The Long Sword

by Christian Cameron

  The admiral called me aft.

  ‘I’ll place you ashore between those two Turkish galleys,’ he said. ‘And you hold the beach. I want all these ships. If I can’t drag ‘em off, I’ll burn them here.’

  Just then, it seemed to me impossible that ten Christian men-at-arms, all exhausted, could hold a beach that was alive like a disturbed anthill.

  And as we turned end for end, the great sweeps reversed on one side so that the port side oarsmen rowed facing forward while the starboard side rowed facing aft, my friends and I watched the beach.

  Nerio raised a blood-flecked eyebrow. ‘Even for me, this is insane,’ he said.

  Marc-Antonio, right arm strapped to his side, brought us wine. It was uncut malmsey, thick and dark and sweet and we drank it like water.

  The Turkish arrows began to fall among us.

  Alessandro began to lace our helmets. The third men on the benches began to come aft with javelins and axes and arming swords. Some were now armed with Turkish weapons.

  ‘Oh,’ Fiore said. ‘I though he was only sending the five of us.’

  Somehow, that seemed the greatest jest ever told, and we hooted.

  ‘Last man on the beach buys wine,’ I roared, and jumped into the surf.

  This is what a harness of plate is for. I only had to jump ten feet, and the water and the sand took the shock of my leap – but I fell forward, my foot catching on a rock, and my helmet filled with seawater. And then I was up, with no memory of rising. Arrows struck my helm and my breastplate, but thanks be to God not a one struck my unarmoured left arm or shoulder, and I was moving up the beach with seawater pouring out of my harness like milk from a leaky farm bucket.

  Perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps the freedom of having space to swing, to engage one opponent and sidestep another, but I remember that fight much better than the four before it. I remember catching the Emperor’s longsword at the mezza spada, the middle of the blade, to face a Turk with a heavy axe, and using the quillons of my sword to gouge his eyes before running the point over his hands and severing the tendons while my armoured knee slammed into his balls. And I stepped through him to plunge my point like a dagger into the unprotected back of Juan’s adversary as they wrestled, and as another Turk tried to put an arrow into my back, Fiore beheaded him.

  Behind us, the oarsmen roared ‘Saint Mark! Saint Mark!’

  More Venetians were landing all along the beach, and then, finally, it was over.

  Sometimes our finest moments are lost in the black and the fatigue. It may be the best fight we all had together.

  Well, the fighting was over.

  War at sea is the hell of squires. My harness had been drenched in seawater and covered in blood, scorched with fire – I have no idea where the fire happened, but I had burns and scorch marks and all the straps on my left cuisse had to be replaced. Oh, and then I rolled in wet sand.

  Marc-Antonio, with the best will in the world, was hurt far worse than I. His right arm was all bandages and they were red with blood, and he’d stayed on his feet and used a sword left-handed – a truly knightly act. But there on the beach, when the Turks broke and ran – to the tender mercies of the local Greek peasants, a tough bunch if ever I saw one – when we’d slumped to our knees, breathed like bellows, and gradually dropped most of our priceless harness in the blood-soaked strand, Marc-Antonio shook his head.

  ‘You’d better clean that and get some oil on it,’ he said. He grinned, so I didn’t kill him. And I knew he was right.

  This is what you are trained for, in the order. Not just so that you can triumph on the day of battle, but to have the will to conquer your own body and the listlessness that comes with survival. Oarsmen were sitting among the dead, passing bottles of wine and water. Crossbowmen were coming ashore to loot.

  My four brothers and I began to clean our armour. The Venetian marines knew tricks we didn’t – that one stain could clean another. Under their instruction we waded into the sea and cleaned our sabatons and our greaves of the ordure stuck to them, and while Fiore and I washed the pieces of harness, Miles and Juan dried them and oiled them with sheepskin and whale oil.

  Nerio drank wine while Alessandro worked, and then he shook himself like a dog and handed his wine to Marc-Antonio. ‘Sometimes I’m an arse,’ he admitted, and set to work.

  The two Venetians joined us, and one by one the looters stopped and fell in, too, washing their maille in seawater before scrubbing it with oiled lambswool and wrapping the dried shirt in a dry fleece full of old lanolin.

  Eventually I was clean from wading in and out of the sea, my shoes ruined, my cut foot a burning anvil of pain only then beginning to intrude on me.

  ‘By Saint Mark, if you and your friends hadn’t made such a slaughterhouse of the beach, we could get our cook fires lit,’ said the admiral at my back. But his smile belied his tone. ‘Sit! You’ve earned it, and so have I.’

  Slaves and oarsmen cleared most of the dead off the beach, though the rocks were full of corpses and leaving the fire for a piss could raise a ghost, I can tell you, but there was a wind rising, and the admiral refused to leave the site of his victory.

  ‘I won’t lose one hull,’ he said. ‘We’re in for a two-day blow. And not a man of us will be worth a shit in the morning.’

  There was one more incident. Alessandro and Marc-Antonio did their best to prepare a meal, but firewood became the last crisis of the day, and suddenly every man on the beach was so utterly tired that many let their fires die rather than walk up the headland for wood. Nor were the local peasants especially gracious, but I forgive them. They had daughters and coins and unburned farms and they probably feared us as much as they feared the Turks.

  At any rate, Juan and I managed to get to our feet and walk up the beach, and then, after some desultory searching, we found a whole tree that had floated ashore as driftwood, dry as a bone and ready to be three fires. I managed to walk back down the beach to get the dead Turk’s axe, and then back to limb the tree. The wood was strong and hard and well-seasoned, and it took all my strength, hobbling on a badly cut foot, let me add.

  You might think I’d have been too tired, and perhaps I was, but those of you who have stood the blows of the enemy know that something to do – something, anything to occupy your mind is preferable to nothing. Or perhaps to considering how close one was to nothing.

  As I cleared branches, Juan – Spanish aristocrat – piled them and used dead men’s belts to make bundles. The belts came from the corpses that the slaves and servants and junior oarsmen had tossed in behind the driftwood. They didn’t smell rank, yet, but they had the copper-shit smell of dead men, the battlefield smell that northerners call ‘Raven’s call’.

  At any rate, I was halfway up the trunk of the tree when one of the corpses opened his eyes. I lifted the axe automatically. His eyes met mine. He groaned.

  In a fight, I can kill without a thought. But by the gentle Jesus, on that windswept beach that smelled of death, I’d had enough of it. I knelt and looked him over, fetched him water – hobbling to the fire and back, damn it! And in the end, Juan and I carried him to our fire. The oarsmen had stripped him naked for his clothes, and left him to die.

  He should have died. He had a spear wound in his gut – a ticket to a nasty, week-long bout with delirium before death, but God and Saint Barbara had other plans for my Turk.

  The admiral’s prediction was as accurate as a sorcerer or an astrologer’s. The next day we had the first rain of autumn, and a heavy wind blew all day. Men huddled by the fires in silent misery; muscles ached, and wounds seemed worse.

  Some were, but they weren’t mine.

  The second day wasn’t much better, and our old admiral lay in his blankets all day under a makeshift tent.

  But the third day dawned bright and clear, and trumpets called us to our duty.

  ‘Mutton and cheese i
n Piraeus,’ the admiral promised. ‘And wine enough for every man to forget.’

  ‘And then on to Rhodes,’ Nerio said.

  The admiral glared. ‘I’ve just won the greatest naval victory of these last twenty years,’ he said. ‘More than any Venetian expected of this “crusade”.’

  Sometimes it is best to be silent.

  We were.

  Piraeus was delighted to receive us. The Turks were a constant threat in Attica and Thrace, and I found the attitude of the Greek soldiers and peasants very different east of Corinth from that west of Corinth. I had a good chance to learn about Greeks in Athens and Piraeus.

  Thanks to Giannis and Giorgos, I had translators and Greek friends, and my friends and I were the heroes of the hour: all the Greeks in the two Peloponnesian vessels had seen us break the Turks on the beach. They were eager to buy us wine, even though we were Latins and schismatics; that is, heretics to their church.

  ‘You were magnificent!’ said an older man with a beautiful white beard. He wore scale armour plated in gold, with enamelled scales and fine Italian elbows and leg armour. We were parading our prisoners and captured ships for the people of Athens, Latin and Greek alike. The older man turned his dark eyes on me and grinned. ‘For a brazen-haired heretic, I mean.’

  His Italian was better than mine and I wasn’t sure what to say, so I bowed.

  ‘You are from Thule? That is what I hear, yes? Far away over the sea, where the Emperor’s guard is from – Hyperborea. Yes?’ He looked at me as if I was a rare heraldic animal. ‘The Axe-bearing guard, yes? You know?’

  I had Giorgos Angelus at my back. I turned and looked at him.

  ‘One of the Kantakouzenoi,’ he said.

  The old man smiled thinly. He spat something in Greek, and Angelus stiffened.

  Giannis Lascarus shook his head on my left-we were lining the pier for the Duke of Athens and his friends. ‘Kantakouzenos calls Giorgos a traitor and a heretic. Giorgos chooses to say nothing, but the Kantakouzenoi betrayed the empire.’

  The old man offered me his hand. ‘Iannis,’ he said. ‘I am Navarch aboard this ship.’ He pointed at one of the long Greek ships.

  I bowed. ‘Sir William Gold,’ I said.

  The ceremony passed without further incident, and evening found us filling a street of waterfront tavernas that allowed us to have several hundred men all sitting at what seemed like on long table.

  John Kantakouzenos sat opposite me. ‘Fighting the Turks is a waste of time,’ he announced. ‘They are good soldiers, and the empire needs soldiers.’

  Angelus grunted. ‘They will take the empire and break it up among themselves,’ he said.

  Kantakouzenos shook his head. ‘No, it is we who will break them up. Look at the Patzinaks and the Cumans and all the other nomadic peoples – they come to us and we make them Romans! We used the Huns to break the Goths, and the Patzinaks to break the Bulgars. Perhaps with the Turks we will rid ourselves of the Latins. Yes?’ He laughed.

  ‘You seemed willing enough to fight yesterday,’ I said.

  The old man shrugged and drank. ‘My brother says fight. I fought. The despot has an agreement with your knights, the Duke of Athens, the Emperor, and Venice.’ He smiled with half his mouth. ‘It will only last as long as it is convenient for you Latins, and then you will stab us or sell us. As always.’

  Father Pierre had maintained that the Greeks would be strong allies of the crusade once they saw that we were serious and friendly. An evening drinking wine with Syr Iannis made my head spin. He had a different story for everything I knew, not least, of course, that we were the heretics and he was the practitioner of the true religion. He reminded us of the perfidy of the Venetians in attacking the empire a hundred and fifty years before, and he referred to the Latin lords of the Morea as pirates and brigands. It was an eye-opening conversation.

  And when Giorgos Angelus accused him of treason again, he just smiled. ‘My brother was the best hope the empire had,’ he said. ‘We need to be done with gentle men who know the ceremonial and love to debate in church. We need soldiers and statesmen and even merchants.’ He shrugged. ‘The empire has no tradition of primogeniture like you Latins and your barbaric ways. Here, if a man takes the empire, it is his. It is nothing but the will of God.’

  ‘Your brother is a friend of the Turks!’ Angelus spat.

  ‘Better than Turks than the Franks,’ Kantakouzenos said. ‘The Turks are honest and decent. The Venetians would sell their mothers as whores for a few ducats.’

  Nerio might have been expected to take part, given his father’s record in Greece, but he had found a girl, a beautiful girl. Juan was befriended by a Greek priest and they had a conversation about theology and Juan followed him to his little Athenian church to see his icons. Fiore spent two hours debating the Roman origins of our martial tradition with Giannis and one of Kantakouzenos’s officers. Miles basked in the admiration of twenty knights and sat with the two Hospitallers, drinking in their praise.

  I listened to Syr Iannis Kantakouzenos, and I worried.

  Carlo Zeno never explained what he had been doing at the Tower of Winds. But he never mocked me again – well, any more than Nerio or Juan. Despite that, for one evening, Greeks and Venetians and Hospitallers were all on the same side.

  And later we danced. Nerio had become the centre of attention: his name had got out among the men-at-arms, and his father was a famous figure among the Latins of Greece. People came out of their houses to see him, and the atmosphere became less constrained.

  I had no idea how famous our little victory was. It was my first sea fight, and if I’ve told it well, that owes as much to hearing the old admiral tell me what had happened as anything I remember. I know that the wind changed at some point and that seemed of great moment to the sailors; of course I understand better now. And I know that the Greeks and Latins shared this – they were starved for victory. The Turks, the Serbs and the Bulgarians had beaten them over and over for twenty years, not by skill in arms but by sheer numbers. And why? For the most part, as far as I could see and by the relation of Giannis, Giorgos, Nerio and Lord Contarini, the lords of Achaea and the Morea were beaten because they were divided among themselves. I have heard it said many times that the knights of Romania, as we called it, were the best in the world, and par dieu, gentlemen, those I met were hardy, cruel men of preux and cunning, , but they had not the gift of loyalty, and so they were easily bested by lesser men.

  Or so I see it.

  Regardless, that Sabbath eve in Piraeus and Athens, we had won a victory that gave them heart-heretics and schismatics together, so to speak.

  The next day we gathered cargoes on the waterfront. I had a hard head; I had drunk too late, I think, and I was in a foul mood. I was worried for Marc-Antonio, whose wound was festering, and inclined to find my Turk, who I expected to die despite the treatment of the brothers of the Hospital. In short, my view of the world was as black as it can be for a man four days out of battle. My own wounds hurt, my head hurt, and life seemed … empty.

  Usually I filled this feeling with a woman. There, ‘tis said. Taken like a drug. But chastity, and chivalric love – a terrible pair to yoke together – left me alone with my thoughts instead of abed with a soft friend. Alone, a man in dark mood can see many things … differently … and I walked the docks, tormenting myself with Emile’s words, her lack of love for me, her inclination (as I saw it in my darkness) for the king.

  A man can use any tool to justify himself to sin and I was busy using my blackness to work myself to hate Emile so that I might find myself a pretty Greek. But Miles saved me from this, with a sort of deadly cheerfulness that made me vent my spleen on him. He gave me the sele of the day and enquired after my wound.

  ‘It pains me,’ I said. ‘I can scarcely walk.’

  He dared to smile. ‘And yet you go up and down these piers as if searching for our
Saviour,’ he said with gentle derision.

  ‘I have much on which to think!’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘I am younger than you,’ he said, ‘but it seems to me a man can think while sitting down, if his foot is cut.’

  ‘Are you wandering about explaining to men the errors of their ways, or do you have some errand?’ I asked. I may have been even more direct. Perhaps I said, ‘What business is it of yours?’

  Miles smiled. ‘In truth, the senior knight of our order was asking for you this morning, and Milord Contarini is sitting under his awning just there, awaiting your good pleasure.’

  I was being mocked; knights await the good pleasure of lords, and not the other way about.

  I realised that I had been pacing up and down in full view of the command structure of the fleet and no man likes to look a fool.

  ‘And how long have you known that I was wanted?’ I asked. In my mood, I saw him laughing at my pain and watching me pace the docks.

  Miles bowed, refusing to be drawn to temper. ‘About as long as it took me to walk from the poop to this spot,’ he said.

  Something in his restraint finally cracked my bad composure. ‘Miles, my apologies,’ I began.

  He shook his head. ‘None needed.’ Really, he was too good to be believed. He didn’t seem to need a wench or a confessor and he had fought quite brilliantly.

  I sighed, and hobbled to the gangway of the great galley. What inconsistency of the mind allowed me to walk back and forth, cursing Emile’s imagined faithlessness, without so much as a twinge from my foot-but the moment I returned to my duty, it hurt with every step?

  Bah! I see both of you gentlemen are familiar with this sort of thing.

  At any rate, as I limped, I watched the deck crew using the foremast’s yard as a crane to lift a bale of hides inboard. Something turned over in my head. Hides wouldn’t go outbound to Rhodes – Rhodes might have a leatherworker or two, but hides were a homebound cargo for Venice. I had been listening to Nerio and to Lord Contarini when they spoke about merchanting.