Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Five

by Christian Cameron

  She put a finger on the wound over his ribs and the slight salt of her hand stung him. She cocked her head to one side.

  Swan considered crushing her to him, but she was wearing a small fortune in Greek silk and instead he took a towel and began to dry himself. But then he stooped like a falcon and kissed her.

  She put her hands on his naked back. They ran all the way down to the base of his buttocks and back up; a long kiss.

  ‘You are considerate not to get blood on my gown,’ she said. ‘There is no more Greek silk like this; the Turks have it all. Come and unbutton me, then. You are a surprisingly patient man.’

  Swan unbuttoned her, thinking of nothing. She folded the gown and the undergown carefully, and then took off her shift at the window, and her hose. To Swan, watching her strip her hose down her legs was perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he carefully walled his mind against the images of the men burning to death on the beach with her breasts and her thighs and the slim enticement of her sides as she leaned forward to unbuckle a garter.

  ‘Pregnancy?’ he asked at a most intimate moment.

  She smiled lazily. ‘Unlikely,’ she said. ‘I have had a few opportunities.’ She leaned back as if going to sleep and smiled to herself.

  Later, Clemente knocked. Swan had fallen asleep with Theodora lying atop him, and he awoke, startled. She smiled.

  They were stuck together with his blood. She laughed. ‘So this is the blood of brave men I’ve heard so much about,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it washes off my skin more easily than my silk. Come, love,’ she said in Greek. ‘Rise and go.’

  When Swan was dressed, she kissed him hungrily; so hungrily that he was for a moment almost shocked.

  Then she smiled her brilliant smile. ‘Perhaps I will see you again,’ she said. ‘But never like this again. Go marry your lady, Ser Suane. I will do my duty.’ She licked the tip of his nose. ‘You go and do yours.’

  She armed him, as Clemente brought in his armour; she laced every point, buckled his cuirass, checked the fit of his sabatons.

  And when he was in the doorway, she said, ‘What did you think of Caterina di Orsini?’

  ‘I liked her,’ Swan said.

  Theodora laughed. ‘Of course you did,’ she said. ‘If you win, you will buy me five more years of a good life,’ she said.

  Swan thought of that all the way to the beach; of thousands of men fighting to the death so that the Gatelussi princes could enjoy a few more years of classical parties by moonlight. He wondered, and not for the first time, whether Islam might be … better. Or simpler …

  He doubted it.

  He boarded Bembo’s galley in armour, shook hands with Juan di Silva, and Bembo embraced him.

  ‘We are raising both anchors together, to show those Genoese dogs how sailors go to sea,’ Bembo said.

  ‘Has it ever occurred to you that we are the villains and not the heroes in this romance?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo turned his head. ‘Once,’ he said to the early morning darkness, ‘once I was breaking a man’s jaw against a stone in Rome. He was screaming.’ Bembo spat over the side. ‘A year later I saw him begging in the Forum. I had done worse than kill him.’ He shrugged. ‘We are bad men, Tommaso. We kill, we fornicate, we sodomise.’

  ‘That’s on you,’ Swan said. ‘The last one.’

  Bembo laughed. ‘Prude,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo issued an order, loud in the silent darkness, and Swan felt the ship alive under his sabatons. Sailors ran by, bare feet slapping the deck.

  ‘Do you think that the cause matters?’ Bembo asked quietly.

  ‘No, I’m asking you.’ Swan said.

  Bembo sighed. ‘I think men are animals,’ he said. ‘And if we work very hard, we can be something better. Perhaps it is mere vanity, but instead of counting up sins, I count up triumphs; people I do not kill; moments when I am rational. I find that in Venice, with my wife, I have no need to break men’s lives.’ He shrugged again. ‘Perhaps this is just a story I tell myself. But I am done with this, English. I no longer want to kill or die. I want to drink wine with my friends. I suspect that some day, you and I and Loredan and Clemente will want to tell each other about our moments of triumph, but for the moment, it’s all shit to me.’

  ‘Amen, brother,’ Swan said. ‘Let’s go fight the Turks.’

  As the sun rose over Asia, Swan was standing amidships, fully armoured, with Columbino and Di Silva. Behind him, in full harness for the first time, was Will Kendal, now ‘William Kendal’. The former archer kept walking about the narrow deck, as if testing the limitations of his new carapace. Clemente was spitting over the side, a form of contemplation that young Italians seemed to enjoy. Bembo was astern, watching his great lateen as they started to angle in with the shore. Mithymna was just becoming visible; the Venetian squadron would be the first to weather the long point on which the ancient fortress stood, and to open the deep bay with Petra and her islands at the bottom. Far off to the west, Swan could see the ruins of Antissa, a Genoese colony destroyed by the Turks before Constantinople fell.

  Swan had a sabatoned foot up on the rowing frame, and there were three big, strong men just under his leg, grunting at each fetch as the heavy oars swept back and forth at a steady pace, keeping up the ship’s speed as the lateen was taken in.

  For battle.

  A red pennon rose at Corner’s masthead, and the Jesu e Maria fired a swivel gun off her stern rail.

  Bembo pointed to one of his aristocratic young men, and a small bronze piece on the stern rail of Bembo’s Santa Maria Magdalena fired, and he, too, broke out a red pennon.

  Enemy in sight.

  One of the men under Swan’s leg spoke up with the informality of the eve of battle.

  ‘We gonna take ’em, Cap’n?’ the man said in Veneziano-accented Italian.

  Swan tucked his unhelmeted head under the beam so he could look the man in the eye. ‘For once in your life,’ Swan said, ‘you have the wind, the tide, and the ships. If we fail to win today, we have no one to blame but ourselves.’

  The rowers chuckled. ‘Messire Bembo says if we take the Turk camp, there’s shares,’ another rower said cheerfully.

  ‘Messire Bembo is a brilliant captain,’ Swan agreed. He drank off a half-cup of wine to steady his nerves. Something felt wrong; perhaps it was having lain with Theodora. He held Sophia’s sword in his hand and he knew that he had sinned. Sophia would never ‘understand’. And in the warm Mediterranean light of day, he didn’t feel like a ‘man of the world’ but like a foolish sinner who had had every opportunity to do the right thing and had failed.

  He wondered whether Sophia’s sword would break in his hand. He wondered whether he would die; whether Bembo would die; whether Kendal or Clemente would die.

  He clanked his way back to the command deck, where Bembo stood with his helmsman and his marines. Swan took the opportunity of the lowering of the lateen to look to leeward and watch the coast; to see the Turks running for their ships. Their panic was evident in every man’s posture and desperation.

  Surprise, then.

  He saluted Bembo, and Alessandro bowed; not sarcastically, either. There was an informality to the moments before a fight; but there was also a sense of finality.

  ‘Tommaso,’ Bembo said, smiling. He hardly ever addressed Swan by his first name. ‘By God, Tommaso, you look like a knight from a fairy tale; perhaps off to rescue a princess.’

  Swan winced. ‘I have a letter for Sophia,’ he said, and took the letter out of the top of his cuirass.

  Bembo nodded. ‘I have a letter for my wife,’ he agreed, and handed it over to Swan, who tucked it inside his breastplate through the arm opening.

  Then Bembo leaned over, his eyes on the coast, and kissed Swan on the cheek. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘You are the best friend I’ve ever had.’

  Tears started in Swan’s eyes. For a moment he could not speak, and then he mastered himself. ‘Then let
’s live to enjoy life in Venice,’ he said.

  Behind Bembo’s shoulder, they were opening the harbour of Mithymna rapidly. The coast on both sides of the headland was full of ships, beached or on short hawsers. They were launching, but any veteran could see that their guns were gone, and as planned, the Genoese swooped on them like striking falcons, their guns roaring away to open the battle, shooting into the Turkish and Asian galleys like hunters shooting rising ducks.

  A gun fired from high on the fortress. There, well above the smoke, hung a great banner, white with a red cross; the most ancient of the Crusader banners. On the lower ground to the west of the fortress, an assault was going in; the Turkish infantry packed together, trying to get out of the gully.

  Or trying to run for their ships.

  It was luck, or the will of God, but the Turks had been caught in the very moment of an assault, and their crews were unable to launch most of the ships on the north side of the fortress. The Christian fleet should have turned into the beaches and begun putting fire into those ships.

  But they did not. Instead, the Venetians and the Knights of St John weathered the headland and rowed by at cruising speed, their bows pointed deep into the bay, and Swan hoped that Omar Reis’s heart died within him as he watched twelve warships pass by his trap, ignoring the bait and rushing to engage his ambushers.

  ‘Now we see,’ Bembo said.

  Right off the bow, two squadrons, one of eight and one of ten ships, emerged from the islands at the base of the bay. They had all their marines and all their guns. They would have fallen on the unprotected flank of any attack on the beaches, but now they would go head to head and beak to beak against the Venetians and the Christian pirates called the Knights of St John.

  The centre-line gun on Santa Maria Magdalena spoke. The whole ship seemed to stop for a moment, and the ball slapped the water a hundred paces off the bow and then skipped like a rock thrown by a boy; skipped again, faster than thought, and struck the lead Turkish galley with an explosion of splinters, shattering the enemy ship’s starboard cathead and ruining the precision of her rowing.

  And then everything that had happened very slowly seemed to happen very fast; the temporal acceleration that Swan had always experienced in combat. The closing speed of the ships, at first leaden, like Swan’s nervous limbs, suddenly seemed to increase to supernatural levels; Swan’s sweat soaked through his arming clothes between one thought and another as the sun climbed higher, and when Clemente handed him his fine, light armet, it was already hot to the touch. He put it on, and by the time he had the visor open, Bembo was straining like a hound on a leash, and the wounded Turkish galley filled Swan’s vision, wallowing a quarter off course as her rowers desperately tried to turn.

  ‘Too fast,’ said the helmsman, a professional seaman. He was dispassionate; merely sharing information.

  Bembo shook his head. ‘Brace!’ he roared. Every man aboard used both hands for the ship; Swan could see Kendal by the mainmast, his short fighting spear trapped between his body and the mast with his armoured arms wrapped around the tarry rope.

  ‘… Spiritus sancti …’ muttered the helmsman.

  They struck. The hull rang like an anvil struck by a hammer, and the long pole ram, protruding amidships and meant only for ripping rowers and oars, broke with a crack that might have signified the end of the world. The mainmast snapped forward like a swordsman’s best fendente and then whipped back, and every man on the helm deck fell flat, regardless of what they were holding.

  But the timbers were almost new, and the Bembos were rich, and the Arsenal remained the finest shipyard in the world. Nothing gave; a seam appeared in the bow, and water came in, but nothing that a professional crew could not repair.

  The Turkish ship, struck almost precisely on her shattered cathead, simply folded like an invitation to a ball, her stem broken, her wreckage pressed down under the Santa Maria Magdalena’s forefoot. The Venetian galley’s pine-tarred hull slipped over the wreckage and nothing tore loose or caught, and for a terrible moment, Swan could look straight down into the drowning faces of fifty or a hundred men, Turks and Christians, janissaries and rowers, all doomed together, already ten feet under and going down, like a vision from a particularly virulent hell; their mouths open in desperate supplication and their lungs already full of water.

  Swan crossed himself. And tore his eyes away.

  The Turks were skilled sailors, and they had formed in two lines; the second line to defeat any intruders into the first line, in the accepted fashion of a style of combat that was itself more than two thousand years old.

  But Alessandro Bembo’s ship had gone in like the sudden strike of a viper, or the longest lunge of a great swordsman; so sudden and so terrible that the second-line ship was in no position to strike, still two hundred paces away.

  Swan didn’t even think. He ran forward, aware that Santa Maria Magdalena would not deliver another crushing strike, even if her timbers could stand it.

  ‘On me,’ he called as he raced down the central catwalk. A little room for fear, now; knowledge that if he went over the side, he’d go straight to the bottom, twenty fathoms or so, in his fine Milanese plate.

  A little room for fear, and a little to think; of Jesus; of Sophia; of Theodora, without guilt; about Alessandro Bembo and friendship.

  Swan arrived in the bow. One of Bembo’s marines was just loosing a heavy arbalest over the bow; the weapon unleashed its bolt with a crack like lightning. Under their feet, Swan could see the gunners ramming something home in the centre-line gun.

  A Bohemian-German voice called, ‘Ready!’

  ‘Fire as we ram!’ called Bembo from amidships.

  The Santa Maria Magdalena turned very slightly, her rowers now at full stretch again. The Turkish galley was larger; perhaps four frames longer, and full of men.

  Swan was old and cynical, at least to outward appearances. But he was not immune to glory in all its outward manifestations, and there he was, at the very front of his armoured men, deep in the enemy line.

  He turned his back on the Turkish archery. A cane shaft shattered on his helmet and he winced, but he opened his visor and looked back and down on forty men-at-arms, most of whom he’d led to Belgrade and to Mistra.

  ‘Today we are the Spartans,’ he shouted. ‘And today, by God, we will triumph.’

  So final was his tone, so absolute his belief, that forty men believed him. Forty visors were snapped closed, and men looked right and left with the confidence of the elite team, the belief of victory that is itself victory.

  The Turkish galley made no attempt to manoeuvre. Twenty yards out its guns fired in a ripple. The centre-line gun’s ball struck the mainmast of the Santa Maria Magdalena and cut it off clean; a rain of lethal oak splinters ripped through the rowers, killing a dozen and maiming more. One of the falconets missed entirely, its whole load of hail shot wasted on the water a few inches from the Venetian ship’s bow; the other falconet’s hail shot fell on the barrier of oak that protected the marines, tore gaping holes in it, and passed through. But stones and oak splinters, utterly lethal to unarmoured rowers, now had to contend with a bulwark of men in steel.

  Swan found himself lying on his back. His eyes stung, his chest felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule, and his shoulders both felt as if they’d been dislocated, but he took a breath and then another.

  He got to his feet just as the ships touched, their closing speed only six or seven knots. Swan fell again, found his right shoulder was damaged, and then the guns under his feet fired; however horrible the enemy hail shot at twenty paces, enough gunners had survived to return the favour with their muzzles touching the enemy ship’s bow.

  Swan was up with no memory of getting to his feet. No one was coming off the Turk; Swan didn’t have to think. He croaked something and used Sophia’s sword to cut the boarding plank loose, and then, first man, he ran down from the safety of the closed quarters, across the little foredeck in an eddy of sulphur smoke and hell,
and he jumped aboard the Turkish galley.

  The Turkish centre-line gun was dismounted, having taken the Venetian fifty-pound ball right on the crown. The tube had been driven back and a little off-kilter, smashing the bulwarks on both sides and making a terrible, grizzly ruin of all three gun crews.

  Both ships rocked in the sunlight, enveloped in smoke. Arrows whickered above Swan’s head, and a swivel gun fired close by him.

  ‘This way,’ said a disembodied voice, and Swan followed another steel-clad figure to the port side, where there was a gap full of blood and meat like a butcher’s shop. But one push and they were through, into a maelstrom of weapons; Swan was hit an uncountable number of times.

  His armour took it all. Leaning forward like a man going into a heavy wind, he reached out, blind because the impact of a spear on his helmet turned his head. But he got his sword on a spear haft and reached blindly for the fingers; caught another spear in his left hand and pulled, went forward into the weight of his opponent’s desperation, and then Sophia’s sword was gone and he was using his armoured hands and knees and his steel-pointed sabatons.

  Then he was breathing like a horse after a mile race, and he was standing with a dagger in his right hand and a scimitar in his left, broken off a hand-span from the hilt, and Juan di Silva was next to him on one side and William Kendal on the other, and he could see the length of the ship to the command deck. The rowers were open mouthed; Christian slaves, paralysed with hope and fear.

  A single archer amidships leaned out from the mainmast and aimed at him. He loosed.

  The arrow struck Swan’s right thigh like a jousting lance and Swan fell, but the arrow had not penetrated his steel and he rose, having lost the broken scimitar. The archer had pinked Di Silva on his second shot, and Kendal, alone, was running down the gangway. Swan got his hand on Sophia’s sword; the archer raised his bow to shoot Kendal; a slave let go of his oar, rose on his bench, and plunged an iron spike into the archer’s slippered foot; the arrow went wild, and Kendal’s sword beheaded the archer.