Tom Swan and the Last Spartans

Volume Four: Glarenza

Christian Cameron

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Title Page

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans: Volume Four: Glarenza

Also by Christian Cameron

Copyright

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans
Volume Four: Glarenza

Tom Swan awoke slowly. A magnificent Greek sun, almost untouched by winter, poured in through the tall arched window across from his closed bed. The hangings had been opened and the fire in the curious Greek fireplace made up.

He felt wonderful; clear headed and well rested, the best he had felt since getting wounded. He’d slept for a long time …

‘Clemente?’ he asked the empty room.

‘Despotes,’ said a voice. There was a boy standing like a statue by the door. ‘What is your pleasure, lord?’ he asked in Greek.

Tom stretched like a cat. Demoiselle Sophia in my bed, naked and willing, would about cover the possibilities. The room was light and airy, and well appointed. It was in the Imperial Palace of the Despot Demetrios; it had been designed and built by the very best of the architects of Constantinople and Venice, and the stonework, the details and the hangings were magnificent.

It was all a long way from a freezing tent in Albania.

Swan rose, went to the window and looked out over the Vale of Sparta laid out like a green and brown map at his feet. The palace sat at the third level of Mistra, about halfway up the mountain, and it looked out over a four-hundred-foot drop to the road below. The fortress towered above it; a magnificent piece of modern military engineering.

In Greek, Swan said, ‘Let my Clemente sleep in for once, but would you fetch me a little food and something to drink?’

‘Whatever the foreign lord wishes,’ the boy said, and went out through the door. Swan did some more stretching, trying to get his shoulder and back to respond properly; both needed exercise and were stiff.

The boy returned with a tall amphora of wine and some bread and olive oil. The bread was stale, but Swan was a veteran of many days and nights in Greece and knew that this was what everyone ate. He rubbed his bread with a little garlic from a dish, dipped it in olive oil, and ate it with appetite. The wine was delicious; Sparta had good red wines, as good as Italian wines. The boy was horrified when Swan drank his morning wine neat, with no water added. But his expression made clear that this was just one of many horrors he expected from a foreign barbarian.

Swan found his bags laid out on the floor; he noted that near-constant campaigning had all but ruined the linen canvas bag that held many of his possessions and that his leather saddle malle was very much the worse for wear. Like those of his company, whose armour was brown or worse. They had received new clothes and supplies from Venice; they needed time to sort them, to repair armour, polish it … most of the company’s crossbows had lost their heavy cords, owing to neglect, emergency and winter; they would all have to be replaced.

On the other hand, Swan and his lieutenants had done the impossible; they had brought a company of lances across Albania from Belgrade to Mistra. Looking back over the string of fortunate incidents, lucky victories and miraculous communications, Swan was tempted to see the hand of God in his affairs, but his basic cynicism won out and the hand of Venice looked heavier.

He smiled and finished the wine.

By afternoon, the lower town of Mistra appeared to be under siege by Italians and Germans and English archers. Anxious Orthodox nuns scurried along the street; the city contained over a hundred churches, monasteries and nunneries, many of their occupants exiles from Constantinople; every second person on the street was a religious, and none of them liked the presence of so many armed foreigners, cursing, pushing into tailor’s shops and cutlers or leaning against the taverna walls, drinking their fill for the first time in months.

‘Get thee to a nunnery!’ shouted Will Kendal at a particularly handsome nun in a very severe veil. There was no part of her showing, and yet her form and grace were obvious.

‘Master Kendal,’ Swan said.

‘I know, I know. Be an example.’ Kendal shook his head. ‘Ye know, Ser Thomas, before I met ye, I liked a jug o’ ale and a lass, and I seemed to find it easy to have either. An’ now that you’ve made me agent, I’m fuckin’ ruined. I can’t punch some lout in the street, I can’t grab a girl for a quick cuddle, and I drink wine, and the worst of it is that I don’t even want those things anymore. It’s like a fucking sickness.’

He looked after the lithe form of the nun, swathed as she was from head to toe in dark grey wool.

Ser Columbino, neatly dressed in dark red, appeared from the taverna. ‘Eh, Illustrio? Is there trouble?’

‘No trouble at all,’ Swan said. ‘Only I need everyone to know … bah. Bast. Get Orietto.’

‘Certo, Illustrio.’ Columbino bowed and went back into the dark, crowded interior. Swan followed him, and after a near-altercation with a table of archers, they borrowed Master Cressy and sat in a rough circle.

‘We’re here for a while,’ Swan said. ‘The Pope didn’t specify whether we were to serve Demetrios or Thomas; Demetrios rules from here to Monemvasia, and Thomas rules in the western Morea. Thomas is the Turk fighter, and Demetrios is the one who has Turkish allies, but this is where we were sent and we will play the hand as best we can. Understood?’

Di Silva smiled with no humour. ‘So we do not trust our patrone?’

‘Exactly. Further, I may have to go; almost certainly. I will probably take some of the men-at-arms with me. I can’t say where or when yet. Columbino will remain, commanding the compagnia in the service of the Despot. The Pope is paying, so as of today everyone can expect regular pay. I have a financial instrument that I can cash on the Medici, here, and I will before I go.’

Orietto nodded. ‘That’s good news. Most of the lads will be out of hard specie by tonight.’

‘How many Albanian girls did we bring away?’ Swan asked.

There was a lot of shifting and moving eyes, especially from Orietto, who had an Albanian mistress with whom he was very obviously smitten.

Columbino leaned back. ‘A few,’ he ventured.

Swan nodded. ‘I venture it was more like fifty,’ he said. ‘It was the first thing the Despot mentioned this morning. This is a very religious city. The Despot tells me there is no prostitution here. And we are here on his sufferance.’

‘We’re here to save his worthless arse,’ Orietto said, and the rest nodded.

‘That is not how it appears to the Despot or his people. To them we are foreigners; perhaps as bad as Turks, perhaps worse. So here is my rede; if a man brought a woman here, she lives with him and on his pay as if they were married. No exceptions. Understood?’

‘What if a girl walks off on a man?’ Kendal asked.

Swan’s voice hardened. ‘I’d recommend that not happen. If it does, we’ll see what we have to do. This seems a small thing. Let’s not make it a big thing. Also, any harassment of locals, especially nuns, will lead to some very severe punishments, and I’ll try and get to the bastard first, just to save the Despot the trouble.’

Nods.

‘Any fighting?’ Orietto asked.

‘It’s winter,’ Swan said. He looked at Juan di Silva. ‘There isn’t a Turkish army within the Peloponnese, and with a little luck, it’ll stay that way all year. This could be the contract of a lifetime; good pay, and no fighting.’

Di Silva frowned. ‘That’s a terrible contract,’ he said. ‘You spend all your time watching the lads, and they get in trouble. If there were Turks to fight, they’d be fine.’

Swan was thinking of his audience with the Despot. ‘There may be fighting,’ he said carefully. ‘Our patron wishes to clear some castles held by his relatives. I have to decline to fight his brother, but otherwise, we will be used to try and clear the Albanian bandit chiefs and supporters of the Catacuzenoi.’

Di Silva shook his head wearily. ‘You mean, now that we’re here, paid for by the Pope, we’ll be sent to help Greek Christians kill other Greek Christians.’ He frowned. ‘But surely the Despot’s generalissimo is a Catacuzenoi.’

Swan nodded. ‘Yes, that about sums it up,’ he said. ‘How is this different from fighting in Italy?’ he asked.

Columbino threw his hands in the air, a very Italian gesture. ‘There are no Turks just over the horizon in Italy,’ he said.

‘Really?’ Swan asked.

The next week was pleasant enough. The compagnia took exercise on the fields below the city, and the Despot was pleased to watch the muster and display. He was dressed in a thousand ducats’ worth of brocade, a little worn at the edges; he had a tiara over his tall Mongol hat, and was mounted on one of the finest horses Swan had ever seen.

‘You think you can stop the Turks with three hundred men?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged. ‘Leonidas did,’ he said. But then he shook his head. ‘No, Majesty,’ he said, keeping his eyes carefully averted in the best Byzantine way. ‘But a handful of armoured Franks and some solid infantry can be useful in building a larger field force. We found this to be true at Belgrade.’

‘Why do the princes of the West never strike when they have the Turk down?’ the Despot asked. He shook his head wearily, as if his cynicism was a weight on his shoulders. ‘Why, instead of sending me a handful of mercenaries, however talented, do the Venetians and the Milanese and the French and the Holy Roman so-called Emperor not simply drive the Turks from all Romania?’ He glanced at Swan so quickly that Swan did not have time to look away, and he was staring the Despot in the eye.

‘Majesty …’ Swan began.

‘No, never mind,’ the Despot said. ‘In such a world, I would have nothing, and the Franks would own my country.’ He shrugged. ‘As it is, the Turks have it. Much of a muchness. They are demanding, but at least they are efficient. I understand them. You, I cannot understand.’

Swan bowed in the saddle; there was nothing else to do. He trotted his Arab along the ranks. Everything was clean; the armour was polished again, the straps repaired, the men’s faces less drawn. Marco Corner once again looked seventeen and not sixty; Grazias had fewer lines on his face.

He gave and received salutes, and the muster unfurled like a flag at dismissal; men trotted off, or stood in knots, talking.

‘Do we pass muster?’ Swan asked.

The Despot smiled. ‘Am I even allowed to say no?’ he asked. ‘Your company is excellent. Better than any fighting force I have ever seen here. So? Most of the Albanian bandits in the hills can muster four times as many men.’

‘In most situations, I think my people can handle four times our numbers of Albanians,’ Swan said.

‘Simon Trapezetos has a thousand men and the friendship of Omar Reis,’ the Despot said. ‘He will test you, and then we’ll see.’

That night, in the Taverna San Giorgio of Mistra, Swan outlined his orders.

‘Someone will test us in the next two weeks,’ he said, and Di Silva nodded. ‘I want Grazias out in the woods, and archers on duty by the horse herds, and a reserve of men-at-arms in full harness, every night.’

There was a collective groan, but no protest.

‘Find out what you can about this Trapezetos,’ Swan said to them. ‘Soldiers talk.’

Grazias nodded. ‘I know a little about him. Trapezetos is merely a nickname. He is a noble; his mother was Florentine from Achaea. He has a thousand horse and acts as if he is independent of both Sultan and despots. And I suspect he is. He has a castle over at Sellasia that is big enough for an army.’

‘How far is Sellasia?’ Swan asked.

‘Perhaps twenty leagues,’ Grazias said.

Kendal whistled. ‘Cattle-raiding distance,’ he said. As a Borderer, that meant a great deal.

‘Exactly,’ Grazias said.

Spring was creeping across Greece. They had two weeks of rain, which made night-time duty doubly oppressive and led to a great deal of damp grumbling, which Swan ignored. There were rumours of a Turkish incursion near Corinth, but no evidence emerged. The Despot proposed several ideas, all with an air of hopelessness; various hill castles that he was proposing might be taken with the aid of Swan’s artillery, which consisted of one Bohemian bronze falconet and one slightly larger captured Turkish piece from the battle at Mycenae.

Every rainy night, Swan put on his harness and rode among his outposts, often with Grazias or Orietto or Di Silva or Columbino. The Greek captain, Catacuzenos, joined them in patrolling the roads. Swan had him watched discreetly by two of the English archers. He didn’t trust the Greek officer. The man had too many loyalties, too unevenly divided. He was proud, touchy, worried.

He did seem like a very good soldier, though.

So Swan had him watched.

But the Greek nobleman seemed content to watch the Franks and provide some guidance on the web of roads and landmarks in the Vale of ancient Sparta, as well as conducting a sort of military tour for Swan and his officers.

‘I was one of the Plethon’s duller students,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘But I loved everything he said about the Ancients.’

Swan produced his copy of Plethon from his saddle-bag and Catacuzenos warmed to him a little and began to speak of the great man. One night, after patrols, he knocked at one of the city’s monastery gates and took them to see Plethon’s tomb.

‘He was a great man,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘The church hated him when he was alive. Now, they venerate him.’ He shrugged. ‘This is Greece.’

Swan shrugged. ‘It could as well be England or Italy. Listen, Strategos. You do not have to accompany us every night in the rain. We can patrol.’

‘The Despot bade me wait until you were proved,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘But my cousin was with you at Mycenae. And Grazias is a famous soldier, among my people. I would like to believe in you.’ The next night, Catacuzenos had with him two dozen pronoia cavalry, professional soldiers with equipment that looked Turkish. They knew the roads and Swan used them as guides through the fields.

All they saw was sheep and rain.

‘Maybe our reputation is too strong for them,’ Orietto opined.

‘Maybe they’re smart enough to stay out of the rain,’ Columbino proposed. He had rain pouring down his face because there was no bill on his armet.

A travelling Franciscan said mass for all of them and told them that there was a scandal in Rome; one of the banks had broken. Swan wondered whether he was jumping at shadows, but he found the presence of a Franciscan in Mistra more than a little suspicious. He thought, for the first time in a month, of the little black book of Cyriaco’s agents, and he leafed through it, found the sign and location for Mistra, and determined to build himself a network in the new Imperial capital.

The issue of pay became pressing, and he forgot about his suspicions, went to the Medici factor for Mistra and was told that he could not negotiate a bill, even on a Medici bank, because the bank had no specie.

‘If my lord would go to Monamvasia,’ he said, ‘I am sure that Capretto there could find the two thousand florins Messire requires, but I’m not sure even the Despot in this town has that much ready money.’

Swan fingered his beard, which, contrary to fashion, he’d grown quite long. It made him look older and more dignified with all the Greeks in theirs.

‘I was promised that you could cover my bills,’ he said. ‘Why do you have no specie?’

Francesco, the factor, shrugged as if it was a matter of no moment.

Swan nodded. ‘You know, a couple of months ago I was sitting in Cosimo di Medici’s office in his palazzo in Florence,’ he said, name-dropping with purpose. His words went home like a master jouster’s lance. ‘I will certainly mention to him when I am in Florence that your office has insufficient specie.’

‘The Illustrious Ser Suane knows Medici Primo?’ Francesco asked. His face and voice betrayed a theatrical anxiety.

‘We have only met once,’ Swan said. ‘But as I am marrying a Florentine, I suspect we will meet again. I am an investor in the bank,’ he went on. ‘And I will not be fobbed off with some casual shrugs. Why do you have no specie?’

Francesco stepped back as if struck. ‘I am not at liberty to discuss this,’ he said.

Swan nodded. ‘Very well. I will say so in my report.’

Francesco looked appalled. ‘Report?’

Swan took the opportunity to shrug.

‘Perhaps I could raise so much with some of my own money,’ Francesco allowed.

‘Why do you have no specie?’ Swan asked again.

‘There is a shortage, Illustrio. I am sorry for my shrugs. I will find you the specie if I have to send a mule train to Monemvasia.’ He bowed.

Swan nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘Anyone know anything about banking?’ Swan asked. He wished he had either Violetta or Alexander Bembo with him. Either would know what he wanted to know. He tried to bludgeon his memory for everything Spinelli had said at the campfire about papal finance.

Columbino made a gesture of aristocratic dismissal, almost perfectly echoed by the Portuguese, Di Silva.

Kendal shrugged from an opposite class but equal ignorance.

‘Spinelli could tell me this in five minutes,’ Swan lamented.

‘Tell you what?’ Columbino asked.

‘Why the Florentine bank has no money,’ Swan said.

No one could explain. Orietto was shocked. ‘Isn’t that what bankers do?’ he asked. ‘They have money?’

‘It comes from somewhere,’ Swan said, trying to remember what the Medici factors in Vienna had told him about papal banking. It had had very little to do with his life at the time; it hadn’t stuck.

‘The Franciscan priest who said mass,’ Orietto said. ‘He’s from the Bardi family. All bankers.’ Orietto rubbed his chin. ‘He is asking a great many questions.’

‘Is he still in Mistra?’ Swan asked. His arrival had been ill timed, as the town was full of ‘Franks’ and not too kindly disposed, but the Franciscan’s gentle piety and dirty robes were hardly arrogant and the orthodox Greek bishop had chosen to ignore him. Swan had attempted to intervene for the Italian priest with the Despot, only to find the Despot already weary of the whole thing, as he often was.

‘I will not antagonise the West,’ he said. ‘I am priest-ridden enough already, however. I don’t need more.’

The priest was sent for, and came, fresh from baptising two Albanian women, as it proved. Swan closed his eyes for a little while in what might have been prayer, thinking thoughts very similar to those of the Despot. His sigh was deep and meaningful.

‘Father, I have a question which I ask in the name of the Pope,’ he said.

The Franciscan folded his hands in his lap. ‘Really? You seem an odd representative of the Holy Father,’ he said. His tone was light, and his eyes had a humour in them all too often lacking in priests.

‘Nonetheless, in this matter I am the Pope’s man,’ Swan said. ‘I gather you come from a family of bankers.’

Father Guillermo nodded. ‘The Bardi,’ he said. ‘Although my family is really from Lucca, not the rich ones.’

Swan nodded, tapping his teeth with his thumb, which he did far too often. ‘Tell me, Father,’ he said. ‘Why would the local factor of the Medici have no capital?’

The Franciscan started. His face changed colour, and his hands moved. It was quite a giveaway of something, but Swan had no idea what.

‘How do you know this?’ asked the Franciscan, visibly shaken.

‘Your turn, Father,’ Swan said. ‘Why are you here? In the last capital of the Greek church?’

‘My order has the jurisdiction of Outremer,’ Father Guillermo said. ‘I may come and go as I please.’

Swan was almost sure the priest was lying.

‘I had a bill on the Medici,’ Swan said. ‘From the Pope.’

The Franciscan began to fidget with his prayer beads, a rope of a full hundred and fifty beads of wood and bone.

‘Perhaps the good father does not know that we are here paid by the Holy Father,’ Columbino put in. His lifted eyebrow said he was reading the priest as Swan had read him.

The Franciscan sat back. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I know you have won a victory over the Turks. I confess I am not always sure that the arm militant worships the same Christ I worship.’ But his eyes returned to humour from fear.

Swan nodded. ‘I understand your hesitation,’ he said. ‘Tell me, are there … tithes and so on? Collectable in Outremer? From Frankish merchants, for example?’

The Franciscan looked at Swan for a long time; long enough for Columbino to fidget in his turn.

He narrowed his eyes, and he looked like a much tougher man than Swan had taken him for. ‘By what right do you question me?’ Father Guillermo asked. ‘Are you holding me against my will?’

Swan rose and opened the door. ‘Absolutely not, Father. I assume we are on the same side.’

The priest rose and sketched a blessing in the air. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘I must decline to answer any of your questions.’ He nodded, and Swan let him go.

‘Follow him,’ Swan said to Clemente.

Clemente bowed and went through the door like smoke.

‘What the fuck?’ Orietto asked in colloquial Italian.

Swan poured good Spartan wine from the amphora on the table, walked to the door, looked outside, and closed it carefully. ‘We are on the outer edge of a vast conspiracy,’ he said. ‘I’m not telling you any more so that you can sleep at night. Right now, all that matters is that the richest bank in this city cannot meet our bill on the Pope.’

‘Conspiracy?’ Columbino asked. ‘I’m from Sienna. My father was hanged as a traitor. I know all about conspiracy. Tell me, at least.’

Di Silva leaned his chair back until it creaked and he had his shoulders comfortably against the frescoed wall. ‘I detest conspiracies,’ he said. ‘But we are friends, and what you know, I should know.’

Orietto shrugged. ‘I am Veronese,’ he said. ‘I agree that it is usually a terrible thing to know of a conspiracy. But if you tell them, you might as well tell me, so we can all be assassinated together.’ He smiled. ‘What else are friends for?’

Swan thought for a moment, tempted to confide, but the risk was insane. ‘I thank you,’ he said.

‘But you don’t trust us?’ Columbino asked, stung.

‘Don’t be a fool. He’s protecting us,’ Orietto said. ‘The Medici?’ he asked Swan.

‘Yes,’ Swan said.

‘And the Sforza?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged.

Orietto shook his head in turn. ‘He who says Medici says enough. I, for one, am ready to serve in any way you wish, but I’d rather not know that the Pope is helping the Turks, or whatever it is.’

Swan winced. But he nodded. ‘I need you to take five lances and go down to Monemvasia. I need to know where Cardinal Trevisan and his fleet are, and I need to know what’s going on out there, and I need you to bring me back two thousand gold florins.’

Orietto bowed. ‘At your service.’

‘Someone will try to ambush you, I promise.’ Swan smiled. It was a nasty smile.

Then he outlined the rest of his plan to Di Silva and Columbino, Grazias and Kendal.

‘You are insane,’ the cautious Columbino said.

Di Silva grinned. ‘I like it. And if it is insane, we will at least all be insane together.’

The next morning, Swan rose with the dawn, watched five lances in polished armour ride out through the seven gates of the city and then followed the sun-dazzle on their armour as they rode away down the road at his feet and vanished into the distant haze of the Vale of Sparta.

Then he walked down into the town, the lower town where foreign merchants resided and some richer Greeks and a small Armenian community, as well as a sizeable Jewish ghetto. He counted doors carefully from the V-shaped junction of two narrow streets, passed a yellow door with relief as to the accuracy of his instructions, and left a small white chalk mark at waist height on the stone wall opposite the door after the yellow door, and then he continued through the smell of cats and jasmine, and back out from under an arched tunnel to emerge on the walls. An eagle circled below him in the Vale of Sparta; it was on his right, the best of auguries in the ancient world, and he smiled and thought of Cyriac of Ancona.

There was no rain, and the sun was beating down with enough warmth to suggest that spring might be in the air. Swan stood on the wall listening and waiting, to make sure he was not followed, and then he climbed by another set of stone steps, higher and higher, until he was on the third-level walls and could follow them around to the palace. It was an hour before he found Kendal; the archer was sitting having wine with Catacuzenos. He gave the all-safe sign and Swan went to his meeting with the Despot’s officers about an attack on one of the Albanian forts.

The next day, Swan rode out with Columbino and twenty lances to reconnoitre the nearby fort at Sellasia; a fortress belonging to the notorious Trapezetos. The fort sat like an eagle’s nest on the southernmost of two rounded hills that appeared so much like a young woman’s breasts that Swan had to work to keep his face straight; all for nothing, as it proved that the two hills were called ‘The Breasts’.

Swan looked up the slopes for an hour, from several vantage points. Metal twinkled along the height of the Breasts.

Catacuzenos smiled cynically. ‘Too hard to assault, yes?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged. ‘Maybe if my troops were paid. Not before.’

‘You have no other comment?’ asked one of the Paleologi, the cousins who officered most of the loyal troops.

Swan smiled. ‘No,’ he said.

The roads were miserable and Swan sent Columbino with fifteen lances to go around the Breasts to the south and return home over the plains. Columbino saluted, clearly annoyed to be given the dirty work, and rode away in a haughty fury.

Kendal said quietly, ‘You’re never getting away with yon.’

‘Watch me,’ said Swan.

He and Di Silva and the other three lances rode back into Mistra at sunset. Columbino was still somewhere to the south, wading through muddy fields and getting his armour dirty. Or so Swan told the gate guards when he asked them to keep the gates open late.

Later, he was playing cards with Catacuzenos, Di Silva and Kendal. He was winning when an Imperial officer came in and whispered to Catacuzenos.

‘He says they must close the gates,’ Catacuzenos said.

Swan let his annoyance show. ‘Where is the ingrate? Looting some village for wine? I’ll have his head.’

‘Thomas,’ muttered Di Silva. ‘Please be calm.’

‘My lord, would you like us to send men to look for them?’ Catacuzenos asked.

Swan waved at Kendal. ‘Tell Grazias to mount immediately and go and find Columbino. He should be near by.’

‘I’ll go with them,’ Catacuzenos said.

‘Unnecessary.’ Swan smiled. ‘Ser Grazias will do the hard riding and you can play cards.’

Grazias came in, rather ostentatiously pulling on his maille shirt, or so Swan felt.

‘I wish to protest, Ser Suane,’ he said carefully in Italian. ‘I was asleep. This is unfair.’

‘Continue with this complaint and I will show you what unfair is like,’ Swan said.

Grazias glanced at Catacuzenos as if to say ‘you see how he treats us’, and then turned on his heel and strode out into the dark night.

‘Not enough fighting,’ muttered Di Silva.

‘I think they will all be fighting you,’ Catacuzenos said.

Swan shrugged. ‘No money. If they aren’t paid, it will be ugly soon.’ He looked at his cards, fingered his discards ostentatiously, and said, ‘I’ll have the Pope’s money and all this will cease and we can attack some Albanian hill forts.’

He watched the Greek’s eyes. They flicked to the door. To the throne room, where the Despot was in council.

Swan sat back. ‘Shall we play?’ he asked. You hate him. Why do you hate him and yet serve him?

The evening passed uneventfully except that Swan made money at cards, drank too much and went stumbling back to his room. Kendal refused to help him; Clemente was nowhere to be found, and Swan had to strip off his clothes by himself, roll up his dirty linens, and crawl into his bed.

Only in the morning did Swan note the chalk mark outside his window. It was a curled mark he didn’t know, and he had to open Cyriac’s book and look at the back pages for a while until he understood. He threw a loose wool gown over his head, belted it, and thus, looking like a servant, walked out of his room carrying his own night jar. No one paid him the least notice, and he dumped the jar in the jakes and went out into the morning, among the cooing of doves and the calling of roosters, the sun already warm through his wool. He smiled, pulled up his hood and walked down into the lower town with a dirty chamber pot in his hand until he came to one of the open fountains, where he washed it, to the obvious disgust of a housewife, who glared at him so hatefully he thought she might strike him.

He left the clean chamber pot on a ledge and hurried farther down into the town. When he passed the yellow door he knocked, once, turned into the next alley and went to the end. There was a smith, shoeing a mule. Swan waited and a woman emerged from the yellow door; an older woman with a fine figure in a Western gown with a jacket; more Burgundian than Italian. It was like finding a gold piece in a manure pile; she was not young, but her strong face and excellent clothes gave her a character. She was clean and neat, more handsome than pretty, and had an air of self-assurance that was rare in women. She walked up to Swan, took his hand and led him to the yellow door.

‘I’m a whore of sorts,’ she said quietly. ‘You can just come in. It is what everyone expects.’

Swan sat on her bed. She lay on it, fully clothed, with a small copybook in her hands. ‘I really never expected anyone to contact me ever again,’ she said. ‘I suppose it says something about my life that spying seems noble, or at least exciting, next to spreading my legs for various grubby Italians. How is Cyriac?’

‘Ma donna, he is dead,’ Swan said. ‘Would you rather speak French?’

‘By Mary Magdalene,’ she said. ‘Bien sûr, mon vieux.’ She looked at him with her grey eyes. She had an excellent figure, and Swan found it difficult to pinpoint her age, which was somewhere between thirty and fifty. ‘Such a pleasure to speak French,’ she said in that language. ‘Cyriaco is dead? Oh, Madonna. I liked him. He was a good customer and a good spymaster, too.’ She blinked at him. ‘You see? I might trust you. In part because I know who you are; I confess, in fact, that I had hoped you would visit me as soon as I heard your men were wandering the town.’

‘I thought there were no prostitutes?’ Swan said.

She smiled, unabashed. ‘I am not a common prostitute,’ she said. ‘I’m a courtesan, really. A sort of serial mistress. And I can count the Orthodox bishop among my friends. And your friend Catacuzenos, and the Despot Demetrios, who is, in fact, no friend of yours.’

Swan nodded. ‘I suspected as much,’ he said. ‘But neither does he seem a man for pillow talk.’

She smiled. ‘You would be surprised, Ser Suane.’

‘I don’t know your name,’ Swan said.

‘They call me Despoina Zenos, the foreign lady.’ She shrugged. ‘I had a name once, but I have misplaced it. Call me Marie.’

‘Misplaced it?’ he asked. ‘Do you have wine?’

‘I’m sure I can find you some,’ she said. She rolled off the bed, straightened her gown, went to a sideboard, produced an amphora, and then called out. A young girl came and shyly opened the door.

‘My daughter,’ Marie said. She handed the girl the amphora. ‘Wine,’ she said. ‘The best he has.’

‘Yes, Mother,’ the girl said. She was perhaps thirteen.

Marie went and sat by Swan on the bed. ‘So. Cyriac is dead. You are the new master?’ She asked that with a flick of her tongue that had to have been intentional.

‘I suppose I am. Marie, do you know anything about the Catholic church here?’ he asked.

She licked her lips. ‘You know they are all Orthodox. Heretics.’ She made a face.

Swan nodded. ‘I have been out here since ’53,’ he said.

‘Ah.’ She smiled. ‘You seem such a boy to me, to be a famous Turk-killer. Tell me, is it true you bedded Omar Reis’s daughter?’ she asked.

Swan made a moue. ‘A gentleman does not kiss and tell,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘What a rogue. Well, sir, let me tell you that I am old in sin and in the trade, and I’m not to be trifled with.’ She began to unbutton her short jacket with her left hand, her fingers caressing the tight material, plucking at the small buttons. She began to kick her right leg in time to her buttons coming undone, and just as one very full and exquisite breast began to emerge, she produced a dagger from her right stocking.

She put it right against Swan’s slightly engorged manhood with a dexterity that betrayed hundreds of repetitions in practice. The hollow between her breasts had produced a second dagger, this one very small.

‘Poison,’ she said. She was standing now. ‘So, tell me, what was Cyriac’s favourite thing in the world?’

‘The Ancients,’ Swan said.

‘Ah,’ she said. Her neck and the top of her breast were not those of a forty-year-old. Swan’s excitement had quite died; the poison on the dagger looked real, and he wondered what he’d walked into.

‘His favourite poet?’ she asked.

‘Ma donna, I do not know,’ he admitted. ‘I know he was searching for the poems of Sappho when he died. For Bessarion.’

She was close enough that he could smell the cloves on her breath.

‘Ah, Sappho,’ she said. ‘Some say a troop of horse is the most beautiful, and some say a company of infantry, and some say a fleet of ships, but I say it is you, my love.’ She smiled. ‘Cyriaco taught me Greek,’ she said, and stepped back, sheathing a poisoned dagger between her breasts without so much as a glance.

‘I imagine you taught him a few things, as well,’ Swan said.

She laughed. ‘I am quite close to the Despot,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when he is in a dark mood he comes and we play chess and fuck.’ She shook her head, and stood looking at a small icon of St John the Baptist on the wall. Her hands were on her hips. She seemed very much in charge of herself.

‘Can we go back to my question about the Frankish church here?’ he asked, working hard to keep up his nonchalance.

She nodded, all business, turned. ‘Yes. Ask me and I’ll try to answer.’

Just like that, she trusts me?

Maybe she is quite mad.

Or more professional than I am.

‘Are there papal tithes here?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘Yes. The merchants must pay, of course, and all the Franks in the town, and the merchants in Monemvasia. Athens has more Franks and so do Corinth and Thebes. They are very rich.’ She shrugged. ‘I went to Athens on pilgrimage two years ago during Lent. I made a tidy sum, although I fear I did not help the gentlemen keep their Lenten vows.’

‘Marie, can you tell me what the Roman church in Monemvasia brings in?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘A thousand florins?’ she guessed. ‘Five times that for Monemvasia, and as much again for Nafplion.’ She smiled cynically. ‘You might be interested to know that I was asked these same questions by the Franciscan friar.’

Swan sat back. ‘Of course you were,’ he said. ‘Do you want to leave?’

‘For where?’ she asked.

‘I could take you to Rome. I wouldn’t take you in keeping there; I am not a rich man. But I could guarantee you free passage to Roma.’ He looked at her, radiating sincerity.

‘Why haven’t you asked me about your missing men?’ she asked. ‘I mean, are you not worried about your ensign and fifteen lances? Fifty men, all vanished?’

He gazed into her eyes. ‘Not really,’ he said. In truth, he was all but writhing in agony; now they were almost a day late, and he didn’t like waiting.

She made a face. ‘It is a pity you cannot ask Catacuzenos,’ she said. ‘I suspect he knows. He sent messengers as soon as he heard that you were convoying gold from Monemvasia. And Demetrios sent a man to Trapezetos.’ She sat up. ‘See? I am honest with you. I can be a good asset. And yes; I would love to go to Rome. Or Paris, better still.’

She had no hint of hardness about her. She was a handsome woman who appeared vulnerable and at the same time enticing, and yet she could produce two daggers in a blink of her grey eyes.

Loredan would hire her in a blink, too, Swan thought. This is a dream agent, if I can only win her.

‘I will trust you too,’ he said. ‘If all goes well, I will take you to Rome. You have my word. Now here is what I want to know; why does the Medici banker have no specie?’

‘You should join arms with the Franciscan,’ she said. ‘I will endeavour to get you an answer. You work for the Pope?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Directly?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said simply. He shrugged. ‘I doubt that he remembers my name,’ he went on with more honesty than perhaps he had intended, but he was already beginning to like her. There was something very winning in her directness.

She smiled. ‘Well, then, you know what it is like to be a whore,’ she said. ‘Could you get me an indulgence? A forgiveness for my sins?’

Swan nodded. ‘Yes, Marie,’ he said. ‘I can promise that.’

She smiled, suddenly flirtatious. ‘Then let us seal our new bargain, mon vieux.’ She unbuttoned the jacket the rest of the way.

‘Men generally shake hands,’ he said.

She stepped out of her gown, naked except for her hose. Her body was not just good, but glorious; small where small was best, and full and soft in other places, although her thighs shone with muscle. ‘The more fool they,’ she said. ‘I know Albanians who will not make a bargain until they see a man drunk. I have my way.’ She smiled winsomely.

‘I agree,’ Swan said, light headed with lust.. He pulled the wool gown over his head. Then he reached out as if to fondle her breast and instead caught at the small dagger that dangled between them. ‘Could we not have this somewhere else for a few minutes?’ he asked.

She smiled and pulled it over her head, and added the dagger from her hose-top. ‘Trust,’ she said. And put them under her pillow.

When her daughter came back with wine, Marie was just lying back and mocking him for his speed.

‘Ma donna,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘If you only knew how long …’

She laughed. ‘You are easy to like,’ she said. ‘It has always been my curse that I like men.’

They drank the wine and persevered, and the second time was much better. She was lying across him, drinking her wine, and Swan was contemplating a third engagement.

‘I just wasn’t made for marriage,’ she said. ‘I like soldiers, and camps, and excitement. I am easily bored.’

Swan thought of Violetta and Sarka, and wondered how many women there were in the world who felt the same. ‘We have a good deal in common,’ he said.

She laughed, and raised her head.

‘You know where your soldiers are,’ she said suddenly, her grey eyes fixed on his.

She raised her hand as she looked at him and Swan’s reflex was to reach for a dagger under her pillow. But he didn’t. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I hope so.’

Too much trust. But he was naked and so was she, and he was a fool for women and always had been.

She nodded. ‘Good. You are subtle. Now you know I am subtle too.’ She rolled off the bed. ‘And now I know that you will confide in me when you are naked, which, in some way, makes me trust you too. I am sorry that I need my house to myself, Ser Suane. May I bid you go? My daughter can get you into the palace unnoticed.’

‘Your daughter …’ Swan paused. ‘… knows you are a courtesan?’

Marie smiled bitterly. ‘You have no children, I think?’ she said. ‘You cannot keep anything from a child.’

Swan suspected that dismissing him was also a test. Or just possibly she was intending to betray him. He thought about it. He was worth money to Omar Reis; worth money also to various factions in Rome.

He shrugged. Little things count, with spies. She had kissed him hungrily. She had prayed to the icon of St John on the wall, and covered it before they made love. She was truly religious, and she wanted the indulgence. She had used the term heretic about the Greeks in a way that spoke of deep emotion.

She had shown him her daughter.

On balance, Swan felt inclined to trust her.

He also left her neat house in a haze of unaccustomed guilt. The pleasure of the sex had not hidden this odd feeling; that he was betraying Sophia. It was a new feeling to him, and he hated it.

Marie-Eve led him out the back, through the blacksmith’s yard, and through a tiny sally-gate that was probably supposed to have been walled up when the lower level was built. She led him up a flight of stairs inside the second wall and then along the catwalk above the third wall, into a tower.

‘Will you be nice to my mother?’ she asked. ‘Some people are, and some are not.’

Swan gave her a gold florin. ‘I think your mother and I will be good friends,’ he said.

‘I will never be a whore,’ the girl said. ‘I’m not tough enough. Mama says so, and I agree.’

Swan felt a lump in his throat and wondered why he was so soft about some things and not others.

‘Your words to God’s ear,’ he said, and went out of the tower and across the palace’s outer yard.

Clemente was waiting in their room.

‘Where in all of the hells has m’lord been?’ Clemente asked. ‘Francesco the banker is dead.’

Swan stopped in the doorway and swore, fluently, first in English and then in Turkish. ‘Suicide?’ he asked.

‘Only if you can cut yourself open and drop your guts on the floor,’ Clemente said. ‘Whoever did it killed his wife and son too.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Swan cursed. ‘The Despot knows?’

‘Right now, m’lord, only you and I know. And the flies and maggots. You sent me to watch the priest; he went to the banker, as you predicted, and then you set me to watch the banker, and he is dead.’ Clemente shrugged. ‘I have to sleep,’ he said, showing some remorse.

‘Sleep, or sex with one of the Albanians?’ Swan asked.

‘Yes, whatever, yes,’ Clemente answered. He was the company’s most notorious lecher, and had been since Peter had helped him recover from his humped back and a lot of abuse. ‘You cannot expect me to watch the banker every minute.’

‘Damn,’ Swan said. He was tempted to kick the boy, as this was almost exactly why Clemente had been set to watch.

‘I can’t do everything myself,’ Clemente whined.

Swan made a hand motion of negation. ‘Why did the banker have to die?’ he asked the walls. No answer came.

‘Find me the priest,’ he said to Clemente.

Then he went to find Di Silva, and the two of them paced the walls and worried together. Darkness fell abruptly, and Swan went to his room, anxious and truculent. But the Franciscan was sitting, bound with ropes, at Swan’s side table.

‘Clemente,’ Swan said, shaking his head.

‘I’m afraid you’ll throw me out,’ Clemente said.

‘Never,’ Swan said. He ignored the priest and gave his servant a warm embrace. ‘Relax, it is not your fault. But I mean the priest no harm.’

Still, he took his time before he cut the bonds on the priest’s hands and feet. Then he kicked the chimney stool in front of the man, who was moaning with the pain of returning circulation.

‘Welcome back, Father,’ he said.

‘I am a servant of Cardinal Picclomini and you thwart me at your peril,’ the Franciscan spat, without a trace of his former humour.

‘Did you kill the banker, Francesco?’ Swan asked.

‘No, but you probably did,’ the priest accused.

‘You work for Aneas Picclomini?’ Swan asked. ‘I know him. Well.’ He sat back.

The priest put a hand on his wrist and began to rub it.

‘Do you know Niccolo Forteguerri?’ Swan asked.

The priest glowered. But he was a man with a sense of humour, and his glower was not his natural expression. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He’s a bastard. But in my master’s service.’

Swan nodded. ‘Well, I perform much the same set of services for Bessarion, and now the Pope,’ he said. ‘I too am a bastard, both literally and in most other ways, but I suspect we are not adversaries here. You are investigating banks and the collection of papal tithes?’

The Franciscan shook his head. ‘I can’t tell you anything,’ he said.

‘That’s all right,’ Swan said with more confidence then he felt. ‘I already know the answer.’

Clemente brought the priest a cup of wine, which he drank off. Then he nodded sharply and managed a half-smile.

‘If you didn’t kill the banker,’ the priest said, ‘who did?’

Swan nodded. ‘You were my first suspect,’ he said. ‘Since Clemente here tracked you to him.’

The priest practised his glare.

Clemente was immune.

‘I’m guessing that the papal tithes have been collected by the Medici acting as tax farmers,’ Swan said. ‘And I’m going to further guess that the money is gone, and that should not be possible. That there should be three or four thousand florins sitting in bags here.’

‘I’m not going to help you,’ the priest said.

Swan sighed. ‘Tell me your name at least.’

‘I am Père Riccardo.’ He extended his hand. ‘Why would anyone kill a banker?’

‘Because he knew something about the money. Beyond that, I can’t guess. Will you join me?’ Swan asked.

Père Riccardo shook his head. ‘I must remain … independent.’

‘Take him to his home, or cell, or what have you.’ He looked at Clemente. ‘Where’d you find him?’

‘The Venetian factor’s chapel,’ Clemente said, with a shrug.

Swan glanced at the Franciscan and changed tack. ‘Do you know Cardinal Trevisan?’

‘Yes,’ the Franciscan admitted.

‘Do you happen to know where he is right now?’ Swan asked.

‘Rhodes,’ the priest answered. ‘I left him there less than a month ago.’

Swan fingered his beard. ‘I will try a different tack, Father. I am supposed to join the papal fleet with some men-at-arms. My orders were to bring my company from Albania all the way here. I cannot carry out my orders without money. Do you have any suggestions?’

The Franciscan nodded. ‘That is a question I may answer. You know Trevisan is Venetian?’

Swan shook his head. ‘I should have known that, but I did not.’

‘The Venetian factor might find you money. Or you could go to Nafplion. I understand you were just there; that you saved it.’ The priest smiled. ‘You see, I can be quite forthcoming, but I will not discuss the other matter.’

‘You know the banker is dead,’ Swan said. ‘If you are doing what I think you are doing, your life is in peril.’

‘I am a servant of Christ and Saint Francis,’ the man said. ‘My life is theirs.’

Swan rose to his feet, bowed and opened the door. ‘I’ll try not to order your arrest again.’

The Franciscan smiled with his original humour. ‘Perhaps next time I will just come.’

Swan reached out and touched his arm. ‘We can protect you,’ he said. ‘I can be a bastard, but you would be safe with us.’

‘You tempt me,’ the Franciscan said. ‘But I am pretty fair at resisting temptation.’

He went out and Swan heard his sandals on the steps. His faint smell of sweat and unwashed wool lingered, covering the jasmine-laced spring air of Greece.

Swan went to his window and stared out of it for a while.

Then he knelt and prayed. He prayed an entire set of beads; he strove to meditate on the crucifixion, and he wondered when Lent began. He looked through his book of hours and found the date. March third. It had been Lent for days.

He was in prayer when Catacuzenos came with a dozen Greek stradiotes to arrest him.

‘I am truly sorry,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘I am only obeying orders.’

Swan nodded and handed over the sword Sophia had purchased for him.

He was taken directly to the great hall on the third floor of the palace. There he was made to wait for a long time with four stradiotes guarding him with drawn swords, which was a compliment of sorts. He considered all the disasters that might have led to this moment and went back to prayer.

Towards evening, he was led into the audience hall. He felt dirty; the Despot kept the full ceremonial of the court of Constantinople, and a row of beautifully brocaded men in long coats and tall hats awaited him as he was escorted to the throne, where Demetrios sat.

He bowed. Demetrios was not Emperor, and Swan didn’t intend to prostrate himself anyway.

‘Where are all your men?’ Demetrios demanded.

Swan did his best to look puzzled.

‘Your men are gone,’ Demetrios said. ‘There are no guards on my herds; the roads are unguarded. Your men are gone.’

Swan heard a bustle at the back of the hall, and saw Clemente dragged in, and Di Silva, and his squire.

‘My men are right here,’ Swan said. ‘Apparently under arrest, Majesty.’

‘Where are your hundred lances?’ Demetrios asked again. There was now a threat in his voice.

Swan looked around. ‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Possibly they have deserted, because they were not paid.’

Demetrios smashed a hand down on the arm of his throne. ‘I do not believe this.’

Swan shrugged, and one of the soldiers hit him with the haft of a pole arm. That hurt. He stumbled.

‘You have betrayed us,’ Demetrios said. ‘You are in service to the Latin Pope and you have made common cause with my enemies.’ He steepled his hands. ‘Omar Reis has offered me ten thousand ducats for you,’ he said. ‘Alive,’ he added, smiling. ‘I will send you as an earnest of my good intentions. And because betrayal should be met with betrayal.’

‘Is that what Jesus says?’ Swan answered, even as the bottom dropped out of his stomach. Alive to Omar Reis. Alive to Omar Reis.

The pole arm shaft hit him again.

‘I have not betrayed your Majesty,’ he said. You intended this all along, you bastard.

Swan was dragged away.

The prisons under Mistra’s citadel were dark and surprisingly dry. Most of the prisoners were retainers of the Catacuzenoi who would not recant. Many had been tortured. In fact, in an hour under the citadel, Swan learned more about Demetrios than all his time in Mistra had taught him. This was a tyrant who enjoyed hurting people, personally. Swan lay on clean straw and listened to a grizzled old Turk-fighter with no fingernails tell him of the rebellion and its aftermath.

‘We call him the betrayer,’ the man said. ‘He brought in the fucking Turks. He treats them as friends and guests. We are Spartans! By Christ Pantokrator, if we must go down, let us go down fighting.’

Swan winced.

He was glad Kendal wasn’t there, and very sad that Clemente was. Clemente had been beaten, and was curled in a ball. Swan cleaned him up and sat by him in the cell, holding his hand. But after an hour, a pair of soldiers came and took him away, stripped him down to his shirt, and put him in a bottle-shaped hole in he rock. He could neither stand nor sit nor lie down.

‘Despot says you might kill yourself,’ a soldier said. ‘And if you do, he kills one of us. Please don’t try.’

Swan stood hunched over and tried to meditate. He tried to imagine what had gone wrong; he tried to see the terrain between Mistra and Monemvasia.

He was not tempted to laugh.

A long time passed.

He had a lot of regrets. He regretted the Moslem man he’d killed in a mine under Rhodes; he regretted that he’d so easily fallen into bed with the courtesan Marie; he regretted a great many other sins, venal and mortal. The pain in his shoulders and back from the hunched position was at first trifling, and later terrible; and the isolation was bad, and the weight of earth atop him, the whole castle, the hole in the rock, made him think of Rhodes over and over, and he knew he whimpered several times, and finally he had to relieve himself in the hole, and that meant that the floor was covered in his own shit, and then there was no water, and that went on for a long time.

Eventually he would surrender the shred of dignity he had, and he’d slump into the piss and shit in the bottom of the hole.

And that, of course, was nothing to what Omar Reis would do. Impalement, probably, after some humiliation, maybe rape, and certainly emasculation. It would be bad. He had time to imagine it, and he did.

In between bouts of shame and guilt, fear of the hole, horror and remembered trauma, he wondered what had gone wrong with his beautiful plan, which was, as usual, far too complex, and had seemed so smart at the time.

He tried to meditate on the passion of Christ, and he mostly failed.

The grating moved.

There was light.

‘Haul him out,’ said Catacuzenos. ‘Christ in heaven, is this what we are?’

‘The Despot ordered …’

‘Saint Demetrios, Saint Michael Taxiarch, and all the saints, Giorgos, is this what … Fuck your mother. Get him out.’

Rough hands dragged him from the hole. It no longer stank, or at least, he could not smell it.

‘How long was he in this hole?’ Orietto asked.

‘Two days,’ a soldier said, clearly terrified.

‘Perhaps we should put you in?’ Orietto asked.

‘We were only following orders,’ the soldiers whined.

Swan awoke from dark dreams in clean sheets. He could see Clemente; the boy was sitting in a chair, reading the Bible slowly and following the words with a finger. He jumped to his feet.

‘You are awake,’ he said, and leaned into the corridor and shouted.

Orietto and Columbino appeared.

Swan had trouble recognising them, or even caring. Part of his head was still in the hole, and he shrugged and then flinched.

‘Thomas?’ Di Silva said.

Swan took a deep breath, and burst into tears.

It took him two full days of food and solitude to achieve some sort of equilibrium. It wasn’t really good, but a sense of responsibility came to him, and a sort of nightmare-like appreciation of reality. He was beyond listless. He had no desire to do anything, except perhaps prepare himself for death.

His friends watched him with obvious concern.

He ignored them, struggling to find something.

Something to live for. Someone to be.

Two fucking days. How weak am I?

He lay awake on the evening of the third day. He was trying not to think; it was his new pastime; a sort of negative meditation where he attempted to blank his mind against the images of the pit and the expected humiliation, which somehow still haunted him, waking and sleeping. He was afraid.

The door to the corridor opened.

Swan lay still. But when he didn’t hear Clemente’s footsteps, or his voice, he raised his head.

There was Marie.

She sat on the edge of the bed.

‘I have never felt less like sex in all of my life,’ Swan said.

‘I know who killed the banker,’ she said.

‘So do I,’ Swan said. ‘Demetrios.’

‘No,’ she said. She lay down on the bed next to him, fully dressed. She smelled beautiful; a musky scent, but with a sweet overtone. She took his hands, and he let her.

‘Not Demetrios,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘There is an Italian in the city. Chigi. He is a killer. Now he is waiting for the Franciscan.’

‘How can you know this?’ Swan asked.

‘The usual way,’ she said, and her face was next to his. She put one of his hands on her suddenly bare thigh, and despite everything, a shock like the after-burn of a lightning bolt went through him. Her lips locked onto his lower lip, and her hands were busy.

‘Be alive,’ she said.

He felt the knife on her thigh, and she laughed.

And later, he laughed with her. And ordered Orietto to protect the Franciscan.

The next morning he sat in hose and a shirt with Grazias, Orietto and Kendal, and Di Silva and Columbino.

Marie sat on the bed, reading the gospels.

The other men tried not to look at her, although Swan, whose busy head was working again, knew they must have sent for her.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

Orietto frowned. ‘Everything … weather, bandits, horse trouble. But the real trouble was Monemvasia. In the end, I got in with the help of a serving brother of the Order of Saint John who claimed to know you. The Florentine factor had no money, as you said; I get a big strong box from the Order and we brought it back. Empty.’

Columbino nodded. ‘We went south as you said; the country is not so difficult. It was hard to hide camps, and men followed us. I went too far south to lose them, and ended up in sight of the sea.’ He shrugged. ‘For all that, on the fifth day out, I found Orietto by the river, as we agreed.’

Orietto nodded. ‘So we headed north up the Vale. And sure enough, Trapezetos attacked us on the sixth day.’ He pointed his chin at Grazias.

Grazias sat back. ‘I was already behind Trapezetos, but he brought more men than I had expected. Still, they couldn’t make any impression on your men-at-arms, and the archers were killing them.’

‘Christ crucified, I didn’t want a massacre,’ Swan said with something of his accustomed asperity. ‘How many did you kill?’

‘Only a dozen,’ Orietto said, and his voice betrayed the lie. ‘Mostly it was a massacre of horses.’

Columbino nodded. ‘We took him and two of his sons. Alive.’

Orietto nodded. ‘Then we came back and threatened to blow down the gates.’

‘The Bohemian enjoyed moving the falconet up the next hill to show that he could put balls into the palace,’ Columbino said. ‘I’m sorry, Thomas. We had no idea what the bastard had done to you.’

‘I still don’t know what he has done to me,’ Swan said. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. So we have Trapezetos, but no money.’

‘That about sums it up,’ Orietto said. ‘And Catacuzenos stood by us. He wants to see you.’

Swan looked at Marie. She gave him a faint nod.

‘Send him in,’ Swan said.

He didn’t even have time to sink into darkness before Catacuzenos was there. The man bowed deeply, and then he shook his head.

‘For my part, I am very sorry,’ he said. ‘So sorry that I would offer to take your place in the hole. We are better than this.’

Swan looked at the man who had arrested him; considering cruelty, which came very easily to him suddenly. Anger. Pain. Lust. He was suddenly a very simple man.

He let go a breath. Took another. ‘Who are the other men in the cells?’ he asked.

‘My family,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘It is very complicated.’

Swan already knew the story from Marie. But he leaned back, feigning nonchalance, crossed his legs and nodded. ‘I have time,’ he said. ‘Sit.’

Catacuzenos sat, eyes shifting wildly. He was nervous; deeply unhappy.

Vulnerable.

Swan half-closed his eyes.

‘They were wrong to revolt, my cousins,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘I refused to join them, and later I fought them for Demetrios.’

‘Wrong why?’ Swan asked.

‘You know the phrase, any king, however foolish, is better than no king?’ Catacuzenos asked.

Swan smiled. ‘We do not have this phrase in English. We mostly kill our kings when they annoy us.’

Catacuzenos muttered something that sounded very like ‘barbarian’. Then he looked around. ‘What would they have done? My cousins? Raised taxes, fought the Albanians, fought among themselves. Demetrios has friends among the Turks. I thought he would find us a path to save our people. Our way of life.’ He shook his head. ‘I have seen too many betrayals,’ he said.

You have betrayed too many friends, Swan translated.

Swan leaned forward. He was surprised to find no excitement, no spirit of the game in his heart. Only pain, and a cynical weariness.

But he knew his role. He glanced at Marie. She smiled warmly, as if reminding him of God’s love, or the rules of espionage, or both. ‘I could arrange the release of your cousins,’ he said.

‘Demetrios will never let them go,’ Catacuzenos said. His face writhed. He was a man with an inner torment; every spymaster’s dream.

‘I can take them to Venice as stradiotes,’ Swan said. ‘They will have no reason to return.’

Catacuzenos blinked. ‘By the risen Christ,’ he said. ‘You could do that?’

‘And I can offer you a unique opportunity,’ Swan said wearily.

Before Catacuzenos left the room, his name was in Cyriaco’s black book, and the man himself owed his family’s survival to Thomas Swan.

Marie stayed for two days. He prayed with her; he was silent with her. He made love to her. He took her like a drug for sadness, for the blackness. She never stopped being cheerful, laughing, teasing him, reading aloud, asking him questions.

Someone tried to kill the Franciscan with a crossbow. The attempt was foiled by John Drake, an archer; but he failed to catch the bowman.

Clemente, quieter and more careful than before, reported that a mongrel dog had died eating Swan’s food. Columbino had most of the company living outside the walls, with a subsidiary watch at the town’s main gate, which they had siezed by coup de main during a guard change. Swan’s archers had taken to charging a toll at the gate, like soldiers the world over, and the situation was becoming untenable as the Greeks grew increasingly angry.

Swan sat in the palace and waited.

The third day, the Despot summoned him.

He went with four armoured men-at-arms at his back.

The Despot sat in the same place. Sun shone in through the magnificent windows, the tapestries were beautiful, and the air was full of incense.

‘So,’ he said. The court chamberlain fled, ceremonial uncompleted.

Swan looked at the man who’d ordered him into the pit. He found that he had very little to say.

‘I want Trapezetos,’ the Despot said.

‘So that you can release him?’ Swan asked. ‘Majesty?’ he added, with a trace of sarcasm.

‘Yes,’ the Despot said. ‘What do I have to do?’

‘Let me just sum up, may I, Majesty?’ Swan said. ‘You accused me of betraying you, and yet you always planned to sell me to Omar Reis, even while you informed Trapezetos of my shipment of gold going north from Monemvasia. Correct?’

The Despot looked bored. ‘You would do the same in my place,’ he said. ‘And the very best use I could make of you would be to sell you to Omar Reis. That would buy me five years’ peace. Your three hundred men, even if they were Leonidas and his three hundred, would never buy me five years’ peace.’

‘I do not think that we can continue to serve you,’ Swan said. ‘I will be taking my company and leaving. I think this may be the time to note that my people defeated your notorious Trapezetos and took him prisoner with very little effort. I don’t think you stand a chance against the Turks. I think you need every real soldier you can lay hands on. But not mine. Majesty.’

‘Good riddance,’ Demetrios, Despot of the Eastern Morea, said. ‘Get your thieves out of my gatehouse.’

‘But only when I’m done here,’ Swan said, his voice hardening. ‘We will be here a little longer.’

‘Really?’ Demetrios said. ‘I think not. I order you to leave. That is why I summoned you. Your services are no longer required.’ He shrugged. ‘I never asked for you in the first place. If you make trouble, I will not be able to prevent a massacre.’

Swan nodded. ‘If any of your soldiers touches any of mine, I’ll see your fucking city burn to the ground,’ he said. ‘In fact, I promise it. And I have the incendiaries to make it work. Do not cross me, Despote.’

‘What do I have to do the rid myself of you?’ the Despot asked. His tone changed; from hard to reasonable.

‘I want an Italian named Chigi,’ Swan said. ‘I will have a few other demands; mostly, I will want you to release all the Catacuzenoi you hold. And my sword. Immediately.’

‘The sword, yes. The Catacuzenoi, never,’ Demetrios spat.

‘Soon,’ Swan said, ‘I will take them away with me, so you needn’t be afraid. I will take them to Venice, where they will be valued. In the meantime, you are aware that your main gate is now in my hands. As soon as I have Chigi and the Catacuzenoi, I’ll move outside your walls.’

‘God’s curse on you,’ Demetrios said.

Swan found his tendency to shrug was returning. ‘You put me in the hole,’ he said. ‘Perhaps a mistake.’

A few hours later, Swan sat with Simon Aten, Michael Aten’s brother, a Paleologi and most commonly known as Trapezetos. With him was his son, also Michael. Both were pretending good humour.

‘You cannot hold us,’ Simon said with a bearded smile. ‘Every hand will be against you.’

‘I can cut your throats,’ Swan said reasonably. ‘Or have it done.’

‘Then there would be a blood feud that would destroy you,’ Michael said hotly.

Swan shrugged. ‘You could come and find me in England? Seriously? No. I came to rescue you so-called Spartans, but really, I think I’ll just go home. I have had enough of Greece and Greeks. I think the Turks deserve you, and your deserve the Turks.’

‘Fuck yourself,’ Simon spat.

Swan smiled. ‘I’m so glad we are getting to know each other. Now here is what I want from you, gentlemen. There are Turkish envoys coming; coming to collect me, I expect.’

Michael’s face gave him away.

‘Good,’ Swan said, and his voice rang with a cruelty he had not even known he possessed. ‘Bring me their heads. Or bring them alive.’

‘Blessed Saint Demetrios!’ Simon Trapezetos said. ‘You cannot mean it.’

‘I can,’ Swan said. ‘And I have a very good way of knowing whether you bring the correct heads, so please do not waste my time.’ This last was all bluff, but he had them, and he knew it. ‘I will release Michael. If he does not return with the heads in two weeks, all the rest of you die.’

‘You stupid fucking Latin pig,’ Simon Trapezetos said. ‘How dare you? You will land us in a war, a war we cannot win. You doom us.’

Swan shrugged. ‘You doomed yourselves. I came to help you.’

When the two prisoners had been removed, he sent out messengers; to Nafplion, to Monemvasia, to the west coast, where Despot Thomas held sway. It was the poorer half of the country. But he thought he might yet get a welcome there.

And he wrote a long letter to Bessarion, and another to the Ten. He sealed both with his personal seal and sent copies with every messenger.

The sun rose and the ground hardened. Olive trees came into flower; the plains of Sparta became a carpet of thousands of tiny blossoms, and the heavy smell of jasmine filled the air. Swan and Marie made love, and read the gospels, and Swan began to stretch inside his mind and return to being himself.

Nineteen days after his release, Michael Aten, son of Simon, brought him two heads. Swan was glad, in a distant way, that neither was Omar Reis’s son Idris.

I killed them.

Their deaths sat in his head like cesspools. He didn’t mind killing men on battlefields, or even in alleys, but this was bad. He knew it.

He was committing a lot of sins lately.

He thought the thinner, bloodless face might belong to a man he’d gone hawking with, outside Constantinople.

He took the bag. ‘You may take your men and go,’ he said.

‘You are a dead man,’ Trapezetos said.

Swan shrugged. ‘Death waits for all of us,’ he said. ‘You are, pardon me, no Omar Reis.’ He waved a hand as if brushing them away. ‘Go. Before I add you to the bag.’

The same day the killer, Chigi, was brought to his camp by Catacuzenos. And there with him were thirty men, dirty, pale, thin. Grazias took them immediately.

Swan had Marie and her daughter. He had everything from Mistra that he ever wanted.

He sent a note into the town by way of Clemente, to tell the Franciscan to meet him for dinner.

He held an officers’ meeting and told all of his people that they would be riding in the morning for the west coast, where he hoped to rendezvous with the Venetian squadron coming down the coast from the Lagoon.

The priest, in brown robe and sandals, joined them for dinner in Swan’s somewhat dilapidated pavilion.

Swan had Kendal bring Chigi.

He was a tough-looking man, with a bushy black beard, heavy brows, a domed head and many missing teeth.

Swan looked at the Franciscan’s face, and he was surprised that the priest didn’t even give a flicker of recognition, and he revised his views of the plot yet again.

‘Well, well, Messire Chigi,’ Swan said. ‘Care to tell us about the banker, Ser Francesco Pergugi?’

‘You are the English knight, eh?’ Chigi asked. He nodded. ‘You work for Bessarion, eh?’

Swan nodded back. ‘You have the better of me,’ he said.

Chigi looked at the wine. ‘I thought I was for it when the fucking Greeks took me.’ He grinned at Swan. ‘How’d you get me free?’

‘I traded for you,’ Swan said.

‘Dannazione, capitano. Now I owe you.’ The man smiled a toothless smile.

Swan looked at the Franciscan. The priest still didn’t give a glimmer of recognition.

Swan shook his head. He had all the unravelled yarns of the plot, at least as it applied here, and yet he was no wiser. Or not much wiser.

‘Why did you kill the banker?’ Swan asked directly.

Chigi picked up a cup of wine and drank it off. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘Serious as death, capitano. If I tell you, you have to die. Maybe not today, but some day.’

‘Everyone dies,’ Swan said for the second time that day.

The Franciscan looked horrified.

The big Italian assassin shrugged. ‘Stare all you want, Father,’ he said. ‘You have to go and you know it.’

Swan felt a rising tide of frustration. ‘You two know each other?’ he asked.

‘I know him,’ the assassin said. ‘He’s on my list. I’m just cleaning up, capitano. Seriously; I respect you. Hero of Belgrade. Turk-fighter. Just let me walk away.’

Swan looked around. ‘I really don’t think you can kill five armoured men.’

The big Italian shrugged. ‘Oh, as to that, I have no doubt you fine gentles can kill me. But there’s others, and when they know you killed me, you’ll be on the list.’

‘Must be a long fucking list,’ Orietto said.

Di Silva made a gesture of contempt.

Kendal had his knife in his hand.

Grazias was already behind the killer.

Swan shrugged. ‘I’m tired of killing,’ he said. As soon as he said it, he knew it was true. ‘A life for a life, assassin. Let the priest go.’

‘Off the list?’ Chigi said. He was incredulous. ‘Jesus wept, capitano. It’s not my list.’

‘Whose, then?’ asked the priest. He was watching the assassin the way children watch a dead bird full of maggots, with horrified fascination.

Chigi whistled, as if appalled by their naivety. He shrugged and made the sign of a tall hat over his head.

‘The Holy Father?’ Di Silva asked. ‘Jesus Christ and all the saints, you kill people for the Pope?’

Chigi shrugged. ‘I didn’t say nothin’. But you gentles need to know what you are into.’ He looked at the priest. ‘I can say that I, personally, won’t touch him. That’s all I can say.’

Kendal said, ‘Why is the …’ and Swan shut him down with a look.

‘Perhaps we will meet in Rome,’ Swan said with careful civility.

‘Terrible place,’ the assassin said. ‘Fucking dangerous. Thanks for the wine and getting me out.’

He turned and went out of the tent.

There was silence for a long time.

Kendal couldn’t hold it in. ‘The Holy Father ordered a banker killed?’ he asked, incredulous.

Swan was looking at the priest, his eyes narrowed. ‘No,’ he said.

Orietto put a hand on Swan’s shoulder. ‘You know what is going on?’

Swan nodded. ‘Almost everything, yes. But only now, this minute, and there’s still two huge parts of the puzzle I don’t understand.’

Di Silva shook his head. ‘You are as enigmatic as Bembo,’ he said.

Orietto nodded. ‘Should we know?’ he asked.

Swan sat heavily. He looked at his officers. His friends.

‘I am going to write the whole thing,’ he said. ‘I will leave a copy with Clemente and another will go to Alessandro. I do not think any of you will benefit from knowing. And as I say, there are two things I still do not know. And frankly, I have followed this plot from the moment I was assigned to find Spinelli, and I’ve been wrong at every turn.’

He watched the priest, and when he said, ‘Spinelli,’ the priest made a sound.

When the rest of them had gone off to their wine and their own tents, the priest remained.

‘Anything you’d like to confess?’ Swan asked.

The priest sighed. ‘I think you have done me a very great favour,’ he said. ‘Despite which, I cannot help you. I have sworn an oath.’

‘That’s fine, then. But please tell your cardinal and your Forteguerri that I did everything I could to help you. And we both know what I’m talking about. Yes?’ Swan said.

The Franciscan bowed his head. ‘Yes,’ he said.

The next morning, the whole company, including a small herd of Turkish horses and some nice Albanian mares recently added, some recovering Greek former prisoners, forty-seven Albanian women well mounted, a courtesan, and her young daughter on a stolen pony, departed Mistra. The banner of St Mary Magdalene snapped in the spring breeze. Flowers bloomed as far as the eye could see; the plains were a riot of colour that blended into a pinkish grey out towards the horizon. The sun sparkled on spears and armour.

The company’s archers dismounted from the great gates of the city, and the Bohemian covered them, a burning match in his hand, until the last archer was on his horse. Then the falconet – still loaded – was hitched to the back of the baggage wagon with eight horses, and the whole company went down the road at a brisk mounted walk. The roads were dry.

The company went north and west, along the ancient road to Elis and Olympia. The road was studded with memory; not direct memories like the darkness that awaited Swan under Mistras, but memories of learning; lines from Herodotus and Pausanias. He had a scroll, possibly even an original scroll, of Pausanias in his saddle-bag, taken from one of the monasteries of the city behind him, and the Greek letters, all in a single hand, told of the ancient world at its height, when all the temples of Olympia were open and the games still played. Swan travelled north, and dreamed of a long-dead past, and only realised when he was lying on his camp bed that a day had passed and he had not felt the terrible darkness.

The next morning was clear; magnificent. Three eagles circled far away on the right as he emerged from his tent, although he had some doubts about the power of augury. The mountain air was clear and cool; the carpet of flowers was already fading, and there was new grass; the tinkle of goat bells sounded. In a small field at his feet, the former prisoners were choosing horses from the company’s herd. They shouted back and forth in Greek, and Grazias and the Other Demetrios watched them, taking notes on wax tablets. Swan sat in the sun as his pavilion was struck, reading Pausanias. The manuscript was very difficult to read; as on the ancient monuments, the letters were all in the old form, and all together, with no word breaks, no spaces, and no punctuation whatsoever.

He looked at Marie. ‘It is the greatest treasure map ever written,’ he said.

She laughed. ‘I thought that you would like it. But my friend the abbot wanted it to go to the West. I have a dozen more.’

Swan nodded. ‘Of course you do. Will Catacuzenos stay loyal to me?’

She shrugged. ‘Me, I cannot predict the future, or I would be married to a handsome knight and not a courtesan. But you have his whole family. You settle them in Venice … why should he ever betray you? And soon enough, he will want a home for himself and his wife; his wife is quite pretty, by the way. She’s a Komnena.’

‘What do you want?’ Swan asked.

Marie frowned. ‘A comfortable old age,’ she said. ‘Maybe as a nun in a very nice nunnery.’

‘With your help here and a dozen classical manuscripts, I suspect we can buy you such a life,’ Swan said.

She smiled. ‘The thing is, much as I love God and I love to read …’ She looked out at the Greeks, who were now all mounted, and were playing some sort of game with a leather bundle and swords. ‘I love this. I have always loved camps. And men.’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’d be a terrible nun.’

Swan was beginning to see the basis of his future network. ‘What if I suggested that you could have both,’ he said.

That afternoon, there was an ambush. The ambush struck the head of the column, triggered by the aggressive scouting of Grazias’s outriders. Two men were killed from the company; one was the Englishman, John Drake; the other an Albanian that Grazias had recruited, what seemed like years before. Clemente took a wound, a light crossbow bolt through his right forearm; the ambushers had a dense cavalry column, a hundred men strong, that made a dedicated attack in the standards.

Swan’s men were ready, but perhaps not ready enough for the ferocity of the attack and the numbers.

Swan had to fight, hand to hand, with a wild-eyed young man in a Turkish kaftan, a long maille shirt and a round hat full of plumes. He looked like a modern Achilles and his scimitar moved like lightning.

Swan was wearing a small fortune in the best Bohemian plate armour. The scimitar was useless, and Sophia’s sword eventually bound the curved sword, rolled over it, flat to flat, and slid home into the brilliant young man’s eye, killing him instantly.

All along the column, training and better armour and bigger horses defeated ferocity and impetus. Orietto led a dozen armoured men in a counter-charge that rolled ponderously along the column’s left flank, overthrowing attacker after attacker until the whole mob broke away like a flock of starlings and flew for the hills, pursued instantly by Grazias and also by the Catacuzenoi.

A German knight who had been with them since Belgrade died despite his armour; one of the Catacuzenoi died in the pursuit. Four dead and eight wounded, for nothing, at the very edge of the Despot’s territory. The attackers left twenty men dead and as many again wounded.

Swan shook his head.

‘Trapezetos?’ he asked Grazias.

The Other Demetrios shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said, which might have had a variety of meanings.

‘Pick up the wounded and let’s take them with us,’ Swan said.

‘Wagons will be heavy,’ Orietto said. ‘But sure, the ground is dry.’

The column marched all night under a new moon. It would soon be Easter, whether one was Catholic or Orthodox.

As the sun rose, they came to the river that divided the Despot Demetrios’s land from his brother Thomas’s western Morea. There were forty stradiotes waiting.

And the Despot Thomas in person.

Swan dismounted and knelt, and the Despot gave him a blessing.

‘Majesty,’ Swan said.

Thomas smiled. Like all of the Paleologi, the man was very handsome, with tanned brown skin and pale eyes. ‘You have more soldiers than I have,’ the Despot Thomas said. ‘So it seems a little foolish for you to pretend that I am the Emperor. Has my brother claimed that he is Emperor yet?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Swan said.

‘He will.’ Thomas sighed. ‘When he breaks with his master in Edirne. Well; welcome to the last free part of the Roman Empire that was, Ser Suane. All that is left of Plethon in Mistra is his corpse.’

Swan wanted to believe. Thomas was slightly smaller than his brother; his shoulders stooped, but his eyes were bright and alert and he was engaging, which Demetrios was not.

‘We will, if it pleases you, ride to Glarenza,’ the Despot Thomas said.

‘My lord, let us ride if we must,’ Swan said. ‘We had a fight yesterday, and I have wounded men in my wagons. And we rode all night so that we would not have to fight again.’

The Despot nodded. ‘You have infuriated my brother, no doubt,’ he said, clearly pleased.

Swan nodded. ‘My lord, we had a misunderstanding.’

Thomas rubbed his beard. ‘We can make camp in the bend of the river, right there. Are you pursued?’

‘No, my lord.’ Swan was trying not to like the younger brother, but the man had a manner that was hard to ignore. He had an openness to him that men told Swan his oldest brother had had; Constantine IX, who had died on the walls of Constantinople, fighting to the last.

Like Leonidas.

And the Despot Thomas went with Swan to visit the wounded, some of whom were awed by his presence. When they were done, Swan sent wine to the prisoners and his own wounded, and then they sat in the evening light outside Swan’s pavilion, and Clemente waited directly on the Despot of the West.

‘What will you do with your prisoners?’ Thomas asked.

‘Recruit them,’ Swan said, with a significant glace at Grazias. ‘Good light cavalry are more valuable than gold in Italy. I assume my company will go back to Italy now.’

‘You do not want to stay and fight the Turks for me?’ Thomas asked.

Swan bowed. ‘That will depend on you, my lord. I was told to take my company to Mistra. To be … frank, I suspect that the Pope thought that you, and not your Turkophile brother, was Despot of Mistra. Regardless, I cannot serve there. Whether the Pope will pay to keep us here, in the western Morea, I do not know. That will almost certainly be up to Cardinal Trevisan, the papal legate in Outremer, to whom I have communicated all my …’ Swan shrugged. ‘Problems.’

‘When we heard of Belgrade,’ Thomas said, ‘we stopped paying our tribute to the Sultan.’

Swan nodded. ‘More wine, Majesty?’ he said.

‘Mehmed bin Murad will come this summer. I cannot say where.’

Swan smiled grimly. ‘I suspect he will be very angry with your brother. Who appears to have murdered his envoys.’

Thomas started. ‘What? My brother loves Mehmed better than he loves me. Why did he murder the Turkish envoys? He must be mad.’

Clemente smiled as grimly as Swan. And poured more wine.

‘So …’ Thomas said. He fingered his beard. ‘So you think Mehmed will attack Demetrios.’

Swan shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, Majesty, but I have had a very fatiguing week.’

Thomas suddenly sat back. ‘You murdered the Turkish envoys!’ he said.

One of his officers, standing close by, stepped up to his master, hand on his sword.

Swan shook his head. ‘I assure you that I did not,’ he said.

Thomas laughed. ‘Demetrios really made you angry.’

‘Yes,’ Swan admitted.

The younger despot rose to his feet. ‘I will endeavour to make you a friend,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’ He paused. ‘But listen. My brother is a fool. He betrays automatically, because, I am sorry to say, he was badly raised. He saw too much betrayal. I will say no more. I had the better childhood; I was never a hostage.’ He shrugged. ‘But listen to me, Frank. I will not let Demetrios lose it all. He has Nafplion and Monemvasia and Mistra; I have some beautiful ruins. He has all the men trained by Plethon; I have a handful of goatherds. Despite the unfairness of the division, I try not to fight him. Fighting only squanders our strength. But if Mehmed attacks him … then, perhaps, he will see reason, and we will have a chance to reclaim our own.’

Swan nodded. ‘I do not think there is the strength in the Peloponnese to face the Turks.’

‘No,’ Thomas the Despot said. ‘No, we will need Venice and Milan. And you, Ser Thomas. I see hope that we share a common name.’

Swan smiled, thinking of Thomas Spinelli. ‘And yet, those named Thomas are prone to doubt,’ Swan said.

In Glarenza, there were letters. There was one from Cardinal Trevisan, dated only a week before, from Negroponte; a letter from Alexander Bembo at Nafplion, and a letter from Loredan at Venice.

Trevisan ordered him to use all possible dispatch to join the papal fleet at Lemnos or Negroponte.

Loredan begged him to use his company to help hold the western Morea against Mehmed’s spring campaign.

Bembo told him that there was a Venetian squadron coming out of the Adriatic to join Trevisan. Swan saw no sign in any of the letters that anyone had received his reports on the situation in Mistra, and his deliberate provocation of the Sultan and Omar Reis now appeared to him a foolish piece of cruel bravado and not the brilliant coup he’d imagined at the time.

Swan read his letters twice and took Columbino with him to the ‘palace’, which was a fine old Frankish castle of Clarence, or ‘Glarenza’, as the Greeks said, two centuries old and in good repair. It looked out over the blue waters of the Ionian, with Zakynthos and Cephalonia almost close enough to touch.

He set Clemente to watch the Franciscan, who’d come with them from Mistras; he assigned Kendal to watch the Florentine factor, with three archers to support him. There was a small Latin convent; a memory of Frankish Greece. Swan escorted Marie there, gave her a clandestine kiss, and left her with the abbess, a middle-aged Italian woman of unimpeachable quarterings who obviously possessed a lot of energy. She welcomed Marie-Eve as well; the two women vanished inside the nunnery and the great iron-studded gate rang shut behind them.

Swan missed Marie immediately, but he was weaning himself from her. In her arms, he had begun to lose the man who would marry Sophia; that man had received many blows lately. But Swan had learned a thing or two from all that gospel reading, and he aimed to finish Lent in a state of denial and see whether he could win back a little of himself; the cheerful, open self he’d shed in the hole in Mistra.

He received word that Mehmed was stirring from Edirne in the east, and then, on Holy Saturday for Latins, Alexander Bembo stepped off a tiny galliot in the harbour as if that was perfectly normal, and threw his arms around Swan.

‘How bad was it?’ he asked that night. Swan had moved into the guest rooms of the Latin monastery, as if he was a great nobleman. His company was in tents on the plain, because that was both safer and more hygienic. There was some plague in the town.

‘Terrible,’ Swan said. He grimaced, despite his attempt to keep his face straight. Over four cups of wine, he told the entire story.

Bembo shook his head. ‘Fucking Greeks,’ he said. ‘As bad as Italians, really.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, brother.’

‘I still can’t imagine that I was so weak; so broken, so quickly.’ He looked out of the window over the darkening sea.

Bembo’s eyes were dark. ‘I was tortured once, in Rome,’ he said. ‘It is terrible, when you have no hope and no power.’ He made a little movement of his hands.

‘Someone saved you?’ Swan asked.

‘Bessarion,’ Bembo said.

They sat in silence for a while.

‘I have conflicting orders,’ Swan said. ‘Loredan wants me to help the Despot face the Turks. Trevisan, who is, I think, a Venetian military cardinal, nonetheless wants me to join his fleet.’

Bembo nodded. ‘Do what Loredan requires,’ he said. ‘Listen, I will be back in a month with a squadron. Then you can come and join Trevisan. But for the next month, if Mehmed goes for Corinth, you are all the force we have.’

‘We, the monarchs of the West? We, the Pope?’ Swan was sarcastic.

‘We, the Senate and the people of Venice,’ Bembo said. ‘The Pope knows nothing, and, pardon me, Bessarion’s interest in saving Mistra is personal and not strategic. Corinth is the prize.’

‘For Venice,’ Swan said.

‘For everyone,’ Bembo said. ‘I need to go to bed; I need to leave with the first breeze of the morning. If you will take my advice, go and get Thomas to support Michael Aten; together, they have the force to keep Omar Reis out of the Peloponnese this summer while Trevisan picks off some islands and annoys the Turks in the Aegean.’

‘Whose strategy is this?’ Swan asked, laughing.

‘Mine!’ Bembo said. ‘It is all like the tinsel and paint actors use to pretend to be kings and queens. We don’t have a real army or a real fleet. So? We pretend. Perhaps Mehmed is fooled. One summer at a time.’

‘Blessed Saint George,’ Swan swore. ‘All right. Corinth. And you swear you will come with a squadron.’

‘I swear,’ Bembo said.

Only after Bembo’s galliot was a pinprick on the distant blue horizon did Swan realise that he had not told his friend about the dead banker, the assassin and the Pope.

The Despot Thomas was a very different patrone from Demetrios. He didn’t suggest any Albanian chieftains he wanted to dispossess, and he was immediately interested in Swan’s stated desire to support Michael Aten at Corinth. And he began, like a professional, by questioning Swan’s sources of information.

Swan bowed. ‘My source is Venetian,’ he admitted. ‘But it appears to me that in this, the interests of Venice, of Mistra and of Glarenza all converge. If Corinth holds, the Peloponnese is relatively safe, as we showed last autumn when we beat Omar Reis. If Corinth falls …’

‘We have nowhere to make a stand,’ Thomas said. He was standing in his own great hall; a hall less than half the size of the hall of Mistra, and nowhere near as richly decorated. Despite which, it was full of people; farmers coming for legal resolutions and Italian merchants paying taxes.

‘Do you pay a tithe to the Latin church?’ Swan asked. ‘Majesty?’

The Despot nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I don’t publicise this, but I do pay. I collect the tithes as one of the conditions for the Latins staying. I need them. I try to be a good lord, in the French way.’

Swan nodded.

‘Who collects the tithes?’ Swan asked.

The Despot narrowed his eyes. ‘These are odd and rather intrusive questions for a mercenary,’ he said.

Swan bowed. ‘My lord, I am attempting to solve a mystery. I admit that I do not wish to share its nature. I give my word it has nothing to do with you or your possessions.’

Despot Thomas turned to face him. ‘I collect the money myself. I borrow against it. Recently, the Pope has demanded that I hand it over to the Florentine factor, but, as I have spent it all, I have nothing to hand over. Not this moment. Is that sufficient, or do I need to confess more? It is very grubby, running even a small state. One lies and cheats like a mountebank.’

Swan bowed again. ‘No, my lord. In this case, you have relieved me of an anxiety. Now; shall we march to Corinth?’

Despot Thomas nodded. ‘I think we shall. I’ll raise my levies. It will take me two weeks.’

Swan bowed low. ‘My lord, if I have two weeks, I would like to visit Olympia.’

‘My chamberlain, Dukas, is from there. I will have him take you.’ The Despot Thomas waved a dismissal. ‘You love the Ancients?’ he asked when Swan was at the door.

‘Yes, my lord,’ Swan said.

Thomas shook his head. ‘A philhellene Frank.’ He smiled. ‘A very rare bird indeed. My brother is truly a fool, and I wish that I could come to Olympia with you.’

Swan went to Olympia with Di Silva and a dozen archers and stradiotes, all volunteers, and Giorgos Dukas, the Despot’s chamberlain. He spent two happy days with his rough pencil translation of the requisite passages of Pausanias, looking at a round temple he could not recognise and trying to guess where the gymnasium had been. There were far more ruins than the book described; most of it was just rubble.

But with Dukas’s help, he found the stadium. Dukas was an old man with a white beard, a priest in the Greek rite, and a very well-educated man; another of Plethon’s students, as it proved, and a correspondent of Bessarion, if only an occasional one, and in his careful, educated way, Dukas did as much to heal Swan of his ordeal as Marie; not with warmth, but with knowledge; not with the love of the body, but with the love of the mind. And the other men fell in with Swan’s wishes, although mostly they wanted to chase the shepherdesses and ogle the Aphrodites and drink the excellent wine. So when Swan paced off the depression beneath the ruins and pronounced it to be the stadium, and when Dukas scraped away turf from a stone and told them it was the starting line, they all stripped to hose and shirts, and ran. An Englishman, James Harris, won the race, to his own delight, and had his back pounded by his mates, and two Greek stradiotes poured wine down his throat and he sputtered and roared with laughter.

When Swan returned to Glarenza from Olympia, he wrote Sophia a long letter; his first in months. He told her, not the full truth, but far more truth than he’d expected to tell her.

Latin Easter fell on 19 April. Swan attended a midnight vigil with all his knights and men-at-arms in his harness, in the old chapel of the Knights of St John, and Easter mass at the nunnery, which service the Despot Thomas also attended, although he scrupulously did not take communion.

The next morning, with almost six thousand peasant archers and spearmen, and five hundred horse, and the Company of Mary Magdalene, the Despot of the Western Morea marched east to Corinth. As they passed Patras and the northern Peloponnese lordships, a few dozen descendants of Latin knights came out in their antiquated harnesses and joined the army. The Despot’s logistics were well planned; his men had food every night, mostly bread and salt pork.

Swan felt he’d come full circle, as six months before he’d landed his company on these very shores. But the roads were passable; the food was plentiful enough, and he assumed that eventually the Pope would pay. Personally, Swan was out of money; so were his officers. The Florentine factor in Glarenza had no money, and the Venetian factor was absent.

He tried not to worry about money.

The little army arrived before Corinth on the first of May. There were no Turks, but Aten came out with a strong escort.

‘My brother hates you like the plague,’ he said to Swan. Aten shrugged. ‘He’s a mad dog, anyway. Omar Reis is somewhere east of Athens with eight thousand men. Or maybe he’s south of Edirne with twenty thousand.’ Aten shrugged. ‘Or maybe marching into Persia with a hundred thousand.’

This time, Swan had the time to visit all the wonders of Corinth. He climbed the acropolis, although he was guarded every inch of the way by Aten’s professionals, and he looked down at the sea on both sides of the isthmus. He wandered through the ancient agora, and looked at the remnants of a dozen mighty temples. In the market, he purchased dozens of coins, including a gold coin with a figure of Nike that he knew would fetch a magnificent price in Rome. He was pledging credit, until he found a Jew who knew all the Jews of Rome and Venice; in very little time he had a pocket full of gold and enough to cover immediate needs for his company, and in return he paid ten per cent. He asked ‘Messire Davide’ to pass a letter to Rome and wrote it out on the man’s change table, explaining to Ben Aaron and any other Jew of Rome how short of specie the Medici were. It was a calculated risk.

Michael Aten led the combined armies forward to the old Spartan Wall; when Swan examined it, it looked Roman to him, or even more recent. The wall, which crossed the isthmus from side to side, was almost six miles long and untenable in several points.

‘It would have to be rebuilt to withstand a dedicated siege,’ Aten said. ‘But with this wall and the citadel of Corinth behind it, we can hold the Peloponnese for ever against the Turk.’

Swan wasn’t sure he agreed. And the six miles of wall represented a kind of financial investment that he couldn’t imagine Thomas and Demetrios agreeing to make; hundreds of thousands of florins at the least.

Di Silva shook his head. ‘Forty thousand men to hold it,’ he said. ‘I agree it would stop casual raiding. But that’s all it would do. Crowd control.’ The Portuguese knight looked brilliant, tanned and fit in the sun, but he shook his head angrily. ‘Why do men always come up with these foolish solutions?’

‘Desperation?’ Swan suggested.

The Turks came in mid-May. To Swan’s delight, it was not Omar Reis, but another commander, an Albanian Turk called Bin Salim. Aten went forward beyond the wall with most of the light cavalry and there followed two days of hard skirmishing. Swan’s men were behind the wall, in a fortified camp because neither Swan nor Di Silva nor even the Bohemian trusted the wall.

Aten’s strategy was like the man; simple and practical. While his own army camped, with food, behind the wall; while his peasants and Despot Thomas’s brought dry stone from the old quarries and the ancient buildings and repaired the worst breaches in the Hexamilion, Aten kept the Turks awake and hungry.

The second evening, Swan offered his company for the next day, to Orietto’s delight and Di Silva’s disgust.

‘Make them ask us!’ he said.

Swan shook his head. ‘Aten lost today. But his strategy is sound, and as long as we have the camp and the wall, this is a good place to fight.’

‘Our men-at-arms are too slow,’ Di Silva said.

Swan nodded. ‘They’ll be fast one time,’ he said. ‘Let’s make that one time count.’

Aten was cautious. ‘I am delighted that you offer; Franks can be great cowards, but we know you have some mettle.’ He smiled. ‘Listen. If you would cover the Despot’s stradiotes, it would probably help him. He doesn’t have enough people to hold the left alone. And we have to be able to fill the isthmus to keep the Turks from lapping around groups and taking us in the rear.’

Swan thought about that, and then produced a drawing of the wall, done by the Bohemian.

‘What if we drew them into a fight by the wall?’ he asked.

The Despot Thomas agreed, but he added, ‘The problem with feigned flight is that once men begin to run, they too often forget that it is a trick. And they just run. Sometimes all the way home.’

In the dark, they dug their two guns into the ruins of a tiny bastion in the old Roman wall. Two hundred sweating peasants cleared out the old ditch and dug it right down to the old stone. Swan bought wine and had it served to them, and then suggested, through Grazias, that if they wanted to kill a few Turks and have a little loot, they stay and man the walls around the guns with their bows.

The Turks were up early, and they tried to force their way right to the wall, riding like daredevils in the half-light before dawn, but Aten had been fighting Turks all his life, and his cavalry charged out of the gaps in the walls and temporarily won the flat ground. Then pronoia archers and peasants flooded into the brush and began to hit the Turks, driving them back.

Swan moved his men-at-arms and mounted archers into the gaps in the old wall. The Despot led his stradiotes through the wall and pressed east.

Swan sat on his warhorse and watched the little redoubt above him, where two tiny coils of smoke rose in the still morning air. He could smell the slow match; he could smell the last of the jasmine, and olives, and grass. Away east, men were dying, and horses screamed.

Swan found that he was praying. He had made no conscious decision to begin praying, but he was well launched, and he continued through his rosary as if he was a genuinely religious man. He was curiously unafraid, although the next half an hour could bring death or, worse yet, capture.

The Bohemian waved his linstock.

‘Look lively,’ Orietto snapped. Men who had dismounted took up their reins. Horses grunted and shuffled.

One of the guns fired; a sharp bark over their heads.

‘Shit,’ Swan said.

The Bohemian leaned over the wall. ‘There’s a fuckink horde,’ he said.

Swan dismounted and scrambled up the back of the ancient fortification. He couldn’t see much; the ruined wall was only about six feet higher than the brushy plain. But there were men coming, on small horses; even as he watched, the second gun, the one they’d captured in the autumn, barked a load of rusty nails and scrap iron into the oncoming horsemen, and they died.

‘Shit,’ Swan said again.

He ran down the back slope, his sabatons ringing on the hard earth.

‘No sign of Aten or Despot Thomas,’ Swan said to Orietto and Di Silva.

‘I told you this was too complicated,’ Di Silva said with a certain pleasure.

‘Regardless,’ Swan said. He drew Sophia’s sword. The men-at-arms drew in close, and the archers formed ranks behind. The archers were better armoured than most of the Greek stradiotes; they had spears and heavy swords and good horses, thanks to Belgrade.

‘Rally on the standard and the trumpet!’ roared Swan.

A handful of peasants ran out and dragged the screen of dead brush out of their way, revealing a forty-pace gap in the old works.

Clemente blew a long note, and the whole company, less their gunners, started forward.

Both guns fired, and Swan saw an Albanian woman on the wall, twirling her rammer like an acrobat.

He reached up and slammed shut the visor of his armet. He didn’t have a lance; his lance was somewhere in Albania. So he leaned his weight slightly forward and pointed his sword at the enemy, or rather the dust where he expected that the enemy must be.

A wave of arrows rattled against the front rank of men-at-arms, like hail against windowpanes in a storm. There were shouts; a scream.

‘Forward,’ Swan shouted, and Clemente sounded a long call, and the company went forward faster.

Now Swan could see the Turks even through the slit of his visor and the dust. They were already running, scurrying like insects to get clear of the armoured column.

But immediately behind the Delhis, the light cavalry equivalent of the stradiotes, was a thick line of Turkish infantry. Owing to the close terrain, the scrub and the fighting they’d already endured with Greek peasants, they were bunched up on the open ground, so that their own Delhis crashed into them and through them, wrecking their order.

The company struck them like a sword cutting a thick rope; there was a timeless rage of dust, and then Swan’s shoulder hurt, his sword-hand burned, and there was blood running down his upraised blade onto his hand.

And the Turkish infantry was gone into the dust.

‘Rally,’ he croaked to Clemente. The boy could not fight; his right arm was still bandaged from the fight a month before. But he’d stayed with Swan all the way through the melee.

Now he sounded the rally, and Orietto appeared out of the dust, and then other men; dribs and drabs and then a whole phalanx.

Orietto rode up, opened his visor, and waved. ‘I held the archers out,’ he said. ‘We need someone to rescue us if the tide comes in.’

Swan nodded. ‘The plan is ruined,’ he said. ‘Back to the wall.’

It was then, in the midst of rallying, with their horses standing, head down, and men drinking water, that the spahis charged them from out of the dust. They had a few seconds’ warning from a peasant’s yell; then the dust exploded with armoured men on armoured horses.

Swan had been in some cavalry melees, but none like this. His horse tried to bolt and turned, but had nowhere to go; Swan found himself making desperate, shoulder-wrenching parries backwards, over his shoulder, and then his Arab changed her mind and turned, and he was in the midst of the spahis without as friend in sight and with his visor up.

There was no fencing. He cut, and covered, and cut; mostly he trusted to his armour to keep him alive, and he defended his horse’s neck and flanks with the sword, and tried to drive it home. He landed blows, and took some; a ringing blow to the back of his armet that didn’t kill him, and a lance that exploded against his breastplate, a light lance. His horse was unshaken; his saddle held him, and his down-cut across his horse’s head removed one of her ears and killed the lancer.

She exploded forward in outrage at the pain, and he unhorsed a man with a lucky sweep of his bridle-hand in the close press, and then he was riding, riding …

He emerged from the press, alone. The dust of the combat rose like the smoke of a sacrifice to the old gods behind him, orange-white in the sun. Men and horses moved in the dust like shades in Hell.

Swan was alone with the sunlight and the rest of the Turkish army. And they were in disarray. There were men fleeing in almost every direction; another column of dust to the right suggested that Aten was doing no worse; a few yards to his front, a man sat on a fine horse in a gold helmet under a horsetail banner with a magnificent bow in his hand.

As Swan noticed him, he loosed.

The arrow shattered against Swan’s reinforced breastplate, but the force knocked him back in the saddle.

The man’s bodyguards loosed at Swan. He was the only target, and he felt like a fool.

He turned his Arab and ran.

He went through the curtain of dust, aware that his mount was dying. She was sluggish; a glance showed half a dozen shafts in her right side.

He ploughed into the back of a spahi, unsportingly stabbed him through the back of his neck, right through his maille, and kicked his own feet out of the stirrups, but his on-the-fly plan to take the man’s horse ran off into the dust and he was on his feet in a cavalry melee.

Swan abandoned saddle and tack and began to run forward, towards the wall. He could hear the guns firing, even through his helmet. He reached up to shut his visor and found an arrow sticking out of his face.

It took him a long heartbeat to realise that he was alive. The arrow had gone in through his open visor, ripped a furrow out of his cheek, and the barbs were stuck in the liner.

He was afoot in a cavalry melee with an open visor he couldn’t close.

He was knocked flat by a riderless horse and then he was able to use a scraggly wild olive to drag himself to his feet. A terrified Greek peasant was standing a foot away with a long knife and a broken bow. Swan could smell him.

‘Saint George,’ Swan said.

The man sighed. For the next long minutes, the two cowered together at the edge of a great fight. It appeared, through the gaps in the dust, that the men-at-arms had shrugged off the spahis. That Columbino had fallen back on the archers, or the archers had charged. Either way, they’d won themselves some space.

Swan decided to move. There were perhaps ten Turks between him and his own archers; a hundred paces.

‘I’m going,’ he said in Greek. ‘Come with me.’

‘Beautiful,’ said the Greek. Orea.

Swan began to trot as fast as he could. One leg hurt like hell; the sabatons were terrible for running on rock and he had gravel inside his fighting shoes, but he managed a good speed.

The company was dismounting.

Two Turks turned away from the wall of steel, loosed arrows over their shoulders, and thundered down on Swan and his Greek companion.

Swan had his sword in his hand. It was not the right weapon for the situation. He slowed, the Greek ran into his armoured back, and the two of them fell in a tangle.

A gun fired, close by.

Swan was showered with horse blood as a falconet ball struck the back of the nearer Turk’s horse. The big animal rolled over and over as if bowled by some malevolent god, and fell dead, its rider broken on its back.

Swan crossed himself and dragged the Greek to his feet. ‘Now for it,’ he said.

He looked back, and there was a line of spahis, all dismounting. Instead of an ambush, his spot in the line had become the focus of the whole Turkish attack.

He didn’t have the breath to curse. Instead, he covered the last few paces to the line of men-at-arms. Orietto was laughing.

‘Of course you are alive’ Orietto said. ‘Your visor is open and you have an arrow in your face.’

‘Push him back,’ Swan ordered, giving his Greek a shove. ‘Push him through. He has no armour.’ He turned to Orietto. ‘There is a God,’ he said.

‘Kendal is trying to find you,’ Orietto said. ‘Pray for him.’

‘Look sharp!’ shouted Di Silva, and Clemente’s trumpet sounded, and spahis came out of the dust, four ranks deep and packed close. It was Belgrade all over again.

Except it wasn’t, because it was never a contest. The rubble of the breach in the Hexamilion was rough underfoot, but the company was higher and better armoured and had their opponents outflanked with two small artillery pieces.

Not that that prevented a few seconds of sheer terror as the whole wall of Turks crashed into the front of the company and tried to overcome armour and advantage with sheer courage. The Turks managed to push the company men-at-arms back almost three feet at impact. Swan almost fell, kept his footing, took a savage blow to the top of his helmet, got his pommel into someone’s face and found himself gripping his sword by the blade and using the quillons as a pole hammer, his left palm cut and bleeding, and the Turks gone.

Men were looking at him.

They wanted to go forward.

Di Silva opened his mouth.

‘Hold!’ Swan roared.

The line actually swayed.

Arrows came out of the dust and rattled on armour.

Above him, the two guns fired; slam, slam.

Di Silva looked sheepish, and sank to one knee. Marco Corner, in the front rank despite having only half-armour, leaned over as if he was going to vomit, but he only heaved.

Heavy English shafts began to fly over the line from above them.

‘When did Kendal go to look for me?’ Swan asked Da Silva. He looked past Di Silva to where Orietto was standing by the standard, which was in the hands of one of the old Malatesta men-at-arms, Servino, who had been Di Vecchio’s squire. Servino had blood leaking through his fingers under his arm, and looked white.

‘Sound rally,’ Swan told Clemente.

‘But we’re all …’

‘Sound rally!’ Swan ordered.

Clemente played the notes, three times.

The Turks were out there in the dust. Another volley of arrows came in and rattled on armour. Many went over their heads, and there was a scream from above them where an artillery server was hit.

Swan wished he had water. He wished he knew anything about what was happening elsewhere. Their plan had failed; he had no idea whether they were in a major battle or not. It felt like a battle.

But Kendal was out there in the dust. Swan had just been there. He knew what it was like, in the dust. He addressed the men around him. ‘I want to find Kendal,’ he said. ‘We are going forward a hundred paces, no more. Where is Grazias?’

Men pushed and shoved out of the way so that he could see their stradiotes, fresh, with maces in their hands, sitting on their small horses at the top of the breach.

It took more effort than he thought he had in him to turn and walk up the breach, his feet burning like two dull fires, to where Grazias waited. But he knew, from experience, how bad it would be if he didn’t think this through.

‘I want to go out into the open ground,’ Swan said. ‘I need you to cover our flanks and find Kendal.’

Grazias raised an eyebrow.

The Other Demetrios nodded. ‘Kendal. Ne. He’d do it for us.’

Other stradiotes nodded. Kendal was a popular man.

Swan went down the rubble to the line, which looked very small. Three hundred men can pack into a very small space. The rolling dust of the melee was vast.

‘Ready?’ Swan called.

The line growled.

‘Guns?’ he called.

‘Firing!’ shouted the Bohemian.

An eternity passed. It seemed that everything moved very slowly, and Swan’s thighs were like lead.

Slam.

Screams from the dust.

Slam.

‘Forward,’ Swan called, and the line went forward, their order bad, men jostling for balance and for position. They went forward ten paces, and then another ten, and Swan already felt naked, unprotected. Arrows whistled overhead and then he could see figures with tall hats and turbans.

His line growled.

The Turkish line seemed to shudder. A ripple of arrows whispered overhead, and then the Turks seemed to waver like candlelight on a windy night, their metal winking in the dusty half-light.

‘Charge!’ Swan ordered. He was running forward without thought, his sword in his right hand.

The Turks ran. They ran as far as a patch of scrubby olive trees and made a stand, or just stopped running from fatigue; by then, Swan was barely jogging, and so was Orietto next to him. He had all the time left in his life to see a Turkish archer raise his bow, point his arrow at Swan’s face, and release. He saw the flex of the arrow in the air, like a salmon leaping in the Lea at home, and then the arrow struck him in the breastplate and shattered, and a splinter of cane went into his cheek, and he cut. His sword went into the cotton of the man’s turban and the man fell, and behind him another Turk thrust at Swan with a spear. Swan got his left hand on the shaft of the spear and the point of his slender sword cut through the spearman’s fingers and plunged into his abdomen. The man fell off the sword, eyes rolling in his head, and the little olive grove was full of corpses.

‘Suane! Suane!’ someone was calling. Swan was having trouble seeing; he fell to one knee without intending to, stayed there for a time, and got to his feet to find Michael Aten towering over him on a big black horse.

‘We must go forward! Ser Suane! Order your men forward! The Turks are running!’ Aten was yelling, his helmet dented, his scimitar bloody to the hilt.

Swan got to his feet. Clemente was blowing rally, and the rally was thin; perhaps two hundred men, and the fully armoured men moved like automatons, too tired to move well.

‘Now! Now!’ yelled Grazias coming out of the dust.

The line started forward. Swan didn’t think he’d given the order; he was too tired to think, and he worried …

They came to the edge of the dust.

Three hundred paces away, the Turkish spahis were remounting. The man in the golden helmet was already mounted; he was pointing right at Swan with a horsehair whip.

‘Close up!’ Swan screamed shrilly.

Grazias pounded past with fifty stradiotes at his back, headed for the spahis. Aten cursed and roared an order in Greek, and more Greek horse passed the company and went forward at a gallop, but they were too late. The Turkish cavalry was riding away, and behind them was a second line. The second line was the inferior troops who had led the attack, but they were rallied, and a desultory shower of arrows fell on the stradiotes, emptying a few saddles, and the Greek cavalry turned and trotted out of range.

The Turkish cavalry retreated through their infantry, raising a new curtain of dust off the dry plain.

Aten rode back, a mace in his hand. He smiled. ‘The will of God,’ he said. ‘Almost, we had a great victory. Instead we have a small one.’ He saluted.

Swan’s men sagged.

Swan stepped out in front of them. ‘You fought brilliantly,’ he shouted. He took a canteen from Clemente, rinsed his mouth and handed the water on. ‘Now finish as you started. We will withdraw in good order to the wall. Collapse then.’

Someone told him to fuck off.

Most of the men straightened up.

Swan made himself stand straight in his harness, ignore the stones that were like a torture rack in his shoes, and point. ‘March!’ he called.

And with a sigh, they began to withdraw, not perfectly, but well enough; wounded men were dragged along; men in armour shuffled, but viewed from the Turkish lines it was an impressive performance. The banner stayed up, the armoured men withdrew into the dust, and the sun hadn’t moved a hand span across the sky since the first charge.

Swan waved to Grazias. ‘Kendal?’ he panted.

Grazias just shook his head.

They’d lost thirty men. It was the worst day they’d had since Belgrade, and the men were tired, surly, mouthy. Swan was old enough in war not to challenge them about anything. Stripped of his armour, he went out below the wall and started to haul dead men back inside, and Clemente went with him, and some gunners, and soon enough there were fifty of them. The Greek peasant he’d saved came. He followed Swan everywhere.

‘Theodor,’ he said. He had the worst breath Swan had ever encountered, and his teeth were rotting, but he was big and very strong and he helped pull the bodies.

‘Sign him up,’ Swan told Clemente. The boy was too tired to smile, but he patted the Greek like a good dog. The Greek worked more like a horse.

But they didn’t find Kendal.

Later, towards evening, Grazias rode in to say that the Turks were gone, their camp abandoned.

He made a wry face. ‘It was only ever a raid to them,’ he said. ‘They tried us and left. They won’t even rate this a battle.’

Swan was having trouble forming coherent thoughts.

‘Could Kendal have been captured?’ he asked.

Grazias frowned. ‘I don’t think they were taking prisoners,’ he said.

Finally all the dead were found and buried, and the only missing man was Kendal, and the moon was rising, a sickle moon. Swan had stumbled over the same dead Turks three or four times. Other men helped him look; Di Silva, Columbino. Servino. Theodor. Most of the English archers led by Bigelow.

Finally he had to admit that the man was not there.

He called them all in, to the breach. ‘Go and sleep,’ he said. ‘Maybe he’ll come in the morning.’

No one thought that very likely.

He went back to his pavilion and lay down in his sweat-soaked arming clothes and was cold. He lay there, freezing, aware that if he stripped, he’d be warm instantly, but too tired to move.

He had a terrible dream of Kendal, obviously dead, his abdomen slit and entrails dragging on the ground, walking under the sickle moon. He awoke so cold he couldn’t imagine he’d been asleep, made himself get up with his joints aching and his legs like dead mutton below his hips, and he fumbled with laces, cursed, and fumbled again until he had his damp arming clothes off, and then his linens. He wrapped himself in a wool blanket and shivered, and wondered about his exhausted men and how they were faring. He was back in the hole. Under the earth in Rhodes.

He fought it.

Clemente had left him a water bottle and he drained it and went outside, warmer now, and pissed on the ground. The moon was high; there was mist over towards the Gulf of Corinth, and the stars seemed to flicker.

‘You lookin’ for me, Cap’n?’ said a voice. It floated there.

Swan turned, and there was a dark shape, and another hurrying up behind. Moonlight hides many things, and accentuates others.

Swan moaned.

‘Ser?’ asked the figure. ‘I got lost.’

Swan took a breath. The ghost’s breath steamed in the cold night.

He was real. It was Kendal. Not Kendal’s ghost. Just for a moment …

‘You bastard,’ he said. He grabbed the Englishman and threw his arms around him.

Clemente’s voice said, ‘It is really him!’

Kendal laughed. ‘By the Trinity, Cap’n!’ he said. ‘You’re naked as a worm.’

Swan picked up the blanket. And shook his head. ‘Lost?’ he asked, as the supernatural slipped away from his fatigue-sodden brain.

‘I got in with the Despot’s cavalry and we pursued the Turks all the way to the sea,’ Kendal said. ‘Never caught a one of ’em.’ He sighed. ‘I’m about dead,’ he went on. ‘Time for my blanket.’

But by then there were twenty men pressed around Kendal; Orietto took his hand, and Di Silva embraced him as warmly as Swan had.

Swan shook his head, which was suddenly clear. ‘Thank God,’ he said.

He went in and fell asleep.

In the morning, the Greeks mostly marched away. A few hundred peasants stayed under their own leaders to work on the wall. Theodor had a Turkish scimitar and Clemente had him on the spare horse. His bare legs hung far down the horse’s flanks.

Swan was surprised, but Grazias was not. ‘The Turks are gone,’ he said. ‘They won’t come back this year. Before we even fought, they heard that Scanderbeg is loose in Serbia; that’s a threat. The Venetians and Genoese are both at sea.’ Grazias smiled at his captain. ‘It is good to be on the winning side, but almost all these men are farmers.’

‘We are the only full-time soldiers here,’ the Other Demetrios said.

Alexei laughed. ‘I guess that makes us the Spartans,’ he said. ‘We are three hundred.’

Marching back to Glarenza, Swan rode with the Despot Thomas, who seemed elated.

‘A fine victory,’ the Despot said. ‘I will see that your men are rewarded.’

Swan bowed politely. One of the dead was young Morbioli, who’d been with him a long time. Two English archers. The Albanian woman who’d served the guns.

The problem with leading a company of three hundred was that you knew everyone so well.

‘You do not seem content with it,’ the Despot said.

‘I have seen many pointless victories,’ Swan said. He thought he’d heard the same from Hunyadi, or perhaps Bessarion.

Thomas smiled bitterly. ‘It is the only kind of victory I have ever known,’ he said. ‘When we lose, we are destroyed. When we win, we buy only time to breathe a little. The fight at Corinth will buy my people a year; perhaps two. Mehmed will come with a real army as soon as Scanderbeg retreats and the Pope’s fleet sails home. He will bring heavy guns and two hundred thousand men. The Hexamilion cannot be held. You saw that.’

Swan nodded. ‘Not without every king and prince in Europe contributing men,’ he said.

The Despot Thomas looked out to sea and then back at Swan. ‘And we all know how likely that is, do we not?’ he said. ‘I do not blame them. We are no better. I go to fight beside Aten, and his brother and my brother plot behind our backs. And the same in Wallachia and Albania and Hungary. Even now, they say, the Cilli and the King of Bohemia are pulling down the Hunyadis, architects of every victory in the West since I was a boy.’ He looked at Swan. ‘Sometimes I am tempted to bow my head to the obvious will of God.’

Swan had a thought that was out of step with the seriousness of the conversation. He thought, quite suddenly, of kissing Sophia on the bench of the nunnery in the Venetian Lagoon, and how carefully she had arranged it all. He looked down at the sword she’d bought him; a sword which had kept him alive.

Swan shrugged. ‘Despite it all,’ he said, ‘I find it difficult to be sad on such a day.’

Beyond his outstretched hand, the sun sparkled on the Gulf of Corinth, and there, across the bay, the town of Naupactis rose above the sea and wavered in the sun-dazzle. The hills were beautiful in their rocky elegance and the sea was blue, and the last of the jasmine covered the army’s other scents. Beside the road lay an ancient marble. Swan dismounted and knelt by it.

‘You can read the old Greek?’ the Despot asked. ‘Dukas says you can.’

Swan ran his finger along the edge of the marble where it emerged from the dirt. ‘Whoever he was, he was a priest of Apollo and he won a race at Olympia,’ Swan said. ‘The name is under the ground.’

‘Forgotten,’ Thomas said.

Swan shrugged. ‘I think, in my current mood, I would argue that the Ancients are far from forgotten. We think their thoughts in books; we admire their art; we use their fortresses. We admire them. And do we not, alive, seek to be admired?’

Thomas nodded. ‘I feel there is an obvious flaw in your philosophy, Ser Suane,’ he said. ‘But I confess that the idea pleases me that some day men will look at Mistra and Glarenza, and say that good men, brave men, made them and that they did their best and were noble and thought great thoughts. We are near our end.’

Swan remounted. His new horse was another fine Arab mare, taken from the spoil of the battle; every spahi seemed to have a pair of them. The new mare was bigger; not as pretty, but dark and lithe. Swan called her Eve.

‘Sparta lasted hundreds of years after Thermopylae and Plataea,’ Swan said. ‘The wars with Persia were not the moment of Sparta’s decline but perhaps her finest hour.’

The Despot reined in. They were just at the jutting point where the fortress of Patras stood out into the gulf. From there, the two men, and the army behind them, could see all the way to Delphi to the left, and all the way to the Ionian sea to the right. And way out, almost to the Ionian, there were galleys; big military galleys, under sail with their huge lateens rigged.

‘Venice,’ Swan said.

Thomas looked at him. ‘If my wife had told me that I would be lectured on the history of ancient Greece by a barbarian mercenary after a victory over the Turks, I’d have had to laugh.’

‘Your wife?’ Swan said.

‘She is a seer. A prophetess. And Italian, of course.’ The Despot shook his head. ‘I do not hold out so much hope for our last Spartans, or New Spartans, or call them what you will. But it is pleasant to win a victory, however small, and imagine for an afternoon that we are saved, and a Venetian fleet is going against the infidel.’ He shrugged. ‘Of course, later I will find that the Venetians are taking guns to the Turks, and that the Genoese are demanding a new tax and my brother will attack me.’ He laughed.

Swan laughed with him.

Alessandro Bembo had his own Galea Sotilla, which made Swan smile, because he could remember when his friend was not even allowed to serve as a noble marine on a Venetian ship. But Bembo had more – news; letters from home; six thousand Venetian ducats to pay the company and cover expenses.

‘Give me your paper from the Pope,’ he said.

Swan handed over the draft for two thousand florins which no one could cash.

Bembo folded it and put it in his purse. ‘The Medici are tottering,’ he said. ‘The Sforza of Milan have loaned them money to keep the bank from going under. Loredan has gone to Rome. Something terrible is happening, and I begin to think there is a conspiracy to undo the Peace of Lodi by undermining the banks in the north.’

Swan was interested in what his friend was saying, but he had a letter from Sophia, and he was reading it.

‘Jesus Christ the righteous,’ Bembo said. ‘Can we deal with serious things?’

Swan glanced at him. ‘No,’ he said.

‘You are such a boy, English,’ Bembo said.

Swan nodded. He was reading a very good part. But he managed to tear himself away, grinning like a fool, and he motioned to Clemente.

‘Tell the lads we will pay them tonight. In the castle courtyard with the Despot’s permission. If it is lacking, in the yard of the monastery.’

Clemente’s grin matched Swan’s. ‘Yes, Illustrio.’

Four hours later the men were paid. Columbino and Orietto, Di Silva and Kendal and half a dozen other men sat around the Despot’s table with Grazias and Dukas and another officer, the blondest Greek Swan had ever seen. Kendal was teaching the Greeks to play piquet.

Bembo was chatting with the Despot.

‘You know his wife is Florentine?’ Bembo asked.

Swan felt a slight chill. ‘I didn’t know.’

Bembo nodded thoughtfully. ‘I am to take you, with your men-at-arms as extra marines, to Trevisan. The Turkish fleet is at sea.’

‘By the saints,’ Swan swore. ‘I have had enough fighting this last year for three lifetimes.’

Di Silva nodded and drank more wine.

Bembo smiled. ‘Yes, perhaps. You are the heroes of Belgrade. But my dear Englishman, you may never again see a fleet with papal vessels, Genoese galleys and Venetian galleys all going together against the Turk. The alliance is so fragile that it might blow away on the wind. The Pope has threatened to disestablish your Hospitallers because they advised diplomacy with the Mamluks in Egypt.’ Bembo favoured them with a wry smile and shook his head. ‘A great war for the saving of Europe,’ he said.

The Despot laughed aloud.

‘So then,’ Kendal said, oblivious, ‘then you play again.’ His Italian was so good that Bembo looked twice.

Dukas laughed. ‘But you have already scored points with this hand,’ he said.

Kendal drank wine. ‘That’s the beauty of piquet,’ he said. ‘You use the same cards but you use them different ways.’

‘But always the same result,’ muttered Orietto.

And later, Swan sat in his room with Bembo across the table. Both men had reached the stage where they were ‘bleary’. Swan was looking out over the sea; he had a small balcony, very Italian.

He had just explained everything he knew of the Spinelli plot, as he thought of it, to Bembo.

‘But where would all that money go?’ Bembo asked. ‘I mean, for your notion to be sane, than the Pope must have a massive throne of stolen gold. A harem larger than the Sultans. And no one thinks that of Calixtus. It makes no sense.’

‘Alessandro,’ Swan said. ‘We are both men of the world.’

‘None perhaps more worldly than we,’ Bembo said, and took a drink. ‘So worldly that I feel that I need to tell you that my wife is pregnant.’

Swan paused with his hand reaching for the wine pitcher. ‘Delightful,’ he murmured, because Bembo, in addition to being his best friend, was a touchy bastard and a deadly hand.

‘You have no further comment to add?’ Bembo asked aggressively.

Swan thought for a moment. ‘No,’ he said.

Bembo squirmed in his seat. He seemed on the very edge of the sort of confidence that would disturb him later, so Swan leaned back.

‘The Pope’s assassin killed a banker in Mistra. Ponder that.’

‘Christ on the cross,’ Bembo said, distracted. ‘Calixtus doesn’t have an assassin. He is actually a good man. That is why he is so dangerous as Pope.’

Swan was looking out to sea, thinking that he was really very clever. And then it occurred to him that a man could imagine he was working for the Pope, and not really be working for the Pope. Out at sea, lights twinkled. The stars were magnificent.

‘The assassin could work for anyone,’ Swan said.

‘My point exactly,’ Bembo said. ‘And there may be no money. Where does that leave your plot?’

Swan cursed. ‘Then why is Loredan in Rome?’ he asked.

‘Oh, because people are dying like flies and someone is trying to undermine the Medici and, with this fleet at sea, all the markets are vulnerable. The Peace of Lodi is vulnerable. Italy is vulnerable. I believe you, English. I think that there is someone using the papal machinery to move puppets on the stage. The question is, who?’ Bembo allowed his chair to rock forward until the front legs slammed on the stone floor with a boom. ‘I am drunk. We are already late for the rendezvous. Can your people sail tomorrow?’

‘I think, based on the wine and the gold, we will have to wait until the day after tomorrow,’ Swan said.

Bembo nodded. ‘Why hurry to a battle? Stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.’

‘At least you have fathered a child,’ Swan said. Then he froze.

‘Yes, I have,’ Bembo said. ‘Although I have friends who will never believe it.’ He smiled, and rose unsteadily. ‘Christ, Thomas. The sun is rising.’

‘I want to go to Venice,’ Swan said suddenly. ‘To hell with Trevisan and to hell with the Pope and the Turks. I’d like to live my life, father a few dozen children and watch them grow up. Maybe have an orange tree.’

Bembo was holding himself up with his strong arms. ‘Umar,’ he called softly, and his servant came and put a shoulder under his reaching arm. He winked at Swan, who winked back, and Bembo was half carried out of the room.

‘Don’t drop him,’ Swan said.

It took them five days to cross the Aegean, island-hopping east and south past Athens and Delos, watching the horizon for sails on a sea that seemed to have been emptied. They made an all-night sail from just east of Delos, passed a chain of islands in the dark, drank the last of the water aboard in the morning, and raised the coast of Chios at noon. Bembo’s navigator looked relieved.

‘A Venetian secret,’ Bembo said. ‘All of you gentlemen are sworn to secrecy.’

The decks of the five galleys were heavy with Swan’s men-at-arms and all his English archers. Only the pages had been left to watch the horses, and the gunner to watch the guns, with Grazias in command. The only page aboard was Clemente; Marco Corner had been appointed to a ship, as he had just received a letter from the Ten.

Swan watched Chios grow and then fall away, and the familiar coast of Lesvos appear over the bow. The commander of the Venetian contingent, an octogenarian who sprang about his rigging like a much younger man, ordered them into the Bay of Kalloni for water. Swan watched the familiar headlands go by and thought of various men and women he knew. Of his very first mission for Bessarion. Of the great Christian fleet he’d seen in these very waters.

‘I was here three years ago,’ he said.

‘I remember,’ Bembo said.

The word at the port of Kalloni was that Mytilene was still held by the Gattelussi, and that the Pope’s fleet was at Lemnos, or Rhodes, and the Turks were attacking Mythymna. They took on water and the Venetians allowed all their oarsmen ashore and gave them exercise; almost all the rowers were free men. None deserted.

‘Two days to Mytilene,’ Swan said. ‘We could ride there in a few hours.’

‘No,’ Bembo said. ‘We couldn’t. We have galleys.’

So they spent the next morning re-lading the galleys and getting all the rowers aboard, and then and only then did they row into the light breeze all the way down the bay. Then they went out into the offing, weathered the long headland, and crawled north and east around into the channel between Asia and Lesvos, and finally could raise their sails and run north.

They were low on the water again, and the sun was just setting behind the mountains of Lesvos when they saw the great fortress of Mytilene against the sky. There were great beaches on either side of the fortress, and both beaches were crowded with shipping, and there was a long line of galleys anchored under the guns of the fortress; Bembo stood in the bow and counted them. He was just counting the papal galleys when Swan looked at him.

‘Sweet Mary, mother of God,’ Swan said. ‘I know where the money is.’

The End of Part IV

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans will be completed in the next instalment. But the adventure has farther to run, and Tom Swan is not done yet.

Also by Christian Cameron

The Chivalry Series

The Ill-Made Knight

The Long Sword

The Green Count

The Tyrant Series

Tyrant

Tyrant: Storm of Arrows

Tyrant: Funeral Games

Tyrant: King of the Bosporus

Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

Tyrant: Force of Kings

The Long War Series

Killer of Men

Marathon

Poseidon’s Spear

The Great King

Salamis

Rage of Ares

Tom Swan and the Head of St George Parts One–Six

Tom Swan and the Siege of Belgrade Parts One–Seven

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans Parts One–Five

Other Novels

Washington and Caesar

Alexander: God of War

Writing as Miles Cameron

The Traitor Son Cycle

The Red Knight

The Fell Sword

The Dread Wyrm

A Plague of Swords

The Fall of Dragons

Copyright

An Orion ebook

First published as an ebook in Great Britain in 2017 by Orion Books

Copyright © Christian Cameron 2017

The right of Christian Cameron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 4091 6588 0

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