Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Seven

by Christian Cameron

  The dust rose. The Turks galloped on, visible only as shapes in the haze, like damned souls in an Italian fresco, and then they were gone, moving back around their camp, and the dust hung, obscuring everything.

  ‘Fire!’ Ladislav called. The guns fired into the rising breeze:

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  FIVE, as the demi-cannon roared. Sulphur-tinted grey-white smoke rolled back over the battery.

  A thin scream – more souls in hell – rose from the Turkish camp.

  Ladislav leaned far forward over the recoil of his gun, the low wheels passing under his massive shoulders as the bronze serpent spat fire and the gun rolled back. Two Hungarians, dim figures in the fading smoke, stopped the recoil with heavy bars and other men were already sponging as Ladislav waved his hand idly, as if he could clear the smoke and see the fall of his shot.

  Arrows began to fall on the redoubt. A sponger went down, screaming, and gut shot through the small of his back.

  Swan tore his eyes from the redoubt and looked towards the Sava. The dust held – a long line of dust marking the passage of the Turks like the wake of a boat.

  Then the edge of the wavering dust and the heat shimmer sparkled with steel.

  A cross appeared, alone, the fanatic under it walking fast, tonsured head high. A dozen or so white gowns appeared behind him, and then the whole line of crusaders came out of the haze like a miracle made concrete in wool, flesh and steel.

  ‘Holy Christ, Mary mother of God,’ said Will Kendal, putting his back into his bow.

  Di Silva dropped to his knees.

  So did almost every man in the redoubt. Men stopped loading the hot guns, and men stopped drinking water. Arrows fell like cruel hail and men died, and still the moment stretched, and the long line of crusaders came on, a mile long, so many of them that they needed neither formation nor tactics nor training.

  Capistrano walked forward.

  No one said a word.

  Von Ewald, perhaps more practical, broke the spell. He called, in German. Heads turned.

  The Turkish bowmen weren’t skirmishers.

  A formed phalanx of Turks was coming out of the centre of the camp, and they gleamed in the brutal sun.

  ‘Here they come,’ Sam Cressy yelled, in English.

  Swan had all the time in the world. Time to look at the loading of the guns. Time to see that, on his left, Hungarians were emerging from the rubble of the lower town and storming the empty batteries. Time to order his men-at-arms to the front, and the archers to the back. Time to drink a little water, and get his straw hat off his head, and his armet on. Only then did he realise he had no weapon but his sword.

  It really didn’t seem to matter.

  Swan jumped down from the breech of the great, useless cannon. ‘Get back,’ he shouted at Ladislav, as the mad Hussite and his battle-brothers loaded the demi-cannon and the falcon.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Ladislav said without raising his head.

  Swan measured the pace of the Ottoman charge and the state of the two big guns.

  ‘I can do it,’ Ladislav shouted, as another Bohemian fell dead over the muzzle and two Hungarians dragged the corpse off.

  His English archers were dropping their last arrows at a steep angle on the charging Turks. There seemed to be thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

  All the time in the world.

  Swan looked out over the battle. The not-quite battle. The stradiotes were gone – they’d delivered their charge and flitted away from the formed infantry. The Turkish horse was dead or scattered. Swan assumed that the enemy sipahis, their best, their answer to knights, were formed somewhere in the camp, or getting ready to shred the crusaders. He knew, having seen the Turkish heavy horse in their camp, that there were thousands of them, as well. But so far, it was not quite a battle.

  But now it was going to be a battle.

  He looked at the front of the Turkish charge, led, like last night, by the best janissaries in the best Turkish armour. They were slow. They were as tired as he was, and they had lost in the firey hell of the upper town. But someone had rallied them, given them orders …

  … There. Swan saw him clearly, a big, powerful man on a magnificent white horse. A diamond the size of a robin’s egg glittered at the base of a huge plume.

  The Sultan. He was in the midst of the attack, and he was the guiding force.

  Even as the janissaries reached the base of the earthwork, they slowed. Gone was their unstoppable frenzy. The opium had been yesterday. Today was the reaction. The fatigue. The horror and the loss. Swan knew it all too well.

  In a long moment of kinship, Swan saw it all. And knew that the Hussite madman was going to get his demi-cannon loaded. The race was already lost. Even though the Turkish battery was only a few feet above the grass, it was too hard for exhausted men. Too hard for one last sprint to victory.

  Swan understood, and for a moment, despite hate and enmity and blood and loss and fatigue, he understood what the janissaries faced, and he admired them. They did not flinch. Their faces were to the foe.

  They simply had no more to give for their Sultan.

  ‘Ready!’ roared Ladislav. Up went the portfire. He was laughing, talking wildly.

  ‘Fucking Catholics!’ the Hussite called. He was in another war.

  ‘Fire,’ Swan said gently. As if he was an executioner, doing a bad job as well as he could.

  The falcon fired first by a half-beat, and then the bigger gun. Crack-BOOM.

  The two guns had been filled with scrap metal and Hussite hackbut balls.

  The archers and the pages shot into the smoke.

  Out on the plain, there was another roar.

  As the smoke cleared, the janissaries were all but stopped thirty yards from the muzzles of the guns.

  Dazed, or simply unable to go forward, and the carnage was terrible.

  ‘I’m out,’ Kendal shouted, and jumped back, his quiver empty. He drew his sword and put his shoulder behind Swan’s.

  But the janissaries were proud, and tough. They called to each other, and the Sultan, untouched, called, almost singing his praise of them.

  And they came on. Hundreds shot arrows as they came, and while most went over the battery, many struck home. The Hungarians had the worst of it, unarmoured and without helmets; every arrow was a hit.

  By Swan’s shoulder, Kendal spat. ‘Hunyadi’s coming out,’ he said.

  The Turks were over the base of the redoubt and climbing, and there were no more arrows. The pages had shot all their bolts. There were no tricks left.

  Swan’s visor was still open. ‘Saint Mary and Saint George!’ he called.

  He slammed his visor down as they responded, and then the Turks hit. They were exhausted and they were desperate, and their Sultan was among them, and they had made it through arrows and fire and smoke …

  Swan downed the first man almost without effort, a flick of his point, one-handed, at a man too tired and too blinded by sweat to parry.

  And then it was just fighting. Swan parried, was hit, struck back. There was a moment when all seemed lost – he was aware at some remove that Kendal was above him, on the great gun, and they were on the wrong side of the battery, and the whole of it was full of Turks.

  ‘Push, goddam it!’ roared Di Silva.

  Swan obeyed. He lowered his left shoulder, got his sword blade in his left hand, and pushed, ignoring the blows that fell on him. He knocked a man down and his sword stuck in another and the man went down and Swan took a blow and shrugged it off and stabbed, two-handed, blind, struck, was hit again, this time in the leg, hard enough to cost him some balance, and he fell to one knee but got his sword up, and made his parry, covering a huge blow from a pole arm – feet under him, rising, rolling the halberd to the right, sticking the halberdier in the joint of his arm harness where the elbow articulated, stabbing so hard that the point grated against the steel on the far side. Pommel into the man’s mouth so th
at his teeth sprayed. Aware, in some distant country, that those were Milanese arm harnesses under a magnificent Turkish helmet. Superb, European armour. Enamelwork and silver inlay.

  Dead and down.

  Next.

  ‘Push,’ he croaked. He meant it. He was back in the middle of the battery. He was almost alone, but the dust was so bad that no one hit him – the Turks around him were as well armoured as he, and only their turbans, many of them slipping or cut away, distinguished them.

  Swan allowed himself the luxury of a deep breath, and then another, and no one hit him.

  The Turks were taking the battery. Ten thousand to one hundred, they had every right to it.

  Gold winked and a diamond flashed an arm’s length away, and Swan, had he been a little less numb, might have managed a laugh. Had he had a glass of wine, he’d have raised it to Alessandro Bembo.

  They always do, when they are desperate, he thought. That’s what Alessandro had said.

  He had time to raise his sword. He had it in two hands, in the guard Messire Viladi called serpentina. Hilt high by his own head, point low. He stepped forward through the curtain of dust, and there was the Sultan, in his heavy armour, reinforced mail, every link inscribed with a verse from Holy Koran. His helmet was covered in gold inlay so that it glowed, and his turban was white as only silk could be, with a diamond as big as the earth shooting stars into the battle haze, and a peacock feather. He had steel plates on his arms and his thighs.

  All that, in one grimy glance.

  The Sultan cut down, hurriedly, late in understanding that this was a foe, and behind him another magnificent figure screamed a warning and men turned.

  Just what Messire Viladi said in his garret in Venice. Kill your opponent in three blows.

  Swan’s hands moved economically. His sword swept, left to right, like an oar, and his low point caught the Sultan’s descending cut. The blades bit. Swan’s hands, wide apart, gave him the leverage. He rotated his blade, point low to point high, against the Sultan’s will, and thrust home.

  One.

  Desperate, the Sultan raised his hands. Swan’s point missed his naked face by the width of a finger and caught the turban on his helmet, gouged a furrow through the gold and ripped it from his head.

  Swan punched with his pommel and slammed it into the side of the Sultan’s helmet, a wasted blow, but the man staggered and lost the tempo and Swan stepped close, his knee between the Sultan’s legs.

  Two.

  The Sultan fell away backwards, his balance shattered, and Swan reversed his thrust, high to low, glissading along the Sultan’s impotent blade and thrusting home again. This time there was no desperate parry. Swan’s point slammed into the links of the Sultan’s leg armour and tore through into the inside of his thigh.

  Ten swords hit Swan at once. Swan went down, covered in the Sultan’s bodyguards. Men were screaming in Turkish, and Swan couldn’t understand a word. He was seconds from death, and he couldn’t, in that moment, understand a word of Turkish.

  He wasn’t dead, so he kept fighting. The man who’d brought him down hadn’t stayed with him. The Sultan was screaming, or someone was, and Swan got his right hand on his dagger with a feeling not unlike joy. No blow struck him. He had no idea what was happening and he couldn’t see, so he struck wildly with his dagger and hit nothing. A leg crossed his vision and he struck …

  Too late it occurred to him that full-plate leg armour could only be Christian. The blow rebounded from hard plate, and he was lying under Di Silva. The big man was using a poleaxe. But no one was fighting him.

  Swan wanted to get up. He was sure he told his limbs to move, but nothing happened, and he just lay in the swirling dust, staring at Di Silva’s knees. And other parts. Heaving in breaths. Shaking.

  He gave a low shriek. And curled on his side. His legs both spasmed and he couldn’t control himself and for a moment he thought he was going to weep and throw up at the same time.

  ‘You’re alive, then,’ Di Silva said.

  The battery was empty of Turks.

  Swan was a long time getting up.

  Finally, into the sound, he said, ‘Yes.’

  By then, Di Silva was kneeling in the dirt. He wasn’t speaking, and his helmet was off, and his face was bright red, a red Swan had never seen on a human being. Swan got his armet off – it seemed to take hours. And then he got the falcon’s gun bucket and poured it over Di Silva’s head.

  The Portuguese knight looked up. ‘Thanks for that,’ he said, as if it was all perfectly normal.

  There were other men moving, by then.

  Kendal was there. He drank all the water in the bucket without apology. He was completely unwounded, a miracle in itself. Swan knew he had blood coming out of him somewhere. He’d now been wounded often enough to know the signs. So many things hurt it was hard to imagine which represented an actual wound. In the last fighting, he’d taken more hits, more blows, then he could count, and he felt punch drunk.

  Cornazzano was alive, if scarcely able to move. Morbioli was dead, under a pile of Turks, and Olbioni leaned drunkenly against a gun. The pages had been savaged.. Many had run from the Belgrade side of the redoubt. Swan thought they were the smart ones, and they came back, shamed.

  Marco looked at them like lost sheep. His sword was broken, as was his left arm, and a scimitar had taken one of his ears, but he’d fallen and been ignored. And he was alive. The page looked like a tomcat who’d been in too many fights. But he was alive.

  Columbino was down, wounded, and unconscious.

  Ladislav was dying. Swan took him water, as the crusaders, almost at his feet, began to press the beaten janissaries. The janissaries were the better soldiers, but not that day. The crusaders were fresh, and they believed.

  ‘Are we winning?’ Ladislav asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Swan answered.

  ‘Give me the chalice, then,’ Ladislav said. He was somewhere else, Swan knew. On another battlefield, fighting another foe. Swan gave him the cup and helped him drink, and watched him die.

  Di Silva was watching over the gabions. ‘We are in trouble,’ he said.

  Swan managed to reach the edge of the wall in time to see the sipahis charge. They clawed into the crusaders. Behind them, a wedge of infantry was forming, and beyond that, Swan could see through the dust to where a knot of brilliantly accoutred Turkish officers were putting the Sultan on a horse. He was fewer than a hundred paces away.

  The hurriedly reformed infantry were beyond a charge. But they came forward. Swan watched them. In a detached way, he walked back to where he’d dropped his sword when he fell, and picked it up. He had no helmet, and he wasn’t sure he could fight even one exhausted Turk, but the sword was a comfort in his hand.

  The Sultan’s turban was wrapped around the blade. He had stabbed right through it. There was red, red blood on it.

  And a great burning diamond.

  ‘I’m too tired to run,’ Di Silva said. He shuffled to Swan’s side, and Kendal drew his sword and put his buckler on his fist on Swan’s other side, and Marco readied his crossbow and Olbioni brought up his Italian halberd. A dozen other barely mobile men closed in around them.

  They heard the Turks coming up the face of the redoubt, even as they heard the point of the wedge go into the crusaders below them.

  And they heard the trumpets as Hunyadi released his reserves.

  Marco, in his Venetian Italian, said, ‘Shit, they are behind us,’ in the matter-of-fact voice of the nearly dead. They heard the footsteps, light and fast, on the rubble and dirt, and then the horde came over the Belgrade side – fifty, a hundred men and women, most with no armour, led by a woman with a messer. She went past Swan without even a glance, straight across the packed and bloody earth of the little redoubt, and with a scream into the Turks huddled on the slope below her.

  Hundreds, thousands, of peasants, Hungarians, Serbs and Wallachians, poured over the redoubt and fell with a roar on to the Turkish infantry. Swan didn’t have to lo
ok to understand. Hunyadi’s mounted knights, his banderium, had charged into the sipahis.

  It was all done, but the killing.

  Swan rose to his feet.

  ‘Be good to women, Ser Thomas. So few are.’

  Di Silva watched him. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘Into the Turkish camp,’ Swan said. ‘To save some Christian slaves. And even … a few Turks.’

  ‘You know what I hate about you?’ Di Silva asked with a grunt. ‘Just when I thought nothing would get me moving.’ He shook his head.

  It was another night of hell. Swan did what he could. Grazias got him a horse, and he rode deep into the Turkish camp, chose a defensible area, and set his Albanians to work rounding up Turkish camp followers.

  ‘No rape,’ he said to Grazias.

  ‘It is what men do, when they win,’ Grazias said with a shrug.

  ‘Not today,’ Swan said. ‘Are we crusaders, or thugs?’

  Grazias made an odd face, eyebrows raised. Around them, men were dying – the trapped infantry of the Turks, and all the poor ghazis with no hope of escape were hunted and killed amid the treasures of the tents. ‘Next you will tell me not to loot,’ Grazias said. ‘They are Turks, not people.’

  ‘Many of them were Greeks, not five years ago,’ Swan said.

  Grazias twisted in his saddle as if he had been struck. But then he frowned, and his head moved slowly side to side. ‘I will obey. You are a strange man,’ he said.

  Swan nodded. He felt like a strange man. Maria had done this to him. Or had Šárka?

  He felt stranger when he rode down a trio of Hungarians trying to pull a baby out of an Anatolian woman’s arms. He didn’t remonstrate. He cut one, and they all fled.

  It was not yet dark when he came across Capistrano, bent on the same work of mercy as Swan. He glared, his eyes almost red.

  ‘Crusaders?’ he spat. ‘Beasts! Any Turk we kill is damned for eternity! Only by conversion can they be saved! We must save them!’

  Swan thought, not for the last time, that war made for the strangest allies. But the Dominicans had a sort of aura to them, and they had enlisted many of the crusaders – the most faithful, and the women. Dozens of German women stood with bared swords around a pen of Turkish fugitives.