Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Five

by Christian Cameron

  It was the only part of the ship fight Swan ever remembered afterwards. The slave was an Irishman; Swan took him as his servant when Clemente became his archer.

  But that was hours away, and the Turkish galley was cleared, no quarter offered or asked, and left to drift with Di Silva and ten men-at-arms as ‘crew’ and the surviving freed Christian slaves to get her ashore.

  The Santa Maria Magdalena was already leagues away to windward, because the moment the Turkish commanders saw the failure of their trap, ships began flying off the beaches, intending not to fight but to run, stripped of guns and sometimes even of men, sails up from the first as they ran, or working their rowers to death to run upwind. A dozen or so were taken or sunk in the first moments of the rout, but the Turks were both brave and expert seamen, and they knew their business and the coast of Lesvos. They scattered like baitfish when a tuna attacks, and the papal galleys, underpaid and with mediocre crews, tended to let them go, already revelling in a victory that would bring Cardinal Trevisan and his officers glory for a decade.

  But for the Venetian professionals, victory was the moment in which to ensure future sea control, and the Genoese and Order galleys shared that professionalism, turning out to sea after their combats and raising their sails where they could.

  Santa Maria Magdalena gave chase to a long red galley, a capitana or a bastarda command ship. The loss of the mainmast was temporary; even as the rowers powered the ship smoothly through the perfect blue water and the men-at-arms bandaged each other, drank wine and tried not to let their thoughts slip into the dark abyss of extinction, the sailors were raising the great mast again. The operation was incredible to Swan, and so seaman-like, so risky, and so expert that it kept him from his post-combat depression of spirit as he watched, fascinated.

  ‘Can you steer?’ Bembo asked his friend.

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said, eager to help. The great tiller was put in his hands, and he stood under the red and yellow awning, decorated with the Lion of St Mark, enjoying the shade, the breeze, and the feeling of power, as the helmsman directed the removal of the mainmast stump. Six sweating men loosed the wedges and ropes that held it fast, and lifted it clear to splash over the side, while a carpenter and a dozen sailors and rowers brought the mainmast aboard with the care that might have been lavished on the Doge himself; it had dragged by its stays alongside, and now they brought it aboard as the red Turkish galley slipped farther and farther ahead. To starboard, those on Fra Tommaso’s galley went aboard a dirty blue Turkish galley and took her in a hail of gunfire and crossbow bolts.

  The rowers pulled on, smoothly, ignoring the fact that a third of their number were dead, wounded or raising the fished mainmast. On the centre-line of the deck, the carpenter took a sharp saw and cut a new, unsplintered base to the mast; two sailors heated tar on a brazier, careful of every coal, and proceeded to wind rope around the new joinery. To Swan it went faster than anything he could have imagined; the red galley was still hull up when the sweating sailors, including Bembo stripped to his shirt, hauled the recut mainmast up with a web of ropes to the top of the foremast, or boat-sail-mast, as Swan understood it in Italian. Galley combat, and galley maintenance, were skills conducted in a polyglot jargon of Veneziano, Aragonese and Arabic, and Swan even thought he heard a Provençal term float by, about the tar.

  The mast went home, and fast as thought, a dozen sailors seized lines already fastened to her tops and belayed them, fastened the mainstay, and crossed the great lateen spar, thankfully uninjured, with the sail still attached and only a little damp.

  To port, the Venetian admiral, Corner, caught his quarry. There was no hail of fire; the Turkish ship suddenly swerved, and then her yard came down and her marines threw down their arms. Venice was an old friend, as well as an old enemy, of Constantinople; Venetians would avoid a massacre if they could.

  ‘Get him if you can!’ Corner roared as Bembo shot by, his lateen coming home in one brilliant flash of blood-red canvas that caught the setting sun like a red mirror as it was sheeted home. The whole galley heeled in the light wind. Santa Maria Magdalena was new built and clean, her tarred bottom as smooth as a lady’s hands, and her tired oarsmen drew in their oars and crossed them under each other’s benches and then relaxed, rubbing their muscles, skilled men digging their thumbs into other men’s necks.

  Bembo came back along the companionway after watching the new mast for a little while. The helmsman was with him.

  ‘You steer like a sailor,’ the helmsman said. ‘I’ll take ’er back now, sir.’

  Swan was not so old that he couldn’t glow with a compliment. He beamed. ‘Fra Tommaso taught me to steer,’ he said.

  The helmsman settled to the tiller and grunted. ‘Aye,’ he said. He had nothing to add.

  Swan looked at Bembo. ‘That was amazing,’ he said. ‘But surely we’ll never catch him.’

  Bembo smiled. ‘I will not tempt Fortuna,’ he said. ‘I will forbear making grand prognostications. But you will note that none of these men calls on me to put about and run for the beach and the loot and the wine.’

  Swan gave a low whistle. ‘Omar Reis?’ he asked.

  Bembo shrugged. ‘Someone with a big turban, anyway,’ he said. ‘You fought brilliantly. It is very odd to watch you fight while I stand giving orders.’

  Swan smiled wide. ‘My friend, less than six months ago, you fought while I gave orders. It seems only fair.’ He flashed on the moment when he was in the bulwark, without a weapon, using his hands and his feet to clear space. His gorge rose, and then he was master of himself.

  The sun was setting.

  ‘Get some sleep,’ Bembo said.

  ‘How long?’ Swan asked.

  ‘I do not like to tempt fate,’ Bembo said.

  ‘Four hours,’ the helmsman said. He shrugged expressively. ‘Eh, Illustrio, it could be never or two days, but I have five ducats on four hours.’

  Swan nodded. He trusted experts; it saved time and effort. He’d seen them raise the mainmast; they knew what they were about.

  He lay down in his armour, and went almost instantly to sleep.

  ‘Time, capitano. Time,’ whispered Clemente. Swan came awake instantly, his chest and shoulders a stiff mass of pain and tension.

  Swan was trying to piss over the side without fouling his braes or his steel when Bembo spoke. ‘He ran for the coast of Asia at darkness,’ Bembo said. ‘We cut him off from the coast and he tried a tack for Lemnos. Now we’re back to Asia and he has to fight.’

  But the Turks never intended to fight. Jibing at the last moment, they went across the wind, their lateen groaning, and in the very last light of day they passed almost before the very tip of the Venetian galley’s bow, as the Venetian guns fired yet again into the Turk’s stern. A crackle of small arms, angry red stars in the falling light, sent balls and arrows and bolts back into the Venetian’s bow; half her gunners were dead or wounded.

  The Turk was visibly sinking. One of the heavy balls had hit at or below the waterline.

  She turned suddenly across the wind, to starboard; so suddenly that Bembo and his helmsman were fooled, and they went past the Turk at the edge of darkness, and again arrows and bolts flew. Twice the Venetians got a grapnel aboard the Turk, and twice brave Turks cut the grapples free, and the Venetian shot past and began a wide turn, sleepy oarsmen suddenly on their benches and the sail coming down in the last red-grey light as the Turk pulled heavily, his ship sinking, for the beach at the very tip of the land to the north and east. It was a race of turtles after a day of work; two exhausted ships, and the Turk carrying a heavy weight of water, but every sinking ship is full of desperate heroes, and the Turks kept their bow aimed at the beach and struck at full reach, almost ramming speed, sheering off their mast so that the sail fell across the ship.

  Bembo was more cautious, his quarry secure, and he coasted in, grapnels flying again, but the Turks were not staying to fight. A few janissaries sold their lives dearly at the edge of night, holding the mid
ships catwalk for a minute and then another. Swan went sword to sword with a man in a beard as long as his arm; the man had a kilij and a round shield, and he and Swan danced back and forth in the failing light, the Turk reaching for the joints in his harness with his hooked point and Swan carefully hoarding his strength. He was making an offering to the God of War, or perhaps to the Prince of Peace.

  He intended the man to live.

  So he danced back and forth, his thigh muscles screaming, as the janissary cut and cut, until he lured the tired man into cutting at his extended and armoured leg, hooking his point for the back of Swan’s knee with the desperation of fading hope and fading muscle.

  Swan voided the leg, passed it back while rotating his sword from the head guard he’d been in to a lower guard. It was one of Vadi’s duelling moves, not intended for an open deck, but Swan felt the power of victory; he swept his adversary’s blade up and to his right and powered forward, reaching far along the deck with the leg he had just voided, his empty hand taking the rim of his opponent’s shield and slamming it back into the man’s nose, Sophia’s slim-bladed sword passing behind his adversary’s head instead of running him through the throat, and Swan threw the man to the deck with a turn of his hips, put his left foot on the man’s sword hand, and pointed his sword at the next man.

  ‘Yield, and all of you will be spared,’ he said in Turkish.

  The next Turk, blond and blue-eyed and tall, fell to his knees and dropped his weapon. Behind him, an older man stood his ground with a partizan for a few beats of their hearts.

  ‘Fuck it,’ he said in passable Spanish, and dropped his partizan.

  They didn’t get Omar Reis. They got Idris, who was wounded and could not run up the beach, and they got a dozen other Turkish officers, men of standing in Edirne and Constantinople. The janissaries were not worth a ransom; Swan would not see them enslaved.

  ‘I made a vow,’ he said, deeply pleased with himself. The three survivors, the middle-aged officer, the old man and the blond boy, were released at dawn with bandaged wounds, to carry the news of Idris’s capture home. Bembo divided the spoils of the command ship on the beach.

  ‘Probably the most authentically classical thing you’ve ever seen,’ Bembo commented to Swan.

  Swan snorted. But he’d fulfilled his vow; the three Turks lives were his sacrifice to his own gods for safety and luck and Sophia.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said.

  ‘Me too,’ Columbino said. ‘Let me see Sienna again, dear God, and I will never complain about fucking Ghibellines again.’

  ‘Yes you will,’ said his squire.

  ‘Bast,’ the Italian said.

  The relief of Mithymna was a marvel throughout the Christian world; the capstone in a year of Christian victories, or so it seemed at the time. But the Turkish fleet really was shattered; all their best ships were taken or burned, and a dozen of their best captains dead or chained to Genoese oars or awaiting ransom in Venice.

  So, of course, the Christian fleet split up almost immediately in a fog of curses and acrimony, in the best Homeric tradition of disagreement over spoils. The papal troops who overran the Turkish encampment had no intention of dividing spoils with the Genoese and Venetian ships who had done all the fighting; Cardinal Trevisan pretended to be above such matters while his agents attempted to seize every bezant available.

  Swan went ashore on only the second day to pay his respects to Caterina di Orsini. She received him as if he, and not the papal legate, had relieved Mithymna; a dozen hand-gonners fired a volley from the ramparts, Francesco Della Rovere escorted him inside with a deep bow and kissed him on both cheeks, and Swan introduced the young Italian knight to Fra Tommaso.

  Orsini received Swan in a solar, wearing a brocade gown in the latest Roman fashion. There was no sign on her of a woman who had killed a dozen Turks sword to sword in the dark, except for a long line over her eyebrows where her helmet had left a permanent, or semi-permanent, impression on her forehead.

  ‘Now you will go home to Italy,’ she said.

  ‘I expect we will campaign here all summer,’ Swan said.

  Orsini shook her head. ‘Trevisan is breaking up the fleet so that no one can question his accounts,’ she said bitterly.

  Swan swore. ‘We could take Smyrna!’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘The Pope should have better taste in admirals,’ she said. ‘You Venetians will be the first to be sent home. I wrote a letter to my brother, Orsini Primo, and another to my friend Catherine. I miss her; I hope she will come out and visit me.’ Orsini looked out of the window. ‘Before the end comes.’

  ‘The end?’ Swan asked.

  ‘This is the last gasp, is it not?’ Orsini said. She shrugged. ‘Listen, Ser Suane. I am not so old, but I know the way of the world. The Pope does not have another fleet; it is common knowledge now that this one is rotting under his feet. Eh?’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps we have five more years in our little paradise. What is that worth?’ She made a moue. ‘At any rate, I have done you a favour. I have written to my brother, Orsini Primo. I have told him that you saved my life and honour; I have begged that you be received as a friend. I urge you to seize this moment to end your quarrel with my house.’

  Swan went down on one knee. ‘I vow it,’ he said simply. ‘I am in a mood to end quarrels.’

  She nodded; no smile, but a serious look. ‘It is not an opportunity that will come again. You have many enemies for so unimportant a man. But by God, messire, you saved all my bacon; I will see that my father has a try at saving yours. Beware. Trevisan hates you. Did you really call him a fool? And offer to…hmmm…sodomize him?’

  Swan just laughed. In the end, Orsini laughed too.

  Later, with her heavy, long letter in the bosom of his best Venetian doublet, he stood on the deck of the Santa Maria Magdalena, watching the very last of the sun over distant Antissa.

  ‘You made peace with the Orsini in Greece,’ Bembo said. He smiled. ‘You went to war with them on a whim, fighting in the streets of Rome.’ He took a long drink of wine. ‘Why don’t you go home to England?’ he asked.

  Swan looked at the sunset. ‘England is pulling itself apart,’ he said.

  ‘You would have to declare yourself,’ Bembo said. ‘You, Cardinal Beaufort’s bastard.’

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘I may be deeply cynical about the Holy Father; I may think crusading is a waste of men and time; I may be contemptuous of the Greeks and tired of the Order.’ He took a deep breath, smelling the scented air of Lesvos. ‘But the stasis in England … is one group of greedy thugs fighting another for the spoils. I love London.’ He shrugged. ‘But I can love Venice, too, and not be hanged, drawn and quartered for my thoughts.’

  Bembo smiled to himself, perhaps thinking of his own years of exile and his own oft-repeated bitterness. And later, the speed of his return home.

  ‘Umar?’ he called. ‘More wine.’

  The Venetian squadron broke up off Negroponte. The admiral bore away for Cyprus and Alexandria, safe from the prying eyes of his Genoese rivals, and leading two smaller galleys, swiftly refitted in the Negroponte yards from war to trade. Bembo’s older friend Zembale took his ship into Monemvasia to load with wines.

  Bembo ran for Venice and home; he had the admiral’s dispatches and he didn’t need a cargo to pay for his summer, although his oarsmen had filled every space between the benches with wine and saffron and unaccustomed Lesbian sugar and illegal cinnamon bark.

  ‘You don’t care?’ Swan asked.

  Bembo shrugged. ‘My father is paying,’ he said. ‘And my oarsmen will remember this for many years; that I allowed them to make a profit while I paid the freight. And anyway,’ he said, and indicated a small Byzantine chest of ivory he’d taken as his share of the spoils, ‘it’s full of pearls.’

  Swan had a small bag of sapphires, full of fire; his summer had not been wasted either. His men all had good loot and pay coming.

  ‘What’s for them, in Venice?’ he asked.
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  Bembo shrugged. ‘Columbino will never work for Venice,’ he said. ‘He loves you but he hates us.’ He shrugged. ‘If you keep your company, I can see to it that they are hired on, like the Colleneschi. If you want shot of them, let Columbino have them. He’s a good captain; he doesn’t need you any more.’

  ‘That stings,’ Swan said.

  Bembo smiled, already less a capitano and more a great nobleman. ‘Neither do you need him,’ he said. ‘What will you do now?’

  Swan shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  At Swan’s urging they put in at Glarenza. It was a long shot, even for Swan, but the Despot’s spouse was in residence, and when he sent his name into the castle, the chamberlain, Dukas, came and fetched him. He went ashore with Kendal at his back, both of them dressed well, and they were received like princes at the castle. Despot Thomas was in the south, collecting taxes and, as his chamberlain said, reducing the bandit population. Swan was reminded of how much he liked the man, and they talked over a cup of wine about Plethon and Mistras and the rebirth of the classical world, until a demure maid came and fetched Swan and left Kendal to make witticisms with a master.

  Swan entered Catherine Zaccaria’s presence for the first time through a silk curtain, and was instantly struck dumb, the way some men are struck by a bolt of lightning.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said aloud, in English.

  The lady so addressed blushed. She was seated in a deeply recessed window seat framed by the glorious stonework of the old Frankish masons and the little Green Men who decorated all the beam ends.

  ‘Ser Suane,’ she said in her deep voice. ‘Are you unwell?’

  Swan went down on one knee, more to keep his knees together than to pay her the respect she deserved.

  Catherine Zaccaria was the spitting image of Sophia Accaiaoulo. Older, more mature; perhaps thirty-five to Sophia’s twenty-three, as he could see now that the shock was over.

  He took a deep breath and grinned. ‘My lady, I have a letter for you from Caterina di Orsini of Lesvos,’ he said, and presented the letter. ‘And may I say, with nothing but reverence, that you are the very image of my own lady, Sophia Accaiaoulo of Florence?’