Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Six: Chios tsathosg-6

by Christian Cameron

  Fra Domenico had said it — For the first minutes, the Sturmy will be alone against all their ships.

  The sun had not quite left the sky when the Turkish ships leapt to ramming speed. The Sturmy was under full sail, her round hull ploughing the water at a third of the speed of one of the order’s galleys or one of the charging Turks — a speed that was pitifully slow. Swan regretted allowing Sturmy to risk his ship, which was going to be hulled by half a dozen rams, anyway.

  And behind them, the order’s galleys huddled in the broad wake of the big English merchant as if they were terrified of the Turkish onslaught.

  Swan put a hand on the German sword at his waist and felt its hilt, which he already loved. It was light and responsive — heavy on the hip, but light in the hand. He had on all his armour. His leg harnesses were killing him — all he could imagine was that his legs had grown again.

  Amidships, the Burgundian gun crews stood over their low gonnes — which the crew had christened ‘right pig’ and ‘left pig’ because they did look a little like feeding pigs. Slow match burned, as it did aboard the Turkish ships, and every sailor who could be spared had his English longbow to hand. Peter had his on the deck beside him, despite his armour and assumed air of knightly prowess.

  Swan was playing the role of ship commander. In fact, he never gave an order — it was Sturmy’s ship, and Shipman was clearly the true captain, and the two men worked together with the ease of long and sometimes bitter familiarity.

  Neither seemed concerned about the encounter.

  The lead Turks came on. They had now formed into two lines. The lead line was going to ram the English round ship, and the following line was going to pass to the north and south of the wreck and attack the order’s galleys.

  Just as Fra Domenico had predicted.

  Swan glanced at the ring on his finger. It sparkled like Fra Diablo’s eyes as he gave the orders.

  When Swan thought about the ring, his roguish notions of cleverness were largely rendered squalid by the excellence of Domenico’s gesture.

  And he thought — Well, if I go to the bottom, so does the ring. Take that, Drappierro. But at another level, he had to ask — Why did he just give it to me? Eight thousand ducats?

  As always seemed to happen in a sea fight, time began to compact. One moment, he had all the time in the world to empty his bladder and check the hang of his sword, to try to adjust the fit of his left leg-armour, because the greave was grinding into his instep somehow — and the next, the Turks were ten ship lengths away, at full racing speed, the grunts of their rowers audible over the darkening sea.

  Swan drew his sword.

  Sturmy put a hand on his arm. ‘You might put it away,’ he said with a smile. ‘Yon heathen will never make it near my deck.’

  Swan nodded sheepishly and sheathed his sword.

  He spent the last minute going forward to stand with the other ‘knights’ in the forecastle.

  Peter grunted at him. He pointed at the Turks, close enough to touch.

  ‘Fucking Idiots,’ he said.

  The first Turk struck them, his narrow profile almost lost behind the high bows of the English ship. But his ram, mounted above the waterline, struck the English ship like a hammer.

  Against an anvil.

  The Turkish ship was at full speed, and she struck hard enough to kill the Katherine Sturmy’s way for a heartbeat, but the masts held.

  The Turkish ship bounced.

  It bounced so hard that its mainmast came down, slewing the whole galley — the bow came round sharply, exposing the long fragile broadside to the impact of the Sturmy’s forefoot, and she ground the Turkish galley under her like a great lady treading on a snake. The Turk rolled, took on water, and was broken in half — all in three heartbeats — and every one of her two hundred Christian slaves died in ten more.

  Katherine Sturmy swept on, for all the world like an aristocratic lady in a great hall, moving slowly and with vast canvas dignity.

  The second Turk was caught in the ruin of the first — too close to turn, he ended by ramming the sinking galley and Katherine Sturmy needn’t have crushed his oars, but she did as she passed. The wreck of the dead Turk was already dragging his ram down, trapping the second ship the way a drowning man might kill his rescuer.

  The next three Turks turned away.

  The archers amidships began to have targets, and the quarter-pound arrows began to rise like lethal gulls to fall — the full weight of the sea breeze behind them — on the hapless Turks. With just a dozen archers, the Katherine Sturmy’s men — forty feet above the Turkish decks — began to inflict a catastrophe.

  Right Pig belched fire.

  Peter, the only archer in the forecastle, leaned out and loosed. ‘You could stop pounding my back and lend a hand, Englishman!’ Peter barked.

  Swan found he was grinning like a fool. He got his Turkish bow up — his arms felt like lead in arm harnesses — but he fought off his fatigue and began to rain arrows into the Turkish galleys far below as they passed.

  Left Pig barked — and a Turkish galley’s mast fell in two. It was, in fact, a wild shot. But the shot clipped the mast fifteen feet above the deck, and the whole sail fell over the rowers. They were still fighting to get the canvas off their faces when the Blessed Saint John ended their struggle, ramming them. Blessed Saint John cut the Turk in half and carried through, oars in tight, and the drowning rowers screamed as the halves filled with water. Chained to their benches, they went down with the wreck.

  The fight was never close, and quickly took on the air of a massacre. One Turkish ship ran inshore and took the full weight of the artillery mounted high in the Mytilini fortress, as though all of Prince Dorino’s frustration was to be vented in one fall of shot.

  Each of the order’s galleys killed one Turkish galley, as if their professional reputations demanded an equal share of the kills, but Blessed Saint John ran the Turkish squadron flagship down, well upwind. The two ships lay side by side for half an hour, wreathed in smoke from small arms, while the rest of the order’s galleys hunted other prey or rescued the handful of Christian slaves who could swim and were not chained. The Katherine Sturmy was out of the fight as soon as the Turks learned not to close with her. She couldn’t catch any of them, and couldn’t point close enough to the wind to give chase, anyway.

  Before the last two Turks vanished over the horizon, Master Shipman had turned the ship and was running down the wind — waddling down, Swan thought — towards the gap in the breakwater. They entered the harbour with the rising of the moon, and dropped anchor to the cheers of thousands of townspeople, Greek and Latin, gathered on the beaches and on the slopes under the fortress.

  Swan hadn’t redrawn his sword. He had loosed half a hundred arrows, but he was elated instead of exhausted. He couldn’t stop moving — he helped the English sailors unload the guns and started on their cargo.

  Blessed Saint John was the last ship into the harbour. Every other ship cheered her — she had killed two Turkish galleys and taken a third by boarding, her knights moving in a thin red line across the Turkish decks until the last desperate — and demonically brave — Turk was cut down. The captured galleys were towed to mooring and their freed crews swam ashore into a riot of celebration.

  Swan waited for the Blessed Saint John to land, stern first. He could tell from the way she was rowed that she’d lost men — the oars weren’t fully manned.

  He held a rope while the ship beached. He waited with the first rush of oarsmen coming ashore, and then, when he heard what they had to say, he ran up a ladder and went aboard.

  Fra Domenico was by the mainmast amidships. His head was in Fra Tommaso’s lap, and his eyes sparkled like the ring’s jewel. The whole right side of his breastplate was caved in, and no one had even tried to remove it.

  His brilliant eyes met Swan’s.

  Swan bowed, and he found that his eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Ah!’ Domenico whispered. ‘The English spy. Or
prince.’ He laughed, and coughed, and blood sprayed across the deck. ‘You know, as long as I wore the ring, I was invincible, eh?’ He nodded.

  Fra Tommaso pointed at the ring. Swan took it from his own finger and held out to the other man, but the dying man pushed him away with surprising strength.

  ‘Yours now, boy. I go to meet my god. I have left no sins untried, nor am I a humble and contrite heart, but by our lord, I have beaten the enemies of the faith like a drum.’ He smiled. A long sigh escaped him, and Swan thought he was dead.

  But the man’s eyes rolled open. ‘And if we were wrong — if killing in war is murder …’ He laid his head back. ‘Then I console myself that Christ died even for such as I.’ His smile changed its character. ‘Tell the English they were beautiful. Will you tell them, Master Swan?’

  ‘I will, my lord.’

  Domenico’s smile was now almost too much to bear. He raised the jewelled cross on his breast and touched it to his lips, and looked at Tommaso. ‘I am not afraid,’ he said.

  And died.

  After a while, Fra Tommaso put the dead knight’s head on the deck. He turned to the two Venetian knights. ‘Are we agreed that we follow the rest of his plan?’ Tommaso asked.

  Fra Giovanni nodded. ‘First, because he was who he was.’ The Venetian shrugged. ‘Secondly, because it is still the best plan.’

  Later, Swan half carried Tommaso into his room at the hostel. The older man was so far gone — fatigue, and sorrow, and a small wound on his left thigh — that he could scarcely walk. Outside, the town celebrated as if it were Easter. It almost was, if you were a Frank.

  Recklessly, Swan poured his mentor a cup of wine, and the older knight drank it off. He stared out at the revellers just outside his window.

  He turned his head, and by the fitful candlelight, Swan could see that the other man was crying.

  Swan put a hand on his shoulder — embarrassed as children are when parents show weakness. But Tommaso pushed him away. ‘What if it is for nothing?’ the old man asked the darkness. ‘What if Drappierro is right, and we’d be better to sail away and leave them to surrender?’

  Swan sighed. He’d wondered the same thing, even as his arrows plucked lives. He thought of all the Turks he knew — and admired. And all the Italians he detested.

  But he didn’t suggest any such thing. Instead, he straightened and said, ‘It can’t be for nothing. Fra Domenico …’

  Tommaso turned back to the darkness. ‘Lived by the sword, and died by it. Bah — be gone, boy. Go drink wine, or worse. I’m in a black mood, and I’ll console myself in the usual way.’

  Swan went to pour him more wine, and the old man managed a slight smile.

  ‘Prayer, foolish boy. Be gone.’ He put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘We’ll play this through to the end in the morning. Eh? I know you won’t do it, but I’d recommend some sleep.’ He sniffed. ‘Or a bath. Do I smell fish?’

  Swan left the knight on his knees.

  Fra Tommaso knew him all too well, and the bells at midnight found him on the slope under the castello, drinking his third cup of wine with a dozen English sailors. Shipman had his arm around Swan’s waist, and said, ‘Just come aboard and we’ll see you home, Master Swan. These foreigners are no friends, let me tell you, for all you’ve steered us through ’em like a ship through reefs and sands. Eh, Master Richard?’

  Richard Sturmy had his arm around his wife, a tall, brown-haired woman who looked very much in charge of her own destiny. She dropped a pretty, straight-backed curtsy and said, ‘Your servant, Master Swan.’

  Swan gave her a bow.

  ‘If my husband is to be believed, we owe you a real debt,’ she said. She smiled to show she was teasing. ‘I came for adventure, and I confess I’ve had a good deal more adventure than I wanted. But our thanks are genuine.’

  Master Richard nodded. ‘Anything for you, Master Swan. Any time. That alum will make my fortune.’

  Swan nodded. ‘There are — to be frank — three things you could do for me. And one is to take my mother a letter.’

  If they were shocked to hear that a gentleman of the order had a mother at an inn in Southwark, none of them gave themselves away by midnight torchlight, although Katherine’s twelve-year-old girl shrieked and asked her mother, ‘Aren’t they all whores in Southwark? Pater says so!’

  And Master Shipman laughed. ‘I’ll take it,’ he said. ‘I know the Swan quite well.’ He shook his head. ‘I probably know your mum, lad.’

  Swan laughed, because social embarrassment was the farthest thing from his mind. ‘She owns the place,’ he said.

  ‘Christ on the cross!’ exclaimed Master Shipman. ‘You mum’s Ann the Swan of Southwark?’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Swan said. He knew his mother would be flattered to hell and back to know that men stood on a beach in Greece and spoke of her inn.

  ‘And the second thing?’ Sturmy asked.

  Swan shrugged. ‘I noticed you have a small wherry on your decks. I need her.’

  Shipman looked pained, but he nodded. ‘Can you handle her?’ he asked. ‘We brought her all the way from the Thames!’

  Swan shrugged. ‘I stole a dozen of them as a boy,’ he admitted. ‘I’d also like a small cask, and some tallow.’

  ‘Tallow we have.’ Sturmy laughed.

  Eventually, it was all too much for him — their gratitude, the matter of his mother, and their offers to take him home. He sent a taverna boy for pen and parchment, paid in good silver, and sat on a camp stool to write a letter that would cross many thousands of miles before it reached his mother — if ever.

  ‘Dear Mater,

  You may be surprised that I am still alive …’ he began. He grinned, feeling a little better, and wrote on for almost half an hour, until the small blond girl came shyly to his elbow. She watched him write. She’d been asleep twice, but now was awake because cannon had been fired out over the harbour — at first, men thought it was an alarm, but it proved just the garrison clearing loads from the day.

  ‘You write very well,’ the girl said.

  Swan nodded. He was almost done.

  ‘You said you was writing your mater, but that says “Messire Drappiero”.’

  Swan glared at her.

  ‘The princess in the fortress …’ Hannah Sturmy paused. ‘She said if I met the English knight, I was to give him this. But I think my mother won’t approve.’ Young Hannah looked at him — a frank appraisal, as if trying to work out why her mother might not approve.

  It took Swan several moments to work it out — he was composing something very carefully. He looked up. ‘At the palace?’ he asked.

  ‘You smell really bad,’ Miss Sturmy said.

  Swan managed a laugh. He rose and stretched and caught a whiff of his own smell, and wrinkled his nose.

  ‘By Saint George,’ he said to Hannah. ‘I am rather foul.’ He saw her mother close at hand, by the family fire. ‘Goodwife Sturmy?’ he called out, dusting sand from the beach under his feet on the small square of parchment. Then he used the seal he’d pocketed from Fra Tommaso’s room.

  ‘I think we are gossips, now, Master Swan — you being from Southwark just as we.’ She nodded graciously. ‘Londoners or near enough.’ She curtsied. ‘You may call me Katherine. Or even Kat.’

  He nodded, warmed by the accent — the exact accent — of home. ‘Please call me Tom,’ he said.

  He smiled at Hannah, and the child looked at her mother. ‘I have a note. For Master Swan. But that’s wrong, isn’t it? From a lady, I mean.’

  Goodwife Sturmy took the note from her daughter and placed it in Master Swan’s hands.

  ‘But I cannot receive notes from men!’ Hannah muttered. She rolled her eyes like twelve-year-old girls the world over.

  Katherine Sturmy looked, for a moment, like her namesake in the harbour. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You may not, Hannah Sturmy.’ She allowed herself the slightest smile at Master Swan, although there was disapproval there, too.
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  Swan made himself finish his letter to his mother, although he longed to read the note and rush off. In truth, he knew that the Sturmys had left the palace shortly after the battle. The note was six hours old.

  He kissed Katherine Sturmy’s cheeks and embraced Richard Sturmy. He embraced half a dozen sailors and Master Shipman, and then, free at last, he wandered down the hill towards the torchlit tavernas open along the beach. The night was still full of revellers.

  He read the note.

  I will wait. Find me.

  Fatigue fell away from him.

  Where would she wait? The palace? He walked up the winding road, almost half a mile around the great stone bulk of the fortress and its many bastions. There were revellers everywhere, and just short of the torchlit main gatehouse, he found what he’d hoped for — twenty noblemen and women gathered in the softly lit darkness under the great walls. He watched them from a distance for a long minute — but none of them was the woman he sought. He went into the gatehouse, and was passed without question — he was still, he was shocked to find, in his breast and back plate and his red surcoat.

  Halfway into the inner ward, his elation and his energy deserted him. Suddenly the sword on his hip was a grinding spit of iron, and the armour was a prison, and every muscle in his back and shoulders whined and moaned or screamed in agony. He paused, and for a moment he considered simply sitting under the wall and going to sleep.

  Sleep.

  He looked up the hill of the great fortress’s interior from the main gate. But the palazzo was dark — even the cressets at the doors were extinguished.

  He turned and began to walk down the cobbles to the gatehouse. It suddenly seemed very far, and he felt very foolish. In fact, he laughed aloud.

  His feet were loud on the stones.

  He emerged from the gatehouse and turned to look at the aristocrats and their party, but they weren’t people he knew — he saw one older man from the festival at the palace, but the others were strangers — and he couldn’t very well ask whether they’d seen a princess of the blood wandering loose.