Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade: Part Five Read online

  Ladislav rose when he saw Swan, came over and clasped hands. ‘I would offer you soup, but we didn’t bring more than we needed,’ he said.

  Swan laughed. It was his first laugh in five days. ‘I am hungry,’ he admitted.’

  ‘Go eat at my fire. Tell Šárka that I said to give you our wine.’ He nodded. ‘I like that you do not want to kill the peasants,’ he said suddenly. ‘I had to think on it. Let us kill Turks, and be men.’

  Swan smiled.

  Šárka was not tall. She had a heart-shaped face, dark brown hair, and eyes as blank as Ladislav’s. She wore a German messer—hung from a man’s belt, and her waist was so small Swan could have put his hands around it.

  She wore the messer while she watched two boys keep the fire going. Swan guessed she wore it all the time. It was a weapon he saw a great deal of in the east, like a falchion or a storte, but a little lighter.

  ‘Boys like fire,’ she said.

  ‘Ladislav said you would feed me,’ Swan said, feeling a little more like the waif of his boyhood and less like the captain of a company of lances.

  She flicked her dark eyes at him. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Feed him, Přemysl.’

  Swan was brought a stool, a bowl, bread. He took his spoon out of his purse and his eating knife from the scabbard of his heavy dagger.

  He hadn’t realised how hungry he was.

  All of the Bohemian women came and sat by the fire. There were two more girls – both blonde, both with the high cheekbones and wide shoulders of the local Slavs. One spread a piece of blanket, and the five of them started rolling dice.

  They had a surprising amount of money.

  Tom sat on his stool and ate. The women played cards. Accents and giggles gradually suggested to Swan that the girl lying full length on her stomach with her legs kicking up behind her was Hungarian, not Bohemian – – at least, that was the language she spoke. She was neither winning nor losing, but she laughed a great deal, and her bare legs caused Swan some deep breaths.

  He kept eating. He hadn’t realised how hungry he was, or how tired.

  Ser Columbino found him first. Swan was just considering a train of things – that the Hungarian girl was almost certainly local; that the amount of hard silver she was gambling with could only mean she was a prostitute; that this suggested that the Bohemian girls were recruiting.

  He tried to decide whether it was his business to do … anything.

  Ser Columbino glanced at the five women. ‘Ah, Santa Maria. The flowers of the field.’ He smiled. One of the Bohemians smiled back. He had an odd look on his face – Ser Columbino rarely looked simply happy, but the five young women seemed to delight him.

  He turned back to his captain. ‘The monks have a wagoner who moves their products to market,’ he said. ‘The man speaks good German. He says that the Turks are already at Belgrade, and that tomorrow or the next day at the latest we’ll see refugees.’ He frowned. ‘He thinks the Turks will destroy Hunyadi, who he says is terribly outnumbered.’

  ‘All this from a wagoner?’ Swan asked.

  Columbino shrugged. ‘As to that, I agree. But the refugees – he’s seen them. They could choke the roads. And food will become difficult.’ Columbino was looking at the girls. ‘More difficult. These monks do not want to sell us all the fodder we can buy.’

  There was the tiniest bit of censure in the last remark. Even Columbino felt that making war justified a certain amount of looting.

  Swan felt the darkness begin to settle again. He missed Peter. He missed the barbed wit and the chance to exchange comments in freedom, in privacy.

  ‘I will press the abbot in the morning,’ Swan promised. ‘The more especially if we’re about to see refugees.’ He was annoyed at himself for not thinking of refugees. The coming of the Turks, whose looting and rapine made Italians and Germans look like amateurs, would drive every peasant and burgher on the Hungarian plain from their homes.

  War at sea and on the islands of the Ionian and Aegean didn’t produce refugees. Or these enormous problems of transport and fodder. He had twelve wagons for his people, and even at a wagon for twenty men he couldn’t hope to feed his troops from ‘supplies’. His men needed to buy – or steal – food every day.

  Ser Columbino made his bow. Swan looked for wine as Columbino went and knelt by one of the Bohemian women. She rolled over, laughed, and blew him a kiss. And went back to her game.

  One of the Hungarian girls – the one on her stomach – saw Swan with his empty glass in hand and rose with surprising grace. She plucked a dark green bottle shaped like an onion or a pasha’s hat from the grass and brought it to him, kneeling by his stool to pour.

  ‘You make me feel like an emir!’ He laughed.

  She smiled at him. ‘You speak Hungarian!’ she said. ‘My lord.’

  She went back to her game with the bottle. She looked over her shoulder at him and swung her legs back and forth like a cat’s tail.

  Swan looked somewhere else. Refugees.

  He was finishing his second cup of wine when Di Vecchio came up. He barked at the women, and one of the Bohemians fetched him a camp stool and made the horn sign behind his back.

  ‘Young Galahad says we are going to hit refugees and chaos tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Is that wine?’

  This time it was Swan who rose. He went over to where the Hungarian girl was obviously locked in mortal pasteboard combat with Šárka, and lifted the bottle of wine.

  All the women looked up, although the Hungarian and Šárka hugged their cards close to their abundant chests.

  ‘I’ll get the abbot to send wine,’ he said.

  Šárka met his eye. ‘That would be very decent of you,’ she said. ‘Life is hard enough without wine.’

  Swan poured Di Vecchio a measure in his own glass, and sat back down. Di Vecchio toasted him and said a prayer. He watched the women. The Hungarian had obviously won the game. She was, perhaps, awestruck at the amount of silver she now had, and Šárka was lecturing her. Swan couldn’t understand what they said – it was a lingua franca of Hungarian, Latin and Bohemian, and very fast.

  ‘Yes,’ Swan said, as if there had been no interruption. ‘If, by Galahad, you mean my lieutenant, Ser Columbino.’

  The two men locked eyes. Di Vecchio shrugged. ‘He is a humourless devil, except when he’s with his whore,’ he said, and his eyes flicked to the girls. ‘Mind you, she’s handsome enough to keep anyone happy. Look at her waist! Christ. I’m old.’

  Swan never knew how to talk to Di Vecchio. But he’d had good teachers in the arts of leading men, and he decided to try one of Bembo’s tricks. Bembo always said, ‘No man is ever offended if you put yourself in the position of being his student.’

  ‘Tell me, messire,’ he said. ‘You are a veteran at the art of war, and I am a novice.’

  Di Vecchio laughed. ‘Are you trying to borrow money?’ he asked, but Swan could see he was pleased.

  Swan pointed to the girls. ‘The Bohemians are recruiting local girls,’ he said.

  Di Vecchio laughed. ‘They recruit themselves.’

  Swan winced.

  Di Vecchio shook his head. ‘I can’t make you out, Ser Thomas. You are the most curious compendium of soft and hard, jade and novice.’ He looked at the girls. ‘Born on a farm – maybe born to a farm labour family, on a farm, but not free?’ He shrugged. ‘Worse here than in Italy, but bad enough in Italy.’ He gestured at the horse lines. ‘We have a dozen new boys since last week. They can watch horses and forage and soon they’ll all have swords. Or be dead.’ He shrugged. ‘The girls are the same. I think that to some, we are demons from hell – but to others, we’re a better class of Roma, and they run to join us like they join the gypsies.’

  Swan nodded, fascinated. His mother had been a whore – a better class of whore – and she had often told him that sleeping with strangers was not the worst job she’d ever had.

  ‘Try stripping dead creatures o’ their skins in a tannery vat full o’ dog shit,’ she said
once. ‘I’ll tup a man any time.’

  Swan nodded again. ‘So – this is a good point. But tell me – do I need to take notice?’

  Di Vecchio leaned back. ‘No. Not at all, unless you want a cut. Listen, Capitano. There are some hellions out there – women so bad that they can wreck a good lance. Hard women who loot and kill and foment discord for their own twisted amusement.’ He frowned, as if in memory. ‘But these girls – even the Bohemians, and they are tough …’ He shrugged. ‘Good to have. Part of a company, really. Better for nursing. Who do you want to hold your hand when you take a lead ball in your belly?’ He sneered. ‘Me?’

  Swan didn’t imagine dying with a lead ball in his belly, but he suspected the other man had just revealed his own nightmare. ‘Not bad for discipline?’ he asked.

  Di Vecchio shrugged. ‘There are men who say they are.’ He finished the wine in his glass and handed it to Swan. ‘I think they are fools, or boy-lovers.’ He rose to his feet. ‘You’re doing well enough, by the way. Most of my lads will fight for you now.’ He nodded. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Even though I hanged that boy?’ Swan asked suddenly, and his voice rose. He felt a fool.

  Di Vecchio paused and turned back. ‘That sticking in your craw, lad?’ he asked.

  He’d never called Swan ‘rigazzo’, which could mean lad or boy or servant, before.

  But he didn’t seem to mean anything slighting. He went on. ‘You had to do it. If you’d backed down, they’d all be testing you every day.’ He smiled. ‘And they will again, anyway. When I command, I watch for the ones I want rid of anyway. And sometimes I hang one.’ He grinned. ‘That’s my advice on the art of war, and I should charge.’

  ‘Keep the whores, hang the laggards?’ Swan asked.

  ‘You are a good student.’ Di Vecchio bowed.

  Swan nodded. ‘Di Vecchio …’ he called, and the other man stopped.

  ‘Start watching, then. I don’t want the next to be a child who weeps. Pick me a black ram of Satan.’ He stood up to say it.

  Di Vecchio bowed. ‘I know the very man. We’ll take him—’

  ‘No, wait until he commits a crime,’ Swan said.

  ‘You are soft. But very well.’ Di Vecchio bowed again and swaggered into the gathering gloom.

  Swan downed his wine. Šárka was standing by a tent – probably her own.

  ‘If I leave my glass here, will it be here when I return?’ he asked.

  She smiled – her warmest smile since he’d come. ‘It depends on whether you return with more wine,’ she said. ‘And how long you take. Glass vanishes very quickly.’

  ‘Perhaps I could pay you a small fee,’ he suggested amicably. ‘But I am going for more wine.’

  Lacking Clemente, he had to do his own fetching, and he determined to find these Hungarian peasants and engage a groom and perhaps even a servant. He wondered whether Will Kendal would consider contracting as his own archer. He remembered that Peter had wanted him to fill out the numbers in his own lance. He ought to have had an archer, a mounted squire and a servant. In fact, al he had was the servant.

  He walked through the summer evening, nodding absently to men he knew, until he came to his own tent. The wine was where he least expected it, in the box that held his armour – two fine glass bottles gifted by a bishop chance-met on the road. He lifted one, turned his own bed down, and put the second on his armour chest. His tent was pitch black. He found his travelling purse on the painted cloth floor, found his flint and steel by touch, and lit a taper and from it a candle in one of the two small, round lanterns he carried in his cart.

  Then he walked back across the camp to the Bohemians. Ladislav was back from his time on duty and Swan poured almost a third of his bottle into the man’s leather jack. Ladislav was a good officer – he shared it round with his mates.

  Šárka was sitting with one of the other Bohemian girls under an awning, swatting insects. Swan brought a stool and sat with them.

  Šárka said something sharp, and the other girl bobbed a curtsy and vanished.

  Swan could hear a man and a woman in the next tent. The sounds were unmistakable.

  Swan laughed. ‘How many girls do you run, Šárka?’

  She frowned in return. There were two hanging oil lamps, one black iron and the other obviously stolen from a church – silver and brass and glass.

  But this was followed by a pinch-lipped, forced smile. ‘Ah. Am I in trouble?’

  Swan noted that none of the Hussites said ‘my lord’. In any language.

  ‘No,’ Swan said. ‘But there are things I would like to know.’

  She bit her lower lip. Her hands were on her hips, and her head was back. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But what if I said that the girls are none of your business?’

  He bowed – a short bow, the kind he’d make to Di Vecchio or any other officer. ‘Any person following my company is my business,’ he said. ‘I do not ask for money, Šárka. Merely a little discussion.’

  ‘Do I need to call Ladislav?’ she asked.

  ‘Is he your master?’ Swan asked.

  ‘No man is my master,’ she said. She didn’t spit it – she merely asserted it. ‘But Ladislav makes many decisions for us all. In fact, he is my brother. We have been together since we were born.’ She looked away, into the evening sky, which was still pink. ‘Yes, I run the girls. No one else does, in your company. So I am … growing.’

  Swan sat back. Ladislav was watching him from the next fire. She didn’t look a bit like Ladislav – she was slight, and brown and, despite her figure, slim to the point of emaciation, with hard muscles and little fat. Ladislav was a huge man with a thick blond beard.

  Swan had a hard time imagining them as kin. But it was not his problem.

  ‘If the Turks attack, what do your girls do?’ he asked.

  She made a face – her lower lip stuck out. ‘We are with the wagons,’ she said. ‘The Czech girls can defend themselves.’

  Swan nodded. He poured her some wine, and she handed him his glass. He filled it.

  ‘How many girls do you have now?’ he asked.

  ‘Tonight?’ she asked. ‘Twelve, like Christ’s apostles.’

  A man – a big man – emerged from the tent to their right. Swan didn’t call out, but he was fairly certain it was Ser Niccolo Zane. He said something back into the tent, and a woman’s voice laughed in reply.

  Swan nodded. ‘Where do you march when the column moves?’ he asked.

  Šárka shrugged. ‘Wherever we want. Some girls wander, or rob houses with men.’ She turned to him. ‘Not since you hanged the boy, though.’

  Swan nodded. ‘Tomorrow, we will see crowds of refugees.’ When it was clear she didn’t know the word, he said, ‘People fleeing the Turks.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I have never fought the Turks, but I know how this will be. Many girls will want … to join.’

  Swan scratched under his chin and wondered whether crusading could grow any more sordid. The suffering of peasants was a business opportunity.

  He thought of some replies, swirled the contents of his glass, and then set it down. He’d fancied Šárka, right up to the last comment. Now he just wanted to be away. ‘No more than twenty,’ he said. ‘Total. And none to be more than a hundred paces from the wagons. Understand me? If you want to make an expedition, please tell me. If you want to make a picnic, tell me. The Turks are very fast.’

  She laughed. ‘All men are fast,’ she said.

  Swan rose. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this chat. Goodnight.’

  ‘But you brought wine, and some is still left,’ she said. ‘I am nicer to men when I’ve had wine. It has always been so, in fact.’ She smiled, and her teeth, which were straight and white, like a noblewoman’s, shone in the starlight.

  ‘Perhaps another night, ma donna,’ he said.

  ‘Eh, perhaps you are just a man like other men,’ she said, bored. She sat back.

  He rose, and left.

  The refugees didn’t start wit
h a trickle. They were up with dawn, and the stream was already passing them – wagons, carts and people piled like pedlars filled the road east and south.

  Grazias pursed his lips. His men had been in the saddle since two hours before dawn.

  ‘If we go across the fields,’ he said, ‘we can make another set of roads, almost four miles west. Closer to the river. But,’ he shrugged, ‘I expect there will be as many there.’

  Swan scratched under his chin.

  Šárka, of all people, appeared at his elbow. She was dressed like a rich peasant, in a fitted bodice and a long skirt and a very fetching hat with a pheasant feather. She handed him a heavy ceramic cup that proved to be full of warm broth. He drank it gratefully.

  ‘Can you clear them?’ Swan asked.

  Grazias frowned. ‘You won’t like it. But my little devils will enjoy it.’

  Both statements were true. The handful of stradiotes swarmed across the road like tuna bursting through smaller fish, or falcons in a swarm of songbirds, and the refugees screamed and scattered. The panic was communicated all the way down the road.

  Swan hated it. He hated the fear in the eyes of the men and the panic, terror and hatred he saw in a mother’s eyes.

  But the road was clear, and his people moved. He had the wagons in the middle of the column, and now that a rumour of his little army was abroad, the road cleared ahead of him, and he saw poor people with their possessions trailing across the fields, headed west to the other road.

  Clemente trotted up and reined in by him. Juan di Silva mounted, took the company standard, and joined the boy.

  Clemente coughed. He met Swan’s eye and made a face.

  ‘The monks were kind enough,’ he said. ‘But very religious. I’d rather be an armourer or a spy.’

  ‘Is your cough better?’ Swan asked.

  Clemente coughed. ‘No.’

  Swan sighed. ‘Listen, lad – I need a groom. And maybe a servant.’

  ‘Aye, and an archer,’ the boy piped up. ‘Someone bigger and stronger than me, any road. You met Šárka?’ Clemente asked. ‘She’ll get us a groom. She knows everyone.’