Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Volume Six

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Tell me,’ he said to Kendal.

  Kendal was silent for a bit. The sound of combat was shrill, loud, omnipresent – men were killing and dying all around them.

  ‘Everyone clear?’ Di Silva asked. Then, close by Swan’s side, he said, ‘We’re letting the Turkish galley sink. The chain is cut. Orietto and Columbino have boarded the hoy – the Turkish round ship there.’

  Swan could vaguely sense a dark, tall boat to the north and upstream.

  At the same time, he could also see that cutting the chain was having an effect. The current was now dragging both sides of the severed chain and all the boats attached downstream, so that the Turkish fleet seemed to be opening like a pair of doors.

  Swan desperately wanted to rub his eye.

  The hoy was moving away, dragged by current and breeze towards the northern bank.

  ‘Anything we can fire our guns at?’ Swan asked.

  Orders were shouted, and Swan had the curious experience of being ignored while being in command.

  They’d written him off. Kendal wanted him to get out of his harness.

  In fact, he could see more every few minutes.

  Kendal was still talking, describing the battle.

  ‘The Hungarians are all aboard,’ he said. ‘They just scrambled in. Our boats is hanging back, like.’

  ‘You mean, following the battle plan and using their guns,’ Swan said.

  Kendal spat audibly. ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Some of the downstream Turkish boats is cutting free of the chain, and there’s more Turkish boats – here, not so fast!’ he cried. ‘By all the saints, I have it wrong. There’s a dozen big boats coming upstream out of Belgrade,’ he said. ‘Hunyadi’s flag just flew off the bow of the lead ship. She’s big – as big as this one.’

  Swan put a hand over his left eye and had a look.

  He had to say that the odds looked better.

  ‘Lay us for this ship,’ he said, pointing to a Turkish river galley that seemed to be holding the centre of the ragged Turkish line. ‘Ladislav – fire at her.’

  It took effort, and he felt more tired than he could ever remember being, but he managed to convince Kendal to give the orders to the German captain. The man cursed and summoned St Jacob to his aid, but the tiller turned and the head of the ship came up to the wind and Ladislav’s beloved gun lined up with the Turkish river galley.

  The portfire swept down and the gun roared, and the breeze, blowing across the shot, took the veil of smoke away as fast as a dancer’s veil in a taverna.

  The little galley was already sinking, her back broken with a single shot.

  Beyond her, Hungarian foot soldiers with pole-arms were storming the Turkish works where Capalitti’s guns had blown a breach ten paces wide.

  Turks – hundreds of them – were leaping into the water – or struggling to cut their chains and get free of the doomed line. Swept against the bank, several smaller Turkish ships were being stormed by the Hungarian soldiers on the north shore, or pounded with crossbow bolts and harquebus balls.

  The big round ship, itself probably a Genoese or German ocean-going hoy, was the last serious Turkish defence on the north side of the stream – and the Hunyadi fleet from the city were slamming into the rear of the Turkish line on the south side, just where the fighting seemed fiercest.

  ‘You ain’t going again,’ Kendal said.

  ‘Ain’t I?’ Swan answered in his best London accent. He had the left eye covered in cotton from a dead man’s pourpoint and then had his head wrapped, and his blood-filled armet was put back on his head.

  ‘You can’t!’ Kendal said, pulling his own sallet over his head in surrender.

  The hoy’s sides towered above the German ship’s, and both ships were more nearly round than they could credit, with a steep tumble home at the top of the hull so that while the side of the two ships touched when they slammed together, it was twelve feet from gunwale to gunwale.

  The Turks were trying to retake the main deck. The forecastle was held by the Christians, and the aftercastle by the Turks, and the main deck between was a sticky hell of blood and intestine, corpse and dented armour.

  It was too far to leap.

  Di Silva was all but bouncing in his armour, so eager was he to come to grips. ‘I can see Columbino!’ he said.

  In truth, the Italian knight was fighting like a man possessed of the strength and skill of a paladin of old – his sword moved like a swooping bird while his rotella covered his side.

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone rescued my sword,’ Swan said.

  ‘In your scabbard,’ Kendal muttered.

  Perhaps it was all the ship-fighting drills on Rhodos – or perhaps, with his vision occluded, Swan didn’t bother to watch the ferocious melee on the Turkish ship’s deck.

  He was moving up and down, and he saw the stern gallery – a long, three-sided catwalk with a low bulwark of its own running around the stern of the hoy, about eight feet from the water. It stuck out from the sides of the stern.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  ‘He is fucking wode,’ shouted Kendal, but Swan was moving. He ran into the bow, climbed out into the shrouds, and had the maddening experience of catching a sabaton on a frayed rope and standing for long, agonising seconds with his left foot high in the air. He told himself not to panic as he showed his arse to the foe, and arrows were lofted at him.

  He kicked, kicked again – and whatever small lame that held the twine let go, or the twine parted, and Swan all but fell. He had the presence of mind to push off with his feet, and he fell into the stern gallery of the enemy ship and his scabbard tangled between his legs and gave him a sharp blow in the privates that seemed to drive the air from his lungs and up into his throat.

  But despite all that he got to one knee and tried the hatch into the stern cabin and found it unlatched. He pushed through.

  Juan di Silva, Will Kendal and all the Hussites were with him before the pain had settled to a dull throb between his legs. The cabin they were in was opulent. Even Swan’s eyes were torn to the hanging lantern of solid gold, the silk cushions, the drapes – the beautiful woman lying on the divan …

  ‘Please, I am Christian,’ she begged. ‘Do not rape me. Please.’

  Swan gestured for her to be silent. ‘No one touches her,’ he said. ‘Or the gold. It’s ours and we’ll come back for it.’ He nodded to the Christian woman, trying to be pleasant, but she flinched and cowered away, and a glance in the quizzing glass that hung on one of the cabin walls showed a huge blood-encrusted steel monster in a closed armet.

  Above them was a cacophony of shouts and foot-stamping – all very Turkish. The roof of the cabin was the quarterdeck of the hoy.

  Swan turned to Ladislav. ‘Shoot up through the planks,’ he said.

  Ladislav grinned. ‘I like this,’ he said.

  Swan shifted his attention to Di Silva. ‘When I open that door,’ he said, pointing at the hatch to the main deck, ‘we will be behind the Turks.’

  Di Silva drew his sword and looked at him in complete comprehension. ‘You are a man after my own heart,’ he said. ‘I might even call you a man of Portugal.’

  Both men lowered their visors. With one eye patched closed and his visor down, Swan was very nearly blind again.

  He drew his sword.

  Will Kendal, for the first time that day, strung his great bow. The cabin was small enough that he had to perform a complex squat to loose it, but he managed. Swan looked at him, used the fingers of his left hand to manipulate the catch on the door, and pulled.

  Will Kendal loosed five arrows as fast as a boy could count to five.

  Swan stepped past him into chaos.

  Darkness had fallen by the time they cleared the hoy – and not once but twice, Turkish vessels fought their way upstream and launched desperate attempts to retake it, and in the first counter-assault the German ship was cut away from them. There was little choice but to raise sail and use the breeze to fight the current or be swept dow
nstream into Turkish territory – and suddenly they were alone.

  On the south side of the river, the Turks shifted one of their heavy batteries and began firing into their own ships and the crusader ships, to deadly effect – one of the Hunyadi ships went down with every knight and man-at-arms aboard.

  Swan could remember sitting on a looted stool amidships with his back to the mast, a cocked crossbow by his side, and the Christian slave close by him. Then, at some point, the second wave of Turks hit them, and suddenly his crossbow was broken and so was his sword blade. And when the second attack was beaten away, the cable had been cut, and now the big round ship was drifting.

  Swan was in a heavy ship with a cargo of dead men, a handful of Christian knights, six Hussites, three Englishmen, and not a single sailor. They were adrift on the Danube and downstream was a Turkish army of a hundred thousand, and among them, Omar Reis.

  Swan called them all together. ‘Anyone been to sea?’ he asked.

  Di Silva had a wound in his left side, but it was not mortal, and he had a deep cut in his upper leg – he hadn’t worn leg harness. ‘I have been to sea,’ he said.

  Swan smiled tenderly at the Spaniard. ‘You, my friend, are not in a condition to be much help. All right – strip the Turks and get them over the side. Can anyone swim? Besides me?’

  The Englishmen – Bigelow and Willoughby had followed them aboard – shook their heads. Kendal was having a Turkish arrow extracted from his foot by one of the Bohemians. A bizarre, deadly fight had raged in the aft cabin – the Hussites shooting through the ceiling of the cabin, the surviving Turkish archers shooting down into the dark, and finally Kendal loosing his heavy arrows up through the shattered timbers. In the end, the combination of gunfire and heavy war-bow arrows – and better cover – had shattered the Turks, and the last dozen had jumped into the Danube and swum for the friendly shore.

  ‘I can swim,’ Kendal said dully.

  Ser Columbino lay on the deck in a state of complete exhaustion, having fought, without pause, for almost an hour in armour. ‘I can swim,’ he muttered.

  The Hussites all shook their heads.

  ‘Von Nymandus could swim,’ Ladislav said.

  The German was dead, and his armoured corpse lay on the deck.

  Swan blew air out through his mouth, puffing his cheeks in exasperation.

  He looked down at the slave woman. ‘Greek?’ he asked, in that language.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘God be praised.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Can you by any chance swim?’ he asked.

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘All my life.’

  Swan took a deep breath. ‘God be praised indeed,’ he said. ‘Give me the end of the anchor cable.’ In Greek, ‘What’s your name, woman?’

  ‘Mary, lord.’ She was trying to cover herself, as she was dressed in very little, and was aware that even the wounded men coveted her. Swan suspected she’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.

  ‘I need you to take this rope, as quick as ever you can,’ he said in Greek. ‘See the light just there?’

  ‘That is almost two hundred paces!’ she said.

  ‘Are you a good swimmer?’ he asked.

  ‘For my life and freedom?’ she asked. ‘Maybe the best.’ Her looks were fierce – not cowed. Swan wanted to hug her, but decided that would not suit the occasion.

  ‘You will let me be free?’ she said, like a tigress.

  Swan nodded. ‘I give you my word,’ he said.

  ‘I will do it.’ She put a hand to her breast and produced a cross. ‘I swear by Christ.’

  ‘Get the rope to that shore and tie it to anything,’ Swan said. ‘Best of all, the pier under the castle. I think that’s where all the men are standing.’

  Di Silva had a length of light line – probably the flag halyard – tied to the anchor cable, and now he brought it to Swan and the slave woman. She took the rope, tied it around her waist, kicked off her slippers, and nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and leaped.

  By luck, she leapt when the port side faced the city of Belgrade, but the ship began to turn in the current. They were in the eddy opposite the castle, and Swan watched with apprehension for her head to come up to the surface. The surface of the water looked … stretched – as if it was too tight for the water – and Swan knew from the Thames that meant a heavy flow and a difficult eddy.

  When she broke the surface, she was sixty paces away and swimming like a porpoise.

  He tried the tiller but it was a dead weight under his hand – he could no more steer a drifting round ship than a rock.

  Di Silva bit his lips in pain and then said, ‘I do not want to be captured.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Me neither,’ he said.

  They were moving past the city and the fortress. In the darkness, it was clear that much of the lower town was afire, and now there were breaches in the upper walls. Trebuchets in the Ottoman lines threw flaming missiles across the sky. A great gun roared – and the ship under them shuddered.

  ‘Santiago!’ Di Silva grunted. ‘That hit us.’

  ‘The Turks can see us,’ Swan said. He pursed his lips.

  He leaned out over the bow and saw several hundred Turks gathering along the shore. They had already grabbed half a dozen of the own drifting ships out of the current, and they were waiting for this one.

  Swan also realised that if the ship spun any more, the swimming girl’s line would either foul or drag her under.

  He found the sweeps buried under the dead, stored along the heavy bulwarks to port and starboard, and he pushed unwilling men to the sweeps, a dozen ports, each tiny oar port set clumsily high in the ship’s side.

  ‘How can we row?’ Di Silva asked.

  ‘Sweeps,’ Swan roared, in useless English. ‘Stay standing. Like this!’

  Despite his eye and the burning pain in his shoulder and all his exhaustion, he didn’t want to die or to fall into the hands of Omar Reis. He let his oar-blade bite deep and then walked towards the bow, pushing with all his strength. Di Silva understood. Ser Columbino clambered to his feet. Willoughby grabbed an oar, as did Bigelow. Other men – Columbino’s squire, and Orietto’s two pages – their knight had been carried, wounded, back aboard the German ship – all grabbed oars.

  After a long minute they had her head around and facing back downstream.

  He showed them how to reverse their oars. He scrambled to the tiller and Di Silva, despite his wounds, was their makeshift timoniere, and their ragged stroke moved the hoy perhaps ten inches back upstream against the current. But the second stroke was better, and the third a little better yet.

  Swan looked aft, down the line of the rope. He could not see a thing. He dared not pull on the rope for fear he would tow the girl under or pull her from her destination.

  She was carrying the weight of a lot of line tired to the anchor cable – the lightest line they could find, but too heavy for a slim woman.

  The stroke was more regular now. Swan tried to line up a light on shore with one of the stern posts.

  They were still headed downstream.

  And then …

  He could feel the line being pulled with a will, and the paid end of the anchor cable went shooting by him.

  ‘Pull!’ Swan screamed. He knew if they were moving too fast when the rope went taut, it would all be for nothing – the light line they’d sent with the girl would snap.

  Ten tired, desperate men, most of them wounded.

  Di Silva began to croak out a song – the song, in fact, that the company sang every morning when there wasn’t mass. It was a simple song about a man watching a girl watch cows – a French song for an Italian company.

  The long sweeps went back, and bit, and moved forward together.

  The line continued to run aft.

  Swan let go of the tiller and ran for the capstan. He managed to get to it before the line ran off and opened the ratchet so that it could turn freely. Somewhere ashore, they were pulling with a
will.

  ‘Pull!’ called Di Silva. He was standing in a pool of his own blood to row.

  Swan got one of the bars seated home in the capstan and then another. They weren’t flying around, but they turned too fast and he had to duck.

  It was all guesswork – a three-dimensional problem in geometry. The girl swum ashore with three hundred paces of light line tied to his anchor cable. Then the men ashore were pulling anchor cable off the capstan, and at some point, if the rowing was strong enough, the men ashore would get to the bitter end of the anchor cable – get it in their hands, and they would belay it.

  When would he know that had happened?

  He just wanted to lie on the bloody deck and go to sleep.

  Then he came up with the practical solution – he didn’t need to do anything. At some point, the men pulling from shore and the motion of the vessel would take the last coil off the capstan, and they’d be hard up against the true bitter end. And then, either the cable would break – or they’d pull themselves into Belgrade on the capstan.

  Swan left the capstan, which was turning freely, and took Di Silva’s sweep from his hands – almost against the Spaniard’s will.

  But the man slumped to the deck, and Swan managed to dip, bite and pull without wrecking the tempo.

  ‘I think we’re going backwards!’ called one of the pages.

  Swan pulled, but watched the capstan. After three more pulls, the rowing was easier, and the capstan stopped with a jerk. Almost every man was thrown flat.

  ‘Man the capstan,’ Swan shouted. Then he had to show them what a capstan was. They were all soldiers and men-at-arms, but as soon as he touched the capstan he knew the cable had not parted – yet. He threw his weight against the bars and in a moment they heard a click as the ratchet passed one revolution.

  ‘Nothing to fear now,’ he called. ‘All we have to do is wind our way home!’

  As if to belie his words, a shower of arrows fell on the main deck. One of the pages was killed instantly, and suddenly, close by, a cannon spoke – a sharp, high crack – and a ball passed through the deck near Swan’s feet. He took a splinter in the back of his unarmoured thigh, a hand’s breadth from his genitals, and he flinched.