Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Six: Chios (7 page)

He nodded.

More shouting from aft.

‘There is talk of taking the Englishman from thee, mistress,’ Mustafa said.

‘Let us be away to our own ship,’ Auntie said. ‘Immediately. I command it. Englishman, what have you done?’

Swan bowed his head. ‘As I serve God, lady, I have done nothing but carry a message from this man Drappierro to the Lord of the Knights of Wrath and then I have brought the lord’s answer to Drappierro.’

She smiled as they settled in a small boat. Her Africans began to pull them away from the side. There was more shouting aboard the flagship, but no heads appeared at the side. Swan could hear Omar Reis and another, deeper voice.

‘Truly, you are the very son of iniquity and father of lies, young man. Despite which, I can see thee as … Ganymede.’

‘Hermes,’ Swan managed. ‘Ganymede’s tastes ran to other things than messages.’

The woman laughed again. ‘Oh, infidel, how I shall use thee.’ She turned to her rowers.

Swan saw his small boat still tied under the stem of the flagship.

‘Shall I merely cut out his tongue?’ she asked Mustafa.

The African grunted and pulled his oar. They were passing down the length of the ship.

‘Why is my brother so wroth with the Genoese ambassador?’ she asked.

Mustafa grunted. ‘This infidel brought the Genoese a message from the Pirates of Rhodos,’ he said.

My hands are not tied, and I do no think this is going to get any better
, Swan thought.

‘So he is a double traitor,’ Auntie said with real satisfaction. She smiled at Swan. ‘If my brother kills him, I won’t have to pay him a thing for you!’

Swan smiled at her with every bit of forced flirtation he could muster. All he could see was her eyes.

‘I can use my tongue for many things,’ he whispered.

She giggled. ‘Well – perhaps we will have a test of that. If you pass, you may keep it. We could apply these tests one part at a time – anything that fails is removed.’

‘Anything that fails you, mistress, deserves nothing more,’ he said in Arabic. His right hand moved very slowly.

They were twenty cloth yards from his little boat.

He saw her close her eyes as he leaned forward to kiss her, and his hand trailed along behind Mustafa’s back.

He took Mustafa’s belt knife out of the sheath at his back and cut the man’s throat before Auntie’s eyes were open again. The other rower went for the knife – Swan broke his arm and he screamed and got the knife in his eye for good measure, and then Swan slammed the pommel into Auntie’s head as she drew her own knife.

The woman moaned and subsided, eyes wide with terror and the weight of the blow. She was stunned, but not unconscious.

The boat was suddenly full of blood.

Swan was sick of all of it.

He knelt by her in the bow and wrestled the boat with one oar alongside his own. No one looked over the side to see the source of the dying man’s scream. Swan panted twenty long breaths, his mind almost blank.

The woman opened her mouth.

He put his hand over it and she bit his hand until he put the knife to her nose.

‘I won’t kill you,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take your nose off.’

‘Try, you dog! You killed Mustafa, you—’

He rammed a thumb up under her jaw and she grunted in pain and subsided.

Carefully, he tied her hands and feet and then crumpled one of her shawls into a gag and shoved it into her mouth. She was unresisting.

‘Please note that I am not killing you,’ he said carefully. ‘I could. But I’m sick of the whole thing. I’m … sorry about Mustafa.’ He sounded insane, even to his own ears.

For a moment, in the darkness, he almost lost it.
The man’s skull popping under his hands – the feel of the dagger. In the stinking, hot darkness.

He threw up over the side.

He rolled into his own boat, and shoved Maral Khatun’s boat as hard as he could, sending each of them in opposite directions.

Forty feet away, Drappierro said, ‘Your accusations are pure foolishness, Pasha. Get a grip on yourself. There is no mighty Christian fleet, and there is no trap.’

Omar Reis did not sound angry. Merely professional. ‘Why the letter, then, messire?’

‘A forgery!’ Drappierro spat. ‘An obvious forgery.’

Swan went into the water. It was colder than he expected, and he felt the current as soon as he went in. He fought fatigue and revulsion.

And fear.

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

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

He was there for long enough to feel the total panic. He couldn’t get his head under the water. He would not do it.

Any moment, a Turk would put his head over the stern and see Auntie – or him.

He tried again.

Damn it.

He tried prayer, and nothing came.

Tried thinking of beautiful women. Of the head of St George.

Of life.

He didn’t breathe deeply enough, but in the end he got his head under water, and he got under the boat, and his desperately questing hand found the little keg secured by the rope. Weighted with lead.

Fuck them all
, he thought.
I’m going to pull this off.

He made enough noise to wake the dead, getting back in his boat.

No one paid him any attention, because Drappierro and Hamza Beg and Omar Reis were shouting like bulls.

Swan opened the small keg. Inside it was full of tallow, except for the bars of lead that killed its buoyancy, the oiled leather packet of gunpowder, and the small oiled silk packet. Swan took that. He didn’t smile. The fun of the prank was gone with Mustafa’s throat.

Now it was just a job.

Inside the powder bag was the length of a man’s hand of slow match, and his tinder box. Swan reassembled his device – the packet of powder inside the tallow, which he packed back, his hands greasy with the stuff. He pulled the waxed plug on the barrel and fed the fuse through it, and then he tapped the top of the keg into place until the thin board snapped past the ends of the staves.

It took him ten tries to light his char cloth. Auntie was a hundred yards away, coasting on the current.

He giggled.

He reached out and grabbed the anchor chain and pulled, so his boat began to float north along the side of the galley. Swan got this oars in the water, set the keg on the stern post and gave three long pulls so he was moving well – he was clumsy, using one hand to balance the barrel every other stroke, and the boat swung back and forth and bumped along the galley’s low sides.

A sailor – deck crew – looked out over the side, his head silhouetted against the moon.

Swan ignored him and touched the char cloth to the slow match. The fuse began to burn, a thin wisp of smoke rising in the still air.

Drappierro shouted, ‘Of course it’s the little bastard. He’s made the whole thing up – forged the letter! Listen, Pasha! He’s a thief and liar!’

‘There’s a man in a boat!’ shouted the sailor.

A hackbut appeared over the side, the torchlight sparkling on its polished barrel.

Swan had expected to have another minute to let the fuse burn. But his time was up – he could hear the gods telling him he was done.

Or just God.

He rose at his oars, plucked up the keg, and threw it with both hands as hard as he could into the air.

And then, without awaiting the result, he dived into the water.

And at the bottom of his dive, he swam down, even as he heard the bark of hackbuts above the water.

The dreams of death – Salim’s death – followed him in the water, but he out-swam them.

He swam until he could no longer hold his breath, and even then he moved his arms. It was suddenly light all around him.

All around him.

He was trying to rise when the fist of a giant slammed into the water above him, and he was forced out – and down. He swallowed water, but he was past his panic.

He coughed out the last of his air, utterly disoriented. Unable to choose which way led to the surface and air. The light dimmed – but
fortuna
showed him the glint of a glass bottle on the bottom of the harbour where some reckless sailor had dropped the precious thing – and suddenly his brain worked, and up and down were restored.

He gave a kick to the surface.

The Turkish flagship was on fire.

Swan laughed.

Swan swam into the town on the exuberance of success, and climbed the central pier unaided and undetected. The whole harbour was lit by the inferno of the galley burning in the middle of the channel, and by the time Swan was standing on the pier, two dozen alert deck crews had cut their cables and were rowing – weakly, because most of their oarsmen were ashore – rowing for safety. A galley is fifty metres of light, dry wood coated in pitch and fused in oiled linen and hemp and tarred rope – a firebomb waiting for a light – and no Turkish captain could afford a spark.

The Chians, quite naturally, thought it was an attack and sounded the alarm. Every soldier in the town went to the walls, seaside and landside. From the pier, Swan could see the Genoese and Portuguese gunners in the seaward bastions, their matches lit, watching the desperate movements of the Turkish crews. In the Turkish camp off to the north, the janissaries stood to arms and the drums beat.

A second Turkish galley caught fire.

The crew, less brave than the crew of the flagship, jumped for the safety of the water. The ship drifted on the current, and more and more galleys cut their cables or dropped their anchor chains.

Undermanned galleys began to drift within extreme range of the town’s guns. Unordered, the Portuguese master gunner ordered the seaward bastion to open fire.

Unnoticed, the author of the night’s excitement dragged himself under a fishing boat pulled well above the tideline on the town’s inner beach.

Despite the roar of the cannon and the flickering light, he was asleep before the third Turkish galley caught.

In the morning, a professional observer could make out four Turkish galleys burned to the waterline and then turned turtle, their buoyant timbers keeping the wrecks afloat, drifting with the obscene wetness of dead jellyfish. Two more had been captured when they drifted ashore, and another destroyed by gunfire.

Swan stood on the beach, drinking it all in, and then walked – naked – up into the town. He went to the house of the Latin bishop, and demanded clothing as a member of the order, and was clothed. Swan played the injured hero to perfection, and had the sympathy, first, of the bishop’s valet, and then of his housekeeper, and by the time he’d shared a plate of veal with the prelate, he had the bishop’s complete sympathy as well.

‘You are the young man who accused the president of the council of impiety,’ the bishop said, with a certain amusement. ‘I remember you.’

Swan bowed where he sat. ‘Yes, my lord.’

The bishop – a Genoese – sat back and played with his cup. ‘The president sees his duty differently than you or I,’ he said.

A young Greek appeared at the doorway to the room – once a woman’s solar, Swan thought – and when the bishop looked at him, he indicated a small piece of paper or parchment between his fingers.

‘Excuse me,’ the bishop said, with a civil inclination of his head. He accepted the message and read it. And smiled.

‘The Turkish fleet is reported to be abandoning their camp – their rowers are going aboard and they are burning all the supplies they moved ashore. Come, Master Swan.’

Swan followed the bishop – a big man who nonetheless appeared capable of rapid movement and decisive action. The diocesan palace was not a grand affair, but it did sport a fine old tower, and they ran up six flights of steps to the top.

From the top, they could see the straits full of Turkish shipping, and the far coast of Asia. To the south, at the base of the mountain, the Turkish camp looked like a nest of woodlice kicked by a child, and to the north, they could see the vanguard of the Turkish fleet already forming up. On the beaches south of the town, dozens of Turkish ships were landing stern first and taking aboard their full crews of oarsmen.

Almost at their feet, in the town’s main square, the president of the Mahona and a dozen Mahonesi were arguing with an armoured man, who was waving a sword like an actor in a St George play.

‘Young man, I do believe that God has answered our prayers.’ The bishop nodded and then grinned like a much younger and less dignified man.

Swan’s joy was tinged with anxiety for the young Lord of Eressos. ‘My particular friend Zambale …’

The bishop shook his head. ‘Why hold him, when the Turks are leaving? He was only taken up at the behest of that detestable apostate Drappierro.’ He shrugged. ‘There is half the Mahona. Let us go and address them.’

The bishop paused in his own yard only long enough for servants to drape the correct robe and place the correct mitre on his head – which they did as he walked through them. Swan received a scarlet surcoat – close inspection showed the white cross to have been hastily added to a churchman’s garment, but Swan was transformed from looking like an armed servant to a soldier-prince of the Church.

The bishop gathered a dozen retainers – men-at-arms and priests – and swept out of his gates into the square.

In the square, a crowd had gathered. There were twenty fully armoured men on horseback, and the captain of the town continued to argue with the Mahonesi, the face inside his armet red with exertion – and wrath.

But the appearance of the bishop – brilliant in his Easter robes, with a retinue behind him – silenced the square. The captain, a mercenary, knelt before the bishop and kissed his ring.

The president of the Mahona fiddled with his black cap nervously.