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

  ‘All the gut ones are here wit us,’ Ritter said. Swan was surprised to realise that the man had spoken English with a heavy north German accent. ‘I served your kink in Francia,’ Ritter said. ‘I like the Englishers. Usually. When they are not fat fools.’ He laughed. ‘I haf a few in mein employ. But they alvays inzist on beink paid.’

  The third of the trio seldom spoke, but he looked intelligent and he wore a polite smile all the time. He seemed more like someone’s well-trained steward than a soldier. His name was Albrecht von Ewald, and he wore green, like a hunter.

  ‘May I ask which way you are going to Belgrade?’ Swan asked.

  They all looked at each other. ‘Ve vait for a pass from the Serbs,’ Ritter said. ‘I don’t vancy riding through Romania.’

  Ewald spoke up in Latin. ‘Hunyadi will probably try to force a battle. The word is that Belgrade is untenable in the face of modern artillery.’ He shrugged. ‘Something the Turks always have in plenty.’

  Swan looked around.

  Von Bulow nodded. ‘We don’t have the horses,’ he said. ‘We have horses for our wagons and a handful of men-at-arms, but we thought we’d fight from the city.’ He looked around again, clearly unsure of himself. ‘But if we stay on the north bank, we may never get into Belgrade.’

  Swan agreed. ‘I plan to find Hunyadi,’ he said.

  Ritter laughed. ‘I haf served wit that man before this,’ he said. ‘I vill pass, danke.’

  They parted amicably enough, and Swan told them he’d go east in the morning, and they wished him luck. They offered to have their troops watch all night, and Swan took them up on it, and was applauded by the Greeks and the English.

  Hugh Willoughby came up and waited to be recognised when Swan was disarming. Clemente went as fast as he could. Swan decided he could do two things at once. ‘Come,’ he called.

  Willoughby came into the tent. ‘I’m in a quandary,’ he said. And somewhat belatedly, ‘my lord.’

  Swan, who wasn’t really anyone’s lord, passed on the opportunity to comment. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  ‘There’s two dozen lads here,’ he said. ‘None of ’em been paid in some time. They’d like work. A few even want to fight the Turks.’

  Swan raised both eyebrows.

  ‘Contracts?’ he asked as Clemente got one of his leg harnesses open.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Willoughby said. ‘But I’m guessing they owe somebody money and somebody owes them.’ He looked around. ‘They heard you was … you know. English.’ Willoughby wasn’t much given to smiling, but now he did. ‘I could be a condottiere!’ he said.

  Swan nodded. ‘If we can have them without too much trouble,’ he said. ‘But only if they’re mounted.’

  He realised that, just by saying this, he was sanctioning some horse thievery. But he all but salivated at the idea of having a dozen more Englishmen in his polyglot company.

  He turned a blind eye when it proved, as he left his tent, that all his Greeks had mounted their spare horses and ridden off into the east a few minutes before. Grazias and his men were always inclined to be helpful, if they could enrich themselves in the process.

  He went and found his leading German knight, who’d become, de facto, the captain of the crusaders. Bertold von Nymandus was standing in his shirtsleeves instructing a pair of boys on the use of the long war sword. His motions were controlled and elegant, and Swan recognised him in one stance and a quick cut as a deadly swordsman.

  He waited quietly for the man’s attention. He didn’t understand much German yet, but he understood sword instruction, and most of the terms associated – plough, ox – were simple ones. It looked – to him – very like the Italian swordplay of the spada a due mana, but there were subtleties that were different. He was considering the mysteries of edge-to-edge contact – binding – trying to fathom a new German word when Von Nymandus saw him. He bowed and came across the grass.

  Von Nymandus had grey in his beard, but his body was solid with muscle. He looked – somehow – larger without his armour. He bowed, knee to the ground, and Swan returned the courtesy in kind.

  ‘Would you be so courteous as to take a walk with me?’ Swan asked. He blinked at Clemente, who appeared unconcerned.

  ‘I will attend you directly,’ Von Nymandus said.

  ‘My apologies for interrupting your lesson,’ Swan said.

  When the German knight had sent his pupils to their chores, the two of them walked out into the horse lines. There were pickets every hundred paces, and they were alert.

  No one who had fought the Turks failed to keep sentries out. All the time. It was a mistake that only had to be made once.

  ‘I am turning east in the morning, to go to Transylvania,’ Swan said without further preamble. Von Nymandus had been with them since Graz. He deserved a choice. ‘I think that you may prefer to remain here with your countrymen, and approach Belgrade through Serbia.’

  Von Nymandus flushed. ‘Why?’ he asked. He was angry – Swan could see it and he knew he’d gone about this incorrectly. ‘Have I done something to offend you, young man?’

  Swan tried not to bridle at the term ‘young man’. It was infernal – he knew he made mistakes, he knew he was young, and he particularly resented having his youth thrown in his face because, in fact, he was so aware of it.

  ‘I do not think that you appreciated my handling of the affair of the man who was hanged,’ Swan said.

  ‘I think you disliked it a good deal more than I did,’ Von Nymandus said. ‘I confess that I have several times asked myself how I would have acted, had I been the young man’s father.’ The German knight shrugged. ‘But I was not, and he was caught, red handed, in a serious crime. I have been a soldier all my life, and I have never burned a peasant in his house.’ He frowned. ‘And it made a point, I think.’

  ‘I’m going to join Hunyadi,’ Swan said.

  ‘Good,’ Von Nymandus said. ‘He is a great man. Ruthless – sometimes evil.’ The German knight had pale blue eyes and they locked on Swan’s. ‘Which goes with power, of course.’

  Swan bowed. ‘So you will stay with us?’ Swan asked.

  ‘Stay?’ Von Nymandus asked. ‘I’ve added a few helmets, my fine English knight. But yes. I have served Hunyadi before. He is the best captain in Christendom. If he has not lost his nerve.’

  The German camp was like a city of tents. There were almost a thousand men in it, and its wagon burg was very strong. The Germans – all veterans of fighting either the Turks or the Bohemians or both – had palisaded their horse camp, and they had a dozen small guns defending their works. The wagon burg sat like a castle at the top of a steep ridge, and the only disadvantage to the site was that the water was at the base of the ridge – and even there, the Germans had built a trench and palisades right to the river’s edge and a bastion across the stream.

  Short of an attack by an army with a baggage train and siege weapons, the position was impregnable. And consequently, several thousand refugees from northern Serbia and eastern Hungary had created a sort of slum to the German ‘town’. They, too, had wagons, but the Germans had the discipline to keep the ‘lower town’ beyond bowshot. It smelled bad – when the wind came from the lower town. They did not have the leadership or the organisation to dig regular latrines, or to make orderly use of the water source.

  Swan looked down at all of this from the top of the ridge, where he was sitting to eat with the Bohemians. The women seemed to have multiplied during the day – now there were at least the twenty he had authorised. All of them smiled at him every time they met his eyes. Most of them seemed to be seventeen or eighteen.

  ‘I told them I only keep ten,’ Šárka said from behind him. ‘They are all very eager to please, because they want to go when we go.’

  Swan shook his head.

  ‘What do you think?’ Šárka asked. She was not so tall, close up, but with her hands on her hips and one hand near the hilt of her sword, she seemed fairly imposing. ‘Listen. The Turks will rape the
m all to death, and sell the survivors as slaves. Eh? And the boys. Once a little farmer like these,’ her hand swept over the lower town, ‘once he leaves his little plot of land – he’s a serf. He never goes back. What does he eat? Did he ever want a daughter?’ Šárka was angry, and Swan decided it was his day for making people angry. ‘I do not take the girls when their fathers try and sell them to me, eh? I take the ones who ask, and know what they ask. You are so high and mighty. You have only blood on your hands, you think, and this is cleaner than sex.’

  Swan nodded. ‘You know,’ he began, and wondered whether his Hungarian was up to it. He decided that it was not.

  He saw Will Kendal emerge from one of the Bohemian tents. The man looked embarrassed, but Swan beckoned to him.

  Kendal could be a brutal man, and was often an aggressive one. But he was cautious around Šárka, and he gave her a wide berth.

  She tossed her head and walked away.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ Kendal said. And then, shame faced, ‘It is. I – it’s a long way from Venice.’

  Swan smiled, wondering when he had become the forgiving father to a man who was perhaps two years his junior. ‘This is between you and God, Will. I wish to ask you – since Master Willoughby is about to get a new draft of archers – if you would consider becoming my archer in my lance. I’d up your pay and improve your armour.’

  Kendal looked around. ‘Oh,’ he said. He managed a smile. ‘Sorry, m’lord. Don’t want you to think me ungrateful. But I ain’t sure, like. I been with Hugh and the boys … a long time. We seen some bad things together.’

  Swan didn’t want to seem to plead. ‘I won’t separate you,’ he said. ‘I just need a good man at my shoulder. I miss Peter.’

  Kendal smiled. ‘Not the best recommendation,’ he said. ‘That is, sir.’

  Swan frowned.

  ‘As he’s dead, ain’t he?’ Kendal said. He was tall, thin, muscular for his form, and he tended to sneer instead of smiling. ‘Sorry – I done it again. Don’t mean to shoot my mouth off like a flight arrow in a high wind, eh?’ He bowed sketchily. ‘Can I ha’ a day to think on it?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ Swan said.

  Kendal walked away with a furtive glance at Šárka, who was standing with two men – or rather, a young boy of perhaps twelve, and a tall young man with the most vivid blond hair.

  She pushed them forward. ‘This is Radu,’ she said. ‘This is Mercia,’ she added, shooing the tall blond. ‘They are Wallachians. Or so they say. They were in the camp. They speak a little Hungarian and a little German and no Latin. Perhaps some Greek. I don’t know. Mercia says he knows horses.’ She smiled – a surprisingly kind smile – at the blond boy. He smiled back and bowed very low.

  ‘They will be yours, if you take them,’ she said. She smile crookedly. ‘If you don’t take the tall boy, the Turks will pay gold for so pretty a face on a man.’ She glanced at the camp behind her. ‘Nor just Turks, I think.’

  Swan tried them in Greek. The blond boy knew enough to say ‘Kyrie eleison’ with an accent that could curdle a Greek scholar’s blood. But Swan was tired of washing his own dishes and he beckoned to Clemente, whose mouth was full of food.

  ‘These two are yours,’ he said. ‘Mercia’s the tall one. He’s our new groom. Radu is the little one. He’s our page and servant. You are now my squire.’

  Clemente shook his head. ‘I don’t have any armour. Besides, my mama, may God bless her, was a whore.’

  Swan laughed. ‘Mine too, bambino. All the best knights—’

  Šárka looked at him. ‘Your mother?’

  He only just kept himself from blowing her a kiss – she was crestfallen, so sure had she been of his arrogance. I shan’t gloat, he promised himself. ‘Unless there has been some unhappy incident, and may God stand between us and evil, she keeps a fine inn, the Swan, in Southwark, by London town.’ He leaned over. ‘Where the brothels are, by and large.’

  The Bohemian woman ran the fingers of her left hand through her hair, as if to check that it was still rich and brown. ‘I see.’

  Swan went back to Clemente. ‘You do the duties of a squire, and when you are grown enough, we’ll see if you can fight. Which is to say, I know you can fight. We’re talking armour.’

  Clemente bowed. But his wit was undisturbed, even though he had tears in his eyes. ‘This is the luckiest day of my life,’ he said. ‘It’s too bad the Turks are going to kill us all.’

  He turned and put his arm around Radu, who smiled in fear. Clemente’s German was coaxing and already better than Swan’s. Swan caught something about food, and sleep, and then a joke. And then something about work. The three boys walked away.

  ‘He is a good boy, if perhaps a little mad for the girls,’ Šárka said. ‘He would be the best customer, if he had the money.’

  This little revelation brought Swan up short, as he saw the formerly bent-over young man as a helpless victim still, when it was clear that he was moving into his new life – in many ways.

  Down at the edge of the outer camp – the lower town – Swan saw Grazias and the stradioti returning. They had, as he had expected, ‘grown’ a dozen horses or more. One of them had a rider – a very strange-looking rider.

  Swan handed the Bohemian woman the bowl and walked away. She took it with an ill grace.

  ‘I am not your servant,’ she shouted after him.

  He waved, and walked to the gates of the wagon burg.

  Grazias didn’t even trouble to look embarrassed. ‘Most of them we found,’ he said. ‘We’ve been passing unridden horses for two days. It is no surprise – armies go through horses at a great rate, and the peasants that have a few let them go when they can’t feed them. The grain is only beginning to ripen,’ he went on. ‘There’s going to be famine all though the plains.’

  Swan was alive enough to evil to know that Grazias had said he found most of them, but he let it pass.

  A voice from among the Greeks said, ‘There is plague in the south, in Albania and Greece.’

  Swan looked at him. The man was clearly a priest of some sort. He rode a big, glossy mule and he had long dark robes.

  ‘Are you a Dominican, Father?’ he asked.

  The man bowed. ‘Father Pietro,’ he said. ‘And I am indeed a Dominican, although I have some … business with those of the Orthodox rite. I believe in the Union.’

  Grazias made a hand sign. ‘I found him out there alone and I brought him in,’ he said.

  Father Pietro nodded. ‘I thought they were Turks, and that I was a dead man. I have been telling the poor of this land that the Turks were twenty days away, and then I fell to the very superstition and fear I have been preaching against.’

  ‘Happens to me every day, Father,’ Swan said.

  At sunset, Swan invited all of his officers to join him for wine. He’d bought a fair amount from a Genoese merchant in the camp – Hungarian wine, but strong and red. His new servants waited on them, and he borrowed a trestle table from their hosts. He sat at the head.

  ‘I intend to go east,’ he said. ‘I want to lay out my plans from here. I think it is time we had contracts, or at least gave our words and oaths on what we are about.’

  Hugh Willoughby, still a little awestruck to be considered an officer, sat by Swan. A German notary – borrowed with the table – sat with a small desk on his lap, writing furiously by the last good light.

  His people were silent. He sat at one end of the table, and Ser Columbino sat at the other. In between sat Grazias, Ladislav, with his sister hanging on his arm, and across the table sat Di Vecchio with his ensign, the old knight Alessio Fortebracchio. Von Nymandus sat with his own squire, who was almost as old as he.

  Swan realised once again that he’d been waiting for Peter.

  He shrugged. His Wallachian boy brought him a cup of wine, and he raised a toast.

  ‘To the Company of Saint Mary Magdalene,’ he said.

  They all raised cups and drank.

  ‘I was not aware s
he was a … military saint,’ Di Vecchio said.

  Swan laughed, and his eyes flicked to Šárka’s. And then past her brother – if he was her brother – and on to Di Vecchio. ‘I think she will be the perfect icon for this company,’ Swan said. ‘But if you object, please say so now. Master Julius will simply have to recopy all the documents he’s drawn up.’

  The notary stopped, and his basilisk glare would have slain lesser men. As it was, hardened killers muttered that the name was fine, fine.

  ‘I have confirmed the rates of pay as discussed. We will pay again at Temesvár. Each of you will be paid by the head, as discussed. Italians by lance, Germans by helmet. Yes? All of you are in direct service to the Church – but I think it is better, here at the edge of Europe, that we all know where we are going.’ Swan sat back. ‘Belgrade is perhaps six days’ march away. The Turks had not reached it when Father Pietro was there – and neither had Hunyadi or Fra Giovanni di Capistrano, who seems to have raised a mighty army – or at least, so he claims.’

  Swan raised his hand. He wore the ring of the Conqueror, and held his baton, which seemed almost welded to his right hand these days. ‘We will divide all loot. Any man committing a crime against the laws of the company will be punished by our provost, who will be Ser Niccolo Zane.’

  The enormous Ser Zane stood for a moment, and then sat.

  ‘What laws?’ Ladislav asked.

  At a motion of the baton, the notary rose and read through the document.

  Ladislav shrugged. ‘It will still be war,’ he said.

  But in the end, they all signed.

  As they all rose, after more toasts, Ladislav caught Swan’s arm. ‘I bought a gun,’ he said. He seemed very excited.

  ‘Let him show it to you,’ Šárka said. ‘Or he will never be calm. He gets like this. Humour him.’

  Swan put an arm around the big Bohemian – mostly to calm him – and waved for silence. ‘And I wish to engage Master Julius to be our notary, and Father Pietro as our chaplain.’

  They’d had enough wine that they cheered.

  Swan sighed, and Ser Columbino came and embraced him around the Bohemian. ‘Now we will be something,’ he said fiercely.