The Long Sword (43 page)

I had never seen anything so moving in my life. I have seen Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople and my beloved London, Venice and Baghdad and Vienna and Krakow and Prague, and to me, none of them have the ancient majesty of the citadel of Athens, which seems to me to be as ancient as man’s presence on the world of sin. And it makes me feel odd … small, and somehow weak, to imagine that this was built by men like me, so long ago that we have lost the crafts by which it was made.

Bah! My views on ancient architecture bore you. So be it. The King of Sicily was, at that time, the Duke of Athens, and the city was held by the bishop – an Italian. He was, to all intents, at war with the Duke of Thebes, who was French: Roger de Luria, of whom I might say more later. Suffice it to say that this man, the Marshal of Achaea, was, despite his high-sounding title, a routier, and was in league with the Turks. Nerio seemed to know everything about Greece and I learned from him many a curious fact, not least of which was that his father already owned land all over Romania (as we call it) or Greece.

He gave his lopsided smile. ‘I am myself the Baron of Vostitza,’ he said, waving a hand airily toward the Morea.

I wanted to ride farther afield. Greece is rich; the farms on the plain behind Athens are magnificent and well-tilled, yet a third of them stood fallow and the castle at the edge of the plain was burned.

Nerio shrugged. ‘Romania is falling apart,’ he said. ‘Bad government, greed – mostly our own greed.’ He looked at me. ‘My father has strong views on how Greece should be ruled. You should ask him.’ He looked out over the plains. ‘For myself, I love it,’ he said.

I was falling in love myself. The air was so clear, and the overwhelming sense of the ancient was very beautiful to me.

It must have been that night – I suppose we were only in Piraeus three days – when we went up to the town of Athens that nestles under the castle. Everywhere you can see the ancient city, like bones of soldiers long dead on an old battlefield. Some bones were well preserved – a Greek priest told us that the temple with a church that we admired had once been dedicated to Hephaestus, the smith god of the ancients. But the town was very small, with fewer than five thousand people. Nerio said it was so small for the same reason that the castle on the plain was burned – the constant state of war.

‘The Frankish lords fight each other,’ he said. ‘And the Franks fight the Despot at Mistra. And the Greeks fight among themselves, and fight the Vlachs and the Albanians. The Genoese fight the Venetians. The Turks attack everyone, but no one fights them.’ He spread his hands. He might have said more, but we were climbing in the last light into the occupied parts of the town on the slope of the acropolis, and he saw a girl leaning over the door of her house, and he smiled at her, and she probably smiled back and I lost him.

I might not even remember that evening, except that Fiore felt better and my friends ordered a dinner from a big taverna, perhaps the only taverna, almost directly under the walls. It was a pleasant building and had tables out on the roof of the next building down the steep slope, and we seemed to be sitting among the stars while we ate lamb and rice. The local wine was good, but Nerio was anxious to be away; we all knew him by then, and Miles smiled at me.

‘He wants to get to church,’ I said.

There was, in fact, a pretty little church, a Greek church, but we were not so choosy in those days, and the Greek priest rang the bell himself and welcomed us to compline. Nerio had chosen the taverna and seemed very eager to be at Mass.

I had never been in a Greek church before. Everyone calls them schismatics and heretics – I once asked Father Pierre to explain how they were heretics, and he laughed.

‘My son, it is all too possible, that it is we who are the heretics. Peter wrote letters to the Corinthians and the Thessalians, but none whatsoever to the French, the Italians, or the English.’ He laughed his lovely laugh and then looked directly at me. ‘Don’t tell the Pope,’ he said. And changed the subject.

At any rate, we all had dispensations, from Father Pierre as legate, to hear Mass under the Greek rite, and I had never done so, so we went to Mass. The singing was very different from our own, but beautiful, and Fiore said it was like masses he had heard in Venice.

We were in the church just long enough to admire the lamp, a magnificent hanging lamp of silver, when Nerio’s sudden burst of religious enthusiasm was explained by the arrival of the girl from the doorway down the hill, wearing a veil. I didn’t know her, but Nerio beamed at her – oh, that man!

At any rate, immediately after Mass, all the Greeks went out into the tiny square and drank wine, and Nerio sat with his lady. He had a little Greek and she had a little Latin, and they conversed with long looks that smoked and smouldered.

We heard the shouts and did nothing, because we were a little drunk and the Greeks were being very friendly, but when one of the shouts became a scream, Fiore was on his feet, sword in hand. I suppose I should say that, in Romania, men openly wore swords, even longswords, and all of us had ours by our sides.

I followed Fiore when he ran past the church and plunged into the darkness. The streets were narrow, wound like a tangled skein of yarn, and were as steep as a mountain. As we ran, we heard shouting again. This time, we could clearly perceive that the shouting was Italian and the screaming was from a woman. We cut down another street and came out above a round tower and found four men fighting one while another fumbled at a screaming woman’s clothes. He had her on her back.

There was another man down, but in the darkness, it was very difficult to make out who was who.

The single man fighting four had his back to the tower – they call it the ‘Tower of the Winds’ – and he would charge out into them, swing wildly, and then back away. The four were cowards: they would not close with him.

I became convinced that the single man was Carlo Zeno. Some combination of movement and the tone of the shouts.

Zeno – if it was he – was trying to cut his way through to the woman. She, in turn, was resisting her would-be rapist with spirit. She kicked him in the head, and when he tried to raise her skirts, she got them over his head and stabbed him with a knife. I know this, because by then I was upon them, running full tilt. I gave him the pommel of my sword in the back of his head and left him to his tender victim.

I passed them and pressed into the back of Zeno’s
mêlée
. He was beside himself, and he used his sword two-handed, sweeping it back and forth, trying to make a hole in the four men facing him.

I kicked one in the back of the knee. He went down and I stamped on him while thrusting at a second man, and Fiore passed his blade over the head of a third and threw the man into the wall of the tower so hard that he died.

The fourth man fell to his knees. He wept and begged – attacker to victim in a matter of moments.

Zeno stabbed him through the mouth as he begged. It was a pretty thrust.

The failed rapist was thrashing his heels on the ground in his death throes. His intended victim had cut his throat.

Miles Stapleton ran up behind us, but it was done.

Gianni di Testa was lying at the foot of the tower, his head broken by an iron club. We carried him to the priest’s house and then bought wine for the woman. She was Greek, and possibly a prostitute. The men were foreign scum, waterfront workers from Piraeus. If anyone knew them, no one claimed their corpses.

The rest of the evening was not very pleasant.

The next day, we received further news of the presence of the Turkish fleet, which had raided Negroponte for twenty days, so that the smoke of the Turkish fires could be seen in the north. The Venetian lords in the area and their feudal subordinates, as well as the bishop of Athens and his allies, had rallied a dozen galleys of the smaller size, and there were two Greek galleys in Piraeus. Syr Giannis Lascarus Calopherus and Syr Giorgos Angelus had accompanied us from Corfu, aboard the Corner galley, and they came aboard to inform us that these were Katakouzenos galleys from Mistra and not to be trusted.

The politics of the schismatic are as depressingly convolute as our own, and it transpired that the current Emperor had been ruled as a child by a regent, John Kantakouzenos, who had as so often happens, taken the throne for himself. When he abdicated in favour of his lawful charge, he had granted to his own children the Despotate of the Morea, a string of Greek states carved out of the Latin dominions in western Greece. Despite which, Lord Contarini was delighted to accept their service: the two Greek galleys were large and well-built, and well-crewed.

I watched Lord Contarini spend all his effort on food and water, and I learned much. War at sea is like war on land, except more so. A general can allow himself to believe that his men can live off the land, and most armies can do so for a few days at least, although the results can be catastrophic for discipline. But an admiral cannot believe any such thing – there is neither food nor fresh water at sea, and an admiral must carry every scrap of food and water his men will consume; and he can count the number of days his men will be able to maintain the campaign before a single arrow is loosed or his ships have even left the beach.

Any road, by the end of three days we put to sea with thirty-one galleys. The Venetians were the core of the alliance, but provided slightly fewer than half the ships.

At the south end of the strait between Negroponte and the mainland, we found, not the Turks – though we spent the better part of a day creeping over the ocean to reach them as stealthily as possible – but a pair of galleys belonging to my own order. They were part of the Christian League squadron that covered Smyrna, and they had shadowed the Turkish squadron for twenty days, doing what damage they could.

The commander of the galleys was an Italian, Fra Daniele Caretto. I sent my respects to him by a note when the admiral sent Messire Zeno aboard his ship, but he didn’t send a response. He knew, of course, that the crusade was at sea. He said the Turks were equally aware, and that their campaign on Negroponte was probably an attempt to pre-empt our attack and force us on the defensive.

Contarini laughed. ‘They imagine we are all allies,’ the old man said bitterly.

‘As we imagine of them,’ Pisani added.

With thirty-three warships, Contarini was, if not eager to engage, at least far more willing to seek out the enemy. We cruised up the channel between the great island and the mainland of green Boeotia practicing all of his fleet manoeuvres, most of which consisted of making various half-circle formations of ships and the vital art of backing water. Because the rowing was endless, all of us took part, day after day.

I confess that I hated it. It was as hot as my image of hell, with burning winds blowing along the Greek coast and the smell of thyme in the air with animal manure and sea salt. I had a touch of something, from Athens, bad food or bad air, and I was as weak as Fiore had been. But rowing every day in the sun made me better, and stronger, and eventually I began to feel something of the strength I had had before the beating.

We took our ease the third night on the beaches of northern Negroponte. And there our Greeks – and especially Giorgos Angelus – entertained us with stories of the days of greatness in Greece. They told us of a great sea battle fought for four straight days between the fleets of all the Greek cities and the Persians, right there, at the bend in the strait. After dinner we took our cups of wine and climbed the headlands to see the columns and collapsing roof of the temple to the Greek goddess Diana.

‘In our tongue, Artemis,’ Syr Giorgos said. ‘And this headland, Artemesium.’

His companion nodded. ‘It was one of the greatest battles of the ancient world,’ Syr Giannis said.

‘Who won?’ Miles asked.

Syr Giannis shook his head, the wide head shake of the Greek. ‘No one,’ he said. He pointed to the south and west. ‘The King of Sparta died over there, at Thermopylae. When he died, the Greek fleet retreated.’ He smiled. ‘It is a famous place, to Greeks. I wish to go to Thermopylae someday.’

I had heard of the death of the Spartan king – there was a romance about the Persian Wars making the rounds in Venice. The current fashion for aping the ancient world was just in its infancy then; men like Petrarch and Boccaccio were reading the ancients and even translating them. So I was enthusiastic.

‘Perhaps we could arrange a passage of arms!’ I said enthusiastically.

The idea caught everyone’s imagination, and we drank a toast to the notion.

But first we had to fight the Turks.

Dawn brought us a fair wind and the labour of getting our ships off the beach. But as soon as we were underway – and we were moving before the red disk of the sun was free of the eastern horizon – we could see the Turks moving toward us under bare poles. I’m going to guess that the admiral had received scouting reports the night before – why share them with me? – because he seemed unsurprised.

We stayed with the wind under our quarters while we armed. Most of us had squires by then, but what I remember about that morning, my first sea fight, is Nerio, the proud, buckling the armour for Marc-Antonio, perhaps the humblest squire. We all served each other.

I had commanded men before, and yet that morning, when we formed in two dense and iron-clad ranks, knights in the front, squires in the back, it made my heart soar with joy.

I had never seen a sea fight before. I had some idea, from all the order’s drills and the Venetian drills, too, but I hadn’t experienced how different it was from a land fight. Perhaps the most difficult difference – hard to explain, and hard to endure – is the waiting and the interludes. The ships determine the pace of combat, not the knights. A battle is usually a single long grind of action and terror and amidst the terror, most men fight using nothing but their training and their fear. The grind of battle makes men tired; their armour makes them tired, their fear makes them tired, and their fatigue makes them afraid, until they conquer or die.