Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Two: Venice (8 page)

In the morning, he went to his room and found an oiled silk envelope that weighed two pounds. With it was a scroll tube sealed with a red seal in heavy wax.

Swan took them both. He put the silk envelope into the wicker basket with his armour.

He watched the basket and his heavy leather bag swayed up over the side of the state galley
Nike
, and down on to the deck before going down into the shallow hold under the rowers.

‘We’ll sail after matins,’ said the mate, a young Venetian aristocrat with a full beard. ‘Good to have a couple of knights aboard. Will you fight as marines if we have a scrap?’

‘Of course,’ Alessandro said. ‘Show us our stations.’ He turned to Swan. ‘I’m going to assume you were attacked,’ he said.

‘Not exactly,’ Swan answered.

He told the story and Alessandro laughed his unpleasant laugh. ‘So – for all you know, you attacked an innocent man,’ he said.

Swan shrugged.

‘I don’t think so, either,’ Alessandro said. ‘But next time, leave someone alive, eh, Barbarossa?’

As Alessandro’s harness and arms were swayed aboard, Swan saw that he had a long sword, four feet of steel with a heavy cross-guard, a long hilt and a spiked pommel.

Giannis had one, too.

Giannis saw what he was looking at and leaned over. ‘In a ship fight, it is good to have reach and power,’ he said.

Alessandro opened Swan’s basket. ‘Fine armour. Milanese. Does it fit?’

‘Well enough,’ Swan said. ‘Better than the stuff I wore at Castillon.’

Swan had been to sea – twice – in great ships. A galley was a very different ride. He was close to the water, and it felt faster and more personal.

As a ‘knight’ in the train of an ambassador, he rode in the captain’s luxurious ‘coach’ with eight other men – the bishop, his two priests, the captain, the mate, their two men-at-arms who were well-born Venetians training for the sea, and Alessandro.

After one very uncomfortable night, Swan joined Giannis under the awning. The deck was as hard as rock, but the space to roll over was better than a feather bed. The third night, Peter showed them both how to rig a cloak as a ring for the hips, and Swan slept well.

They put in almost every night after the first week at sea. They touched in Dalmatia, every day, and down to Ithaca and Corfu. Then they turned east, and they were in a sea that was supposed to be friendly, because Venice and the Turks were at peace.

But Ser Marco, the captain of the galley, was very watchful. He was different from the aristocrats that Swan had seen in France. He was very professional, and he was on deck at all hours. He had grey in his beard, and no front teeth – when he smiled, he looked like a drunken bully Tom had known in his youth. But there was nothing drunken in his style on deck. He was demanding, and his men loved him.

He was also very cautious. He seemed to expect pirates from every headland. He made them practise arming and disarming every day. Every day at dawn he had all the marines and all the archers on deck, fully armed, unless they were in port. When he discovered how good Alessandro was, he had the young nobleman direct a sword exercise – every day, rain or shine, on the gangway down the centre of the ship.

The ports were pleasant – small towns, carefully fortified. The Venetian fortifications were always modern and well maintained. The guards of their garrisons turned out with a flourish.

Venice took care of its overseas empire, that much was obvious.

On the west coast of the Peloponnese, Genoa still held sway, and the Venetian galley stayed out to sea and didn’t touch land except for headlands. Swan stayed on deck all the time, watching the distant shore and trying to guess what part of the classical world they were passing. That low-slung isthmus – was that Sphacteria? Was that towering summit Mount Olympus?

He got used to donning and wearing armour. He fenced with Alessandro every morning, and with Giannis, and with the three Venetian men-at-arms. The oarsmen would watch them, sometimes wager, and always offer raucous comments. They were
not
slaves.

Around Attica, they put in at Piraeus, and the scarred Parthenon towered in the distance.

‘I must see it,’ Swan said. Cesare agreed, and when the
capitano
said they had a day, the two men rented mules and rode up from the port to the ruins of Athens. The Dukes of Athens maintained a residence on the summit of the Acropolis, but the duke wasn’t present. Swan climbed to the summit of the Acropolis in a state of near-awe, and stood on the steps of the Parthenon, looking up at its dazzling white stone, the miraculously intact roof, the carved coffers in the ceiling, the frieze of endless, marvellous statues – the gateway . . .

He spent three hours wandering the crown of the Acropolis. Cesare sat down in the shade of an ancient olive tree.

‘Too damned hot. Enjoy yourself,’ he said.

On the way back, Cesare cursed his mule, and then said, ‘You really love all that.’

‘It is
right there
,’ Swan said. ‘It’s . . . as if Pericles might come out and speak.’

Cesare shook his head. ‘Insects and hot sunlight and greedy peasants,’ he said. ‘Much like home, but without the good wine and the taverns. And the cities and the money and the good roads.’

‘I copied down some of the epitaphs,’ Swan said excitedly. ‘Aeschylus!’

‘You sound as if you didn’t believe he was real before.’ Cesare shook his head.

‘
The long haired Persians remember me in the grove of Marathon
,’ Swan quoted. He looked at his tablets. ‘The wax is melting,’ he said, disgusted. ‘I copied one about another solider – Diodorus something. Fought in Egypt.’ He looked at the Italian. ‘Yes. It seems more real here than in England.’

Cesare shook his head. ‘And you waited tables in an inn? What a fascinating country England must be.’

At Naxos, the bishop, who hardly ever showed his face on deck, went to pay a visit to the Duke of Naxos, who was, of course, a Venetian.

The Bishop of Ostia was a papal courtier. It was not his first trip outside of Rome, but one would never have guessed it. The man’s world view was utterly dominated by Rome, and he seemed to feel that the world existed to serve the Pope, which, as Alessandro said, was going to make his visit to Constantinople very exciting.

Alessandro went with him to the Duke of Naxos. Swan looked at a temple of Apollo, paying two local men to be guides. He took Giannis, who was at least as bored as Cesare had been. The temple of Apollo was on an islet just off the coast. The local men spoke a dialect of Greek that Swan found incomprehensible at first, but by the end of the day he could joke with them and buy sausage from a woman in the streets of the principal city. While the bishop was feted in the palace, he sharpened his spoken Greek every day.

On the third day Cesare was summoned to the palace, and he joined Swan in the cool of the evening, sitting on a terrace – really the roof of a large taverna. ‘This is more like it,’ Cesare said, drinking wine and admiring the girl serving at the next table.

‘What did the bishop want?’

‘A letter to the Pope. He thinks he’s the legate. I think the Pope will not thank him for dabbling in local politics, but I’m a mere notary.’ Cesare knocked back his wine. ‘I met a monk – a Greek monk. We had a bit of a debate.’ He smiled. ‘I liked him and invited him to come over for a cup of wine.’

In fact, when the monk came, the tavern owner treated him with the kind of respect that an Italian tavern keeper kept for beautiful women and the very, very rich. The wine at their table was taken away, and replaced with a fresh pitcher that was, upon tasting, of much higher quality. The monk, who insisted that they call him Fra Demetrios, waved at the wine and said it was from Nemea.

‘With the lions,’ said Swan, in Greek.

Fra Demetrios laughed. ‘Not bad. You are Florentine?’

‘English,’ said Swan.

Fra Demetrios nodded. ‘Fine men, the English.’

‘You know England?’ asked Cesare.

‘I am from Lesvos,’ Fra Demetrios said. ‘The Gatelusi have maintained English soldiers to guard us from the Turks for . . . oh, I don’t know. A hundred years.’ He smiled. ‘The English are great pirates – but like good sheepdogs, they prey only on the wolves, eh?’

The wars of the Gatelusi led to the fall of Constantinople.

‘The end of everything,’ said Fra Demetrios, and he shrugged. ‘Venice does not yet realise with what she is dealing. The Turks are ten – twenty – fifty times as powerful as Venice. That foolish old man – Foscari – is busy fighting petty lordlings in Italy, and the Turks will take all Greece.’ He looked at a pair of Turkish soldiers lounging in the street. They were mercenaries, serving with the Duke of Naxos, but they were, nonetheless, Turks. ‘In truth, they have already conquered us. We merely await the axe.’

After another pitcher of wine, he laughed at Cesare’s pretensions to learning. ‘Any Greek monk has read
all
the ancients,’ he said. ‘Not just the bits that have wandered out of our libraries to the west.’

Cesare didn’t rise to the provocation, but smiled agreeably. ‘What texts do you have that we don’t?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I’ve read Aristotle.’

‘How many books?’ the monk asked.

‘Of Aristotle? All three.’ Cesare nodded. ‘
De Anima
,
Ethics
and
The Athenian Consitution
.’ He winked at Swan.

‘Three!’ said the monk. ‘By Saint George, my Latin friends, Aristotle wrote more than twenty books.’

By the fourth pitcher of wine, Demetrios was writing the titles of every Greek book he’d ever read on Cesare’s tablets.

In the market, Swan found tables of curios – dozens of classical seals and coins, as well as several small statues, rings, heads of gods, a bronze spearhead, a butt spike. He bought several of the seals, and the spearhead and butt spike.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘What will you do with this junk?’

Swan handed over a silver coin with the owl of Athena on one side and a magnificent head of the goddess on the other. Alessandro pursed his lips in appreciation. ‘That is pretty,’ he admitted.

‘Worth money in Rome?’ Swan asked.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’

Giannis looked at the coin. ‘You’ll find mountains of this old rubbish in Constantinople,’ he said.

‘How will we ship the cardinal’s things back to Rome?’ Swan asked.

Alessandro stroked his beard. ‘Christ on the cross, I had forgotten. The bishop has me dancing attendance every day – I think he imagines I actually work for him.’

Swan nodded. ‘Each port we’ve visited, they are expecting a Venetian squadron bringing soldiers.’

Alessandro shrugged. ‘I heard of it in Venice. Genoa is losing a great many towns. They’ll need garrisons.’

‘Galata, too?’ asked Swan.

‘I see where you are going. I’ll ask around.’ Alessandro nodded. ‘You think the troopships will go home empty?’

‘Even if there’s cargo, chances are we can get some space,’ Swan said.

If Swan thought that Ser Marco was cautious before Naxos, he redoubled that caution after they sailed for the Golden Horn. Twice they made long legs out to sea to avoid Turkish ships along the coast.

But off Samothrace, they ran into thick morning mist, and when the hot sun burned it off, they were hull up and in clear sight of a pair of galleys.

‘Arms!’ ordered the captain, and he put the ship about. ‘Nothing to worry about yet, friends. We are at peace.’

Peace or not, the ship’s archers were in the bow and stern in a hundred heartbeats, and the men-at-arms had their armour on deck in the grilling sun.

The Turkish galleys paced them. By the time Swan was armed, there was a galley on either side, a few hundred paces away, matching them oar for oar. The Englishman walked to the side, trying his arm harnesses, feeling his stomach press against his ribs.

Peter was leaning nonchalantly against the ship’s side, bending one of the archer’s bows. His own was strung, and he had twenty arrows stuck point up through his belt. He grinned at his master.

‘Look at this bow,’ he said. ‘It’s Turkish!’

The Italian archer nodded. ‘Horn, and sinew,’ he said.

‘As heavy as my bow,’ Peter said. ‘I would like very much to try it, when we are ashore.’

‘Perhaps we could have a little contest,’ said the Italian. ‘If we aren’t taken and enslaved in the next five minutes, of course.’ Swan admired the archer’s sangfroid – the Italians had various words for it, and Swan’s favourite was
sprezzatura
: effortless performance, whether of bravery or of swordsmanship of just the recitation of poetry. He smiled at the man, who nodded coolly. Then he smiled. ‘Best get your breastplate on.’

The ship’s trumpeter sounded a long note, and the drummer beat ‘To Arms’. Swan saw Alessandro beckoning. ‘He wants us all in the stern,’ Alessandro said.

Ser Marco had his eyes on the island to port. ‘I am gong to bear up and leave the island on our port side,’ he said. ‘It’s good sailing anyway, but it will force them to commit. If they want to continue flanking us, that bastard there will have to row across the wind.’ The farther Turk had a striped sail as big as a ship.

He gave the order, the timoneer repeated his orders, and the Venetian galley spun in the water and went due east.

The captain watched the Turks for a minute. ‘Very well. They’re coming for us,’ he said.

Swan didn’t see whatever it was that gave the captain this information, but his stomach flipped over again.

Alessandro nodded. He drew his long sword.

One of the ship’s men-at-arms turned to Swan. ‘Would you like a spear?’ he asked.

‘Of all things,’ Swan answered. He took a light partisan and a rotella, a steel shield a little more than two feet across and slightly convex. He strapped it on his arm, tried it, and heard a shout.

The farther Turk had turned and was coming straight for them.

The captain held up a hand. ‘Archers – whenever you have the range.’

Peter lofted the first shaft. He shot high, and the arrow went on the wind and vanished.

The Italian archer said something to Peter that made the Fleming laugh, and his bow came up and he loosed at a much lower angle. His arrow fell into the sea just short of the Turkish galley.