Tom Swan and the Head of St George: Part Seven Read online

  Swan sat perfectly still.

  ‘I will send you back to Vienna,’ Bessarion said. ‘You have served me brilliantly, and your reward will be more work. But I will send you to Vienna by way of Rimini and Venice, there to pick up an escort of lances and learn all that may be learned.’ Bessarion raised his heavy, dark eyes. ‘Do as you will, Messire Suane, once you reach Rimini. I would like to have the ring restored to me, so that I can send it to Lord Hunyadi.’ He sat back and flung down his pen. ‘But I would like Constantinople saved, and I would like to have Hagia Sofia moved to Rome, and I would like to save my Greeks. And I fear I will achieve none of these things.’

  Swan bowed. ‘I’m … sorry.’

  Bessarion nodded. ‘So am I,’ he said. ‘Messire Suane, I would also like to have regular news from Rimini. Do you take my meaning? See if you can arrange it.’ He looked up. ‘And be careful. Malatesta is perhaps the most dangerous man I’ve ever met.’

  Swan bowed.

  Bessarion rose and blessed him.

  Swan left him, wishing he’d been angrier. Bessarion’s sorrow left him feeling low, bad, wicked, and ill used.

  Two hours later, in the perfumed back rooms of Madame Lucretia’s, Swan discovered that he was absolutely impotent. His chosen partner, a Moorish girl as dark as Iso was fair, was not kind.

  Swan went out the next day – moving cautiously through the streets because there were Orsini and other liveries everywhere, and swords, bucklers, halberds, spears – an arsenal of weapons on every man. Swan crossed the ruined forum with a gentleman in half-armour – a French pilgrim. They were accosted only by cats.

  He went to a man recommended by one of the clothing merchants in the market. He walked cautiously to a collapsed tenement that had once been six storeys of Roman brick and was now two storeys and some craggy ruins. The man to whom he’d been sent charged him an exorbitant amount of money – in silver – to take his horoscope and prescribe for him.

  The man asked him a hundred impertinent questions. He had a scratchy high voice and an abrasive manner, yet at the same time was condescending and ingratiating – he sounded utterly false.

  ‘If Messire comes back in a week, this lowly practitioner of the divine arts will endeavour to provide Messire with what he desires,’ the man said.

  Swan frowned. ‘I would like … a drug. A philtre. Something. Now.’

  The other man bowed, and Swan thought the man was either badly injured or deformed, and hid it in the dark, stale room. ‘I can do nothing until I have read Messire’s life in the stars,’ the astrologer said. ‘Now please to leave me in peace, eh?’

  ‘Now that you have my money, you mean,’ Swan said, and left in an ill humour.

  A week of running errands – and further impotent experiments – and Swan returned to find the astrologer’s hovel empty. The furniture was there, but the place had been abandoned.

  Swan spat his frustration and went, at last, to see Maestro Claudio.

  Master Claudio received him with a cup of wine and every evidence of deep respect. The Bishop of Ostia was a powerful man who straddled several factions – and a rising star in the Church. He was also a career politician who had discovered courage and a little faith in Constantinople, and who – unlike most of his kind – was grateful to Alessandro Bembo and Messire Swan for his preservation. Despite Swan’s embarrassment, he enjoyed the effusive greetings of the house staff and the terms ‘Excellency’ and ‘Magnificence’ as if he were a great nobleman.

  Alone in a small plastered room with the Bologna-trained physician, he was not altogether the great man he wished to be. In fact, Swan nearly trembled.

  ‘You are impotent?’ Maestro Claudio asked.

  Swan paled. ‘You know?’ he asked.

  Claudio laughed and crossed his legs. ‘Listen, none of you bastards ever comes to visit me unless you are sick or wounded. You aren’t leaking blood, you aren’t puking, and you are well enough to come under your own power. Hence – your prick.’

  Swan bit his lips. ‘Your rhetoric is as good as your medicine.’

  Claudio shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Impotence is a curious phenomenon. Food – fear – age; many things can control the virile member.’ He shrugged.

  ‘Uh,’ Swan said, and sat, miserable.

  ‘You really have to tell me,’ Claudio said. ‘I can’t guess the whole thing.’

  ‘You guessed the problem,’ Swan shot back.

  ‘Mmm. I heard that you couldn’t ride the little Moor at Madame Lucretia’s. So I had a hint.’ Claudio shrugged. ‘How long?’

  Swan related the whole story. It was like going to confession, which Swan had done his whole life. So he told everything – so much that at one point in the relation of his night’s amorous adventures with Demoiselle Iso, Claudio made a face and waved his hand.

  ‘Keep that for your erotic poetry and spare me, eh?’ He smiled.

  Swan flushed in embarrassment.

  At the end, Claudio sighed. ‘You think she’s a witch, and has ensorcelled you,’ he said.

  Swan nodded. ‘I wondered if you could tell me how to fight the spell,’ he said.

  Claudio laughed. ‘Get more sleep. Eat more. Worry less.’ He shrugged.

  Swan frowned. ‘But … she is a witch.’

  Claudio rolled his eyes. ‘Perhaps in the contada2 they believe in such things,’ he said. ‘I am a doctor. It is just blood and gristle – it responds to the mind.’

  Swan shook his head. ‘You don’t believe in witches.’

  Claudio laughed again. ‘No.’

  ‘They are in the Bible,’ Swan said.

  ‘Where?’ Maestro Claudio asked. ‘Spare me. Get some sleep and eat a big meal, and then try again. Please believe me.’

  Swan shook his head.

  Claudio let him out with an apology. ‘I wish I could help you more,’ he said.

  Rest and food didn’t alter his new reality, and Swan felt as if he’d taken a wound – a bad wound that cut the core of his being. He felt different – smaller, slower, less important.

  Despite which, he had to leave for Rimini and Vienna. The cardinal’s dispatches were ready, and Alessandro was deep in the planning of a military campaign in the Morea. In fact, Giannis left the day before Swan, after a fine dinner. He took half the Greeks – the stradioti – and left Swan the other half – five men in broad-brimmed hats and Tartar kaftans with curved swords and Turkish bows. They had fifteen horses among them. Their capitano was Constantine Paleologus Graitzas – he claimed only the slightest relation to the fallen Emperor, and indeed, Rome was full of the Paleologi and their offspring that year. Swan hired them for ready money and a promise that he was bound for Venice first. He knew they’d leave him there.

  Swan had three good horses, and he took them all and Antoine and Peter as well, with their own. All three of them went armed, armoured and heavily cloaked against the spring weather, which more closely resembled winter. So they were eight men with almost twenty horses and two mules when they rode through the Porte Appia and saluted the Orsini thugs on guard there.

  After visiting the church of San Sebastiano outside the walls, they rode east.

  They made their way across the Romagna to Rimini easily enough, although the cold, wet spring had forced prices up and driven more men and women to desperation, so that Swan killed a man who tried to rob them at the crossroads under the castle at Fiano Romano. The local garrison, despite flying the papal flag, did nothing to help.

  The third night on the road, Peter looked at Swan over a cup of wine and shook his head. ‘You sick?’ he asked.

  The inn was small, dirty and cold, and the eight men were the only guests, and they huddled on stools around the fire in the main fireplace, the Greeks speaking among themselves.

  Swan shrugged. ‘I’m well enough.’

  Peter shook his head. ‘You are sick. The girl – have you seen the girl who pours the wine?’

  Antoine, whose inclinations didn’t always run to girls, nonetheless whistl
ed. ‘A beauty,’ he admitted.

  Swan shrugged heavily.

  Peter shook his head. ‘See? Sick.’

  Constantine raised his cup of wine. ‘Ah – I’d say he was in love,’ he quipped. ‘The cough, the money, and the love – three things no man can hide. Eh? Or so we say in Venice.’

  Swan winced, but he smiled inwardly at how fast the Greek exiles were becoming Venetians.

  Another day of wet, cold riding. Swan’s best horse cast a shoe, to his intense annoyance, and they lost a day, leading the charger through two muddy ruts to a tiny hill village whose smith generated no confidence. All eight men slept in two small beds with the weapons close by.

  They were two hours on the road when Swan’s charger cast his shoe again. The same shoe.

  Swan dismounted and swore.

  ‘If we go back …’ he said.

  Peter shook his head, his eyes on the hills around them. ‘I think they’d kill us, or have a good try at it,’ he said. ‘That little village – they eyed us like a farmer watches a pig.’

  Antoine nodded. Constantine’s horse shuffled and its shod feet rang on the ground. ‘I don’t like this,’ the stradiote said.

  ‘So we push on. Damn it, he’s my best horse.’

  Peter nodded agreement, rain dripping off the brim of his battered hat. ‘He’s a fine beast. We’ll get him to a smith. Rimini can’t be so far.’

  They picked their way carefully, Swan riding his smallest horse. They stopped to remove the shoe fully, nails and all, which they managed with an armouring tool that Peter carried. Then they moved on more confidently.

  They climbed the next ridge slowly, watching the hills above them and the hilltops too. But there were no bandits, or if there were, they were too wary to attack eight armed men, even with a lame horse. From the top of the pass, Swan eyed the terrain ahead – three ridges falling, parallel to the sea, each a little lower, or so he thought he remembered. He was looking at the barn in which he and Antoine – and Violetta …

  ‘Fuck,’ he said aloud, and in English. And banished his thoughts. ‘Constantine – I want to take this trail to the left. See how it runs along this valley? I think it will take us towards Rimini.’

  Constantine and Peter studied the ground. ‘Yes,’ they both agreed.

  They started down into the first valley. As they passed into green vegetation, Constantine raised his head and then, without pointing, grunted. ‘Metal on that hillside, boss,’ he said, flicking his eyes instead of his head.

  Peter grinned. ‘They were waiting on the other road!’ he said.

  Swan couldn’t hide his own grin. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, and they all laughed. Constantine told his men to stay sharp in Greek, and they spread out a little as they hit the valley’s floor. There were small farms now, and two children, nearly naked, playing in the road. It was winter at the top of the pass and mid-spring at the bottom.

  ‘Rain coming,’ said one of the stradiotes with a toothy grin. He pointed at the sky to the east.

  ‘Mother of Christ,’ said another. He took his rolled-up felt cloak from his saddle without taking his eyes from the hillsides. Each of the stradiotes checked his bowstring and wrapped his bow as they rode.

  Swan felt safe. As they crested the second ridge, the rain hit them, and Constantine told them to be cautious.

  ‘How much to keep you all after Venice?’ he asked the capitano.

  Constantine shrugged – a Greek shrug that could have meant anything.

  ‘I’m probably going to fight the Turks,’ Swan said.

  Constantine pulled his rain-cloak over his hat with a practised twitch. ‘You mean, all my cousins who have accepted Islam, and a handful of Turks,’ he said.

  Swan’s second-best helmet had a bill to keep the rain off his face, but there was water running down his back and now down his chest because he hadn’t put a cloth cape over his harness. He reached for his cloak.

  ‘They say Mehmet is marching on Belgrade,’ Swan said.

  Constantine nodded. His expression gave nothing away.

  Swan gave up. They rode through rain and twilight, and beat the sun to the top of the last big ridge.

  From the top of the pass, they could see all the way to the sea, and Swan almost imagined he could see the Wolf’s lair.

  Rimini. Another day’s ride and the stark castle towered over the town, dominating it utterly, and a new church was rising among the buildings. The stone was light enough, but the place looked dark and heavy, defiant and impregnable.

  Antoine smiled. ‘It looks like France!’ he said.

  Peter nodded. ‘I was thinking the same,’ he admitted.

  Swan shrugged. ‘The Malatesta are very modern,’ he said.

  1 A ‘Galia Sotil’ was a light galley, the specialty of the Venetian shipyards but built throughout the Mediterranean. Fast and light but still deadly enough for fleet combat, it might be said to be the cruiser or destroyer of its day.

  2 Contada—the countryside

  Also by Christian Cameron

  Tom Swan and the Head of St George

  Volume One: Castillon

  Volume Two: Venice

  Volume Three: Constantinople

  Volume Four: Rome

  Volume Five: Rhodes

  Volume Six: Chios

  The Tyrant Series

  Tyrant

  Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

  Tyrant: Funeral Games

  Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

  Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

  Tyrant: Force of Kings

  The Killer of Men Series

  Killer of Men

  Marathon

  Poseidon’s Spear

  Other Novels

  Washington and Caesar

  God of War

  The Ill-Made Knight

  Copyright

  An Orion eBook

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Orion Books

  This eBook first published in 2014 by Orion Books

  Copyright © Christian Cameron 2014

  Sword image used with permission www.albion-swords.com

  The moral right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 4868 5

  Orion Books

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  www.orionbooks.co.uk