Текст книги "Rhodes"

Автор книги: Christian Cameron

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 7 страниц)

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.

To Swan, it looked more defensible than any place he’d ever seen, except perhaps Monemvasia.

The sun was setting red in the west when they glided inside the fortified breakwater and the rowers folded their heavy oars away, raising them out of the oar ports and feeding them along the central catwalks or into the racks along the ship’s sides. Mytilini cheered them as they landed – seven Christian galleys – and the cheers from the garrison high above met the cheers of the Greek populace lining the beach. On Lesvos, the Genoese – at least, in the guise of the Gattelusi, the ruling family – were well beloved. The Gattelusi had married into the imperial family of Byzantium more than once, and they shared the good looks of the Paleologi and some of their indolence. But their marriages, their powerful private army and their occasional rescues of the Byzantine emperors – some financial, and some military – had earned them the love of their Greek subjects – who also paid the lightest taxes in the eastern Mediterranean.

Swan leaped over the stern to the beach and Peter tossed him the leather bag that held his own clothes and then the leather portmanteau that held Swan’s kit – and then leaped down himself. They walked up the beach, teetering slightly after days at sea. A pair of Greek men came and took their bags with wide smiles.

‘It is nice to be so popular,’ Swan said, smiling at a very pretty Greek girl. She smiled – then blushed and dropped her eyes. And clutched an older woman standing near by, who gave a sniff.

Fra Tommaso landed on the sand with a thump. The oarsmen were all off – most of them already pushing through the crowd. They weren’t going to the brothels and tavernas that lined the waterfront. In this port, they went first up the hill, towards the fortress, in a long and disorderly line.

Swan saw that his kit had joined the line. Fra Tommaso waited until Fra Domenico joined him on the sand, and the two knights went up the hill. The older knight paused and waved. ‘Coming, young scapegrace?’

Swan followed the knights. The line took for ever to move – it started at the edge of the beach, and wound between the lower gates of the fortress and then up to a point that vanished in the dusk on the side of the hill.

The tavernas along the waterfront served wine to the oarsmen in the line – heavy ceramic beakers full of strong red wine that was delicious after salt air. Swan was on his second cup as he passed through the gate.

The soldier there wore a fine, velvet-covered brigandine and had a heavy war bow in his hand. He smiled constantly, but his eyes moved everywhere.

‘You’re English, I think,’ Swan said.

The man smiled. ‘My da was English,’ he said. ‘I’m Greek.’

‘Seems a long way from London,’ Swan said.

The archer shrugged. ‘My pater was from Cumbria. He came out here after Agincourt.’ His eyes went over Swan’s shoulder, and then flicked back.

Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘The Gattelusi hire a great many English,’ he said. ‘They always have.’

‘Englishmen make fine pirates,’ Fra Domenico said. He stooped to scratch a stray cat. Mytilini was full of them.

The line moved on – past the guardpost, and up into the rocks. Swan breathed deeply, just to enjoy the smell. And examined the stonework of the redoubt above him. In the last light of the sun, he could see round stones the size of wagon wheels set into the fabric of the fortification. He tried to imagine why anyone would shape round stones to fit into a fort wall.

He thought – all too often – of the fight in the dark. Of the torches of the Turks revealing the fallen column that half-blocked the passageway.

Three slow steps forward later, and despite his heartbeat soaring and his breath coming hard, he had it, and he said ‘εύρηκα!’

The two knights and his servant all turned on him as if he were a madman.

‘They’re columns! Ancient columns from temples!’ he shouted excitedly. He was all but bouncing on his toes. ‘Those round stones are column drums – ancient ones!’

‘You speak Greek?’ asked a man at his elbow. The man was still smiling, despite half an hour on the hill carrying Swan’s portmanteau.

‘A little, brother,’ Swan said. ‘Those are columns, yes?’

‘From the pagan times,’ agreed the Greek. ‘Over by Kalloni, there are temples.’

‘Like the Parthenon?’ Swan asked.

The Greek shrugged.

Swan waved at a middle-aged woman with a tray full of wine cups. ‘Ο άνθρωπος έχει μια δίψα για το κρασί! This man has a thirst for wine.’

The Greek nodded. ‘Very kind,’ he said in a voice that suggested – politely – that men did not carry heavy leather trunks purely from public spiritedness.

Swan paid the woman and tried a flirtatious smile. She responded with a look that suggested that a life of serving wine to fishermen and pirates had given her some fairly effective armour.

Swan put his smile away for easier prey. And inched up the hillside.

‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

The timoneer, who was next in line behind Swan, grinned. ‘Ancient tradition here. When a galley comes in, we go to the shrine and take mass.’

‘How ancient?’ Swan asked.

He went up three steps. The steps were very old – smooth as glass.

The line moved again. Now he could see there was a heavy wood and iron door – right in the hillside. A party of men came out of it and squeezed down the steps, all smiles – and headed towards the beach and the tavernas.

Fra Tommaso nodded. ‘They think that taking mass protects them against the sins they have yet to commit,’ he said. But he watched his oarsmen with the fondness of a parent for his children. ‘Speaking of sin, Master Swan – we are invited to the palace. Tonight, we are to be received, and tomorrow, there is some sort of fete in our honour.’

‘We will stay?’ Swan asked, hope springing eternal. The word ‘palace’ alone offered more hope than anything he’d heard since Alexandria.

‘I want the hulls to dry,’ Fra Domenico said. He was looking at Asia across the strait – only a few leagues wide. ‘Faster ships take more prizes.’

Fra Tommaso took Swan’s hand. ‘Listen. We are men of God – you are a volunteer. So we will send you to this festivity tomorrow. As our representative. Yes? And you will not do the order any dishonour. Hmm?’

Swan sighed.

They climbed a few more steps and the deck officers squeezed by them, pausing to embrace the old knight, who blessed each of them. And then the door opened, and Swan could smell incense.

‘Come on,’ Fra Tommaso said, starting down steep steps into the dark interior.

Swan got one step down before he froze.

He felt the man’s neck go just as he pounded the blade into his 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 was kneeling on cold stone. Someone was trying to pull him, and he got his arm around the man’s neck and jerked him off balance …

‘It’s me! Christ on the cross, are ye wode!’ shouted Peter in his ear.

Fra Domenico caught Peter and pushed him away. ‘He’s fighting under the city! On Rhodos! Let him be!’ Hands seized Swan around the waist and turned him – so that he could see stars, and the shocked faces of the timoneer and the man carrying his trunk.

He took a shuddering breath.

Fra Domenico turned his head. ‘Smell the incense, my son. See the candles and feel God’s holy presence. There is nothing here for you to fear. This is a holy place.’ His voice was very gentle – very calm. And it ran on, and on.

Swan found that he was … himself. Except that his hands were shaking so hard that he could not hold the railing for the stairs.

‘Take him back into the air,’ Tommaso said.

Swan closed his eyes and swallowed bile. ‘No,’ he gasped. ‘I’ll go down.’

He made a foot reach down, and then another, and then another. It seemed like a hundred steps down into the earth, and he could feel the weight of the tons of rock over his head, a palpable force pressing down on him. He was sweating as if he were fighting in armour.

But he made it to the sandy floor of the cave. And the cave wasn’t dark at all. It was lit by a hundred candles, and the smell of incense drowned the smell of blood that stuck in his nose the way dog shit can stick to your throat.

The priest was Greek. But for once, that didn’t seem to matter. He smiled, said a few words, and gave the two knights communion. They knelt to take it and muttered Latin invocations.

Despite his spinning head – as much to control it as anything – Swan took the bread and murmured, ‘πατήρ μου δίδωσιν ὑμῖν τὸν ἄρτον ἐκ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ.’

The priest raised a clerical eyebrow. And gave the host to Peter.

A hundred heartbeats later, he was out under the stars with the two knights. He took in great gasps if air as if he’d been unable to breathe.

‘You’ll want to bathe before we go to the palace,’ Fra Domenico said, more kindly than Swan had ever seen him. The man’s ring glittered with an inner light as he gestured. ‘There’s a bath just there, where the street rises in front of the gates. Hurry.’

Swan was beginning to get his bearings. ‘How ancient was that … chapel?’

Tommaso shrugged. ‘From pagan times, no doubt – but no less holy for that.’

Fra Domenico shook his head. ‘No – our young hero is smitten by the ancient world. Aren’t you, lad? Nymphs and satyrs and priestesses.’

‘I should like to see the temples at Kalloni.’ For the first time in two weeks, he thought of Cardinal Bessarion. ‘And my master, Cardinal Bessarion, had a mission for me – at Kalloni.’

‘Go and bathe,’ Fra Tommaso said, a little impatiently. ‘We’ll clean our throats with some good red wine. I want to render unto Caesar, and visit my friends here.’

The baths were packed with sailors and oarsmen, but Swan’s status as a Donat and his fame from the fight under the walls won him a spot in the bath almost immediately. Men moved aside – men bowed.

There is something very odd about accepting praise, or even courtesy, while naked. Swan felt shy – he certainly didn’t enjoy the attention as he might have on another occasion.

He didn’t pay enough heed to the men ahead of him, and hopped down into the first bath.

And shrieked.

All around him, oarsmen and sailors cursed – and laughed.

‘First time, my lord?’ asked an oarsman with the body of Herakles. The man had more muscles on his abdomen than Swan would have thought possible. The water was so hot that Swan was afraid that his testicles might burn off.

‘Yes,’ he said through gritted teeth.

‘Lower yourself,’ said another man. ‘Slowly. Don’t fight it. Relaxes the muscles.’

They all looked like Herakles. And they were all grinning.

‘Cup of wine or two, hot bath, a girl on your lap, and the world is a fine place,’ agreed the deep-voiced figure of Poseidon just by him.

It was dark, and hot – but the water was so hot that it steadied him, and he didn’t have to be afraid. And he was … touched by the respect of the oarsmen. When he got out, another man led him to the cold water, and he swam a little.

A small boy offered him a cup of wine from a tray.

The sailor put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Not unless you want to buy the boy, too, mate,’ he said. And grinned. ‘Custom of the house.’

Swan smiled at the boy and shook his head – and made his way to the dry room where he had shed his clothes. He felt so very clean that the clothes he’d been wearing now seemed filthy. He opened his portmanteau and dressed in his second best – brown cloth – too warm for spring in Greece but clean and neat. He paid an old woman a few bronze sequins to do his hair and he sat on the porch of the bath with a cup of wine while the two knights talked to the Greek priest from the cave in the outdoor wine shop under the eaves.

‘A person might think you were a pretty girl and not a knight of Christ at all,’ Fra Tommaso said. ‘Although, I confess that, having met your wife, her standards might have – hmm – rubbed off?’ He laughed.

‘His wife?’ Fra Domenico asked.

‘A very beautiful woman,’ Fra Tommaso said.

Fra Domenico smiled – a private smile, as if something he’d understood had been confirmed. ‘Have you any children, my son?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps we will, with God’s help,’ Swan said, and just for a moment, he saw her naked in his mind’s eye.

‘Children are the greatest blessing of marriage,’ Fra Domenico said.

I’m receiving marriage counselling from the most notorious pirate in the Inner Sea, thought Swan. He paid a small tip to the old Greek woman, who smiled toothlessly and patted him.

‘Adonis is prepared to grace us with his company,’ Fra Tommaso said.

Peter nodded from the porch of the baths. ‘I’ll just be making my way down to the waterfront,’ he said. ‘If you happen to kill anyone, be sure and take their purses – eh, my lord?’

Swan took this as a cue and delved into his own purse for a handful of ducats.

‘Any left for your own girl?’ Peter asked quietly.

Swan shrugged. He felt clean. He was almost out of money and, as usual, ready to face the world one desperate crisis at a time.

The palace of the Gattelusi appeared small enough from the outside. Located securely on the highest point of the acropolis inside the fortress, it was itself a citadel, with its own walls and its own chapel. The interior of the great fortress was not flat – rather, it rose constantly from the three successive gates, past the church, to the citadel. In the gatehouse and again on the walls of the citadel, the arms of the Gattelusi were carved into the stone – over and over – alongside the great double-headed eagle of the Paleologi. To the left and right, on one of the great towers of the citadel, there were – Swan stopped walking and fell behind Fra Tommaso – warriors. And men fighting animals.

Fra Domenico turned. ‘Master Swan!’ he called out.

Swan heard him, in a distant way. He was transfixed.

Fra Domenico walked back down the hill. And looked up. The last rays of the spring sun put a ruddy light over the high tower and placed the figures in high relief.

‘Gladiators, Fra Domenico!’ Swan said in wonder. ‘Roman gladiators on Lesvos.’

The knight put a hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘Come on, my young classicist. Let us meet the owners. Perhaps they’ll give you one.’ He smiled at the older knight. ‘We are leading this young man into temptation!’ He waved at the palace. ‘In there is one of the finest collections of antiquities you will ever see.’

The last rays of the sun made the diamond on his finger glow like something magical.

The palace of the Gattelusi was as opulent as any palace in Rome – decorated in the most modern classical style, with the signal difference that many of the statues were not copies, but the real thing. A magnificent figure of a nude woman stood in the entry hall – modestly covering herself, eyes cast down, she arrested the viewer instantly. Behind her was a painted frieze in the classical style – paint on stucco – depicting dancing nymphs and satyrs. On the plinth to the left of the statue stood a single immense urn – a krater in ancient Greek red-figure ware, with a scene of Penelope weaving at her loom in the foreground, Odysseus leaning on his spear. Lest there be any doubt, their names were written in the ancient letters.

Swan looked down and found he was standing on a mosaic floor – a mosaic of a man and a woman, done in stones so small that the woman’s made-up eyes had six or seven tones to them.

Something like a groan escaped Swan.

Fra Domenico laughed. ‘It is the earthly paradise,’ he said.

Fra Tommaso was less inclined to be lyrical. ‘Is there a major-domo?’ he asked the two slaves who’d ushered them in.

‘I like to greet my guests in person,’ came a voice. It was an odd, androgynous voice – the voice of a mature woman, or perhaps an old man, or a very young one. The Italian was without accent – neither Roman nor Milanese nor Venetian nor Genoese. Merely – Italian.

Swan looked around. There were two African slaves by the door, and another pair of matching Bulgarian slaves standing by what appeared to be the main archway into the living quarters.

He looked up.

A storey above him, a magnificent silver lamp seemed to float in the air, the twenty wicks giving a golden light. Each wick emerged from the head of a beast, and all of the beasts were joined to a central body that twisted as if in mortal combat. The whole lamp was silver, and the chain that vanished overhead into the murk of the tower’s interior was silver.

And on the other side of the lamp, there was a small balcony – an interior balcony. On it stood a man dressed in traditional Byzantine robes, with a small purple-red hat adorned with pearls. He had a mature face – Swan thought he was in his fifties – with wide-set, liquid eyes and the long, straight nose of the Byzantine emperors.

Fra Domenico bowed. ‘Prince Dorino,’ he said.

Fra Tommaso shook his head softly, but said nothing.

The prince leaned over his balcony. ‘You admire my lamp, young man?’ His soft, womanly voice was disconcerting. It floated on the air and played tricks and made Swan unsure about who had spoken. It was like some mummer’s trick at a fair by the Thames.

‘I think it is remarkable,’ Swan said. ‘Is it … Roman?’

Prince Dorino laughed softly. ‘Roman? Psst – that for Rome,’ he said, and snapped his fingers. ‘Rome was a nation of barbarians who could do nothing but copy. It is Greek, young man. Everything worth having was made by the Greeks.’ He smiled. ‘Come – the advantage in height is too overwhelming. Come upstairs – my cousin is here and we are all learning our parts for the fete tomorrow.’

The two Slavs bowed and escorted the three men, in their plain clerical brown, past a magnificent tapestry of men hunting a rhinoceros; to a set of stairs broad enough to drive a wagon up to the top, curving like a snail’s shell, in pale marble. The stairs were flanked by fluted columns. Swan reached out and touched one. He looked at the base and saw that it was ancient – looked up at the capital and saw a design he didn’t know at all.

‘It is Aeolian,’ said a woman’s voice, quite near at hand.

Swan realized that he was standing with his mouth half-open, gaping like a fish. He was at the base of the steps. A woman clad in a chiton, with the peplos folded down for modesty, stepped out from behind the pillar. She had skin the colour of newly finished oak, and black hair that fell in ten thousand curls, and the most astonishing green eyes flecked in gold, like emeralds set in rings. She looked so very like an ancient statue sprung to life that Swan lost his ability to speak for a moment. Then he bowed, as deeply as if to a cardinal. When he raised his head, she was gone.

Swan stood like a statue himself for a moment, and then raced up the steps after the sound of the knights.

At the top of the great steps, an arch twenty feet tall opened into a great hall. The hall itself spoke with many voices – there were heads of animals, including a pair of lions; there were weapons, from a magnificent bronze sword whose green patina was glossy with preservation to a new steel arming sword with an elaborate hilt in the latest style – armour hung on the walls, and from the rafters high above, and spears were crossed all the way down one side. But the tapestries all had classical subjects – Swan didn’t think he had ever been in a hall so lacking in Christian decoration.

There were long tables down the centre of the hall, with a mixture of benches and tables. A pair of musicians in typical Italian court clothes played pavanes and German dances that Violetta would have recognised and Swan did not, but the sound of the lutes made him smile. At a table, six women – each prettier than the next – wove garlands of flowers from baskets of cut blossoms. At the end of the hall, Prince Dorino sat in state, with a pair of knights and a tall, elderly man in plain black clothes.

The Bulgarians escorted them the length of the hall and bowed. Swan bowed. The two hospitaller knights merely inclined their heads.

‘Prince Dorino,’ Fra Domenico said in greeting.

‘My dearest pirate,’ returned the prince in his rich and dulcet voice. The prince extended a hand. ‘This is my admiral, Lord Zacharie. And the captain of my little army – the lord of Eressos. Who is your young man?’

‘An English volunteer, Prince. Master Tommaso Suani, of London. The grandson of the great English Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt.’ Fra Domenico smiled.

‘An English prince? As a volunteer? That seems promising, to me. Will your cousins bring us a crusade to rescue us from the Turk?’ Prince Dorino seemed to find the whole idea comic.

Fra Tommaso put a hand on his sword-hilt. ‘Is it nothing to you that a Turkish fleet is at sea?’

‘Ah – my old friend Ser Tommaso. Are you indignant? Listen, my friend. The Turks will come for my paradise soon enough. Why borrow the trouble?’ Dorino laughed. The men around him did not. They remained almost immobile.

The prince looked at Swan. ‘Speak,’ he commanded. ‘Where is your crusade?’

Swan stood straighter. ‘My lord, I am all there is likely to be from England. Englishmen don’t like to go abroad unless they are paid.’

The Lord of Eressos smiled.

‘Your Italian is impeccable, for an Englishman,’ the prince conceded. ‘Are these seven ships all you have?’ he snapped.

Fra Domenico bowed. ‘They are, my lord.’

The man in black clothes smoothed his moustache and glanced at the Lord of Eressos.

Prince Dorino sat back. ‘We have another dozen galleys,’ he said.

‘Where are they?’ demanded Fra Tommaso.

There was a silken rustle near at hand, and Swan turned his head to see the classical Greek maiden, now dressed as a modern Genoese maiden, come in, her silk skirts stiff with embroidery.

She raised her eyes – and her glance caught Swan’s.

In a fight – a real fight – there is a moment in a hard attack, or a heavy parry, where the blades meet edge to edge. And the two sharp edges bite into one another. The two lock – steel cutting steel. Just for a moment.