over and over, his second night with the fever.

  She made no jokes, and she told no one but a couple of the Hungarian girls. When he began to recover, she gave him wine and chicken broth with an egg in it, and he threw it up, and the next day she gave him more, and he kept it down.

  ‘Our company is in this camp,’ she said.

  He got his head around that.

  ‘Ser Orietto is in command,’ she said. ‘Word is that you are taken by the Turks, or dead.’

  Swan drank some more chicken broth, suddenly ravenous. ‘Not quite yet,’ he croaked.

  ‘You sent me a letter,’ she said.

  Swan nodded. He could see the flash of her eyes in the darkness of her wagon, and not much else.

  ‘You thought you were going to die,’ she said.

  ‘I did,’ he admitted. ‘If I were a cat, I just used eight lives.’

  She might have nodded. ‘If you are better, I need you to go,’ she said. ‘You remind me of other things. I am not here for those things. I am a crusader now.’

  Much later that night, she and two of her girls walked him – still very weak – right to the company’s sentries. Swan’s vanity was deeply touched by the enthusiasm of his reception, and within an hour he lay in his camp bed.

  Alone.

  But alive.

  He listened to the Turkish guns roar, and considered desertion.

  The next day he was weak, but his bedside was crowded with officers.

  László Hunyadi came, and Ser Hargitai, with the good wishes of all the Hungarian knights. Swan had to swallow his doubts about the elder Hunyadi; László was obviously delighted to have Swan back among the living.

  ‘And my people?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Ser Juan led a sortie yesterday.’ László paused. ‘My pater would like to move your company into the garrison. Just your handful have been very active.’

  Swan got up on one elbow. ‘How are we doing? I’ve been out for … saints, I have no idea. Two days?’

  ‘Three days, by my measure. My father put six thousand men into the fortress while you burned the Sultan’s tent. Capistrano gave a speech – such a speech.’ The younger Hunyadi looked out of the door of Swan’s small pavilion. ‘The crusaders scent victory. I wish I had so much hope. But I confess – I feel something. I do not think Belgrade will fall.’

  Swan lay back and tugged at his beard. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and he suspected he looked like a wild man.

  ‘If the voivode wishes our company in the garrison,’ Swan said, ‘we will go and do what we can.’ He said the words piously, but he was ready to meet the Turks again. But this time, in a complete harness and with his own sword.

  And more archers.

  They rowed out past the islands and then crept down the far sides of the low mud banks in the Danube, oars muffled with sacking and cloaks over armour, even on this stifling night. The whole company was there, bar only the dead and the men who had helped board the hoy in the ship fight and were already in the city.

  They rowed very slowly, and the insects had time to find every inch of exposed flesh, every joint in armour, every hole in mail.

  Swan was wearing only his old arming clothes and a tall woollen hat like a flower pot that he’d adopted. His harness was in a tower in Belgrade, and he felt somehow out of place, unarmed. Ser Zane had loaned him a poleaxe, and he had his wicked small war hammer clipped to his belt, and a dagger. Swan didn’t like being out in danger without armour. His armour had grown to be part of him – not an exhausting torture device but a fitted glove of protective steel. He felt naked.

  He felt more naked when there was a flare of torches and a light gun fired from the shore.

  Ser Zane cursed, and Ladislav the Bohemian raised a hand in the darkness and asked the rowers to turn to starboard. Belgrade towered over them on her rock, and the moonlight appeared fitfully among the broken towers above them, like the teeth of a doddering old man.

  Ladislav’s portfire went up and came down, and the whole boat shook – pushed back against the oars, coasting upstream.

  Arrows began to fall.

  Swan’s heart raced, and he cursed. The Turks had discovered them. Behind him, a third of the river fleet he’d helped build was creeping along the Danube shallows, trying to get into the water gate of Belgrade without being detected, but now …

  Another gun roared, and then another.

  But the heavy barges had falconets in their bows, and they responded, their guns barking, the sound so loud that Swan’s ears began to ring. He was used to having a closed armet on his head, not a woollen cap.

  Hugh Willoughby stepped up, putting one wool-clad leg on the gunwale, and grunted as he loosed a quarter-pound arrow. Pages were loosing crossbows – light latchets they would ordinarily have used from horseback. But the return fire from the boats must have been effective. The Turkish missile fire all but died away.

  Swan’s barge turned heavily to starboard and crossed the last few paces of open water before turning further to pass between the iron-crowned stone pillars of the water gate.

  He was back in Belgrade. This time with thirty lances at his back.

  Swan leapt over the bow – since he wasn’t in armour, he moved well, and he helped the men of the garrison and a pair of Ser Zane’s pages to tie off the ropes and get his people out of the boats. Only three boats at a time could dock, and the Turks would not be cowed long.

  Ser Zane ordered the men to fall in by ranks along the quay, and they obeyed, so that the company appeared first as a skeleton and then an ever more solid reality in the moonlight, until the last boat was clear, the grain sacks in the bilges thrown hurriedly on to the dock. Then the last boats were pulling away into the darkness.

  Clemente appeared out of the darkness and embraced him. Swan was moved – Clemente’s gesture pierced him in a way that Ser Orietto’s open-faced delight and Ser Zane’s gruff welcome had not. But Clemente had already lost Peter – Swan put his arms round the boy and pressed him close. Behind him, Juan di Silva appeared in harness, and Orietto’s pages carrying a wicker basket.

  Di Silva forced Swan to submit to another embrace. ‘You aren’t dead!’ he said, pounding Swan’s unarmoured back.

  ‘I might be soon,’ Swan managed in his fledgling Spanish.

  Di Silva stood back. Clemente had a small lantern with horn panes. It threw a good, ruddy light.

  ‘Szilagyi asks if we can make an immediate sortie,’ Di Silva said. ‘They have another convoy – grain boats – coming in behind.’

  Swan had seen the crusaders working like ants, loading grain, wine and meat into the three largest German river ships. The big river ships would make better targets, even on a dark night.

  ‘Very well,’ Swan said.

  ‘We brought your armour,’ Di Silva said, even as Clemente and the two pages started to arm him.

  ‘Why us?’ Swan asked as his sabatons went
on his feet. One of Orietto’s pages had his heavy coat with voiders ready to go.

  Di Silva stepped in close. ‘The garrison is gun shy.’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll hold, but most of them don’t want to go outside the walls. They fear the Turks too much.’

  Swan nodded. ‘I fear the Turks quite a bit,’ he said. ‘My fears might be difficult to beat.’

  Di Silva didn’t even give him a grin. Swan could see in the man’s movements how tired he was.

  Swan’s leg harnesses went on, and then his breast- and backplate. ‘You have a plan?’

  Di Silva nodded. ‘We go out the same gate where Kendal shot that poor wretch the infidels were torturing. Not the gate – the breach. We come back in the gate. Kendal’s already at the gate. He’ll see it open.’

  Swan understood the unspoken comment – that Di Silva didn’t trust the garrison to get the gate open. ‘How bad is this?’ he asked.

  Di Silva shrugged in the lantern light. ‘When Hunyadi or Capistrano are here, in person? They are like lions. When the great men are gone? Szilagyi was wounded yesterday. Their spirit is fragile because they are exhausted. The Turkish guns fired all day yesterday.’

  ‘Well, we’re fresh,’ Swan said. In fact, he felt anything but fresh. His beautiful harness felt like lead. He was not fully recovered from the fever and he could feel the lost weight of muscle from three days of it. His breast- and backplate were as tight as they could be made, and still they moved on his waist.

  But he was not going to keep his men back, and they were burning for the sortie.

  They moved in a long single file through the nearest gate of the high fortress. Then they moved along a bridge that joined two wall sections. The stonework was new, and quite beautiful in the moonlight… new and, to Swan, horribly dated by the power of the Turkish guns. One ball would bring down this bridge and separate the upper town from the lower.

  The curtain wall at the far side of the bridge was sloped and Italianate in design, but it already had a breach blown in it. To Swan’s right was the so-called ‘upper town’, where the houses were still, for the most part, intact. The people had fled to the crusader camp, but dogs still barked and somewhere a lonely duck quacked endlessly.

  They halted in their long march along the wall top when the lead men had to descend to street level at a sally port in the upper town wall. The wall itself descended a steep hill, and the steps were narrow and very difficult for an armoured man. But no one fell, and Swan found himself emerging from the sally port, receiving the salute of a pair of Serbs with axes in long coats of mail.

  The moment Swan stepped out through the sally port, his world changed. In the fortress, sound was muffled. The walls were, for the most part, intact, and all the towers still stood.

  The lower town was dark and full of screams. Beyond, the Turkish gun line looked like a series of small suns, maws of fire that bloomed and died. There were torches out in the darkness, and fires burning for light, and then, in the lower town, the darkness was accentuated by burning buildings.

  ‘Is there still a garrison on the outer wall?’ Swan asked.

  Di Silva shook his head. ‘A few towers are still manned by brave men. But most of the garrison is in the fortress now. They say they will reoccupy the walls if the Turks attack.’

  Swan pulled down the cheek plates on his armet, walling off the sound of a horse dying horribly. He flipped the catch on his helmet, but left the visor up.

  It was very hot. And very dark.

  The archers led the way, calling out when they came to major rubble falls or pits from fallen buildings. The streets were all but eliminated, and most of the houses had been knocked flat. The curtain wall was almost entirely gone – in two places there were breaches that seemed to extend from the stump of one tower to the stump of the next.

  Yet the Hungarian defenders were bolder than Di Silva had suggested. The rubble itself provided excellent cover for determined men, and even as the Turkish guns lit the killing ground like fitful candles, Swan saw men armed with crossbows, lying full length in shallow pits in the rubble, sniping at the Turkish gunners. The Turkish light battery was so close to the walls that the men serving the guns, silhouetted against the fires of the Turkish camp, were taking a heavy toll.

  It was a terrible kind of war out there in the darkness.

  A Hungarian knight appeared out of the gloom. He and Willoughby found that they had no language in common, and then the Hungarian was passed back along the line to Swan.

  ‘So many!’ The man bowed. The formality seemed out of place. ‘The Turks are preparing an attack. My boys in the rubble are killing too many gunners.’ The Hungarian grinned wickedly.

  ‘We’re trying to silence the water battery, if only for an hour,’ Swan said.

  The Hungarian pulled at his moustaches. ‘You’ll have to fight them in the ditch, then. They’re coming now.’

  Swan cursed. He didn’t want to turn his ankles in the rubble. He wanted to fight on level ground.

  But the Turks hesitated, trying to form some sort of a line out there in the darkness, and Swan could hear an officer haranguing his men.

  ‘They are afraid, too,’ Swan called. ‘Men-at-arms to the front. Quickly now.’

  Silvery figures pushed forward. They had almost fifty men in full harness, and Swan led them into the rubble field of the former curtain wall. It was terrible ground for walking, and they moved much more slowly than the archers had moved, and men fell with a rattle and clank. As they approached the top of the slope of fallen walls, Swan ordered all his men down and began to count.

  The Turkish guns fired – one, two, three, four – and their carefully sited rounds grazed the top of the breach.

  ‘Go!’ Swan called. He did his best to move quickly – in full darkness, with only moonlight and the orange glow of distant fires on the chaotic catastrophe that was the collapsed curtain wall and all the buildings that had once leaned against it. The exhaustion of his last week and the weight of his armour conspired to make the attempt to cross the cut-stone-strewn ground a torment, and he knew that if he fell, he might be lost.

  But he crossed the top of the breach and started down the steeper slope to the ditch below, and he could see the distinctive shape of Columbino’s sallet and Ser Zane’s big shoulders. Most of the men-at-arms had rid themselves of surcoats – too hot, and the shiny steel armour was itself surprisingly difficult to see in the dark.

  And he could see movement out on the escarpment. He didn’t think they were facing janissaries. He suspected they were ghazis – military pilgrims, the scum of the Turkish army.

  His lips pulled back from his teeth in what might have been taken as a grin.

  The ghazis were in for a surprise.

  Swan’s men-at-arms shook out into a rough line in the near-total darkness at the base of the collapsed wall and the archers and pages filled in behind them. They would be downslope of their opponents, but for a critical moment the Turks would be silhouetted against the glow of their camp, and the archers – English or Flemish or Italian or Hungarian – readied themselves.

  When Swan heard the scraping, metal-on-stone sound of the Turkish approach, he called out, in Turkish, ‘Hurry, you dogs! The breach is undefended! Now!’

  A dozen men hurried forward. They appeared at the lip of the ditch and died. But their mates began to press in behind, unaware of the trap.

  Some of the archers got three arrows off their bows before Swan lifted his poleaxe and started up the second slope. The Turkish attack had been halted – they were not coming into the ditch. Swan’s people gave a great shout in a dozen languages and went up the slope, and the ghazis scattered.

  Swan didn’t hesitate. He pointed his poleaxe at the hump of the Turkish water battery, now firing steadily, almost two hundred paces away.

  The ground was dry and hard, and made for easy walking – so easy that Swan was strangely tempted to run, but it was dark and there were corpses – putrefying corpses – and if you stepped on o
ne, a cloud of noxious gas was emitted. Swan did, and almost retched.

  The Turkish guns fired behind them, and as if in reply the water battery fired – one, two, three. The grain ships must be coming in, Swan thought.

  ‘At them!’ he called, in Italian. ‘Avanti, avanti!’

  The Turks became aware of them in the last seconds, as Swan struggled up the face of an earthwork. He was the first man up this section of wall. He cut – hard – from a back-weighted stance at the first Turk, and his poleaxe smashed through his adversary’s guard and killed him messily.

  Swan leaped up, got a foot on the sill of the gun embrasure, and slipped, falling full length into the gun port.

  Someone stepped on him.

  He was face down, and he couldn’t get up. His back muscles screamed, and something was inside the faceplate of his helmet – he managed to turn his head …

  And then he was getting to his feet, two archers tugging at him and then running off into the battery. It was better lit here, with two big fires burning in the middle of the redoubt to give the gunners light to work, but it lit them all the way to their ruddy deaths, the Italian men-at-arms hunting them like rats, and the former Hussites cornering them by the little magazine and butchering them

  Swan wanted to tip the big guns into the river, but they were too heavy, and he had to content himself with watching Hugh Willoughby drive iron nails into the touch-holes. Ladislav laughed his terrible laugh and made motions that they should leave, and then busied himself with a length of black rope. He told them to be ready to run. Swan was already planning to run, harness and all.

  A patrol of sipahis appeared, and was driven off with archery.

  ‘Time to go,’ Swan ordered.

  Columbino had the pages go first, moving as swiftly as they could back to the illusory protection of the rubble wall. But they made it, and moved in among the Hungarians, crossbows spanned. Then the archers and men-at-arms, intermixed, moving as silently as they could.

  A patrol of Akinjis, big men on small horses, were emerging out of the darkness, but the sound of their hoofbeats gave Swan’s sortie a few seconds’ warning, and they were greeted with a volley of crossbow bolts and then a flight of heavier war-bow shafts. Only a handful made it to the men-at-arms where they were cut down.