Tom Swan and the Head of St George: Part Seven

by Christian Cameron

  Two borrowed Burgundians got the gate to the stable yard open, and Swan turned to his troop. ‘I know that we don’t agree on the date of Easter,’ he said. ‘But Christos Aneste will be our watchword. If we end up running or fighting in the dark …’ He left that ugly thought unfinished.

  But the stradiotes all nodded. Giannis grinned. ‘Let’s get this done,’ he said, and they were off into the evening.

  The streets were still empty, and their horses made enough racket to scare any late-afternoon strollers into the alleys. They moved at a fast trot, north, under the aqueduct and then along the old walls.

  They encountered only one Orsini patrol, and the red and white men fled as soon as they saw mounted soldiers.

  They clattered up to the ancient Theatre of Pompeii, and Giannis dismounted and went in through a gap in the ruins. Swan fidgeted, rode along the street, swept his horse in a wide turn through the ruins on the north side of the road and came back.

  ‘He’s coming,’ Giannis said simply. ‘So are four other Greeks.’

  ‘Put Nikephorous on the mule.’ Swan nodded. ‘You get him back to the palazzo if we encounter difficulty. Eh?’

  Giannis nodded. ‘My pleasure. I revere his learning.’

  Swan pointed to the other stradiotes. ‘Put the rest of them up behind the men with the biggest horses.’

  The other Greeks nodded, and as the mimes came out – Harpagon still had his mask – they were mounted behind the four best stradiotes.

  Nikephorous frowned. ‘We were getting work done!’ He looked around as if they were all malefactors. ‘We are bringing the great plays back to life!’

  Giannis looked away, embarrassed. Swan dismounted and bowed. ‘Maestro, we feel your life may be in danger. And you are very precious to the cardinal – to all of us.’

  Nikephorous shrugged. ‘Me? I am worth nothing. But this play – we will show these Italians what culture is!’

  Swan imagined Orsini – and Turks – sweeping down and killing them all. ‘If the Maestro would do us the kindness of mounting?’ Swan asked gently. The Maestro combined a highly strung disposition, a hundred generations of Byzantine aristocratic inbreeding and a career as an actor. Swan laid on the flattery as thickly as he could. ‘Civilisation can ill spare the contents of the magister’s magnificent brain.’

  Nikephorous sniffed.

  But he mounted.

  Giannis made a motion, and they were moving.

  Darkness was coming down like a curtain. The watery spring light was still lighting the domes of many churches, but the streets were already dark.

  ‘Ride!’ Swan said insistently.

  To his shock – a sort of long, drawn-out, tension-filled shock – they were not challenged.

  Given all their preparations, the absence of threat was somehow more sinister than a massive assault on their walls. Swan ran up the steps from the stable to the main hall and found Alessandro in his armour, standing with a halberd.

  ‘Got him. No trouble,’ Swan said. Given the state of fear and apprehension of the last hour and the effort involved to get the ageing Greek actor away from his theatre and into safety, Swan swore to himself that that the next time someone told him an errand had been ‘no trouble’ he would be profuse in his thanks anyway.

  Alessandro must have had a similar experience, because he embraced Swan. ‘You got him. Brilliant. Now all we need to do is survive the night. I sent Montorio for bread. He brought enough that we can have dinner.’

  Again, Alessandro sent Peter and Giannis – each with a pair of the stradiotes – out to look around the neighbourhood. This time they went mounted.

  Swan ate Alceste’s rabbit stew with thick bread, and drank some very rough wine.

  The cook sat next to him. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘I had rabbit, and the wine …’ He frowned, reached into his bag and refilled Swan’s Bohemian glass out of a flask. ‘Let the Greeks drink the stuff I use for cooking,’ he said.

  Swan toasted him, and the shouting began outside.

  ‘Message for Messire Suane!’ called a pageboy. Swan groaned and rose – his thighs were still tired, and the small of his back felt as if it belonged to a much older man. He drank off the wine.

  ‘Messire Trapitzou says the streets to the south are full of men, and there is a fire,’ the boy said. ‘Messire Alessandro says to come.’

  Swan grabbed his scabbard in his left hand and ran up out of the kitchen.

  There were three attacks. The first attack was a wave of shouting men with torches. They chanted ‘Kill the Greeks’ over and over. When they came close enough, they began to throw the torches – and some prepared bundles – over the walls and on to the roof, but the garrison of Bessarion’s palazzo was far ahead of them, ready with buckets of water and sand.

  Swan thought the attack was lacking in spirit. Despite having almost forty armed men with bows and crossbows, Alessandro forbade them to loose a bolt until they were actually threatened. Despite the lack of opposition and the Orsini – there were red and white liveries mixed in the multitude, but the crowd was by no means all Orsini – the crowd didn’t press their attack home, and they didn’t have a ladder.

  The stradiotes were itching to fill the air with arrows. Giannis finally turned to Alessando. ‘I can’t stop them,’ he said. ‘They feel we are about to be overrun.’

  Swan shouted, ‘No!’

  Alessandro waved. ‘Keep them still! By God! No one looses so much as a pea!’

  Swan agreed. The lacklustre crowd would only be animated by violence.

  They hacked at Bessarion’s decorative plants with drawn swords, but they didn’t come up the steps or over the stable-yard walls. And after a few minutes, they began to melt away.

  The second attack was very different. Swan hoped that the first was all the challenge the night had to offer, and he was considering getting out of his harness and into his blankets when there was a loud crack, and the glass in an upstairs window shattered. Swan ran – in armour – up the great central staircase and looked into the cardinal’s study, which was dark. Something moved.

  Swan drew. The great multi-paned window had one large pane shattered.

  Swan scanned the room.

  Another crack, and another pane of glass shattered. Shards of glass ricocheted off Swan’s backplate as he crouched, and the ball – Swan had established that this must be a hand gonne – struck the statue of Ganymede and then the cardinal’s desk.

  Suddenly the night was full of the snaps and barks of gunpowder weapons. Swan knelt – not entirely voluntarily – as the windows seemed to explode.

  He ducked back into the hall and looked down the stairs. ‘Not an intruder,’ he shouted.

  Alessandro was at the base of the staircase. ‘I know!’ he shouted. ‘They’re just blowing out the windows.’

  Swan went down more slowly than he’d gone up as another fusillade hit the storey above.

  Di Bracchio shook his head. ‘I assume they have firebombs. Now they will throw them through the upstairs windows.’

  ‘Anyone hit?’ Swan asked.

  ‘One of the Greeks. And some ladies hit by glass.’

  Swan ran along to where Peter stood by a loophole. ‘Do you have a target?’ he asked.

  Peter made a face. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘If they shoot again …’

  ‘Kill one,’ Swan said softly. He had a theory – that the election was already decided, and this was the Orsini’s last night of violence before the new Pope was installed. Hence the lack of ambition in the attacks.

  As if summoned, the fusillade began again. Through Peter’s loophole, Swan saw the ripple of fire. A ball passed through the oak shutter and splinters pinged off Swan’s breastplate.

  Peter drew to the full length of the arrow – a yard of ash with a steel bodkin point. He had the six-foot bow at full draw only for as long as it would take a mouse to squeak – body leaning forward, shoulder muscles fully engaged. Then he released.

>   ‘Hmf,’ he grunted.

  He put another arrow on his string, nocked – and his whole body quickened like that of a hunting dog tasting the scent. He drew and released – a single motion this time.

  From across the street, there was a scream.

  The man sounded like a soul in torment.

  Peter raised his eyebrows. ‘Groin, I think,’ he said with a small shrug.

  Swan reported back to Alessandro. Alessandro pulled at his beard and then sighed. ‘So – now we kill.’ He raised his voice. ‘Archers! Any target.’

  The stradiotes began to loose immediately.

  Alessandro took Montorio and made a sortie via the stable. He returned before the moon rose, and Montorio had one man dead.

  Alessandro slumped down next to Swan. ‘If that man is plotting to destroy us, I’m a Turk,’ he said.

  That was the end of the second attack. Montorio had estimated that the enemy had sent twenty or twenty-five handgunners to hit them, and Di Bracchio thought they’d caught or wounded five. He had a handgun – a fine, Swiss-made gonne of bronze and iron.

  Swan was so tired he thought he might sleep in his armour. He was contemplating lying down by the hearth in the kitchen when the third attack came. The crowd was back – although much thinned by the late hour, and, Swan thought, by someone’s indecision. There were only a hundred men, and many of them were in livery. They didn’t press forward, and so they didn’t provide much cover for the professionals – a dozen arsonists who were betrayed by the lit fuses they carried.

  Peter put a heavy arrow into one. Quite deliberately, he drew a giant horse dropper from his ‘special’ quiver, with a broad head as big as a child’s hand. He feathered his man – a moving shadow twenty paces distant, but backlit by torches – and the man screamed.

  Peter nodded. ‘He’ll scream for long time,’ he said.

  Swan whistled. ‘Remind me never to make you angry,’ he said.

  ‘My pay is past due,’ Peter reminded him.

  It should have been the end of the evening, but one arsonist, more daring, better paid or simply more thorough, climbed up on the garden wall and managed to fling his package into the gaping, glass-toothed ruin of the front-hall balcony window.

  The crowd roared.

  Alessandro looked around. ‘What are they cheering?’ he asked.

  They all smelled the smoke at the same time.

  Swan led all the non-archers – men and women – with buckets. They saved the study – without anyone having to throw water at the wall of ancient scrolls. They fought the fire in the hall until Swan’s armour was hot to the touch, until his left knee began to give under him. He was lifting buckets from the ground floor – in arm harnesses.

  The handgunners began shooting through the windows. Giannis’s housekeeper took a ball through the neck and died immediately.

  The crowd outside shouted their hate.

  But the archers were tracking the gunners.

  It was close.

  The fire flared up – caught at a wall hanging – and the unarmoured men and women fell back, leaving Swan and Montorio, of all people, facing it. But they flung water in a paroxysm of effort – it was like a melee with a dozen monsters. Behind him, strangers thrust buckets of water at him. His knee was forgotten, and his thighs – there was only the fire and the water.

  Side by side they walked forward, buckets high – throw, turn, take another, turn, step, throw. The stone of the palazzo wall hissed as water struck it.

  A hand gonne ball struck Swan. It struck him where the lower lip of his gorget crossed the pauldron – two layers of steel. He was spun around and thrown flat in the charred ruins of the front hall, and the ball crushed his maille against his skin, leaving blood and pulped skin behind – but it didn’t penetrate.

  By the time they had his armour off, the attack was over, and the night was once again quiet.

  Swan lay on the kitchen table and screamed unashamedly as they pulled fragments of maille out of his skin.

  Giannis was weeping, and Alessandro was sombre. Swan – throat burning – was force-fed a bellyful of wine and honey. He almost threw it up, and the room spun.

  But eventually, his friends pulled him up. There were four bodies being sewn in shrouds on the next table, and another of Montorio’s men-at-arms had a hand-gonne ball in his hip, and one of the stradiotes – also weeping – had his arm broken. Messire Claudio – where had he come from? – gave Swan a push. ‘Make room, my hero,’ he said quietly.

  Alessandro took his hand. ‘More lives than a cat,’ he said. ‘Damn you – I thought you were gone!’

  Peter was still watching the night, but Antoine took Swan in hand. ‘Bed, sir!’ he said.

  Swan shook his head. ‘I can still swing a sword,’ he insisted.

  ‘They won’t be back,’ Alessandro said. He shrugged. ‘Or I’m wrong and they will be, in which case, I promise to wake you.’

  Swan looked around. Most of the Greeks were either weeping or staring angrily around – at the walls, the doors, anything. ‘What happened? Is it the housekeeper?’ Swan had always thought her a shrew – although she’d been a heroine from the classical era in fighting the fire.

  Di Bracchio sighed. ‘No. Maestro Nikephorous took a ball.’

  ‘My God!’ Swan said. The wine was taking effect. ‘How bad?’

  Giannis shook his head. ‘Dead,’ he said.

  Swan looked at his burned boots. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Antoine got him to his own door. Swan kept things in his room he preferred others not to see, and shooed the man away. The wine was in his head and he stumbled once, but he managed to get his key into the lock.

  But the telltale chip of wood he kept in the door was gone.

  He was so tired that he couldn’t decide whether he had put it in place that morning or not. He did forget.

  ‘Sweet Christ,’ he said, and drew his sword. His room was only slightly larger than a horse stall in the stables.

  ‘I really hope you are not planning to kill me,’ said the Demoiselle Iso.

  Swan leaned against the door frame. ‘Oh my God,’ he said aloud, in English.

  She laughed and sat up. She was naked. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re drunk,’ she said.

  Swan was angry. ‘What are you doing here?’ he shot at her.

  She frowned. ‘I would think that was obvious, but if you are disappointed, I’ll be gone.’

  Swan saw the armour, neatly stacked, on top of his precious chest. ‘You are the tenth Malatesta man-at-arms!’ he said. Or rather, slurred.

  ‘Minerva! You are drunk.’ She rose out of bed, and Swan had a glimpse of her figure, which was full, heavily muscled, and beautiful. ‘Is that a sword in your hand, or are you just happy to see me?’ she said.

  Swan sighed heavily and leaned his sword by the bedside. Without meaning to sit, he sat.

  ‘Juno’s tits!’ the demoiselle said. ‘You are all blood – what happened?’

  ‘You know the house has been attacked?’ Swan said. He wanted to sound either manly or bitter, but her shoulders and breasts and the hollows where the two met were emptying his head of any thought but one.

  She laughed. ‘I know that the Orsini shot out the windows.’

  Swan nodded. ‘You could hear that from in my room?’

  ‘I was in the study when you came in,’ she admitted. ‘It seemed like the best place to hide.’ She was stroking his good right shoulder. ‘Lie down.’

  Something about the demoiselle being in the cardinal’s study seemed wrong, but her presence in his bed seemed absurd – impossible – and he had taken on a gallon of wine. The room was spinning.

  ‘Let me go,’ he said. He levered himself to his feet. His left shoulder wasn’t much worse than if he’d had a bad burn.

  She protested – and then let go, mostly because he wasn’t listening.

  There had been opium in the wine, too. Maestro Claudio believed in opium.

  Swan stumbled down the hall t
o the closet and vented a good deal of used wine. Then he tidied himself up and walked back down the hall. He saw Father Simon going into his own room, and stumbled past, and closed his door.

  The Demoiselle Iso was still there. That was a shock. Swan had told himself he’d imagined the whole thing.

  He closed the door and leaned against it. She came and put a hand under his shirt. ‘If you hurt too much …’ she said.

  Swan ran his tongue across the nape of her neck and down, tasting the salt of her sweat. He put a hand behind her back – her naked back.

  She had the muscles of a dancer – an acrobat.

  Up close, her gaze was too intense, and she did not close her eyes to kiss. She watched him kiss her as if he were a curious insect or a problem to be solved.

  But there was no relaxation in her arms. She was demanding – forceful. She moved his hands, she rolled him over, she crawled and writhed and made noises Swan had never heard a woman make.

  It was exciting, and had a tinge of danger – and another tinge, of something darker. She wore a star with a ruby around her neck, and she rubbed it on him several times. And when she mounted him, at the first streak of dawn in the east, she made an invocation. Swan was busy – delighted by what the light revealed – and yet conscious in his opium-soaked mind that she was speaking Greek backwards. He couldn’t seem to get her sense. But he was sure that her ecstatic ay-ie-rick! was kyrie!

  And when erotic delirium and opium caused him to recite poetry – silently – she sat up on his chest. ‘Sappho!’ she cried, loud enough to wake the house. ‘I love Sappho!’

  Through the delirium came the clear thought that she could read lips. Many Italians could, but she was very good, to pick out his mumbled Greek. He noted that down for future reference, and was lost again in her …

  When she was done, she ran a finger along the tip of his penis and rubbed his semen on her star. Her too-bright eyes never left him. ‘Now you are mine,’ she said.

  Swan might have been terrified, but near-death, wine, opium, fatigue and months of chastity had granted him magical powers not normally given to men, and he had no intention of wasting them on talk or fear for his immortal soul.