Tom Swan and the Head of St George: Part Seven

by Christian Cameron

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George

  Volume Seven

  Christian Cameron

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George: Volume Seven

  Also by Christian Cameron

  Copyright

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George

  Volume Seven

  Swan awoke, hungry and tired. The muscles in the inside of his thighs ached, and those on the outside ached, too. The small of his back ached. His nose was cold and he huddled deeper into his blankets.

  The smell of food, worming up from the cardinal’s kitchens, combined with the very urgent need to piss.

  He threw back his blankets. In that moment, he thought, first, of Violetta, who had shared this very narrow bed with almost silent enthusiasm, and second, of standing on the night-time deck of a galia sotil1 of the Order, watching the stars, the ten thousand stars – and third, by some transference of the stars, to the feeling of dancing – dancing with forty other people, dancing beautifully, his whole body tuned to the music …

  He pulled the blankets back over his naked shoulder and imagined Theodora’s body.

  He coughed.

  Kicked the blankets off and rolled to a seated position. And then, his thighs burning from twenty days in the saddle, he pushed himself to his feet to face another day.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, in English.

  A few minutes later, he was leaning against the great kitchen fireplace in his master’s kitchen. He had tall boots hurriedly laced to his small, tight doublet – and a plain brown gown hung on the back of the chair, matching the doublet’s severe brown. He had troubled to shave. His only apparent concession to worldly vanity was a red jewel that burned on his finger – a big garnet in a gold ring, deeply cut with an eight-pointed cross.

  All the kitchen staff were men. Cardinal Bessarion disliked scandal, and some said he disliked women, as well, but be that as it might be, his house was staffed with men, from the gnarled hands of the veteran cook, Alceste, a Catalan, to the phalanx of pretty pageboys who served the cardinal’s food. They weren’t doing much. The whole palace seemed empty.

  Alceste was overseeing the creation of a set of game pies. But he liked Swan, and his affection showed in an apple tart that a grinning boy brought the Englishman with a steaming cup of hippocras. Swan wolfed it down, his thoughts clearly elsewhere, and the cook cursed.

  ‘My food not good enough for my lord?’ he said.

  Swan snapped back into focus – giving offence to any cook was foolish, let alone the one who ruled your own kitchen. He bowed – much the same bow he would have made to the cardinal on a formal occasion. Back straight, he sank on one knee with his right hand crushed to his heart.

  ‘Oh, most illustrious prince of apple-tart bakers,’ he began.

  ‘Flatterer,’ the cook spat. ‘You do not even notice my apple tart. You inhaled it without so much as a sign of delight.’

  ‘My senses were ravished …’ Swan began.

  The cook rolled his eyes.

  Swan sighed. ‘I’ve been on the road three weeks, illustrious Alceste. All the way to Vienna and back.’ He might have said again. He’d been to Vienna too often, this last winter. He’d also failed to get to Vienna, not once but twice, snowed into Alpine passes or marooned by choked rivers and collapsed bridges.

  The cook, unimpressed by his sufferings, sniffed as if there was something in the kitchen that was slightly rotten.

  Swan leaned towards the older man. ‘I’ve been hungry since I left,’ he said, with perfect honesty.

  Maestro Alceste’s ill-humour – assumed only to wrench a compliment from his favourite courier – vanished. ‘Hungry? No one in my kitchen is ever allowed to be hungry!’ he said.

  Boys ran in every direction. ‘His Excellency gave a dinner for ten cardinals,’ he said. He named dishes – peacock, roast boar, lamb in a sauce …

  Fresh bread, the crust tough, nearly perfectly armoured in sesame seeds …

  Wine – two Venetian bottles, each three-quarters empty. Swan produced his own glass – like most gentlemen, he carried a glass in a small leather box in his travel case. While he was savouring the sort of wine that princes of the Church drank, the bells rang for ten o’clock in the morning, and the high, clear sound of mass could be heard beginning at the church of St Cesaro across the courtyard.

  Peter, his ‘servant’, lurched into the kitchen. Unlike the other servants of the cardinal’s men, Peter had his own quarters, his own watchword, and was sometimes sent on errands himself. He was Dutch, tall and thin, a master archer. He, too, had just ridden to Vienna and returned. So had Antoine, a Frenchman who mixed the arts of cookery with the arts of the sword. Antoine was greeted as a returning hero – a family member – and much embraced.

  Peter walked as if his knees were locked, but he made it to the long bench at the servant’s trestle table and collapsed on to it. Antoine moved from hug to hug and plopped down next to the Dutchman.

  Swan slid his own wine glass under Peter’s reaching hand. The Dutchman emptied the glass and scooped a slice of lamb – a beautiful, fresh, succulent young lamb, but several days old. He ate it, and another, and another …

  The three men sat and ate.

  Maestro Alceste watched them benevolently. He liked men who would actually eat. Too many of his guests were the merest gourmands – a few were outright sinners, at least against food. But these three always ate – well. Nor was Antoine above helping out.

  ‘Ten cardinals?’ Swan asked around a huge mouthful of bread and wild boar. ‘Vrstmth?’ – the last being a meaningless set of syllables that emerged from his full mouth. He meant ‘Really?’

  Alceste laughed. ‘You two know that the Pope is dead?’

  Swan sat back, thunderstruck.

  ‘He was sick. Our Excellency called to him the good princes of the Church, and they dined together and discussed who is to be the next Holy Father.’

  ‘I wrote down everything they said,’ piped in a cherubic little boy with bright blond curls. ‘Messire Alessandro told me to!’

  Peter grumbled in his throat.

  Swan raised his eyes. ‘Who’s the next Pope, then?’ he asked.

  Alceste shrugged. ‘Our master,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, sweet Christ,’ Swan said piously.

  Peter grunted and reached for another piece of lamb.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Swan asked.

  Alceste looked at him as if he were a particularly inept serving boy. ‘The cardinal is in convocation,’ he said.

  Swan looked at Peter, and they both sighed.

  Swan cooled his heels outside the cardinal’s officer for an hour. He had looked for the cardinal’s secretary; for Alessandro di Bracchio, the cardinal’s head of intelligence and Swan’s own officer; for Giannis or any of the cardinal’s Greeks. The feeling of being alone in the palace pressed on him.

  Eventually, he pushed into the cardinal’s study and left the treaty – the document he had been sent to the Imperial Court at Vienna to procure – on the desk.

  Peter waited in the doorway. ‘Ve are not velcome here,’ he said simply.

  Indeed, the whole study seemed alchemical – there were skulls, and books, and scrolls, but if the cardinal were conjuring a spirit, it was the spirit of the classical world – there was a bust of Miltiades, and another of Plato. Swan saw scrolls he’d stolen for the cardinal, and others he’d purchased – he saw a play that Peter had smuggled out of Constantinople in his quiver. He frowned.

  ‘Alessandro must be about,’ he said.

  Peter squinted. ‘C
ould you plees come out of there?’ he asked. ‘You make me nerfous.’

  Swan was curious that Peter, who could stand in a battle line and loose accurate arrows on men attempting to kill him, could not bear to see him enter the great man’s study, but men had different barriers, he knew. ‘Where would Alessandro go?’ he asked.

  Peter retreated a step and Swan looked over the cardinal’s desk again. But His Eminence was a veteran of many conspiracies, and his desktop was as empty as a town looted by the Swiss.

  The two of them paced through the empty, echoing galleries of the palace.

  ‘It iss as if the plague came,’ Peter said.

  ‘God between us and evil,’ Swan said.

  His next step was the offices. The majordomo, the secretary and the clerks were all in closets and small rooms on the ground floor and in the basement. Swan walked down to echoing halls, and found scrolls neatly in pigeonholes and a tall stack of cards inscribed and ready to be sent.

  He knew that Giannis Trapitzou and his wife Irene no longer lived in the palazzo. Swan knew their home and walked there, amazed – amazed – at the silence of the streets. The Trapitzitoi lived in a tall stuccoed house well to the south of the palazzo. It had once been the house of a steward of an estate.

  Swan knocked and knocked. Eventually, a middle-aged Greek woman came and frowned at him.

  ‘I seek Maestro Giannis or Mistress Irene,’ Swan said.

  ‘Not here,’ she said, and tried to swing the door shut.

  In Greek, he asked, ‘Do you know where they’ve gone?’

  The Greek woman smiled. ‘Ah – excuse me, my lord! I didn’t know you. Maestro Giannis has taken the despoina and the baby to the country. Because of the election.’

  Swan declined a cup of wine and walked back to the palazzo. He knew where to find Cesare, but it was a long walk. He didn’t know where Maestro Accudo had moved – the dapper notary had lived in an apartment in the palazzo for years, and had suddenly taken a house.

  Swan walked back up to the cardinal’s receiving office once more – hoping against hope that the great man would have returned, or that Alessandro, or Giovanni or one of the Greeks would have appeared. But he could feel the house’s emptiness from the entry hall, and the only sounds of life came from below.

  Defeated, Swan went back to the kitchen. ‘Do any of you know where Messire Alessandro might be found?’ he asked. He looked around apologetically. ‘I really thought he’d turn up.’

  Alceste shrugged. ‘You have not been with the household during an election?’ he asked.

  Swan shook his head.

  Alceste savoured his moment of knowing more than one of the cardinal’s couriers, who usually sat inscrutably, knowing everything. ‘When the cardinals are in convocation, they can receive no messages nor send them.’ He shrugged. ‘All of them are marooned in the Vatican.’ Alceste wrinkled his nose and smiled at Antoine. ‘For some reason, Captain Alessandro is very busy in those times. As was his predecessor.’

  One of the apprentice cooks, greatly daring, raised a heavy hand. ‘Eh – messire?’

  Swan smiled to put the young, spotty man at ease. ‘Carlo? Isn’t it?’

  The young man flushed at being recognised. ‘Lord Suane, I … overheard … that is … one of the boys.’ He sputtered and went out like a damp candle.

  Swan nodded. ‘You heard from one of the pages?’

  ‘Ay, my lord.’ The cook nodded. ‘That the capitano – that is, Messire di Bracchio—’

  ‘Out with it,’ spat the cook.

  ‘Went to the house of the Malatesta,’ the undercook said. ‘That is, the cardinal – our master – is said to have sent him.’

  Swan smiled. The Malatesta di Rimini were among the Pope’s least trusted, most feared retainers. Noblemen of the Romagnol, they fought each other and everyone else. But they always had too many men-at-arms, and Alessandro knew their chief, the Wolf of Rimini, as he was called, even to his face. Cardinal Bessarion sometimes turned to the Malatesta for muscle.

  Swan frowned. ‘Are papal elections violent?’ he asked.

  Even the pot boys looked at him as if he were a fool.

  Swan sighed. He nodded to Peter. ‘Let us go and visit the Malatesta,’ he said.

  Peter shook his head. ‘I’ve been in the saddle for three weeks,’ he said slowly. ‘If the cardinal needs me, he can find me himself – just here, in his house. Eh? Why must we go looking for him? And in that house of killers?’ He rose, and then looked at Swan. ‘Unless you order me?’ he added.

  Swan thought for a moment. ‘And if I do?’ he asked.

  ‘Certes,’ Peter said. ‘Then I remind you how many months my pay is in arrears.’

  Rome, during a papal election.

  The streets were so silent that you might have thought the plague had come. Wagons still moved about, and men haggled in the market, but the street traffic was slowed to a handful of men, and all of them were armed. Swan went out, walked to the end of the Via Cortese and back to the cardinal’s palazzo to fetch his sword and dagger. He was pleased to see that he had several letters, and they almost dissuaded him from his errand, but he had news – crusade news – that the cardinal would want.

  He went back out into the cold, damp spring. The Malatesta maintained a fortified residence – a set of old towers with curtain walls, like a small fortification inside the city. It was across the Tiber, a good English league away.

  Swan walked quickly. He wore his gloves and hat, and took purposeful strides, and he was unmolested, even when he crossed the forum, right across the ruins. His boots, gloves, sword and deerskin doublet all said ‘soldier’. Or so he hoped.

  Down to the river and across the small fortified bridge at Ponta Santa Maria.

  And then back, almost the way he’d come, but on the other side. He was wary – wary of armed men at any time, wary of the Orsini of Rome, with whom he had waged a two-year-old feud, and wary of footpads. But the city’s silence did not hide violence. Even the footpads were in convocation. He walked uphill from the Tiber and found the Malatesta towers as grim as he remembered them – grimmer, perhaps, in a gentle April rain.

  There were two men in corselets on duty in front of the gate. Swan bowed. ‘Might I enquire after Capitano Alessandro di Bracchio?’ he asked the nearest. The man was big – huge, even. He towered over Swan, with a red-blond beard.

  The man shrugged.

  His partner laughed. ‘He only speaks German,’ he said in good Roman. ‘He’s a Swiss.’

  Swan smiled, as pleasantly as possible. The Swiss, in his small round steel cap and carrying a halberd big enough to stop a charging elephant, was a fearsome sight.

  The smaller Italian – smaller, but still half a head taller than Swan – nodded without moving the rest of his torso. ‘Di Bracchio paid us the honour of a visit,’ he admitted. ‘You’re his lieutenant, eh? The one the Orsini all want to castrate?’

  Swan nodded. ‘Do you know if my capitano is still here?’ he asked.

  The Italian guard looked him over. ‘There’s a reward,’ he said.

  Swan sighed. ‘And you want to earn it?’ he asked. His eyes locked with the Italian’s.

  The man pursed his lips. ‘The Wolf would gut me, even if I succeeded,’ he said. ‘No private contracts, no sidelines. It’s in our contracts. The Wolf doesn’t like divided loyalties,’ he went on.

  Swan imagined that the Wolf didn’t fancy men who talked too much, either, but it was not his business. ‘Do you think I might enquire?’ he asked.

  The talkative Italian sent a runner to ask whether the Capitano Alessandro was within.

  A gentleman returned and the door within the great gate was opened. The gentleman beckoned him inside.

  ‘Sword,’ said the Italian on duty. He held out his hand.

  Swan paused. But the equerry bowed. ‘Ser Suane may keep his sword,’ he said.

  Swan smiled thinly, and wondered why he felt the need to do this. Peter was right – he could have gone back
to bed and waited for the cardinal to summon him. No one liked entering the House of the Wolf.

  He followed the equerry along a damp corridor that smelled of horse, and out into a wet courtyard surrounded by the bulk of the towers. The interior walls were lined with balconies and windows, and the windows were those of the last century, mullioned with a thousand small panes of glass like jewels set in silver.

  They went into the central hall, and Swan crossed himself in front of an icon, and then followed his guide up a set of shallow steps to the great hall.

  He took a quick breath. The old Gothic splendour of the outer yard had not prepared him for the classical feast inside. There were statues – a line of them running down one wall of the great room, so that he imagined the oak boards of the room’s floor sagging under their weight. A curio cabinet, the size of a small room, filled a niche in the middle of the wall, and above it hung the arms of the Malatesta, in embroidered silk. When Swan was close enough, he saw that it was a war banner. But the curio cabinet – if that was the appropriate term – grabbed his eye as effectively as a pretty woman would have. It was full of coins, mostly Roman. In the middle stood a small bust, in brown patinated bronze, and there were scrolls in the pigeonholes and a very familiar-looking spearhead in bronze.

  ‘You are the cardinal’s collector, are you not?’ asked a rough voice at his elbow.

  Swan had learned that voices did not always match men, but Malatesta’s voice – rough and snarling, like the Wolf whose name he bore – was absolutely at odds with this slim, almost effeminate man. He had a narrow face, a long, straight nose, pale olive skin, very clear, and brilliant, eyes. Swan knew that Malatesta was twenty years older than he himself, but he might have been the same age.

  Swan had the sense to bow graciously. ‘My illustrious lord is too kind,’ he said. ‘Which is to say that I have found one or two small curiosities for His Eminence.’

  Malatesta nodded. ‘What do you like of mine?’ he asked in his grave, gravelly voice. It was like watching a boy imitate a man, and Swan couldn’t help but think of Domenico Gattleussi on Lesvos, who had a high-pitched, effeminate voice.