Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part One: Castillon (8 page)

‘Face me!’ roared the count. ‘You sons of bitches!’ He had his visor open.

Another arrow hit him – missed his face by a handspan and struck full on his lifted visor, ripping it away from the helmet.

Swan angled towards him, trying to draw his attention away from Alessandro, who was coming up from behind the armoured man. But Alessandro caused him to turn – and then swept by to the right, his horse labouring on the hillside.

Giannis shot a bolt into the back of the man’s unprotected thigh at twenty yards.

The count screamed and went down.

Alessandro rode up and dismounted even as Swan dismounted himself. Alessandro handed the Englishman his reins. ‘I’ll do this,’ he said. He shrugged.

‘Arrhhh. Arrhhh!’ the count grunted. He was rolling back and forth, his left hand scrabbling at the quarrel that had penetrated his thigh, broken the bone and probably lodged against his thigh armour – in front. He was clearly in incredible pain. His head thrashed back and forth.

Alessandro walked over to him – and suddenly the man dropped the pretence and got to one knee, his sword sweeping low in an attempt to cut one of Alessandro’s legs.

Alessandro blocked some of it with a sweeping downward parry, but the cut was low and he had no leg armour, and he stumbled and went down.

‘Fuck you, you bitch!’ screamed the count. ‘I’ll kill every fucking one of you, you whores!’ He was on one knee.

He began to drag himself to Alessandro, who tried to roll away.

Swan had no armour, and he had a feeling that the count was far out of his league as an opponent. And he wasn’t sure he owed Alessandro anything.

He considered intervening, and thought,
I don’t have to do this
.

But he wanted to be a knight, and not a thief. He had a feeling – in a long moment between stillness and an explosive leap – that this was his moment to choose. As was so often the case, in one moment of decision, he dared himself.

I don’t have to do this
.

I really don’t have to do this
.

He leaped over the Italian.

The count cut down.

He caught the cut on his high guard, as his uncles had taught him. The count twisted, but he was on one knee and probably not as powerful as he was used to being, and their blades locked, the two keen edges biting into each other just a little.

Swan had the enormous advantage of being on his feet, armour or no armour. He lunged with his left foot and rotated his sword on the point where the two blades were locked, and punched his pommel into the count’s unprotected face.

He was very fast. People always underestimated his speed.

The count’s teeth exploded over his pommel, and the man fell back, and Swan, almost as surprised as the count by his own success, cut wildly, his point bouncing up from the count’s gorget and cutting across the man’s lips and left eye.

He stumbled back.

The count screamed a long, drawn-out scream. Swan had only ever heard such a scream from a woman in childbirth. He looked like some sort of nightmare monster.

The count got his good leg under him and powered himself to his feet, his scream now a roar.

Peter’s arrow struck his breastplate right over the heart. It didn’t penetrate. But it knocked the count back, and he unbalanced and fell down again, and the spell was broken.

Giannis was shouting in Italian, ‘Get out of the way! Get out of the way!’

But Swan stood between the monster in armour and Alessandro, who he wasn’t sure he liked.

Alessandro was staunching the flow of blood from his ankle. ‘You have to kill him,’ he said.

Swan walked over to the count, who was lying on his back with one leg cocked and the other flat on the ground. He was breathing as if he’d run a race.

‘
Je me rends
,’ he said heavily. ‘
Je me rends
.’ He waved his sword-hand.

Swan put his right foot on the hand, pinning it to the earth.

‘Jesu! Get off it, you little bitch. I have yielded.’ The fire in the count’s eyes was unholy. Even with a foot on the man’s sword-arm, his face ruined by the pommel strike, a crossbow bolt in his thigh, he was terrifying in his full plate, and his size. Swan feared him, even now.

‘Pray, Messire Count. You are about to die.’ Swan placed his sword-point near the man’s face, and found that his point was wobbling from the trembling of his hand.

‘I’m worth a thousand ducats, sodomite. Get off my hand.’

‘Pray, messire.’ Swan found his hand was steadying.

‘God is a fucking lie, boy.’ The man lay there, his one good eye staring.

Swan wished he would make one more attempt to rise – to fight. Anything to justify what he was about to do.

His point wavered.

Alessandro said, ‘Just kill him, for the love of God.’

He took a deep breath and . . .

Giannis leaned over and pulled the latch on his crossbow, and his quarrel blew through the man’s skull and killed him instantly. ‘There’s money wasted,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You hit bad, messire?’

Peter was hobbling, favouring his side.

In the distance, four dust clouds on the plain gradually merged to two, and then to one. By the time Stefanos came riding back, Alessandro was on horseback, one foot out of the stirrup and dangling, with Swan’s neck cloth around his ankle.

Stefanos had Marcus over his horse. He shrugged at his
capitano
. ‘Bad luck,’ he said.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘Dead?’ he asked.

Stefanos nodded.

‘What a waste,’ Alessandro said. ‘You get them both?’

‘Yes,’ Stefanos said.

‘Where are the bodies?’ Alessandro asked.

‘In the river. In armour. What do you think – I was born yesterday?’ The Greek spat. ‘Any of them have anything worth taking? Those two had nothing but their swords.’

‘Leave it. Take nothing but coins. Nothing to mark us.’

‘What about the horses?’ Giannis asked with a whine in his voice.

Alessandro was in pain, and his temper was short. ‘What did I just say?’

‘Fuck. What do we get out of this?’ complained Stefanos. ‘Marcus is dead. I got less than an ecu.’

Alessandro glared.

Giannis, Swan, Ramone and Giorgos dragged each corpse into the wood. It was hard work, and disgusting. Ramone put a knife into each corpse’s neck under the chin, just to be ‘sure’, and searched the corpses for cash.

Peter picked up the count’s sword.

‘Leave it,’ Alessandro said.

‘It’s a fine weapon,’ Peter said, putting a touch of ‘v’ into the ‘w’ of weapon.
A vine veapon
.

‘It could get us all beheaded,’ Alessandro said.

Swan noted that the
capitano
spoke to Peter almost as a peer.

Peter nodded the way a man nods when he disagrees utterly. He dropped the sword in the grass.

In twenty minutes, they were done.

‘Put fire to the wood,’ Alessandro said.

The soldiers got a fire going, and spread it. The summer woods caught very fast.

‘Let’s go,’ Alessandro said.

Paris was dull after the road. Alessandro’s ankle cut was worse than it had looked in the field, and he had to go to a surgeon to be bled. The cardinal had apartments in the Louvre, but the rest of them were housed in the Convent of the Ursilines, and the cardinal introduced Swan to the King’s Librarian. He was shocked to be given the run of the Royal Library. Days passed very quickly while he read. He did little but read.

That was good, because every night he dreamed. He dreamed of the four men on the road, of the count’s one remaining eye, of the blood. Every night. Sometimes in the day.

He fantasised about every young nun in the convent, went out with the notaries and drank too much on the silver of the men he’d killed, and diced and played cards until he felt tired enough to sleep without dreams.

It never worked.

After they’d been in Paris a week, the cardinal summoned him. A servant fetched him from Aristotle, and he walked up through the labyrinth of halls to the cardinal’s apartment.

He bowed, was summoned forward, and kissed the cardinal’s ring.

‘Your Eminence,’ he said.

Bessarion smiled. He looked strained. ‘I am about to trade you,’ he said. ‘I believe you said you were worth a thousand florins?’

Swan noted that Alessandro was lying on the cardinal’s bed. He waved an idle salute.

Swan twitched. ‘As to that . . .’ he said, smiling apologetically.

‘Half that?’ the cardinal said. He was already writing. ‘I’m trading you to the King’s Librarian. He wants you as his prisoner. He’ll use you in the library until your father arranges your release.’ He paused. ‘Of course, we’ll need your father’s name.’ He looked at Alessandro. ‘I’m sorry for this, young man. I had thought of releasing you without ransom after your daring on the road, but the truth is . . . we’ve had a disaster.’ Bessarion, the very model of decorum, or Roman-style gravitas, had a catch in his voice.

Swan realised the man was on the edge of tears.

‘A . . . disaster?’ Swan asked.

Alessandro rose on his elbow. ‘Constantinople fell to the Turks. In May.’

Bessarion buried his head in his hands. ‘My city.’

Swan was at a loss. Constantinople was a name redolent with magic – a wonderful place, a schismatic, heretical place, a palace of wonders. Babylon. He had to imagine that the flesh-and-blood Bessarion thought of the great city as . . . as home. Home, like London.

Bessarion raised his head. Now Swan could see that he had aged. His lips were thin, his hair greyer. ‘Suddenly I am cut off from revenue. So I’m afraid I must sell your ransom, young man.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’

Swan shrugged.

‘Tell him,’ Alessandro said suddenly. ‘There’s no point in pretence, boy. Tell him.’

‘What’s this?’ Bessarion asked.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘He’s not worth a sou of ransom. He’s someone’s bastard, that’s all.’

Bessarion continued to look at Swan. ‘Is this true? Do you know this to be true?’ he asked.

Swan was frozen. But if he said his father’s name, it would all become instantly clear, anyway.

Cardinal Bessarion nodded. ‘Ah. Of course. What nobly born boy speaks Greek?’ He looked at Swan. ‘Tell us, boy.’

‘My father is dead,’ he said. He shrugged his shrug. ‘He was a cardinal. He wanted me educated for the Church.’

‘Kemp?’ asked the cardinal, his voice sharp. ‘Kemp had a mistress?’

Swan lowered his eyes. ‘Cardinal Beaufort, Eminence.’

Alessandro whistled from the bed. ‘You’re a bastard of
that
bastard?’ He snorted.

Bessarion pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow. ‘You aren’t worth a sou.’

Alessandro laughed aloud. ‘So – you
were
a royal page!’

Swan spread his hands. ‘Not for long,’ he admitted. ‘I . . . played a prank.’

Bessarion shook his head. Raised his eyes from his hands and looked at his
capitano
. ‘I can sell the Ptolemy,’ he said. ‘It will get us the money to go to Rome.’

Alessandro nodded.

Bessarion looked at Swan. ‘You did me good service, young man. Despite your lies. Ahh – spare me. A lie is a lie. Go – I’ll see to it you get a safe conduct.’

Swan sighed. Greatly daring, he met the cardinal’s eye. Then he looked at Alessandro. And shifted his glance back to the cardinal. ‘I’d rather have a job,’ he said. ‘If it’s all the same to you. There’s . . . nothing for me in England.’

Bessarion shook his head. But he laughed. ‘I’m not sure I have what would be required to save your soul,’ he said.

Alessandro nodded. ‘I’ll take him,’ he said. ‘He has a weak stomach for the killing, but I’ll take him.’

‘At least he can read Greek,’ Bessarion said. ‘And Cesare likes him.’

The news that Swan was going to accompany them to Rome didn’t seem to be the thunderbolt that Swan had expected it to be. He told Giovanni at the convent, and the lawyer clasped his hand, kissed him on one cheek, and laughed. ‘Welcome to the very gates of heavan,’ he said.

‘The gates of the inferno is more like it.’ Cesare was a large man, and Paris in midsummer was hot, smelly and stifling. ‘You are not the missing Prince of Wales after all, eh?’

Swan bit his lip.

‘We had a joke about you in the early days,’ Giovanni said. ‘You were either an impostor, a peasant playing at being a lord, or the other way round – a great lord playing at being a lesser light. But we could never guess which.’

‘You were too easy with the servants,’ Cesare said. He shrugged. ‘The way I am. I grew up – as a servant, eh?’

Swan nodded. ‘My mother owns a tavern,’ he said. ‘I waited tables as soon as I was old enough to carry the cups.’

Giovanni laughed. ‘But your Latin is impeccable!’

Cesare grunted.

‘Oh, my father had me educated,’ Swan said. He shrugged. ‘I even did a little jousting,’ he added.

The lawyers shook their heads.

‘You’ll be happy in Italy,’ Cesare predicted. ‘Here in the north, the idiots think birth matters. In Italy – we’re making a new world. Where a man is what he is.’

Giovanni looked down his long nose at his friend. ‘Birth is birth,’ he said, and then relented. ‘But it’s true. We’re not hunting dogs. Cesare proves that anyone can go to university and emerge a man of letters.’ He ducked a thrown inkwell, which splattered against the whitewashed wall. ‘You just made some young novice very unhappy, my friend.’

‘I’ll just imagine her on her knees—’

‘None of your impiety, you blasphemer—’

‘Working her little heart out—’

‘Stop!’

Swan left them to it.

He walked to his own cell – a tiny room the size of a blanket chest, which is what his bed seemed to be. As he expected, Peter was sitting on it, reading the psalms. Copybooks – short tracts, meticulously written out by copyists – were quite cheap in Paris.

He sat on the blanket box. He took the cardinal’s livery badge from his purse and put it on the box. ‘I’ve taken service with the cardinal,’ he said. ‘I’m going to Rome.’ He smiled. ‘You’ve been very good to me. I think we’re . . . even. Eh?’

Peter smiled, slipped a strip of linen tape into his tract, and sat back. ‘I’m fired? Just like that? Just when I’ve figured out how to get the nuns to wash our shirts?’