Tom Swan and the Last Spartans
Volume Three: Mistra
Christian Cameron
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Title Page
Tom Swan and the Last Spartans: Volume Three: Mistra
Also by Christian Cameron
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Tom Swan and the Last Spartans
Volume Three: Mistra
Demoiselle Sophia was naked; half-turned away from him in the glorious evening light of a Venetian sunset, her pale skin bathed in hues of pink and gold. She looked back with a longing in her eyes that moved Swan deeply.
He reached to take her breasts in his hands.
‘Dawn,’ she said.
He hesitated, and reality flickered around him.
‘Dawn, messire. First light,’ Clemente’s voice said, and the cold reality of dawn in a pavilion deep in the mountains of Albania at the very edge of winter poured into his consciousness with all the crushing force of a cavalry charge. Demoiselle Sophia’s naked body vanished, to be replaced by all the cares of running a company of lances; a set of cares that included immediate worries about drinking water and fodder for horses, and longer-term concerns about the reception his company might receive from the occasionally fickle and always dangerous Iskander Bey, sometimes known as John Scanderberg, de facto ruler of Christian Albania.
Swan really wanted to close his eyes and return to sleep. Sleep had been better, although the most cursory examination of his memories of the dream he’d had suggested that he’d put Sophia’s head on Violetta’s body. He had only a vague impression of the demoiselle’s body, whereas Violetta’s he knew and remembered well.
Too well.
‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘Yes.’
‘Messire. You said to wake you,’ Clemente said again, this time closer.
‘Is that hippocras?’ he asked. ‘Is it hot?’
He could tell it was; he was talking to prove that he was awake. Clemente had found wine in a camp with no wine.
‘My lord,’ Clemente said. It was odd that the words were so respectful, as the reality was that his tone conveyed perfectly, in Italian, the contempt of the early riser for those who lie abed.
Swan swung his legs over the edge of his camp bed. It was cold; he was already cold, and the long draught of hippocras didn’t do much to dispel it. The brazier had gone out long since, and in fact was gone; already packed on the baggage wagons. His clothes were laid out on a folding stool; there was a small square of woven grass on which he could stand while he dressed. As soon as he stood up, a pair of archers grabbed the bed, stripped it, and folded the frame, which vanished out the door. He hadn’t even grunted ‘good morning’ at them.
Swan’s legs hurt, his back hurt, and his hands burned as if they were on fire. And he slept in a bed, off the ground; all of the men serving him had nothing but blankets and perhaps an armful of straw to keep them from cold and damp.
He got into clean braes and a clean shirt; ironed, no less, and smelling of rose water.
Alessandro Bembo rose from the second folding bed and sniffed.
‘You smell beautiful,’ he said. His smile was mocking.
‘I feel beautiful,’ Swan said. ‘Christ risen. I feel like shit.’
Bembo nodded. ‘As do I,’ he said. ‘Remind me why I wanted to accompany you?’
‘Boredom?’ Swan shot back. He wasn’t good at being mocked first thing in the morning, which was odd, as he’d had years of it.
Alessandro nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.
‘Duty to the Serenissima?’ Swan said.
‘Enlightened self-interest, anyway,’ Bembo said. ‘Christ, why do I not get the hippocras?’
‘Because Clemente isn’t your servant, he’s my servant,’ Swan said pettishly.
As if summoned by the thought, Umar appeared. A new smell filled the tent; foreign, slightly bitter, slightly sweet.
‘Ah!’ Alessandro said. ‘Quaveh!’
Umar smiled. He poured a small pottery cup of the stuff for his master and then, turning to Swan, indicated that he had a second cup.
‘No, none for him, the ruffian,’ Alessandro said. ‘All for me. I will be alert and he will be drunk.’
Swan took the cup from Umar anyway, just as Clemente returned with a steaming cup of hippocras which he handed, with a silent bow, to Alessandro.
The two friends exchanged a long look. And both laughed.
Outside, the morning was so young that the sky was not yet even a pale shade of pink; there were, in fact, still stars.
Juan di Silva shook his head. ‘Five more nights like that and we’ll be losing horses like a camp with the horse plague,’ he said. ‘We have a dozen sick horses right now.’ He kicked a wooden bucket full of water to show his capitano that the top of the water was frozen solid.
Ser Columbino shrugged. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘we have no trouble whatsoever with desertion.’ He smiled. ‘Because really, it’s like hell out there. A damp, cold hell.’
Out there was the mountainous terrain of central Albania. Off to the west, the sea loomed, but it was still fifty miles or more away.
‘Grazias is already away?’ Swan asked.
‘Before the moon set,’ Ser Columbino said. He leaned even closer to the fire. ‘Other Dmitri is already back with the start of the route.’
Every day the scouts went out at dawn, and set up a chain of guides for the company to follow. The roads in Albania were non-existent; there were no maps; they had tracks the width of two wagon-ruts if that, and the heavy military wagons that the company used could not easily be turned around with a four- or six-horse hitch, especially in a mountain pass or with a steep drop to one side or the other. They’d lost their way twice in six days, and the nadir of the trip, so far, had been a day’s trip on an apparent dead end. They turned the wagons, taking hours to do so, only to return to an earlier camp and the news that Grazias had been wrong. They had been on the right road, and they had to turn all the wagons again. And repeat the day’s efforts.
That had been three days ago.
The other issue to Swan was the condition of his company. The men were in good spirits, or as good as could be expected in difficult country at the edge of winter, but their material condition was terrible. There were men without shoes, and men whose boots were nothing but collections of patches; hose worn footless and hanging like growths; jupons burned to a pale pink from deep red by months of sun, out at the elbows and sometimes at the shoulders. Hats were ragged, shapeless things; hardly any soldier sported a feather, much less a plume. The condition of the armour wasn’t much better; six months in the field had wrecked buckles and straps, cut laces and replaced them with various makeshifts; most of the armour was rusted to a deep brown, and waxed, because no one had time to polish it, and the only bright metal on most men was their dirks and swords.
The horse tack looked better, but that was, for the most part, because they’d had the pick of the Turkish camp to loot, and many men were riding Turkish saddles. Most of the archers, whether English, Hungarian or Italian, had Turkish bows and Turkish arrows; indeed, only three of the English had heavy yew war bows, as the rest had worn or broken. Some men simply had no heavy livery arrows left, and so had switched to the Turkish weapons. Most of the pages who had started the campaign with light crossbows now had only a handful of quarrels; some men had none.
‘That was the last of our wine,’ Clemente said, as if he was an officer and welcome to speak at officers’ meetings. ‘Why did we leave Rome?’ he asked the air in front of him, as if this excused his insubordination.
Swan drank his last slug of the hippocras with what enjoyment
he could muster. ‘We will find Iskander Bey today,’ he said.
Ser Columbino nodded. ‘Why do you think so?’ he asked.
Swan shrugged, even as Clemente began to lace on his arm armour. ‘The other options are too difficult to contemplate,’ he said. His armour was still bright, and his laces were of silk. Because he’d been gone two months.
An hour later, fully armed, head to toe, and girded with a sword he didn’t particularly like, Swan rode easily in the middle of his column. He had mounted archers at the front and back of the column, and his men-at-arms in the middle. His stradiotes were far ahead, but from time to time they met with one; at every place where two trails crossed, or where Grazias, the captain of the stradiotes, imagined that the wagons would bog down or require work to pass.
Nones saw them cross a narrow creek with steep banks; they had to double-team each of the baggage wagons and the bronze falconet to get them over the stream, and then clear the area around the crossing with axes and saws. Men ate in shifts, but it was warm; some men fell asleep on the spot.
A little after the sun reached its zenith, the last wagon bogged down in the stream-bed. Swan dismounted with Bembo to push, standing in the ice-cold stream up to his armoured knees in rushing water while Clemente muttered about the work he’d have to do on the armour.
The wagon remained bogged down. They had to unload it, with virtually the entire company working; tents, personal packs which weren’t supposed to be in the baggage; the last candles in the company; split peas; a round of Parmesan cheese weighing half as much as a man; it all had to come out. Then men pushed; the two teams pulled, and with a great heave the empty wagon shivered and then moved up the bank, and the process of reloading began.
Swan was standing by a fire that Umar had made on the stony riverbank. He was soaked to the skin, and he wasn’t sure he could face another night in the open, but he had dry clothes and many of his men did not.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
Bembo sneered. ‘The glorious life of arms,’ he said.
Swan turned to his friend. ‘Would Messire do me the great favour of starting a catalogue of wants? We cannot remain in the field in this condition. Look at Orietto’s girth; more cobwebs than leather.’
‘I knew I’d end up as your secretary,’ Bembo said. ‘There you were in your shit-stained hose, and I said, there’s a man who will make my life a misery.’ He took out a wax tablet and a stylus. ‘Shall I list all the things we need? Or the much shorter list of things we have? Cold water. That we have in abundance.’
But there was better in the offing. Before the convoy was rolling again, Grazias rode up in person; he swept off his small felt hat as if Swan were a great noble.
‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I have found Iskander Bey, or rather, John has found him; camped in a valley, not fifty stadia from Kruje. We can make it there if we press on past the fall of night; he is sending out guides and they will have torches, and he will have hot food ready, on his honour.’
Swan’s mood improved immediately, and he felt mildly ashamed for showing his lack of endurance; on the other hand, he’d been at the papal court just a few weeks before, and enjoying Bembo’s hospitality in Venice even more recently. ‘I didn’t miss all this,’ he muttered.
There followed six miserable hours. But despite the difficulty, the knowledge that Scanderberg’s camp was close kept them all going; when they encountered the first troop of mounted Albanians toward evening, morale rose still further, especially when the rumour spread that Scanderberg had wine.
Swan rode along his column. By then they were on something that might have been described as a road; almost three yards wide, wide enough for men-at-arms on big horses to ride two abreast. ‘Finish as you started,’ he called. ‘Look like soldiers.’
Men tightened buckles or did them up; one of Di Silva’s men-at-arms took his bevoir from a page and buckled it, looking away to proclaim his innocence; Will Kendal groaned and pulled his helmet form his saddlebags, a long, pointed German sallet salvaged from the battlefield of Belgrade. But by the time Scanderberg’s men were lighting their torches, the company glittered with polished buckles and shiny-brown harness and somewhat tarnished brass, and their pink-red surcoats caught the ruddy light of the setting sun as they crested the last rise before camp and saw fires; almost three hundred fires, burning in the valley below them, and running in long, fairly neat lines off to the north and west.
Ser Columbino rode up next to his captain. ‘But still no stabling for the horses,’ he said.
Swan nodded. ‘Mistras,’ he said.
‘Even after this, you think we can make Mistras?’ Columbino asked.
Swan nodded. ‘I do not fancy wintering over with Scanderberg, do you?’ he asked. ‘Let’s have a few days’ rest, feed the chargers until we can’t see their ribs, and pray for good weather.’
Columbino frowned. ‘And if it is raining? Or, Christ forbid, snowing?’
Swan sighed. ‘Then we’ll do something else.’
He rode forward, down the last long slope to the campfires, in the cold darkness. The Albanians cheered their arrival, and Scanderberg came in person. Swan dismounted and gave his best courtly bow, and Scanderberg seemed pleased. They exchanged a few halting phrases in Latin, and Swan found himself invited to dinner; an invitation he wanted to refuse, but could not. The invitation included Alessandro Bembo and his other officers, and so, stripped of the weight of their armour and feeling, collectively, as if they might be able to fly, the officers of the Compagnia di San Maria Magdalena left the chaos of a hundred tents rising in the icy darkness and a dozen fires being lit to sit in the relative comfort of the great Iskander Bey’s silk pavilion. There they were fed lamb in saffron with raisins, eaten Turkish style in great bronze cauldrons with rice, and drank wine, which would not have been so common with the Turks.
Scanderberg wore the same red hat he had worn three weeks before. He sat with a man who had a gold chain so thick it must have weighed ten pounds. It was so thick it was ugly; Swan wondered why the man wore such a thing.
After dinner, Scanderberg sat Swan and Bembo on his right and left, and Swan found himself next to the man with the enormous chain. The man was taciturn, and looked less than enthusiastic about having Swan placed above him.
‘Ignore him,’ Scanderberg said. ‘He is Varlim Bey’s son, and I captured him. I’m making him wear his ransom for a few days, to teach him respect.’
Swan looked at the man, who was as blond and blue-eyed as any of the Albanian gentry. ‘He is Turkish?’ Swan asked.
‘Am I Turkish?’ Scanderberg asked. ‘How is your wound, Suanabeg?’
‘Suanabeg?’ Swan asked.
Scanderberg laughed. ‘Beg or bey is a term of respect,’ he said. ‘Have you not diddled the daughter and the sister of Omar Reis? Have you not put your sword into the body of the Sultan? And yet you still ride abroad. Alive.’
Men along either side of the great cauldron of food nodded; hard men with empty eyes. A dozen began to tap their knife hilts on the cauldrons.
‘How is your wound?’ Scanderberg asked again.
Swan shrugged. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘Although when I drink too much wine, my head hurts,’ he added with a disingenuous smile.
Scanderberg slapped his thigh. ‘Now, this has also happened to me,’ he admitted. ‘And Hunyadi?’ he asked suddenly, changing direction like a cat.
Swan shrugged. ‘Dead,’ he admitted.
‘Are you sure?’ Scanderberg asked.
‘I saw his plague-ridden corpse,’ Swan said. ‘Two weeks ago.’
Scanderberg crossed himself, and so did all the men sitting in the tent. Then the small man sat back. A slave brought him wine, and he drank, and then handed the cup to Swan. ‘If Hunyadi is dead …’ he said, and looked at Swan.
‘Count Cilli and the king intend to attaint László and take all of Hunyadi’s lands,’ Swan said. ‘I have this from László himself.’ He drank from the cup and handed it, at a motion from
Scanderberg, to Bembo. It was like communion; a shared cup with all the community of killers.
Scanderberg watched the cup pass down the table. ‘The king of Hungary is a fool if he imagines that he can defeat the Hunyadis,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘But they will not be fighting the Turks this year or next,’ he added. ‘If I had money, I would fight the Turks next year. And indeed, Ser Suane, I will need help next year unless you and the Pope want me to go down.’
‘After Belgrade?’ Swan asked.
Scanderberg shrugged. ‘Maybe Mehmet will take a year or two to rally,’ he said. Then he shook his head. ‘But I doubt it. Fifty thousand men lost? He has three armies that big. It will make him cautious, is all. Caution demands that he has to find an enemy that he can defeat. That’s either the Greeks in the Peloponnese or me. Unless we are very, very lucky and he turns on the Persians.’
Swan nodded; this all accorded with his own perception and with what László Hunyadi had said.
He looked at Alessandro.
Alessandro gave him a nod.
‘The Pope and Venice are prepared to provide you with some funds,’ he said.
Scanderberg nodded. ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘How much?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps ten thousand ducats,’ Swan said.
Scanderberg looked away for a moment. ‘So much, indeed?’ he asked.
Swan almost laughed aloud, because Hunyadi had all but ridiculed twice that amount. ‘Yes, my lord,’ he said.
Scanderberg wasn’t shy. ‘When?’ he asked.
Swan shrugged. ‘Half now and half in the spring,’ he said.
Alessandro nodded. ‘My lord, I can offer some direct Venetian support; ships in the spring, with men to man them and help you clear the coast; and a steady supply of guns and soldiers who can use them.’
Scanderberg laughed. ‘Well, well. And what do you want me to do, messires? Storm Constantinople? Take Edirne?’
Swan looked at Bembo. ‘I do not have the opportunity to consult with my master, Cardinal Bessarion …’
‘I know him,’ Scanderberg said. ‘A good man. Rare, in this world.’
Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Three Page 1
