Tom Swan and the Last Spartans

Volume Five: Mytilene, Glarenza, Venice, Rome

Christian Cameron

Contents

Title Page

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans: Volume Five: Mytilene, Glarenza, Venice, Rome

Also by Christian Cameron

Copyright

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans
Volume Five: Mytilene, Glarenza, Venice, Rome
By Christian Cameron

Swan awoke. He came completely awake in a single bat of his eyelashes, and he sat up, almost smacking his head on the beautiful coffered ceiling of the great cabin of his friend Alessandro’s fighting galley, and setting his hammock-bed swinging wildly. Swan managed to get out of the wood and canvas contraption, but only at the risk of complete humiliation; the risk wasn’t justified, and Bembo’s chuckles pursued him out onto the gallery, where he relieved himself while looking at a red morning with a tower of dark cloud away over Asia.

To starboard, the fortress and city of Mytilene were lit by the rising sun, a magnificent array of pastel hues, Genoese frescoes and Greek whitewash.

‘If you are done pissing into my ocean, we could have a morning swim,’ Bembo growled. Fastidiously, because he was, after all, the scion of one of the richest families in Venice, he walked around to the other side of the stern gallery and leapt into the sea. Swan followed him, striking out strongly after he rose to the surface, foolishly and irrationally trying to distance himself from his own piss. He swam strongly, pursuing Bembo, feeling the current that ran through the whole strait between Lesvos and Asia and feeling also the coolness of the water.

‘Storm coming,’ Bembo called. They swam the length of his galley, and Swan realised that his friend was looking at his ship from the waterline like a professional captain.

They swam down the port side and then turned and swam alongside one of the papal galleys. Like their Genoese counterparts, and unlike those of the Venetians, the papal galleys had some slave rowers and they stank.

‘Don’t swim too close,’ Bembo said. ‘Che schifo,’ he managed in Italian.

They swam around the stern, and Bembo went down suddenly, diving deep.

Swan followed him. The water was so clear that in the ruddy light he could see Bembo’s legs kicking away and the helix of bubbles he left behind.

Bembo went right under the shallow hull of the papal galley. He rolled over when he reached the stem, so that he was on his back, his long hair trailing behind like a mermaid’s, and Swan almost lost the air in his lungs at the humour of the image, and he had to strike out with powerful strokes to reach the surface, where he gasped for breath, laughing.

One of the papal officers came to the rail and began to curse.

Bembo surfaced farther out, and Swan swam towards him while the papal officer shouted imprecations in Genoese dialect.

They swam slowly back along a third vessel, one of the Gatelussi warships. Once, the Gatelussi had possessed the most powerful fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, but time and riches and decadence had run down their sea power and now they had only six hulls. Yet, as Swan knew all too well, the six warships they possessed in their dotage were the equal of the six warships that were the whole of the possession of the Knights of St John Hospitaller, a military order dedicated to crusade. With all the revenues of the Order in the Western world, they could maintain only six great galleys; and alongside the Order’s galleys and the galleys of the Gatelussi, the Genoese, and the Venetians, who had only sent six of their eighty, there were the galleys of the Pope’s new fleet; fourteen warships that Swan had just learned the Pope had built at Venice’s rival, Ancona. The whole tithe of the Christian world apparently produced only fourteen warships.

But however the cost was counted, the forty military galleys and assorted supply ships floating in long lines at anchor in the pink-tinged sea or drawn up on the open beach under the guns of the fortress represented the largest concentration of Christian warships anywhere in the world, and the largest fleet in the Mediterranean.

The problem was that Swan was counting the cost. It made his head hurt despite cool water and a good swim, and eventually he gave up and swam powerfully for Bembo’s Venetian vessel. Alessandro had already gone up the companion ladder that hung from the gallery, where Umar, his African servant, handed him a towel. The two of them were discussing something in Arabic when Swan came up the ladder, and Clemente appeared, handed over an identical towel and held a small silver tray with a single cup of quaveh.

Umar raised the towel in his hands and sent the tray out of Clemente’s hands and into the sea.

‘Oh dear,’ he said with a bow. ‘So very sorry.’

Clemente glared.

Swan took his towel and rolled his eyes at Bembo, who shrugged.

‘I could tell Umar to go and get it,’ he said. ‘He’s a superb swimmer.’

Swan considered making a nasty comment about people who took their lovers to sea, but decided to let the moment pass. ‘I’d settle for another cup of quaveh,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it was your silver plate.’

He went into the cabin. He rarely scored off Alessandro; he savoured his moment and his clean exit. And began to dress. Fashionable Venetian clothes were absurd in the sun of the Mediterranean summer; Swan had evolved a successful fashion strategy whereby, as a sometime professional soldier, his arming clothes were always correct. As his arming clothes consisted of a series of fustian doublets with arming points and lace-on maille voiders, comfortable hose and clean linens, he was lighter by many layers of wool and silk; plain brown and black where Bembo wore blue and gold; fewer layers and more ventilation.

Despite which, they were ready at roughly the same time. Bembo went up on deck and looked at his watch-board by the helm, where a junior officer, a Venetian ‘young gentleman’ learning the ropes, stood harbour watch. Most of his rowers were ashore; Venetian rowers were free men with wages and permission to ship small cargoes; every oarsman was a merchant, many of them workers from the Arsenal.

Bembo smiled at the young man at the empty helm. Swan’s views on age had altered since Belgrade, or even before; he felt like an ‘old man’ and he viewed the sixteen-year-old aristocrat at the helm as a child, even though in fact he was a mere eight years older.

The boy looked self-important, saluted, and took the note tablet back from Bembo.

‘Pack a bag,’ Bembo said. ‘We’ll probably spend the night ashore.’

Swan nodded and went below. Clemente was already packed, and had his own kit as well. He was smug. Umar seemed to be nursing one arm.

Swan left the matter alone. Whatever small war was transpiring between Umar and Clemente, it was best not to be involved, Swan knew.

Alessandro followed Swan to the side, where a small boat waited with four oarsmen in the Bembo family colours. All three men leapt easily down into the small boat, and the oarsmen gave way together like the professionals they were and ran them across the harbour to the great Capitano, the huge command galley that Cardinal Trevisan used as his headquarters.

Even as their oarsmen rowed them across the blue water of the harbour, clouds were sweeping in from the east, the wind was rising and the water of the harbour, even inside the mole, showed some chop.

Swan looked at the water with a certain hesitation.

‘Worse before it is better,’ Bembo said. ‘That’s why I said to pack a bag.’

‘No Umar?’ Swan asked.

‘I required him to perform a small task. Will Clemente condescend to serve me?’ he asked.

Clemente laughed. ‘Of course, Illustrio.’

They rowed in under the stern of the Capitano but the watch officer shouted that the cardinal had gone ashore with all his staff.

Bembo sneered. ‘And that man calls himself a Venetian,’ he said.

‘There is absolutely no reason for us to risk our ships in this weather,’ the cardinal said. He looked slowly around. He tried to straighten his hunched shoulders, to enhance his stature, but he remained a small, ugly, round-headed man whose anger had a hint of a whine to it.

Outside the magnificent hall of Prince Francesco of the mighty, if somewhat reduced, Gatelussi, sheets of rain slashed at the glass windows and rattled the casemates. Now the inner harbour was aboil with waves and the outer harbour had long rollers crashing against the mole. The Venetian ships were anchored fore and aft outside the breakwater; a deliberate insult, or so Swan had assumed, since the papal galleys, the Gatelussi and the Knights of St John were all dominated by the inveterate enemies of the republic of Venice – the Genoese.

Swan sat off to the side, watching. He had no role to play; he had been appointed to the expedition by the Pope, but so far had not even read his commission. His sixty cavaliers, most of them in the very best armour that Venetian or church money could buy, were all distributed among the Venetian galleys, with another sixty armoured squires and men-at-arms to back them up.

Trevisan was a tyrant; not just a tyrant, but a cautious tyrant, that much was clear. He had the largest fleet on the ocean and he was clearly unprepared to risk it.

If what Swan suspected about the cost of its construction was true, he understood the cardinal better than he might have otherwise. Regardless, the last few years had begun to teach Thomas Swan, Knight of St Mark and donat of the Order of Saint John, a certain humility, and a willingness to sit silent, at least until called upon.

The rain slammed against the walls and fell away. The waves roared against the breakwater and tugged at the cables of the Venetian ships anchored out.

Swan listened to the officers discuss the minutiae of the ordering of the squadron as if these were vital issues. So many bullocks slaughtered; so many bushels of wheat and barley for bread, an escaped slave …

He might have drifted off to sleep, but instead he caught the eye of Prince Dorino Gatelussi. They had met before. The ascetic-looking blond prince, old and young in the same body, a whole character of paradox, smiled a thin-lipped smile at Swan, and very subtly pointed one long finger at the gallery that overlooked the hall; remnant of a time when musicians played from such balconies.

There was a faint scent, a rustle of silk, and Swan was looking at Donna Theodora.

He leaned back to have a better look, his face relaxing, when a hand descended on his shoulder.

‘And now you are a knight of Saint Mark,’ Fra Tommaso said. The eastern Mediterranean’s most notorious pirate stood above him, smelling of the sea and soaking wet. ‘My astrologer said I’d meet an old friend here.’

Fra Tommaso Dandalo, Brother Knight of Justice of the Order and terror of both Christians and Turks, opened his arms, and Swan rose and accepted the wet embrace.

‘What brings you here, you scapegrace?’ Fra Tommaso asked.

‘Silence, please,’ Cardinal Trevisan said.

Fra Tommaso bowed coldly. ‘Your pardon, Eminence.’

A junior officer or perhaps a priest in a dark gown and wearing a sword came and bowed to Tommaso. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to remove yourself and return when you are suitably clad,’ he whispered.

‘Now, by God and Saint John,’ Fra Tommaso said loudly. ‘I am soaked to the skin in the service of my order, and of the Faith. You find some seawater offensive? Wait until you hear my news.’

Cardinal Trevisan turned. ‘Wait your turn,’ he said. ‘We discuss important …’

Fra Tommaso swept water out of his beard in a gesture of contempt. ‘The Turks are at Mithymna,’ he said. ‘The city is on the verge of falling. A woman is commanding the defence. Surely that will rouse you gentlemen to act.’

Trevisan shrugged. ‘If the cause is so desperate, why did you leave?’ he asked.

Swan put a hand on Fra Tommaso’s sodden cloak.

‘I was the only one who would go,’ Fra Tommaso said.

Swan, standing by his former commander, saw that the liquid soaking the man was not just water. There was blood pooling by his feet, and the man was swaying.

‘He’s wounded,’ Swan said clearly, his first words since the interminable meeting began.

Almost on cue, Fra Tommaso swayed, and Swan caught him, getting fresh blood on his arming clothes.

With the help of Prince Dorino, Fra Tommaso was installed in a room, an old solar over the hall. Swan held a small vein until the doctor came, an old Greek man who cauterized the wound with a bronze implement he heated in the little ceramic stove with brutal efficiency. Fra Tommaso screamed a little, involuntarily, and then lay still, unconscious. The doctor watched him for a while, and then, when the big knight and pirate began to snore, he smiled.

‘Greek?’ he asked.

Swan bowed. ‘A little, sir,’ he said.

‘Ah, a scholar,’ the doctor said. ‘Are you his friend?’

Swan had to smile. ‘I suppose I am,’ he said.

‘As soon as he wakes, he needs food. Rich food; meat broth, maybe beer.’ The doctor smiled and left.

Swan sat watching a very dangerous man. He thought that Tommaso’s collapse had been at least partly theatrical, but the snores seemed genuine and his scream at the burning bronze seemed terrifyingly like the real thing, and so Swan sent Clemente for a palace servant.

He knew by the scent who had come instead. Donna Theodora, distant relative of the Paleologi of Mistra and Glarenza, deposed princess of Byzantium, strolled into the little room.

‘Messire Swan,’ she said in her accented Italian.

‘Donna Theodora,’ Swan said. He bowed deeply.

They looked at each other.

‘You are in love,’ Donna Theodora said.

Swan laughed and felt himself flush. ‘Ma donna, it is true.’

She smiled graciously. ‘I could tell as soon as I saw you. Who is she, who fascinates you so completely?’

Swan bowed. ‘A lady in Venice.’

The princess smiled warmly. ‘So you have a heart, after all, Master Suane. I think I am pleased. Now, why did your man send for a servant?’

‘Fra Tommaso …’

‘The new Fra Diablo?’ she asked impishly.

‘That was Fra Domenico. Fra Tommaso’s lost a great deal of blood …’

‘Some of it on my brother-in-law’s sheets,’ she quipped. ‘The Turks call this one Fra Diablo now.’ She leaned over him, sweeping her hair back with a gracious gesture. ‘He brought most of the women and children out of Mithymna. An incredibly daring act.’

‘He is a great knight,’ Swan said. ‘Despite which, he will need food and broth and heavy beer when he awakes, to rebuild the lost blood.’ He smiled. ‘Legends build themselves.’

She smiled. ‘We have dealt with a wounded man or two,’ she said. ‘I can be trusted.’

She glanced back over her shoulder at the empty corridor, leaned forward and brushed his lips with hers. ‘You don’t smell like fish,’ she said softly.

Swan put a hand on her waist and she opened her mouth under his. A moment later she laughed in her chest and he let her go.

‘What of this poor lady in Venice?’ she asked.

‘I am a poor sinner,’ Swan said with a shrug. ‘I am easily tempted, fall often, and may be dead tomorrow.’

She looked up at him, lust banished. ‘Sadly, these are very like my own thoughts,’ she said. ‘I think perhaps we are to be pitied. When I lie dying in a Moslem harem, I will feel nothing but regret for the nice Christian gentlemen of my youth.’

‘Christ and the angels,’ Swan said. ‘It will not come to that.’

She smiled up at him, and her cynicism might have matched his own. ‘Won’t it? The Gatelussi always use their women as bargaining counters, and Dorino is desperate.’ She shrugged.

They kissed again. The feeling of the second kiss was different; sadder, more contemplative.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if the whole reason that poets praise youth is that in youth we can sin naturally and almost without vice; when we are more experienced, sin has an edge of …’

‘Careful planning?’ Swan asked.

She smiled. ‘You would know,’ she said.

‘You think that Mithymna can be saved?’ Swan asked.

Theodora shrugged. ‘Of course.’

‘Will you tell Prince Dorino?’ he began.

‘Join us for dinner,’ Princess Theodora said.

‘May I bring my friend? Bembo?’

‘A Venetian?’ she asked. ‘Well, that will have at least the virtue of novelty.’

They drank afternoon wine, sweet wine from Chios, with the Venetian admiral, a member of the vast Corner clan, but not a man Swan had served with before. He was old, and tough; he underdressed so much he made Swan look like a courtier, appearing in a plain cotton doublet and padded hose that, as a passing Genoese complained, would have looked bad on a galley slave.

‘He doesn’t plan to do a thing,’ Corner said. He raised his wine to his lips, tasted it, and licked the rim of the glass, an odd performance.

Bembo nodded.

Both of them looked at Swan. Swan shrugged. ‘I thought Trevisan was a Venetian?’

‘He is the prelate of Venice and the Bishop of Aquila,’ Bembo said. ‘That doesn’t actually make him Venetian, and he chose to build the papal fleet at Ancona. And got gouged on the price.’

Swan was looking out from under the huge canvas awning which made the street-front taverna bearable in the pouring rain. Out beyond the cascades of water rolling off the awning was the narrow street, and on the other side of the street stood the silversmith’s shop. Swan was annoyed at his feelings of caution, but the silversmith had been his first successful agent meeting, years before, or so it seemed. He needed to see the man, and he didn’t want to risk Bembo knowing of the man’s role, which was foolish. It was foolish …

… But the habit of caution was becoming ingrained.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ Admiral Corner asked. ‘I heard that you were quite talkative.’

Swan smiled. ‘I agree that he is cautious,’ he said. ‘But surely the Gatelussi will insist that Mithymna be saved.’

Corner shook his head. ‘I fear not, young man. Even the chivalric spectacle of a woman in distress, the desperate Caterina di Orsini holding the citadel alone with no man to protect her, could not rouse the cardinal. I think that women do not move him.’

Bembo glared at Corner.

‘Ah, I have misstepped,’ Corner said. He waved to his page to bring him more wine. ‘I’m sorry, Bembo. I’m sure he’s a fine man …’

‘No, he’s a stiff prig and a cautious fool, but it has nothing to do with his taste in women,’ Bembo snapped.

Corner nodded slowly. ‘Sometimes I think it might benefit you to remember which one of us is admiral,’ he said.

Swan smiled, and his smile caused both of them to laugh.

Swan sipped his wine. ‘Mithymna is not far,’ he said. ‘And the Turks will hardly put to sea in weather like this.’

Corner nodded.

Swan looked at the dark sky all the way to Asia. He was thinking of Theodora. Of temptation, and its avoidance. Of sin, and redemption. And the silversmith.

‘I might just consider going to Mithymna, over the mountains,’ he said.

Bembo all but spat his wine.

Corner shook his head. ‘I hadn’t even asked yet,’ he said.

‘I know,’ Swan said.

‘Because she is a woman?’ Corner asked.

‘Because she is an Orsini?’ Bembo asked. ‘You want to kill her yourself?’

Swan nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘All of those things.’

Bembo shook his head theatrically. ‘Dannazione, English. You have become a subtle, ambiguous bastard.’

‘I learned from a master,’ Swan said.

When Bembo was gone, accompanied by Clemente into the soaking rain, Swan went across the street to have his silver cloak clasp repaired.

The silversmith waited on him, took the brooch, and said he could fix it in a few hours.

‘What news from Mithymna?’ Swan asked. The shop was empty.

The silversmith looked sideways, as if making sure no one could overhear him. ‘My brother came out night before last,’ he said. ‘He brought off two women, a dye-seller, and a child.’

‘He is a brave man,’ Swan said.

‘He is getting rich,’ the silversmith said. He shrugged. ‘The Turks are coming, whether he makes money off them or not.’

Swan nodded, because he remembered the silversmith’s brother. ‘How much to be taken into Mithymna?’ he asked.

Later that night, Swan was late for dinner, an unpardonable sin in gentle society, but one for which he was forgiven because both Theodora and Dorino knew him. He was dressed as well as circumstances allowed, and his peacock plume was a pale shadow of its former splendour.

Prince Dorino steepled his hands. ‘You are, I find, unchanged.’

Swan bowed. ‘May I introduce my friend, Alessandro Bembo of Venice.’

‘You may,’ Prince Dorino said. He didn’t rise; instead, he extended a limp hand, and Bembo bowed over it. ‘You command one of the galleys?’ he asked.

Bembo smiled. ‘For my sins,’ he said.

Dorino made a moue. ‘Can either of you tell me what the devil the Pope is playing at, here?’ he asked. ‘He sends a cautious old man to command a fleet that is too small to dominate the Turk and too big to lend aid to isolated outposts. The loss of that fleet would be a catastrophe, but its presence tempts the Turk to rashness.’ He sat back.

Bembo looked blank, and Swan favoured him with a smile. Swan knew Prince Dorino of old; the man’s apparent effeminacy hid a deep and very tough mind, and he liked to surprise people. And he was both ruthless and deadly.

Bembo took a sip of wine to cover his confusion. ‘Your Grace,’ he said. ‘Trevisan is an unknown quantity in Venice. I cannot speak for the Serenissima, but I will venture that the fleet as constituted represents the best effort of Christendom, not a calculated effort.’

‘Saints and martyrs,’ Dorino said, raising his hands to heaven. ‘Forty-two galleys is the best effort of Christendom? Perhaps we should all convert to Islam? Saint Peter’s might make an attractive mosque, with a good minaret.’

Swan cleared his throat. He was having a hard time taking his eyes off Theodora.

‘I think I can promise you,’ he said softly, ‘that Alessandro’s words are true words, Your Grace. The Holy Father has neither more money nor more ships. The princes of the West offer nothing but their usual obligations, and often not even those.’ And the Pope stole the money to build the fleet, Swan was tempted to say, just to shock everyone present, but he kept his poisonous views to himself. He was in a black mood, and a reckless one; but not so reckless that he would disclose everything.

‘Genoa has a hundred ships alone,’ Dorino said, suddenly pettish.

‘So does Venice,’ Bembo said. ‘So does Aragon.’

‘So does Naples,’ Swan said.

Theodora sighed. ‘We are abandoned, then,’ she said.

Bembo spread his hands on the table. ‘Ma donna, I am a Venetian; often, too often, an enemy. But I think that perhaps I can comment on the politics of Genoa as an outsider. Genoa no longer looks east. The loss of Constantinople was a shattering blow; Genoa has access to Cyprus, but the most valuable cargo is now sugar, and Genoa and Aragon and Portugal are all competing for a sugar trade that no longer runs this far east.’

‘Portugal,’ she said. ‘Almost Thule.’

‘Yet I am from England,’ Swan said, ‘and my friend Juan di Silva, drinking in a taverna this moment, is from Portugal.’

Bembo sat back as the first course was served; a magnificent sea bream, baked with saffron. ‘I fear that the East was actually lost fifty years ago, when Venice and Genoa fought to the bitter end for Tenedos.’ He shrugged. ‘It was a foolish war. It bankrupted both states. And they, and only they, cared about what happened in the East.’

Theodora’s head came up. ‘We cared,’ she said. ‘For a thousand years and more, we held the line against the infidel. And you only visited us to sack our cities.’

Bembo could not meet her eyes. ‘Venice’s record is not so very good,’ he admitted.

Swan blinked. ‘Your Grace, I will go to Mithymna tonight,’ he said. He willed them to change the subject.

Theodora looked at him and flushed. ‘You will not stay the night?’ she asked, and then cast her eyes down.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘This seems precipitate, even for you,’ he said.

Swan shrugged. ‘Fra Tommaso cannot make the trip,’ he said, ‘and the Turks will be alert to the sea, even if they fear the storm.’

‘What can you hope to accomplish?’ Dorino asked. He was genuinely curious.

Swan nodded. ‘You were going to send someone, were you not, Your Grace?’ he asked.

Dorino barked a laugh. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I was thinking of asking you.’

Swan smiled. ‘And Admiral Corner thought the same. Is it so surprising that I should guess that I will be asked? Give me any messages you have. Do you have any troops to relieve the town? I am curious. Looking for a lever to move the cardinal.’

‘My firman from the Sultan allows me two hundred soldiers,’ the prince said. ‘I have almost twice that; not enough to relieve a barn, much less a city. Omar Reis, for it is he, has eighty ships and almost ten thousand men, and more again on the mainland.’

Swan nodded. ‘You know,’ he said, his recklessness surfacing, ‘I have, myself, defeated the Turks in the last year. And with the Despot of the Morea and the Lord of Corinth, we defeated the Turks again; and I was at Belgrade when we almost killed the Sultan. Far from being giants, terrible and unbeatable foes, I find the Turks to be men like me; brave and cowardly, clever and foolish, every bit as apt to be asleep on watch or follow the wrong trail. They are excellent soldiers because they practise constantly and they have little time for incompetence; something the princes of the West might do well to emulate. But most of all, above all other things, they are daring. They take risks.’ He looked around. ‘Trevisan takes no risks, and the Pope takes few risks, and Prince Dorino takes no risks, and we will, in the end, be swallowed by the Turks, not because they are so very fearsome, but because we cede them the initiative in everything.’

Prince Dorino smiled. ‘You chide me with cowardice?’ he asked.

Swan shook his head. ‘Never. I chide you with caution. You will have to fight for every inch of your possessions all the rest of your life. This looks like a bitter struggle; easier to make peace and pay. That is the whole of the Turkish strategy.’

Dorino nodded. ‘I think you forget which one of us is a prince, and which one a paid killer,’ he said.

Swan smiled. The darkness rose almost like joy. ‘I think you forget that you need me to go to Mithymna.’

Theodora laughed, and so did Bembo. He clapped his hands. ‘Your Grace, my admiral chided me with the very same words earlier today, and I confess that intimacy tempts a gentleman to reveal himself.’

Prince Dorino snapped his fingers and wine was poured. ‘I do not mind straight talk. But Ser Suane, I do not think you can imagine how much we risk, when we fight. I think you speak with the bravado of the young.’

Swan sat back. ‘I admit it,’ he said. ‘But if I am young, so are the Turks; young and daring, and they will not stop coming. It will be like blackmail; every time you concede, there will be a new demand.’

Prince Dorino nodded graciously. ‘I agree with your assessment of the strategy of the Turks; if I did not, no Christian fleet would find harbour here. Lesvos is the easternmost possession of Christendom, and one of the most beautiful. If the Pope wants my support, if he wants me to open my harbours, he needs to send more troops, more money, and more ships. No, no more; I drink to your health. Let me tell my chamberlain what to write; we will send messages of hope into Mithymna, and maybe it will hold. My brother’s wife is a good chatelaine. You know she owns her own armour, and fights like an Amazon?’

‘I had heard as much,’ Bembo said.

‘I remember her as Diana when there was a play,’ Swan said.

Theodora smiled. ‘Those were beautiful times,’ she said.

Swan deceived both Kendal and Clemente, because he wanted no hostages to fortune. He set out in the pouring rain of a dark night, following Stefanos, the silversmith’s ‘brother’. He’d paid the man fifty gold ducats in advance, with double that as a reward if they made it back to Mytilene. He had hours of walking in the rainy dark to think of the insanity of his actions; going almost alone into the camp of his enemies, where he could be captured, tortured horribly, and killed.

He was afraid of being afraid. That is, something had happened in the pit in Mistra, and now he needed to prove to himself that he was still the sort of man who would dare to take on such a mission. Or at least, when he was soaked to the skin stumbling along a rocky road that ran along the beaches of northern Lesvos, his own fears were as close to an explanation for his reckless behaviour as he could vouchsafe.

‘I am a fool,’ he said aloud, and Stefanos whirled and silenced him with an admonishing finger, even though the rain covered any noise they could make; would have covered them if they had been mounted on tournament steeds and wearing armour.

When the day came up, a slow bleeding of light into a grey landscape, they walked along the coast, left the road, and crossed a beach. Four men were sitting under the upturned wooden hull of a small fishing boat. Stefanos waved, the four men crawled out, righted the boat with a single heave, and began to put her gear aboard. Stefanos and Swan crossed the soft sand to the hard sand; the wind was blowing as if all the furies in the world were blowing together, but there were patches of blue visible in the storm-tossed sky.

They boarded the boat without a word from the crew and Swan, wet and fairly miserable inside and out, huddled in the bow as they left the beach and the full wind in the channel struck them, but despite the weather, the four men raised a scrap of the lateen sail and the little boat raced along, seeming to fly more than sail, skimming the wave tops and racing the clouds.

Stefanos looked at Swan, and Swan discovered that he was standing in the bow, heedless of the spray, and grinning.

‘You like the sea,’ Stefanos said, as if it was the first normal thing he’d seen in Swan.

‘I do,’ Swan agreed. ‘And this is like flying.’

They entered a rain squall, ran downwind for a while, the boat running free for the coast of Asia, and then came so close before they tacked that Swan thought he might just get to visit Ephesus after all. But then they came about, all the fishermen bending sharply so that the boom could snap over their heads, and Stefanos holding Swan down as if afraid a foreigner might be too stupid to notice the boom.

They made another long run, across the wind, close-hauled. The fishing boat pointed much closer to the wind with a lateen than Swan had imagined.

The fishermen were fishing, even at this speed; not with nets, but with lines. Fish after fish was landed; a fine red snapper, a big gold-head. The pilot-helmsman gutted them, the tiller under his arm as his sharp knife worked. When he looked up and met Swan’s eye, he grinned. He had a beard like a patriarch and an ancient Italian wool hat that might once have been red, and he seemed to know the coast of Lesvos without looking over the side.

Mid-morning they went about again, and the bow was pointed at Asia. Swan took a turn on one of the heavy rods, trolling a weighted baitfish on a heavy hook. He got a fish that he didn’t recognise; the other fishermen congratulated him, and he drank some wine with the pilot. He was offered bread and goat’s cheese; he found that he was hungry and in a much lighter mood than he had been the night before; the whole thing seemed insane now, but he was committed. He ate the damp bread with gusto, drank a little more wine, and was shocked to see the coast of Asia so close he might have hit it with the last of his bread.

The pilot pulled him down and the fishing boat put about like a dolphin and then they were running back, close-hauled again, the lateen pulled as tight as four strong men could arrange.

‘We will land on the beach at Sikamineas,’ his guide said, the first words of explanation he’d offered. ‘You bring them luck. They like us. We will spread nets when we are off the beach. Please be patient.’

On and on, and the rain started again and blew into them from the side. Swan was soaked and cold, but the speed was exhilarating even through his fatigue.

When they were perhaps half a mile from the land, a deeply indented beach with a red-roofed town high above, the fishermen dropped the sail, set a broad scrap of canvas to catch a little of the strong wind, and began to cast their nets. Swan had grown up on the Thames; small fishing boats had a certain similarity, and Swan could cast a corner of the net by the weights, and he pitched in. The smell of rotting fish filled his nostrils as the nets were taken from the little hold, and it was, all in all, a smell with happy memories of youth; he threw, and pulled, and they hauled in a net of varied Aegean fish even as the next rain squall was chasing them down the shallow bay. They landed with a hearty thump and the rain hit them ten breaths later, but by then all six men had dragged the little hull well up out of the surf and stood breathing hard.

‘Welcome to Skala Sikamineas,’ Stefanos said. ‘My home village is up above.’ He glanced around. ‘We will go into Mithymna tonight. First, we’ll eat a big meal.’

Swan ate fish, slept, ate more fish, and had a nap. A toothless older woman dried his clothes and shared some arak with him; later, she made him a little cup of quaveh and he learned her name, Andromache, which struck him as an odd and masculine name for a woman, but no doubt had classical antecedents.

After his quaveh, Stefanos joined him and took his clothes. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look like a peasant.’

He joined Stefanos in loose, dry clothes that were soaked in an hour of climbing an old cobbled road into the hills above the beach, which loomed like the Alps but proved to be constructed on a more human scale, although Swan was breathless enough when they crested the last of them on the slick cobbles.

‘Who built the roads?’ Swan asked.

Stefanos shrugged. ‘Pericles, for all I know,’ he jested. ‘The ancient people. Men repair them every spring; the donkeys go better on the cobbles, and some tinkers have wagons.’

Swan felt that he was seeing an entire world that he missed when he was a knight and a soldier; small men and women living normal lives.

Midnight and they were passing over the shoulder of Lepedymnos, the tallest of the local mountains, and there below them twinkled the lights of Mithymna, which looked cheerful enough at a distance. Until an ugly orange light flashed; a gun firing in the darkness.

Stefanos led them to a well-roofed shepherd’s cot, and started a very small fire. Then both men ate a bowl of fish stew and put on packs full of carefully wrapped dried fish.

Swan had no weapon other than a sharp fish knife on a thong around his neck. Anything else would give them away instantly, and Stefanos had insisted; not even a fighting knife, not so much as a saint’s medallion would he allow.

Going down the last shoulder of mountain was terrible; the sky was dark, the stars hidden, and the combination of gravel, loose rock, open, wet rock faces and scrubby pine trees made the going both dangerous and noisy.

‘Hurry,’ Stefanos said. ‘We are late.’

Late for what? Swan wondered, but he did his best, tumbling down what proved to be a short cliff and landing on sand; a miracle or a tribute to the goddess Fortuna, who seemed to protect Swan at all times.

He trotted on behind Stefanos, and they were moving quickly in the near-total darkness when they blundered into a Turkish patrol, or rather, a Turkish looting party.

A heavy spear was pointed at Swan and a closed lantern opened. ‘What is in that basket?’ a heavy Albanian voice asked.

Swan had no trouble looking terrified. He took the basket off his shoulders and put it on the ground.

‘Fish! Fucking fish,’ muttered another Albanian. ‘Hey, Greek, is there a village up here? Eh?’

Stefanos nodded. ‘Oh yes, great lord. There is a village in the saddle between the mountains, called Vasileus. But you are going the wrong way.’

The Albanian looked at Swan. ‘And you? What do you say?’

Swan grinned. ‘I say, fuck those bastards in Vasileus. They screw us all the time on taxes.’

The Albanian laughed, a gold tooth glinting in the lantern light. ‘You can lead us, then,’ he said.

Swan looked surly. ‘If I could see and knew where I was going, do you think I’d be here, watching you steal my fish?’

The Albanian laughed. ‘Fuck your mother,’ he said. ‘Move.’

Swan made a face, shouldered his basket and led off into the growing light. He led them down the mountain; they were right on the outskirts of Mithymna’s abundant fields and orchards, and Swan could see the Turkish camp. In five minutes he had learned that the siege was not particularly close; it didn’t surprise him that Stefanos could get people out.

More interesting, and already visible, was the landing of guns from the Turkish ships. Swan could see a big galley in the deep water north of the town, with her bows low in the water as men worked on the metal banks that held the tube to the ship. Cliffs hid the movement closer in, but almost at his feet, another party of sailors or slaves was raising a big gun on ropes with a winch.

He crossed a sheepfold that reminded him of the hedges and stone walls of France and then paused. Clouds were rolling in, a cold tang to the air that would, in England, have heralded a heavy fog. Swan watched the clouds while the Albanians caught up, and then turned inland, away from Mithymna. They were keeping Stefanos at the back of the little column of a dozen soldiers. Swan had no idea where Vasileus was, or how to get there, but he had a good idea of where Greek peasants hid their villages and he had no interest in being the proxy cause of a massacre, so he headed south and west. Below him, at the base of the long ridge, the coast curved in sharply from Mithymna to Petra at the base of the bay; a tiny church sat above the town on a sheer rock, the rock that gave the town its name, and there were two large islands off in the middle of the bay. There was another Turkish squadron hidden behind the islands; only a dozen ships, but cunningly positioned.

Then he turned more sharply uphill as he found a narrow track. A wall of clouds rolled in and Swan paused to pray.

‘Move your worthless pagan arse,’ muttered the Albanian captain.

‘Pagan yourself,’ Swan said. He thought he had the measure of the Albanians; they weren’t any worse than his own archers or pages, and they probably just wanted coins to take home, but he was damned if he was going to lead them to a village. They had not, apparently, seen Petra at the base of the bay.

The fog rolled in. They were passing through an ancient volcanic caldera; two huge rocks protruded like jaws, or fangs; one moment they arched above Swan like a gate to a foggy English hell, and the next they were gone, hidden in the swirling mist.

Swan stepped to his left, felt his way around one of the jaws, and lifted his long Greek robes to piss.

No one followed him, and he heard the men pass him, a few feet away; he could even smell them in the fog, sweat and fear and cardamom. He fell in at the back. There was arguing at the front, where his absence had been noted, and he bumped the man behind Stefanos, spat ‘Fucking infidel’ in good Turkish so that the man started, and hauled on Stefanos’ shoulder.

In two beats of his heart, the two men were moving south and east over bare rock, unable to see more than a few inches. Behind him, the Albanian captain was shouting.

They could still hear him a half an hour later, when they were five hundred feet lower and had managed not to fall to their deaths in the fog.

‘You almost led them straight to Vasileos,’ Stefanos said. ‘Christ Pantocrator! It was as if you really did hate them.’

They made their way down, and down; they emerged onto the shingle of a narrow beach at the base of the cliff. Mithymna was now north and west around the point, and the two of them hurried along the strand, happy to be in the one place where they could not get lost. Twice they hid as parties of delhis or ghazis went by them but Stefanos kept them moving fast because he wanted to use the fog to pass the enemy lines.

Swan lost track of time, but he was game enough, and they walked briskly along the beach and then, when they could hear the creak of ropes in the fog and the sound of gunfire was pulsing dully from close by, Stefanos and Swan paused, and without a word exchanged, agreed by head-nods and started up a goat path to the top of the beach cliff. There was a road there, a white nightmare with a fall to the left and a deep ditch to the right; after some experimentation the two of them got into the ditch and walked along it, sometimes crawling over rocks. A party of Turkish speakers passed them an arm’s length above, unaware that they were there; and over the next two hours, as the fog darkened, they got close enough to the town that the gunfire and the shouts of combatants covered any noise they made.

‘We need to go uphill and around the town,’ Stefanos whispered.

They clambered up a sandy bluff, the ground crumbling under their fingers, and then hauled themselves up a huge rock to the level of the terraces and valley farms. They could hear voices in the fog, but visibility was virtually the length of a man’s arm.

‘Climb again,’ Stefanos said.

They climbed straight into a hive of slaves, Christian slaves, building a battery. Most of them were naked, or almost naked, and they were working so hard that they were sweating, piling sand and red-brown earth into gabions of wicker that were being made at incredible speed by women and children.

The fog was patchier up in the battery, but no one looked at them, and Swan walked boldly through the huddle of wicker-weavers and around the base of the battery, where fifty Christian men were trying to raise the tube of a heavy galley centre-line gun up onto the newly built earth platform. Swan turned his head to look with professional interest, and he saw the Turkish officer in his silk kaftan and long curved kilij in the same moment that the officer saw him.

The recognition was instant and mutual.

‘Take that man! In the blue robe!’ shouted Idrahim, son of Omar Reis.

Swan ran. His feet flew over the uneven ground and now, heedless of the defenders’ crossbows and hand gonnes, he leapt down from the Turkish lines and into the vineyards and small farm plots that ringed the town. The fog was still thick.

A gun fired close by him, and the vineyard around him was stripped by flying shrapnel and the gravel it kicked up. He was on the edge of the blast and caught only gravel in his legs, but he felt as if he’d been flayed.

An arrow whispered out of the darkening fog and then whickered along the dry rocky ground, but Swan was hobbling and jogging on, moving under trellis supports, anything to put distance between himself and capture.

‘Follow me! Fifty golden sequins to the man who takes him. He is a Frankish spy!’ shouted Idrahim in the fog. He was very close, either that or the fog misled Swan, but he turned and ran along the line of trellises; parallel, he thought, to the Turkish lines.

He fell flat.

His long Greek gown tangled his bloody legs; it was soaking wet, a clumsy garment for running, and the slippers he was wearing were not as capable as his Italian boots. He managed to get to his feet, looked back, and saw a ghazi right on top of him.

Swan killed the man before he had thought of the method; he charged him, got a hand on his sword-wrist before the man completed his draw and sank his fish knife into the man’s temple through his turban, a clumsy strike and not one Swan would ordinarily have recommended.

He drew the man’s scimitar and ducked under the vines. The fog was full of voices and his legs were bleeding worse than he’d thought, but he had a sword and he thought he had a chance. He crouched, and a Turk in a turban ran past him from behind.

Swan stayed put, and a janissary in a tall felt hat passed behind him, called a war cry, paused to spit, and screamed as a crossbow bolt, shot at random or carefully aimed at his war cry, took him in the middle of the gut. The man lay screaming and no one came to his aid.

Swan didn’t want to give himself away, but everything was wrong. The janissary had come from the wrong direction, and so had the crossbow bolt; so he was running the wrong way in the fog.

The gut-shot Turk screamed gain, and then began to pray in Turkic. Swan could hear him; the poor bastard was begging his mother, his father …

Swan stepped over to him and put a hand on him.

‘Blessed Saint George,’ said the Turk.

It seemed like a very odd thing for a Turk to say, but Swan was aware that many Turks viewed St George with religious veneration.

‘Peace, brother,’ Swan said.

The man groaned.

Swan took a deep breath and the Turk screamed, a harrowing, mother-in-childbirth scream.

Swan crept away, calculating that if he killed the man, his silence would give away his position. But two screams later, Swan’s conscience smote him, and he crept back.

‘Oh, my God, my God,’ the man said.

Swan killed him.

Silence, and a little light rain out of the fog. The sharp snap of a heavy crossbow, quite close, almost as loud as a gunshot.

Swan started in what he hoped was the right direction and there …

… was Idris. Their blades crossed, a janissary charged Swan from the left, and Swan stepped back and cut, low to high, and crossed both swords in one blow. He snapped a back-cut into the janissary and ducked under the grape trellis and then, desperate, dropped down a six-foot terrace without looking, landed on his feet without twisting his ankle, and ducked through a second trellis.

‘On me! On me, my children!’ Idris yelled. ‘I have the Frank right heeeeeerrrrree.’

There was a thump as Idris fell over the edge of the terrace. There was also a sound of rushing feet, and Swan hesitated, his sword six feet from Idris’s head, shook himself and ran down into the gully that separated the vineyards from the town like a natural moat.

He moved almost a hundred paces along the moat and several guns fired, and not all of them from the Turkish side. He found a projecting overhang; his questing hands found stonework, and he felt marble. The abutment or the pier of an old bridge over the gully; perhaps very old …

Swan got in between the ancient stone and the dirt. It was surprisingly dry.

He waited there until it was fully dark. It took a long time, and he thought dark thoughts and some religious thoughts and felt like a fool.

And then, with enormous care, he began to climb up what he hoped was the town side of the gully. Bowstrings hummed from time to time; crossbows snapped. Not a shaft came close, and he climbed, found no access to the top, climbed down, and had to start again. The whole process was interminable, and he was lost again; the gully apparently had bends in it that had confused him and he was exhausted and felt as if he’d been climbing for hours.

Another gust of rain hit, swept over him, soaking him, and then it stopped, and stars appeared. There was a little moonlight, and suddenly Swan could see where he was, well up the slope on the north side of the fortified town. The fortress loomed directly above him.

He got a hand up to the top of the rock he was climbing, and very carefully, cursing the basket and the now sodden salt fish, he pulled himself up onto a narrow path that ran along the base of the wall. Even in fitful moonlight, he could see that the walls of Mithymna were indescribably ancient; huge Hellenistic blocks in the foundation layer, and maybe blocks older than that, with Roman and Byzantine courses above and Genoese work in repair.

If the Turkish guns had done the town any damage, he couldn’t see it. He moved cautiously until he was north and east of the walls, on the side where he didn’t think the Turks had a serious presence, and then he knocked at a postern gate.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing before a short middle-aged woman in armour.

‘Ser Tommaso Suane,’ he said. ‘Knight of Saint Mark.’

‘You caused the ruckus on the south side?’ she asked.

‘Yes, my lady. By the new Turkish battery.’ He bowed.

She shook her head. ‘Well, you may be brave, but you are an idiot,’ she said. ‘There’s no one on the north side, or not twenty of the bastards. Here, have an apple.’ She tossed him one. ‘I’m leading a sortie just to keep Omar Reis aware that I’m alive. My steward will feed you.’ She glanced at the huddle of armoured men in the gateway, Greeks and Italians and at least one suit of obvious German armour. ‘Any news from Dorino?’ she asked.

‘Here are my messages,’ Swan said. ‘Anyone want some salt fish?’

The next morning, Swan met Caterina di Orsini dressed as a woman and was surprised to find how pretty she was. Out of armour she was not short, merely petite; she had the elegant manners of a Roman princess, which, of course, she was.

She had Prince Dorino’s letters on a table in front of her. ‘I gather Omar Reis wants you alive,’ she said. She smiled. ‘His son identified you in the fighting, and Reis offered me protection for my town if I would hand you over.’

Swan’s stomach did a flip.

She raised both eyebrows. ‘And I think my father would praise me,’ she said with a nasty and very Orsini-esque half-smile. ‘I think you are no friend of the Orsini.’

Swan sat, weaponless, in the lair of the warrior princess of the Orsini and contemplated his own foolishness.

She shrugged. ‘But I am not so venal,’ she said. ‘I fear that I grew to womanhood on romance. Rolando, Giron le Courtois, Lancelot …’ She smiled. ‘You are a brave cavaliero, a true knight, who came through the enemy lines to bring me news. I do not think that the heroine of romance sells her knight to be eviscerated by the Turk, do you?’

‘No, my lady,’ Swan agreed piously. ‘Although to be fair, evisceration would be the easy part of what Omar Reis has planned for me.’

Caterina raised her eyebrows. ‘You fucked his son and his daughter, or that’s what my people tell me,’ she said. She threw back her head and laughed. ‘Listen, Ser Suane. I have lived my entire life in camps, with soldiers and whores. I’m a better blade than any man in this garrison, and I say “fuck” when I feel the urge.’

‘Of course,’ Suane said. He was warming to her.

‘Still, Reis hates you, so I will have to get you out of here tonight. Before one of my people decides to sell you. He’s tightened the ring, and he’s landing more guns.’ She smiled wryly, a very mannish smile. ‘If Trevisan would move his worthless arse, he could have Omar Reis and his whole fleet.’

‘Reis has a covering squadron down by Petra, behind the islands,’ Swan said.

She leaned forward, her chin on her hands. In another woman it might have been flirtatious, but the Orsini princess merely seemed curious. ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘I hoped you weren’t just a pretty face.’

‘But not insurmountable,’ Swan said. ‘Do you know how many ships have landed their guns?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘The fog comes and goes. But I would say at least fifteen and perhaps twenty.’

Swan sat back.

‘Are you the same Tommaso Suane who fought at Belgrade?’ she asked.

‘Yes, my lady,’ Swan said heavily.

She grinned. ‘Well met. We share some common friends. You must know the Despot Thomas.’

‘Of course, my lady. I was just in Glarenza. We … fought a battle together.’

She clapped her hands together. ‘Did you meet his wife? The Basilia? Caterina, like me?’

Swan bowed. ‘I did not have the honour.’

‘Oh! We were schoolgirls together, in a way; when Achaea still had a court and I was learning what it was like to live in the East.’ Caterina di Orsini smiled, and then the smile vanished into fatigue. ‘I can last about ten days. Maybe more; the walls are very strong, and all the women and children are gone, so the men will fight well, up to a point. And then, perhaps, they will surrender. I don’t really fancy a harem; one husband is one too many, for me.’ She shrugged. ‘Can you leave tonight?’

Swan rose. ‘My lady, I would like to have whatever view I can have of the Turkish fleet.’

Orsini sent him with a pair of her Italian men-at-arms and he was escorted to the top of the walls and out onto a tower. The tower had taken a dozen hits from the Turkish guns and was beginning to lose its lower courses, but the stone was ten feet thick and the tower had a long way to go before it collapsed.

Swan looked out over the sea in the last grey light of another stormy day, but the wind had finally moved the fog. Most of the Turkish ships were beached on the dark shingle along the base of the cliff below the town; far, far below.

‘Achilles landed here,’ said one of the Italians. ‘Buono Giorno and Blessed Saint John be with you, brother.’ The man had a donat’s ring like Swan’s own, and Swan took his hand.

‘You bring honour to our order,’ the man said, and Swan felt like a charlatan.

‘Did Fra Tommaso make it to Mytilene, then?’ the man asked.

Swan nodded.

‘Achilles?’ he asked. He was looking at a pair of ancient pillars set lengthwise in the wall. He wondered whether the town was laced with antiquities.

‘Oh, by the Trinity,’ the Italian said. ‘Local people say Briseis came from here, not Lemnos.’

‘You are a student of the classics, brother,’ Swan said. ‘You have the advantage of me; I don’t know your name.’

‘Ah; Francesco Della Rovere,’ the man said. He had ruddy hair made redder by the sunset, with red bristles in his unshaven face; he was short and stout and looked very strong. ‘I’m a bastard son.’

‘Aren’t we all, brother?’ Swan joked.

‘I came out here to be nearer the land of the Iliad. It is my honour to fight here for the faith, and on the ground Achilles and Hector walked,’ the man said.

‘How long can this place hold?’ Swan asked him.

The donat made a face. ‘As long as we are alive. This is no fanfaronade, brother; we have a fine garrison because the lady pays well, and we have good armour and modern weapons and cisterns full of water. And food.’ He looked out. ‘Look there. They’re bringing another gun.’

On the beach, another galley was being warped in. Her bow guns were already in slings on the foremast, ready to be dropped on the beach; very seamanlike.

Swan watched the whole operation while Francesco recited a part of the ship list from the Iliad. He counted the vessels on the beach and anchored in close, some in the Venetian manner, bow and stern. One galley was on the rocks in the inner harbour, her bows stoved.

Swan pursed his lips and muttered some curses.

‘Daring,’ he said aloud.

‘Will you make a sortie tonight?’ Swan asked the armoured lady.

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Could we attack the battery where I was almost taken?’ he asked.

She frowned. ‘Are you mad? Insane? Over the gully and up a set of terraces?’

‘I want to take back my friend, if he is alive,’ Swan said. ‘I’ve been a Turkish prisoner. He won’t have moved far. He’s probably being forced to work on the battery.’

She shook her head. ‘Too risky. Besides, your friend is probably dead or worse.’

Swan nodded. ‘Probably. Still.’

She smiled. ‘Damn. Well, if they captured me, I’d sure as hell hope someone would come for me.’

Swan nodded. ‘I would like to suggest a fanfaronade, as Francesco so aptly called it.

Swan went through the sally port in a maille shirt, a very light breastplate and a beautiful pair of Italian finger gauntlets of the last age, releathered by the Orsini armourer just for him, topped by an old and visorless armet. He carried an arming sword and a knife in his belt and the fish knife, still around his neck. On his back was his fish basket. The salt fish had been eaten.

He was the fifth man out the door; Caterina di Orsini led from the front. They prayed; her men-at-arms reminded each other that she was not to be taken alive, and Swan made the same request.

Francesco Della Rovere nodded to him. ‘We know,’ he said.

They scrambled down the goat path from the postern, while two small gonnes played on the Turkish battery, and the battery suddenly fired, five loud slams in a row, and splinters flew off the wall above them and all of them were showered in gravel and shards of stone, and a man went down despite his full armour. Swan took a blow on the head that made it ring and left him unsteady and a little unsure of the way in which the world worked, but he followed Francesco down the steep, terraced slope into what appeared to be Dante’s hell; ring upon ring of darkness, smoke and fire.

Down they went; down and down, and another tremendous volley of guns fired, now well over their head; the only tangible result a shower of gravel in the darkness, ringing on their helmets.

They turned left at the bottom, and began to move along the gully. Swan could hear Turks talking above them, and then another explosion. The straps on his basket were cutting into his shoulders, but he kept his head down, tried not to think about what he was carrying, and kept going.

They went under a bridge, and then they were in a tunnel, and the men not wearing full plate were summoned forward, and they crawled. It was a long way; far enough for Swan to panic at the weight of the earth over his head and then calm himself and crawl forward again. He was in the middle of the crawling file, and the tunnel was at best as tall as a child. Then he could smell the sea, and Francesco was laughing with relief.

‘That was the old city,’ Francesco whispered. ‘From the time of the Persian Wars. Miltiades.’ He shrugged. ‘It is as if it is all happening again, yes? The Persians …’ He fell silent, and Swan looked back at the tunnel, which was a gaping mouth in a seaside cliff.

‘Their ships are over there,’ Francesco said as another of the Orsini men crawled out of the tunnel. He was dragging his basket, and he joined Swan, and finally there were four of them.

They clambered over moonlit seaside rocks, volcanic ripples that seemed too organic not to be alive, and then they were on a beach, and the Turkish galleys stretched away into the moonlight like a linear forest of masts and prows. Swan tested the breeze. ‘Upwind,’ he said, and the four men, unchallenged, crawled and then walked along the moonlit beach. The Turks were above them, fifty feet or more, on the flat ground. There were slaves on the beach and a handful of sailors or soldiers to watch them; most of the guards were asleep.

They woke up when the great galley at the north end of the beach blew up. The explosion was big, because Swan had taken the time to put his basket of black powder in metal casings right alongside the vessel’s small powder magazine.

The third galley in the line blew a few seconds later. The flaming wreckage fell onto the other ships, both on the beach and, by sheer luck, the ones anchored off the beach, bow and stern.

Turkish sailors and soldiers poured down the low cliffs and pushed the slaves into the flames, demanding that they put out the fires, using any vessel that would hold water. It wasn’t intentional cruelty but faulty fuse-cutting that caused the last two charges to go off almost ten minutes after the first two, so that the packed mobs of Christian slaves were slaughtered by the splinters.

So were the Turks.

Swan saw what he’d done. It was as if a shutter went down over his mind, but too late; he was aware, far away from the instant needs of the moment, that he had crossed a line in horror; that the slaughter of a hundred or so men in the dark was in fact worse than being kept in a hole in the ground.

‘Let’s go,’ he said to Francesco. The Bolognese shrugged, as if the incredible slaughter were an everyday event. The two men ran into the darkness, and Francesco led Swan through a tangle of vineyards and across the inevitable gully. Was it the same gully? Swan’s mind was sluggish, and then they were at the base of a very ancient aqueduct. There was nothing left bar a single heavy pylon.

‘That looked spectacularly successful,’ Caterina di Orsini said.

Swan grunted.

‘Good. Follow me, then,’ she said, and the whole party, now almost fifty men-at-arms, flowed along the crest of a low ridge and then dropped down out of the hills. Just as the distant east began to show a little brush of light, they fell on the new Turkish battery from behind. The battery was almost empty; the whole Turkish covering force was fighting the fire on their ships.

Swan opened the stockade of prisoners, and most of them huddled away from him.

‘Stefanos!’ he called, and to his immense and illogical joy the man came, bruised, but unbroken.

‘Sweet Mother of God,’ Stefanos said. ‘You came for me, Frank?’

‘I wanted more fish stew,’ Swan said.

He kissed Caterina on both cheeks in the Turkish battery, a few minutes before a powder charge blew in three days’ work by all the Christian slaves. The terrace above collapsed, and the resulting mudslide crumbled the battery like paper.

Swan was gone by then. He’d left the arming sword and the armour in his fish basket, and he was dressed in a dead Turk’s clothes and moving as fast as his lacerated legs would allow over the thorny low hills behind the battery. They went inland until it was getting light; caught a path in the old spruce woods and raced, breathless, east and south.

Morning found them asleep, high on the slopes of Lepedymnos. They rested for six hours, and then moved, crossing the ridge where no Turk could see them and then descending all day into the sharp hills above Sikamineas. Nightfall and Swan was sleeping under a wool blanket in the old woman’s house, his belly full of good bread and old wine.

He awoke to find her sitting on his rickety bed, her hand over his mouth.

‘You cry,’ she said.

He found that he was crying. He couldn’t stop. It made no sense.

He didn’t want to be alone, either, and he couldn’t go back to sleep.

But the next morning he was happy enough to board the fishing smack. The wind was still in their favour, a remarkable reversal, and they sailed down the coast without sighting the Turkish galley he dreaded. The swell was down, and the storm was breaking up.

‘I need to go straight into Mytilene,’ Swan said to Stefanos. ‘I know why you mess around, but every heartbeat counts.’

The pilot chatted to Stefanos in vernacular Greek. Both men were smiling, but there was a heavy air of tension.

‘He says no,’ Stefanos said. ‘These men live and die by their ability to go … anywhere.’

Swan considered remonstrating. And he considered simply threatening to kill them; he didn’t really think five unarmed men could resist him in an open boat, but fishermen were tough and he’d had enough killing.

‘There are thousands of lives at stake,’ he said, but he didn’t really expect an answer. If they had been the kind of men to want to save the world, they’d have volunteered.

‘I can get horses at Thermi,’ Stefanos said. ‘Good horses.’

‘Then Thermi,’ Swan said, too tired to argue. He wasn’t just physically tired, either.

Late afternoon; the sky was clearing in the east, and the wave height outside the harbour was barely more than a ripple.

Cardinal Trevisan sat in a huge chair that might have been Francesco Gatelussi’s throne, when the old pirate made himself Lord of Mytilene in the last century. He was flanked by Fra Tommaso and the Genoese admiral. Corner, the Venetian, was seated on a three-legged chair as if he was an errant schoolboy. The Genoese admiral, Doria, was just laying forth his sailing plan for a descent on Chios.

Swan was still in his Greek/Turkish clothes. They stopped him at the great six-foot-wide and nail-studded door to the great hall, and Trevisan’s fashion-conscious confessor, Father Etiore, smiled and tugged his moustache. ‘Perhaps Messire could return when smelling a little less like a fishing boat?’ he said. ‘And perhaps wearing hose instead of theatrical costume?’

Swan bowed. Then he stepped past the priest as easily as a dancer might have, and strode into the hall. His robes flapped, spreading his smell, and the dust of his ride from Thermi rose in the shafts of late afternoon sunlight streaming into the clerestory windows.

The priest grunted and pursued him down the nave, but Swan’s stride was long. Behind him, the priest called, ‘Ser Suane!’

Every head turned.

‘What is the meaning of this interruption?’ Doria asked. ‘And who are you, sir?’

Swan kept walking. He passed the Genoese officer and walked until he was directly before the cardinal, to whom he made a deep reverentia.

‘Eminence,’ he said. He made another, as if his legs were not made of mud, to the prince. ‘Your Grace.’ He had a scroll rolled in his hand like a captain’s baton. He hoped, a little desperately, that the cardinal was not altogether a fool.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Trevisan snapped.

Prince Dorino nodded. ‘I took the liberty of sending Ser Suane to Mithymna,’ he said.

‘We cannot save Mithymna,’ Trevisan said pettishly. ‘The fleet thanks you for your bravery, Ser Suane, but it was misplaced, and …’

‘We can save Mithymna,’ Swan said.

Trevisan’s look changed. ‘Do not imagine you can brook my authority?’ he snapped.

‘Eminence, I believe it would be to your benefit to hear me out,’ Swan said.

‘Remove yourself. You are impertinent,’ Trevisan said.

Swan held up his scroll, so that the papal seal showed. ‘If you make me use this,’ he said clearly, ‘you will regret it very much.’

All the conversation in the hall came to an abrupt end.

‘Clear the hall,’ Trevisan said to his chamberlain.

‘The admirals and Messire Bembo and the prince will stay,’ Swan snapped. He didn’t care. He didn’t care that he was destroying his career. To hell with them all. Just once, he would do the right thing, and do it right. It wouldn’t matter; no one would even remember …

‘How dare you?’ Trevisan said. He stood. ‘I don’t even know who you are.’

Swan was almost driven to a kind of insane laughter at the irony, the deep, bitter irony of it. The Pope who had stolen money to build a fleet had appointed a proveditore, a military auditor, to make sure everything was done well. And that commission was in his hand. Because Bessarion had recommended him. And Trevisan had wanted his men-at-arms.

Swan might have laughed, but the situation was too dire.

‘I am Ser Tommaso Suane of the Order of Saint Mark,’ he said. ‘I am your proveditore; appointed by his Holiness, the Pope.’

Trevisan flinched, as if from a blow.

‘The Turkish fleet is crippled; they have landed their guns to lay siege to Mithymna, sure that the Christians do not dare to attack.’ Swan snapped his commission open and pointed it at the cardinal. ‘If you do not attack, I will make sure that the Venetians explain to Europe exactly where the money for these ships came from. And trust me, Eminence. I know to the ducat.’

Trevisan looked at his confessor. ‘What is he …’ He focused on Swan. ‘How can you know …’ He shook his head. ‘Never mind. I will have you placed in irons. You can explain to the Pope …’

Prince Dorino shook his head in turn. ‘No, Eminence,’ he said. ‘No, I think I am with the young man. Why should we not attack the Turks?’

‘The risk is …’ Trevisan grew very red in the face. ‘No!’ he shouted.

Alessandro Bembo leaned back and made a clicking noise with his tongue; the noise a Venetian crowd made when disappointed in a performance. Admiral Corner laughed.

‘Why not attack?’ Bembo said. He stretched and came to his feet. ‘You spent all the Pope’s money on this fleet, and your whole fleet is rotten with Tenedos worm, isn’t it?’ Bembo shrugged, his Venetian drawl intentionally offensive. ‘I swam under your ships,’ he said. He held out a hand, and Umar put a piece of wood into it, with the little worm still in it.

‘This is off your Capitano galley,’ he said. ‘You had your ships built in Ancona, and you didn’t even pay to have the bottoms tarred.’ He shrugged. ‘In three months, the fleet sinks.’

Corner laughed. ‘Ah, the shipyards of Ancona,’ he said.

‘Jesus Christ Redeemer!’ spat the Genoese. ‘Is this true?’

‘I invite messire to go for a swim under the papal galleys,’ Bembo said.

‘So in three months, they sink,’ Swan said. ‘And there is an inquiry throughout Christendom.’ He took the plunge. ‘Or we fight a battle in the morning, at good odds, and if we triumph, no one will ever ask that question, Eminence. Least of all your proveditore.’

‘You will never work in Rome again,’ Trevisan said. ‘I will be sure that you never receive the slightest …’

Swan shrugged. ‘Fuck you, Eminence. Here’s a thought from the graceful young men who do all your work, all your killing, all your thinking. This word isn’t just for you, but for all your kind. Fuck you, you useless sybarite. Here’s my word. Fight the Turks and win. And consider, when you threaten me, which of us can push a knife home in a throat without a fucking qualm.’

No one moved to help the cardinal. He stood, shaking with rage.

Bembo was shaking with laughter.

An hour later, in Swan’s room above the great hall, he drank wine with Bembo.

‘I hope Venice means to honour its commitments to me,’ Swan said. He felt much better.

Bembo shrugged. ‘Oh, that was priceless. Things I always wanted to say, even to Bessarion.’ He shook his head. ‘Of course, you’re a dead man.’

Swan shrugged. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Omar Reis wants me dead. The Sultan wants me dead. I’m not sure that Cardinal Trevisan is even worthy of my notice.’

Bembo reached out and embraced him. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps we will win a signal victory,’ he said. ‘And in Venice, everyone will know who the architect was.’

Swan bowed drunkenly. ‘When do we go aboard?’ he asked.

Bembo pushed his friend back into a chair. ‘I will go now. You come when the moon is full.’

And then Clemente came. ‘You went to Mithymna without me,’ he said bitterly.

‘Sorry,’ Swan said. ‘I had to.’

Clemente was sullen, fetching water and then soap. ‘You make me think I am someone,’ he said finally. ‘I want to be someone. Not just a servant, even though …’ He looked away. ‘It’s a good life, being your servant. But I want to be …’ He shrugged. Swan recognised that it was his own shrug, and he smiled.

‘Clemente, the next time someone needs to get smuggled into a fortress ringed by Turks, you can go,’ he said.

Clemente smiled. ‘Bless you,’ he said. ‘When Kendal’s a gentleman, I want to be your archer.’

Swan nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said.

Clemente whooped. ‘You won’t regret it, Illustrio,’ he said. ‘Par dieu. Grazie mille, capitano.’

Swan smiled, washing away the blood. He was covered in bruises that made no sense; inside his bicep, both elbows, a big, angry welt over his ribs. Clemente stepped out, and Swan changed towels. There was blood coming out of the welt on his ribs.

He heard Clemente step back in, and Swan was exploring the welt which now appeared to be a very shallow penetration. He’d almost died. The blow had gone through the maille; when had that been?

There had been some fighting by the galleys …

A cool hand touched his back, and he realised that he’d been a fool and that his unguarded back was to the door …

The ‘assassin’ laughed.

‘And again you smell of fish, Messire Swan,’ Donna Theodora said.

Swan turned to find the Byzantine princess standing by the wooden washtub.

‘At least this time I’m doing something about it,’ he said. He realised that, all things being balanced, he wanted her desperately; as a refuge; as a place of peace. Not because of her body, but because she was a peer; she knew …

‘You look as if you lost a terrible fight,’ she said. She was fully clothed and he was naked. ‘Those are some remarkable bruises.’

He nodded. ‘Anyone who fights wears these,’ he said. ‘In a way, they are signs you are alive; blows that didn’t kill you.’

She put a finger on the wound over his ribs and the slight salt of her hand stung him. She cocked her head to one side.

Swan considered crushing her to him, but she was wearing a small fortune in Greek silk and instead he took a towel and began to dry himself. But then he stooped like a falcon and kissed her.

She put her hands on his naked back. They ran all the way down to the base of his buttocks and back up; a long kiss.

‘You are considerate not to get blood on my gown,’ she said. ‘There is no more Greek silk like this; the Turks have it all. Come and unbutton me, then. You are a surprisingly patient man.’

Swan unbuttoned her, thinking of nothing. She folded the gown and the undergown carefully, and then took off her shift at the window, and her hose. To Swan, watching her strip her hose down her legs was perhaps the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he carefully walled his mind against the images of the men burning to death on the beach with her breasts and her thighs and the slim enticement of her sides as she leaned forward to unbuckle a garter.

‘Pregnancy?’ he asked at a most intimate moment.

She smiled lazily. ‘Unlikely,’ she said. ‘I have had a few opportunities.’ She leaned back as if going to sleep and smiled to herself.

Later, Clemente knocked. Swan had fallen asleep with Theodora lying atop him, and he awoke, startled. She smiled.

They were stuck together with his blood. She laughed. ‘So this is the blood of brave men I’ve heard so much about,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it washes off my skin more easily than my silk. Come, love,’ she said in Greek. ‘Rise and go.’

When Swan was dressed, she kissed him hungrily; so hungrily that he was for a moment almost shocked.

Then she smiled her brilliant smile. ‘Perhaps I will see you again,’ she said. ‘But never like this again. Go marry your lady, Ser Suane. I will do my duty.’ She licked the tip of his nose. ‘You go and do yours.’

She armed him, as Clemente brought in his armour; she laced every point, buckled his cuirass, checked the fit of his sabatons.

And when he was in the doorway, she said, ‘What did you think of Caterina di Orsini?’

‘I liked her,’ Swan said.

Theodora laughed. ‘Of course you did,’ she said. ‘If you win, you will buy me five more years of a good life,’ she said.

Swan thought of that all the way to the beach; of thousands of men fighting to the death so that the Gatelussi princes could enjoy a few more years of classical parties by moonlight. He wondered, and not for the first time, whether Islam might be … better. Or simpler …

He doubted it.

He boarded Bembo’s galley in armour, shook hands with Juan di Silva, and Bembo embraced him.

‘We are raising both anchors together, to show those Genoese dogs how sailors go to sea,’ Bembo said.

‘Has it ever occurred to you that we are the villains and not the heroes in this romance?’ Swan asked.

Bembo turned his head. ‘Once,’ he said to the early morning darkness, ‘once I was breaking a man’s jaw against a stone in Rome. He was screaming.’ Bembo spat over the side. ‘A year later I saw him begging in the Forum. I had done worse than kill him.’ He shrugged. ‘We are bad men, Tommaso. We kill, we fornicate, we sodomise.’

‘That’s on you,’ Swan said. ‘The last one.’

Bembo laughed. ‘Prude,’ he said.

‘So?’ Swan asked.

Bembo issued an order, loud in the silent darkness, and Swan felt the ship alive under his sabatons. Sailors ran by, bare feet slapping the deck.

‘Do you think that the cause matters?’ Bembo asked quietly.

‘No, I’m asking you.’ Swan said.

Bembo sighed. ‘I think men are animals,’ he said. ‘And if we work very hard, we can be something better. Perhaps it is mere vanity, but instead of counting up sins, I count up triumphs; people I do not kill; moments when I am rational. I find that in Venice, with my wife, I have no need to break men’s lives.’ He shrugged again. ‘Perhaps this is just a story I tell myself. But I am done with this, English. I no longer want to kill or die. I want to drink wine with my friends. I suspect that some day, you and I and Loredan and Clemente will want to tell each other about our moments of triumph, but for the moment, it’s all shit to me.’

‘Amen, brother,’ Swan said. ‘Let’s go fight the Turks.’

As the sun rose over Asia, Swan was standing amidships, fully armoured, with Columbino and Di Silva. Behind him, in full harness for the first time, was Will Kendal, now ‘William Kendal’. The former archer kept walking about the narrow deck, as if testing the limitations of his new carapace. Clemente was spitting over the side, a form of contemplation that young Italians seemed to enjoy. Bembo was astern, watching his great lateen as they started to angle in with the shore. Mithymna was just becoming visible; the Venetian squadron would be the first to weather the long point on which the ancient fortress stood, and to open the deep bay with Petra and her islands at the bottom. Far off to the west, Swan could see the ruins of Antissa, a Genoese colony destroyed by the Turks before Constantinople fell.

Swan had a sabatoned foot up on the rowing frame, and there were three big, strong men just under his leg, grunting at each fetch as the heavy oars swept back and forth at a steady pace, keeping up the ship’s speed as the lateen was taken in.

For battle.

A red pennon rose at Corner’s masthead, and the Jesu e Maria fired a swivel gun off her stern rail.

Bembo pointed to one of his aristocratic young men, and a small bronze piece on the stern rail of Bembo’s Santa Maria Magdalena fired, and he, too, broke out a red pennon.

Enemy in sight.

One of the men under Swan’s leg spoke up with the informality of the eve of battle.

‘We gonna take ’em, Cap’n?’ the man said in Veneziano-accented Italian.

Swan tucked his unhelmeted head under the beam so he could look the man in the eye. ‘For once in your life,’ Swan said, ‘you have the wind, the tide, and the ships. If we fail to win today, we have no one to blame but ourselves.’

The rowers chuckled. ‘Messire Bembo says if we take the Turk camp, there’s shares,’ another rower said cheerfully.

‘Messire Bembo is a brilliant captain,’ Swan agreed. He drank off a half-cup of wine to steady his nerves. Something felt wrong; perhaps it was having lain with Theodora. He held Sophia’s sword in his hand and he knew that he had sinned. Sophia would never ‘understand’. And in the warm Mediterranean light of day, he didn’t feel like a ‘man of the world’ but like a foolish sinner who had had every opportunity to do the right thing and had failed.

He wondered whether Sophia’s sword would break in his hand. He wondered whether he would die; whether Bembo would die; whether Kendal or Clemente would die.

He clanked his way back to the command deck, where Bembo stood with his helmsman and his marines. Swan took the opportunity of the lowering of the lateen to look to leeward and watch the coast; to see the Turks running for their ships. Their panic was evident in every man’s posture and desperation.

Surprise, then.

He saluted Bembo, and Alessandro bowed; not sarcastically, either. There was an informality to the moments before a fight; but there was also a sense of finality.

‘Tommaso,’ Bembo said, smiling. He hardly ever addressed Swan by his first name. ‘By God, Tommaso, you look like a knight from a fairy tale; perhaps off to rescue a princess.’

Swan winced. ‘I have a letter for Sophia,’ he said, and took the letter out of the top of his cuirass.

Bembo nodded. ‘I have a letter for my wife,’ he agreed, and handed it over to Swan, who tucked it inside his breastplate through the arm opening.

Then Bembo leaned over, his eyes on the coast, and kissed Swan on the cheek. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘You are the best friend I’ve ever had.’

Tears started in Swan’s eyes. For a moment he could not speak, and then he mastered himself. ‘Then let’s live to enjoy life in Venice,’ he said.

Behind Bembo’s shoulder, they were opening the harbour of Mithymna rapidly. The coast on both sides of the headland was full of ships, beached or on short hawsers. They were launching, but any veteran could see that their guns were gone, and as planned, the Genoese swooped on them like striking falcons, their guns roaring away to open the battle, shooting into the Turkish and Asian galleys like hunters shooting rising ducks.

A gun fired from high on the fortress. There, well above the smoke, hung a great banner, white with a red cross; the most ancient of the Crusader banners. On the lower ground to the west of the fortress, an assault was going in; the Turkish infantry packed together, trying to get out of the gully.

Or trying to run for their ships.

It was luck, or the will of God, but the Turks had been caught in the very moment of an assault, and their crews were unable to launch most of the ships on the north side of the fortress. The Christian fleet should have turned into the beaches and begun putting fire into those ships.

But they did not. Instead, the Venetians and the Knights of St John weathered the headland and rowed by at cruising speed, their bows pointed deep into the bay, and Swan hoped that Omar Reis’s heart died within him as he watched twelve warships pass by his trap, ignoring the bait and rushing to engage his ambushers.

‘Now we see,’ Bembo said.

Right off the bow, two squadrons, one of eight and one of ten ships, emerged from the islands at the base of the bay. They had all their marines and all their guns. They would have fallen on the unprotected flank of any attack on the beaches, but now they would go head to head and beak to beak against the Venetians and the Christian pirates called the Knights of St John.

The centre-line gun on Santa Maria Magdalena spoke. The whole ship seemed to stop for a moment, and the ball slapped the water a hundred paces off the bow and then skipped like a rock thrown by a boy; skipped again, faster than thought, and struck the lead Turkish galley with an explosion of splinters, shattering the enemy ship’s starboard cathead and ruining the precision of her rowing.

And then everything that had happened very slowly seemed to happen very fast; the temporal acceleration that Swan had always experienced in combat. The closing speed of the ships, at first leaden, like Swan’s nervous limbs, suddenly seemed to increase to supernatural levels; Swan’s sweat soaked through his arming clothes between one thought and another as the sun climbed higher, and when Clemente handed him his fine, light armet, it was already hot to the touch. He put it on, and by the time he had the visor open, Bembo was straining like a hound on a leash, and the wounded Turkish galley filled Swan’s vision, wallowing a quarter off course as her rowers desperately tried to turn.

‘Too fast,’ said the helmsman, a professional seaman. He was dispassionate; merely sharing information.

Bembo shook his head. ‘Brace!’ he roared. Every man aboard used both hands for the ship; Swan could see Kendal by the mainmast, his short fighting spear trapped between his body and the mast with his armoured arms wrapped around the tarry rope.

‘… Spiritus sancti …’ muttered the helmsman.

They struck. The hull rang like an anvil struck by a hammer, and the long pole ram, protruding amidships and meant only for ripping rowers and oars, broke with a crack that might have signified the end of the world. The mainmast snapped forward like a swordsman’s best fendente and then whipped back, and every man on the helm deck fell flat, regardless of what they were holding.

But the timbers were almost new, and the Bembos were rich, and the Arsenal remained the finest shipyard in the world. Nothing gave; a seam appeared in the bow, and water came in, but nothing that a professional crew could not repair.

The Turkish ship, struck almost precisely on her shattered cathead, simply folded like an invitation to a ball, her stem broken, her wreckage pressed down under the Santa Maria Magdalena’s forefoot. The Venetian galley’s pine-tarred hull slipped over the wreckage and nothing tore loose or caught, and for a terrible moment, Swan could look straight down into the drowning faces of fifty or a hundred men, Turks and Christians, janissaries and rowers, all doomed together, already ten feet under and going down, like a vision from a particularly virulent hell; their mouths open in desperate supplication and their lungs already full of water.

Swan crossed himself. And tore his eyes away.

The Turks were skilled sailors, and they had formed in two lines; the second line to defeat any intruders into the first line, in the accepted fashion of a style of combat that was itself more than two thousand years old.

But Alessandro Bembo’s ship had gone in like the sudden strike of a viper, or the longest lunge of a great swordsman; so sudden and so terrible that the second-line ship was in no position to strike, still two hundred paces away.

Swan didn’t even think. He ran forward, aware that Santa Maria Magdalena would not deliver another crushing strike, even if her timbers could stand it.

‘On me,’ he called as he raced down the central catwalk. A little room for fear, now; knowledge that if he went over the side, he’d go straight to the bottom, twenty fathoms or so, in his fine Milanese plate.

A little room for fear, and a little to think; of Jesus; of Sophia; of Theodora, without guilt; about Alessandro Bembo and friendship.

Swan arrived in the bow. One of Bembo’s marines was just loosing a heavy arbalest over the bow; the weapon unleashed its bolt with a crack like lightning. Under their feet, Swan could see the gunners ramming something home in the centre-line gun.

A Bohemian-German voice called, ‘Ready!’

‘Fire as we ram!’ called Bembo from amidships.

The Santa Maria Magdalena turned very slightly, her rowers now at full stretch again. The Turkish galley was larger; perhaps four frames longer, and full of men.

Swan was old and cynical, at least to outward appearances. But he was not immune to glory in all its outward manifestations, and there he was, at the very front of his armoured men, deep in the enemy line.

He turned his back on the Turkish archery. A cane shaft shattered on his helmet and he winced, but he opened his visor and looked back and down on forty men-at-arms, most of whom he’d led to Belgrade and to Mistra.

‘Today we are the Spartans,’ he shouted. ‘And today, by God, we will triumph.’

So final was his tone, so absolute his belief, that forty men believed him. Forty visors were snapped closed, and men looked right and left with the confidence of the elite team, the belief of victory that is itself victory.

The Turkish galley made no attempt to manoeuvre. Twenty yards out its guns fired in a ripple. The centre-line gun’s ball struck the mainmast of the Santa Maria Magdalena and cut it off clean; a rain of lethal oak splinters ripped through the rowers, killing a dozen and maiming more. One of the falconets missed entirely, its whole load of hail shot wasted on the water a few inches from the Venetian ship’s bow; the other falconet’s hail shot fell on the barrier of oak that protected the marines, tore gaping holes in it, and passed through. But stones and oak splinters, utterly lethal to unarmoured rowers, now had to contend with a bulwark of men in steel.

Swan found himself lying on his back. His eyes stung, his chest felt as if he’d been kicked by a mule, and his shoulders both felt as if they’d been dislocated, but he took a breath and then another.

He got to his feet just as the ships touched, their closing speed only six or seven knots. Swan fell again, found his right shoulder was damaged, and then the guns under his feet fired; however horrible the enemy hail shot at twenty paces, enough gunners had survived to return the favour with their muzzles touching the enemy ship’s bow.

Swan was up with no memory of getting to his feet. No one was coming off the Turk; Swan didn’t have to think. He croaked something and used Sophia’s sword to cut the boarding plank loose, and then, first man, he ran down from the safety of the closed quarters, across the little foredeck in an eddy of sulphur smoke and hell, and he jumped aboard the Turkish galley.

The Turkish centre-line gun was dismounted, having taken the Venetian fifty-pound ball right on the crown. The tube had been driven back and a little off-kilter, smashing the bulwarks on both sides and making a terrible, grizzly ruin of all three gun crews.

Both ships rocked in the sunlight, enveloped in smoke. Arrows whickered above Swan’s head, and a swivel gun fired close by him.

‘This way,’ said a disembodied voice, and Swan followed another steel-clad figure to the port side, where there was a gap full of blood and meat like a butcher’s shop. But one push and they were through, into a maelstrom of weapons; Swan was hit an uncountable number of times.

His armour took it all. Leaning forward like a man going into a heavy wind, he reached out, blind because the impact of a spear on his helmet turned his head. But he got his sword on a spear haft and reached blindly for the fingers; caught another spear in his left hand and pulled, went forward into the weight of his opponent’s desperation, and then Sophia’s sword was gone and he was using his armoured hands and knees and his steel-pointed sabatons.

Then he was breathing like a horse after a mile race, and he was standing with a dagger in his right hand and a scimitar in his left, broken off a hand-span from the hilt, and Juan di Silva was next to him on one side and William Kendal on the other, and he could see the length of the ship to the command deck. The rowers were open mouthed; Christian slaves, paralysed with hope and fear.

A single archer amidships leaned out from the mainmast and aimed at him. He loosed.

The arrow struck Swan’s right thigh like a jousting lance and Swan fell, but the arrow had not penetrated his steel and he rose, having lost the broken scimitar. The archer had pinked Di Silva on his second shot, and Kendal, alone, was running down the gangway. Swan got his hand on Sophia’s sword; the archer raised his bow to shoot Kendal; a slave let go of his oar, rose on his bench, and plunged an iron spike into the archer’s slippered foot; the arrow went wild, and Kendal’s sword beheaded the archer.

It was the only part of the ship fight Swan ever remembered afterwards. The slave was an Irishman; Swan took him as his servant when Clemente became his archer.

But that was hours away, and the Turkish galley was cleared, no quarter offered or asked, and left to drift with Di Silva and ten men-at-arms as ‘crew’ and the surviving freed Christian slaves to get her ashore.

The Santa Maria Magdalena was already leagues away to windward, because the moment the Turkish commanders saw the failure of their trap, ships began flying off the beaches, intending not to fight but to run, stripped of guns and sometimes even of men, sails up from the first as they ran, or working their rowers to death to run upwind. A dozen or so were taken or sunk in the first moments of the rout, but the Turks were both brave and expert seamen, and they knew their business and the coast of Lesvos. They scattered like baitfish when a tuna attacks, and the papal galleys, underpaid and with mediocre crews, tended to let them go, already revelling in a victory that would bring Cardinal Trevisan and his officers glory for a decade.

But for the Venetian professionals, victory was the moment in which to ensure future sea control, and the Genoese and Order galleys shared that professionalism, turning out to sea after their combats and raising their sails where they could.

Santa Maria Magdalena gave chase to a long red galley, a capitana or a bastarda command ship. The loss of the mainmast was temporary; even as the rowers powered the ship smoothly through the perfect blue water and the men-at-arms bandaged each other, drank wine and tried not to let their thoughts slip into the dark abyss of extinction, the sailors were raising the great mast again. The operation was incredible to Swan, and so seaman-like, so risky, and so expert that it kept him from his post-combat depression of spirit as he watched, fascinated.

‘Can you steer?’ Bembo asked his friend.

‘Yes,’ Swan said, eager to help. The great tiller was put in his hands, and he stood under the red and yellow awning, decorated with the Lion of St Mark, enjoying the shade, the breeze, and the feeling of power, as the helmsman directed the removal of the mainmast stump. Six sweating men loosed the wedges and ropes that held it fast, and lifted it clear to splash over the side, while a carpenter and a dozen sailors and rowers brought the mainmast aboard with the care that might have been lavished on the Doge himself; it had dragged by its stays alongside, and now they brought it aboard as the red Turkish galley slipped farther and farther ahead. To starboard, those on Fra Tommaso’s galley went aboard a dirty blue Turkish galley and took her in a hail of gunfire and crossbow bolts.

The rowers pulled on, smoothly, ignoring the fact that a third of their number were dead, wounded or raising the fished mainmast. On the centre-line of the deck, the carpenter took a sharp saw and cut a new, unsplintered base to the mast; two sailors heated tar on a brazier, careful of every coal, and proceeded to wind rope around the new joinery. To Swan it went faster than anything he could have imagined; the red galley was still hull up when the sweating sailors, including Bembo stripped to his shirt, hauled the recut mainmast up with a web of ropes to the top of the foremast, or boat-sail-mast, as Swan understood it in Italian. Galley combat, and galley maintenance, were skills conducted in a polyglot jargon of Veneziano, Aragonese and Arabic, and Swan even thought he heard a Provençal term float by, about the tar.

The mast went home, and fast as thought, a dozen sailors seized lines already fastened to her tops and belayed them, fastened the mainstay, and crossed the great lateen spar, thankfully uninjured, with the sail still attached and only a little damp.

To port, the Venetian admiral, Corner, caught his quarry. There was no hail of fire; the Turkish ship suddenly swerved, and then her yard came down and her marines threw down their arms. Venice was an old friend, as well as an old enemy, of Constantinople; Venetians would avoid a massacre if they could.

‘Get him if you can!’ Corner roared as Bembo shot by, his lateen coming home in one brilliant flash of blood-red canvas that caught the setting sun like a red mirror as it was sheeted home. The whole galley heeled in the light wind. Santa Maria Magdalena was new built and clean, her tarred bottom as smooth as a lady’s hands, and her tired oarsmen drew in their oars and crossed them under each other’s benches and then relaxed, rubbing their muscles, skilled men digging their thumbs into other men’s necks.

Bembo came back along the companionway after watching the new mast for a little while. The helmsman was with him.

‘You steer like a sailor,’ the helmsman said. ‘I’ll take ’er back now, sir.’

Swan was not so old that he couldn’t glow with a compliment. He beamed. ‘Fra Tommaso taught me to steer,’ he said.

The helmsman settled to the tiller and grunted. ‘Aye,’ he said. He had nothing to add.

Swan looked at Bembo. ‘That was amazing,’ he said. ‘But surely we’ll never catch him.’

Bembo smiled. ‘I will not tempt Fortuna,’ he said. ‘I will forbear making grand prognostications. But you will note that none of these men calls on me to put about and run for the beach and the loot and the wine.’

Swan gave a low whistle. ‘Omar Reis?’ he asked.

Bembo shrugged. ‘Someone with a big turban, anyway,’ he said. ‘You fought brilliantly. It is very odd to watch you fight while I stand giving orders.’

Swan smiled wide. ‘My friend, less than six months ago, you fought while I gave orders. It seems only fair.’ He flashed on the moment when he was in the bulwark, without a weapon, using his hands and his feet to clear space. His gorge rose, and then he was master of himself.

The sun was setting.

‘Get some sleep,’ Bembo said.

‘How long?’ Swan asked.

‘I do not like to tempt fate,’ Bembo said.

‘Four hours,’ the helmsman said. He shrugged expressively. ‘Eh, Illustrio, it could be never or two days, but I have five ducats on four hours.’

Swan nodded. He trusted experts; it saved time and effort. He’d seen them raise the mainmast; they knew what they were about.

He lay down in his armour, and went almost instantly to sleep.

‘Time, capitano. Time,’ whispered Clemente. Swan came awake instantly, his chest and shoulders a stiff mass of pain and tension.

Swan was trying to piss over the side without fouling his braes or his steel when Bembo spoke. ‘He ran for the coast of Asia at darkness,’ Bembo said. ‘We cut him off from the coast and he tried a tack for Lemnos. Now we’re back to Asia and he has to fight.’

But the Turks never intended to fight. Jibing at the last moment, they went across the wind, their lateen groaning, and in the very last light of day they passed almost before the very tip of the Venetian galley’s bow, as the Venetian guns fired yet again into the Turk’s stern. A crackle of small arms, angry red stars in the falling light, sent balls and arrows and bolts back into the Venetian’s bow; half her gunners were dead or wounded.

The Turk was visibly sinking. One of the heavy balls had hit at or below the waterline.

She turned suddenly across the wind, to starboard; so suddenly that Bembo and his helmsman were fooled, and they went past the Turk at the edge of darkness, and again arrows and bolts flew. Twice the Venetians got a grapnel aboard the Turk, and twice brave Turks cut the grapples free, and the Venetian shot past and began a wide turn, sleepy oarsmen suddenly on their benches and the sail coming down in the last red-grey light as the Turk pulled heavily, his ship sinking, for the beach at the very tip of the land to the north and east. It was a race of turtles after a day of work; two exhausted ships, and the Turk carrying a heavy weight of water, but every sinking ship is full of desperate heroes, and the Turks kept their bow aimed at the beach and struck at full reach, almost ramming speed, sheering off their mast so that the sail fell across the ship.

Bembo was more cautious, his quarry secure, and he coasted in, grapnels flying again, but the Turks were not staying to fight. A few janissaries sold their lives dearly at the edge of night, holding the midships catwalk for a minute and then another. Swan went sword to sword with a man in a beard as long as his arm; the man had a kilij and a round shield, and he and Swan danced back and forth in the failing light, the Turk reaching for the joints in his harness with his hooked point and Swan carefully hoarding his strength. He was making an offering to the God of War, or perhaps to the Prince of Peace.

He intended the man to live.

So he danced back and forth, his thigh muscles screaming, as the janissary cut and cut, until he lured the tired man into cutting at his extended and armoured leg, hooking his point for the back of Swan’s knee with the desperation of fading hope and fading muscle.

Swan voided the leg, passed it back while rotating his sword from the head guard he’d been in to a lower guard. It was one of Vadi’s duelling moves, not intended for an open deck, but Swan felt the power of victory; he swept his adversary’s blade up and to his right and powered forward, reaching far along the deck with the leg he had just voided, his empty hand taking the rim of his opponent’s shield and slamming it back into the man’s nose, Sophia’s slim-bladed sword passing behind his adversary’s head instead of running him through the throat, and Swan threw the man to the deck with a turn of his hips, put his left foot on the man’s sword hand, and pointed his sword at the next man.

‘Yield, and all of you will be spared,’ he said in Turkish.

The next Turk, blond and blue-eyed and tall, fell to his knees and dropped his weapon. Behind him, an older man stood his ground with a partizan for a few beats of their hearts.

‘Fuck it,’ he said in passable Spanish, and dropped his partizan.

They didn’t get Omar Reis. They got Idris, who was wounded and could not run up the beach, and they got a dozen other Turkish officers, men of standing in Edirne and Constantinople. The janissaries were not worth a ransom; Swan would not see them enslaved.

‘I made a vow,’ he said, deeply pleased with himself. The three survivors, the middle-aged officer, the old man and the blond boy, were released at dawn with bandaged wounds, to carry the news of Idris’s capture home. Bembo divided the spoils of the command ship on the beach.

‘Probably the most authentically classical thing you’ve ever seen,’ Bembo commented to Swan.

Swan snorted. But he’d fulfilled his vow; the three Turks lives were his sacrifice to his own gods for safety and luck and Sophia.

‘I want to go home,’ he said.

‘Me too,’ Columbino said. ‘Let me see Sienna again, dear God, and I will never complain about fucking Ghibellines again.’

‘Yes you will,’ said his squire.

‘Bast,’ the Italian said.

The relief of Mithymna was a marvel throughout the Christian world; the capstone in a year of Christian victories, or so it seemed at the time. But the Turkish fleet really was shattered; all their best ships were taken or burned, and a dozen of their best captains dead or chained to Genoese oars or awaiting ransom in Venice.

So, of course, the Christian fleet split up almost immediately in a fog of curses and acrimony, in the best Homeric tradition of disagreement over spoils. The papal troops who overran the Turkish encampment had no intention of dividing spoils with the Genoese and Venetian ships who had done all the fighting; Cardinal Trevisan pretended to be above such matters while his agents attempted to seize every bezant available.

Swan went ashore on only the second day to pay his respects to Caterina di Orsini. She received him as if he, and not the papal legate, had relieved Mithymna; a dozen hand-gonners fired a volley from the ramparts, Francesco Della Rovere escorted him inside with a deep bow and kissed him on both cheeks, and Swan introduced the young Italian knight to Fra Tommaso.

Orsini received Swan in a solar, wearing a brocade gown in the latest Roman fashion. There was no sign on her of a woman who had killed a dozen Turks sword to sword in the dark, except for a long line over her eyebrows where her helmet had left a permanent, or semi-permanent, impression on her forehead.

‘Now you will go home to Italy,’ she said.

‘I expect we will campaign here all summer,’ Swan said.

Orsini shook her head. ‘Trevisan is breaking up the fleet so that no one can question his accounts,’ she said bitterly.

Swan swore. ‘We could take Smyrna!’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘The Pope should have better taste in admirals,’ she said. ‘You Venetians will be the first to be sent home. I wrote a letter to my brother, Orsini Primo, and another to my friend Catherine. I miss her; I hope she will come out and visit me.’ Orsini looked out of the window. ‘Before the end comes.’

‘The end?’ Swan asked.

‘This is the last gasp, is it not?’ Orsini said. She shrugged. ‘Listen, Ser Suane. I am not so old, but I know the way of the world. The Pope does not have another fleet; it is common knowledge now that this one is rotting under his feet. Eh?’ She smiled. ‘Perhaps we have five more years in our little paradise. What is that worth?’ She made a moue. ‘At any rate, I have done you a favour. I have written to my brother, Orsini Primo. I have told him that you saved my life and honour; I have begged that you be received as a friend. I urge you to seize this moment to end your quarrel with my house.’

Swan went down on one knee. ‘I vow it,’ he said simply. ‘I am in a mood to end quarrels.’

She nodded; no smile, but a serious look. ‘It is not an opportunity that will come again. You have many enemies for so unimportant a man. But by God, messire, you saved all my bacon; I will see that my father has a try at saving yours. Beware. Trevisan hates you. Did you really call him a fool? And offer to…hmmm…sodomize him?’

Swan just laughed. In the end, Orsini laughed too.

Later, with her heavy, long letter in the bosom of his best Venetian doublet, he stood on the deck of the Santa Maria Magdalena, watching the very last of the sun over distant Antissa.

‘You made peace with the Orsini in Greece,’ Bembo said. He smiled. ‘You went to war with them on a whim, fighting in the streets of Rome.’ He took a long drink of wine. ‘Why don’t you go home to England?’ he asked.

Swan looked at the sunset. ‘England is pulling itself apart,’ he said.

‘You would have to declare yourself,’ Bembo said. ‘You, Cardinal Beaufort’s bastard.’

‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘I may be deeply cynical about the Holy Father; I may think crusading is a waste of men and time; I may be contemptuous of the Greeks and tired of the Order.’ He took a deep breath, smelling the scented air of Lesvos. ‘But the stasis in England … is one group of greedy thugs fighting another for the spoils. I love London.’ He shrugged. ‘But I can love Venice, too, and not be hanged, drawn and quartered for my thoughts.’

Bembo smiled to himself, perhaps thinking of his own years of exile and his own oft-repeated bitterness. And later, the speed of his return home.

‘Umar?’ he called. ‘More wine.’

The Venetian squadron broke up off Negroponte. The admiral bore away for Cyprus and Alexandria, safe from the prying eyes of his Genoese rivals, and leading two smaller galleys, swiftly refitted in the Negroponte yards from war to trade. Bembo’s older friend Zembale took his ship into Monemvasia to load with wines.

Bembo ran for Venice and home; he had the admiral’s dispatches and he didn’t need a cargo to pay for his summer, although his oarsmen had filled every space between the benches with wine and saffron and unaccustomed Lesbian sugar and illegal cinnamon bark.

‘You don’t care?’ Swan asked.

Bembo shrugged. ‘My father is paying,’ he said. ‘And my oarsmen will remember this for many years; that I allowed them to make a profit while I paid the freight. And anyway,’ he said, and indicated a small Byzantine chest of ivory he’d taken as his share of the spoils, ‘it’s full of pearls.’

Swan had a small bag of sapphires, full of fire; his summer had not been wasted either. His men all had good loot and pay coming.

‘What’s for them, in Venice?’ he asked.

Bembo shrugged. ‘Columbino will never work for Venice,’ he said. ‘He loves you but he hates us.’ He shrugged. ‘If you keep your company, I can see to it that they are hired on, like the Colleneschi. If you want shot of them, let Columbino have them. He’s a good captain; he doesn’t need you any more.’

‘That stings,’ Swan said.

Bembo smiled, already less a capitano and more a great nobleman. ‘Neither do you need him,’ he said. ‘What will you do now?’

Swan shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

At Swan’s urging they put in at Glarenza. It was a long shot, even for Swan, but the Despot’s spouse was in residence, and when he sent his name into the castle, the chamberlain, Dukas, came and fetched him. He went ashore with Kendal at his back, both of them dressed well, and they were received like princes at the castle. Despot Thomas was in the south, collecting taxes and, as his chamberlain said, reducing the bandit population. Swan was reminded of how much he liked the man, and they talked over a cup of wine about Plethon and Mistras and the rebirth of the classical world, until a demure maid came and fetched Swan and left Kendal to make witticisms with a master.

Swan entered Catherine Zaccaria’s presence for the first time through a silk curtain, and was instantly struck dumb, the way some men are struck by a bolt of lightning.

‘Oh, God,’ he said aloud, in English.

The lady so addressed blushed. She was seated in a deeply recessed window seat framed by the glorious stonework of the old Frankish masons and the little Green Men who decorated all the beam ends.

‘Ser Suane,’ she said in her deep voice. ‘Are you unwell?’

Swan went down on one knee, more to keep his knees together than to pay her the respect she deserved.

Catherine Zaccaria was the spitting image of Sophia Accaiaoulo. Older, more mature; perhaps thirty-five to Sophia’s twenty-three, as he could see now that the shock was over.

He took a deep breath and grinned. ‘My lady, I have a letter for you from Caterina di Orsini of Lesvos,’ he said, and presented the letter. ‘And may I say, with nothing but reverence, that you are the very image of my own lady, Sophia Accaiaoulo of Florence?’

She laughed and took the letter. She tapped it on her hand. ‘Hardly a surprise, since all my family are Accaiaoulos on my father’s side,’ she said. ‘But I believe that I can draw a compliment from your observation, if I am clever; either I resemble a woman of half my age, or your lady-love is a terrible old woman for you.’ She smiled brilliantly, and Swan had the disconcerting idea that he was face to face with his intended bride in her fortieth year, and the feeling was so powerful that he turned his head, trying to imagine what he would be like at forty-five.

‘My love …’ Swan began, and found he had no words to describe Sophia that would do justice to her.

The Princess Zaccaria smiled again. ‘How pleasant to see a young man actually in love,’ she said. ‘Like a story. Please give me a moment with my friend.’ She opened the heavy letter, and there passed a curious half-hour which Swan was to remember later as very pleasant; wine was brought to him, and the walls had pictures as good as those in an Italian palace, and he walked among them, patted an old deer hound, and glanced through a magnificent old Frankish book of hours while Catherine Zaccaria read her friend’s letter, complete with chuckles, grunts of astonishment and peels of girlish giggles.

She looked up. ‘Apparently I am not the first woman to see in you a knight from an old romance,’ she said with a half-smile. ‘My Caterina was most taken with you.’ Her eyes narrowed slightly. ‘Caterina tells me many things, but I must seize on one for my husband. This Cardinal Trevisan; he has directly collected the tithes from the Florentine banks wherever he has touched. Do you know this?’

Swan thought that over for a moment. ‘I do not think I knew that, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘I wish I had.’

Princess Zaccaria glanced at a ledger by her prie-dieu. ‘My lord refused to allow the cardinal’s people to take the gold,’ she said. ‘Later, we found that six thousand florins had been taken against our orders. Do you think that you could obtain redress for us?’

Swan shook his head; it was not the interview he’d expected, but an ugly resurfacing of the whole Spinelli business that he wanted dead and buried.

Or did he?

‘It was your money?’ Swan asked.

Zaccaria shrugged beautifully. ‘Arguably it was the Holy Father’s money,’ she said. ‘But as you know, out here, gold is precious and reserves are few. That money had two or three owners. I am frank with you, you see. I suppose you will be family. Sophia. Of Florence. With a brother, perhaps?’

‘Yes, Your Grace. About my age or a little older.’

‘Antonio’s children, no doubt. Second cousins.’ She smiled her brilliant smile and looked, for a moment, just like Sophia, and Swan’s heart stopped. ‘Poor as a church mouse?’ the princess asked.

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

The princess nodded. ‘And you will live in Venice?’ she asked.

‘That is our plan. If she will have me,’ Swan said.

‘I expect I will need friends in Venice soon,’ the princess said. She went to a coffer and opened it with a key from her bosom and lifted out a ring. ‘Give this to your bride from her great-aunt,’ she said.

It was a fine ruby; big and red, well set in red gold. ‘It was Nerio Accaiaoulo’s,’ she said. ‘He gave it to a lady and it recently came back to me. Give it to your lady that it may stay in her family, with my blessings.’ She smiled, and Swan kissed her hand.

‘Is it possible,’ Swan asked, greatly daring, ‘that when Trevisan demanded the gold, he sent a note?’

Princess Zaccaria met his eyes directly; it was like a little shock. ‘Let me ask my man of business,’ she said. ‘If it can be found, shall I send it to you?’

Swan bowed. ‘If I can arrange the correct meeting,’ he said, ‘it is unlikely, of course, but possible, that the money could be returned.’

She smiled bitterly. ‘Tell the Holy Father that when he took the gold from us, he killed us. That his fleet is useless unless we can defend ourselves; borrow money, raise crops, fortify, and train. He took all that. Ask him why.’

‘I do not think the Holy Father was involved directly,’ Swan said softly.

‘Of course not,’ Princess Zaccaria said with withering contempt. ‘They never are.’

That night, a messenger came aboard, forcing the guards to stand upright and pretend to be sober. He gave Swan a small packet, carefully folded and sealed with the private seal of the Princess Zaccaria. It was contained in a cover sealed by the chamberlain, who wished him fair winds and included a small scroll of Latin jokes, many very dirty, that purported to by the poet Lucian.

Swan showed it to Bembo.

Bembo nodded. ‘When Florentines bribe you, they do it beautifully,’ he said.

Swan shrugged. ‘I would have done it anyway,’ he said. ‘In fact, now I know how to do it.’

Bembo held up a hand. ‘I do not want to know,’ he said. ‘Do I?’

‘Let’s say I knew enough to bring down a very powerful man …’ Swan said.

‘Let’s say you knew enough to get yourself killed,’ Bembo said. ‘We’re going to drink wine in Venice, my brother. We are going to grow old with nothing worse than quarrels over lovers and complaints about vintages. We have killed, we have rolled in their shit; Orsini and Colonna, Medici and Malatesta. You can bring one of them down? Who cares? More of them will spring from the ground; tyrants are cheaper than dragon’s teeth in the markets of Italy. Walk away.’

Swan leaned back. His shoulder felt terrible; his whole body was still pockmarked with bruises from the fighting at Mytilene. So were his dreams.

‘Yes,’ he said fervently. Almost, he flipped the note, the hastily scribbled note ordering the removal of a fortune in gold from the coffers of the Medici factor, over the side. It was only a few words, and unsealed; not binding in a court.

But it was signed ‘Antonelli’.

It dangled on Swan’s fingertips for a long heartbeat, prevented only by his faint perspiration from fluttering over the side, and then he closed his sword hand like the striking viper he was, and thrust the crinkled vellum into the breast of his shirt. ‘I’ll keep this as insurance,’ he said.

They paused at Corfu for water. Swan stayed aboard, because he was met by a letter from Sophia, and he lay on the deck and read it a dozen times. Bembo left him after some mockery, and Swan read it, folded it around Antonelli’s note, and then had himself rowed ashore to carouse with his men, as the rest of the company had already been transferred here by the Venetian Senate and would now board two round ships for the Lagoon and the short trip home.

He was sitting in a waterfront tavern with all the world before him, marriage and fame, and a comfortable middle age, when Alessandro Bembo came into the taverna looking as if he’d seen a ghost.

‘What is it?’ Swan asked.

Bembo looked everywhere in a single panicked glance. ‘Not here,’ he said. He dragged Swan out into the night.

‘Loredan is arrested in Rome,’ he said.

Swan was full of good wine and camaraderie and he was slow. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Loredan, our friend, has been arrested by the Pope, and may already have been tortured.’ Bembo was recovering, but his voice was as bitter as aloes. ‘Back to the cesspool, my friend. The Holy Father’s minions are desperate, and they have decided to fight to the last ditch.’

Swan leaned suddenly against a building, uncaring if it had been used as a pissing post. ‘Fuck,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ Bembo said.

Swan straightened. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘For once, I know what to do.’

Drunkenly, in the dark, he outlined his plan to Bembo.

And when he was done, Bembo spat.

‘All or nothing?’ he asked. ‘I like it.’ He reached out for Swan’s shoulder. ‘If we do this, I want an agreement before we start. No mercy. No softness. These are bad, stupid men. Promise me; we leave no hostage and no loose end. We finish them, and go home, or die trying.’

Swan managed to laugh. ‘What an excellent time to be at peace with the Orsini,’ he said.

Bembo managed a laugh too. ‘You have the luck of the devil, but Fortuna is a fickle bitch. Imagine; you and I are going to Rome to rescue Loredan from the Pope, who hired us. With the Medici and the Orsini as allies.’

Swan stood straight. ‘The cesspool.’

That night, with little sobriety, Swan penned letters. He wrote four full pages to Sophia, with a proposal that he prayed to God she would accept. He wrote another, in a very different tone, to Cosimo di Medici via Spinelli; brief, concise and servile, with a list of names and dates. A third went to Sforza in Milan, in the same tone; almost the same note, word for word, except with different details.

He wrote out a fourth while it was fresh in his mind. He directed it to Cardinal Aeneas Picclomini, and he folded it neatly and put it in his own purse. The note for Sophia di Accaiaoulo went to Umar, who Alessandro proposed to send into Venice with the ship. Umar would have the easiest time reaching his target and the most difficult mission thereafter; he seemed delighted by the challenge. Swan sent Kendal with the notes for Sforza and Di Medici; his former archer, bearing his signet ring, would carry weight in Milan and would be known to Spinelli and probably to Medici, saving time. Kendal would have the most difficult time reaching his targets and the most dangerous route; he was also the young man Swan thought most able to kill anyone who stood in his way.

Clemente was disappointed not to be sent, and said so. ‘I can do anything Umar can do, and better,’ he said, pettishly.

‘You would not, for example, be instantly admitted to the Ca’Bembo,’ Swan said mildly. ‘Come, Clemente. We will spill rivers of blood in Rome. You will be a hero or dead. And, quite frankly, only you can make a rendezvous with a certain urchin who now holds the horses for gentlemen at the Picclomini palace.’

‘Ah, messire remembers me, then?’ Clemente said, flushing.

‘Clemente, you are now my archer. No longer my servant; I have young Padraig for that. For what it is worth, you will be my archer …’ Swan smiled. ‘We may all be taken and killed. This is a mission that passes beyond “delicate” and enters into “desperate”.’

Bembo, silent until then, chuckled. ‘But not “futile” or “suicidal”.’

Swan shrugged.

Bembo put a hand on Clemente’s shoulder. ‘We hold many cards. The only worry is that our adversaries will overturn the table.’

Clemente put a hand on his sword. ‘I swear on my mother … on Peter’s soul. I am with you.’

‘Ah, youth,’ Bembo said. ‘We accept.’

‘Now Padraig,’ Swan said. ‘Send him in.’

Padraig, the young Irishman rescued from the Turkish galleys, was of an indeterminate age between fifteen and twenty-five. He was handsome, with dark red-brown hair and a full beard. He’d been ill used; had lice and crusty old sores from having been forced to wear an iron collar, but seemed to show no ill-effects. His smile was broad, his laugh deep.

Swan wasn’t fooled, but neither did he think it his job to strip men of their armour in public.

‘Padraig, Messire Bembo and I are going on a bit of an adventure,’ he said in Italian. Padraig’s English was terrible. He spoke excellent gutter Turkish and passable gutter Italian and Leinster Gaelic, a language utterly beyond Swan’s ken. His Latin was excellent, however.

‘Sure,’ Padraig said.

‘We’re … hmmm. Very likely to be killed.’

‘Or taken and tortured,’ Bembo said.

‘Then killed,’ Swan said cheerfully.

Padraig shrugged. ‘Sure,’ he said.

Swan smiled. ‘So I will release you here in Corfu with a month’s wages,’ he said.

Padraig shook his head. ‘Why, lord?’ he asked. ‘Ha’ I fucked something up?’

Swan wrinkled his nose, possibly because he’d managed to acquire a sunburn. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are an excellent servant.’

Padraig nodded. ‘Then what?’ he asked.

‘You could die,’ Swan said.

Padraig nodded thoughtfully. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘So there’s a bonus?’

Bembo laughed. ‘And you can kill,’ he asked. ‘Can’t you?’

‘Try me,’ Padraig said.

Last, Swan sent for Columbino and Di Silva, who were awake.

‘Gentlemen, I must leave you,’ Swan said. ‘I may never come back. The matter is personal. Messire Columbino, here is your commission from me to command the compagnia; forever, or until I return. Venice will purchase the entire service if you are willing.’

Columbino flushed with pleasure and then made a gesture of extreme distaste. ‘I am not a great supporter of Venice,’ he said.

‘Just so. If I do not return in three months, you are capitano.’ Swan smiled. ‘I have one stipulation; that is, when Umar brings a certain lady to Grazias, that he and all the stradiotes are to be released to escort her where she sees fit.’

‘Donna Sophia?’ Columbino asked.

‘Assuredly not,’ Swan said. ‘A Greek lady. I will say no more.’

Columbino had grown to manhood with matters of state. ‘I understand.’

Di Silva frowned. ‘I for one do not understand,’ he said.

Swan shrugged. ‘A personal matter.’

Di Silva picked his teeth in a contemplative, Portuguese way. ‘I am at your service,’ he said. ‘In every way, my blade is at your back.’

Swan grinned. ‘Not this time,’ he said.

Columbino rose and bowed. ‘I have loved serving under you, Ser Suane. I hope you return.’ He left with the grace of a man who knows when another man is plotting.

Not Di Silva. When Columbino left, Di Silva put both hands on the heavy table and leaned across it. ‘I fucking insist,’ he said.

Swan grinned again. He and Bembo exchanged a glance.

‘Useless to tell you it’s likely to end in humiliation and death?’ Bembo asked.

Di Silva shrugged.

‘Come with Grazias, then,’ Swan said. ‘You’ll be in time for the party.’

‘Delighted,’ Di Silva said. He bowed and left them.

When he was gone, Bembo shook his head in apparent delight.

‘Two Englishman, a Portuguese, some Greeks, an Irishman, a Venetian, a deformed cripple and an infidel,’ he said. ‘Against the greatest power on earth.’

‘Nah,’ Swan said. ‘We’re not against the Sultan. We’re only going against the Pope.’

Bembo laughed and laughed, and his laugh rang across the waters of Corfu harbour and out into the night.

Swan and Padraig were both capable of sailing an open boat, and they bought a fine little fishing smack off the beach at Corfu the next morning and sailed west into the fading darkness, with the sun rising like an orb of glory behind them. The sun rose on a clear blue sky, and the Adriatic was like a child’s pond, and for several hours Swan and Padraig rowed, while Bembo made small talk and then read in the bow.

But before the sun was halfway through the sky, a breeze came up, and they set their little sail.

‘Do ye believe in God or no, lord?’ Padraig asked as they handled the sail.

‘More and more I do, Padraig,’ Swan admitted. ‘I want to,’ he said.

Padraig nodded. ‘Well, lord, the Christ has always been right with me. So I’ll say ye straight; that breeze is right over the starboard quarter, the best breeze we could want for Italy.’ The Irishman shrugged.

‘You are suggesting the hand of God?’ Swan asked.

Padraig nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Swan looked at his new servant’s face; the heavy-fleshed face of a bruiser with the eyes of a Dominican set in it. The man was bright; perhaps even brilliant. Or mad as an inmate of Bedlam.

Swan was uncomfortable with the idea of the hand of God. ‘We are going to save a friend,’ he said.

‘God loves nothing better,’ Padraig said, as if he was the very voice of the Deity. ‘And by that way, I’d be that in debt to yer lordship if you would see your way to getting me a sword an’ a dagger.’

‘By God,’ Swan said, laughing. ‘You change tack faster than this little boat. Very well, Master Padraig. In Ancona we’ll fetch you a sword.’

They sighted Bari on the first evening, a perfect crossing, and then proceeded to enjoy five days sailing up the Adriatic, coasting along Italy, landing in fishing towns and buying food every night. They were careful; Clemente did all the buying, and if they aroused suspicion, no one acted against them, although they had an unpleasant hour when they were intercepted by a Ragusan galliot and searched. There was a moment when Tom thought they might all be killed, and then the Ragusan captain was leaning over the side, telling them where to pick up lobsters.

‘It amuses me, in a dark way, that one squall, an angry Ragusan, and we’re dead,’ Bembo said quietly. ‘And Loredan is tortured to death, and the Pope gets away with the whole thing.’

‘God’s will,’ Padraig said. It was impossible to retain the appearance of servility in an open boat for five days, and all of them had dispensed with even the outward appearance of class distinction.

‘God’s will that Loredan be tortured?’ Bembo asked.

Padraig shrugged. ‘How can I know what God wills, or why?’ he asked.

‘What about free will?’ Swan asked.

‘Ah, now you have me,’ Padraig answered. They were rowing at the time, trying to get clear of the Ragusan before he changed his mind and came after them again. They hadn’t opened the false-bottomed water cask wherein Swan and Bembo had stashed all their jewels, and they hadn’t found the swords remarkable.

Fortuna.

‘I have you?’ Swan asked, as he pulled.

‘Well, I canna ken the mind o’ God, so I ha’ no real notion o’ what he does wi’ free will.’ Padraig shrugged. ‘But I think it works like this; I know full well that Messire Bembo here is too faine a gentleman to row. It’ll never foukin’ occur to he to pull an oar. So while ye and me pull all the way to foukin’ Italy, Bembo retains his free will. At any moment he might offer to row. But we know he won’t. See?’

Swan was by then gasping for breath, and Clemente was so convulsed that he hung his head over the side.

‘I’m so glad that I can keep you gentlemen amused,’ Bembo said. ‘I suppose I should row.’

‘Nah,’ Padraig said.

‘No, I insist,’ Bembo said.

Swan hauled his oar in and handed it to Bembo like a man handing over a prized sword.

‘Be my guest,’ he said.

Bembo took the oar and demonstrated, in a minute of rowing, that he was, in fact, quite expert. ‘You don’t grow up as a bastard in Venice without learning to row a boat,’ he said. ‘But my hands are soft.’

‘You can have my gloves,’ Swan suggested maliciously, allowing Clemente to vanish in another tide of laughter.

Padraig raised an eyebrow. ‘And you, my young friend.’

Clemente stopped laughing. ‘I’m a cripple,’ he said.

‘Not any more,’ Swan noted. ‘Peter fixed that, didn’t he?’

Padraig began teaching Clemente to row.

Later, they drank sour wine on an Italian beach and Padraig chuckled to himself.

‘I can’t rightly remember the last time I enjoyed rowing so much,’ he said.

Bembo looked at his hands. ‘Don’t expect me to fight anyone tomorrow, you bastards,’ he said.

‘I think the comedy here is that we are all bastards,’ Swan said.

On the sixth day they landed on an open beach just south of Ancona. Swan knew the town well; he’d lived here with Violetta.

‘Well,’ he said, when all four men had bathed in the sea and dressed in the clothing appropriate to their stations. ‘Now for it.’

They walked into Ancona and bought accommodation. Swan had gold; he purchased four horses, as well as a sword and a dagger, and before the sun was fully over the coast of Dalmatia, the four men were mounted. They passed west; up and over the ridge of mountains; through the estates once the property of the Wolf of Rimini, and now the property of the Pope, and down into the rolling hills of the Romagnol and the open ground around Rome. They moved very fast, because time was limited, and they didn’t talk, for fear of being overheard.

The last night before Rome, Swan carefully forged a travel pass for Bembo and silently handed over his donat’s ring, and early in the morning, by the Via Appia, they entered Rome as four soldiers newly come from the Order to report to the Roman commandery. No one deigned to notice them; they passed the gate after the most cursory inspection of their swords and travel document, and then they rode south, away from Bessarion’s but towards the Order’s holdings. However, they never went there; instead, they rode into Spinelli’s yard and stabled their horses until nightfall, when they cut back, quickly, arriving at Bessarion’s gate just as torches were being lit for the cardinal, who was going out.

The four men passed in without a word, and before they’d made their way to the stables, Giannis was there.

‘So,’ he said. He couldn’t hide his grin. ‘You’ve both come home.’

Swan embraced the Greek, and then Bembo did.

‘His Eminence said he recognised you,’ Giannis said. He could not stop smiling. ‘I missed you; I thought you were sell-swords looking for work.’ He sketched a bow. ‘I have to go. It’s bad out there, and I can’t let him out without swords. But he says don’t you dare stir a foot until he returns.’

Swan bowed back. ‘Giannis, we’re here until … it’s over.’

Giannis’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’re ready,’ he said. ‘When they took Loredan, I told His Eminence you’d come.’

Bembo smiled, his fine teeth glinting in the dark stable. ‘Of course, dear Giannis, if you think that, so does Antonelli.’

Giannis shrugged. ‘He has a lot of thugs,’ the Greek said. ‘We have us.’

As soon as the captain of Bessarion’s guard was gone, Swan untacked his horse and set his saddle carefully on a saddle horse, atop a beautifully made but very plain saddle. He tipped the other saddle on the straw, and ran his hands along it, until he felt what he half expected, half feared; almost, his heart stopped. He took a knife from his belt and slit the stitching, ran his thumb inside, felt the crackle of parchment and slid it out. Then, heart beating as if for combat, he hung his bridle on the wall after Padraig lit torches, and he took time with a pick to examine to his horse’s hooves.

In the kitchen, he endured the embraces of Antoine, cook and swordsman, and a dozen other staff; servants, clerks, pages and equerries.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am not here, and Messire Bembo is also not here. If you allow anyone to know we are here, we are dead men, and so, perhaps, is His Eminence.’

Bembo, who was smothered in as many prodigal returns as Swan, stepped back from a particularly affectionate page.

‘Listen to what Messire Swan says. Because if you blab, and I survive, I will find you and cut your prick off and feed it to you.’ Bembo smiled his horrible smile, and men turned white. Even Padraig looked a little pale.

The party was subdued for a little while. Then Antoine served apple tarts, and everything was fine again.

Later, the cardinal returned. He had the candles lit in his study, and Swan had the oddest feeling that three years had fallen away; there he was in his usual seat, and Bembo in his, with his booted feet up, as if no time at all had passed.

Bessarion steepled his fingers. ‘So,’ he said. ‘I cannot pretend. Your being here tells me that the crisis is reached.’

Bembo took the lead, as was his right. ‘The crisis was reached when Antonelli took Loredan, an accredited ambassador,’ he said.

Bessarion nodded. ‘I tried …’

‘Eminence, we are your men, boot and spur,’ Bembo said. ‘But in this … I am your man and an agent of Venice, too. And I say, enquire not too closely.’

Bessarion frowned. ‘That is not my way,’ he said. ‘If I am to benefit from a base act, I would know it.’

Bembo flicked a glance at Swan. ‘We have a plan,’ he said.

Swan spoke quietly. ‘It will move very fast when it moves,’ he said.

‘We ask only that you hide us for perhaps ten days,’ Bembo requested.

‘Perhaps fewer,’ Swan added.

‘And then?’ Bessarion said. ‘What if they put Loredan to the torture?’

‘Then there will be a great deal of blood,’ Swan said.

‘Some of it ours,’ added Bembo.

Bessarion looked out of the window. ‘He’s a fool,’ he said. ‘He has no notion of how to guide the Church, and he is unbelievably intelligent without being in any way capable of self-criticism. And this victory at Mytilene will double his power.’

Swan nodded. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Bembo and I will …’ He looked at Bembo. ‘Act. To save Loredan. Indeed, Eminence, I held two powerful weapons in my hands and on both the bolts are loosed. I have told Sforza and Di Medici the truth about where the money has gone.’

‘Yes,’ Bessarion said. ‘Of course you have.’ He rose, and held his rosary in his hands. ‘I ought to have done it …’

‘We spared you that,’ Bembo said.

‘Both bolts will fly to the heart of the Church,’ Bessarion said.

Swan shrugged. ‘The Holy Father made that decision,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the means are the method. You taught me that, Eminence.’

Bessarion sighed, closed his eyes, and prayed.

Then he opened them. ‘Despite everything, seeing you two gives me joy,’ he said. ‘I will hide you. But I do not think you have ten days. Antonelli hates Loredan; he has a regiment of bravos, many of them brought from Spain; and he thinks that he can still win, simply by telling lies and killing dissent.’

Swan nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.

‘Good?’ Bessarion almost erupted.

Swan spread his hands. ‘I hate fighting Turks,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate them. I rather admire them. And many of them are honest, religious men, better men than I. So I am delighted to find that Antonelli is a righteous fool, a loathsome worm, and using Spanish bravos. Good. Because, Eminence, this is going to be messy.’

‘You are speaking of fighting in the streets,’ Bessarion said quietly.

‘No,’ Bembo said. ‘This will be about murder.’

The next day, dressed as a servant, Swan saw the Spanish bravos. There were dozens; they lounged on every street corner. One tall, handsome fellow ripped a lady’s veil off and then killed her gallant for protesting; the tall Spaniard laughed at the irony of it. On another corner, the Spaniards all bowed to nuns while calling every other woman who passed a ‘whore’.

Swan was surprised, even after Bessarion’s warning, at how many of them there were, and how cowed the Romans already were. There were no Orsini in the street, and the only Colonnas were near their palazzo. The Malatesta fortress was boarded over and empty.

Swan knew how to get in, and he did. It was odd to walk through the dusty, empty hall; the curio cabinet was empty, the statue niches stripped. But he found beds and bedding, and the well had good water.

And then Swan crossed the city to Donna Lucrezia’s. He had to cross the river; a dozen Spaniards in armour toyed with him, one prodded his arse in a suggestive way, and another asked him whether he was a Jew. The servant girl behind him they called ‘whore’ and they began to prod her, to pull at her clothes.

Swan allowed himself to be mocked, and escaped after being cuffed a little and kicked once. It was no worse than his youth in London, and he stumbled out the other side of the bridge, aware that the servant girl behind was going to suffer worse – rape, most likely – and that if he acted to help her, his whole plan was in ribbons. For an hour, the indignity and horror of it fired a rage in him. When the Spaniards flung her out, he took her and carried her to Donna Lucrezia’s, his indifference shattered. Mostly, he was aflame with rage, and the frustrated anger of powerlessness; he, who was so often powerful, could not save a little servant girl from being raped by thugs. Or he had chosen not to save her; a terrible thought. Swan was almost ill with the desire to use violence.

The doorman was new, and competent. He took the girl, and then led Swan to an officer.

Donna Lucrezia came in. ‘Why the girl?’ she asked.

‘She was raped,’ Swan said. His hands shook.

‘We know all about that here,’ Lucrezia said. No smile. ‘What are you here for?’

‘I’m here to topple Antonelli,’ Swan said.

Lucrezia settled into her chair. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Why should I care?’

Swan felt disadvantaged; he was angry, and he was dressed as a servant; she was, as usual, dressed like a princess of a great house, and perfectly calm. She sat like a female cardinal, dressed all in red, surrounded by red drapes and magnificent hangings.

‘I could pay you to care,’ Swan said.

‘You could pay me?’ she asked, now curious. ‘Messire Swan. I do not wish to brag, but I cannot imagine you could afford me.’

Swan had not been invited to sit, which was not a promising start. This was the weakest part of his plan; if she sold him to the Pope or Antonelli, he was done.

‘Twenty thousand ducats and the friendship of Venice,’ Swan said.

She looked up, her magnificent eyes suddenly bright. ‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘We are, at least, talking about something that would interest me.’ She sat back and steepled her fingers exactly as Bessarion did, which Swan felt was a trifle disturbing.

‘You need Calixtus gone,’ Swan said. ‘He tried to close you. And his Spaniards are the curse of the city.’

She nodded. ‘Some busy Roman lord will take care of that eventually,’ she said.

‘You know that the Pope arrested the Venetian ambassador?’ Swan asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m in the business.’ Her tone was sharp, and even condescending.

‘I say it again. In ten days, Antonelli will be gone.’ Swan sat back.

She leaned forward. ‘Now you interest me. I know you; you believe what you say.’

‘Two names,’ Swan said. ‘Then I must ask you to choose. To act with me, or to refuse to act.’

‘I think you threaten me,’ she said.

‘Just this once,’ Swan said, ‘I do threaten, ma donna.’ He showed his empty hands. ‘I am here because I trust you to defend your own interests. Hellfire, I am here because I knew you’d care for the poor girl.’ He shrugged.

‘But if I do not act with you, you will count me an enemy,’ she said flatly.

‘So much so,’ Swan said, ‘that if you choose not to aid me, I recommend that you not allow me to leave.’ He shrugged. ‘It will come to the same in the end.’

‘What a little cock you are,’ she said. ‘So fucking sure of yourself.’ She leaned back. ‘But if I have to choose between that pig Antonelli and you, I prefer your arrogance to his. So note this; I choose you without the names. But tell them to me now.’

Relief flooded him. But he didn’t allow himself to sag; rather, he leaned forward. ‘Sforza; Medici,’ he said.

She turned first white, and then a splotchy pink. ‘Dannazione,’ she said. ‘What is my part?’

‘I need to have a meeting with the Orsini, the Colonna and Forteguerri. All at the same time. It cannot be observed and I must not be seen to be involved.’

She laughed with delight. ‘But they are all my regular guests!’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘I did think this through.’

She nodded. ‘Will you really pay me twenty thousand ducats just to arrange a meeting here?’ she asked.

Swan shook his head. ‘No. But I will pay you so much if you will find me a way in to Loredan and a way to communicate with him.’

She looked aside, and drummed her fingers on the arm of her throne. ‘I could like Venice,’ she said. ‘If this goes badly, will your beneficence extend to a house there and citizenship?’

Swan had no idea how the Ten would back him. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Jesus the risen Christ,’ she said. ‘Really? I should be nicer to you.’ She shrugged. ‘You walked in here, knowing that I might betray you.’

‘I have some insurance,’ he said.

She frowned.

He bowed. ‘Will you take care of the girl?’ he said.

She met his eyes. ‘Women are raped every day. Casually, for entertainment, by soldiers and priests and farmers. Men. Why save this one?’

‘I allowed it to happen,’ Swan said.

‘You are not God,’ she said. ‘But if it salves your conscience, I’ll save this one. Next time you are talking to God, mention me, eh?’ She coughed, and he saw a flush on her face; one of the few clear emotions he’d ever seen her register.

He gave her his best bow and withdrew, watching his back carefully.

Swan walked home by way of the used-clothing market. He had not been in a year, and he was mostly beyond such places now; in fact, as he walked, he was considering that between the Sultan’s jewel and the piece he’d stolen in Venice, he had the makings of a small private fortune. He was wondering whether the servant girl wanted to be a nun. He was thinking about the cell in the floor of a dungeon at Mistra.

He was not paying enough attention to his environment. He was thinking dark thoughts and frowning and not looking at clothes, and then, suddenly, he knew that someone was watching him.

He looked up in time to see a man point. He knew the man; one of Forteguerri’s men-at-arms. He pointed, and another man turned his head. The second man was a Spaniard. Swan knew it by his hat and his sword.

The Spaniard drew the moment he saw Swan.

Drawing in a public market in Rome, where the wearing of swords was illegal, was an act of such confidence in one’s patron, such bravado, that Swan knew, again, that the Spaniards had to be working for the Pope.

Swan jumped over a long table covered in gowns. A woman screamed.

The man-at-arms was in a short gown over hose; he had a dagger and drew it.

Swan was dressed as a servant and had no weapon at all. He cursed. That didn’t help, and he ran along the seller’s side of the tables, hip-checked a handsome young woman with dyed blond hair into her own baskets and leapt the last table like a boy leaping fences. He cleared the table and landed well on the smooth marble, an aisle ahead of his pursuers.

He went straight into the church. It was one of the oldest in Rome; it created the fine square that had become the used-clothing market of Rome. Swan entered through the side of the apse, and ran right through a little crowd of thurifers and sub-deacons and priests preparing to say mass in a side chapel. He ran across the main aisle, crossed himself automatically, and ran out the far door into a much richer square, where prosperous merchants and senior prelates walked gravely in the late afternoon sun.

The Spaniard burst out of the church at his heels.

Swan ran straight for a knight of Rhodes, resplendent in rich brown and deep red, walking with his hands behind his back, deep in conversation with a Dominican friar. Swan ran at him from the side, the Spaniard ten steps behind, and then stepped behind him, grabbed the hilt of the knight’s sword with his left hand and leapt the low wall of the square’s central fountain, the sword coming free from the scabbard as he went over the wall. He splashed into the fountain, ran through the spray of water, out the other side, and was up and onto the flagstones in three long paces, now with the knight’s sword in his right hand. It was a fine long sword in the German tradition, with a ring at the hilt to cover the hand and a long, slim blade.

The Spaniard had run like Achilles pursuing Hector and was now closing from his left, having gone around the fountain. Men were scattering; a woman called a warning to someone.

The Spaniard didn’t slow, but ran at Swan with a heavy overhand cut.

Swan covered and let the blow slide off his blade as he allowed his momentum to carry him forward another pace, crossing the Spaniard’s path and then stepping past him. The Spaniard’s blow fell on his borrowed sword like rain on a roof, and slithered down; Swan rolled his wrists and took both of the Spaniard’s hands off with his counter-cut. He dropped the borrowed sword and ran on, leaving the Spaniard on his knees by the fountain.

He ran through an arch and into the street. There was blood on his hands; he wiped them on his dark brown hose, stopped running abruptly and began to walk quickly with his head down, a servant who knew where he was going.

Forty people saw all of that, he thought. Christ, I’m a fool. Now the whole plan is ruined.

‘So Forteguerri is working with the Spaniards,’ Bembo said. ‘And at worst, they know you are here.’ He shrugged. ‘They are already desperate men. Perhaps you will drive them over the edge of reason. Why on earth would Forteguerri, who works for Picclomini, help the Spaniards, and thus the Pope?’ he asked.

Swan was still bitter. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I killed the Spaniard. Why does this make me feel better about the servant girl?’

‘Fallen humanity,’ Bembo said. ‘Original sin.’ He shrugged. ‘Have some apple tart.’

The next morning, Giannis brought them word of a gang of Spaniards working their way through the city, questioning and beating.

‘They are looking for you,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘It is only a matter of time before they come here.’

Swan looked at Bembo. ‘Spinelli’s place?’ he said.

‘I may choke on the irony,’ Bembo said. ‘Or I may not. Let’s go.’

By evening they were ensconced in Spinelli’s barn. They spent a quiet night and a very boring morning. After Swan had searched the house for the third time, he opened the vellum he’d cut from Landi Gianetti’s saddle.

‘Remind me who Gianetti was?’ Bembo asked.

Swan sat back against the barn wall. ‘Gianetti was Tommaso Spinelli’s agent in Rome,’ Swan said. ‘Antonelli ordered him brought in for questioning, but Antonelli’s thugs killed him; at least, that’s what I think happened. Gianetti is the only tie that binds all this horseshit together; he worked on the old Pope’s accounts for another banking house, before Spinelli ever came into the story.’

He had another thought. ‘I wonder …’ he said.

‘Oh dear,’ Bembo said companionably.

‘Oh dear?’ Swan said.

‘Most of my most difficult hours have resulted from you having an idea. Also, I worry about Loredan, which has a touch of irony itself. He is a proud man. He will break too easily.’

‘I’m doing my best, here. By tomorrow, Lucrezia ought to know how to reach him.’ Swan sighed.

Bembo nodded. He sat against the opposite wall. ‘Did I say I missed this?’ he wondered aloud.

Swan was looking at the vellum. It was old without being ancient. On it were musical notes in brilliant red and black calligraphy. He whistled the notes, but no treasure fell from the sky.

‘Chant,’ Bembo said.

‘A penitential psalm,’ Swan said.

‘You expected a treasure map?’ Bembo asked.

‘Frankly, yes,’ Swan said, exasperated.

Hours passed.

‘I thought Spinelli deeded this place to monks,’ Bembo remarked.

Swan shrugged. ‘There’s litigation,’ he said. ‘It’s Rome.’

Padraig brought them dinner; roast capon with saffron rice, from Bessarion’s kitchen. He was wearing a sword.

Padraig was reserved. ‘The Spaniards came last night. Bessarion protested but they had an order from the Pope. Messire Giannis says to tell you that there were no men from Forteguerri, and that His Eminence says he does not believe that there is a connection.’

Bembo was picking his teeth with his eating pricker. ‘One of Forteguerri’s men has sold out,’ he said. ‘But we have a perfect way of finding out.’

‘We do?’ Swan said.

‘I sent Cesare di Brescia to work for Forteguerri,’ Bembo said. He said it with the flourish of a man revealing a masterful hand of cards.

Swan looked at him and smiled. ‘You really are the master,’ he said.

Bembo blushed. Then he laughed. ‘Oh, the sweet praise of one’s peers. But yes. In this case, I played a card at random and it has returned as trump. Master Padraig, do you fancy being a spy?’

‘Nothing better,’ Padraig said. ‘As God is my witness, all I’ve ever wanted to be is a fuckin’ Judas, and I ha’ the red hair to go with it.’

‘I never know what he means,’ Bembo said.

‘He means yes,’ Swan said.

Padraig went off to leave the signs for Cesare to see; typical tradecraft. Bembo followed him; they had no particular reason to distrust Padraig, but there was a great deal at stake and both men were cautious.

When Bembo had not returned by the fall of darkness, Swan tried not to worry. Instead, he closed up the small barn and made his bed in total darkness, lay down, and failed to sleep. He thought about many ugly things, and his role in them, and when he did sleep, it was only to watch the drowning Turks and Christians in the sinking galley.

He awoke and drew his sword to find the barn door opening.

‘Dannazione,’ said Bembo.

Swan began to breathe again. ‘You took long enough!’

Bembo laughed. ‘You were once jealous of my little circle of “friends”,’ he said. ‘One just tried to sell me to the Pope. Jesus, it’s bad out there.’

‘So they know we’re both here,’ Swan said.

Bembo rustled in the darkness. Swan smelled a familiar scent.

‘You went to Lucrezia’s!’ he said.

‘I wanted news of Loredan and I got it. Unfortunately, one of my former friends saw me there.’ Bembo shrugged.

‘We should move,’ Swan said.

‘Do you have another bolthole in Rome?’ Bembo asked.

‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘Let’s go.’

They left through the culvert; smelly but very secret. Then they walked; Alessandro Bembo, noble of Venice, carrying a bundle of firewood that contained all their weapons, while Tommaso Suane, Knight of St Mark, carried a basket of small kindling and bark chips and their money. They didn’t have to pass a gate, but they did have to cross a bridge, and Swan baulked at the Pope’s bridge by the Castello. There were Spaniards at both ends of the bridge.

‘I’m not sure we’ll make it,’ he said.

Bembo nodded. ‘Colonna,’ he said, and the two apparent woodcutters backtracked, going west into the suburbs and finally coming to the Colonna bridge over the Tiber. Dawn was breaking.

The Colonna men-at-arms were alert and stood with drawn weapons. But they were alert for Spaniards, not woodcutters, and after some jokes and a very small bribe, they let the two men across into the old city. Swan led them by alleys to the walls of the Malatesta compound and then opened the small side porte that the Demoiselle Iso had first shown him.

Bembo laughed softly. ‘The last time I went through this gate,’ he said, ‘Bessarion was going to be Pope and Malatesta had just guaranteed me Picclomini’s vote.’

‘And everyone still called you Di Bracchio,’ Swan said, swinging it open.

The whole vast fortress was empty. Swan and Bembo camped in what had been the notary’s room, where he had sat and sealed his master’s correspondence. The furniture remained, including a trunk full of tapestries that were warm and free of rats or moths.

‘But we didn’t get Picclomini’s vote,’ Swan said suddenly into the darkness.

‘Exactly,’ Bembo said. ‘Picclomini owed Malatesta, but he let him swing on the vote and on a few other things. Picclomini is very good at the game; Malatesta has fallen, now, and he’ll never be powerful enough to exact revenge.’

‘You like him?’ Swan asked the darkness.

He heard his friend chuckle. ‘Like and dislike don’t matter much for Malatesta,’ he said. ‘But the man is nowhere near as bad as he’s painted, and he was always a good friend to Bessarion; another follower of Plethon.’

‘What did you learn about Loredan?’ Swan asked.

‘Lucrezia has a man who is one of the jailers at San Angelo.’

‘Of course she does,’ Swan said.

‘Exactly,’ Bembo responded. ‘I spoke to him, friend to friend.’

‘Money?’ Swan asked.

‘And sex. Unimportant. By now, Loredan knows that help is no more than six days away.’ Bembo paused. ‘Knowing that is … everything.’

‘I know,’ said Swan, thinking of Mistra.

‘Why do we do this?’ Bembo asked.

‘So many plots,’ Swan said.

‘Rome,’ Bembo said.

Somewhere a street or two from the old Malatesta palace a young priest visited a woman. Perhaps she was his mother; perhaps he disgraced his vows. Regardless, she put his gown and hose to air on a line and Swan stole them in the first light of day. Then, dressed as a priest, he paid a link boy to run an errand to Bessarion’s palazzo; a note of a few words so that no more food would be sent to Spinelli’s. Swan did not tell the cardinal or Giannis Trapezitoi where he was.

Swan returned to the Malatesta fortress with sweet rolls and small beer and some sausage, and the two famished men ate it all.

‘You make a very handsome priest,’ Bembo said.

‘I need to go and follow a lead,’ Swan said. ‘I need to know where Gianetti lived. And how he lived.’

‘I need to see Cesare,’ Bembo said. ‘And tomorrow both of us need to be at Lucrezia’s. Colonna, Orsini Primo, and Forteguerri.’

‘Damn,’ said Swan. ‘A day or two too early. Where is Umar?’

Bembo sniffed the last sweet roll. ‘We cannot count on any of that. We have to be ready to act with what we have; Cesare, Giannis, the evidence in your hands.’

‘It’ll have a lot less blood if we can use …’

Bembo shook his head. ‘There will be blood,’ he said.

Swan walked north, towards St Maria Maggiore. He asked monks and wine-sellers until he was in the right street; a street he’d never seen before, of new houses built solidly of brick. Nice houses.

He found Gianetti’s house easily enough, and he knocked at the door.

A servant came, eyes downcast, and as Swan was dressed as a priest, called that ‘il padre’ was there on the step.

Swan found himself introduced to a middle-aged woman.

She smiled. ‘Father!’ she said. ‘Were you a friend of my husband’s?’

She was perhaps forty-five and very well preserved; she wore unremitting black and looked well in it, and had the shoulders and carriage of a woman who rode.

‘I knew your husband slightly,’ he said. ‘He often handled my business for one cardinal or another.’

She smiled. ‘I think that he and old Spinelli owned the whole college at one time or another,’ she said. ‘Will you take wine?’

Swan was taking advantage of the time to look around. He hoped that he wasn’t too obvious but he didn’t really need to be too careful, either.

Gianetti’s house was finer than Spinelli’s in Florence. It was full of beautiful things, from the open book of hours in the mullioned window to the lady herself, who wore black wool as fine as that of any bishop. There was wood panelling and good furniture of fruitwood and most of the panelling was carefully inlaid. Not one but three fine paintings occupied the walls; St Martin, St Thomas and a crucifixion.

And the wine was quite good.

‘Can I help you in any way?’ Swan asked, to make conversation.

‘I would like to reclaim my husband’s horse and saddle,’ the woman said. ‘I love to ride, and Messire Spinelli apparently kept his horse.’

Swan smiled. ‘I will ask Cardinal Picclomini,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ the lady said. ‘You serve the august Cardinal Aeneas?’

Swan shrugged. ‘In my own poor way,’ he said.

‘My husband always hoped to be associated with him,’ the lady said.

‘You are Florentine?’ Swan asked.

‘Yes, Padre. And you? I cannot place your accent.’ She smiled.

He smiled back. ‘Veronese,’ he said.

‘Forteguerri has a traitor. Cesare will expose him and gain the credit,’ Bembo said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Christ on the cross, this room is cold even in summer.’

‘Poor Picclomini,’ Swan said. ‘I planted a stable boy on him, you planted Cesare, and then, of course, the Pope owns one of his men-at-arms.’

Bembo snorted. ‘Pride cometh before a fall,’ he said. ‘What of Gianetti?’

Swan smiled. ‘He was married, if the woman in question was actually his wife. He has a house furnished like a Medici palace. Have we ever asked Lucrezia about Gianetti? My first thought looking at his wife was that she was one of Lucrezia’s women in retirement.’

‘So?’ Bembo asked. ‘Not so uncommon.’

‘Women out of that world cost contractual money.’ Swan shook his head. ‘I begin to fear I had all this backwards. Again. Gianetti knew where the old Pope’s money was. And he spent it, carefully. He didn’t live in a palace. He only had two horses; both excellent. But in the end, someone caught him.’

‘Antonelli,’ Bembo said.

‘Yes,’ Swan said. ‘But now I have to wonder if Lucrezia has been in on this from the very beginning.’

Bembo fingered his beard. ‘I bought us clothes; nice clothes.’ He made a face. ‘I don’t see Lucrezia as a traitor,’ he admitted. ‘She could have sold me yesterday. She found someone to get a message to Loredan …’ He trailed off.

‘Or did she?’ Swan asked. ‘Look. Imagine that Donna Gianetti is a former employee of the good Donna Lucrezia. Damn; I should have stayed and watched her house.’

‘We cannot be seen,’ Bembo said.

‘Right. But imagine; Lucrezia could be the set-up agent all the way. She finds that Gianetti has too much money, she shops him to Antonelli; now we offer her money …’

‘Fuck,’ Bembo said, crude and to the point. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘We can’t proceed,’ Swan insisted.

‘I agree,’ Bembo said. ‘But even my cynicism just received a jolt.’

‘I may be starting at shadows,’ Swan admitted.

‘If you are right, Loredan has no idea we are here,’ Bembo said.

‘If I am right, then Donna Gianetti has already told Lucrezia I went there,’ Swan said.

‘We’re in for a busy night,’ Bembo said. ‘Because now we need to go, in person, to Orsini Primo and to Colonna Uno and Picclomini. And tell them not to do anything on Lucrezia’s say-so, and not to visit her house.’

‘There’s a fine way to make ourselves popular,’ Swan said. ‘You go to Orsini and I go to Colonna.’

‘Agreed,’ Bembo said. ‘And Forteguerri …’

Swan chewed silently on the thumb of a pair of stolen gloves. ‘This is a long shot,’ he said. ‘But … what if Forteguerri is working with Lucrezia?’

Bembo froze as his busy mind ground through what he knew. ‘Possible,’ he said.

‘Let him go,’ Swan said. ‘Either way, he goes to Lucrezia’s often enough. Without the other two …’

‘Right,’ Bembo said. ‘Money?’

‘I have about forty ducats,’ Swan said.

‘Give me half,’ Bembo said. ‘Fallback?’

‘If we can’t meet tomorrow,’ Swan said, ‘then tell them to wait for an invitation from the Holy Father.’

‘What?’ Bembo asked.

‘Trust me,’ Swan said. He pulled on the sort of leather mask that thugs and lovers wore and went out into the street.

The night stank. It was full summer; even the darkness in Rome was hot, and all the garbage stank. Dead people, dead cats, rats, uneaten food and manure of fifty species warred for his attention. The alley outside the old sally-porte stank of cat piss.

Swan had a leather doublet and a short cloak and his own sword; he knew he looked like a bravo, but time was short.

He was standing at the opening of the alley when Bembo emerged. Swan went back.

‘Call me a coward,’ he said. ‘But I think both of us should do both errands.’

Bembo’s smile flashed in the darkness. ‘Two swords are better than one,’ he agreed.

The streets were empty; the Spaniards had driven any normal traffic indoors. Most people only went out to get food or wine; no one went farther than the tavern on their street.

The heat was stifling, and Swan loosened his collar and took off his gloves.

On a positive note, the Spaniards all had torches. They were easy to avoid because of the light, and although they tried to control all the city’s access points, they didn’t know the alleys or where men could hire a boat. Rome was a city that ran on secrets and an illicit sex trade; it was riddled with ways to pass unseen.

They climbed and descended, bribed a boy to row them, and ended under a balcony of the Palazzo Colonna. The front gate was watched by a large gang of Spanish men-at-arms, two of them in armour.

‘Well, well,’ Swan said.

‘I know how to get in,’ Bembo said. He walked along the north side of the palazzo and threw stones at a window until the window opened and a male voice called. ‘Que?’

‘Di Bracchio,’ Bembo said softly.

‘Fuck me, you’re kidding,’ said the voice. ‘Back from the dead?’

‘Just Venice,’ Bembo said. ‘I need to see Uno. Life or death. No joke.’

The man grunted and the window closed.

‘An agent?’ Swan asked.

Bembo raised an eyebrow in the moonlit darkness.

In a minute, they were standing before the cardinal-deacon. Both men had been disarmed.

‘So,’ the cardinal said. He sat comfortably in a loose robe at a table piled with food. A woman was holding a child a few chairs away.

Swan took the lead. ‘My lord. Have you received word to meet me tomorrow?’

Colonna frowned. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Please do not go,’ Swan said. ‘Please do not visit a certain house until this has all blown over.’ Swan glanced at the young woman with the child. ‘I have reason to doubt Donna Lucrezia. I may be wrong.’

The young woman didn’t react to the name.

Colonna smiled wolfishly. ‘I tell you what, Messire Suane. I will not tell my cousin Frederico that you think his wife, a Monferrat princess, might be a girl from Lucrezia’s, mmm?’

Swan winced.

Colonna Uno nodded. ‘What is this about?’ he asked. ‘Since we are, in fact, meeting.’

‘Eminence, Messire Antonelli is stealing money from the Church and from Messire Cosimo di Medici.’ Swan bowed his head.

‘And Medici knows,’ Colonna said.

‘He does now,’ Swan said.

‘And …’ Colonna prompted.

Bembo spoke. ‘Antonelli was foolish enough to arrest the Venetian ambassador,’ he said. ‘We will ensure that Messire Loredan is released. Messire Antonelli is unlikely to survive. Politically. Or, really, in any other way.’

Colonna sat back, watching the woman and the child. ‘It is my fate to owe you favours, Ser Suane,’ he said. ‘Be careful. Antonelli is looking everywhere for you.’

Swan nodded. ‘I know.’

‘He is saying that it is you,’ Colonna added. ‘I feel it is the least I can do to tell you that Antonelli is telling the world that you are the one who has stolen the money from the Medici. You are the one who killed the factor; you are the one who knows where the old Pope’s money is.’

Swan swallowed. ‘Of course he is,’ Swan admitted.

‘And if he catches you, he will have days to persuade you to tell a confessor,’ Colonna said. ‘So how exactly do you plan to topple him? He may convince Medici himself!’

Swan smiled nastily. ‘Unlikely,’ he said with snide assurance. Then he spread his hands and glanced at Bembo. Bembo’s look said ‘Your play’.

Swan bowed to the old cardinal. ‘I cannot disclose my little plan without spoiling it,’ he said. ‘But I expect that you will receive an invitation in the next few days to an audience with his Holiness.’ He bowed again. ‘We’ll see how that goes.’

Colonna nodded. ‘You are a very dangerous young man, Ser Tommaso. This is not always a compliment.’

Bembo bowed. ‘It’s always interesting to be with him. For my part, Eminence, if anything happens to Loredan, Venice will burn Rome. That’s no threat. Your Pope and your financial agent are threatening to upset the Peace of Lodi.’

‘Now you threaten me,’ Colonna said.

Bembo shook his head. ‘When last we met, I was a bastard adventurer and you, Eminence, were the head of the most powerful faction in Rome. Now I am the scion of the richest house in Venice; I have offices; I know what I say.’

‘You think this makes you my peer, eh?’ the cardinal asked.

Bembo bowed. ‘No, Eminence. We are not peers. In real power, I could buy and sell you.’

‘Get out of my house,’ Colonna Uno ordered.

Out on the river in the small boat with the terrified boy, Swan turned to his friend.

‘Was that wise?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Bembo said. ‘It was foolish, but by God, Thomas, they burn me, these Romans, playing on a dung heap and claiming it to be the world.’

Swan shook his head and watched the far bank.

‘Can we at least be nice to the Orsini?’ Swan said. ‘The Colonna used to like us, remember? The Orsini hate us.’

‘They hate you and Cesare,’ Bembo said. ‘But I will be mild as a nun.’

‘I’ve known nuns,’ Swan said.

They stole a garden ladder, like boys with illicit lovers, and climbed over the Orsini palace wall. There were dogs, but Swan found a servant, probably up to no good, and they were taken into the hall. The Orsini guards were none too fond of them, and the result could have been ugly had not Orsini Primo appeared at the head of his magnificent stairs.

‘Saint George and Saint Michael,’ Orsini said. ‘All of Rome is looking for you two and I have you under my roof. What were you doing? Seducing my dogs?’

Swan reached into his doublet and produced a letter. ‘I have a letter from Caterina,’ he said. ‘From Mytilene.’

Orsini snatched the letter, summoned a torch, and read.

‘Joseph and Mary,’ he snarled. ‘You saved my sister?’ he said, as if complaining to the heavens. ‘What’s wrong with the world, Ser Tommaso? I hate you. You hate me. This is as the world should be.’

Swan shrugged. ‘I found your sister a most gracious ally and a fine sword,’ he said.

Orsini smiled. ‘Wine for my guests. Christ crucified, is that Di Bracchio, the notorious sodomite?’

‘I thought you said he liked you?’ Swan asked. ‘May I introduce Bembo Primo, of the Golden House of Venice?’ he added sweetly.

‘Oh, the fucking floor is falling out of the world,’ Orsini said. ‘So now I suppose you two cretins are going to save me from the Pope, who has just suspended my commission as Gonfaloniere and ordered an audit of my accounts?’

Swan shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Illustrio,’ he added.

The whole of the next day passed without apparent event. Gangs of Spaniards roamed the streets; people were killed. Out by the old aqueduct, a pair of Spaniards were trapped, no one knew who by, and murdered.

Swan and Bembo ate bread and sausage and drank cheap wine. They discussed war, and war at sea; they debated the concept of free will at length, quoting Plato and Augustine back and forth like the pedants they were; they talked about Sophia and about Bembo’s wife.

It was, all in all, a very pleasant day.

Towards evening, Swan went out into the darkening air and the stink and checked his three signal posts. He had just noticed the chalk mark on the first one when he saw Kendal; the Englishman gave no sign of recognition, but Swan was confident in his man and turned and walked.

Kendal followed him. Unbeknownst to the younger Englishman, Bembo was behind him, covering Swan. But if they had other shadows, they didn’t see them, and the three men passed into the Malatesta fortress together.

‘I saw ’em both,’ Kendal said. ‘Sforza was no friend, but he said he’d do what could be done. The so-called First Citizen …’ Kendal whistled. ‘Saint George, Swan, he’s something. Any road, he cursed a bit, as you would, and then he asked what you intended.’

Swan smiled.

‘So I told him you have a plan. And he laughed, and said that he thought men like you always had a plan until the halter went around your necks.’

Swan stopped smiling.

‘He said that he would take action against Messire Antonelli. He said that he has evidence of his own.’ Kendal shrugged. ‘That’s all, except that Clemente passed me this for you.’

‘This’ proved to be a list of comings and goings from the Picclomini palace.

Swan looked at it with satisfaction.

So did Bembo. ‘Now we can double-check on our friend Cesare. I trust him like a brother, but this is a difficult business.’

Swan nodded. ‘William, I need you to go back to Bessarion. Send Clemente next time; I have a mission for him, and you are too well known.’ He then embarrassed his squire by embracing him. ‘Well done, William.’

‘Not bad, eh?’ Kendal said. ‘Giannis is worried,’ he went on. ‘Spaniards are everywhere.’

‘Any word from our other friends?’ Swan asked.

‘Wouldn’t I have told you first?’ Kendal said.

‘Next thing. I need you to find where the papal chamberlain lives.’

‘Jacob?’ Kendal asked. ‘That old tub o’ lard?’

‘Just so, William.’

‘Consider it done. Anything else?’ Kendal asked.

‘Send us Clemente,’ Swan said.

Kendal slipped out into the stinking dark after a cup of wine, as if he was any house guest come for an evening.

Bembo shook his head. ‘If Loredan weren’t in danger,’ he said, ‘I’d be enjoying this.’

‘I thought you hated Loredan,’ Swan said.

Bembo shrugged. ‘Things change.’

‘I know,’ Swan admitted.

‘I know this is your finest hour,’ Bembo said. ‘But will you take advice?’

‘From you, the master spy?’ Swan said. ‘Tell me anything.’

‘Don’t try to bring down the Pope,’ Bembo said. ‘Antonelli, yes. Leave Callixtus some plausible deniability and walk away.’

Swan sat back. They had agreed, after much walking around, that one candle in the old notary’s room could not be seen from outside. It was just enough light to read a friend’s facial expression. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Antonelli is a tool. Calixtus is the one killing people, stealing money, and betraying …’

Bembo held up his hand. ‘Primo,’ he said, ‘because if you bring down the Pope, everyone will be terrified of you; even allies. Medici will fear you. And me. No one will hide us. Please, let’s get Loredan and go home and make babies.’ Bembo smiled. ‘You make babies. I’ll take the one, and bless God we managed it.’ He ticked another finger. ‘Secondo; because then we’ll have a papal election with a great deal of scandal, and all of it will be for nothing. The next Pope is almost certain to be Picclomini.’

Swan sighed. ‘I admit, I was hesitant to pull down the Pope.’

‘I know you,’ Bembo said. ‘You were tempted, just to see if you could. And to see what would happen.’

‘Yes,’ Swan said.

‘Good. Just this once …’ Bembo shrugged.

The next morning, Clemente arrived with the dawn. Swan saw him make a casual chalk mark across the street and wander off down a lane, and he was at the wicket gate in time to open it.

Clemente all but glowed with something – self-importance, victory, grace. Swan felt like tormenting the boy, just because of his clear desire to speak of his triumph.

Clemente had a basket of warm food, fresh from Antoine; rolls, butter, honey, a clay pot of warm hippocras, a big slice of ham, a pair of Cypriot oranges. The two men, famished, dug in, demolishing the basket with the fervor Christians were supposed to reserve for fighting the infidel.

‘Very well,’ Swan said, his mouth full of a perfect combination of bread and butter and honey. ‘Tell us your news.’

Clemente shrugged. ‘Illustrio, I have two pieces of news.’ The boy’s eyes positively sparkled. ‘First, the Princess Caterina Zaccaria and her entourage have entered the city. They have made quite a stir; indeed, Giannis heard that they have demanded an audience with the Pope. And Antonelli.’

‘Remarkable,’ Swan said.

Bembo smiled and lines of tension eased in his neck. ‘Well, well,’ he said.

Swan rubbed his hands together like a stage villain. ‘This is superb, Clemente. What is the other news?’

‘Oh, it is a very small piece of news, nothing important …’ Clemente was actually bouncing up and down.

‘Out with it,’ Bembo snapped. ‘The Pope has died?? Antonelli is arrested?’

Clemente bowed. ‘Nothing so profound, gentles. Only, yesterday, I bought a nice ham in the market …’

Swan rolled his eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘I was with Antoine. You left me, messires, after a promise that I would be employed. In this business.’ The boy shrugged.

Swan had a flash … a moment wherein it seemed possible that the boy had betrayed them, just through boredom.

Clemente’s smile put paid to any such possibility. It was radiant; St Francis of Assisi might never have smiled such a smile.

Swan sat with his cup of hippocras and allowed himself to indulge the boy. ‘Yes. Events overtook us. I miscalculated in a matter … I could not come back for you.’

Clemente nodded. ‘So I ended up as a sort of supernumerary at the house, if you take my meaning. And after catching up on some much-needed sleep, I found time to help Antoine, and he needs help at the market with all the Spaniards about …’

‘Good God,’ Bembo groaned. ‘Get on with it, you are killing me.’

‘I, Illustrio? I merely relate my little tale. I bought a ham at Antoine’s direction; a huge, greasy thing, but I was wearing an apron. I hoisted the thing on my shoulder, and then, there was Siscotti, the Pope’s chef. You know him?’

Swan shook his head.

‘Of course not; fine gentlemen rarely know a cook. Siscotti told me to take the ham directly to his kitchen, and a man-at-arms stepped in behind me. Believe me, gentles, these little misunderstandings happen all the time; servants come and go from various masters.’ Clemente was glowing; he might have been said to emit light.

‘The Pope’s cook mistook you for his boy,’ Bembo said.

‘Under half a pig, yes,’ Clemente said.

‘And Antoine?’ Swan asked.

‘Played perfectly, engaging the other cook in conversation. I was marched back to the Castel Sant’Angelo, carrying a huge ham.’

‘Jesus,’ Bembo said.

‘I walked in under the iron portcullis, and all the way to the kitchens, where my man-at-arms wandered off immediately to kiss a girl. So I picked up a pail of slops from a jake; I stank, covered in pork fat, eh? And I walked …’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ Bembo was laughing.

Swan was shaking his head.

‘I walked past the living areas and down the central steps; the ones that go to the prison, brushing past guards with my pail of shit. No one questioned me, and indeed, Illustrio, I have heard you say many times that these things must either be played like music or planned like a siege. I walked down into the prison, found the jakes, dumped my bucket, and then exchanged a few words with the illustrious Lord Loredan.’

Bembo was unable to speak, but he leaped to his feet and embraced the surprised young man.

‘Clemente, you are a great man, and when you are the master of Bessarion’s special service, I hope that you will remember me in my dotage.’ He pounded the man on the back. Clemente just beamed.

‘How was Master Loredan?’ Swan asked.

‘Bad. But immensely cheered. If I may be bold, my lords, I would venture that I put life into him. He has been beaten; several times. But not tortured, not by professionals.’

‘He was not specially guarded?’ Swan asked.

Clemente shrugged. ‘I was terrified; I stayed perhaps one minute. His cell door is low, and hidden by a turn in the corridor; the nearest guard was perhaps two turns away.’ He shrugged.

‘Did he know we were here?’ Swan asked. He stood up. ‘A great deal depends on this answer.’

Clemente thought for a moment. ‘No. I swear, he cannot have known you were here, because he grabbed at me as a drowning man would clutch a spar. Even through his door. He said he had given up hope. He said terrible things …’ Clemente frowned. ‘He is in a bad way.’

Swan looked at Bembo. ‘So. Lucrezia looks even worse.’

Bembo narrowed his eyes. ‘And yet she did not have you killed. I wish you to consider her life; and let me suggest that in every case, she must play everyone against everyone else; compromise, adjust.’

Swan considered. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That is exactly right. She is playing both sides.’

‘If Loredan died, it is nothing to her,’ Bembo continued. ‘You, she likes. But now she knows; indeed, she had to know from the moment you walked into a certain house.’

Swan shook his head, feeling foolish. Then he took a writing case out of the table, spread a scrap of vellum, and began to write in his clerkly hand.

‘Clemente, the only reward for work is more work,’ he said. ‘This needs to go to David Ben Abraham. I owe him that much.’

Bembo curled his lip. ‘Bah. Jews.’

Swan shrugged. ‘Our Lady was a Jew, or so I hear. Indeed, Jesus was called Rabbi. Reading Greek reveals a host of truths. Listen, Alessandro; you know a host of men who love other men; I know a host of Jews.’

‘By such people is the order of the universe preserved,’ Bembo said, snarling his quote of St Augustine.

When Clemente was gone, Bembo looked at him. ‘Too many people know where we are,’ he said.

Swan shrugged. ‘I have become fatalistic. Inshallah.’

Bembo shook his head. ‘What did you tell Ben Abraham?’

Swan looked out of the little window. ‘I said, “Antonelli falls tomorrow. Save yourselves.” The Jews are heavily invested in the Pope’s scheme.’

‘Your heart is far too soft. They risk money; let them get their fingers burned.’ Bembo sounded angry. Swan thought it was the anger of a man cooped up too long.

‘I agree. We should move,’ Swan said. He was watching a Spaniard walking back and forth in front of the Malatesta gate.

‘They will have followed Clemente,’ Bembo said, picking up his sword.

Swan swore. ‘Right you are.’ He threw the rest of the vellum, the pens and the candle into the jakes, in case they could betray something. Then the two men went out of the notary’s space, and into the hall; there, behind the throne of the wolf, was the truly secret door, which Bembo had access to.

He kicked the throne, and it moved with a soft, well-oiled click.

‘Malatesta has a sense of humour,’ Swan said.

‘Alberti designed all this,’ Bembo told him.

‘There’s a man who hates me,’ Swan said.

‘Be lucky he’s not in on this,’ Bembo pointed out. ‘He’s far away, designing a cathedral. If Antonelli had Alberti working for him, we would be in even more trouble.’ The two men descended into the earth, down a set of gleaming white marble steps that were the antithesis of anything ‘secret’. Bembo went back and pulled the throne along its slide, until it clicked home and the trap was shut. It was black as pitch, and the two men had to move very slowly.

Behind them came two voices speaking rapidly in Spanish, and the sound of a hammer blow on a big door; resonance made the sound appear close.

Swan was feeling for the catch on the inner door of the tunnel. Neither he nor Bembo could find it; hurry and darkness encouraged panic.

A third loud voice demanded silence.

‘This is the lair of the wolf,’ Forteguerri’s voice said. It carried as if the man were right there with him. ‘Our enemies are in league with the heretic.’

Swan’s hand found the catch. He picked at it, very carefully, and it came loose; the door under his shoulder pressed open without a sound.

There was a corridor that ran right under the floorboards of the hall. Swan and Bembo walked carefully along it, mindful that at least three enemies were directly over their heads.

‘I smell a candle,’ a Spaniard said in bad Italian.

‘Dannazione,’ Forteguerri said. ‘Malatesta will have this fucking place riddled with warrens. Take the hunchback boy. Start cutting pieces off him until he talks.’

‘Make the whore talk!’ spat a Spaniard. ‘More fun that way.’

Forteguerri stamped a foot. ‘The woman you call “the whore” has as much power in Rome as the Pope,’ he said.

‘All the more reason. A woman; fuck her. If she complains, cut her throat. There’s an end of it. You Italians are so soft.’

‘You Spaniards are so fucking stupid it’s a wonder you ever beat the infidel,’ Forteguerri said. ‘She knows things. Those things will linger after she is killed. She has been very clear about this.’

The Spaniard laughed. ‘She may know things about you, or Borgia, or Sforza,’ he laughed. ‘She knows nothing about me. I say, take her and rack her. She will tell us where this whoreson is.’

Swan would have liked to stay and listen to more, but he kept moving. Above, conversation stilled; quiet as they were, Forteguerri sensed something, for he said, ‘Silence!’

Bembo kept moving.

Forteguerri growled. ‘I heard something.’

Swan heard his weight shift above and had an adolescent desire to run his dagger through a crack in the floorboards and get the man in the foot. But Bembo tugged at his shoulder and they entered a brick-lined tunnel, black as pitch. It ran downhill at a slight angle, away from the light coming through the floorboards.

It ended at an iron grate.

‘Hmmm,’ Bembo said. ‘I don’t remember this.’

Behind them, they could hear more footsteps and a shout in Spanish. A loud fist began banging at something; a wall or a panel.

‘They’ll find the door,’ Swan said.

‘Spaniards? Never,’ Bembo said. ‘In ten minutes one will kill another over a trifle. Besides, these aren’t Spaniards, they’re Aragonese. Like the plague, but more cruel and …’

The iron grate gave with a loud squeal.

‘Oh, well,’ Bembo said, and slipped under it in the darkness. Swan caught the grate, felt the rust under his hands, and had a terrible, tangible moment in which he was under the earth of Rhodes, fighting for his life. In the hole at Mistra.

‘Tommaso? Come.’

Swan was shaking. ‘Fuck,’ he managed, like a man with a fever.

Bembo came back for him. He shoved the grate open; it squealed like a pig escaping the butcher’s maul, and the fury behind them increased.

Bembo caught his hand. ‘Come. Come, Tommaso.’

Swan was shaking like a tree in a tempest. His teeth were chattering. He had a moment …

… he tried to fight …

… tried to land a blow …

The Moor caught his arm, levered it and pulled him off balance, and he took a step. He reached for his dagger …

‘Tommaso,’ said Bembo.

Swan’s hand was on his dagger. There was a little light from somewhere ahead and he was not, apparently, in the tunnels under Rhodes. His breath caught; he was, for a moment, exquisitely and terribly balanced between realities, and then Alessandro resolved as himself and Swan’s questing right hand relaxed and, with an effort of will, he took his hand off the dagger.

‘Oh, Sweet Christ,’ he muttered.

Bembo pulled at him, hard, and the grate slammed shut behind them with a crash of doom.

‘Now you need to move quickly,’ Bembo said.

Swan grunted, and Bembo released the ligatura hold he had on Swan’s left arm. He ran towards the light, and Swan followed, their feet splashing in something modestly foul, and then there were steps. The steps went up.

‘This is not the way I came out before,’ Bembo said. ‘I have taken a wrong turn.’

‘Not going back now,’ Swan said. He put his shoulder to the next door and pushed, the door opened, and they were inside a house. It was a small house; one room up and one down, very narrow, with an old-fashioned hearth.

There was one small window at the front, very high up. The house was two hundred years old. Swan grabbed a stool, stood on it, and looked out. He could see a church he knew and a rather grand block of residences from which he’d once climbed down.

‘Rooftops?’ he asked.

Bembo smiled. ‘Better than sewers, I’m thinking,’ he said.

They went up; up and up, right out onto the roof. But they were on the right side of the narrow street, and after one incautious leap from a balcony to another balcony, they were in the long block, moving from chimney to chimney. Both men paused and slung their sword belts to make climbing easier; then they raced along the red roof tiles, most of them old and solid underfoot, corrupted with fungus and moss like old bodies corrupted with sin, but steady enough.

‘I wish we had a bow,’ Swan said.

‘Why?’ Bembo asked, panting. ‘They don’t even know we’re here. Why shoot them?’

‘You’re the one who wanted blood, remember? Where are we going?’ Swan asked.

‘I thought you knew?’ Bembo said.

They paused in a forest of roof-trees and chimney pots.

‘No water here, but otherwise a fine place to wait for a day,’ Swan said. They were in a pocket where four steep roofs converged on a central fireplace system with four chimneys, so that the result was a sort of red-tiled, elevated patio a hundred feet in the air. The converging roof-trees were like garden walls shielding them from prying eyes.

‘A bad trap if they came at us over the roofs,’ Bembo said. ‘And no water all day?’ He shrugged.

Swan agreed. ‘We could go to Lucrezia’s.’

‘Saint Mark and Saint George, English. You mean your overdeveloped sense of chivalry includes a madame who probably sold you to the Pope?’

Swan thought about it. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Forteguerri’s going for her.’

‘Forteguerri … is he being used or using the Aragonese, do you think?’ Bembo asked. His breathing was returning to normal.

Swan sat back against the roof-tree. ‘You know what I learned a long time ago as a spy?’ he asked. ‘I learned that there are no masterful plots. People make this shit up as they go. We’re onto a very old plot with a lot of frayed ends. Lucrezia is playing for her own; Forteguerri is playing for his own. They no doubt change their minds.’

Bembo managed a smile. ‘So. You now know everything. This is the great secret of our art; everything changes always.’

‘So we descend on Lucrezia ahead of the Aragonese. And we take her …’ Swan smiled. ‘Christ, I have it.’

Bembo shook his head. ‘All we have to do is stay alive for twenty hours and we win. Despite which, you will take an insane risk for a woman you mostly despise.’

Swan shrugged.

Bembo shrugged back. ‘Naturally, I’m coming.’

Donna Lucrezia was collecting her papers when a window broke and one of her girls screamed. She stepped out into the hallway and found Alessandro di Bracchio with his sword-point at her throat.

Swan was leaning over the third-floor banister, where the girls lived. Of course, he knew that; he’d virtually lived with Violetta.

‘Run!’ Swan bellowed. ‘Out the back, all of you, and run for your fucking lives. Now!’ He grabbed a young woman by the wrist. ‘I need you to go to the house of David Ben Abraham. Take this note. Understand? Here’s five ducats. Go.’

A torrent of young women began to move down the stairs, like a living waterfall of flesh. It was noon; they were all clothed, most of them in dull, workaday colours; Donna Lucrezia required her girls to clean and carry and even do sewing and weaving.

‘Run!’ Swan bellowed. ‘And stay clear of the Spaniards.’

Donna Lucrezia met Di Bracchio’s eyes. ‘You would kill me, wouldn’t you?’

‘With some pleasure,’ Di Bracchio admitted. ‘And some pain. I have had many good times here.’

‘Time to go,’ Swan yelled, and he dropped from the third-floor landing to the second, landing neatly and without falling over his sword.

‘I didn’t betray you,’ Lucrezia said to Swan, a little desperate.

Swan nodded. ‘Never said you did,’ he said. ‘Out the back, now.’

Swan had once come in with a framed picture. He went out the same way, through the kitchen and the servants’ entrance. In the servants’ entrance, Swan took a big overgown, a coarse wool garment that the cook probably wore, and threw it to Donna Lucrezia. ‘Put this on and cover your hair,’ he said.

‘So that you can murder me quietly?’ Lucrezia asked. She was calm.

Swan looked her in the eye. ‘No,’ he said. ‘My word on it. Now move.’

‘My girls will be caught …’

Di Bracchio smiled his nasty smile. ‘A few will,’ he admitted. ‘And the bevy of them bursting from cover will take up a great deal of time.’

‘Di Bracchio, you are a worthless, gutless bastard.’ She shook her head.

‘Bembo now,’ he said. ‘Otherwise correct. Last chance, Donna; put on the gown or …’

‘Or what?’ she said.

Swan clipped her on the back of the head with his sword hilt and she went down.

‘I told you that would be easier,’ Bembo said.

‘I hate hitting women,’ Swan admitted.

They wrapped her in the gown and carried her through the door. Outside there was a big mule, the kind a cook would use to fetch provender from market. Swan put her over the mule and together they made their way to the house of the physician of the Bishop of Ostia, Maestro Claudio. Swan had not been to see the man in two years; he went in through the servants’ entrance, and unbundled Donna Lucrezia, who lay inert, panting badly and with clammy skin.

Claudio barely looked at the two men. ‘I know this woman,’ he said.

‘Good to see you, too,’ Swan said.

‘Surely, in all your life of violence, someone has taught you to knock a person unconscious better than this,’ Claudio said. ‘Far too hard; far too high on the skull.’ He pressed with his thumb and Lucrezia moaned. ‘In fact, I’d say you didn’t want to do it, had to work yourself up, and then overreacted.’

‘Thanks, Maestro, and such a pleasure to see you again,’ Swan said.

‘She’ll have you both killed,’ Claudio said.

‘No,’ Swan replied. ‘We just saved her life and probably saved her from some very aggressive Spanish torture.’

Claudio met Swan’s eye. ‘Really?’ he asked.

‘We could explain,’ Bembo said.

‘I thought you lived in Venice, now, in a palace,’ Claudio said.

‘I do. I did. I made the mistake of following Swan …’

‘An easy mistake to make. Please do not explain. I do not want to know anything.’ Claudio nodded. ‘I will take care of her. The bishop can protect me.’

‘My thought exactly,’ said Swan. ‘Can the bishop provide us with some plain brown robes?’

The two Augustan friars walked up the road to San Silvestro, and were stopped by the porter.

‘I don’t know you, brothers,’ he said.

‘We’re from Ireland,’ Swan said.

The man shook his head but admitted them, sending a boy ahead to the abbot. Hibernia was so far away as to seem incredible, yet creditable.

Swan crossed the church’s paved courtyard following the novice and walked carefully up the wooden steps to the refectory, lest his booted feet fail to sound like sandals. At the top, he pushed open the door to the apartment reserved for the abbot.

‘Who is that?’ asked Di Monserrat.

Swan walked in and Bembo followed him. They both bowed, rather unlike friars.

‘Messire Abbot,’ Swan said. ‘I need to be hidden and fed for twelve hours. In exchange, I can absolutely promise you that Messire Spinelli’s holdings will be granted you in full.’

Di Monserrat smiled a fairly worldly smile. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I am gathering that you are the two men for whom the Pope, his guard and Messire Forteguerri are searching Rome.’

Swan shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But on the other hand, if we were to fall into the Pope’s hands, Messire Antonelli would still not give you the reversion of Spinelli’s lands. Ever.’

Di Monserrat sat back. ‘I will go to confession for this,’ he said. ‘But I will tell you that my loathing for Antonelli is such that I’m unlikely to do anything to help him hold on to power. But I am human enough, and my order is poor enough, that I wonder why Messire Antonelli would never, as you put it, give us the reversion of an estate we were legally granted.’

Swan bowed. ‘Abbot, once I tell you, you will be on a shortlist of men the Pope will order killed to protect the secret.’

Di Monserrat crossed himself and prayed for a moment. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Tell me.’

‘Antonelli believes that the old Pope’s fortune is buried on Spinelli’s estate. About three hundred thousand ducats. Forteguerri believes the same.’ He and the aristocratic abbot locked eyes.

Monserrat’s eyebrows went up. ‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘Now I understand everything.’

Swan looked surprised. ‘You do?’

‘Too many things,’ Monserrat said. ‘We will hide you. I am no supporter of Calixtus III or Antonelli. And I doubt anyone could find anything is this ancient pile of stone.’

He was still fingering his short beard and considering when there was a knock at the door. Bembo put his hand to his sword and Swan stepped behind one of the window curtains.

The young novice called out, ‘There’s another Irish monk.’ He sounded personally aggrieved.

Swan smiled at Bembo. ‘Padraig,’ he said. ‘So Clemente is safe, and all is well.’

Bembo shook his head. ‘Naming calls,’ he said. ‘You draw down curses with this arrogance.’

Padraig opened his bundles. Inside he had two complete outfits; small round beaver hats, long kaftans. He gave Swan a short letter, which Swan kissed when he read it, and Bembo a note, which he also kissed, after a curious look at Swan.

Swan sent Padraig back with instructions for Master Kendal. Bembo added instructions for Clemente.

Swan looked Padraig in the eye, both hands on the Irishman’s shoulders. ‘Tell Giannis, “Go.”’

‘Go,’ Padraig said.

He grinned and left them.

Neither man slept very well, in the belfry of the church of San Silvestro.

The next morning, as the bells of all the major churches began to ring for the seventh hour, Jacob, the papal chamberlain, purchased a sausage in a bread roll from his favourite baker just by the Forum. Then he looked for a while at a protrusion of what had once been Trajan’s Column and walked off through the ancient centre of the empire, whistling an air from the motet of the mass he’d heard the day before.

At a turning in the ancient road, he met a man all in green, who put a dagger to his throat.

‘Don’t make trouble, Master Jacob,’ Kendal said.

Two hours later, messengers reached the Orsini Palace, the Colonna Palace, Bessarion’s palazzo and the palace of Aeneas Picclomini, all bearing commands from the Holy Father to attend him instantly on a matter of the first importance. All three men took men-at-arms; more than a dozen, in each case. The cardinal deacon’s were commanded by his nephew, Colonna Secunda. Cardinal Picclomini’s guards were commanded by Forteguerri. Cardinal Orsini’s guards were commanded by his natural son, usually called Orsini Primo, formerly papal Gonfaloniere, a valuable office recently passed to an Aragonese captain. Bessarion brought six guards, all Greeks, commanded by Giannis Trapezetoi.

But a few minutes before this wave of horseflesh and steel fell on the Castel San’Angelo, the Princess Caterina Zaccaria rode through the gates, swathed in veils, followed by her own guard, twenty stradiotes, and attended by her dark-skinned Algerian page. She had a pass sealed with the Pope’s own personal seal, and the Aragonese swordsman on duty admitted her entourage with many a long glance at the stradiotes, who looked too much like Grenadine jinetes to make any Spaniard comfortable. The tall bastard who commanded her guard winked with an insolent green eye as he passed the Aragonese captain, who glared in return.

They went up the ramp, which curved gradually, and the princess pulled her veils back and uttered a curt command. The guard of stradiotes halted. Most of them turned their horses or dismounted.

Six of them went on with the princess. One of them was very fat, and sweating profusely. They rode to the inner courtyard and dismounted, and a small stradiote who made a great effort to stand straight took the horses and bowed deeply to the princess, who swept by him, swathed in a fortune’s worth of red velvet.

Her long riding gown, as magnificent as only the Greek East could afford, matched the red of the Red Chamber almost perfectly. Her guards swept in with her; a Aragonese man-at-arms slammed his visor closed and called out in Spanish, and was too slow to avoid being thrown over a stradiote’s hip and pinned to the floor. A dagger was put to his visor.

The princess continued down the corridor. She stopped outside the private entrance to the papal chamber.

She pointed at the short, fat stradiote, who was now revealed as the papal chamberlain. ‘Antonelli,’ she said. ‘Now.’

Jacob, terrified, leaned out into the corridor. ‘Messire Antonelli?’ he called out.

Jacob felt the prick of a dagger against his neck and hot breath on his face. ‘Messire Antonelli?’

‘So you are not lost to the heathen after all, eh, Jacob?’ Antonelli called back. ‘I am busy saving Rome from the barbarians.’

A chair creaked.

‘The Holy Father needs you,’ Jacob said, his voice trembling.

Antonelli rose. ‘Why?’

‘The Princess Zaccaria demands it,’ Jacob said.

‘Stupid bitch,’ Antonelli said, and came out into the corridor. Immediately a sword was put across his throat.

‘Surprise,’ Tom Swan said.

The cardinals arrived to find the gates held by stradiotes. It was an odd occurrence, although Bessarion, who arrived first, was quick enough to make a joke in Greek that made all the men on the gate laugh.

He looked back at his captain, who gave a very Hellenic shrug.

‘It is as you see it,’ Giannis said.

‘What have they done?’ Bessarion asked.

‘What needed to be done, Eminence,’ Giannis answered.

There was blood on the paving stones, and blood again at the first small courtyard, and the horses rolled their eyes and started. Bessarion went into the entry hall and through the room where Swan had first heard of Spinelli, with the cupids on the fireplace. In a few minutes, he was joined by Cardinal Orsini, Cardinal Colonna and Cardinal Picclomini. The room was full of armed men.

The papal chamberlain, white as a day-old corpse, came in and bowed low. ‘My lords, Your Eminences; please follow me.’

‘Why are there no Spaniards on the gates?’ Forteguerri asked.

‘All of your questions will be answered,’ Jacob said. He turned and led the way into the papal audience chamber, where Swan, not so long before, had knelt to tell the Pope of the victory at Belgrade.

The Pope sat on his throne, silent.

Messire Antonelli stood nearby, also silent. A tall man in green wool stood close to him. Forteguerri started. He turned, and found that one of his men-at-arms had his dagger at Forteguerri’s unarmoured crotch.

‘Go in,’ Cesare di Brescia said pleasantly.

‘You fucking traitor,’ Forteguerri said.

‘This, from you?’ Cesare asked. He winked at Swan, who stood close to the Pope.

Colonna didn’t wink. He sat, and stretched his legs. ‘Messire Suane, no protection offered by Venice can survive what you have done here.’

Swan glanced at the Pope, who was clearly livid with rage.

‘Eminence, we are about to have a brief trial. You and your brothers of the college will try Messire Antonelli for the crime of treason to the Pope and the Christian community. If you find him to be innocent, I may then fear your retribution.’

Alessandro Bembo, no longer dressed as a stradiote, stepped forward. ‘The Pope has been duped by this man,’ he said in a resonant voice.

Bessarion rolled his eyes.

Orsini smiled. The smile never reached his eyes, but his lips said, ‘Ahh.’

Colonna sank a little deeper in his chair. ‘That’s as well. Bembo, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, Eminence.’

‘A little more courteous than in my house, eh, messire?’ Cardinal Colonna said.

‘I regret my discourtesy,’ Bembo said smoothly.

‘Well; I’m a difficult old man.’ Colonna looked at the other three cardinals and the Holy Father. ‘Just kill him, Swan. We don’t need a trial. We all know what it’s about.’

Picclomini leaned forward. He had watched Forteguerri held at dagger point with interest, as if he’d never seen an open display of violence before. Now he looked back.

‘By no means,’ Picclomini said. ‘Let us have a trial.’

‘You are absurd,’ Antonelli said. ‘You are not lawyers and I am. You cannot try me.’

‘Surprise,’ Bembo said. ‘We can. Because we have the swords.’

‘You cannot have taken the whole castle,’ said the Pope, his first words. His lips were almost white with anger.

There was a short silence.

Swan bowed. ‘Holy Father, I took the liberty of removing the vermin I found in your palace. Bad men, who have committed many crimes against the population. When we are done here, I will give them to the captains of Orsini and Colonna for trial.’

‘Trial, trial,’ spat Antonelli. ‘You have no evidence.’

‘Do we not?’ Bembo said. ‘First, I have Loredan.’

The Venetian ambassador stepped into the room. He still smelled a little stale, but he was decently dressed. Grazias had released him as soon as the castello had been in their hands.

Antonelli shrugged. ‘So? He is a dangerous man, an impostor. The Holy Father ordered his arrest.’

Pope Calixtus looked as if he’d been made to swallow bitter medicine.

‘The Holy Father is not on trial here,’ Loredan said very quietly. ‘And you ordered my arrest. You forget that I was there.’

Antonelli looked, if anything, relieved. ‘This is a simple misunderstanding. I was told that this man was an impostor …’

‘I assure you that he is not,’ Bembo said.

‘I had nothing to do with his arrest,’ the Holy Father said.

Antonelli felt the knife go in. That is, he knew in that moment that the Pope had abandoned him.

‘Holy Father, there are a great many things I might say,’ Antonelli began, but Swan silenced him with a rude gesture.

‘Tell us about the five hundred thousand ducats, Messire Antonelli.’ Swan was aping the manner of many advocates he had known. He should have given this role to Cesare; the man really was a lawyer.

‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ Antonelli said.

Swan gestured, and the Other Demetrios brought in a veiled woman. When her veil was removed, every man present saw that it was Donna Lucrezia.

‘You told me that you would find five hundred thousand ducats,’ she said clearly.

‘You bitch,’ Antonelli spat. ‘You all know who this is? The very whore of Babylon. Perhaps you all lie with her together …’ It occurred to Antonelli that, however great his contempt for the college of cardinals, this was not the place for it. ‘She would say anything for money.’

‘I loaned you money, you viper,’ she said. ‘You threatened me. You offered me money.’

Antonelli shrugged.

Swan motioned and Clemente came and brought a chair, exactly like the chairs the Orsini and Colonna had, and seated Donna Lucrezia in it.

Swan walked across the floor. ‘Perhaps you think we do not know everything. Let me explain. Once upon a time, Pope Eugenius put away a store of gold for the papacy against future need. It was a large amount of gold; large enough that banks could borrow against it. In effect, the papacy could be a bank. That was twenty years ago; times change. People change. People die. And finally, the only man who knew what there was to be known about the money was …’

Forteguerri spat, ‘Spinelli! I knew you were after the money, Swan!’

Swan smiled. ‘Landi Gianetti,’ Swan said to Forteguerri. ‘If you hadn’t killed Pepin the carter, you’d know all about it. Lucrezia knew, and apparently she never told you.’ He smiled at Lucrezia like a boy at his first lover.

She looked at the floor.

Swan motioned to Antonelli. ‘But even as the players in the secret papal bank died, or were poisoned – or pushed; that’s not my story, gentles – another Pope needed money for a crusade. An insane amount of money. Tens of thousands of ducats a month, every month. For a while, the Pope’s banker was able to write loans. Then he simply folded his bank and declared himself unable to raise further capital.’

‘You lying man-whore,’ Antonelli said. ‘You are in league with Spinelli to defraud my master, Cosimo di Medici.’

‘Goodness, shall I fall on the floor in awe of that name?’ Swan said. He held up a scroll. ‘Shall I read a letter for him? Antonelli, you financed months of war by taking papal tithes directly, instead of leaving them in situ.’ Swan looked around. Bessarion understood him, and Picclomini. ‘Eminences, I beg your indulgence. Usually, when England pays its papal tithe, the money stays in a vault in London. The Holy Father gets a piece of paper that allows him to do business in Rome at a very slight discount; the next time the Ricardi of Lucca want to buy English wool, they simply buy the Pope’s paper money in Rome and turn it into gold in London. So the gold, which Englishmen paid to the Pope, buys Luccan weavers a lot of English wool. Everyone understand?’

Antonelli, for the first time, showed signs of discomfort.

‘Messire Antonelli realised that he could take the paper and then send agents to take the gold in person. It would gradually undercut the whole economic system of Europe, but in the short run, he’d have the money for the crusade.’

Antonelli drew himself up. ‘I was ordered by the Holy Father,’ he said. ‘And I never did any such thing against an Italian bank. Foreign banks, perhaps; there is no law. Indeed, the King of England did as much to us in the last century.’

Swan smiled, and it was as bleak as a hangman’s knot. ‘You stole money from your own maestro, Cosimo di Medici.’

For the first time, men looked interested. Lucrezia put a hand to her beautiful neck. Forteguerri edged slightly away from Cesare.

‘You can never prove that,’ Antonelli said.

‘I can,’ said a clear voice. The Princess Zaccaria, scion of one of Florence’s oldest families, came in from the papal apartment. ‘I have an order in your own hand. You gave it …’

‘Who is this?’ asked Cardinal Picclomini.

Swan bowed. ‘The Princess of Achaea, Eminence.’

‘Ah.’ Aeneas Picclomini nodded. ‘I think we met when you were a child.’

The princess inclined her head graciously.

Antonelli’s guilt was written on him.

‘You ordered men killed. You took all the money from our coffers …’

‘Gracious God!’ shouted Antonelli. ‘The Holy Father ordered it!’

Silence greeted his admission.

‘I did not,’ said the Pope.

Swan bowed to the princess. ‘You took the gold from twenty places; you took the gold that might have been used to build alliances and hire soldiers, all to pay for a fleet you had built with the most incredible corruption, all in hopes that your agents would find the old Pope’s treasure and you could put it all back before you were caught.’

‘He ordered it!’ shouted Antonelli.

Picclomini turned and looked at Forteguerri.

Colonna smiled.

Orsini frowned.

Bessarion looked at his hands.

‘I say you did it yourself,’ Swan said. ‘And I say you have just admitted it.’

The Pope was now as white as his chamberlain.

‘But,’ Antonelli said, weakly, ‘if you know that I took the money, surely you know …’

The princess made a deep reverentia to the Pope. ‘I believe we are done with this bad servant?’ she said.

Loredan inclined his head. ‘I know where there is an empty cell.’

Kendal took Antonelli’s arm and Forteguerri moved. He drew his dagger and put it into Di Brescia’s arm and drew a sword from one of his men-at-arms; a desperate move, flawlessly executed.

Men sprang to cover their principals, and swords grew like blades of grass in the spring, and Swan moved, too late, to protect the Pope, but it was not the Pope that Forteguerri went for, but the princess. ‘Everyone stay where you are,’ Forteguerri said. ‘I wonder who among you wants this woman to die?’

He had a dagger at her throat, and his sword emerged from behind her.

Swan looked at her, and their eyes met.

‘If you come any closer …’ Forteguerri said.

The princess turned, her neck passing inside the circle of his arm because he didn’t have a hand to hold her, and she dropped to the floor, slipping through his arms. Swan passed forward, and Forteguerri’s sword rang on Swan’s. He tried to bind off the cut, but Swan passed to the left and Forteguerri had to retreat or have his face opened by Swan’s rising montante.

Swan went forward again, getting a leg over the princess. She rolled like an acrobat and Bembo grabbed her outflung arm with his good one and dragged her clear on the smooth marble floor.

Forteguerri threw a flat cut at Swan’s head and Swan parried, a little too close, a little late in the tempo; his own sword cut his head. He rifled a counter-cut and again Forteguerri stepped back.

Swan threw a small thrust at Forteguerri’s hand and made the man change guards.

No one was moving to help Forteguerri. Grazias and Clemente, an unlikely pair, were closing in on Forteguerri’s back.

Forteguerri knew, too. He pushed forward, cutting again, the same cut at Swan’s head, high and flat.

This time, Swan passed his right foot back behind his left; his sword went through a half-circle, low to high, so that he crossed his adversary from the inside, and in the same tempo he passed forward again, his right leg powering him as Vadi had taught him, and Forteguerri’s desperate parry served only to push Swan’s thrust into his own shoulder. Swan stepped offline; Forteguerri screamed; Clemente took Forteguerri’s sword out of his spasming hand as the man fell off Swan’s blade.

Padraig stood in front of the princess, a heavy knife in his hand. Grazias and Umar had Antonelli between them. The Other Demetrios had pressed Loredan to the wall; the Venetian was unarmed, and the veteran stradiote protected him.

Swan drew his arm back to finish Forteguerri and Bembo caught his wrist neatly, as Cardinal Picclomini stepped between them. The small cardinal was afraid; yet curiously bold.

‘I want him,’ Picclomini said. ‘He is a black sheep, but he is mine.’

Orsini Primo was pushing his cardinal out the door, and Colonna Uno stood in a corner behind a fence of swords. Secundo waited for a moment, and the only sound was the sound of thirty armed men breathing very fast.

‘Gentlemen,’ Jacob said. ‘Put up, gentlemen. The Holy Father, gentlemen.’

Swan bowed to Colonna Secundo. He was trying hard not to kill Forteguerri. ‘Would you do me the great favour of guarding the Holy Father?’ Swan asked. ‘All of the stradiotes are about to leave the castello.’

Secundo saluted with his sword and sheathed it. Cardinal Colonna stepped forward.

‘So close to Armageddon,’ he said.

Bessarion emerged from a hedge of stradiote blades. The Pope, on his chamberlain’s arm, rose from his throne, and everyone bowed deeply.

Swan was breathing normally.

Bessarion stepped forward. ‘There are still Aragonese all through the city,’ he said.

‘The Orsini and the Colonna will clear them away,’ Bembo said with a look at Orsini Primo.

‘In perfect amity,’ Cardinal Orsini said. ‘Perhaps my nephew might be announced as Gonfaloniere?’

The Pope inclined his head, and it was done. He turned, and went into his apartment.

The Orsini and the Colonna went out, all together, as if they were friends.

Picclomini nodded to Swan. ‘You were with Trevisan?’ he said.

Swan had forgotten. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘I was.’

‘Tell us!’ Picclomini demanded.

‘A great victory,’ Swan said. ‘The Turkish fleet is destroyed at Mytilene.’

Picclomini crossed himself. The Pope came back to his door.

‘A victory?’ he asked, his voice rasping.

‘Yes, Holy Father,’ Swan said, on one knee. Useless and transitory. A victory.

‘And my fleet?’ the Pope asked, like a parched man asking for water.

‘Intact,’ Swan said. Full of Tenedos worm; rotting at its moorings.

‘Now God be praised,’ the Pope said. He glanced at Jacob. ‘See this man is suitably rewarded,’ the old man said, as if he could not remember that Swan had been the messenger from Belgrade, or that he had just layered accusation on accusation in that very chamber. He turned away with another benison and passed through the heavy oak door.

Loredan was laughing. It was a bitter laughter. ‘Oh, Alessandro,’ he said. ‘They came for me because there was a rumour that Trevisan lost. Such a pack of fools.’

‘And I am to understand that the Princess Zaccaria is to lie under my roof?’ Bessarion asked. His hands were steepled; they all sat in a circle around his great writing table; Loredan, Bembo, Swan, Clemente, Umar, Grazias, Giannis, even Antoine. The princess sat very quietly.

‘As to that,’ Swan said, and Bembo laughed aloud.

‘Now we hear it,’ Bembo said.

The princess blushed.

‘Eminence, this is not the Princess Zaccaria, who is, God willing, in her castle at Glarenza.’ Swan glanced at her, and she blushed again. ‘This is my intended wife, Sophia Accaiaoulo. She happens to bear a strong resemblance to the princess; not that it mattered, as no one knew her but Picclomini.’

Bessarion uttered the first low whistle they had ever heard from his lips. ‘So in fact, you defrauded four cardinals,’ Bessarion said.

Swan smiled. ‘Eminence, I needed to get into the castello, and I needed to send a jolt of fear through their conspiracy; the way a shout can freeze an inferior swordsman in place.’

‘So you risked an innocent young woman …’ Bessarion said.

‘I wanted to,’ Sophia said. ‘In fact, it was part of our marriage contract. Did I act my part well?’

‘You were brilliant when you slipped Forteguerri,’ Bembo said. ‘You can be all the heroines in my adventures.’

Bessarion nodded to himself. ‘You were very careful with the Holy Father,’ he said.

The Greeks present all looked away.

Bembo nodded. ‘There was nothing to be gained …’ he began.

Bessarion rose to his feet. ‘Ser Tommaso, I believe you are to be congratulated; a masterful plan. Far too complicated; I suspect that you could have ridden into the castello as the messenger of victory and ended the whole matter …’

Bembo looked at Swan, who was suddenly frozen.

‘Or perhaps just arranged to have Di Medici murder Antonelli as he walked to the castello one day,’ Bessarion said. He shrugged. ‘But you do like an elaborate plan. I thank you all. Because of you, all the corruption and decay that is Rome can rumble on for a few more days. Perhaps we are just Constantinople, again.’

Grazias crossed himself.

‘But I believe I spoke to you strongly once before about bringing a woman into my house,’ Bessarion said to Swan, and such was Swan’s mood that for a moment he thought the great prelate was threatening him, until he saw the smile behind the beard.

‘I sentence you to marriage, Ser Tommaso. Immediate marriage, or I throw you into the street.’

And so, an hour later, in Bessarion’s chapel, Sophia Di Accaiaoulo was married to Tom Swan, knight of St Mark; Lord Loredan of Venice gave her away, and Lord Bembo acted as Swan’s father, and Antoine prepared, at no notice, an heroic feast.

They drank, and danced; it proved that, despite the admonitions of the cardinal, a surprising number of Lucrezia’s wards had been gathered by the stradiotes; musicians were found, because it was Rome; wine flowed, and lies were told, and the week’s quiet battles refought; Clemente was toasted, and colour began to return to Loredan’s face.

And later, Sophia stood, mostly undressed, by Swan’s narrow bed under the eaves.

She was laughing.

So was Swan.

‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said, suddenly.

She smiled. ‘Maybe it will,’ she said. ‘I wanted an adventure, not a convent.’

‘You came to the right place,’ Swan said.

This ends the adventure of Tom Swan and the Last Spartans

But Tom will ride, or walk, again, in six more adventures

Out in 2018!

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 6589 7

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