Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Five

by Christian Cameron

  Swan tried to be excited. But the legalities were done. He needed to get a standard painted, but Bessarion’s would do – for ever, if necessary. But soldiers liked flags.

  He and Ser Zane and Ser Columbino followed Ladislav to his wagon. Behind it, like a calf following a cow, was a small wheeled gun with a very long barrel. It gleamed of bronze by candlelight.

  Several of the girls came out with candle lanterns, prompting Swan to wonder how many white beeswax candles had been looted from local churches to light the way to lechery.

  But the gun was magnificent in its long, lethal way. The muzzle had the head of some kind of monster cast into it, and the breech was equally ornate. It rode, as all the newer guns did, on its own wheeled carriage, and it had a painted leather bucket beneath it.

  Swan admired it. ‘Magnificent,’ he said.

  ‘It shoots very small balls, which we can cast ourselves,’ Ladislav said enthusiastically.

  Šárka took Swan’s hand. ‘Make him leave it,’ she said. ‘Don’t be like him. It is a toy. A toy which will exhaust the horses pulling it.’

  Swan thought she might be speaking some sense. He also thought it remarkable, in the detached, ironic part of his mind that never quite shut down, how her touch was like the onset of a storm, and swept through him from head to groin.

  ‘No, I love it,’ he said.

  ‘You would,’ she said. And let go his hand, and vanished into the darkness.

  Two days’ hard marching and they entered Transylvania. The hills that edged the plain were not terrible, but it did take forty men on ropes to haul each wagon – and the gun – up the last slope of the narrow pass in the sweltering heat. The height of the passes brought a cool breeze and a forest of old firs that offered coolness, but the depth of the trees only belied the muggy air and the swarms of mosquitoes.

  They had increased from twelve wagons to almost twenty when they left the German tent city – peasants were selling good wagons cheap, and Swan knew how valuable they would be. But in the hills at the edge of the plain, the wagons were a liability. Men cursed, and one of Di Vecchio’s armed pages, a mounted crossbowman, dismounted and, sweating in his grubby, loam-flecked shirt, spoke out.

  ‘You will kill us all before we even reach the fucking Turks!’ he spat. And then flinched as Swan’s eye picked him out effortlessly.

  Swan swung off his horse as all work muddled to a stop. Men wiped their faces with their drenched sleeves, poured the rest of their water bottles down their parched throats, and waited.

  Swan went over to the wagon. Of course, it was the company forge – the heaviest. And the bugs were worse, on the ground.

  Swan stripped out of his second-worst gown – the wool so threadbare that it almost counted as light. He did not have the clothing for Hungary. He’d expected the East to be colder.

  He walked over to the man with a deliberate swagger – inviting violence, if the man wanted to try.

  Di Vecchio’s page was a thin man of thirty, with bad scarring on his face from some childhood disease, and a short pug nose.

  ‘Well?’ Swan asked in the hush.

  The man had the good grace to look at the ground. ‘I …’ he began.

  ‘Go and sit and cool off,’ Swan ordered. ‘I’ll have a go.’

  They got the forge wagon over the last crest with ropes belayed on trees. It was, in a strange way, fun, and a relief from being the commander. Swan worked until he’d sweated through his shirt and his hose, and then he drank water and poured a little over his head.

  ‘I want a swim,’ he said. They all laughed.

  They were empty of fodder by the time they rolled down the other side of the hills and into Temesvár.

  But they made it. As they came over the last low ridge, they saw another city of tents stretched out – this one larger than the last. Swan estimated between four and five thousand men, and the camp was professionally laid out – it looked as if an Italian army was camped there, with silk tents and a neat set of horse lines. He saw a road running off to the north, and on it a convoy of wagons.

  A herald met them as they came to the base of the last ridge. The English and the Bohemians – together, the largest men – were all off their horses, and had a rope tied round an old holm oak which they were using to belay the heavier wagons – the forge and the gun – down the last hill. The prior three days had reduced this operation to a science, and there was little conversation and no need for oversight or for the knight of St Mark to dismount and participate.

  Swan instead got to sit on his horse and consider his next steps.

  He sent the herald back with his name and style and a request for a meeting. By the time his column was nearing camp, the great man and his whole entourage emerged from the camp – almost a hundred horsemen. They rode magnificently, almost all of them mounted on horses that made Swan’s fine warhorse look like a nag. Most of them might have passed for Italian condottieri, except for their pointed beards and long hair – some with pearls woven in – their armour was modern and of high quality. But a few, and those riding closest to Hunyadi himself, looked more Turkish even than the stradiotes, in high Mongol caps edged in pearls and gold and long silk kaftans, wearing sabres or scimitars instead of the German or Italian cross-hilted swords.

  Hunyadi was by his banner-bearer, and was not the tallest of the men-at-arms, but Swan knew from his bearing and position – and his carrying a golden baton of office – that this was the voivode of Hungary, the former regent, and the famous soldier. Swan dismounted and bowed – an honour usually reserved for the Pope and the Emperor, but Hunyadi accepted it as if it was his due.

  The great man bowed from the saddle and looked at Swan’s column the way a Romani horse dealer looked at a young horse. Ser Columbino and Di Vecchio both detached themselves and made their own bows – and were ignored. Ser Zane had the company banner, and he rode on, to where a pair of outlandishly dressed – if, that is, you were Italian – local boyars indicated that the column should follow them into camp.

  The sun pounded down. Swan remained kneeling, and his ire began to rise with the burning of his scalp, as he’d removed his round cap to make his best bow and the sun was like a malevolent thing.

  When Hunyadi spoke, however, Swan was immediately cured of temper.

  ‘Actual soldiers,’ Hunyadi said. ‘Are these your own, my lord?’

  Swan shook his head. ‘I am only the servant of Cardinal Bessarion,’ he said.

  ‘Ah! The great Bessarion,’ Hunyadi said, and suddenly doffed his cap, and all the Hungarian and Transylvanian nobles and boyars did the same. ‘He is a great man. I honour him.’

  ‘I have letters and messages from him, and from Cardinal Carvajal,’ Swan said.

  Hunyadi took his hand. ‘I wish you brought more,’ he said. ‘But by God’s grace – some soldiers from the west. This is indeed a miracle.’ He frowned. ‘A hundred lances, think you?’ he asked in Latin.

  Swan bowed again. ‘Fifty lances of my own, and some German crusaders, my lord, including this man, Bertold von Nymandus, who has had the honor of serving Your Excellency before.’

  Hunyadi did not precisely smile, but his eyes lit up. ‘Varna?’ he asked.

  Von Nymandus also dismounted and swept his feathered cap to the ground. ‘Excellency, I was on the Long Campaign with you, and again with the King at Varna.’

  Hunyadi reached out his hand. He was clearly seen to have tears in his eyes.

  ‘By the living God,’ he said. ‘I thought we were forgotten.’

  A very young man – twelve or thirteen – in a very rich brocade doublet unsuited to the heat, gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘You said there would be no soldiers from the west, Father.’

  ‘Sometimes it is good to be wrong, my son,’ Hunyadi said.

  Swan remounted, and they rode together towards the great scarlet pavilion set up in the middle of camp. As they rode, Swan was introduced in a bewildering assault of unfamiliar vowels and consonants. He was able to pick o
ut a few. The handsome boy was Hunyadi’s son Mattias, and the other striking man, with the large eyes that Italian artists always gave to the Lord Jesus Christ, was none other than Vlad Tepes, the newly appointed voivode of Transylvania. The tallest knight was László Kanizsai, and the older man – as old as Hunyadi, or older, and richly dressed – was János Korógyi, the Bán of Macsó. Hunyadi’s eldest son was László Hunyadi – a dark-haired man with a hard, thin mouth but a gracious smile. He was especially courteous, and introduced one of his knights as ‘Ser Hargitai, a Transylvanian, who has served in Italy and speaks Italian’.

  But the arrival of messengers from the south cut Swan off from Hunyadi, and he found himself with the Wallachian prince, Dracula.

  Tepes had long hair and a long, ascetic face. He was dressed in as near to pure Turkish dress as could be managed, and only the gold cross at his throat suggested he was not an Ottoman officer or a commander of sipahis. When he was introduced – in Hungarian – he bowed, and Swan returned his bow.

  ‘I have letters for you from Bessarion and from Cardinal Carvajal as well,’ Swan said.

  Tepes nodded. ‘Perhaps when the great ones are finished with you, you will do me the enormous favour of visiting my all-too-humble tent.’

  But instead of being forced apart, an accident of riding, when the main party began to dismount and Hunyadi turned aside to deal with some business of his own, left them close. On instinct, Swan tried the Wallachian princeling in Turkish.

  Tepes brightened. ‘Aha! You speak Turkish!’ He bowed again. ‘I expected a dour German. Or perhaps a Burgundian. Are the English close to Burgundy?’

  ‘As close as Serbia and Wallachia,’ Swan said, ‘if you might imagine a little of the Aegean between them.’

  Tepes laughed. Swan thought the man might laugh easily.

  ‘Your Turkish is terrible. In the seraglio, you’d be beaten for that sentence,’ he said.

  ‘The seraglio? In Constantinople?’ Swan asked.

  Tepes laughed again. ‘It is as much my home as Wallachia – Edirne and Constantinople both. My father sent me and my brother to be hostages. I was educated there.’

  Swan nodded, his eyes on Hunyadi. He’d grown to manhood waiting on great men, and he knew better than to get deeply involved in a conversation, however interesting.

  ‘I will come and visit you for wine, bring your letters – which I promise you will be dull – and you can tell me about Edirne. We may have a friend in common.’

  Tepes bowed deeply in the saddle – looking exceptionally Turkish as he did so.

  Swan thought he might be given time to bathe and change, but in fact he was formally presented to Hunyadi as an ambassador and captain by Hunyadi’s major-domo while wearing his ancient, stained wool gown and his breast- and backplates and leg harness. He was, without doubt, the least ostentatious man present, including most of the servants, and felt his lack of display keenly. Such things mattered, as much with fighting men as with courtiers. One magnificent man, with a bald head and moustaches as long as a lady’s hanging sleeves, had a cloak of some exotic cat fur – leopard, or lion.

  But they were all sweltering, and Swan consoled himself that he had nothing on under his mail but his oldest linen shirt, which would be rags by nightfall, and every breeze that whispered down out of the high woods cooled him. He made his three bows and formally presented Hunyadi with the three packets he had – each heavy with parchment.

  He kept the ring of the Conqueror on his finger, however, the collet turned inward. In an hour, he’d been given a feel for Hunyadi and his military court – for court it was. Swan was a veteran of courts, and despite the outlandish clothes and the virile air, Swan thought he knew this one – a keen competition for the master’s eye. The ring could wait.

  Besides, Swan had come to love it – and to believe in it. He might mock himself in a moment of contemplation, but wearing the ring that had belonged to mighty Alexander – it carried power.

  However, Swan had another gift for Hunyadi. After he had made his bows, he asked for a private interview, which was immediately granted – with such alacrity that Swan knew the Hungarian prince wanted it as much as he did himself.

  The scarlet awning was cleared of all but Hunyadi’s two sons, a dozen well-armoured men of the lord’s bandarium, and his chamberlain.

  ‘So, Englishman,’ Hunyadi said. He sat on a camp stool, leaned back and motioned to his chamberlain to pour wine. ‘Did you bring money?’ He leaned forward like an animal pouncing. ‘Or just promises?’

  Swan had not been invited to sit. He bowed. ‘May I tell my lord a brief story?’ he asked.

  Hunyadi sighed. ‘So no money. Go ahead – be my guest. And please, all of you – no more stupid ceremony. You all make my knees hurt. Sit. Kurt – stools!’

  Swan bowed again. ‘My lord, when I came to Vienna, it was to find that Cardinal Carvajal had collected tithes for the crusade, but that the Emperor – and the King of Hungary—’

  Hunyadi laughed aloud. ‘Had seized them!’ He sat back. The other soldiers – knights, most likely – all spoke to each other in Hungarian, which Swan understood well enough to know that they were deeply angry.

  ‘The King of Hungary and the Emperor felt that the money was theirs,’ Swan said lightly.

  ‘Of course.’ Hunyadi sighed. ‘It is always thus, with us.’

  Swan bowed a third time. ‘But,’ he said without a smile, ‘we were able to convince them to send the money on to you, the captain in the field.’ He paused. ‘The process of convincing them cost blood. My best man, and a close friend.’ Swan shrugged inwardly, as this was not the way he’d planned to go. ‘I have twenty thousand ducats, more or less, for you. And a letter of credit on the Medici bank, if you can cash it, for as much again.’

  ‘You have twenty thousand gold ducats?’ Hunyadi asked. ‘Now? With you? In this camp?’

  ‘For my lord,’ Swan said in his beautiful Latin. ‘From Bessarion and Carvajal and His Holiness the Pope.’

  The Hungarian knights looked suddenly like martial saints. A man to whom Swan had not been introduced, in superb Milanese plate and with pearls in his hair, spontaneously threw his steel-clad arms around Swan.

  ‘By the risen Christ and all the saints,’ Hunyadi said. ‘This changes – everything.’

  The next twenty minutes were as trying as any time Swan could remember when he was not actually starving, wounded or imprisoned. He was ignored, when he had expected to be treated as a hero.

  Virtually every man left the awning, and messengers went in every direction. Hunyadi withdrew behind a wall of his own guards, and Swan sat, virtually alone, in the odd light thrown by the afternoon sun on the scarlet silk, and through it.

  Clemente came, and Swan kept him.

  ‘The new boys are doing all the work,’ Clemente said with satisfaction. ‘Hey, lord, I brought you an apple.’

  Swan hadn’t had an apple in months. The apple was sound, a little dusty.

  ‘A Romany woman is selling them in camp. I paid silver.’ The boy shrugged. ‘I know you like apples.’

  Swan had, in fact, been using Bessarion’s money to pay for almost everything – and realised that as soon as the gold was turned over to Hunyadi, his free spending would have to stop.

  He bit into the apple, and it was delicious – perhaps more delicious for long abstinence and thirst and heat.

  Hunyadi suddenly reappeared with his chamberlain. He came across the carpet on the awning’s floor faster than Swan could rise, and took his hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘When you return to Venice and Rome, thank them. Armies run on gold. They eat it. I have little credit left with the moneylenders. It is not just the gold. It is that I can, with a few lies, use the gold to raise more.’ He sneered.

  Prince Vlad appeared with a pair of soldiers as outlandishly dressed as he. He bowed.

  Hunyadi kissed him on both cheeks. They spoke rapidly, in Hungarian and again in another tongue – so rapidly that Swan co
uld not even follow the tone, except that both men were excited – Prince Vlad the more so.

  The other knights began to filter back.

  Hunyadi turned. ‘Can you turn over the money to my chamberlain?’ he asked.

  ‘Immediately,’ Swan said, eager to be out of his armour.

  ‘No, stay. Send your man.’ Hunyadi waved him to sit. Swan felt dirty, and he hated being disadvantaged by language. The foreignness was all around him. But Prince Vlad beamed at him, and Swan tried to make the best of it.

  ‘Clemente – take my ring to Ser Columbino. Fetch … the wagon.’ He smiled. Clemente – and Peter – were among only a dozen men who knew where the gold was, exactly. Even moving a certain wagon over the highest pass had not revealed it.

  Clemente laughed. ‘I’ll have it here in no time,’ he whispered. ‘Do I bring the blacksmith?’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ Swan admitted.

  ‘Blacksmith?’ Hunyadi asked. He’d been to Italy – he spoke some Italian.

  ‘My lord, the gold is built into the sides of a wagon. What better wagon than my farrier’s wagon? It is already the heaviest. I needed to move it without comment.’ Swan shrugged.

  ‘You are a man with a headpiece,’ Hunyadi said. ‘I see why you are the Pope’s officer. Now,’ he said, as two servants carried in a folding trestle table. ‘Now to work.’

  Prince Vlad settled next to Swan. ‘When they speak too fast, I will translate,’ he said in excellent Latin.

  ‘You learned Latin at the Ottoman court?’ Swan asked.

  ‘And some Italian,’ the Wallachian prince said.

  Hunyadi drew directly on the table in charcoal. He indicated where they were, and drew the line of the Danube far to the west, and the location of Belgrade to the south. As he outlined positions – mostly of food – Prince Vlad spoke quietly.

  ‘We had planned a different war – a counter-raid into Albania, perhaps, or even Greece. With so few men, the voivode cannot hope to face the Sultan, and he will not even try. But money makes this different. He goes back to our first plan.’ The young Wallachian grinned. ‘I say our, because now it is I who will lead the raid. Except it will be more than a raid, and perhaps …’ He smiled, and for a moment he was not an ascetic Jesus, but more like a fallen angel, or Satan himself. ‘But listen.’