Текст книги "Rome"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

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Swan shrugged. ‘I’m …’ He struggled to define what it was he did. He laughed. ‘Well, I certainly saw some fighting last summer,’ he admitted.

‘I knew it!’ said the Frenchman.

They sat watching Violetta as she turned, back straight, on her toes – even in a frumpy wool overdress and a heavy man’s shirt, the set of her head, the way her eyes touched Swan’s …

Behind her, the main room’s door opened, and a wave of yellow and red washed into the room.

As it was, the Orsini were immediately confronted by Violetta, and her beauty turned their heads for a count of three, before their captain pointed at Swan. ‘There he is!’ he shouted.

By the count of three, Swan was standing erect with his sword in one hand and a heavy dagger in the other, and he was surprisingly sober when he came on guard. He turned his head once – looking for somewhere to run – but the construction of the place left him no options. The kitchen door was far across the room behind the table at which the Florentines had been sitting. The party was all intermingled now –

Nor did the Orsini seem to have any target beyond Swan. The leaders – three men – ran across the open floor.

The Frenchman seized the heavy table at which they’d been sitting and stood up – tipping the table up like a fortress wall. His left hand saved the pitcher of wine as the table fell with a crash.

Swan had nowhere to retreat – the back wall was at his left shoulder.

The lead Orsini thug tangled with the table. The second man leaped over it with an acrobatic jump, but Swan put his left-hand dagger into the man’s stomach and threw him into the wall behind him with a crash. The wall moved – plaster cracked, leaving the twigs and brush that had been used to set the mortar plain to see. The third man cut with a heavy sword at the Frenchman, who parried with the pitcher of wine – it shattered, and sticky, hot wine flew. Swan stabbed diagonally across the table into the exposed underarm of the red and yellow bruiser who was trying to hack the Frenchman down.

The room was full of red and yellow.

The man who’d lost his footing at the table had recovered, and Swan met his sword, mid-blade to mid-blade, over the table. Both men tried for the other’s blade, Swan with his dagger, the other man with a gloved hand – Swan tried and failed to land a pommel-punch, and the Orsini’s left hand punched his dagger arm hard enough to threaten his grasp of his weapon. He threw it with little force, but the quillons hit his assailant’s face and made him flinch, and Swan got his left hand on his own sword-blade and slammed the edge down on the man’s left hand where it had come to rest on the table, breaking all the other man’s fingers.

The Orsini swordsman stumbled back, and Swan vaulted the table and made a fast cut to finish the fight, but the other man parried.

Swan drove him back three steps, but each step took him deeper into the melee, and any thought of single combat vanished as a fist caught him in the thigh – an almost harmless blow that nonetheless awakened him to the fact that he was surrounded by enemies, most of whom had their own opponents but all of whom could potentially end his life.

He caught a sword-blade intended for his head on his crossguard, trapped it with his left hand and slammed his whole hilt back down the line of the attack, making teeth fly. The grip on the enemy sword slackened, and he whirled, swinging the stolen sword by the blade and cutting deeply into his own left fingers. The hilt caught an unwary retainer in the back and shoulder. He rolled with the blow like a trained fighter, but not fast enough to avoid Di Brescia’s debilitating kick to the groin and follow-up blow to the head.

Swan caught a new assailant’s attack in his peripheral vision and raised his sword, only to have it smashed by a chair – a heavy oak chair – which broke his beautiful blade and almost shattered his right arm. One leg caught him a glancing blow to his lip and ripped his face.

Swan saw red, stepped into the open space created by the chair and caught the man’s dagger hand in his own bloody left – the chair-thrower tried to use his own left to drag Swan to the floor, but Swan passed under the blow as Di Brachio had taught him on board ship – slamming his elbow into the man’s throat in passing his own right arm across the Orsini’s body, turning the man unwillingly outward and away, and then throwing him over his own right leg – while maintaining control of the dagger hand, so the man’s shoulder separated with a loud pop, and he screamed like a woman in childbirth.

Giannis had another man against the wall, and was slamming his head repeatedly against the tiles of the fireplace. There was a high-pitched shout of triumph, and another man fell heavily against Swan’s legs. Violetta stood triumphantly over her victim while Irene nursed her knuckles.

‘She parried and I thrust,’ Violetta said, breathing hard.

Irene had a bad cut all the way down her hand and arm. She stared at it, and Andromache grabbed her. ‘Don’t pass out, you little fool!’ she shouted.

Swan rotated, looking for a new adversary.

The Florentines had taken the Orsini by surprise, and all three of them had downed a man, shattering the weight of their attack. Messire Accucciulli bowed like the dancer he was, and flourished his blade. ‘A perfect end to a perfect evening,’ he said.

Di Brescia was looking at the men he’d downed with all the pride of middle-aged prowess, but he returned the bow. ‘Messire may well have saved us,’ he said.

The Florentine shrugged. ‘A small return on your hospitality. Who would abandon a dance partner?’ He bowed to Violetta. ‘At your service, my lady, whoever you might be.’

Swan was looking at Irene’s hand. The blade had crossed her guard and cut down between the knuckles, almost separating the web between the fingers – and had also scored high on the forearm near the elbow.

Violetta helped Swan lower the Greek girl into a chair – the same chair that had done some damage to Swan’s face. ‘Look away,’ she said to Irene, who was white as a sheet and breathing very shallowly.

She peeled the skin back from the edges of the wound for a moment and nodded. ‘Needle and thread?’ she asked.

Giannis and the Frenchman were looting the fallen men of their purses.

The Frenchman laughed. ‘By Saint Denis, I was out of money, and I only joined you lot to touch a woman for a change, and see here! Money from heaven.’

Giannis gave him a look. The Frenchman raised both hands. ‘Share and share alike!’ he said with Gallish sincerity. ‘I swear! Brothers for ever! Or until we have to fight!’

The Florentines watched the process with distaste. ‘What becomes of them, then?’ Accuicciulli asked Di Brescia.

The Roman sneered. ‘Nothing good, but it won’t be at our hands. One dead – the rest are merely down, and this coward here’ – Di Brescia had his foot on one man’s gut – ‘is merely shamming, waiting for us to leave.’

‘Do we hold the battlefield, or must we flee from their reinforcements?’ asked the Florentine. ‘I don’t know your Roman ways.’

The innkeeper, of all people, had taken a heavy blow early in the fight, and sat by the upturned table, with his wife fussing over a new egg on his scalp. She looked up. ‘We don’t want any more trouble,’ she said. ‘My poor man – look at him!’

‘The watch won’t come,’ Di Brescia said. ‘If these were hard times, like a papal election, then both sides would send for more men and we’d have a battle. But in these decadent times …’ The older man shrugged. ‘Swan, you attract trouble like shit attracts flies, you know that, eh?’

In the end, they all went back to the cardinal’s palazzo, moving carefully. Swan’s split lip, along with the bruise to his head, had swelled outrageously, making any kind of talking difficult, and his right eye was almost swollen shut. Violetta had sewn Irene’s hand, and the Greek acrobat stood the pain during the sewing, and got honey from the innkeeper’s wife to spread on the wound. Di Brescia and Giannis were virtually untouched. They embraced the Florentine with promises of future comradery and all of them wrapped themselves in cloaks and followed Giannis, who had volunteered to scout, out into the darkness.

Swan realised that the Frenchman was with them.

‘Where are you going?’ he whispered. They were crossing the edge of the forum.

‘I need work,’ the man muttered. ‘My boss got the plague. You’re rich – hire me. I can fight.’

Swan could barely talk, much less negotiate. ‘I’ll give you a place to sleep,’ he said. ‘That is the limit of my resources.’

Bessarion had two stables, one for visitors and one for his own nags and some donkeys. Swan put the Frenchman in with the mules, and fetched him two good blankets from his own travelling gear.

Violetta stood in the shadows. ‘I can’t go to your room,’ she said.

Swan was in pain. ‘Why not?’ he asked.

Di Brescia shook his head. ‘You won’t be caught,’ he said. ‘It’s as important to the cardinal’s reputation as to ours. Come on.’ He took them in through the kitchen, and the only servant awake was a small boy nodding by the great fireplace.

They climbed the back stairs, up two flights, and crept along the barracks corridors to their rooms. Swan reached his with a sigh of relief, pulled the courtesan in behind him and shut the door. He kissed her in the darkness despite the pain.

She put a hand behind his head. ‘You taste like blood,’ she said. She sounded happy.

Later, in the darkness, she pushed him away. ‘Would you marry me?’ she asked.

Swan couldn’t see her. He grunted, thinking the proposition over.

‘The fucking priests aren’t going to marry me, are they?’ she asked the darkness. ‘My mother said that you needed to find a soldier and stay with him. She did it for ten years, until the gentleman took a lance in the side down in Naples. He was good to us. I remember riding his horse.’ She wriggled. ‘You think I’m used goods. Can I tell you something whores know that virgins don’t?’

‘My mother was a whore,’ Swan said. His whole face hurt. His side hurt. But this was … interesting.

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. ‘It just doesn’t matter. Unless you let it matter. I could be a good wife. Did you just say your mother was a whore?’

‘She runs a tavern in London. Like that woman tonight, except there is no landlord. Just her brothers, who are a pair of …’ He couldn’t think of words to do justice to his uncles. ‘Bruisers. Thugs. Killers. But they were always good to me.’

They lay in silence.

‘I like you,’ he said. ‘I’m not – exactly – the marrying type.’

She laughed. ‘Well, neither am I. But I decided I’d ask you, as you are the only man I know that I like. Well – I like Giannis, now. Di Brescia – he wanted to peel my clothes off even while he teaches me to hold a sword.’

Swan licked the inside of the big bruise on his cheek. ‘So did I,’ he said.

‘You’re not a hundred years old,’ she said. ‘Your body’s as good as mine.’

Later, he said, ‘Damn it, maybe I should marry you.’

Swan was summoned by the cardinal, and was left in no doubt of his failings. It was early, but he was already shaved, dressed and ready.

Swan looked at his empty bed, considered his past and future, and made his decision. He picked up the bag of his treasures – the small items he’d purchased on his own account in Greece – and took them with him to the cardinal.

Bessarion sat across his desk and steepled his fingers. ‘You threatened my steward, you created a riot in the forum where my name was mentioned, and you brought a notorious courtesan into my house. And no doubt fornicated with her.’ He sounded weary. ‘You look like an animal,’ he added.

Swan was past anger. He’d been awakened early by Violetta – after almost no sleep – and his face was as big as a melon. His right eye was barely able to open and he looked like a puffy-faced Turk. She had dressed quickly, with almost no talk, and she hadn’t kissed him.

He’d taken her out through the kitchen, of course. Except that the kitchen at dawn is a much busier place than the kitchen at the dark of the moon.

‘I feel that you are out of place in my household,’ Bessarion said.

Swan thought furiously – much as he’d thought when Violetta proposed marriage. It wasn’t what you said – it was how you said it. Adults had been shouting at him for his various misdemeanours for most of his life. Reacting to the injustice of the situation was almost never the best tactic. He controlled his breathing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

‘No, you are not,’ Bessarion said. He raised his eyes, and they had a little sparkle to them. ‘She is quite remarkably beautiful,’ he said. He almost sounded wistful. ‘Listen, boy. I owe you a great deal. But this is an awful time for the Curia. The loss of Constantinople …’ He shrugged. ‘For me, it is liking losing my right hand. But even for the Latin curates, it is as if God has turned his back on us.’ He looked off into space beyond Swan’s head. ‘Perhaps he has, and this is the end of the Church. Di Brachio says that the Turk plans to conquer Italy.’

Swan met his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He thinks he is Alexander born again.’

Bessarion smiled. ‘What a heretical notion for an Islamic man to hold,’ he said. ‘I wonder how I can use it against him?’ He looked at the ceiling. ‘Listen, boy. There is a galley at Ancona that is readying for sea – bound for Cos and Rhodos. You need to leave this town, and I am flush with money – I can afford to send you to buy books.’ He leaned back. ‘Mind you, I suspect that you, too, are flush with money. Mm?’

‘I made some money in Constantinople, Eminence,’ Swan replied.

‘The missing stones on the head, perhaps? Never mind. I’m giving the head to the Serenissima in return for their support for a crusade. They can replace the stones.’ Bessarion leaned forward. ‘I was thinking of other money.’

‘Father Ridolpho’s gold?’ Swan asked sweetly. ‘In French francs and Genoese gold mixed? Is that what we’re looking for?’

Bessarion nodded. ‘So you admit it?’ he began loudly, and then paused. ‘French francs? That’s odd.’

‘I thought so, too,’ Swan said. He put the bag on the table – most of the bag. ‘I confess I spent some of it, but I promise it was in a good cause.’

Bessarion sorted through the coins. ‘Sweet Saviour, but the French debase their coins.’

Swan shrugged. ‘Eminence, I freely confess to you that I’d have spent more of them if anyone would take them.’

Bessarion sat back again. ‘Englishman, you are incorrigible. You confess to stealing from my steward.’

Swan smiled. ‘Eminence, he insulted Messire Di Brachio, accused the two of you of sodomy, and is obviously being paid to spy on you.’ Swan waved his hand in dismissal – a gesture he’d learned from his father, closing the subject as unimportant. ‘May I hire another soldier? I have a Frenchman below who saved my life last night.’

‘That falls in with my wishes very well, my boy, as I cannot send Giannis with you – I need him with my Greeks. And Di Brachio is better, but he will not be sailing this week or next. Hire this Frenchman by all means.’ He was unrolling a scroll as he talked – a Greek play. ‘You saved some wonderful things. Go and save more.’

‘What of Monemvasia?’ Swan asked.

‘If I am Pope …’ Bessarion made a very Greek motion with his head – neither yea nor nay. ‘I would take the city for the Holy See. But others do not feel as I do, and Genoa and Venice are putting fingers into the pie. I will make sure that your galley touches there – you’ll want your man back.’

‘But the other men are Venetians …’ Swan rubbed his chin.

‘Leave them,’ Bessarion said. ‘Unless you can make the lion lie down with the lamb.’ He waited for Swan to understand and gave up with a shake of his head. ‘At any rate …’

Understanding hit Swan – a heraldic joke. The Lion of St Mark and Venice, the lamb of the Order of St John – and Genoa. He laughed as people do when they are late to a joke.

Bessarion winced. ‘Listen, my young thief,’ he said. ‘I need you to be able to reach certain people and act in certain ways. You have good manners and your Italian is virtually flawless.’

‘Your Eminence should try my Arabic or my Turkish!’ Swan bragged.

Bessarion smiled the smile of the older man recognising something he didn’t like in himself. ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘I’m sending you on a galley of the Order of Rhodos. You know them?’

Swan nodded. ‘The Knights of St John? They put on all the best plays in London. My mother says they are good to the poor.’ He smiled. ‘There were two of them at Madame Lucrescia’s a few nights ago.’

Bessarion nodded. ‘Yes – I imagine some of them are men like other men. I am arranging for you to be accepted as a Donat – a volunteer – with the order. This will allow you to serve on their galleys. Our Pope has just signed a bull stating that service on the order’s galleys will win remission of your sins.’

Swan nodded. ‘That’s … good,’ he said slowly.

Bessarion laughed out loud. He threw his head back and roared, and for a moment, with his long beard and bushy white eyebrows, he looked like the Silenus Satyr that Swan had seen in Florence. He laughed for several ticks of his enormous German clock.

‘My boy, there are few men in Christendom who need remission of their sins more than you do, and few with less interest. In a way, you are the perfect exemplar of – of …’ Bessarion shook his head.

‘Foolishness?’ Swan ventured.

‘Youth!’ Bessarion said. ‘Here’s a note for the prior – he’s the senior officer of the order in Rome. He’ll take your oath. Thomas, do me an enormous favour, and do not dishonour your oath to the order. For me.’

Swan put his hand on his heart. ‘I will be a faithful … er, Donat. Is that like being a knight?’

‘Very like,’ Bessarion said. ‘Men pay vast sums of money for the rank.’

Suddenly Swan was pleased. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘I’ll do it as well as I can,’ he added earnestly. Suddenly, under his youthful show of indifference, he was afire. The Order of St John!

Bessarion handed him two scrolls. ‘These are your patents of nobility, and this is the Pope’s grant to you. The prior will want both of them. By Saint George, Thomas, I only wish I was going to be there to see you with the knights.’ He waved his hand. ‘Be off with you.’

Swan smiled winningly. ‘Eminence, you say I saved some good things. I brought other things back.’ He opened his sack and began to place objects on the cardinal’s desk.

Bessarion began looking at them impatiently, and muttered something about appointments. But the coin with Alexander’s head and ram’s horns arrested him – another with Medusa made him laugh aloud. The small seals with intricate scenes carved on them – one homoerotic and one heteroerotic – both made him laugh. The spearhead he put aside, and then held out the butt spike.

‘I suspect your military education is better than mine,’ he said.

Swan shook his head. ‘I don’t know the Greek word,’ he admitted. ‘But I think it went on the base of the spear.’

‘Beautiful – like a Greek column,’ said Bessarion, weighing it in his hand.

Swan laid out all his treasures. Bessarion nodded over all of them.

‘I will give them as gifts,’ he said. ‘The butt spike for Sforza of Mila, with the spearhead. They express the majesty of Greece. What is lost. And what can be regained. Well done.’

Swan hesitated. ‘I spent money on them,’ he said. ‘I intended … to sell them.’

Bessarion was looking at a small crystal seal with a tiny Eros masterfully carved into the face. ‘Of course you did, my young criminal. Unless you stole them.’

Swan raised his eyes to heaven. ‘I didn’t steal any of them,’ he said.

‘Then they didn’t cost you much,’ Bessarion answered him. ‘But do not think me ungrateful. I’ll get you some gold. Bring me more of this …’ He waved at his table. ‘Great men will put them in their cabinets and display them. We will have some measure of power by having these things.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘In Constantinople, we had so much of this that these would have been like rubbish.’

‘I need a new sword,’ Swan said. ‘And a breastplate that fits me better.’

‘You should spend less on Demoiselle Violetta, then,’ Bessarion said. ‘Go and see Di Brachio. I’ll find you some money.’ He got up. ‘I will look at Father Ridolpho’s activities. But stealing from another member of this household will not happen again. No matter how much you dislike him. And you will only enjoy sinning with your friend outside my house. Those are my rules. Are they clear in your mind?’

Swan bowed his head. ‘Yes, Eminence.’

Bessarion opened his five-page wax tablet set and tapped his stylus against his forehead in mock consternation. ‘Now it is I who play the fool – I have not told you your mission.’

Swan was on his feet. ‘There’s more, besides fighting with the knights?’

‘My son, much as Christendom needs every warrior, I would not, in fact, send you to fight for the order if there was another ship that was sailing east in winter.’ Bessarion sat back down, and his chair creaked. ‘Listen,’ he said very quietly. ‘The reports coming in from the Siege of Constantinople and from every action of the Turk since then suggests to some that Christendom has a traitor. Many accuse Demetrios Paleologos of being this traitor – he has openly suggested that he might convert to Islam.’

‘He is the current ruler of Monemvasia,’ Swan said.

‘You have a gift for this world of intrigue. Yes. He is. I know him – indeed, I know every member of that handsome family. If he meant a general betrayal, he would not flout his coming conversion. Besides, his hatred of the Latins is well known. Neither the Genoese nor the Venetians trust him. He is not the traitor. The traitor is … effective. Someone we trust.’

Swan nodded.

‘The Genoese are sending a famous man – Francesco Drappierro – to be their ambassador in Constantinople. You understand that Genoa openly supported the Emperor in the last days of Constantinople – yes?’

‘Yes. And paid for it – they lost Pera across the straits and most of their city privileges. I saw that with my own eyes.’ Swan nodded.

‘Just so. Now Genoa is desperate. Loss of the alum mines in Phokaia would devastate the Genoese cloth trade – loss of their sugar plantations would cripple their banking, and loss of Lesvos and Chios – which belong to the Gattelussi – would end Genoa as an overseas empire, topple the balance of power in Italy, and incidentally rob Christendom of the second-most powerful military fleet in the Inner Sea.’ The cardinal steepled his fingers. ‘Some of us suspect that the collapse of Genoa would mean that France would invade. You understand?’

‘More importantly, the fleet most likely to help the Pope,’ Swan noted.

‘I am pleased that you have become so very … accurate in your views on Church politics,’ Bessarion said. ‘So Genoa is sending a very wealthy man – one who was friends with the Sultan’s father – to attempt to bring the Sultan to a more friendly state of mind. Genoa is fully aware that there is a traitor. Drappierro will be fully briefed. You will go with him and serve where you see fit – with the knights, or with Drappierro’s embassy. The Turks hate the knights – but respect them. They despise the Genoese, but use them.’ Bessarion spread his hands. ‘This is a very ticklish matter. I meant to send Di Brachio. Can you help me catch a traitor?’

Swan nodded. ‘I can try. I imagine his weak point would be in passing communications to his Turkish friends.’

Bessarion shrugged. ‘It could be someone right here in Rome,’ he said. ‘Ah – here is a list of my plantations on Lesvos – please collect the rents if you have a chance.’

Swan wished that he had a five-fold wax tablet book. ‘I’m to go with the knights, fight for them if I must, watch for a traitor, buy antiquities for sale, and, if possible, collect your rents from Lesvos. Anything else?’

Bessarion laughed. ‘I have some shirts that need washing,’ he said. He raised his hand and blessed Swan, who knelt and kissed his episcopal ring. ‘I also have some letters for you to deliver. Come and collect them this evening. Now go and see Di Brachio.’

Di Brachio was conscious, and had Master Claudio with him.

‘Ah – you will all be my testimonials when I apply for a professorship at Padua,’ the doctor said. ‘Let me look at that eye – don’t go getting killed before I’m done with you. This is a salve – try it on the abrasion. The abrasion, fool.’ Claudio put salve on Swan’s cheek with his thumb.

Di Brachio’s skin was waxy and his face was pale so that his unshaven cheek seemed to be bruised. He coughed too much. Each cough clearly pained him.

‘Fever?’ asked Swan, whispering, which was pointless, because the close room was absolutely silent.

The doctor shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the blade cut his guts. If it did?’ He shrugged. The shrug was a death sentence.

‘I can hear every word,’ Di Brachio muttered. ‘By the crucified Christ – talk to me, Englishman. I’m so bored I might die.’

Swan pushed into the room and leaned over the bed.

‘Jesus, you look like hell,’ Di Brachio said. ‘Don’t tell me that Violetta did that to you.’

‘An Orsini bastard with a chair,’ Swan said.

‘And you killed him?’ Di Brachio asked softly.

‘No,’ said Swan.

‘What? Are you getting soft?’ Di Brachio murmured. ‘Listen, the doctor tells me you are taking the mission to Chios.’

Swan paused. ‘To Rhodos and Cos,’ he said.

‘He didn’t tell you more than that?’ Di Brachio said. ‘Did you make him angry?’

‘Not particularly,’ Swan said. He was shocked by how bad his friend looked. ‘I’m going to be made a Donat of the order.’

Di Brachio raised his hand, where a red stone burned like an eye in a small gold ring. He muttered something, and Swan leaned close.

‘He’s tired. You need to let him sleep,’ the doctor said.

‘I am a Donat of the order,’ Di Brachio said. ‘I was going to go … on crusade. For my … sins.’

‘I’ll do enough for both of us,’ Swan said, trying to keep the conversation light.

‘I thought you were supposed to keep me from getting killed – eh, English?’ Di Brachio made a clawing motion with his hand. ‘Heh – stay safe, boy.’

Swan kissed the Venetian on the cheek. ‘Live!’ he said.

‘Heh – I plan to. Hell is waiting for me,’ Di Brachio said. ‘I just keep asking myself …’

‘What?’ Swan asked.

‘How I let that cocksucker get his blade under my guard,’ Di Brachio said.

Swan changed into his new velvet doublet and silk hose and walked to the Priory of Rome with a dozen of Bessarion’s swordsmen as his retinue. The Frenchman was one of them, looking a little less polished.

The prior was a young man – as young as Swan himself. He kissed the Pope’s order reverently, and read through Swan’s genealogy, nodding. ‘Your grandfather was the King of England?’ he asked. He was obviously impressed, and trying to hide it.

Swan bowed. ‘No, my lord. My great-grandfather. My grandfather was the Duke of Lancaster.’

The prior nodded. ‘You are the child of two generations of bastardy,’ he said.

Swan thought of a number of replies, and swallowed them. ‘Yes, my lord,’ he said.

‘But the Pope’s grant only deals with one of them,’ said the prior. His eyes burned with fanaticism and suppressed jealousy. ‘Only the most holy, most pious men are fit to lead our great crusade,’ he said.

Swan wondered whether the prior was quite sane. But years of dealing with his mother’s customers had left him some resources, and he bowed, and said in his most respectful voice, ‘I believe that His Holiness has made his desires plain enough, but I would be delighted to serve your lordship by going back to His Holiness and explaining your position.’

The prior reread the Pope’s document and frowned. ‘I suppose …’ he said.

Swan took his oaths from an older knight, and the man – clad in a black gown with the eight-pointed star and wearing a black knitted cap so old that the black was fading to grey-blue – had iron-hard hands and a steady grip on Swan’s shoulder, and Swan liked him immediately. He took Swan into the chapel of the priory, made him kneel, and left him there for an hour.

Swan knelt. He assumed it was a test.

The elderly knight came back and lit candles – seven candles. For each one he prayed a string of prayers, and then he came and knelt by Swan.

‘I make all the rich bastards kneel, to make sure they have an inkling of what this is about,’ he said. ‘See the candles? My friends. All killed facing the foe.’

‘The Turks?’ Swan whispered.

The old man shook his head. ‘Jean-Baptiste died fighting. The rest – plague, leprosy, the cough, the black fever – it’s the hospital that kills us. No armour against disease.’

Swan crossed himself. ‘I see,’ he said carefully.

The old knight helped him to his feet, and he could scarcely walk. ‘You are going to a galley, I gather,’ he said.

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Call me brother. Or sir. Welcome to the order, boy. Do us no disgrace.’ The old man led him to a podium desk, where he signed a document and sealed it. ‘Take this to our bursar and have it countersigned. And then go and get yourself a ring.’ He smiled. ‘Do you love God?’

Swan hesitated.

‘Good for you, boy. Tell the truth. But have a go – see if you come to love him while you wash some beggar’s feet and feed some poor women with leprosy. Or sweat in your armour on a pitching deck while the red-hot sand is flung at you by infidels. See what follows.’ He nodded. ‘You’re a bastard?’

‘I am,’ Swan admitted.

The old knight laughed. ‘Welcome to the club,’ he said.

Swan wandered into the Jewish ghetto as if directed by his feet. But here he met no ill-will, and after several attempts he found a pawn shop that specialised in religious rings. He saw magnificent episcopal rings, and small profession rings, and one massive thumb ring that might have graced a cardinal.

The shopkeeper brought them out willingly enough. ‘What are you looking for, young gentleman?’ he asked.

Swan lifted a ring that had to be three hundred years old and admired it. ‘I’m looking for a profession ring for a Donat of the Order of St John,’ he said.

The owner’s eyebrows fluttered. ‘Oh – oh,’ he said as he picked up a tray, placed it back in a wooden clothes press, and pulled out another. ‘Oh – oh,’ he said again. ‘I have one – my wife, you know – I’m sure I have one. Oh – oh.’