Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes

The coast of the Morea rolled by, an endless succession of small, excellent harbours cut into tawny rock by the ancient gods of the sea.

The
Blessed Saint John
cut the water like the slim predator she was, and her oarsmen grunted softly as they pulled the stroke. There was no wind, and after a winter’s voyage from Ancona, wherein the ship was forced to avoid the Venetian possessions in Dalmatia, no wind was taken as a favourable sign by every man aboard.

Thomas Swan, Donat of the Order of Saint John, stood in his short frowzy brown gown by the tiller of the galley and listened to his mentor in all things nautical. A rich Genoese merchant—Messire Drappiero—had taken over the stern cabin, and Fra Tommaso, the captain, had responded by staying on his quarterdeck at all hours. They’d been at sea nineteen days – mostly passing their nights in secluded coves or on icy, windswept beaches, but they’d spent four nights at sea, as well, and Swan had been on deck almost as often as the old man.

It was rather like learning to ride from the Turks. The flow of information was endless, and the expertise of the teacher unquestioned. Swan tried to learn what he could. The cross-staff made sense to him. Constructing a memory palace based on biblical verses to memorise the costal marks was a little more difficult. Attempting to keep the tiller perfectly straight so that he didn’t leave a notch in his wake while the oarsmen toiled away …

‘Notch in your wake,’ the old man said. ‘Have you tried prayer?’

Swan was briefly tempted to tell the old man where he could put his prayer. He hadn’t slept in three days. He didn’t know where the old man got his reserves of energy, but for himself, he was ready for a cup of wine and a woman.

‘Notch in your wake,’ the old man said. ‘Try saying the paternoster. You know it, don’t you?’ the old man asked, and laughed.

He has me pegged
, Swan thought bitterly.

He set his shoulders, put the tiller in what he fancied was the best place on his hip, and began reciting the paternoster in his head.

‘Try out loud,’ the old bastard said.

Swan prayed out loud.

‘Now say your whole length of beads. Aloud,’ Fra Tommaso said.

‘Beads?’ Swan asked.

Fra Tommaso guffawed. ‘Here, try mine. You really are the spawn of Satan, are you not?’

The knight’s beads were simple globes of wood strung on plain black linen. His cross at the end was brass. Swan took the beads.

‘Say a paternoster for each bead,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘Notch. In your wake. Look at it. Every time you do that, it costs every man on this ship a little more effort to row the ship back on course. That’s why there
is
a helmsman. I’ll spare you the allegory. Pray. Out loud.’

Swan began to pray. There was something about the old knight that kept him at it. Perhaps he just hated the pious hypocrite enough to stay with him all day.

Perhaps.

After seven beads, he realised that the knight was no longer on the deck. He fought a vague panic. He’d never been left alone before.

He went back to praying. Out loud.

When the timoneer came and saluted and turned the hourglass, he was on his second time through the beads. He smiled and nodded.

His hips hurt, his hands hurt, and the muscles in his forearms were beyond simple words like ‘hurt’.

By the time he’d said the beads four times, his lower back hurt.

The old knight reappeared like something mechanical, popping up the stern ladder despite a heavy wool robe and a breastplate. He looked at the wake and nodded.

‘That was half a watch,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen worse, boy. Go and have a rest. Don’t use the cabin – our guest is having a fit.’

Swan was not too proud to bend over in public and try to stretch his back. ‘Sweet Jesu – sorry. My back is sore.’

‘Wait a day or two,’ the old man said.

‘Why is Master Drappierro upset?’ Swan asked.

‘He just discovered that when I said I was going to Monemvasia, I meant it,’ the old man said.

Swan risked the after-cabin to get a stool.

‘Do you think the old cretin who commands this vessel is affronting me on purpose, young man? Can you convince him to move us along? Monemvasia? We could make Piraeus in two days. Speak to him, please, my boy.’

These were the first civil words that the man had spoken to him, and Swan was not moved to help, but he nodded as agreeably as he could manage.

He sketched a bow. ‘I’ll make every effort,’ he said.

Drappierro held out a cup of wine. ‘And get me some more wine,’ he said. He paused and raised his head. ‘Please?’

Swan rewarded his attempt with the whole leather cask from the sideboard. He poured the merchant’s cup half full – patted himself on the back for spilling none in the short, choppy sea – and placed the leather keg by Drappierro’s elbow.

The Genoese grunted.

Swan went below into the gloom of the oar deck. The leather covers, intended to keep the icy spray off the oarsmen, were up, and the wind whistled through the oar holes. He went forward past the Genoese ambassador’s party, who were frozen and bitterly unhappy nearest the stern – past all the oarsmen, who had their chests under their benches, complete with coats of carefully oiled mail and broad-brimmed helmets and heavy axes arranged for instant access. Farther forward were the order’s mercenaries, a dozen for Monemvasia and another handful for distant Kos, paid for by the Duke of Burgundy. Beyond them were a handful of tiny cabins, no bigger than a man’s sea chest, where the standing officers – the carpenter and the timoneer and the deck master – all slept. Antoine had very wisely slung a hammock between two of the tiny cabins – doorpost to doorpost – getting for himself a fairly snug space almost four by eight feet.

Swan nodded to Antoine, who looked pained and rolled out of his hammock. ‘Your worship?’ he whined.

‘Stop calling me that,’ Swan insisted. He climbed into Antoine’s warm hammock and went to sleep. Antoine had no duties and no stations, so he slept all the time, or that was what Swan told himself. The truth was that galleys weren’t built for the crew to sleep aboard, and when they had to, men came to blows over sleeping space.

When Swan awoke he could feel the difference in the ship’s motion, and when he went on deck he saw that they were close inshore.

The old knight nodded, eyes and teeth pale in the wintery darkness. ‘You are becoming a sailor,’ he said. ‘You woke when I changed course.’

Swan shrugged and shivered.

Monemvasia towered over them. Some men called it the Gibraltar of Greece, and in truth the rock rose like a pillar of basalt from the angry sea, three hundred yards from shore. Viewed from the deck of a galley, the place looked impregnable.

‘It has never fallen to a siege,’ the old knight said.

He got them in to the quay with the skill of hundreds of repetitions, despite a rising wind and a following sea – the oars came in like the folding wings of a landing bird, and the ship bumped the wooden posts of the pier no harder than a child might hit another child with a stick.

Fra Domenico embraced him on the quay and held up his hand to examine his ring. The magnificent diamond still glittered on his own hand. ‘You delivered my messages?’ he asked.

‘Yours and the town fathers’,’ Swan said. ‘Cardinal Bessarion assigned some of the Duke of Burgundy’s crusade tithe to supporting the town. He says that if he is Pope, he will take the town under his mantle.’

‘And until then we can whistle in the wind?’ Fra Domenico asked.

Fra Tommaso raised an eyebrow. ‘I brought the men, but the word in Ancona is that the Grand Turk will try for Rhodos in the spring, and we’ll all be called home.’

‘That’s the word here, too,’ Domenico said. ‘I’ll be ready – nor will the soldiers go to waste.’

Swan stood by while Drappiero, the Genoese merchant—and ambassador—was introduced. He was respectful and courteous to Fra Domenico. Swan saw the Genoese notice the knight’s ring, too. The man started. His head turned as if he might say something, and then his jaw snapped shut.

That night he ate good white bread and beef, and drank good wine in the hospitaller preceptory behind the hospital. He sat with Fra Domenico and Fra Tommaso, and Peter waited on him. The Genoese party went straight to an inn.

After dinner, the two older men went off to the hospital and left him with Peter, who embraced him for perhaps the third time.

‘I might haf to tink differnt of you,’ he said. ‘You were commink back for me.’

Peter led him out into the town, which was a quarter the size of Ancona. They met Brother Totten, who rolled his serving brother’s gown up and stowed it in a wooden box by the gate.

‘You are allowed out?’ Swan asked.

The old Englishman laughed. ‘It’s no crime to the order if I have a drink,’ he said. ‘There’s sins in Monemvasia, but not so many we need to watch ourselves so hard.’

Swan introduced Antoine, and the four men played cards in a small room above an open yard where wine was served to men – and only men.

Peter nodded across his cards. ‘One hears you are married,’ he said.

Swan nodded. ‘Not really. But I might. I … love her.’

Peter made a non-committal noise and took a toothpick out of his eating-knife sheath. ‘Twenty-four points,’ he said.

Swan paid up with an ill grace. ‘Now you are better than me, too!’ he complained after losing three times.

‘You haf only yourself to blame,’ Peter said. ‘You left me here with Messire Totten.’

Totten had been talking with the taverna keeper, but he leaned over and broke into a great smile. ‘Let me lighten your load,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy a pitcher of wine, and you can try and find Lady Fortuna.’ He shuffled the cards carefully and took a seat. ‘Who’s the rich bastard on your galley?’

Swan scratched under his chin. ‘Francesco Drappierro. Richer than Croesus. No sense of humour at all. I hope he gets his pocket picked.’

Totten shrugged. ‘My friend in the taverna says he just asked the innkeeper for a Turkish girl.’ He shrugged again. ‘No Turkish girls here.’

The words ‘Turkish girl’ conjured such an image that Swan flushed, but he fought the image down and went back to the cards.

‘Speaking of Turks,’ Swan said. ‘No attacks?’

Totten shook his head. ‘There was fighting in the north, near Corinth. And the Albanians are threatening to revolt – again. You know the Katakuzenos family?’

Swan shook his head. ‘Should I?’ he asked wearily. It was like learning to navigate.

‘They were the lords of the Morea – oh, a hundred years ago. Not long after Agincourt, they … well, some of them died, they lost some battles, and the family ceased to be as important and the Paleologi took the whole Morea.’ Totten’s shrug indicated that this was an extremely truncated version of a longer story. ‘But – for various reasons – the Vlachs and the Albanians prefer the Katakuzenoi to the Paleologi.’

Swan leaned back. ‘You’re making this up.’

Totten laughed. ‘You asked! This is why no one crusades in Greece. Too many sides.’

Swan nodded. ‘Which side is the right side?’ he asked.

Totten shrugged. ‘No one here is much better than anyone else,’ he said. ‘At any rate, there was a battle a month ago – the Albanians lost to Thomas Palaeologos, who had Turks in his army, even though he hates them.’

‘Really, it’s just like Italy,’ Swan said.

‘Or France,’ admitted Antoine.

‘Or Flanders,’ said Peter bitterly.

‘It would never happen in England, thank God and Saint George,’ said Totten. ‘Nothing wrecks a country like a long civil war.’

Later they played with some of the Burgundian archers bound for Kos, and Peter arranged himself and Antoine a comfortable berth. Comfortable compared to lying on a bare deck, at any rate.

The weather turned for the worse, and they were nine days in Monemvasia. Swan grew tired of the wine, and found chastity a heavier burden in a town with dozens of young women than it had been at sea. And his bond with Violetta notwithstanding, he dreamed of Khatun Bengül almost every night, to his own mortification.

However, two sunny days and certain astrological signs that the captain understood had them at sea on the tenth day. They ran down the Aegean, touched at Hermione for wood and water, then across the great bay to Attica, visible all day as they sailed without touching an oar. They were in Athens for two days while Francesco Drappierro visited the Duke of Athens on his acropolis. Swan wandered through the wreckage of the lower town and purchased more than a dozen items from hawkers on the waterfront in Piraeus, including a matched pair of heavy gold rings with seals. He purchased coins, more weapons green with verdigris and a helmet – the best one he could find.

When Drappierro delayed another day, Swan rented a horse and rode north with Antoine and Peter for company. The farmland to the north and east of Athens was excellent, and there was a neat patchwork of hedged fields – wheat and barley ready for the late harvest. It made Swan a little homesick for England.

They crossed the plain and then, in a single long afternoon, climbed the great ridge that dominated the coast and came scrambling down to the small fishing village on the far side.

‘We came to see this?’ Peter said. ‘Are there girls?’

Swan rode along the beach and through the olive trees for several miles. Eventually he saw a Greek priest. The man seemed in no hurry to speak to a Frank, but Swan spoke passable Greek and the man smiled under his heavy beard.

‘I thought you might be another Florentine overseer,’ he said. ‘They sell these lands so fast – the Italians, I mean. How can I help you?’

Swan nodded. ‘Is this Marathon?’ he asked.

The priest nodded soberly. ‘Ah – a scholar. Come with me.’ He fetched a mule tied to a post outside a farmhouse, and led them down the plain.

‘See the little hill, like a pot turned upside down?’ the priest said, and after a moment Swan could see it.

‘My house is just the other side,’ the priest said. ‘But I think the little hill is the tomb. Where the Athenians buried their dead.’

Peter rolled his eyes as Swan reacted with passionate enthusiasm. They rode down the valley, chattering – Swan trying to understand the rapid Greek, the priest trying to be plain spoken.