Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Four Read online

  The Despot narrowed his eyes. ‘These are odd and rather intrusive questions for a mercenary,’ he said.

  Swan bowed. ‘My lord, I am attempting to solve a mystery. I admit that I do not wish to share its nature. I give my word it has nothing to do with you or your possessions.’

  Despot Thomas turned to face him. ‘I collect the money myself. I borrow against it. Recently, the Pope has demanded that I hand it over to the Florentine factor, but, as I have spent it all, I have nothing to hand over. Not this moment. Is that sufficient, or do I need to confess more? It is very grubby, running even a small state. One lies and cheats like a mountebank.’

  Swan bowed again. ‘No, my lord. In this case, you have relieved me of an anxiety. Now; shall we march to Corinth?’

  Despot Thomas nodded. ‘I think we shall. I’ll raise my levies. It will take me two weeks.’

  Swan bowed low. ‘My lord, if I have two weeks, I would like to visit Olympia.’

  ‘My chamberlain, Dukas, is from there. I will have him take you.’ The Despot Thomas waved a dismissal. ‘You love the Ancients?’ he asked when Swan was at the door.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ Swan said.

  Thomas shook his head. ‘A philhellene Frank.’ He smiled. ‘A very rare bird indeed. My brother is truly a fool, and I wish that I could come to Olympia with you.’

  Swan went to Olympia with Di Silva and a dozen archers and stradiotes, all volunteers, and Giorgos Dukas, the Despot’s chamberlain. He spent two happy days with his rough pencil translation of the requisite passages of Pausanias, looking at a round temple he could not recognise and trying to guess where the gymnasium had been. There were far more ruins than the book described; most of it was just rubble.

  But with Dukas’s help, he found the stadium. Dukas was an old man with a white beard, a priest in the Greek rite, and a very well-educated man; another of Plethon’s students, as it proved, and a correspondent of Bessarion, if only an occasional one, and in his careful, educated way, Dukas did as much to heal Swan of his ordeal as Marie; not with warmth, but with knowledge; not with the love of the body, but with the love of the mind. And the other men fell in with Swan’s wishes, although mostly they wanted to chase the shepherdesses and ogle the Aphrodites and drink the excellent wine. So when Swan paced off the depression beneath the ruins and pronounced it to be the stadium, and when Dukas scraped away turf from a stone and told them it was the starting line, they all stripped to hose and shirts, and ran. An Englishman, James Harris, won the race, to his own delight, and had his back pounded by his mates, and two Greek stradiotes poured wine down his throat and he sputtered and roared with laughter.

  When Swan returned to Glarenza from Olympia, he wrote Sophia a long letter; his first in months. He told her, not the full truth, but far more truth than he’d expected to tell her.

  Latin Easter fell on 19 April. Swan attended a midnight vigil with all his knights and men-at-arms in his harness, in the old chapel of the Knights of St John, and Easter mass at the nunnery, which service the Despot Thomas also attended, although he scrupulously did not take communion.

  The next morning, with almost six thousand peasant archers and spearmen, and five hundred horse, and the Company of Mary Magdalene, the Despot of the Western Morea marched east to Corinth. As they passed Patras and the northern Peloponnese lordships, a few dozen descendants of Latin knights came out in their antiquated harnesses and joined the army. The Despot’s logistics were well planned; his men had food every night, mostly bread and salt pork.

  Swan felt he’d come full circle, as six months before he’d landed his company on these very shores. But the roads were passable; the food was plentiful enough, and he assumed that eventually the Pope would pay. Personally, Swan was out of money; so were his officers. The Florentine factor in Glarenza had no money, and the Venetian factor was absent.

  He tried not to worry about money.

  The little army arrived before Corinth on the first of May. There were no Turks, but Aten came out with a strong escort.

  ‘My brother hates you like the plague,’ he said to Swan. Aten shrugged. ‘He’s a mad dog, anyway. Omar Reis is somewhere east of Athens with eight thousand men. Or maybe he’s south of Edirne with twenty thousand.’ Aten shrugged. ‘Or maybe marching into Persia with a hundred thousand.’

  This time, Swan had the time to visit all the wonders of Corinth. He climbed the acropolis, although he was guarded every inch of the way by Aten’s professionals, and he looked down at the sea on both sides of the isthmus. He wandered through the ancient agora, and looked at the remnants of a dozen mighty temples. In the market, he purchased dozens of coins, including a gold coin with a figure of Nike that he knew would fetch a magnificent price in Rome. He was pledging credit, until he found a Jew who knew all the Jews of Rome and Venice; in very little time he had a pocket full of gold and enough to cover immediate needs for his company, and in return he paid ten per cent. He asked ‘Messire Davide’ to pass a letter to Rome and wrote it out on the man’s change table, explaining to Ben Aaron and any other Jew of Rome how short of specie the Medici were. It was a calculated risk.

  Michael Aten led the combined armies forward to the old Spartan Wall; when Swan examined it, it looked Roman to him, or even more recent. The wall, which crossed the isthmus from side to side, was almost six miles long and untenable in several points.

  ‘It would have to be rebuilt to withstand a dedicated siege,’ Aten said. ‘But with this wall and the citadel of Corinth behind it, we can hold the Peloponnese for ever against the Turk.’

  Swan wasn’t sure he agreed. And the six miles of wall represented a kind of financial investment that he couldn’t imagine Thomas and Demetrios agreeing to make; hundreds of thousands of florins at the least.

  Di Silva shook his head. ‘Forty thousand men to hold it,’ he said. ‘I agree it would stop casual raiding. But that’s all it would do. Crowd control.’ The Portuguese knight looked brilliant, tanned and fit in the sun, but he shook his head angrily. ‘Why do men always come up with these foolish solutions?’

  ‘Desperation?’ Swan suggested.

  The Turks came in mid-May. To Swan’s delight, it was not Omar Reis, but another commander, an Albanian Turk called Bin Salim. Aten went forward beyond the wall with most of the light cavalry and there followed two days of hard skirmishing. Swan’s men were behind the wall, in a fortified camp because neither Swan nor Di Silva nor even the Bohemian trusted the wall.

  Aten’s strategy was like the man; simple and practical. While his own army camped, with food, behind the wall; while his peasants and Despot Thomas’s brought dry stone from the old quarries and the ancient buildings and repaired the worst breaches in the Hexamilion, Aten kept the Turks awake and hungry.

  The second evening, Swan offered his company for the next day, to Orietto’s delight and Di Silva’s disgust.

  ‘Make them ask us!’ he said.

  Swan shook his head. ‘Aten lost today. But his strategy is sound, and as long as we have the camp and the wall, this is a good place to fight.’

  ‘Our men-at-arms are too slow,’ Di Silva said.

  Swan nodded. ‘They’ll be fast one time,’ he said. ‘Let’s make that one time count.’

  Aten was cautious. ‘I am delighted that you offer; Franks can be great cowards, but we know you have some mettle.’ He smiled. ‘Listen. If you would cover the Despot’s stradiotes, it would probably help him. He doesn’t have enough people to hold the left alone. And we have to be able to fill the isthmus to keep the Turks from lapping around groups and taking us in the rear.’

  Swan thought about that, and then produced a drawing of the wall, done by the Bohemian.

  ‘What if we drew them into a fight by the wall?’ he asked.

  The Despot Thomas agreed, but he added, ‘The problem with feigned flight is that once men begin to run, they too often forget that it is a trick. And they just run. Sometimes all the way home.’

  In the dark, they dug their two guns i
nto the ruins of a tiny bastion in the old Roman wall. Two hundred sweating peasants cleared out the old ditch and dug it right down to the old stone. Swan bought wine and had it served to them, and then suggested, through Grazias, that if they wanted to kill a few Turks and have a little loot, they stay and man the walls around the guns with their bows.

  The Turks were up early, and they tried to force their way right to the wall, riding like daredevils in the half-light before dawn, but Aten had been fighting Turks all his life, and his cavalry charged out of the gaps in the walls and temporarily won the flat ground. Then pronoia archers and peasants flooded into the brush and began to hit the Turks, driving them back.

  Swan moved his men-at-arms and mounted archers into the gaps in the old wall. The Despot led his stradiotes through the wall and pressed east.

  Swan sat on his warhorse and watched the little redoubt above him, where two tiny coils of smoke rose in the still morning air. He could smell the slow match; he could smell the last of the jasmine, and olives, and grass. Away east, men were dying, and horses screamed.

  Swan found that he was praying. He had made no conscious decision to begin praying, but he was well launched, and he continued through his rosary as if he was a genuinely religious man. He was curiously unafraid, although the next half an hour could bring death or, worse yet, capture.

  The Bohemian waved his linstock.

  ‘Look lively,’ Orietto snapped. Men who had dismounted took up their reins. Horses grunted and shuffled.

  One of the guns fired; a sharp bark over their heads.

  ‘Shit,’ Swan said.

  The Bohemian leaned over the wall. ‘There’s a fuckink horde,’ he said.

  Swan dismounted and scrambled up the back of the ancient fortification. He couldn’t see much; the ruined wall was only about six feet higher than the brushy plain. But there were men coming, on small horses; even as he watched, the second gun, the one they’d captured in the autumn, barked a load of rusty nails and scrap iron into the oncoming horsemen, and they died.

  ‘Shit,’ Swan said again.

  He ran down the back slope, his sabatons ringing on the hard earth.

  ‘No sign of Aten or Despot Thomas,’ Swan said to Orietto and Di Silva.

  ‘I told you this was too complicated,’ Di Silva said with a certain pleasure.

  ‘Regardless,’ Swan said. He drew Sophia’s sword. The men-at-arms drew in close, and the archers formed ranks behind. The archers were better armoured than most of the Greek stradiotes; they had spears and heavy swords and good horses, thanks to Belgrade.

  ‘Rally on the standard and the trumpet!’ roared Swan.

  A handful of peasants ran out and dragged the screen of dead brush out of their way, revealing a forty-pace gap in the old works.

  Clemente blew a long note, and the whole company, less their gunners, started forward.

  Both guns fired, and Swan saw an Albanian woman on the wall, twirling her rammer like an acrobat.

  He reached up and slammed shut the visor of his armet. He didn’t have a lance; his lance was somewhere in Albania. So he leaned his weight slightly forward and pointed his sword at the enemy, or rather the dust where he expected that the enemy must be.

  A wave of arrows rattled against the front rank of men-at-arms, like hail against windowpanes in a storm. There were shouts; a scream.

  ‘Forward,’ Swan shouted, and Clemente sounded a long call, and the company went forward faster.

  Now Swan could see the Turks even through the slit of his visor and the dust. They were already running, scurrying like insects to get clear of the armoured column.

  But immediately behind the Delhis, the light cavalry equivalent of the stradiotes, was a thick line of Turkish infantry. Owing to the close terrain, the scrub and the fighting they’d already endured with Greek peasants, they were bunched up on the open ground, so that their own Delhis crashed into them and through them, wrecking their order.

  The company struck them like a sword cutting a thick rope; there was a timeless rage of dust, and then Swan’s shoulder hurt, his sword-hand burned, and there was blood running down his upraised blade onto his hand.

  And the Turkish infantry was gone into the dust.

  ‘Rally,’ he croaked to Clemente. The boy could not fight; his right arm was still bandaged from the fight a month before. But he’d stayed with Swan all the way through the melee.

  Now he sounded the rally, and Orietto appeared out of the dust, and then other men; dribs and drabs and then a whole phalanx.

  Orietto rode up, opened his visor, and waved. ‘I held the archers out,’ he said. ‘We need someone to rescue us if the tide comes in.’

  Swan nodded. ‘The plan is ruined,’ he said. ‘Back to the wall.’

  It was then, in the midst of rallying, with their horses standing, head down, and men drinking water, that the spahis charged them from out of the dust. They had a few seconds’ warning from a peasant’s yell; then the dust exploded with armoured men on armoured horses.

  Swan had been in some cavalry melees, but none like this. His horse tried to bolt and turned, but had nowhere to go; Swan found himself making desperate, shoulder-wrenching parries backwards, over his shoulder, and then his Arab changed her mind and turned, and he was in the midst of the spahis without as friend in sight and with his visor up.

  There was no fencing. He cut, and covered, and cut; mostly he trusted to his armour to keep him alive, and he defended his horse’s neck and flanks with the sword, and tried to drive it home. He landed blows, and took some; a ringing blow to the back of his armet that didn’t kill him, and a lance that exploded against his breastplate, a light lance. His horse was unshaken; his saddle held him, and his down-cut across his horse’s head removed one of her ears and killed the lancer.

  She exploded forward in outrage at the pain, and he unhorsed a man with a lucky sweep of his bridle-hand in the close press, and then he was riding, riding …

  He emerged from the press, alone. The dust of the combat rose like the smoke of a sacrifice to the old gods behind him, orange-white in the sun. Men and horses moved in the dust like shades in Hell.

  Swan was alone with the sunlight and the rest of the Turkish army. And they were in disarray. There were men fleeing in almost every direction; another column of dust to the right suggested that Aten was doing no worse; a few yards to his front, a man sat on a fine horse in a gold helmet under a horsetail banner with a magnificent bow in his hand.

  As Swan noticed him, he loosed.

  The arrow shattered against Swan’s reinforced breastplate, but the force knocked him back in the saddle.

  The man’s bodyguards loosed at Swan. He was the only target, and he felt like a fool.

  He turned his Arab and ran.

  He went through the curtain of dust, aware that his mount was dying. She was sluggish; a glance showed half a dozen shafts in her right side.

  He ploughed into the back of a spahi, unsportingly stabbed him through the back of his neck, right through his maille, and kicked his own feet out of the stirrups, but his on-the-fly plan to take the man’s horse ran off into the dust and he was on his feet in a cavalry melee.

  Swan abandoned saddle and tack and began to run forward, towards the wall. He could hear the guns firing, even through his helmet. He reached up to shut his visor and found an arrow sticking out of his face.

  It took him a long heartbeat to realise that he was alive. The arrow had gone in through his open visor, ripped a furrow out of his cheek, and the barbs were stuck in the liner.

  He was afoot in a cavalry melee with an open visor he couldn’t close.

  He was knocked flat by a riderless horse and then he was able to use a scraggly wild olive to drag himself to his feet. A terrified Greek peasant was standing a foot away with a long knife and a broken bow. Swan could smell him.

  ‘Saint George,’ Swan said.

  The man sighed. For the next long minutes, the two cowered together at the edge of a great fight.
It appeared, through the gaps in the dust, that the men-at-arms had shrugged off the spahis. That Columbino had fallen back on the archers, or the archers had charged. Either way, they’d won themselves some space.

  Swan decided to move. There were perhaps ten Turks between him and his own archers; a hundred paces.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said in Greek. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ said the Greek. Orea.

  Swan began to trot as fast as he could. One leg hurt like hell; the sabatons were terrible for running on rock and he had gravel inside his fighting shoes, but he managed a good speed.

  The company was dismounting.

  Two Turks turned away from the wall of steel, loosed arrows over their shoulders, and thundered down on Swan and his Greek companion.

  Swan had his sword in his hand. It was not the right weapon for the situation. He slowed, the Greek ran into his armoured back, and the two of them fell in a tangle.

  A gun fired, close by.

  Swan was showered with horse blood as a falconet ball struck the back of the nearer Turk’s horse. The big animal rolled over and over as if bowled by some malevolent god, and fell dead, its rider broken on its back.

  Swan crossed himself and dragged the Greek to his feet. ‘Now for it,’ he said.

  He looked back, and there was a line of spahis, all dismounting. Instead of an ambush, his spot in the line had become the focus of the whole Turkish attack.

  He didn’t have the breath to curse. Instead, he covered the last few paces to the line of men-at-arms. Orietto was laughing.

  ‘Of course you are alive’ Orietto said. ‘Your visor is open and you have an arrow in your face.’

  ‘Push him back,’ Swan ordered, giving his Greek a shove. ‘Push him through. He has no armour.’ He turned to Orietto. ‘There is a God,’ he said.

  ‘Kendal is trying to find you,’ Orietto said. ‘Pray for him.’

  ‘Look sharp!’ shouted Di Silva, and Clemente’s trumpet sounded, and spahis came out of the dust, four ranks deep and packed close. It was Belgrade all over again.

  Except it wasn’t, because it was never a contest. The rubble of the breach in the Hexamilion was rough underfoot, but the company was higher and better armoured and had their opponents outflanked with two small artillery pieces.