Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Five

by Christian Cameron

  Hunyadi was outlining a move forward. ‘If we can get to Kovin before the Sultan,’ he said, ‘we can buy – or build – river galleys.’

  Swan looked around for an explanation.

  Prince Vlad shook his head. But Hunyadi nodded at Swan. ‘I am not mad, my Englishman. The Sultan is bringing a hundred thousand men, or so it is said. I confess to having doubts. Nonetheless, too many for us to face all at once. But in pieces – perhaps we can chew them. So – my new voivode of Wallachia will try to cut the Sultan’s supplies to the east and south. And I will try to cut the Danube. With boats and guns – and money – perhaps we can cut the river like a swordsman slashing a man’s throat, and starve him. At the very least, we should be able to prevent his landing his guns.’

  Quietly, Swan turned to the new voivode. ‘All this because I brought money?’ he asked.

  Tepes shook his dark head. ‘No. We were moving to Kovin already – in two days. But it was mostly bluster – and my lord’s attempt to collect any feudal troops and put them into Belgrade.’ He met the great man’s eye. Silence had fallen.

  But Hunyadi was not offended. ‘Now we will try a little more,’ he said. ‘Ever fought from a boat?’

  Swan smiled. And just for a moment, though he didn’t know it, he looked like the Wallachian prince’s twin.

  ‘Once or twice,’ he said.

  That night, Swan paid his own troops one more time. It nearly emptied his coffers, but it had the curious effect of raising his importance in the eyes of the camp’s moneylenders. Few captains paid the men on the eve of battle. It was easier not to pay the dead.

  Perhaps it was because it was not Swan’s money. But he held the muster, counted the men and paid their officers and watched each of them go off, usually to the back gate of a wagon, to pay their people.

  Šárka brought him a slice of apple pie, which he relished. ‘Your ladies will be busy tonight,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘They usually are,’ she admitted. ‘I am not accepting customers from outside the company.’ She shrugged. ‘It seems … wrong.’

  He nodded. The subject made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Are there no other … girls?’ he asked. He writhed. He had lain with prostitutes and casual ‘friends’ like washerwomen his whole life, but he didn’t talk about it.

  She frowned. ‘A few drabs. They look bad.’ She shrugged. ‘The Roma woman selling apples said she got offers, and she’s sixty.’

  ‘But?’ he asked.

  She frowned.

  ‘Girls like to belong,’ she said. ‘The company is better than nothing.’

  Swan managed to laugh. ‘Well, by God, they belong,’ he said. ‘Although if the Hospitallers, my cardinal and the Pope find out that I have a troop of whores in my company, there will, almost literally, be Hell to pay.’ He handed her the empty plate. ‘That was delicious, and I am aware that you are waiting on me hand and foot. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I wish a favour,’ she said, a little too ferociously. She was not in the habit of asking favours, he could tell.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked. He wanted to visit the young Wallachian and talk about Constantinople.

  ‘Would you … put us on the rolls?’ she asked. ‘Of the company?’

  He was going to laugh, but her look – ferocious and also vulnerable – stopped him. She wanted him to be serious.

  ‘I will consider it,’ he said, in his best ‘I am il capitano’ voice.

  She came up close to him and put a hand on his chest. ‘I would be … very grateful,’ she said. ‘And so would the others.’

  Swan remembered being described, on Lesvos, as the ‘greatest whoremaster in Christendom’ by an irate knight of the Order.

  And he wanted her gratitude that instant.

  Something in his look must have given him away. She made a sound – probably a laugh. ‘Ah, you are not made of iron.’

  ‘Far from it, ma donna. So – please let me pass.’ He was really only aware of how he was – unwashed, sweat soaked, and dusty.

  She slid her hand inside the laces of his half-undone doublet – on to his bare chest – and pulled him the way a wrestler handles his opponent. In a moment he was kissing her. It was easy – simple, really – and he wondered why he’d waited so long or made such a fuss.

  She was small and light. And the tent was not closed. He didn’t care, and he lifted her with both hands when she raised her skirts. She seemed to know her way around him, and while the guards changed outside his pavilion and he heard Clemente telling someone that il capitano was having a nap, he was inside her, looking into her dark, dark eyes. The only part of her that was naked was her neck, and her buttocks in his hands, and he wanted more. He leaned her back against the central pole of his tent. It moved as they moved, and she smiled. He bit her neck and she laughed and bit his ear quite savagely.

  ‘Everyone will know what you are doing,’ she said.

  He carried her to the bed and laid her on it. It was a small camp bed that folded like a drying rack, and it didn’t really have room for both of them – and it tried to close on her.

  He lifted her one more time and she threw her arms around him, and he knelt, a little more forcefully than he’d intended, and she laughed at him, or with him, and he did not care.

  And then she was arranging her skirts. She turned away by his washbasin for a moment, but when he tried to catch her hand, she slipped away.

  He wasn’t a swordsman for nothing. He pivoted on his outside foot and caught her from behind, his hands on her breasts.

  A while later, pillowed against him on his camp bed, still fully dressed and drenched in sweat, she said, ‘I don’t usually kiss.’

  He let that pass.

  ‘Don’t make me pregnant. A war is not the time to make a baby.’ She rolled off his bed. He reached for her.

  ‘Sweet mother of God, not again?’ she asked.

  Swan thought, through a haze of lust, how much he’d like to see her naked, and how relaxed he felt. ‘It has been a very long time,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps I might come back when I am … cleaner,’ she said. ‘I feel like I’m covered in mud. But you … I thought you were such a prude.’ She laughed, in what he took to be triumph.

  Darkness was still far away – it would be a long evening, one of the longest days of the year. Swan sent Clemente for hot water and had an utterly unsatisfactory wash, and then changed into the lightest clothes he could manage – an ancient linen arming doublet, some hose that were scarcely decent, old braes worn smooth and comfortable.

  The heat was like a live thing.

  Swan put on his sword belt and a pair of low boots that were at least as old as the doublet, and picked up a round hat. He looked, he suspected, about as fancy as most of his pages. But he hadn’t brought court clothes, and the Hungarians seemed to fight in theirs.

  Swan wandered across the camp, enjoying the sights, which were foreign and marvellous. There was a bear baiter with a hot, angry bear – Swan’s sympathies were firmly with the bear. A pair of harlots old enough to be his mother gave him a pang of shame, but only a pang – Šárka, he felt, was in a class of her own, whatever that might be.

  The tents were often silk, and magnificent, but many of the foot soldiers slept in the open. Their equipment looked good, and many of the Hungarian men were hand gunners. Their wagons were marvellous – heavier than Swan’s, with folding sides that made them truly like the walls of a fortress, and chains – heavy spiked chains – so that they could be linked together.

  Swan found Prince Vlad with a few questions in his halting Hungarian, and then had to cool his heels as Vlad’s servants didn’t believe that he might be a guest – his clothes were too plain, he knew. But one of them evaluated his donat’s ring and his sword and took the plunge, and Swan was brought into the pavilion.

  All of the Wallachians present were young – as young as Swan or younger. They wore a strange mix of Ottoman and Italian styles – long gowns with boots, kaftans with hoo
ds. But they rose and welcomed him after Prince Vlad gave a short speech in a language Swan didn’t know, and then, after bows and professions of deep friendship in Latin and in one case Greek, they left him alone with the new prince.

  Tepes poured wine himself. ‘Now I know why your name seems familiar,’ he said.

  Swan leaned back with his spine against one of the pavilion’s upright poles. ‘Familiar?’ he asked.

  ‘You are the Englishman that Omar Reis has sworn to kill,’ Prince Vlad said.

  Swan started at the mere mention of the name.

  Tepes’ smile grew wider. So wide it might have been called ‘wolfish’. ‘So it is you. Did you actually bed his wife and his mother and his daughter, all in one night?’

  Swan choked on his wine.

  Vlad laughed again. ‘I see these things grow in the telling. I heard a song about it in Edirne. The singer was caught and gutted.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a good song, but Omar Reis is a bad enemy. You know his son?’

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘I saved his life.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m sure that will make it all better with Omar Reis.’ Tepes laughed and laughed. ‘He is commanding the advance guard, you know.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Swan asked. He had – he was chilled to admit it – forgotten Omar Reis. And Khatun Bengül. And her auntie.

  It seemed foolish of him to forget.

  The Wallachian nodded. ‘I was in Edirne just a month ago,’ he said.

  ‘Spying?’ Swan asked, a little too eagerly.

  Tepes shook his head. ‘Do Englishmen speak so boldly?’ he asked. ‘Yet – we be of one soul, you and I. I feel it.’ He leaned close. ‘If you would be a prince of Wallachia,’ he said, ‘you must always serve two masters – Hungary and Constantinople. It is no different with the Sultan. If some people in Edirne had been …’ he glanced at his nails, ‘more receptive,’ and for a moment he sounded, despite his accented Latin, like Di Bracchio had years before. He paused, to gauge Swan’s reaction.

  ‘You might be in the advance guard of the Sultan’s army?’ Swan asked.

  ‘It was possible,’ Tepes said. He took a small knife from his sash and began to clean his nails. ‘But as I was spurned, I came back to the voidvode, and here I found both peace and contentment, and revenge fulfilled. Hunyadi is a harsh ally, but a good master. Let that be a lesson.’ He leaned very close. ‘Did you really tup Omar Reis’s white ewe?’ he asked.

  Swan shrugged and sipped wine. ‘Never kiss and tell,’ he said.

  Tepes laughed – too loudly. ‘So you did. I can see it in your face. Oh, by God!’ Suddenly serious, he leaned close again. ‘Don’t, whatever you do, allow yourself to be captured. Omar Reis is the favourite now. And whatever you actually did – every man who hates Omar Reis, and they are many, whispers that you had all his women. I think you would have a hard death.’

  Swan felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. But he rallied.

  ‘You will come with us to Kovin?’ he asked.

  The Wallachian shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I go east to Braso, and south through the pass of Ban, with an army made almost entirely of golden ducats. Imagine that you, an Englishman, are the enemy of Omar Reis. Well – if he comes under my sabre, I’ll kill him for you. If he has the girl in his baggage, do you want her?’

  ‘What would I do with her?’ Swan asked, a little wildly. He’d had too much wine, and perhaps too much sex as well. His imagination worked equally well for his torture and death, or a little frolic with Khatun Bengül.

  Prince Vlad smiled. ‘I would think you would already know the answer to that, eh?’ He leaned forward again – more than a little drunk himself. ‘How far away are they? Burgundy and England?’

  Swan shook his head to try to clear it. He’d had three cups of wine in his own tent, and another with Šárka; at least two here. Not enough to make his head swim.

  ‘Fifty days’ travel, on horseback,’ he guessed. ‘More, at sea. Or less, if you were lucky.’

  ‘Fifty days,’ Tepes said. ‘Christ and all the saints. No wonder the English and the Burgundians send us so little. When will you next be at home, Englishman?’

  Swan shrugged. It had been at least a year since he had thought of going home. He hadn’t had a letter. There were rumours of growing civil strife.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, suddenly homesick. He could smell spiced sausage cooking somewhere near by – the reek of fenugreek and cardamom. At home, there’d be English ale, beef, mutton pie …

  ‘Maybe next year. The Pope sends letters to England.’ He grinned. ‘I could carry them, I suppose.’

  Prince Vlad nodded with the seriousness only a very young, intense and drunk man can muster. ‘When you are home, look at the mountains of your country …’ He saw Swan smile and raised his eyebrows. ‘No mountains?’

  ‘Not really,’ Swan admitted.

  ‘Look at something you love, and think of us here, scheming and raiding and dying to keep the Turks at bay. Or wooing them. And think that we protect you.’ Tepes shrugged. ‘It makes me a little happy, and a little sad, you know? I would like it if an army of English and Burgundians came out of the west and helped us. But the last time the west sent us an army, they did more damage to the people than the Turks, and then they lost.’ He nodded.

  ‘Nicopolis. I know. And the Serbs …’ Swan sought to show he understood.

  ‘Englishman, I love you, but you know nothing. No one has fought and bled against the Turk more than the Serbs. Sometimes they, too, must woo instead of fighting – eh?’

  Swan stood up and swayed.

  Tepes stood with him. ‘Thank you for my kingdom. In a week, I will either rule or be dead.’

  ‘You will make a good ruler,’ Swan said.

  ‘Perhaps,’ the new voivode of Wallachia said. ‘I have never commanded so many. But it is, I think, something … do you say, sink your teeth? Like a wolf? Something I can sink my teeth in.’ He smiled, and his incisors showed.

  ‘Good luck,’ Swan said. He, too, felt the kinship.

  ‘Ah!’ Tepes said, backing away. ‘I had forgotten. I have something for you. It is, after all, your gold that gives me my chance.’ He went into a side tent and emerged with a canvas bag. ‘I will wager a golden byzant against a German pfennig that you like clothes. Despite appearances.’

  Swan smiled. ‘I do,’ he admitted. The prince’s beautiful Turkish clothes made him pine for his own, long ago abandoned in Constantinople – loose, flowing, light, and far better suited to the hot air of the Hungarian plains than wool and velvet.

  Prince Vlad laid the heavy linen bag across Swan’s arms. ‘With my compliments. And perhaps – who knows – Omar Reis will not know who you are.’

  Swan found a kaftan, long silk trousers and several shirts in the bag, and silently blessed Vlad Tepes, but in the morning he was in his old arming clothes and his full harness at first light. His men, whatever their other failings – and there were not so many – had packing and moving down to a fine art, and despite drunkenness and hard heads, the tents were struck and the wagons loaded before the last stars set, and before the heat fell like a hammer on their heads. Horses were watered, fires smothered. Men pissed on them and laughed at the foul steam.

  The Company of St Mary Magdalene was among the first in the column, but the Hungarian professionals were no slower. Hunyadi’s own banda, hard men and veterans of twenty campaigns, many of them Wallachian, slept on the ground without tents, rolled their cloaks and stood up ready to march. Even the lords had their pavilions struck and in wagons long before first light.

  Ser Niccolo Zane appeared at Swan’s side. ‘We had some trouble last night,’ he said.

  Swan was on foot, saving his riding horse and his charger.

  Mercia appeared and handed him his baton of command and his cap. He smiled at the young man, who had a very obvious black eye.

  Radu brought him a honey cake and a cup of steaming hippocras. Hot weather and hippocras were
not friends, but Swan wasn’t going to spoil round-faced Radu’s day with that observation, and it went down easily enough.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  ‘Two of Hunyadi’s men tried for one of the girls,’ Zane said. He shrugged. ‘Ladislav said they were all his property and not for sale. The Hungarians pulled their swords.’

  ‘And?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Eh. They are not dead.’ Zane spat. ‘Later, some of their friends came, and some of our Germans had a punch-up with them.’ He shrugged again. ‘Soldiers fight over whores. This is a fact, as old as time. Our soldiers like that these girls are … our own.’ He spat again, a contemplative spit, as if he was perhaps considering the works of Aquinas, or Plato.

  ‘And?’ Swan asked.

  ‘There may be trouble,’ Zane said evasively. ‘Or maybe not. No one was killed.’

  There was a certain amount of ground fog – it was odd, patchy, and seemed alive. It spat out a dozen Wallachians led by Prince Vlad, who leaned down from his tall horse and kissed Swan on both cheeks. Then he waved farewell and rode back into the fog.

  Swan finished his hippocras and handed the cup to young Radu. The fog was rising with the light – it didn’t seem possible, but it was. He imagined even half a hundred Turks coming out of the fog. It wasn’t a pretty dream and he tried not to imagine Omar Reis leading them.

  He sent Clemente for Grazias. ‘Anyone have pickets out?’ he asked.

  Grazias shrugged. ‘How do I know?’ he responded. ‘All my people are hearing mass. The first real priest we’ve seen in two years!’

  Almost half an hour passed before Hunyadi emerged from the fog, which was now dense. He was surrounded by his military court.

  ‘Ah – the Italians are ready at last,’ he said.

  ‘We were ready first,’ Swan said.

  Hunyadi turned his horse. ‘Were you?’ he asked. His voice was unpleasant.