Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes (7 page)

‘Back! Back! The knights know we are here! Back, you fools!’ shouted the one with the voice of iron.

But it was chaos in the corridor.

An older, more experienced man would have leaped at them in that moment, but Swan was still amazed at his initial success and still cautious.

The third man had time to ready his weapons – a light axe, and a curving sword.

‘It is just one man!’ he shouted. ‘Aiiee!’ and he attacked.

Swan ignored the sabre and cut at the axe. The sabre blow rang on his helmet, and his pommel struck something – he had one of the man’s arms, and he broke it at the elbow, and punched his armoured right hand into what he assumed was the face as yet another weapon struck him – he dropped his opponent and stepped back, looking for balance. Two weapons struck him together – a blow to his visor that almost brought him down and a cut to his left arm that rang like a bell on his left vambrace. He had his sword up, and he cut down, into the darkness, and connected – and there was a vicious pain in his right calf. He screamed – or roared.

Someone had his left arm. He slammed his right fist and his pommel at this new threat – connected, and the man fell away – then he took a kick or a punch to his knee that caused him to fall backwards.

His head struck the stones that had almost tripped him as he entered the corridor. He hit hard – but his armet took the blow and his thickly padded liner saved him.

He could hear them coming, and he knew he was hurt, and more on impulse than by training he hauled himself over the rock – under his desperate hands, it became a stone column with deep fluting. He knelt because his left leg was having trouble supporting him, took his sword in both hands, and put the point up.

Forty feet down the tunnel, there was a scream and the last torch went out.

‘One, two, three! Charge!’ called a voice in Turkish. They had taken twenty of Swan’s gasping breaths to ready themselves.

Swan had used the time to get against the right-hand wall, crouched down behind the fallen pillar. He couldn’t see them. But he could certainly hear them.

They all screamed together – the long, undulating scream that had taken Constantinople.

The two leaders hit the pillar together. And fell.

Swan cut – in panic – at the sounds. Hit something soft, cut again, and again. And again. Cut – thrust, cut.

A desperate Turk, heroically brave, seized his sword-blade – probably in his death throes, but his sacrifice was not in vain. By luck, or
fortuna
, he plucked the blade right out of Swan’s hands. Swan felt it go – heard it fall.

A man hit his chest. And tried to wrap his arms about Swan’s shoulders.

Swan pulled the man over the column – every Turk had to discover the downed column for himself, and it had become Swan’s greatest advantage. He used it to break the man’s balance and threw him, and then fell atop him, steel-clad arms and hands working brutally.

A heavy weapon rang off his helmet. And there was suddenly weight on his back – he rolled, a man screamed, and Swan got his right hand on his rondel dagger. It was still there. He got it out – reversed – and stabbed with it.

He realized that the roaring sound was his own voice.

He felt the man’s neck go just as he pounded the blade into the man’s skull. The skull cracked like an egg and then the whole head collapsed under his weight. Then he felt himself repeat the blow, even though he knew the man had to be dead.

He tried to rise off the new corpse, but his leg failed him and he sank back – now kneeling on both knees. He could see nothing. He could hear at least two men dying. Everything smelled of blood, and faeces, and despair.

Perhaps he whimpered. He certainly wanted to.

That was how Fra Tommaso found him, when he came at the head of a dozen knights. Swan was still kneeling, facing the corridor. His armour was caked in blood and dirt, and he had a dagger blade in both hands, and he was weeping. He couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t get his helmet open. As soon as he heard the Italian voices coming, he’d burst into tears.

He was ashamed of his weakness. But that only made him sob. He choked.

Fra Tommaso clutched him to his chest – steel to steel. Torches illuminated the charnel house – seven dead men, all looking as if they’d been savaged by demons or wolves.

‘Ave Maria!’ muttered Sir John Kendal.

Swan couldn’t speak. The man with the crushed skull had been Salim. He had time to see that before he vomited.

‘He’s bleeding,’ said Fra Tommaso.

It took them an hour to get him above ground, and in the end, he lost consciousness.

Swan dreamed about it and awoke, screaming. And Fra Tommaso comforted him.

Either this happened many times, or it was all part of the same nightmare. The dark. The choking heat, the faceplate, the smell of blood, the pressure of a man on his breastplate and the feel of the face caving in under his knife. Again, and again.

And again.

And again.

When Swan recovered himself, he had a moment of extreme disorientation as the man at the end of his narrow bed was Fra Domenico Angelo, known the length and breadth of the Inner Sea as Fra Diablo. The conqueror’s ring burned on his finger like the fire of God.

Swan tried to remember where he was. It probably said something about him that he knew the ring – and felt lust for it – before he came to the conclusion that he was in the Hospital of Rhodos.

He could taste the opium in his mouth. His left leg was wrapped like an Egyptian mummy’s.

The slightest flick of thought
and he was in the dark with the weight of a man on his chest and—

‘The conquering hero,’ Fra Domenico said.

Down the ward, a man screamed.

Swan’s body spasmed. And he leaned over the bed and vomited into a basin.

Fra Domenico sat on his bed and kept his long hair out of his chamber pot. ‘Ahh,’ he said, in his disturbingly gentle voice. ‘It was bad, under the earth, wasn’t it, boy?’

Swan felt a disobedient temptation to punch the brother knight.

‘Listen, lad,’ the other man said. ‘That’s what it is like. And will be like, in your dreams, for many nights.’

Swan flashed on … darkness. Hot darkness. A skull bursting under his weight like a hot chestnut on the frozen Thames. He got hold of himself. ‘Sir …’ he panted. ‘What do I do?’

‘Pray,’ Fra Dominco suggested. He knelt, and began to pray – simple words; the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria.

Two days passed. The bandages came off, and Fra Tommaso and Fra John came to take him to the English Langue. Peter came with clothes. Swan was so far from himself that he didn’t feel dirty and didn’t feel any need to shave. He simply put on the clothes.

Swan walked between them like a prisoner. He didn’t look around himself, and he didn’t have much of a sense of where he was. Sometimes he had trouble breathing.

Fra John Kendal brought him along the main street to the English tower, and together they climbed the internal stairs to the second floor, where the knight had his command post.

He sat. Swan sat opposite him with Fra Tommaso. Even Peter sat.

‘Talk,’ John Kendal said. ‘Tell it.’

Swan looked at the darkness for a long time. ‘Can’t,’ he said.

Peter leaned forward. ‘Sooner you tell it. Sooner it stops eating you.’

A cup of wine was put in front of him. He drank it without tasting it, and another, while the others talked.

Suddenly – without even intending to speak – he said, ‘It was hot and it stank and I
liked Salim.
’ He sobbed the last.

Peter sloshed wine into the cup. ‘Tell us.’

Swan swallowed wine. ‘I fought them. You know,’ he said. He made a motion.

The other two knights sat, silently. Tommaso leaned forward and put a hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘We all know,’ he said. ‘Now you know, too.’

‘Who was Salim?’ Kendal asked.

Swan took a deep breath and steadied himself. ‘An African slave – a prisoner of war. He showed me the tunnels. Weeks ago. And he – I think he was the one – betrayed them to the Turks.’

Fra Tommaso splashed some of the wine into his own cup. ‘Hardly a betrayal,’ he said with a sad smile. ‘Hmm?’

‘He was the last man I killed,’ Swan said. And then it began to come tumbling out of him – phrase by phrase, like pus leaving a wound. The waiting. The fight.

And then the long nightmare in the dark, listening to them die.

Tommaso drank more. ‘Some of them got away,’ he said. ‘We saw them come out of the opening. Peter showed us. They had torches, and there was a sally. They threw a feint against the walls.’

Swan’s brain was beginning to function. ‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘When some of them charged me – some ran.’

He drank more wine. ‘They couldn’t see me in the dark,’ he said. Almost as if he felt for them.

Peter frowned. ‘Polished armour is almost invisible in the dark,’ he said.

‘None of them had any armour,’ Swan added.

‘Several of them didn’t have weapons,’ Fra John Kendal said. ‘Young man, no one denies your courage. Then or now. Tell the story.’

After several false starts, Swan did his best. He was drunk by the end, and Peter carried him to his bed.

‘In a year, it will be a tale to amuse the ladies, eh?’ Peter said.

‘Never,’ Swan spat. ‘Sweet Jesus saviour of the world, let me sleep without dreams.’

While he fought with dead men, the Turks buried their dead and sailed away empty handed. The next day, with the worst hangover of his adult life, Swan stood in the pounding sunshine and looked at the empty beach with the refuse of war—barrel staves and human excrement and an old sail flapping noisily. He felt dirty. He bathed, and shaved, and laced all the laces on his clothing. It felt like improvement. And then, obedient to orders, he sailed with both Fra Domenico and Fra Tommaso for Chios.

He managed to walk on board the galley, and he made himself take a turn rowing. When he was done, he drank down a gallon of delicious fresh water tinged with lemon, and threw up over the side. His left leg was weak. But his head was beginning to clear – both from the hangover and from the fight underground. He stumbled along the deck, drank more water, made sure he was clean, and presented himself to the two knights in the stern cabin.

‘You look better,’ Fra Tommaso said.

‘What are we doing?’ Swan asked. ‘Sir?’ he added, as respectfully as he could manage.

‘We’re bound for Chios,’ Fra Domenico said.

Swan swallowed his reply and tried to look eager.

Fra Tommaso pointed out of the stern windows.

There in the sun lay six more galleys – five of them the order’s entire fleet, and the sixth bearing the banner of Genoa.

‘The Turks have gone to attack Kos,’ Tommaso said. ‘We have information that their real target is Chios, and their attacks on us were to keep us pinned at home while they looted the most valuable Christian possessions left in this sea.’

‘I have been appointed the order’s admiral,’ Fra Domenico said. ‘There should be a Genoese squadron at Chios and perhaps a few ships at Mytilini. I intend to gather them, and force the Turks to fight at sea.’

‘And God help us all,’ Fra Tommaso said.

The sea was clean, and it was sunny, and very different from the stinking heat under the earth, and Swan felt better every day – better when he practised with a spear, and his left leg held under him, and better when he drank three cups of wine and ate a little opium to get himself straight to sleep. He created little ways to protect himself. He didn’t go below decks. He avoided being alone in the dark.

They were two days going to Chios. They ran into an empty harbour, and left an hour later, sadder and wiser about the Genoese empire.

Swan was accepted aboard as an officer, and was invited to the command meeting held in the stern cabin. A dozen knights sat along the low benches under the great silver oil lamp, which Swan suspected had been looted from a Greek church, and watched Chios fall away astern.

‘You’d think they’d have kept their fleet in these waters,’ Fra Tommaso said quietly.

Fra Domenico shook his head. ‘Incredible. The fleet sailed home? Because the danger was too high? What danger are we speaking of, here?’

Fra Antonio – a Genoese knight – puffed air out of his lips and poured himself a cup of wine. ‘The Venetians, of course – with all respect to my brothers,’ he said, inclining his head to Fra Silvestre and Fra Giovanni, two Venetian knights across the table.

Fra Sylvestre sighed. ‘Brother, I wish I could protest that Venice would never attack Genoa while she was fighting the Turk.’ He shrugged. And reached for the wine. ‘But we both know that she would.’

Fra Domenico snorted in contempt. ‘This is surely more important than the petty contests of trade!’

‘This from the greatest pirate on the seas?’ spat Fra Sylvestre. He glared at Fra Domenico.

Fra Tommaso – the oldest man aboard – rose carefully to his feet to avoid smacking his head on the deck beams. ‘Brothers – this is not the place to fight among ourselves. Domenico, is it still your intention to sail for Mytilini?’

‘We can be there by nightfall,’ Domenico said. ‘Listen, brothers – piracy has given me some insights into war at sea from which perhaps the order might benefit.’ Fra Sylvestre appeared ready to remonstrate, but Fra Tommaso pressed him down with his right hand.

‘The best way to relieve Chios is to attack Turkish shipping along the coast,’ Fra Domenico said.

‘Really, you are no better than the Turks!’ Sylvestre spat.

‘Perhaps you think we might take them on, ship to ship? Perhaps we could challenge them to single combat?’ Domenico was derisive. ‘We have enough ships to wreck their commerce for two hundred leagues. And nothing will make the Sultan angrier.’

Swan looked at his hands.

Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘Make the Sultan angrier? That will certainly help.’

Mytilini had one of the largest fortresses Swan had seen in the whole of the Mediterranean Sea. The fortress stood on the city’s ancient acropolis, a headland towering above the lower town and the Genoese quarter on the hillside, and it had guns which could dominate the anchorages and beaches on either side.