Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes (3 page)

‘By Saint John, young Englishman – that’s the effect that Drappierro has. I’m gossiping like a fishwife. He is what he is. Will you stay with my ship?’ he asked.

Swan was watching Drappierro. Bessarion had ordered him to watch the Genoese and work with him, but Bessarion had also asked him to visit Rhodos and Chios and Lesvos.

‘Are you still bound for Chios?’ he asked.

Fra Tommaso waved at a group of approaching knights. But he turned back to Swan. ‘I am. I may wait for the weather to break. Fancy a month on Rhodos?’

Swan thought of Violetta. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Will it be relaxing?’

After a month on Rhodos, Swan longed to return to sea. As a Donat, he rose every morning an hour before dawn, and walked out of the barracks with sixty other volunteers to exercise in the stone-flagged courtyard for an hour – lifting rocks and drawing bows and running like antic madmen. The first meal was dried bread and small beer, although Antoine could usually be counted on for an egg.

Some days, Swan drew various duties, all of which involved being mounted in full armour – patrolling walls, riding abroad on the island, or sitting with the knight on duty as tolls were levied or visiting merchants questioned. Winter still had the Ionia in its grip, but the traffic was already moving – the small traders who hopped from island to island never ceased business, and a month before Greek Easter, the bigger boats were moving, as well, with wares from Egypt, Turkey and Palestine.

The knights were not unnecessarily cruel to their Greek subjects, but neither were they the fatherly protectors that Bessarion imagined. The island’s Greek inhabitants paid a heavy tax for the ‘protection’ of the order – an order that they could not join. Swan, by virtue of his languages, was soon party to almost every property negotiation, and he saw the Greek gentry bridle at any suggestion that the knights should own more land. He heard the order referred to as ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’ by old women in the street. The island’s oldest icon sat in the hospitallers’ chapel where the natives could not revere it; the island’s cathedral church was Latin, not Greek.

On the other hand, the population had schools and fresh water, and paid lower taxes than most of their cousins under Turkish rule. When Swan was off duty, drinking in the taverns, he heard older Greeks admit that business was good. But he saw the young French knights treat Greeks as if they were the enemy.

The duty was not especially onerous, unless he had to spend two hours translating, but the ceaseless practice of arms was. Every day, with no exceptions, the knights, the Donats and all the mercenaries paraded at the castle, marched and formed into various formations, retreated and advanced, and then practised with weapons – one day, Swan cut at a pell with a short sword until he thought he’d been forgotten, over an hour, and his right shoulder hurt for days. Another time he was handed a poleaxe, a weapon he had never used, and instructed by a hectoring Neapolitan until he wanted to kill the patronising little bastard. A rail-thin Scottish knight instructed him at length about tilting and jousting. He hadn’t attempted to tilt since he was at court in England, but his riding skills had improved, and the Scotsman was a far better teacher than the Neapolitan.

As February turned to March, Swan saw the
Blessed Saint John
taken down to the frame and retimbered, with new decking and more than half of her planks replaced with fresh wood that shone nearly white against the older wood, now nearly black. Fencing with sword and buckler against Fra Tommaso, Swan commented on how good the ship looked.

‘She’s always been a beauty,’ Fra Tommaso agreed, obviously pleased that Swan could see his ship’s superiority. ‘That floating log hulled us badly. We’re lucky we made it into port, and luckier still that Master Shipwright has timber this year.’ He nodded at the knights. ‘Either the Turks are coming here, or we’re going for them. This is more men than I’ve seen in this yard since …’ He looked about. ‘Ever,’ he grunted, and set himself to trying to smash the small shield out of Swan’s resisting hand.

Daily practice had done much to allow Swan to distil some of the lessons he’d learned in unconnected pieces – from Messire Viladi, from Di Brachio, from the poem of Maestro Fiore he’d memorised. He’d learned a fair amount, but life on Rhodos allowed him to sort it out, practise it – and theorise.

He began to see what Maestro Fiore meant when he said that all things were the same in fighting, and that once you learned a set of techniques, it was ‘very, very easy’ to apply them to other weapons. This discovery came when, fencing with heavy blunted spears in full harness, he slapped his opponent’s spear-point to the earth and put his bated point into the other man’s visor hard enough to rock his head back. As his opponent was Fra Kenneth, the Scottish knight who taught him jousting – a veteran fighter with a vicious repertoire of elbows, knees, grapples and locks – Swan was proud of himself.

He’d used the technique without thinking, imitating something he’d learned from Maestro Viladi with the sword. Over the next four days he earned a reputation as a canny spear fighter.

Rhodos did have a few rewards to go with its litany of punishments. The order’s library was superb, and Swan sat and read medical texts and was praised for doing so. And he found that working in the hospital was almost pleasant. The building itself was big and airy and full of light, and the attitude of the serving brothers and sisters – and the rate of recovery of the patients, most of whom were foreign pilgrims – did a great deal to change Swan’s view of how medicine worked.

And the food was plenteous and mostly very good. Swan ate as much as he was allowed, and his appetite grew with each day of exercise, until the older knights would sit and laugh to watch him work his way through a great dish of mutton with saffron rice and raisins, a local favourite.

To his intense annoyance, he grew an inch in a sudden growth spurt, and his chest grew larger, so that his new, carefully fitted breast and back plate now fitted no better than his old one. He took it to the order’s armourer, who had a magnificent shop, and who refitted it to him in a day.

He looked longingly at the nuns. Chastity wasn’t in him, and twice in a month he drew sharp penances for his confessions – but they didn’t turn their heads, even the young, pretty ones.

The
Blessed Saint John
acquired her third and fourth coats of paint, and was declared ready for sea. After seventy days as a Donat, Swan had almost come to enjoy the life. He was certainly a better man-at-arms. He’d read some good books, seen some superb art, and by some alchemy he’d come to feel a part of the order, not just a wolf in another wolf’s clothing.

But he was not accomplishing his mission.

And he desperately wanted a girl. He tried his flirting skills on the Greek serving girls in the town – even on servants walking home from the dormitories.

Since Aphrodite had so effectively deserted him, he tried to find ways of passing the time that wasn’t spent in drilling, swordsmanship, spear fighting and wrestling. The library never failed to interest him, and the brother knights were always delighted if he took a turn in the hospital. The acting head of the English Langue – the order was organised by language – was Sir John Kendal, who was somewhat aloof, but seemed to put a mental check mark against Swan each time he washed sick men.

It was because of the hospital that he discovered his favourite part of the island.

Just before spring arrived, two men were brought in, both with multiple abrasions and broken bones. Swan was on duty in the ward and spoke Greek better than any of the other knights, and was summoned.

The two young Greeks were obviously terrified of the knights and of Swan. They lay in simple white wool gowns on clean linen sheets and were completely silent.

Swan sat down between them and waived Sir John away. Then, when they were alone, he spoke in good colloquial Greek. ‘How did this happen?’ he asked.

They looked at each other.

Swan looked over the younger man’s injuries – broken arm, broken leg, sand in every abrasion. ‘Did a house fall on you?’ he asked.

They looked at each other. He thought the other man reacted. Something in his eyes.

The slave who’d brought them in said, ‘Effendi, they were under the town.’

Swan nodded. ‘Under?’ he asked. ‘Go ahead – speak freely.’

‘Very well, Effendi. These unbelieving sons of whores were looting the ancient things under the town.’ The slave – a black African – shrugged, as if everyone knew this.

‘That’s a lie!’ sputtered the older Greek man. ‘I was trying to fix my privy.’

Swan leaned over and took a whiff. And shook his head. ‘Not unless the privy was very new indeed,’ he said.

The younger man’s pupils widened. ‘Please, my lord! We are poor men.’

Swan turned back to the slave. ‘Did they have a bag?’ he asked.

The slave smiled slowly, as if agreeing that Swan was not altogether a fool. ‘They did,’ he allowed.

‘What was in it, young man?’ Swan asked. He smiled a little using the term ‘young’. But as a member of the order, he was entitled to a little arrogance, he felt.

‘Either it was empty, in which case we will never get it back from the gate guards, or it was full of loot, in which case,’ the African smiled, ‘we will never get it back from the gate guards.’

‘Men after my own heart,’ Swan muttered. He was speaking Arabic to the slave, he discovered. ‘Can you take me to where they were found?’

‘The effendi must have noted that I am a slave,’ the black man said with a shrug. ‘I will await your pleasure.’ The man managed to say that in a way that suggested that the waiting gave him no pleasure and neither did service to a foreign infidel.

When Swan was done on the wards, he had the slave fetched.

‘I have waited for you for three hours,’ the slave complained.

‘During which, you were fed and did no work at all by my command,’ Swan said.

The two men looked at each other for a moment.

‘You have been a slave?’ the black asked carefully.

‘Only for a little while,’ Swan said.

‘Clearly the effendi learned some essential matters,’ the African said. ‘I am called Salim, here. Out there,’ he said, waving, ‘I am Mohamed.’

Swan nodded. ‘Call me Tommaso,’ he said. ‘Now show me where they were found.’

‘I can do better, if you pay me,’ the African said. ‘I can show you what the two fools didn’t know – how to reach the ancient city under the sewers.’

‘Are you a prisoner of war?’ Swan asked.

Salim nodded.

Together, they climbed an old house – really a tower, and probably more than a thousand years old. The inside was occupied by beggars who lived in the basement, and all the floors had fallen in and been salvaged for furniture, for room dividers, and even as firewood.

‘Can’t we go in by the door?’ Swan asked while climbing the sun-heated stone of the outer wall.

‘No,’ said the slave. He offered no further information.

Swan wondered whether he was being precipitate in trusting the man, and touched the needle-sharp rondel dagger at his waist. Just in case. They got over the old roof trees and then descended on ropes obviously there for the purpose.

There were other people living in the ruin, and the whole of the old tower was a chimney, so that they climbed down through a variety of cooking smells – onions, some meat, cardamom – all delicious.

Salim seemed to know the occupants, and he and Swan passed among them with only some murmurs. They went down into the old tower’s basement, and then along a short stone-lined corridor that stank of urine, and into an obvious cesspit.

‘Jesus!’ Swan spat.

Salim made a face. ‘Must you swear, Christian?’ he asked.

Swan would have laughed, but the stench made him retch.

The slave raised the hem of his kaftan and Swan pulled his gown tight against his body, and the two men edged along the least polluted wall and into another stinking corridor on the far side.

‘Did I fail to mention that the entry route is used as a set of privies?’ Salim asked with a wicked smile.

Swan grunted. ‘Did I fail to mention that I have a dagger and you do not?’ he asked idly, in Arabic. ‘Even a scratch would be septic, in this.’

‘Uhhnn.’ Salim nodded, not displeased.

While Swan contemplated the Arabic sense of humour, they passed six cesspits, each more odiferous and disgusting than the last, until they emerged into a dark chamber that stank only of cat piss. Swan lit an oil lamp, which guttered, as if the fumes ate the air. But the slave knew where there were lanterns and torches hidden in the rocks, and they made their way along an odd path – almost like a street, except that Swan could tell he was looking at shorings and foundations – heavy stone with an outward slope.

He stepped on something that bit at his foot. Examination under torchlight revealed a bronze arrowhead – light, and with a trilobite head. Swan had seen them before – at Marathon.

‘Persian!’ he said.

The black man shrugged. ‘If you say, Effendi. You are not expecting treasure, I hope.’

Swan smiled. ‘If there was a treasure …’ he said.

Salim raised a black eyebrow. ‘Yes?’ he asked, pausing. The torchlight rendered his face demonic.

‘You wouldn’t take me here at all,’ Swan said.

Salim laughed. ‘Sometimes there are coins. Arrowheads, such as the one you found. It was a great battle, the one the ancient men fought here before the Prophet, may his name be blessed, came to teach men the way of justice.’

‘How much farther does this go?’ Swan asked.

‘All the way to the—’ Salim seemed to catch himself. ‘Not much farther. Sometimes we find different tunnels—old streets. The old slaves say there is a tunnel cut in the rock—all the way under the walls to the south.’ He shrugged. ‘I have never seen it,’ he said.

Swan was increasingly conscious of being under the earth with a man as big as he was and every bit as dangerous. At the same time, he recognized the stone in the torchlight as marble—heavily veined grey marble. From ancient Greece.

‘It is fascinating,’ Swan said. ‘But I have to be at dinner in the hall. Shall we go back?’