Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes (4 page)

‘Yes,’ Salim said, with some relief. He led the way, apparently unconscious of Swan’s careful movements behind him.

Spring came early in Greece. The flowers burst forth, so that the fields outside the town were like intricate Persian carpets, with tiny flowers each a different colour as far as the eye could see.

The first ship in from Italy brought news of a great peace. There was immense excitement in Rome, and Nicholas V, the Pope, was convening a great council to declare a crusade to rescue Constantinople.

Swan heard all this over a cup of wine. He walked quickly back to his barracks and found Fra Tommaso – only to have his bubble of militant Christian enthusiasm burst by the old man’s cynicism.

‘Peace between Sforza and Venice – certainly. I’d heard of it before we cleared Ancona,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘Peace in Italy? I suppose it’s possible.’ He laughed. ‘A crusade? Honestly, young man, where do you get these notions? No one in Europe actually
cares
about the loss of Constantinople! The Italians want to make money, the French want to make war, the English … perhaps want to make beer. The Emperor, may his name be praised, is busy trying to make certain there won’t be a crusade, and trust me, that will be his view right up until Mehmet marches to the gates of Vienna.’

Swan sagged. ‘Oh.’

‘Listen, boy, you’ve been listening to all the Burgundians and the Frenchmen. They’re eager for a crusade. Good for them – it’s not their cargoes that the Turks will seize. But without a fleet – a fleet of both Venice and Genoa – there is no crusade. Eh?’

‘So now what happens?’ Swan asked. ‘We’re ready for sea.’ He thought of the awesome labyrinth under his feet, barely explored.

‘As to that – what happens now is that you and I take our ship down to Alexandria, to pay our loving respects to the Mamelukes, who are every bit as much Muslims as the Turks but are preferred by his Holiness. Understand?’ He laughed again.

‘No,’ Swan said.

‘Good. We’ll sail in the morning. Get your kit aboard.’ Fra Tommaso waved his hand.

Alexandria was everything that Swan thought a city should be. It was huge – unbelievably big, really, with so many different markets and bazaars that the Englishman wandered from morning until night while the order’s delegation met the Sultan and paid their respects – and some kind of secret tribute.

After a day as a Christian tourist, Swan decided to see the city as a co-religionist. He had the clothes – all his Turkish clothes had been with Peter, and he liked the idea of going as a Turk, which would prompt fewer questions about any accent there might be to his Arabic. He went ashore in his military gown and changed in the public privy behind the beachfront bazaar. He rolled his Christian clothes into a tight bundle and placed them in the bottom of the small leather bag he carried. Dressed as a Christian, every move he made would be reported.

Especially a visit to a brothel.

Dressed as a Turk, he wandered through the waterfront souk, waiting to be challenged. But no such thing took place. Instead, he received a great deal of fawning, and he developed a following of a crowd of small boys, whom he pleased by buying them sweets.

A woman took the sweets away from one boy and threw them in a pile of dung.

‘You know what the Turk wants you for,’ she spat in Arabic that he wasn’t supposed to understand.

The boys all fled.

Swan shook his head and continued through the string of markets.

Alexandria was a dream city – a city almost two thousand years old, and built for trade. The magnificent harbour was packed with Genoese and Venetian shipping, as well as a scattering of French ships and – of all things – an English ship, the
Katherine Sturmy.
He almost forgot his position as a Turk when he heard a man speak in English – and heard a woman answer him.

Swan walked away hurriedly lest he betray himself. After two turnings and crossing a broad thoroughfare, he was in yet another set of wandering alleys, no wider than his arm. Here the shops were mere awnings. And here were scraps of antiquities – a head of Aphrodite in marble, a seal carved in quartz, another in bloodstone. Swan eyed them all, collected a few and began to dicker with the owner.

He saw the man signal someone behind him, but made the mistake of assuming it was the signal to another seller.

He made a further error in taking his purse out of his leather bag – and disclosing the sum of ten gold ducats. But Swan
was
canny enough to see the change come over the dealer’s face, like tidal water covering the sands. He flinched and turned – and saw the stick.

He ducked, and took the blow high on his left arm, and let out a startled squeal of pure pain.

He got his right hand on his dagger, and in so doing lost his purse. The silk bag landed and opened, and a gold ducat rolled out.

There were six of them, at least.

A club struck his shoulder. The left arm was numb, but the man lingered too long and Swan kicked him in the groin with the whole weight of his foot.

His life was saved by the second man’s greed. Instead of killing him, the man had knelt to pick up the coin. A third man, tall and black, swung a pole or a spear at his head and Swan tried to back up a step and fell over the kneeling man. On instinct, he rammed his dagger into another footpad’s shin. The man screamed. Swan got a hand on his belt and the same motion that pulled Swan to his feet helped him put the other man on the ground.

He took a blow on his back that hurt like fire, and riposted with a sweeping dagger blow that dropped the tall African, at least temporarily. The others backed away and Swan, his left arm tingling, picked up one of the abandoned clubs. He menaced the pedlar with his dagger and swept the seal stones into his leather bag – the purse would have to stay on the ground.

His eyes went left, then right. He pivoted, and looked over his shoulder.

The pedlar rolled the table over on him. He leaped back, and the man shrieked, ‘A Turk! A Turk! A Turk has raped my son!’

When a somewhat bedraggled Swan went back aboard his galley – he’d run through half of Alexandria, and taken several hard blows – he cleaned up and found himself summoned to the stern cabin to translate for his captain.

Fra Tommaso met him on the main deck. The rowers – all professionals – were ashore, behaving like oarsmen, and Swan, whose ribs ached, wished he had chosen to join them.

‘You have two remarkable black eyes,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘You speak English, I gather.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Swan could barely think. He’d survived the encounter by not using his weapon again and by running – apparently the right tactic when set upon by six men and an angry mob. His stolen gemstones were safe below, but he’d lost the dagger and all the trinkets he’d purchased earlier in the day as well as the ten ducats he’d carried.

He’d learned that Egyptians hated Turks. Probably more than they hated Christians.

‘The English ship is making trouble,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘I want you to explain to them.’

As it proved, the English ship was making trouble merely by existing, and the Genoese wanted to storm it and kill the entire crew. A very voluble Genoese officer, who was never introduced, stormed and raged at the English merchant, Messire Richard Sturmy. Sturmy stood silently with his hands behind his back like an errant schoolboy. Swan liked him immediately.

The Genoese didn’t offer a point of view or a legal quibble. He merely made threats – threat after threat, so fast Swan could scarcely keep up.

‘Tell this sodomite that if his wife and child are aboard, I’ll rape them and sell them to the Turks. Tell him—’ The Genoese found it hard to speak with Fra Tommaso’s hand over his mouth.

‘That is one threat you will not make on my ship, messire,’ Fra Tommaso said quietly.

Swan had waited patiently through a long and vicious harangue. Now he turned to Messire Sturmy.

‘I am English,’ he said. ‘I am a Donat of the order. Thomas Swan.’ He offered his hand.

Sturmy seized it the way a drowning man might seize a log. ‘Blessing to God and Saint George, my friend! An Englishman! Here!’ He embraced Swan. ‘These … foreigners – I can’t understand ’em. My shipman can, but he says we’re forbidden to trade here – which is cant! I have a letter from the King! And another letter from the Sultan!’ He grinned at Swan and seemed to take him in for the first time. ‘By the gentle saviour, lad, someone used you as a pell!’

Swan read the letters quickly. He turned to his knight. ‘Sir – the Englishman has a letter signed by the King of England appointing him an ambassador. And the King of England has the agreement of the Signory and of the Republic to allow this ship to trade on the Levant.’ He handed the letter to Fra Tommaso. ‘And, sir, he has a letter from the Sultan. The Mameluke Sultan Al Ashraf.’

Fra Tommaso raised an eyebrow. He turned to the Genoese. ‘He has letters – even from your republic.’

‘Any whore can get such a letter. Tell him to leave or I kill him and his ship.’ The Genoese leered.

‘You are not the best advertisement for your republic – you know that, eh?’ Fra Tommaso said.

‘I do not ask for your opinion, Fra Tommaso!’ the Genoese said. ‘Genoa does not support the knights so that they may banter about the news. Rid us of these interlopers!’

Bits of the merchant’s spittle flecked Swan’s doublet.

Swan rarely thought of himself as an Englishman. He thought of himself … as himself. As friends with a handful of men and women to whom he was loyal. As one of Bessarion’s men.

But the Genoese made him feel like an Englishman, and he was tempted to do the Genoese a harm.

He read over the letters. ‘Messire Sturmy, this man is determined to be rid of you, and he commands the Genoese shipping here – or has the power to make his commands felt. Would you consider trading up the coast of Syria? Perhaps with the Turks?’

Sturmy laughed. ‘I’d be happy to do so, Sir Knight, but I was told those waters were …’ He turned and looked at the Genoese man. ‘… full of pirates.’

‘What do you trade?’ Swan asked.

Sturmy counted on the tips of his fingers. ‘Lead. I have lead in the holds as ballast, but it is worth a mint here – they don’t have any. And hides. I have some tallow – all the way from the Russias – and wool, of course. Our own wool,’ he added, as if Swan would have believed that another country might export wool.

Swan tried to look as if he was angry. ‘I am looking to make a fool of this Genoese,’ he said, pointing at the man.

‘That would be neighbourly!’ Sturmy said. He composed himself and tried to look contrite.

‘If,’ Swan said, shaking his finger, ‘you dye your own wool …’ He paused and yelled, ‘You stupid whoreson! Are you wode? Listen to me!’

‘I am listening!’ Sturmy shouted back. ‘And the Devil take me if I’ll ever leave my own fulling house again! Ships are for shipmen!’ He spat right back.

‘I imagine you use alum,’ Swan said, in a tone of voice a man might use to reason with a child.

Sturmy began to grin. ‘I use it when I can afford it.’

‘There’s a port – the cream of the jest is it used to be a Genoese port. In Asia Minor, called Phokaia.’ He nodded at Fra Tommaso. ‘And Rhodes would take all your lead. It’s close to Phokaia.’

‘Phokaian alum!’ Sturmy said, and the Genoese captain’s head shot round. Some things translate. Some are easy to pluck out of the air.

Swan spent some time explaining to the Genoese that
Phokaia
sounded very much like an English swear word. He was explicit and embarrassed the merchant, who didn’t like to hear bawdy talk in front of the clergy. ‘He’s sailing away?’

‘For Genoa,’ Swan said piously.

‘Bah. Stupid foreigners.’ The merchant went over the side.

The English ship departed the port of Alexandra before darkness fell. She was a big round ship, as big as the Venetians’ and heavily built – not fast, but a virtual fortress, high off the water and with heavy fighting castles.

Fra Tommaso sat on the edge of his own bunk, dabbing Swan’s forehead and eyes with a damp cloth. Swan had a headache like that of a man who had drunk a great deal of alcohol – another thing he
hadn’t
done.

‘Your Englishmen seemed to obey you quite readily,’ the old man said softly. ‘Where did you send them?’

‘Phokaia, for alum,’ Swan said. ‘He had a firman from the Sultan in Constantinople. The Genoese was being a fool.’

‘That is why the Genoese are losing their empire,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘They’ve created a race of rich, entitled fools who can no longer see beyond their own greed. Why are men so vicious? It is no wonder God has sent us Mehmet. It is what we deserve.’

Swan closed his eyes and thought of Khatun Bengül. He’d been in Alexandria three days, and somehow he hadn’t managed even the most casual encounter.

Chastity pained him like alum on an open cut.

The galley sailed north with the dawn, and spent three weeks beating up against the winds – rowing into headwinds that exhausted the rowers and sheltering in coves, first in Cyprus and then on the south coast of Asia. Finally they made Rhodos. The rowers didn’t even get to leave the ship. Half a dozen young French knights came aboard as soon as they beached, and another dozen archers.

‘Chios is under attack,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘You may get to see it yet.’

They filled their water jars and their biscuit bin and went back to sea, oarsmen cursing. But after a few hours, when a favourable southerly filled the mainsail, the oarsmen had all of their fighting kit filling the benches and the catwalk – mail was polished, and swords and glaives and vicious short javelins were touched up and sharpened, had new oil applied, and the like. The archers took out small whetstones and retouched their best points.

‘How bad is it?’ Swan asked.

Fra Tommaso shrugged and spat downwind.

‘Bad enough, eh? The rumour is the Grand Turk has sent one of his great lords to sea with a fleet – a hundred galleys and fifty troopships. They intend to land and take Lesvos and Chios. A French pilgrim says the rumour in Aleppo is that they’ll go for Rhodos itself.’ The old knight smiled wickedly. ‘To stop the Turks, the order has three good galleys and two very decrepit ones, as well as a dozen smaller ships and about two thousand men. We should be fine.’