Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Three: Constantinople tsathosg-3 Read online

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Three: Constantinople

  ( Tom Swan and the Head of St George - 3 )

  Christian Cameron

  1450s France. A young Englishman, Tom Swan, is kneeling in the dirt, waiting to be killed by the French who've taken him captive.

  He's not a professional soldier. He's really a merchant and a scholar looking for remnants of Ancient Greece and Rome - temples, graves, pottery, fabulous animals, unicorn horns. But he also has a real talent for ending up in the midst of violence when he didn't mean to. Having used his wits to escape execution, he begins a series of adventures that take him to street duels in Italy, meetings with remarkable men - from Leonardo Da Vinci to Vlad Dracula - and from the intrigues of the War of the Roses to the fall of Constantinople.

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George

  Part Three: Constantinople

  Christian Cameron

  Foreword

  There’s something very . . . historical, about writing an historical serial for e-publication. If it’s been done recently, I haven’t heard about it, and yet it has impeccable historical credentials – before we had the epub, we had the magazine, and in that format Dumas did it, and Conan Doyle, and a host of other authors with magnificent credentials; Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, and Charles Dickens.

  It’s a fine format. Instead of a single pulse of seven hundred manuscript pages, the author can write in blocks with independent storylines that may still have an arc and a complex interweb of characters and motivations. I was resistant – but not for long.

  So here is Tom Swan, my first serial character. Tom is firmly based in history; Italy was full of itinerant Englishmen, especially soldiers, throughout the period, and so was Greece. I confess that the man who forms the basis for the character was not English but Italian – Cyriac of Ancona, sometimes known as the ‘Grandfather of Archaeology,’ who roved the Levant in search of antiquities and manuscripts that he could beg, borrow or steal for the Pope and other rich clients in their burning zeal to rediscover the ancient world. Ancient manuscripts were then, and remain, incredibly valuable; recent re-discovery of a complete text of Archimedes in a palimpsest shows that such manuscripts are still out there, and give us an idea of the kind of treasures for which Tom Swan – and Cyriac of Ancona – searched.

  If this serial has some success, I’ll write more – the format, as I say, is fun, and allows me to explore some nooks and crannies of history – and even some characters that I’d love to take to greater depth; Philokles, in the Tyrant series; Archilogos (Arimnestos’s Ionian adversary) in the Long War series; Geoffrey de Charny in the late Middle Ages – the list goes on and on. And I’ll add pieces rapidly – perhaps even one a month.

  Readers of my other books are aware that I’m a passionate re-enactor and also a military veteran, and that these experiences inform my writing. Those who are new to me deserve the following reassurance – I’ve worn the clothes and armour, and shot the bows, and rowed, and even ridden some of the horses. In the process of working as an intelligence professional, I met people who exercise real power every day, and I got an idea of how they work – and how history works. But I don’t do this in a vacuum and I receive an amazing level of support from friends, fellow re-enactors, veterans, academics crafts people and artists. In those last categories, I’d like to thank Dario Wielec, who drew the illustrations; he has a passion for historical detail that delights me every time I see his drawings, from any period, and you can see more of his stuff at http://dariocaballeros.blogspot.ca/. Finally, the ‘covers’ for the Tom Swan series are provided by Albion Swords, who are, to me, the premier manufacturers of accurate replica swords in North America. I use their products every day. How many people can say that – about swords?

  Chris Cameron

  Toronto, June 2012

  Tom Swan – Part Three: Constantinople

  Swan had the worst headache of his life. In fact, he found it hard to think, difficult to concentrate, almost impossible to understand what the people around him were saying.

  After a long time, he decided that he couldn’t understand them because he didn’t know the language they were speaking.

  After more time, he decided that they were speaking Turkish. But that made no sense, as they often used words he knew.

  How did I get here? he wondered. He was lying on a divan or a couch of some sort, at the edge of a bare-earth courtyard – like the receiving entrance of a great house. He lay there, watching, while a train of donkeys arrived with baskets of fruit, and then he went to sleep.

  Once awake, he realised that he was lying in the servant’s yard of a house. A house in Constantinople.

  What happened?

  He couldn’t seem to remember. He had gone riding with Idris. Met the man’s sister.

  After that – nothing.

  Damn.

  He went to sleep again.

  He woke again, and it was dark. Oil lamps lit a bare room, painted white, with the edges of the walls decorated in bright stucco. There were a dozen people eating on cushions at a low central table.

  ‘He’s awake!’ said a child’s voice.

  He looked at the foot of his couch, and saw a small black boy. He smiled – he couldn’t help himself, the boy was so small and imp-like. The boy smiled back.

  A tall African man rose from the table. He approached, and knelt by Swan’s low bed. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked, in slow Italian.

  Swan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  The African smiled, and the smile lit his face like an internal lamp. ‘Good! I feared that I hit you too hard.’

  Swan remembered the man – something about a message.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked.

  The African smiled. ‘Nowhere you need to remember,’ he said. ‘How do you feel?’

  Swan swung his feet to the floor, sat up, and groaned as the blood hit his head. ‘Argh,’ he moaned.

  The African snapped his fingers and a veiled woman brought him a tall pottery cup.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said.

  Swan drank.

  The drink had the same bitter salty taste as the stuff they’d drunk during the hawking – suddenly he remembered it all. Hawking, Khatun Bengül, the note.

  He met the African’s eyes, just as he realised who the man was.

  As the drink hit him.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Englishman,’ said the African. ‘We will not meet again.’

  When he came to, he was hot – boiling hot. His skin seemed to give off steam. He had oil on his skin – he could feel it. He smelled odd.

  His head was exceptionally clear. There was pain, in his left temple, but mostly this wonderful clarity. The room he was in was dark, perfumed, and a single lamp glowed on a table. It lit magnificent wall hangings full of patterns in which his eyes lost themselves, and a silver lamp that hung, unlit, a ball of reflected sparkles, and in his clarity of sight, those reflections spoke to him of the infinity of spheres that Aristotle said made up the universe.

  A shadowy figure passed through a curtain at the darker end of the room and vanished. He heard a murmur of sound. Turkish, certainly.

  A new, taller figure entered through the curtain. Walked to the edge of the bed, and sat gracefully beside him.

  Her hand touched his shoulder, and ran down his side, to his thigh, and down his thigh between his legs.

  ‘Hmm,’ Auntie said. She stood and wriggled, and then she was naked, except for a chain around her waist and bangles at one wrist and one ankle. ‘I wish we had a lan
guage in common, Englishman,’ she said in Arabic. Her left hand ran expertly up between his legs.

  She laughed. ‘Never mind,’ she said and knelt on the bed. She leaned over and her breasts touched his chest. Her perfumed hair fell all around him.

  He moaned.

  She laughed, and kissed him. A little too hard, and a little too fast. It was as if he was delicate.

  Somewhere close, a woman shouted. Another screamed.

  Auntie paused. One finger flicked the head of his penis. In Arabic, she said, ‘Don’t go anywhere.’ She laughed and slipped off the bed.

  Swan, even deep in the throes of lust, noticed that she had a dagger in her hand.

  Everything seemed to be happening very slowly. For the first time, it occurred to him that he’d been drugged.

  Auntie was magnificent, naked, in the light of a single lamp wick, and he couldn’t tear his eyes away. She curved, and curved.

  There was a sound of running feet.

  Auntie said something softly. Swan would have sworn she said ‘Shit’, in some language or other. She picked her long shawl off the floor and slipped it around her body.

  Swan tried to prop himself on his elbow, but he didn’t seem to be in full control of his body. One part of him was working very well – rather embarrassingly well. The rest – refused their duty.

  She slipped out through the curtain.

  Another scream, and the unmistakable sound of one blade on another.

  He tried to get to his feet, and failed. His erection was comic, and he giggled and fell back on the bed. The colours of the wall hangings were deep and vibrant, more like sounds than colours.

  Drugged.

  He couldn’t stop giggling.

  A figure appeared at the curtain. More running feet, and more blades.

  A second figure appeared.

  ‘My poor dear,’ whispered Khatun Bengül, in Italian. And then, ‘My. My, my.’ And a giggle.

  Well-muscled arms lifted him. He couldn’t have resisted if he’d wished to.

  He was wrapped in a sheet, and thrown over a man’s shoulders. He had the wind knocked out of him.

  He could only see the floor.

  Through the curtain to a vestibule. Magnificent with gold writing – Persian. There was a corpse, face down, on the tiled floor.

  Stairs.

  A pool of blood, and blood running down the steps like some sort of ghastly waterfall. At the top of the steps, behind them, lay the African, dead, his head half severed by a scimitar.

  And the blood ran on and on, over the tiled floor., down the steps like some ghastly waterfall. Beautiful, in a way.

  Good Christ.

  The man carrying him ran down the steps and into another hall, and then ran as hard as a man can run while carrying another man.

  It was like a nightmare, except that Swan was never afraid. They crossed a courtyard – arched, colonnaded, and magnificent with glazed tiles and fine hangings. Even in his dream state, Swan realised he’d been there before. With horses.

  Up. A flight of steps, and there were lights appearing all along the top of the colonnade opposite.

  ‘Faster!’ said Khatun Bengül.

  And then they went through a door, into a blaze of light.

  Through a set of beads, and another, and past a great set of double doors of cedar inset with ivory and silver, and then he was unceremoniously lowered into a great trunk, also of cedar. He hit his head, and admired the shooting stars that whirled around him.

  Khatun Bengül’s head appeared, framed in the light. ‘My poor Frank,’ she said. Her eyes shifted away. And back. A certain light came into her eyes, and she leaned down and put her lips on his.

  He responded instantly. His face rose to hers. The tip of her tongue caressed his, and then she was gone.

  Someone slammed the lid of the trunk shut, and he was alone in the darkness.

  The extreme alertness didn’t fade, and he heard a male voice – raised in anger, but some rooms away. Perhaps out in the central courtyard. And then another, and a woman’s, shrill as a fishwife’s. All in Turkish.

  Then the sound of a man’s hand knocking at the outer door.

  ‘Khatun Bengül!’ he cried. ‘Khatun Bengül!’ and then a long, calm string of words in Turkish.

  He heard her, even across several rooms, go barefoot to the door of her apartments and open it.

  Turahanoglu Omar Reis. Even full of whatever he’d been given, he knew that voice.

  Khatun Bengül’s father.

  Idris’s father.

  What am I doing here? Swan thought.

  Auntie must be his sister, he thought, his first piece of deductive reasoning in many hours. Things fell into place.

  His fearless lassitude fell away, and he was suddenly and completely terrified.

  Omar Reis spoke to his daughter for a long time.

  A need to piss began to creep into Swan’s hierarchy of needs. And his posture, folded in the trunk, was growing painful. His lower legs were bent back under him. His knees burned.

  She said something imperious. Swan had been an adolescent – he knew that tone. She said something like Fine! Do whatever you want.

  More footsteps. Male. And many of them.

  After a while, he decided that soldiers or servants were searching the place.

  ‘How dare you! Not in my room!’ she said, with all the drama of the young, in Arabic.

  The cedar doors crashed open.

  I’m going to die naked, in a fancy trunk, with a raging hard-on. Swan couldn’t decide whether to be more terrified or to laugh aloud.

  Drugged. For sure.

  Drawers were opened.

  A trunk was opened. Then another.

  Then a new voice – calm, level, and wheedling.

  Idris.

  Then Khatun Bengül – a shriek of adolescent righteousness that crossed language and cultural barriers.

  In a blaze of light, his trunk was opened.

  A crack.

  Swan’s fear made him virtually unable to breathe.

  Someone’s hand held the trunk open just a little. Idris’s voice – quite close. All Turkish. Swan had no idea what Idris was saying.

  He lay there, waiting for the trunk to be opened farther. The top was ajar about the breadth of a man’s fingers.

  Khatun Bengül was weeping. She said – something – through her tears.

  Idris sounded agitated now.

  The fingers inside the trunk lid were those of a middle-aged man – the nails were clean, but there were scars across all four, and a great ring of silver, gold and a blood-red stone engraved – beautifully engraved – with a running horse. In Greek, the letters by the horse said ‘Eupatridae’. The well-born. The jewel of some Ancient Greek aristocrat, two thousand years ago. On the finger of a Turkish warlord. It had to be Omar Reis’s hand.

  Swan had time to read the stone, admire its age, and say three Ave Marias.

  The trunk slammed shut. He heard Khatun Bengül’s sobs, and her brother’s gentle remonstrances, and then – silence.

  Time passed.

  His cramps grew greater than his fear, and then his need to piss grew greater than either.

  Time passed without a rush of feet, or the blaze of light that would herald his death.

  The last footsteps died away – there were no more shouts from the courtyard.

  The trunk lid was thrown back, and Khatun Bengül leaned in. ‘My poor Englishman,’ she said. She extended him a slim hand, and he took it, and to his immense mortification, he couldn’t rise out of the box. His feet and lower legs were pinned under him, and there was no feeling in them at all.

  ‘You must come,’ she said.

  He raised himself on his arms, and she pulled on his legs until they came free. He couldn’t feel them at all – it was the oddest, and in some ways the most terrifying, feeling. He couldn’t stand. She couldn’t carry him.

  ‘You must do better! If my father finds you here, he will have to kill y
ou.’

  Swan looked at her for a moment. ‘My lady,’ he said in Arabic, ‘you brought me here.’

  She looked at him and wrinkled her nose. ‘So?’

  ‘I was in no – ahem – danger. Where I was.’ His Arabic wasn’t well suited to the situation. He didn’t know any words to convey anything salacious.

  ‘Auntie intended to fuck you and then sell you to the Armenians,’ Khatun Bengül said, matter-of-factly, in prim Italian. ‘I assumed you would prefer to remain free and alive.’ She smiled, utterly desirable. ‘Perhaps Auntie’s body is worth your life?’

  His legs were beginning to tingle.

  ‘I can’t move until I get feeling back in my legs,’ he said.

  ‘Ah!’ she said. She looked him over. ‘Are you always so . . . solid?’ she asked with a giggle.

  ‘I’ve been drugged,’ he said. He was finding it difficult to sound dashing, romantic, or even clever.

  ‘I wonder what she gave you?’ Khatun Bengül said. ‘She must have been very . . . exciting.’

  His feet were tingling, and his upper legs were hurting. A great deal.

  He gritted his teeth. ‘You are far more beautiful than your auntie,’ he said. Time to take the offensive.

  ‘Bah – you just say that. You would have rutted with her like a dog. Why did I even save you?’ she said. She leaned over him. ‘Are you going to be sick?’

  He shook his head. ‘Have you ever gone to sleep on your arm?’

  She laughed. ‘I see. So you are in pain.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat tartly.

  ‘I wish I might discover what drug my auntie used,’ she said. Indeed, his tumescence hadn’t reduced – not from pain, nor time. She sat next to him on the edge of the trunk. ‘How much longer, do you think? Before you can walk?’

  He could barely speak. ‘Soon,’ he said, in Arabic.

  ‘Does it hurt very much?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  She leaned over and brushed her lips against his.

  It was remarkable how instantly his concern for his legs and the pain there receded.