Tom Swan and the Last Spartans - Part Three
Date: 2017-04-05 16:40:15.721975+00:00
Description: The latest instalment of the Tom Swan adventures – the fast-paced serialised novel set in the turbulent Europe of the fifteenth century.
Publisher: Orion
Rights: All rights reserved

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans

Volume Three: Mistra

Christian Cameron

Contents

Title Page

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans: Volume Three: Mistra

Also by Christian Cameron

Copyright

Tom Swan and the Last Spartans

Volume Three: Mistra

Demoiselle Sophia was naked; half-turned away from him in the glorious evening light of a Venetian sunset, her pale skin bathed in hues of pink and gold. She looked back with a longing in her eyes that moved Swan deeply.

He reached to take her breasts in his hands.

‘Dawn,’ she said.

He hesitated, and reality flickered around him.

‘Dawn, messire. First light,’ Clemente’s voice said, and the cold reality of dawn in a pavilion deep in the mountains of Albania at the very edge of winter poured into his consciousness with all the crushing force of a cavalry charge. Demoiselle Sophia’s naked body vanished, to be replaced by all the cares of running a company of lances; a set of cares that included immediate worries about drinking water and fodder for horses, and longer-term concerns about the reception his company might receive from the occasionally fickle and always dangerous Iskander Bey, sometimes known as John Scanderberg, de facto ruler of Christian Albania.

Swan really wanted to close his eyes and return to sleep. Sleep had been better, although the most cursory examination of his memories of the dream he’d had suggested that he’d put Sophia’s head on Violetta’s body. He had only a vague impression of the demoiselle’s body, whereas Violetta’s he knew and remembered well.

Too well.

‘Yes,’ he muttered. ‘Yes.’

‘Messire. You said to wake you,’ Clemente said again, this time closer.

‘Is that hippocras?’ he asked. ‘Is it hot?’

He could tell it was; he was talking to prove that he was awake. Clemente had found wine in a camp with no wine.

‘My lord,’ Clemente said. It was odd that the words were so respectful, as the reality was that his tone conveyed perfectly, in Italian, the contempt of the early riser for those who lie abed.

Swan swung his legs over the edge of his camp bed. It was cold; he was already cold, and the long draught of hippocras didn’t do much to dispel it. The brazier had gone out long since, and in fact was gone; already packed on the baggage wagons. His clothes were laid out on a folding stool; there was a small square of woven grass on which he could stand while he dressed. As soon as he stood up, a pair of archers grabbed the bed, stripped it, and folded the frame, which vanished out the door. He hadn’t even grunted ‘good morning’ at them.

Swan’s legs hurt, his back hurt, and his hands burned as if they were on fire. And he slept in a bed, off the ground; all of the men serving him had nothing but blankets and perhaps an armful of straw to keep them from cold and damp.

He got into clean braes and a clean shirt; ironed, no less, and smelling of rose water.

Alessandro Bembo rose from the second folding bed and sniffed.

‘You smell beautiful,’ he said. His smile was mocking.

‘I feel beautiful,’ Swan said. ‘Christ risen. I feel like shit.’

Bembo nodded. ‘As do I,’ he said. ‘Remind me why I wanted to accompany you?’

‘Boredom?’ Swan shot back. He wasn’t good at being mocked first thing in the morning, which was odd, as he’d had years of it.

Alessandro nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘Duty to the Serenissima?’ Swan said.

‘Enlightened self-interest, anyway,’ Bembo said. ‘Christ, why do I not get the hippocras?’

‘Because Clemente isn’t your servant, he’s my servant,’ Swan said pettishly.

As if summoned by the thought, Umar appeared. A new smell filled the tent; foreign, slightly bitter, slightly sweet.

‘Ah!’ Alessandro said. ‘Quaveh!’

Umar smiled. He poured a small pottery cup of the stuff for his master and then, turning to Swan, indicated that he had a second cup.

‘No, none for him, the ruffian,’ Alessandro said. ‘All for me. I will be alert and he will be drunk.’

Swan took the cup from Umar anyway, just as Clemente returned with a steaming cup of hippocras which he handed, with a silent bow, to Alessandro.

The two friends exchanged a long look. And both laughed.

Outside, the morning was so young that the sky was not yet even a pale shade of pink; there were, in fact, still stars.

Juan di Silva shook his head. ‘Five more nights like that and we’ll be losing horses like a camp with the horse plague,’ he said. ‘We have a dozen sick horses right now.’ He kicked a wooden bucket full of water to show his capitano that the top of the water was frozen solid.

Ser Columbino shrugged. ‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘we have no trouble whatsoever with desertion.’ He smiled. ‘Because really, it’s like hell out there. A damp, cold hell.’

Out there was the mountainous terrain of central Albania. Off to the west, the sea loomed, but it was still fifty miles or more away.

‘Grazias is already away?’ Swan asked.

‘Before the moon set,’ Ser Columbino said. He leaned even closer to the fire. ‘Other Dmitri is already back with the start of the route.’

Every day the scouts went out at dawn, and set up a chain of guides for the company to follow. The roads in Albania were non-existent; there were no maps; they had tracks the width of two wagon-ruts if that, and the heavy military wagons that the company used could not easily be turned around with a four- or six-horse hitch, especially in a mountain pass or with a steep drop to one side or the other. They’d lost their way twice in six days, and the nadir of the trip, so far, had been a day’s trip on an apparent dead end. They turned the wagons, taking hours to do so, only to return to an earlier camp and the news that Grazias had been wrong. They had been on the right road, and they had to turn all the wagons again. And repeat the day’s efforts.

That had been three days ago.

The other issue to Swan was the condition of his company. The men were in good spirits, or as good as could be expected in difficult country at the edge of winter, but their material condition was terrible. There were men without shoes, and men whose boots were nothing but collections of patches; hose worn footless and hanging like growths; jupons burned to a pale pink from deep red by months of sun, out at the elbows and sometimes at the shoulders. Hats were ragged, shapeless things; hardly any soldier sported a feather, much less a plume. The condition of the armour wasn’t much better; six months in the field had wrecked buckles and straps, cut laces and replaced them with various makeshifts; most of the armour was rusted to a deep brown, and waxed, because no one had time to polish it, and the only bright metal on most men was their dirks and swords.

The horse tack looked better, but that was, for the most part, because they’d had the pick of the Turkish camp to loot, and many men were riding Turkish saddles. Most of the archers, whether English, Hungarian or Italian, had Turkish bows and Turkish arrows; indeed, only three of the English had heavy yew war bows, as the rest had worn or broken. Some men simply had no heavy livery arrows left, and so had switched to the Turkish weapons. Most of the pages who had started the campaign with light crossbows now had only a handful of quarrels; some men had none.

‘That was the last of our wine,’ Clemente said, as if he was an officer and welcome to speak at officers’ meetings. ‘Why did we leave Rome?’ he asked the air in front of him, as if this excused his insubordination.

Swan drank his last slug of the hippocras with what enjoyment he could muster. ‘We will find Iskander Bey today,’ he said.

Ser Columbino nodded. ‘Why do you think so?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged, even as Clemente began to lace on his arm armour. ‘The other options are too difficult to contemplate,’ he said. His armour was still bright, and his laces were of silk. Because he’d been gone two months.

An hour later, fully armed, head to toe, and girded with a sword he didn’t particularly like, Swan rode easily in the middle of his column. He had mounted archers at the front and back of the column, and his men-at-arms in the middle. His stradiotes were far ahead, but from time to time they met with one; at every place where two trails crossed, or where Grazias, the captain of the stradiotes, imagined that the wagons would bog down or require work to pass.

Nones saw them cross a narrow creek with steep banks; they had to double-team each of the baggage wagons and the bronze falconet to get them over the stream, and then clear the area around the crossing with axes and saws. Men ate in shifts, but it was warm; some men fell asleep on the spot.

A little after the sun reached its zenith, the last wagon bogged down in the stream-bed. Swan dismounted with Bembo to push, standing in the ice-cold stream up to his armoured knees in rushing water while Clemente muttered about the work he’d have to do on the armour.

The wagon remained bogged down. They had to unload it, with virtually the entire company working; tents, personal packs which weren’t supposed to be in the baggage; the last candles in the company; split peas; a round of Parmesan cheese weighing half as much as a man; it all had to come out. Then men pushed; the two teams pulled, and with a great heave the empty wagon shivered and then moved up the bank, and the process of reloading began.

Swan was standing by a fire that Umar had made on the stony riverbank. He was soaked to the skin, and he wasn’t sure he could face another night in the open, but he had dry clothes and many of his men did not.

‘Fuck,’ he said.

Bembo sneered. ‘The glorious life of arms,’ he said.

Swan turned to his friend. ‘Would Messire do me the great favour of starting a catalogue of wants? We cannot remain in the field in this condition. Look at Orietto’s girth; more cobwebs than leather.’

‘I knew I’d end up as your secretary,’ Bembo said. ‘There you were in your shit-stained hose, and I said, there’s a man who will make my life a misery.’ He took out a wax tablet and a stylus. ‘Shall I list all the things we need? Or the much shorter list of things we have? Cold water. That we have in abundance.’

But there was better in the offing. Before the convoy was rolling again, Grazias rode up in person; he swept off his small felt hat as if Swan were a great noble.

‘My lord,’ he said. ‘I have found Iskander Bey, or rather, John has found him; camped in a valley, not fifty stadia from Kruje. We can make it there if we press on past the fall of night; he is sending out guides and they will have torches, and he will have hot food ready, on his honour.’

Swan’s mood improved immediately, and he felt mildly ashamed for showing his lack of endurance; on the other hand, he’d been at the papal court just a few weeks before, and enjoying Bembo’s hospitality in Venice even more recently. ‘I didn’t miss all this,’ he muttered.

There followed six miserable hours. But despite the difficulty, the knowledge that Scanderberg’s camp was close kept them all going; when they encountered the first troop of mounted Albanians toward evening, morale rose still further, especially when the rumour spread that Scanderberg had wine.

Swan rode along his column. By then they were on something that might have been described as a road; almost three yards wide, wide enough for men-at-arms on big horses to ride two abreast. ‘Finish as you started,’ he called. ‘Look like soldiers.’

Men tightened buckles or did them up; one of Di Silva’s men-at-arms took his bevoir from a page and buckled it, looking away to proclaim his innocence; Will Kendal groaned and pulled his helmet form his saddlebags, a long, pointed German sallet salvaged from the battlefield of Belgrade. But by the time Scanderberg’s men were lighting their torches, the company glittered with polished buckles and shiny-brown harness and somewhat tarnished brass, and their pink-red surcoats caught the ruddy light of the setting sun as they crested the last rise before camp and saw fires; almost three hundred fires, burning in the valley below them, and running in long, fairly neat lines off to the north and west.

Ser Columbino rode up next to his captain. ‘But still no stabling for the horses,’ he said.

Swan nodded. ‘Mistras,’ he said.

‘Even after this, you think we can make Mistras?’ Columbino asked.

Swan nodded. ‘I do not fancy wintering over with Scanderberg, do you?’ he asked. ‘Let’s have a few days’ rest, feed the chargers until we can’t see their ribs, and pray for good weather.’

Columbino frowned. ‘And if it is raining? Or, Christ forbid, snowing?’

Swan sighed. ‘Then we’ll do something else.’

He rode forward, down the last long slope to the campfires, in the cold darkness. The Albanians cheered their arrival, and Scanderberg came in person. Swan dismounted and gave his best courtly bow, and Scanderberg seemed pleased. They exchanged a few halting phrases in Latin, and Swan found himself invited to dinner; an invitation he wanted to refuse, but could not. The invitation included Alessandro Bembo and his other officers, and so, stripped of the weight of their armour and feeling, collectively, as if they might be able to fly, the officers of the Compagnia di San Maria Magdalena left the chaos of a hundred tents rising in the icy darkness and a dozen fires being lit to sit in the relative comfort of the great Iskander Bey’s silk pavilion. There they were fed lamb in saffron with raisins, eaten Turkish style in great bronze cauldrons with rice, and drank wine, which would not have been so common with the Turks.

Scanderberg wore the same red hat he had worn three weeks before. He sat with a man who had a gold chain so thick it must have weighed ten pounds. It was so thick it was ugly; Swan wondered why the man wore such a thing.

After dinner, Scanderberg sat Swan and Bembo on his right and left, and Swan found himself next to the man with the enormous chain. The man was taciturn, and looked less than enthusiastic about having Swan placed above him.

‘Ignore him,’ Scanderberg said. ‘He is Varlim Bey’s son, and I captured him. I’m making him wear his ransom for a few days, to teach him respect.’

Swan looked at the man, who was as blond and blue-eyed as any of the Albanian gentry. ‘He is Turkish?’ Swan asked.

‘Am I Turkish?’ Scanderberg asked. ‘How is your wound, Suanabeg?’

‘Suanabeg?’ Swan asked.

Scanderberg laughed. ‘Beg or bey is a term of respect,’ he said. ‘Have you not diddled the daughter and the sister of Omar Reis? Have you not put your sword into the body of the Sultan? And yet you still ride abroad. Alive.’

Men along either side of the great cauldron of food nodded; hard men with empty eyes. A dozen began to tap their knife hilts on the cauldrons.

‘How is your wound?’ Scanderberg asked again.

Swan shrugged. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘Although when I drink too much wine, my head hurts,’ he added with a disingenuous smile.

Scanderberg slapped his thigh. ‘Now, this has also happened to me,’ he admitted. ‘And Hunyadi?’ he asked suddenly, changing direction like a cat.

Swan shrugged. ‘Dead,’ he admitted.

‘Are you sure?’ Scanderberg asked.

‘I saw his plague-ridden corpse,’ Swan said. ‘Two weeks ago.’

Scanderberg crossed himself, and so did all the men sitting in the tent. Then the small man sat back. A slave brought him wine, and he drank, and then handed the cup to Swan. ‘If Hunyadi is dead …’ he said, and looked at Swan.

‘Count Cilli and the king intend to attaint László and take all of Hunyadi’s lands,’ Swan said. ‘I have this from László himself.’ He drank from the cup and handed it, at a motion from Scanderberg, to Bembo. It was like communion; a shared cup with all the community of killers.

Scanderberg watched the cup pass down the table. ‘The king of Hungary is a fool if he imagines that he can defeat the Hunyadis,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘But they will not be fighting the Turks this year or next,’ he added. ‘If I had money, I would fight the Turks next year. And indeed, Ser Suane, I will need help next year unless you and the Pope want me to go down.’

‘After Belgrade?’ Swan asked.

Scanderberg shrugged. ‘Maybe Mehmet will take a year or two to rally,’ he said. Then he shook his head. ‘But I doubt it. Fifty thousand men lost? He has three armies that big. It will make him cautious, is all. Caution demands that he has to find an enemy that he can defeat. That’s either the Greeks in the Peloponnese or me. Unless we are very, very lucky and he turns on the Persians.’

Swan nodded; this all accorded with his own perception and with what László Hunyadi had said.

He looked at Alessandro.

Alessandro gave him a nod.

‘The Pope and Venice are prepared to provide you with some funds,’ he said.

Scanderberg nodded. ‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘How much?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps ten thousand ducats,’ Swan said.

Scanderberg looked away for a moment. ‘So much, indeed?’ he asked.

Swan almost laughed aloud, because Hunyadi had all but ridiculed twice that amount. ‘Yes, my lord,’ he said.

Scanderberg wasn’t shy. ‘When?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged. ‘Half now and half in the spring,’ he said.

Alessandro nodded. ‘My lord, I can offer some direct Venetian support; ships in the spring, with men to man them and help you clear the coast; and a steady supply of guns and soldiers who can use them.’

Scanderberg laughed. ‘Well, well. And what do you want me to do, messires? Storm Constantinople? Take Edirne?’

Swan looked at Bembo. ‘I do not have the opportunity to consult with my master, Cardinal Bessarion …’

‘I know him,’ Scanderberg said. ‘A good man. Rare, in this world.’

‘I had thought to take my company to Mistras. This was Bessarion’s order. From there I would be in contact with Rome.’ Swan shrugged.

Scanderberg nodded. His face was ruddy in the firelight; his eyes sparkled with intelligence. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘In Morea all these knights might be some use. Here, they are like tits on a bull. You understand?’

Swan was too tired to fight. ‘All too well,’ he said.

‘How much of this money do you keep for yourself?’ Scanderberg asked.

Swan raised an eyebrow.

Bembo leaned forward. ‘Your Excellency, it is not our money to keep, or even to disperse without word from our masters.’

Scanderberg gave Swan a twisted smile. ‘So if I have Sasha here cut your throat and search your purse, I will not find that you have half the money there?’

Swan tugged at his beard. ‘I’d need a much bigger purse, to start with,’ he said.

Scanderberg laughed.

Swan reached into his shirt and produced a single financial instrument on the Medici Bank; the value was a little more than a thousand Venetian ducats. ‘All I have is paper, on the Pope’s banks,’ Swan said.

Scanderberg handed the sheet of close-written parchment unread to his Catholic priest, who put wood-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of his nose and began to read.

‘Are there any Turks in the field now?’ Alessandro asked.

Scanderberg asked one of his men the same question in Turkish. Swan knew Turkish; he was fairly cautious of who he told about his knowledge, and he carefully kept his face blank.

The man, addressed as Suleyman, looked like Satan incarnate in a pointed beard, bushy eyebrows and a long, curling moustache. He played with the ends of his moustache, considered, and then told his master, in Turkish, that Mehmet had a force in the field already; that they had ridden from Edirne just ten days before, and they would raid down into Corinth and beyond if no one stopped them.

Swan looked at Scanderberg. ‘And can we get a message to Venice?’ he asked.

Scanderberg asked another of his men, and there was a long discussion in Albanian, a language in which Swan had no fluency at all. Eventually Scanderberg nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Give Stefan here a letter tomorrow and it will be in Venice in a week.’

Alessandro smiled. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I could be in Venice in a week.’

Scanderberg nodded.

Swan brightened. ‘And perhaps I …’ he began.

Alessandro laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘You’re the captain. Far too important.’

‘Damn you,’ Swan said.

Bembo smiled. ‘I might even come back,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the list, shall I?’

Bembo was still smiling when Scanderberg nodded at him. ‘What did you do with your Turkish prisoner?’ he asked.

Bembo shrugged. ‘I let him go,’ he said.

Scanderberg, who had ordered a man tortured to death to educate his troops, nodded. ‘It is good to have men who owe you a life, on the other side.’ He looked at Swan. ‘If you are captured, you would do well to have friends.’

Just the word ‘captured’ felt to Swan like a kick in the stomach. His limbs felt nerveless. He had trouble breathing.

‘I’ll leave you to your lists,’ Scanderberg said. ‘Don’t forget to bring me money.’

An hour later, in their shared pavilion, the two of them were going over the list; over and over.

‘At least two ordinary galleys to get the men over to the Peloponnese,’ Bembo said, musing. ‘And a horse transport.’

Swan nodded. ‘The only profit these men have made is in horseflesh,’ he said.

Bembo nodded. ‘Even if I can gather these things, this is a heavy bill. Four thousand English arrows? Six hundred brass and iron buckles, all sizes? An armourer?’ He shrugged.

Swan shrugged back. ‘If we cannot have all this, then best you arrange shipping and we sail home,’ he said.

Bembo picked his teeth. ‘Well … Venice is the best armed city in the world; I suspect I can supply most of this straight out of the Arsenal, or rather, Loredan can. The question is whether Venice and Bessarion actually want to do so, and in a timely manner.’ He frowned, warmed his hands over the brazier and looked at Swan. ‘Rope?’

‘Of course rope. War runs on rope – even Xenophon knew that.’

Swan was under no illusion that his supply of horse fodder depended on his willingness to hand over the Pope’s money. On the other hand, he also understood that Scanderberg needed the alliance with Venice; the old bandit knew he could either fight the Serenissima or the Sublime Porte but not both at once.

Swan signed over three thousand ducats, and the supplies of fodder and food flowed. Scanderberg was a little apologetic.

‘I do not have so much food that I have some to give away,’ he said. ‘You do not want to see what we do to the peasants to get the sausage,’ he added.

‘No one likes how sausage is made,’ Swan said, translating an English aphorism into Italian and then into Latin.

Scanderberg roared. ‘You are good,’ he said. ‘Amusing. Funny. God help you if the Sultan captures you, though.’ The man leaned close. ‘Listen, Suanabeg. I have a liking for you. Go home to Italy. You do not want to die the way Omar Reis says he will kill you.’

Swan shut that out of his mind. His men were building huts; the weather had got colder, and the English archers and some of the Italian pages were showing the men-at-arms how to make a hurdle and how to stack them to make warm, dry tents. The rest of the day was spent cutting fodder and collecting firewood for the nights, and making bedding for the sick horses.

An Italian mountebank offered to try physicking the horses. Swan offered to let him try one, a gelding who couldn’t stand. The man rolled his eyes and spent the day and ensuing night with the horse, which stood well enough and began to eat after the end of the ‘doctor’s’ ministrations. His name was Benedetto Crespi, and he was tall, gangly and had come with a Neapolitan company, or so he said, and married an Albanian.

Swan gave him some money and he began to work with Kendal and a dozen other men interested in horses.

‘He knows what he’s about,’ Kendal said. ‘An’ he talks to ’em. My da’ used to talk to horses.’

Crespi settled in to the extent of moving his tent, his wife and their son Ettore into the company camp.

Rest and food worked their own miracles. Most of the men of the company had been in the field since they left Venice in May; two months of pursuit and hard lying in difficult terrain had injured as many men as the Turks had during the siege. Four days of rain found them well encamped; Crespi led the whole company in constructing temporary shelters to keep the direct rain off the horses; fires were built, and the horse herd continued its recovery despite the weather.

‘Pay that man anything he asks,’ Columbino said. ‘I have never seen anyone do more with horses under such conditions.’

Indeed, given that warhorses were irreplaceable in Albania and worth fifty florins or more apiece even in northern Italy, the man’s skills verged on the demonic and his work in saving just a handful of horses would have been worth hundreds of ducats. He was modest about his talents, and admitted that he had learned a great deal from the Albanians themselves.

‘They work magic with horses, but much of it is good sense,’ he said. ‘And some they say they learn from the Turks and some from the Romani. And some I bring from Napoli, eh?’

‘What shall I pay you, Messire Dottore?’ Swan asked.

‘I am not a dottore of Padua,’ Crespi admitted. ‘I only call myself dottore when no one will stop me.’ He shrugged. ‘What does a corporal make?’

‘A man who leads five lances?’ Swan asked. ‘Depends on the contract. Twenty ducats a month, perhaps.’

‘I would ask that you pay me the same,’ the horse doctor said.

Swan nodded. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, his heart singing. When yet another of their prize Arabians rose from the mud the next day and began to walk about and take food, Swan sought out the horse doctor and shook his hand. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘You will be paid as a corporal.’

Di Silva, whose shoulders still ached from wounds at Belgrade, nodded when the horse doctor was gone. ‘Now we need a man-leech as good as the horse doctor,’ he said.

And in the second week after Bembo left them, the fights started. Will Kendal was first; he wrestled with a big Albanian, threw him, and then walked away to collect bets.

The man took a knife from one of his mates and went for Kendal.

Swan wasn’t there to see it, but he heard about it from Columbino, and then he had to explain the whole killing to Scanderberg, who merely shrugged.

‘If women become involved,’ he said, ‘there will be even more killing.’

And that proved true. As the second week wore into the third, several local women appeared in the company camp, and almost immediately both the frequency and intensity of conflict increased.

Di Silva worked it out. ‘We’re rich,’ he said. ‘They’re poor.’

Kendal shook his head. ‘I’ve never been rich anywhere,’ he said.

Ser Columbino scratched under his chin. ‘We need to get out of here before this gets ugly,’ he said.

Kendal looked wistfully at the latest pair of honey-haired Albanian women to ‘wander’ into the camp. ‘I need to be shot of yon before I do something I enjoy,’ he said.

Swan and Kendal exchanged a look.

He tried setting their own watch; he had the manpower, and he put together a watch bill of four watches with a quarter guard. They were to stop any civilian from entering the camp.

That was a spectacular failure.

Clemente, a remarkable lecher by any standard, wrinkled his nose. ‘They turn the guard post into a knocking shop,’ he said.

Swan rolled his eyes and sent Constantine Grazias to deal with the recreants.

In the end it was Di Orietto who told Swan that it could not be done.

‘The women want the money,’ he said. ‘The men want the women. There’s no way to stop them, short of building a palisade and digging in.’

Swan laughed, imagining that they might be under siege. ‘The monstrous regiment of women,’ he muttered, but then he shook his head. ‘Never mind. You are right. Any thoughts?’

Orietto shook his head wearily. ‘I would not care at all, except that the fighting grows worse, and two Albanians are dead today, and my page is badly wounded.’

Swan swore, and went to see Scanderberg.

Scanderberg nodded. ‘I agree that it is time for you to go,’ he said. ‘Farmers say you will have a week of good weather now. The rain is past for a few days. Perhaps you should leave tomorrow. Because some of my people are openly speaking of burning your camp. They say the honour of the Albanian nation is at stake.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘We would conquer the world, if only we could conquer ourselves,’ he said.

Swan nodded. He had wanted to wait for Bembo’s return, but he couldn’t see any point in waiting. And a week’s good weather could save them.

He gave the orders. He was aware that Columbino and Orietto both thought he was insane. And Di Silva pulled at his now-luxurious beard and frowned.

‘Messires, I do not think we can winter here,’ Swan said. ‘And I do believe we can make Mistras, if we are quick.’

‘It took us seven days to come fifty leagues,’ Kendal said.

‘We’ll have to do better than that,’ Swan said.

‘And if Messire Bembo doesn’t come? Di Silva asked. He shrugged. ‘Listen, Tommaso. I love the man like you do, but we are dealing with Venetians. With the best will in the world, he could be in Venice until Christmas. Or for ever. He could be arrested for something. Who can understand why a Venetian does anything?’

Swan sighed. ‘I understand what you gentlemen are saying. I agree with all of it. Despite which, tomorrow at dawn, we will march.’

They had Albanian guides, and Swan didn’t trust them. Swan had come to distrust his Albanian allies, and so he placed a pair of stradiotes with every Albanian and he kept them separated and compared their directions himself before making any decision.

And from the very first, he had them travel in fighting order; armour buckled on, weapons handy.

‘That will slow us,’ Orietto said.

‘Not as much as being dead,’ Di Silva quipped. ‘I agree. There are Albanians who would either kill us themselves or sell us to the Turks.’

And Swan also had time to worry about the Sultan and his officers. He was painfully aware that the moment they left Scanderberg’s camp, he was vulnerable; a single ambush, and he would be taken a prisoner to Constantinople or Edirne, where his life would be short and very, very bad.

There was far too much time to think, really. The weather was beautiful; cloudless blue sky, a pleasant sun that warmed at noon and kept off the chill towards evening. But the days were very short, and only by pushing very hard could they make the distances they needed. The first day they made more than ten leagues; the second, by Swan’s reckoning, almost twice that, flying along over a stretch of what appeared to be Roman road. If heavy wagons could be said to fly.

The third day, and they were out of soft tack and bacon. Swan felt as if he’d lived his entire life in the woods; there were no peasants, and no possibility of getting either good fodder or food for two hundred men.

The fourth day, and there was no wine, even for officers, and only flour and a little oil as ration. The stradiotes, some of the Venetians and the English went hunting, and came back with two wild boar and two deer, and Swan was unsurprised in the dawn of the fifth day to see the carcasses picked as clean as wolves would have done. Almost a thousand English pounds of meat and fat and gristle; gone in one night.

The fifth day their column rode into the ruins of the Roman town of Apollonia. The sea was so close they could smell it, and Swan looked at the ruins of a temple of Minerva while he ate a dish of beans that was the more delicious for being something he hadn’t eaten for days. His foragers collected food from the peasants and they camped in the Roman ruins, the horses munching contentedly on the closest approximation to oats they’d had in weeks.

Orietto was derisive. ‘If this is the best we can do, we are doomed,’ he said.

Swan was disposed to agree. He was also disposed, as men are, to be angry that the others had been right. In five days of glorious weather, they’d come less than a hundred and fifty Roman miles, and even then, they’d had the benefit of a stem of the great Roman road that ran, in ancient times, and even more recently, from Durazzo in the west all the way to Constantinople in the east, the major east–west highway of Crusaders and Turks, too. Without the Via Egnatia to speed their travel, they would go even more slowly, and run the risk of being lost.

Constantly.

‘It is still farther from here to the Venetian post at Naupactis than it is from here to Venice,’ Di Silva said. ‘Or so I make it.’

‘We can follow the Viosa river …’ Swan said, cursing the tentative sound of his voice. He agreed with them.

‘Through the mountains?’ Kendal asked, openly derisive. ‘There’s snow on ’em. I can see it from here. An’ I ain’t ’Annibal.’

Swan had to smile, inwardly, at the second-hand classical education that Kendal was getting.

‘If we make for the coast, there must be a Roman port city that corresponds to this,’ Swan said. His knowledge of the local geography had expired a hundred miles away or more. Even in Venice, they didn’t have good maps of the interior of Albania; merely the coast. He tried to remember what he had seen. ‘Aulona; Avalon, I suppose. It should be close.’

‘Turks have it,’ Grazias said. ‘No garrison. Just a local warlord.’

‘You know it?’ Swan asked, incredulous.

‘Our Albanian guide mentioned it as a place to avoid,’ Grazias said with a nasty smile. ‘I took an immediate interest. I’m sure Venice would like it back, if we took it.’

‘Took it?’ Kendal, usually up for anything, had the wide eyes of outraged innocence.

‘Took it?’ Orietto asked. But his hand went to his beard.

‘Took it?’ Di Silva asked, but he was eyeing the falconet.

‘How far is it?’ Swan asked.

‘Less than twenty Roman miles,’ Grazias reported the next morning. ‘No great garrison. Two iron artillery pieces on the main tower. Four gates to the lower town, which is a sieve, and two big towers; one holds the garrison, and one looks like a ruin. There are holes in the curtain wall I could drive a horse herd through.’

All heads turned to Swan, who nodded. ‘We take it tonight by coup de main,’ he said. ‘Word spreads, and Venice knows in two weeks. Bembo comes and fetches us, and we slip away, nobody the wiser.’

Di Silva raised not one but both eyebrows. ‘Or the Turks send an army,’ he said. ‘In which case, we are nobody indeed.’

Swan looked at the four empty wagons and the increasingly bony horses. ‘I agree that it’s a nearly insane risk,’ he said. ‘Anyone have a better plan?’

Di Silva laughed. ‘Damn my eyes,’ he said. ‘I missed you. You make life so much more …’

Orietto glanced at the Portuguese knight. ‘So English?’

‘Perhaps,’ Di Silva said. He was looking west.

As it proved, the most complicated part of the plan to seize the citadel of Avalon was Swan’s insistence that they have a heavy picket around their own camp all day to prevent any peasant from slipping away and selling their position to the Turks. He had no reason to believe that anyone would.

In fact, the pickets seized not one but two wagons carrying only young men, and no supplies of any kind, both attempting to take the old Roman road to the west, and later Grazias brought in two young men in Albanian clothes who had two good horses apiece.

‘String them up,’ Orietto said.

Swan shook his head. The dice were cast; he was, for him, almost silent. ‘No,’ he said, after a moment. ‘Bring them along.’

The captured wagons were added to their own four, and the prisoners were stripped and given fairly worn Italian clothing. In exchange, young Marco and Swan himself and three of the smallest men, including one of the English archers, Ben Nettle, and Clemente, all dressed in the Albanian clothes, and Stephan, the youngest of the stradiotes, who spoke both Greek and Albanian as well as Italian and a little Turkish, acted as their interpreter. They filled one of the Albanian wagons with loaded crossbows and swords, and threw a tarp over the whole.

With a screen of stradiotes in front and a reserve of English archers behind, the little column moved through the last of the day. Before full darkness fell they were in sight of the sea; to the north, a broad lagoon opened, and lights sparkled in the town below them.

‘Surely the gates will close at dark,’ Swan said.

Grazias shrugged a very Greek shrug. ‘How can I tell what an Illyrian might do?’ he asked, philosophically.

Dmitri laughed. ‘To close the gate, someone would have to give an order, and someone else obey it,’ he said, and Other Dmitri laughed, too.

Swan frowned. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We can only try.’

The military column halted. Already it was almost full dark; the track was empty. Sheep rattled their bells on a nearby hillside.

In fact they made better time than he had expected, rolling down the last ridge and into the agricultural land at the edge of the hills. The road was no better, a series of mud holes that even five days of dry weather could not improve.

Swan had to dismount from his wagon, and he and Clemente had to haul together at the back of the cart to keep it from slipping into the ruts. It was a hard pull, and despite the cool evening, Swan sweated through his shirt, and he could smell the former occupant.

And something was crawling up his neck. He got the louse, and with the instinct of a London boyhood crushed it between his thumbnail and finger and flicked it aside.

‘Why are we doing this?’ Clemente asked.

Because I made a poor decision, Swan thought. ‘Glory,’ he said out loud.

‘Oh,’ Clemente said, deflated. ‘I thought that there was money.’

There was no one on duty at the gate, but then the gate and the attendant barrier were a formality; next to the gate, someone had blown a twenty-pace-long breech in the town’s curtain wall, and the breech was so old that grass had grown between the collapsed stones. The two wagons passed under the Italianate arch of the old gate, where the Lion of St Mark had been defaced by the Turks, and passed into the town unchallenged.

Swan was instantly at a loss, because, in effect, there was no gate to seize. Young Marco looked at him. ‘Now what, Illustrious?’

Ben Nettle laughed. ‘Fuck,’ he said, and spat.

Swan looked up at the two towers; one empty, one with lights winking.

‘Fire arrow,’ he said. That was the signal that the gate was theirs.

Nettle grunted. There passed a long interval while nightfall deepened and none of them could get char to light, and finally Swan walked across the gate-square to where a small tavern operated for travellers and used the doorpost lantern, an enormous brass monster that had once decorated the stern of a galley, and lit the arrow himself.

Nettle shrugged, raised his bow, and loosed the arrow into the air.

‘Now we go for the citadel,’ Swan said.

Clemente gave him a look. ‘I knew you’d say that,’ he said in mock disgust. Or perhaps it was real disgust.

Either way, the six of them plodded on. Swan thought it would have completed his day if they’d become lost in the winding streets of the lower town, but in fact the Turks had thoughtfully knocked down a dozen houses to clear the gate of the inner tower, and create a sort of practice ground for archery, and even in the early twilight of November Swan could make out the inner gate.

There were two guards. They looked as Albanian as anyone else, and Swan realised, with a sinking feeling, that he really should have come as a Turkish officer, a role he could play a good deal better than that of a local farmer.

One of the gate guards called out with a croak like a raven.

Stephan yawned. Suddenly the boy, who was both small and silent, became an actor. He spoke up, his thin voice echoing off the tower.

The two men came towards the wagon.

Stephan backed away from them, and said, ‘I think we have to kill them.’

Swan never did find out what had been said. His steel rondel dagger went into the nearest man; a neat murder, as the man never had a chance to defend himself and may never even have felt the blow. Swan drew his long sword from under the canvas …

The man nearer the gate grunted as Marco’s arming sword went into his gut, but the luck of the fickle goddess Fortuna kept him from crying out.

Two hundred paces away, there was shouting in the gate and the sound of horses’ hooves.

‘Here they come,’ Swan said, and ran for the door of the tower.

‘Fuck,’ Ben Nettle said, again.

Swan ran up the stone ramp to the gate. The doors were open, pinned back with iron pins, and inside, the portcullis was up. There was more shouting from the lower gate, and a voice in Turkish, well up the tower, shouted something.

Swan emerged into a courtyard. Night was falling; there were no torches in the courtyard, and he saw only a pale blue by an inner door, the door to the tower itself.

Behind him, Marco loosed a bolt from his latchet, and the blur was hit, fell, and gave a long, piercing shriek.

High up in the tower, someone came to the right conclusion. ‘Saltiri Altinda!’ cried a voice, and then roared a command, and Swan was off, leaping over the man with Marco’s bolt in his back even as the dying man’s fingers scrabbled for a purchase on life and the stones of the steps.

Swan went up the steps two at a time, and killed a man stringing his bow in the guardroom at the top. His Albanian clothes gave a second man pause, but he waited one moment too long and Nettle’s arrow went through his maille shirt and came out his back and he fell on the rush matting that protected the wood floor. Swan was trying to get over the chests on the barracks room floor.

The door at the far end opened and there, wearing a look of complete astonishment, was a red-haired Turk with a sabre in his hand and otherwise naked.

He leapt at Swan and cut with his sabre.

Swan parried with his sword and it broke in his hand, leaving him with about a foot of steel and a cross-guard.

Swan pushed forward, closing as fast as he could with the naked man. The sabre cut at him and he parried some of it on his guard. The rest left a red crease on his shoulder and left forearm, and then he was in close.

The Turk had stepped forward into his blow, and they crashed, knee to knee, and pain washed through Swan, but his pommel lashed out and he punched the Turk in the shoulder even as he grabbed the man with his left hand and kicked his ankle out from under him with a sweep of his right foot that broke the Turk’s leg with an audible crack. The Turk screamed and went down, his sabre clattering. Swan knelt on the man’s sword arm, intending to finish him, but the Turk was in obvious agony and there were no more enemies coming at him.

‘Illustrious?’ Marco asked, from far away.

Swan turned his head and became aware that blood was coursing down his left side where the sabre had cut him; a perfect sheet of blood.

‘Christ,’ he said, and went into the darkness.

Swan came to consciousness with the horse doctor’s cardamom-laced breath in his face, and he flinched, and the pain that hit him was as white as lightning in the dark.

‘Hold him!’ someone called.

He thrashed; he was in chains, and the pain was the whole horizon of his being, and he thought, Torture. And terror shot through him.

‘Almost done,’ the horse doctor said gently. ‘Hold him tight, messires.’

A jabbing pain, and someone screaming.

Swan swam to the surface and had no way to measure time. There was sun on a frescoed wall; the fresco was in patterns, discs of fading orange, a pattern of diamonds in lapis blue, and Imperial eagles in black. It seemed very important to Swan that some of the eagles appeared different from others, and he allowed himself to believe that each was in a minutely different posture, as if stopped in the action of spreading his wings, and he was suddenly watching them all in motion …

And then he saw Clemente. It was as if he had been upside down and now was right side up; he saw Clemente and the world shifted; he knew who he was, and the eagles lost their overwhelming importance, their central focus, and he took a breath.

‘Clemente?’ he asked.

‘Ah, bene!’ said Clemente and took his hand. ‘Ah, messire!

Swan didn’t want to turn his head, but many things were crystal clear. ‘Have I lost my arm?’ he asked.

Clemente shook his head. ‘No!’ he said. ‘At least, not yet. I will get the dottore.’

‘How long have I been here?’ Swan asked.

Clemente counted. ‘Nine days since we took this place,’ he said. ‘Only three since you stopped bleeding.’

Swan felt exhausted and yet everything had a clarity that he did not really want to explore; he felt that he was light and could understand profound things that were hidden in everything. ‘Am I drugged?’ he asked.

‘Only opium,’ Clemente said.

An hour later, Ser Columbino and Di Silva were with him, drinking wine from heavy silver cups and dressed in long wool gowns like prosperous men.

Columbino leaned back. ‘We took the town with little enough trouble; you killed or captured the only actual Turks, and the rest of the garrison surrendered immediately. We have the Turkish captain who flayed your shoulder, if you want him.’ He smiled evilly. ‘I sent Grazias north to Korratas to find the Venetians and hopefully to find Messire Bembo. Yesterday a priest came from Scanderberg to demand that we hand the town to him.’ He shrugged in a particularly Siennese manner. ‘So I am very happy you are awake.’

‘Losses?’ Swan asked.

‘You,’ Di Silva said. ‘May I say, capitano, that it is time you carried a white wand in your hand and gave orders, and perhaps spent a little less time charging about? By the Risen Christ, Ser Tommaso, our good dottore says that had the sabre passed even a little closer to your neck, we’d have lost you.’

Swan moved his neck only slightly and felt the pain and lack of muscle control. His bladder spasmed. He was afraid of his wound, which he knew was a mistake.

‘What do you gentlemen propose we do about Scanderberg?’ Swan asked. Opium was not really good for decision-making.

Di Silva shrugged. ‘No idea,’ he said.

Columbino gave his peer what might have passed for a glare. ‘We took the town. We are not under contract to anyone but the Ban of Hungary, I believe. That means that the town must be offered first to László Hunyadi, who cannot hold it. And then to either the Albanians or the Venetians.’ He shrugged. ‘Whoever can pay more.’

Swan grunted. ‘How is the compagnia?’ he asked.

Di Silva laughed. ‘Excellent!’ he said. ‘All the Albanians here speak Italian, and the Turks did nothing to make themselves popular. Our men comport themselves like lambs. Voracious lambs, I confess, but not yet rapacious ones. We ordered a head tax on the town as ransom, and I have it in silver; so the town is not to be disturbed.’

‘More than two hundred soldiers will disturb a town,’ Swan said.

‘Just so,’ Columbino said.

‘Can we winter here?’ Swan asked.

Di Silva shook his head. ‘Insufficient food, unless we were victualled by the Venetians.’

Columbino looked out of the trellised window. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think that if we were careful, we could get through with our horses.’

‘That’s enough for today,’ the doctor said. Crespi did not put on airs; he simply bowed and insisted that the two officers leave Swan alone.

‘How bad is it?’ Swan asked.

The doctor shrugged. ‘It is not good. I am not a trained doctor, for people, but muscle structure is muscle structure. It will be months before you have the full use of your left arm and shoulder; you will need special exercises, and that is if it does not become infected.’ He shrugged. ‘Listen, capitano. You lost almost all your blood; maybe you had a tablespoon or two left in you. And that sabre was clean, but the floor you fell on was not. None of the muscles were actually severed; I put some stiches in the way I would in a horse.’ He shrugged. ‘With horses, I boil the thread and wax it; I did the same with you. We will see. But I will tell you; if you become infected, you are a dead man, and no art of mine will help you. So my first interest is to keep you clean.’

‘Aristotle says …’ Swan began.

Crespi raised a hand to silence his captain. ‘I have never read Aristotle,’ he said. ‘But what other men tell me suggests that he knew nothing about healing. I am not a trained doctor; I only know what works on horses … and sometimes on pigs.’

Swan sat back. ‘Which am I?’

Crespi shrugged. ‘I find you more like a pig. Honestly, there’s an Arab doctor among the prisoners; a doctor and a religious man of some sort. Please replace me if you like. My wife says I’m crazy.’

Swan smiled. ‘Let’s hear from this Arab doctor, eh?’ he said.

The Arab doctor was from Tunis. He was terrified of Swan; Swan allowed the man to be terrified. He sniffed the wound, and had a long conversation – in Italian – with Crespi.

‘He wants to know if the prisoners could have better food, and perhaps access to the mosque,’ Crespi said.

‘You speak Arabic?’ Swan asked.

Crespi shrugged. ‘All the good veterinary texts are in Arabic,’ he said. ‘In Naples there are many who speak Arabic.’

‘What does he say about me?’ Swan asked, hoping that he was keeping the whine from his voice.

Crespi smiled a very false smile. ‘Nothing much.’

‘Tell me,’ Swan said. ‘I wish to know.’

‘He says you are dead as soon as the wound becomes infected. He is afraid that he will be executed, and he wants you to know that you were dead anyway.’ Crespi shrugged, and Swan felt his stomach drop away as if he were falling from a great height. ‘Listen, capitano; it is no different from what I said. Let me try and keep you from this infection. Perhaps we will. He has no more to suggest, except to say that I was a fool to sew your muscles. And perhaps I was. And he says that I will have you addicted to opium, and I think I may, but that’s too bad. You need it.’

Swan nodded. ‘I have had opium before.’

‘Ah, worse and worse,’ Crespi said.

Opium or no, Swan had terrible trouble sleeping. Mostly, he thought about being dead. And the state of his soul. And some other things.

Like Violetta’s body.

The new day brought new tidings. Swan woke late, to find Crespi mixing drugs at his bedside. The Neopolitan nodded. ‘Good morning,’ he said.

Swan tried not to stretch. His neck hurt in a new way; he immediately feared infection.

‘Messire Grazias has returned and begs to see you,’ Crespi said. ‘I told them I’d tell you when you woke.’

‘Is my neck infected?’ Swan asked.

Crespi put his fingers on the neck above the bandages. ‘No, praise God. Not yet, anyway.’

‘You are sure?’ Swan asked.

‘Sure?’ Crespi shrugged. ‘By the Virgin, Messire! I am not even sure with horses.’

Swan lay back. Everything itched; everything hurt under the itching, and the itching seemed to multiply the pain, and his muscles were curiously sore.

‘Messire Orietto wishes to know if you’d like the Turkish captain killed; perhaps hanged or even flayed,’ Crespi said.

Swan frowned ‘Bast!’ he grunted. ‘No. Not flayed or roasted or anything.’

Crespi brightened considerably. ‘Ah,’ he said.

‘Ah what?’ Swan asked.

Crespi shrugged again. ‘It is only …’ he began, and then grunted again.

‘What?’

‘Wounds make men afraid. Men who are afraid can do evil things.’ Crespi looked at Swan.

‘You think I am afraid?’ Swan asked.

‘Every moment you are awake,’ Crespi said brutally.

‘Too fucking true, my friend,’ Swan said.

‘You are an odd one,’ Crespi said. ‘For a gentleman, you are like a normal person.’

Swan sighed.

‘I’ll get Messire Grazias,’ Crespi said. He ducked out through the low door and returned in an instant with Grazias.

‘Stand there against the wall, messire,’ he said. ‘Do not, I pray, get closer to my patient.’

Grazias raised a Greek eyebrow but was otherwise unimpressed. ‘My lord,’ he said.

Swan smiled. ‘What have you found?’ he asked.

‘I found Messire Bembo with four ships,’ Grazias said, his face breaking into a big smile. ‘And Messire Loredan as well. They are north of us on the coast and will be here in two days.’

‘Now God be praised,’ Swan said. He crossed himself. It felt odd, but the gesture was genuine.

Loredan seemed unchanged; it might have been ten hours since they last met; the same unstained black velvet doublet, the same hose, the same expression. Alessandro tried to hide his deep concern in a broad smile, but he had obviously talked to Crespi; he was worried, and his voice was high.

‘Will you sell me the town?’ Loredan asked.

‘And how are you, my lord?’ Swan said with a certain sarcasm.

‘Come, Tommaso; we know one another. You are badly wounded; we are allowed only a little time by your horse-leech. First things first.’ Loredan nodded. ‘Bembo can take care of the personal. I am merely a servant of the Serenissima.’

Swan took a deep breath. ‘I will have to consult my officers,’ he said. ‘What do you offer?’

Loredan glanced at Bembo. ‘The contents of our ships; everything you ordered. Passage to the Morea for your compagnia.’

Swan frowned. ‘You can’t have known we’d taken this little gem, Messire. That means you were bringing me these things anyway.’

Loredan nodded. ‘And you are a knight of Saint Mark,’ he said, his hands spread wide as if in apology.

‘So I am, and I never forget it. But I am not under contract to Venice, and in fact Venice is not, just at this moment, at war with the Grand Turk. Eh?’ Swan said.

Loredan grimaced. ‘I see that near-mortality has not lessened your negotiating skills,’ he said. He looked at Alessandro. ‘Messire Bembo?’

Alessandro shook his head. ‘Ah, no, my friend,’ he said. ‘This Englishman is not going to budge; nor am I likely to get between you.’

Swan nodded at Crespi. ‘Leave us, if you please,’ he said.

He sat back, using the whole force of his will to overcome the desire to scratch under his bandages. The previous night, Crespi had washed his hands and under his nails. He said that he’d seen a dog infect itself from its claws.

Swan sighed. ‘Of course I’ll sell you the town,’ he said. ‘But I need more than some supplies that I’ll use in pursuit of your goals.’

Loredan nodded. ‘We hear in Venice that the Sultan has sent a raid, a razee, into the Morea,’ he said. ‘You are the only tool we have to stop it.’

‘Omar Reis,’ Bembo said.

Swan’s heart rate increased.

But he tried to sound like a man of the world. ‘And you cannot claim that I took the town for Venice,’ he said. ‘Because that would contravene your precious secret treaty with the Sultan.’

‘There is no such treaty,’ Loredan said, his face supremely inexpressive.

‘Of course,’ Swan said. ‘Forty thousand ducats; all in specie, to be paid to the compagnia in the event of my death, and which we will divide by shares.’

‘Fine,’ said Loredan.

Swan had the sinking feeling that he’d asked for far too little money, but on the other hand, Bembo gave him a smile that suggested he’d done well enough.

‘And the passage and the stuff in the ships and passage back to Italy when we are done.’

Loredan nodded. ‘I can promise that,’ he said. ‘Since Messire Bembo and his squadron will be staying with you. The Pope’s fleet is even now at Monemvasia. When the Lion flies over this town, we will almost instantly be at war with the Grand Turk.’ He looked at Swan. ‘A war we cannot win; a state of fifty thousand against a nation of millions; our allies are fools, idiots, as is the Pope; more Christians desire our destruction than value our service.’

‘Christ, why fight at all?’ Swan asked.

Loredan nodded. ‘This is what the Senate debates over and over. Listen, you are a fine blade. You know how it is when you fight a bigger man?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Swan said.

‘He wishes to close and use his size against you; wrestle, grapple, throw you to the ground,’ Loredan said. ‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ Swan said.

‘You want to play long; cut at his hands, pink him with your superior point control. Yes?’

‘I understand, truly,’ Swan said.

Loredan nodded. ‘But if your theory is really strong and you are confident, perhaps you open with a close play of your own; you half-sword and cross and push forward. Just to brush him back; just to reduce his confidence. Just to say, This will not be so easy.’

Swan nodded. ‘I have done this,’ he said.

‘As have I,’ Loredan said. ‘I only hope it works, because if we play close and the Turk locks us in a grapple, we will see the crescent over Venice in my lifetime.’

‘You are very passionate,’ Swan said. He admired Loredan.

Loredan shrugged. ‘Listen, I am Venetian. If you cut me, I bleed slightly dirty lagoon water. But I truly think that Venice is the only hope Europe has.’

‘Against the Turk?’ Swan asked.

Loredan smiled bitterly. ‘Against ourselves,’ he said. ‘Do you admire the Turks?’

‘When they are not trying to kill me? Very much indeed,’ Swan said.

Loredan nodded. ‘I feel the same. If Venice falls, imagine France, or Milan, or Rome as the arbiter of power. Or even taste. We are a republic; we work for our riches; we love God and good seafood and we build libraries.’

‘And the Arsenal,’ Swan said. He lay back. ‘You think Venice will fall?’

Loredan shrugged. ‘Not in my lifetime, if I can help it.’

The next morning, the Lion of St Mark rose over the town.

No one cheered, but then no one looked sullen, and the markets were open. Swan’s men handed over the towers to forty Venetian marines, men of Venetian families who could absolutely be trusted.

Another day passed. Swan awoke, and looked at the wall a while, and then lay looking out at the sea. Crespi came in and took his hand; counted out his pulse, and then unwrapped all his bandages, a deeply painful process.

‘Ha, hmmm,’ he said.

Swan took a deep breath.

‘I think you should go with the compagnia,’ Crespi said. ‘At sea, we are healthier; this, too, I see all the time.’

‘Ships are filthy,’ Swan said.

‘Ever seen an outbreak of plague at sea?’ Crespi shot back. ‘No. Disease comes from land.’

‘This is the merest empiricism!’ Swan whined. ‘The classical authorities …’

‘Are not here. In fact, they are dead. You, so far, are alive.’ Crespi smiled in triumph.

Swan knew he was a poor patient; demanding, difficult, whiny and afraid. He sighed, and allowed the Neapolitan to carry the day.

‘Very well,’ he said, and as if by magic, two doses of opium later, he was aboard a Venetian military galley; Clemente was making up his bed while he sat in very little discomfort in the coach of the galley, the great cushioned chest across the stern windows.

‘Did I see a cannon in the bows?’ he asked.

Alessandro smiled. ‘You did,’ he said. ‘Our latest design; the builder is a Greek. Many of our Venetians hate him because he is so often right; my father wants him to become Admiral of the Arsenal. I have two guns in the bow.’

‘That seems to me a dangerous experiment,’ Swan said.

Bembo shook his head. ‘We’ve used guns on ships since the Genoese War,’ he said.

‘The War of Chioggia?’ Swan asked. ‘That was almost a hundred years ago.’

‘Nearer seventy, English,’ Bembo said fondly. ‘I remember when you didn’t even know where Chioggia was, my lad,’ he added. ‘The horse-leech says you should live, now that we are ten days free of the arrows of Apollo.’

Swan nodded. ‘I should be relieved,’ he said. ‘But the better I feel, the more I worry.’

Bembo nodded. ‘Isn’t that always the way?’ he asked. ‘You scared me, Tommaso. I have never taken a wound as bad as yours. God grant I do not.’

Swan shook his head. ‘It seemed little enough at the time; a cut that got across my guard.’

Both men crossed themselves.

They raised Corfu in a single day; a Turkish cruiser ran the moment it saw the three galleys and a round ship to windward, and their chase was unsuccessful; it vanished into the southern Albanian coast and they moved on to Corfu as if they’d planned the diversion.

Corfu was a Venetian fortress, and Ser Columbino used the three days of good weather he had there to remuster the company; to issue and repair equipment, and to feed the horses and give them exercise.

Swan, by Crespi’s order, stayed aboard the Santa Maria Magdalena in the harbour and listened to the guns fired to announce the hours. He read. He had not spent much time reading, not for a year, but he had a few books and the governor sent him more. He read the Bible in Latin; he read some Turkish poetry from a manuscript taken with the fortress, and he looked at Vegetius and grew bored. He found that his Greek had rotted away, but not completely, and the third day, while his company marched back and forth to the boredom and annoyance of every man and horse, he was translating a bit of the Iliad, puzzling at the archaic Ionian style and wishing he had a better grammar to help him with the odd verbs. ‘Polydamas’ puzzled him; he wondered whether it was opium that kept him from guessing the underlying verb, and it was late at night, in the midst of worrying about death, that he understood that Ionian must change some sounds completely; that the verb might have been ‘damazo’ and thus Hector was taming horses. Satisfied, he went to sleep at last, fear banished by languages, and he woke to the kind of rosy-fingered dawn that most delighted him. He got off his hanging bed without too much difficulty, opened a pair of the stern windows, and looked out over the harbour with a deep feeling of thankfulness for being alive.

That day, the compagnia re-formed and marched aboard their ships. Swan watched them, his hand shielding his eyes, from a comfortable seat on the command deck of his galley; he wore a shirt, braes and old slippers and no more, and might have been taken for a beggar, were it not for the gold chain around his neck.

What he saw was a company new minted. The red surcoats were new wool, and shiny; every man had a pair of plumes in his helmet, and most of the armour was polished. Somewhere in Corfu, an armourer’s shop had had a water-powered polishing wheel, he guessed, because there was a star-like glitter of blue-white steel that raised his spirits.

Alessandro had gone ashore to pay for things. Now he sat down next to Swan. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You are better.’

‘I am, too,’ Swan said.

‘Well enough to fight Omar Reis?’ Bembo said.

‘Not personally,’ Swan said. ‘But yes.’

‘Whatever happened to the nice boy who spoke Greek?’ Bembo asked.

‘You thought I was lying,’ Swan said.

Bembo made a face. ‘Well, we are all wrong sometimes, and I knew you weren’t an English prince.’

There was a silence.

‘There’s war in England,’ Swan said. ‘My birth may yet matter. In the meantime, I am still an Englishman who reads Greek. Let’s go and fight Omar Reis. Where is he?’

‘The governor says he’s raiding the northern Morea. I propose we make for Naupactis; spend a day or two there refreshing the horses, and then cross the Bay of Corinth and see what can be done.’

‘How many men does Omar Reis have?’ Swan asked.

Bembo shrugged. And winced. At the same time. Swan knew what that meant.

‘Oh, come on,’ he said.

‘Ten thousand?’ Bembo suggested.

‘Christ. And Venice thinks you and I and our two hundred …’

Bembo laughed. ‘Your ensign has recruited here, and so has your master archer, Cressy. And I have a few men of my own, my friend.’ He smiled and looked away. ‘And if we are dead, they don’t have to pay us,’ he added.

‘That was cynical, even for you,’ Swan said.

‘I just spent two straight weeks with Loredan,’ Bembo returned. ‘Which puts me in mind of something that I suspect you will like. I was in Venice.’

‘You saw Sophia?’ he asked.

Bembo got up without a word and went below. He returned a few minutes later with a long, narrow box of wood and a handful of heavy letters.

‘Some of these are from Rome,’ he said. ‘Bessarion. Loredan opened them and read them.’ Bembo shrugged.

‘I would expect no less,’ Swan said. He was reaching for the others, in Sophia’s beautiful Gothic script. ‘What does he say?’

‘He asks more questions about Spinelli and the Medici banks,’ Bembo said. ‘I would guess that the cardinal has begun to make some of the same guesses that you and I and Loredan have made about the Medici.’

‘Ah,’ Swan said, and the sparkling early-winter day in Corfu harbour darkened. ‘By the saints, Alessandro, I had forgotten the whole affair.’

‘Five hundred thousand ducats missing?’ Bembo smiled like a cat eating cream. ‘No one is going to forget. That money is more important to Rome than any war with the infidel, Tommaso. You should know that.’

Swan was resisting the letters from his love and skimming Bessarion’s long letter. In it, Bessarion gave him precise instructions for dealing with the despot Thomas of Mistras, and the cardinal in command of the papal fleet. Swan read that part twice.

‘You are joining the papal fleet?’ he asked Bembo, eyes locked on the long, narrow box.

‘I may,’ Bembo said with a sneer. ‘And I may not.’

‘Christian unity,’ Swan murmured, and went back to reading. The sailors were weighing anchor. The narrow galley rocked from their efforts.

‘The box goes with the lady’s letters,’ Bembo said, temptingly. ‘Wine?’

Swan looked at Crespi, who sat separately, watching Swan like a jailer. Crespi shook his head.

‘My keeper says no,’ Swan said.

Bembo poured a glass for himself. ‘It might not mix well with opium,’ he admitted.

Swan went back to reading. The bright light was hurting his eyes, but he ploughed on to the part about Spinelli. He had to read one paragraph six times before he got the gist from the over-elegant Latin; the Milanese money was still missing. The Archbishop had recovered, but it was obvious that the money had been embezzled, and the list of possible culprits was short.

Bessarion closed by suggesting that Swan leave the military affairs in the hands of some officer and return to Rome. ‘His Holiness will command it,’ Bessarion said.

Swan kissed the letter in reverence, or perhaps the performance of reverence. ‘Dannazione,’ he said. ‘The Holy Father may demand that I return to Rome.’

‘Perhaps you should,’ Bembo said. He was looking out to sea. ‘A winter campaign in the Morea; Omar Reis has no love for you. Take ship from here to Brindisi and you can be in Rome in ten days.’

‘You want rid of me?’ Swan asked.

Bembo shrugged. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I just do not want you dead.’

‘Me neither,’ Swan agreed devoutly, and took up Sophia’s letters.

He read the last one first. Sophia was as wise as her name, and she had dated her letters so that Swan would know in what order to read them.

I used your own money to buy you a present, she wrote. Not long after you left, Messire Loredan presented me with the award that the Ten made to you for your report on Belgrade. You will pardon me if I spent it on something that Messire Bembo insists you need.

He smiled.

He skimmed through her life; it sounded not stilted but delightful; music, readings in Latin, hawking on the Lido islands; dancing with Loredan’s wife. But her closing made his blood race the way a fight did.

But for all of it, I find my life changed by your kisses. I long for more, and wonder, perhaps for the first time, where they lead. Is this too much honestly, my Englishman? Here is more, then; hurry back and let us see what comes next. I have kissed the seal of this letter as an experiment; see if the imprint of my lips is left.

Swan kissed the seal on her letter with a great deal more passion than he had kissed the mention of the Holy Father.

Then with Crespi’s help he opened the box.

Inside was the sword he’d toyed with at the Brescian cutler’s in Venice. ‘Ah, mine,’ he said, his hand closing on the hilt with a lust that he seldom showed for anything.

Bembo laughed. ‘I was tempted myself,’ he said. ‘But my wife is now your demoiselle’s bosom friend; indeed, if they were any closer, I’d be jealous. And my wife claimed that she had the right to purchase it.’ He shrugged. ‘And I am to keep you alive. Perhaps the best way to do so is to send you to Rome.’

‘Wounded?’ Swan said. ‘Where Antonelli and Forteguerri both want me dead?’ Swan sat back, winced when the pain hit his shoulder, and slowly relaxed. ‘I think I’m safer fighting the Turks.’

‘There is truth in what you say,’ Bembo agreed.

They spent the night at sea, and entered the Sea of Corinth in the dawn of the next day. No Turkish ships guarded the strait; no beacons were burning, and the Venetian squadron passed Patras under sail, the oarsmen chatting on their benches as if they, too, were passengers. Indeed, the only rowing required the whole day was for the entry into Naupactis towards evening. Swan had never been there before, and he looked at the upper fortress, impressed despite himself with Venice’s reckless expenditure of money on her overseas empire.

‘With good artillery, I could take it in a week, from the landward side,’ Bembo said.

Swan nodded. He was again clad only in a shirt; Crespi had forbidden him a doublet until he was sure that the entire length of the cut was closed firmly, the flesh correctly knitted. The shirts had to be laundered every day.

The harbour of Naupactis was only big enough for two galleys at a time; the rowers were worked hard enough by the time every man and every horse was landed. The governor of the town cleared a barracks for Swan’s soldiers and they used the ground below the upper fortress to exercise horses, which took two days and gave the town’s stradiotes time to get them information.

But in the end, they could only tell them what they already knew from Corfu and Bembo; that Omar Reis was rumoured to be across the narrow sea, in the Morea, having passed the crumbling walls of Corinth effortlessly, and that he was raiding, taking slaves and burning.

Swan felt better each day, although his left arm lacked any strength and his shoulder hurt all the time.

But at Crespi’s command, he continued to live in the stern cabin of the galley. His clothes were cleaned with appalling regularity and he took baths when commanded, and his scar was washed only with salt water.

‘Who holds Corinth?’ he asked.

‘Mathew Asan,’ Bembo said. ‘As good a soldier as any the Greeks have ever produced.’

‘You think he would aid us?’ Swan said. ‘Or accept our aid? Really, Alessandro. What are we doing here?’

‘Thomas! Don’t be simple. We are a compromise between a full Venetian military expedition, which would annoy the moderates in the Senate, and no expedition at all, which would anger the hawks. We have no clear orders because no one could agree what the orders ought to be, and I am in command because I am expendable. And you are all foreigners.’

‘But you have powers to treat with the Morean despots?’ Swan asked.

Bembo laughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But you do, for the Pope.’

‘You’re making that up?’ Swan asked. Then he answered himself. ‘No, you are right, it’s implicit in the command to support the Despot of Mistra.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Ten thousand men?’ he asked.

Bembo sneered. ‘Not really. Maybe a thousand spahis and another thousand infantry, with some ghazis to gather slaves. The rest – baggage handlers and joy-girls.’

‘Really?’ Swan asked.

‘No, but it’s a first-rate story for the troopers,’ Bembo said.

‘The moment that we land at Corinth and Omar Reis knows we are behind him, he will have to run for home,’ Swan said. ‘That is, he will have to run at us.’

Bembo nodded. ‘I am more of a sailor than a soldier,’ he said.

‘We are both more hired assassins than soldiers,’ Swan said. ‘But let us treat the army as the man. He hates me, and he has to fear that Venice will cut him off from his base. The combination should make him react.’

Bembo smiled slowly. ‘You are a great man,’ he said.

‘We need to know where he is, without him knowing we are here.’ Swan was looking south, as if he could see the Turks.

‘Surely every captain since Cyrus the Great has wanted to see his enemy without being seen,’ Bembo said. ‘But I have an idea.’

‘Yes?’ Swan asked.

‘Money,’ Bembo said.

They spent two days paying fishermen to gather information, and in the end, Bembo built a picture that appeared solid. The Turks were camped outside Argos, well to the south, three days’ march away, laying waste to the most prosperous portion of the Morea.

Swan sent Grazias to Mathew Asan and asked for his support. And then, in one night, their squadron crossed the Bay of Corinth and landed the compagnia, with fifty Venetian marines and two hundred armed oarsmen, on the Morean coast west of Corinth at a village that Grazias told them was called Kiato.

Before the sun was clear of the bay towards Delphi, where Swan dreamed of going, the little army was moving inland on an ancient Roman road, well paved, that went inland over the mountains.

The mountains, tall and dust-coloured, appeared incredibly imposing from shipboard, but proved on climbing to be less Herculean in scale than they appeared. They even got the falconet over the hills and it was still mid-morning as they descended to an endless plain of olive groves and vineyards.

Swan was in pain; his shoulder hurt terribly, and he was already exhausted from his first real exercise in twenty days … and yet, the lure of the name of the next town was enough to transport him.

Nemea.

‘It’s like living in the classics,’ he said. ‘By God. Are we myrmidons?’

Grazias, a well-read man, laughed. ‘Every Greek feels thus,’ he said. ‘But it is a pleasure to see a foreigner … that is, a friend, who thinks the same.’

Despite the pleasure, they were very careful. Olive groves and vineyards could hide entire armies, and Grazias’ men rode wide, and the archers secured each road junction, at one preventing a dozen very angry Greek men from moving a flock of sheep across the intersection.

Grazias was unapologetic. ‘Anyone will sell us to the Turks,’ he said. He had a Thracian contempt for the Morean peasants, whom he derided as ‘Vlachs’. Swan noted that in one of the villages all the men spoke Albanian, and in another, something like Italian.

‘A much-conquered land,’ Di Silva said. ‘I just read a sign in Catalan.’

Swan had lost interest by then, and when Clemente and Kendal laid him on a clean bed in an inn in Nemea, he was almost unable to mutter thanks to them, he was so tired and in so much pain. He summoned Grazias and the other officers, muttered a few orders about security, and went to sleep.

He was awakened by Crespi and Bembo.

‘Come, wake, messire.’

Swan sat up, muzzy headed with opium. ‘Attack?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Alessandro said. ‘More drugs for him,’ he said. ‘Listen, Tommaso. Omar Reis is not here; he has marched south, to Nafplion. It is meant to be a surprise attack, and Nafplion is perhaps our most valuable city in all the Outremer. Maybe worth more to us than Belgrade.’

Swan couldn’t make sense of it. ‘Where is Nafplion?’ he asked.

‘On the far coast, facing Attica.’ Bembo sounded urgent, impatient.

‘What do you fear, brother?’ Swan asked.

‘I fear one of those bold strokes that reverse everything. If we lose Nafplion we lose all the Morea at a stroke. The best harbour, the largest garrison …’

Crespi got a candle lit at last. Bembo looked white. Swan was cold.

‘You need food,’ Crespi said.

‘I’m never hungry,’ Swan said.

‘That is the opium,’ Crespi said. ‘You make me afraid. It is such a small dose.’

Swan didn’t think it was the moment to tell Crespi that he took more whenever it suited him; it dulled the pain and made him able to command.

‘How far?’ he asked, throwing his legs over the side of his bed.

‘Thirty Roman miles,’ Bembo said.

‘Slowly, slowly,’ Swan said. ‘I am not going to attack Omar Reis and his ten thousand with my one thousand, even in heroic Greece, under the eyes of Leonidas and Philopoeman. Spend money and buy us guides. As soon as Omar Reis hears we are behind him, he’ll come away from your prize.’

‘He may already have it!’ Bembo said.

Swan frowned. ‘Then there is nothing whatsoever I can do about it,’ he said.

He put his feet back on the bed, and went back to sleep.

Four hours later. The sun was rising over distant Attica, invisible far to the east. The compagnia and their Venetian allies were formed in the twisting streets of the little town, and the Greek schismatic priest was blessing Grazias.

‘I have four guides,’ Bembo said.

‘We need a place to fight an ambush, and with a clear line of retreat; even rout,’ Swan said.

Bembo shrugged. ‘You are the soldier,’ he said.

Swan wanted to scream that he had never commanded an army; that he was doped to the eyes on opium; that he couldn’t even wear armour.

He took three deep breaths. His opium-heavy head told him he could do this; his heart told him he was taking an insane risk.

He rode to a small hill just east of the town. The view was spectacular; he could see the great mountain of the Acrocorinth off to the north, towards the coast, and the plain was ringed with dramatic hills.

‘Grazias, I need an ambush site,’ he said. ‘With a clear line of retreat, but on the road to Nafplion.’

Grazias shrugged. ‘I have only been here once,’ he said. ‘But I will keep my eyes open. It is all narrow valleys and big hills; the pass over the mountain into Nafplion could be held by five men.’

‘Too narrow,’ Swan said. ‘Can you put scouts well out, so we have lots of warning if the Turks move?’

‘Do Italians smell bad?’ Grazias said. ‘Of course.’

Swan raised his eyebrows. He looked at Kendal; the English had picked up a dozen more of their countrymen in Naupactus, more dissatisfied mercenaries. Robert Bigelow, who spoke Greek, waved. Cressy was barking orders.

‘Seventy archers and fifty Venetian marines, to say nothing of their oarsmen, all with crossbows,’ he said. ‘We can keep the Turks warm a long day. Very well. Let’s go. But only until we know the Turks are moving towards us.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Bembo asked. ‘I’m sorry, Tommaso. But this has become very serious.’

‘Then I’ll make up something new,’ Swan said, more snappishly than he’d intended. ‘Grazias? Choose us a rally point. Shade, spare horses …’

‘What is a rally point?’ Bembo asked.

‘It’s where you run to, when everything goes wrong,’ Swan said.

Bembo’s eyes grew uncharacteristically wide.

It was odd for Swan, to think that he knew more about anything to do with violence than his mentor, much less to act the great captain while Bembo acted the part of the patron. But those were their roles.

‘Do you fear that everything will go wrong?’ Bembo asked. ‘I’m not a soldier, Inglis. Tell me.’

Swan shrugged and his shoulder hurt. ‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘First, it is always a good idea to have a bolt-hole; I learned that from Zane, bless him. Second, you are commanding me to fight against the best army in Europe at odds of five to one or more.’

‘Yet you are sanguine?’ Bembo asked.

Swan nodded. ‘I think we can bloody Omar Reis’ nose,’ he said with a little too much emphasis.

But as the sun rose over the mountains, he took the precaution of sending Orietto’s lance off to the north, looking for Mathew Asan. Just in case the Greek commander had, in fact, marched.

It rained at mid-morning; a cold, heavy rain that wet everyone through their armour, and left men sneezing. But it only lasted an hour and then it blew away; the sky was blue, the sun high and warm enough.

Swan stayed in the middle of the column. He rode slowly, and the day was a misery for him; his doublet seemed too heavy, his skin prickled with an ugly sweat, and he was more angry every minute; more angry than he could remember being with Alessandro, who was clearly concerned about the loss of Nafplion. Swan didn’t feel there was anything he could do and thought the usually cynical Bembo was showing too much terror.

Maestro Crespi rode by him on a palfrey, gave him bits of fruit and made him eat them, and generally treated him like a child.

‘Have a little of this orange,’ he said. It was two in the afternoon, give or take half an hour.

‘Stuff the orange up your …’ Swan paused. ‘What in the name of God is that?’ he asked, looking up into the hills above the plain.

They could not see the sea in the distance, but the stradiotes had already reached it. The mountainsides were dramatic; magnificent. It was the most incredible backdrop to violence that Swan had ever seen.

Crespi segmented the orange. ‘Have just a piece,’ he said.

‘Dottore,’ Swan said, preparing to use some serious invective.

Crespi looked up the hillside and saw what Swan had seen.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ the Neapolitan said.

Bembo was just behind; riding apart, sensitive that he had offended Swan and yet unwilling to be far from command.

‘An old fortress?’ Swan knew the look; he’d seen hill forts over most of Europe.

‘I see Roman columns,’ Bembo said.

Swan looked at Bembo, and the tension was broken. He laughed. ‘I’m ready to abandon war with the Turks to look at Roman columns,’ he said. ‘And I want a view of the surrounding terrain. That hill must have one hell of a view.’

‘You are rationalising,’ Bembo said.

‘I’m the captain,’ Swan snapped. He turned his horse out of the column. He’d been riding with the falconet. He grunted as he turned his Arab around Jiri, one of the last two Bohemians to stay with him, and leaned forward, even as Crespi shouted at him.

The horse had no orders from his doctor, and flowed from an uncomfortable trot to a very comfortable gallop so smoothly that Swan was transported effortlessly, one with his horse.

He reached the hilltop sooner than he would have imagined. The landscape of the Morea was so dense, so rugged, with such rapid changes, that distances continued to deceive, and the hill proved to be only a couple of hundred paces high. Nonetheless, from the top he could see the sea. He could see the whole of the valley; the Argolid to the north and west, and then away east towards Nafplion.

He saw the dust cloud first. It was big enough that for a moment he thought it was natural; but it was a yellow brown, not white, and there were no longer any clouds in the sky.

Five miles?

It was very difficult to gauge distance in Morea.

Closer to hand, he could see movement; just to the south and east. Dust on two roads.

He looked back. The old fortress lay behind him, on the apex of a lone mountain or high hill. Behind it, to the north, was a whole range of hills, higher and steeper; the old fortress sat on an outlier, a very secure position.

Swan began to consider the merits of the position. His brain was working well; his thoughts came very quickly, and much of the fog of the opium was gone, although that made little sense to him.

Didn’t matter.

There was a long, shallow slope tapering into the distance; a perfect cavalry charge in the making. Perhaps an ideal ambush site might have had a deep ravine across the road, but here there was instead the plain of the Argolid, dotted with dense groves of olive trees. Beyond the olives was a ravine. It looked deep. Almost at his feet, the road ran through a gate in a low hedge with an old stone wall in front of it. He wasn’t going to do any better.

‘This will just have to do,’ he said aloud. He was perfectly calm, for a man about to command his first battle. He didn’t know why he was so calm, but he felt as if the old gods, the ones that the Wolf of Rimini was always invoking, were watching. It was an odd place, and his whole spirit cried out for him to go up and look at the Roman ruin atop the old fortress.

Instead, when Clemente reached him, not having chosen to gallop over broken ground, Swan pointed right back down the hill. ‘All officers,’ he said. ‘And start the wagons and the guns up the hill to me. Leave one wagon to block the road at the hedge, and have the English move up to the hedgerow.’

Clemente saluted without irony, and turned down the hill.

Alessandro rode up. ‘Your horse makes me feel inferior,’ he said. ‘You went up the hill like Bellerophon on Pegasus.’

Swan smiled, warmed by the compliment. ‘She’s magnificent,’ he admitted. ‘I could ride her for ever. I think that she even knows I am hurt.’

Alessandro nodded. Swan was watching him, and he recognised the moment at which Alessandro registered the size of the dust cloud approaching them. His eyes grew fractionally wider, and his nostrils dilated somewhat.

‘Christ!’ he barked, and his horse fretted.

Swan nodded. ‘There are a great many of them,’ he said.

‘Cut your understated English crap,’ Alessandro said. ‘We cannot fight that.’

Swan allowed himself to glare at his friend. ‘You ordered me to fight them, to save Nafplion,’ he said.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘Are you insane?’ he asked. ‘Look at them! You cannot fight them all. Even you, my English firebrand.’

Swan frowned. ‘I don’t think we can slip them now. They’ve seen our scouts, and they know we’re somewhere out here.’ He pointed at the cloud. ‘And they are moving very fast.’

Bembo watched for long heartbeats. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You know what I fear?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Death?’ Swan asked. ‘Dismemberment? Humiliation? Torture?’

‘Yes,’ Alessandro said, grinning. ‘All of those, of course. But now I dread losing … that thing. That thing that makes us able to do the thing, when other men do not. Look at me; afraid of a mere ten or twenty thousand Turks. Is it marriage, do you think?’

Swan drank a little water from his canteen. ‘I’d like to try,’ he said. ‘No. For me, it is that every time I fight, it seems more like luck and less like skill.’

Bembo nodded. ‘I met a man once who said that courage was infinite, and men ran out.’

Swan nodded. ‘I’m a little low just now,’ he admitted. ‘So I’d rather you started telling everyone how we’ll smash the Turks like the wrath of God.’

Bembo rolled his eyes. ‘Of course, Illustrio!’ he said with heavy sarcasm. ‘I live to serve. By the saints, Swan, if I hadn’t known you for years, I’d think you were some great captain.’ But his smile took the sting out of his words, and when Orietto and Di Silva and Columbino and Bigelow and Cressy and Grazias gathered around them with their pages and two trumpeters, and Orietto exclaimed at the sheer size of the Turkish force, Bembo laughed.

‘Crap cavalry from half of Europe; renegades who come for plunder and not for a fight,’ he said, and winked at Swan.

Swan found himself once again in prayer.

The dust cloud was much, much closer.

The wagons, minus the old Bohemian wagon with its heavy armoured sides, which was now hidden behind the hedge below them on the road, rolled up over the lip of the hill and Bigelow ordered them laagered. He parked the falconet at the very point of the ridge and the Bohemians dropped the trail and began to load with a dozen Italians and Germans who had joined the compagnia in the aftermath of Belgrade.

William Kendal, who looked too much like a gentleman to be ignored, rode up on his hackney, spoke briefly with the archer captain, Bigelow, and looked at Swan.

Swan knew that he had a ‘leadership issue’. Kendal was his man; Kendal was also a natural leader, and men liked him, Hungarians and English and French and German. Cressy had been the next archer of seniority when Willoughby died at Belgrade. But he didn’t have Kendal’s authority, even if he did, in fact, have other excellent qualities, as he was demonstrating by organising the camp servants as muscle for the gun. And Bigelow was his equal in seniority. In fact, being English, they all seemed to command together, and Swan didn’t need to solve that. It worked.

Kendal also had the horse sense not to step on the older men. So he looked at Swan, trying to catch his eye.

Swan beckoned the lanky young man; young in that he was a year younger than Swan.

‘Left flank at the hedge is just hanging in air,’ Kendal said, pointing down the hill.

‘I know,’ Swan said pettishly. He hated it when people told him things he already knew. As if he didn’t know them.

He could see the whole length of hedge and wall, and the olive groves beyond.

The other officers were watching him.

God, the risk would be incredible.

His heart began to pound, and he wasn’t even close to combat. Just thinking about what he was thinking about …

He grinned.

Bembo rode over.

Swan drew his beautiful, long, slim sword. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Master Bigelow, attend me, please.’

When he was done describing what he wanted, Bigelow looked at him with the look a good dog gives his master, when his master asks too much of the dog.

And Orietto frowned. ‘This is foolishness,’ he said. Then he looked both sullen and guilty.

But there was something – always had been, for Swan, since he stole his first pie in Cheapside – that fired him with happiness about risk. Instead of bridling at Orietto’s challenge to his authority, Swan grinned.

‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘but it will be great fun, I promise you. Listen, all of you. When you want to sell a man something false, what do you do?’

Orietto looked abashed. ‘Lie?’ he asked.

Columbino frowned. ‘I do not sell men false things,’ he said.

Bembo smiled. ‘You show him what he wants to see,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ Swan said.

Swan issued his orders, his voice light. He could not stop grinning, and his smiles were infectious.

His shoulder didn’t even hurt.

Of course, his hands were shaking.

Di Silva was last to ride away; he had all the men-at-arms, and his duty was to be the reserve, hidden in the scrubby woods by the edge of their hilltop. ‘You are a little like a man who has drunk too much wine,’ he said. ‘I have followed you for a year, and you have the devil’s luck, but this is a throw for everything, and at a high score.’

Swan shrugged. ‘Think of all the fun if we win,’ he said.

Di Silva shook his head. ‘At least we have an escape route.’

And Bembo too shook his head. ‘Even for me, this is insane,’ he said. ‘I understand the logic. I merely …’ He paused. ‘Bah. Where do you want me?’

‘By me,’ Swan said. ‘If any Turks make it this far, the best I can manage is subtle imprecations. You have to do the killing.’

Bembo bowed. ‘At your service,’ he said.

The dust cloud gradually became an army. The first sign was a sort of sparkle at the leading edge; the brilliant December sun on spear points and helmet tips. But soon the glitter resolved; colours and shapes became visible in the haze of dust, and there were horses and men.

The scouts rode through the gap in the hedge at a gallop and kept riding straight west along the road.

The Turkish outriders were close behind them; a long bowshot. They, too, rode through the gap in the hedge; about sixty of them, or almost a tenth of Swan’s whole force, riding into the rear of his ambush.

There was nothing he could do about it. They didn’t notice his wagon, but kept straight on at a gallop.

A mile behind them, a heavy force of armoured cavalry covered the front of the Turkish army. There were perhaps a thousand Turkish spahis in two big blocks, moving quickly, but on the road, in column, with a handful of men on the lower slopes of the ridge to the north, and a heavier post of vedettes moving on the plain, threading the olive groves.

Behind them was only dust.

Swan raised his sword and waved it.

Three hundred paces below him, five sweating archers pushed the heavy wagon across the road. Then they hopped up into the bed and picked up their big English bows. A dozen pages emerged from the hedge where they had lain hidden and latched their crossbows.

There were just twenty men on the hedge, and all of them were at the wagon.

The spahi vanguard slowed a hundred paces out from the wagon, but they did not stop. And fifty paces out, the archers let fly; five expert archers with a wagon full of arrows.

It was like watching a joust from high in the stands. Swan saw men die, and horses fall, but he couldn’t hear the screams, and the movement of the cavalry was only a vibration in the earth below his horse’s hooves.

The third arrows were in the air before the first struck.

Men were dying.

The spahis, too late, realised through the dust that there was no way past the wagon.

A trumpet sounded.

The Turks halted.

A dozen crossbow bolts emptied saddles. The range was very close; and the front of the Turks was in confusion.

Swan watched, his stomach muscles clenched, his hands shaking furiously. He was hunched forward, trying to move the Turks with the force of his hips, and his horse took a step forward, so urgent was his weight change.

The spahis flinched away from the archers and began to move along the hedged wall, headed south. Men were crouched low on the necks of their horses, and a cloud of arrows rose out of the spahi formation and struck into the hedgerow.

The heavy war bow arrows continued to lash them. Every twelve seconds, another five arrows struck their formation; so few, apparently, but the attrition was continuous, and the men couldn’t strike back.

The whole formation began to slip to its left, into the broken ground. The leaders and the original outriders were well to the south already, almost at the edge of the gully …

Swan’s fists were clenched.

‘Oh, my God,’ Bembo said.

A dozen Turks turned, having outflanked the hedge, and began to ride through an olive grove, easily leaping a low stone wall.

A trumpet sounded, and the whole second division, behind them on the road, began to form to the flank. It was devastatingly professional; they formed from a column of fours to a line, four deep, and moved south.

Swan couldn’t breathe.

Out on the plain, at the very edge of the gully, a Venetian marine stood up. He blew a sea whistle. Two hundred and fifty Venetian arsenali rose to their feet, levelled their crossbows, and loosed.

This time, Swan could hear the screams.

His hands unclenched. He looked at Alessandro. ‘Win or lose,’ he said, ‘it’s done.’

Bembo shook his head. ‘If I survive this,’ he said, ‘I’ll tell this story the rest of my life.’

The first division was now in an ‘L’-shaped trap; the Venetian marines and oarsmen poured their bolts in volleys on the flank of the now utterly disorganised mob of spahis. The tail-end of their horde was still being pricked by the handful of archers and crossbowmen at the wagon.

But the second division, uncontested, was moving to outflank the Venetians.

A rider came from the column to the rear. He had a large turban, visible even five hundred paces away. He was quickly surrounded; riders came up to him from every direction.

Swan pointed him out to the gun crew.

Maestro Jiri winked. He played with the long gun’s trail and then whipped his portfire across the touch-hole.

The gun barked. It only threw a four-pound ball, but it could throw that ball a long way.

The Turkish command group exploded, leaving a dead man and a dead horse on the ground.

The gunners laughed and two small wagoners began to swab the bore.

Big Turban was unhurt; Swan could almost hear him curse, but he was giving orders and a kettle drum beat, the heavy, hollow sound carrying clearly over the gunner’s orders as a parchment cartridge was opened and rammed down the bore.

The Turks began to retreat. It was so sudden that the movement caught Swan off guard, and it was a dozen beats of his heart before he understood. The second division, unhurt, halted. The first division turned their horses and ran for the rear.

‘Kill the man in the turban,’ Swan said.

Bembo nodded his approval. Such direct attacks on other commanders were often considered unchivalrous by Italians. Not Bembo. Not Swan. He was reasonably certain that Big Turban was Omar Reis, and his death would make Swan’s world a brighter place.

The falconet barked.

Big Turban was gesturing furiously at the trumpeters near him when the big ball hit his horse. For a moment, Swan thought the man was dead, but Big Turban got his feet out of the stirrups and was off the dying animal before it fell to the ground.

A trumpeter dismounted and handed over his mount.

‘Put a ball in over there,’ Swan said to Maestro Jiri, pointing at the second division of spahis halted out on the plain.

‘He’s going to order this hill attacked,’ Alessandro said, shielding his eyes with his hand. ‘The gun troubles him more than the crossbows.’

Swan spared a glance for the road behind his wagon, but whatever magic Grazias was performing remained intact, and the hundred or so Turkish scouts were far to the north, or in combat; out of the battle.

But battles are never static, and they take on lives of their own. Off to the south, the Venetian officer, one of the Corner clan, ordered his men forward. They had excellent armour, and they were cocky. They advanced almost fifty paces, and all Swan could do was watch.

The reason that men spoke so much about fortuna in war was that such little things could change the face of a battle. The Turks were rallying from the initial surprise; the commander had extricated his over-aggressive lead squadron, and his infantry was coming up in a new tide of dust behind him. The empty walled hedge wouldn’t hold or fool the infantry, and Swan’s battle was wrecked.

Swan motioned to Clemente. The boy had set the trumpet behind him while he tried to kill a horsefly; it fell to the ground.

Swan snapped his fingers. ‘It is time to blow…’ the word retreat was fully formed on his lips when the Venetian marines and sailors halted. They had advanced in a compact body to within shockingly close range of the second Turkish cavalry squadron; the range was perhaps fifty paces.

The Turks were caught by nothing more than training and ill-luck in the helpless moment when every officer’s attention is fully taken up with getting the laggards and the worst soldiers into their places in the ranks; a brief moment of confusion that every commander dreads. The Venetians appeared out of the swirling dust and olive trees, raised their crossbows, and delivered a shattering volley.

Swan was reminded of the moment when the Francs-archers had blown a hole in the front of the English formation at Châtillon. Perhaps a hundred men and horses fell; one man in five, and the crack spahis broke and ran. In fleeing, they crashed through a mob of ghazis and volunteer infantry pressing up behind them, and the whole body fled with the cavalry.

‘Let me charge!’ Di Silva begged Swan.

Swan shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Stay.’

The gun barked. The sulphur smell hung in the air, and the ball ploughed like a sword-slash through the packed ranks of the ghazis.

Big Turban was unmoved by the flight of his spahis; he had more troops coming up behind.

‘If you set me in now, I’ll break them all!’ Di Silva said.

Swan shook his head. He was still thinking of sounding the recall. The dust and the edge of the lower ridge hid the Turkish column from his gaze; he suspected that Omar Reis had more troops, good troops, immediately to hand. Indeed, if the dust meant what Swan thought, he was already extending his left all the way out to the gully; perhaps beyond.

Swan had two more cards to play. It was a little like a game of piquet; everything might hinge on the order in which he played his cards.

‘He’s going to attack the hill,’ Bembo said.

Swan nodded. ‘We need to get out of here. Messire Di Silva! When the Turk throws his assault up the hill … then you can charge. Into their flank, from behind your little grove.’

Di Silva was watching as more spahis and the remnants of the now-rallied first squadron emerged from the dust and formed in neat lines at the base of the hill.

‘All that was waiting for you,’ Swan said. ‘Turks; they do these things well. Squadrons cover other squadrons, even on the march.’

Di Silva’s armet was open. He raised both eyebrows. ‘Or perhaps I would have carried them all away,’ he said.

Swan had already turned. He waved at Maestro Jiri. ‘Move the gun! Up the hill. There, by the cairn of stones and the Roman temple.’

With almost twenty men to haul the gun, they were able to move it quickly enough; almost at the normal walking pace of a man, with eight on each drag rope and four more on the trail. Two boys young enough to be with their mothers carried arms full of tools, and a woman carried a yoke with four pails of water.

‘Who’s she?’ Swan asked.

Bembo laughed. ‘Going to lecture us on morality, messire?’ he asked.

Swan didn’t have time to lecture anyone. The Turkish cavalry was moving.

‘Ride clear, get along behind the hedge, find Corner and order him to retire,’ Swan said. ‘Go! The Turks are about to charge us!’

Clemente got his reins in his hand, saluted, and rode off to the west.

‘Run,’ Swan suggested to Bembo, and he touched his horse with his spurs, and they were away over the broken ground. They passed along the edge of Di Silva’s wood and then into a very shallow ravine that, had Swan possessed any more soldiers, might ideally have been full of them, and then they were moving up the last of the hill.

Swan almost reined in from the shock of what he saw. Even in the midst of battle, he was stunned by the richness of what confronted him; a wall of huge stones, almost too great to have been built by mere men, and a great stone gate. Inset over the gate was a pair of immense lions supporting a pillar or column.

Behind him, the Turkish trumpets sounded. A lone arrow sailed over Swan and splintered on a stone. Swan’s horse dodged, more like a cat than a horse, and then Swan was over a low wall and in among the ruins.

He could see the Turkish cavalry coming up the slope. It was steeper than it looked; they were making heavy going of it.

The gun came in by the lion gate and Swan heard Jiri yelling in broken Italian, and the men on the ropes hauled like heroes as the men on the trail spun the weapon in place.

The barrel came round in line with the Turkish attack. The Turks were just crossing the first crest in the lower hill; four or five hundred heavy cavalry, well formed.

The trail was dropped to the ground. The men on the ropes ran in all directions, but Maestro Jiri touched his portfire to the touch-hole. Swan had never seen a gun moved while loaded before; he was as surprised as the Turks. The ball smashed into their front rank and grazed on down the hill.

The woman came forward with her buckets and the gunners swabbed their monster.

Swan reined in by the gun.

Bembo was swearing. ‘You know?’ he said. ‘In time, armies will be nothing but these. Guns, and guns.’

‘And baggage trains to hold the powder,’ Swan said. The Turkish cavalry brushed off the four-pounder ball like a horse with a gnat, and came on; the laborious movement up the steep hill was ending, and the commander, his sword waving in the air, was pointing at the baggage wagons abandoned on the slope.

He was clearly surprised to find that he had charged an empty slope and some baggage wagons.

Swan would have smiled, if there had been something between him and four hundred Turks.

Maestro Jiri was cackling like a warlock, shouting imprecations. The Turks, or at least most of them, were coming on up the hill to the fort.

The portfire went down again.

This time, the whole centre of the Turkish charge vanished in a red haze. Perhaps a dozen men and horses were suddenly gone, and for a moment the air was tinged red.

The Bohemian gunners were laughing even as the sweating men swabbed their charge again.

The Turks flinched, and Di Silva hit them.

This time, the result was not due to fortuna but good planning and good officers; Di Silva had waited until the Turks were totally committed over the first crest before he emerged from hiding, and the gun had, as Swan hoped, fixed the attention of every spahi on its bronze lethality and left them no awareness of the nakedness of their flanks. A hundred men-at-arms went into their left at a canter; the dust rose with the screams.

Bembo shook his head. ‘You are good at this, I find,’ he said.

Swan shrugged, and his shoulder hurt; a shoulder that he hadn’t even thought of for an hour. ‘It’s not that hard,’ he said with something of his old complacency.

The Bohemians reloaded the gun and then stood, drinking water. If they were aware that any failure on the part of the men-at-arms would result in all the gunners getting almost instantly butchered by the Turks, they didn’t display it; instead, the men postured for the bucket-woman, or made coarse jokes.

‘There are men behind us on the mountain,’ Bembo said, destroying Swan’s brief reverie. Swan felt the pit of his stomach fall away into the depths of hell, and he turned so fast that his shoulder and neck burned.

He could see armour; spear points, horses. They were close; far too close to escape.

‘Dannazione,’ he said. ‘Bast.’ He could envisage the deaths of all the men who had counted on him, and appreciate the bitter irony of Bembo’s comment that he was good at this. His fertile mind ran like a galloping horse over all the things he couldn’t do. The men-at-arms would be spent; indeed, their horses would be too tired even to run.

Bembo shook his head. ‘I think that I cannot be captured,’ he said.

‘Ride,’ Swan said. ‘No dishonour. Go. I have fucked up.’

Bembo was still watching the mountainside behind them. ‘How the fuck did they get behind us?’ he asked.

Swan felt too defeated even to answer.

Down on the plain, he could distinctly hear a Venetian cheer. ‘Saint Mark! Saint Mark!’

That galvanised him. ‘No,’ he said to Bembo. ‘We’ll go the other way. I assume the Venetians and the English are winning.’ He trotted his horse over to Maestro Jiri.

‘Leave the gun,’ he said. ‘Follow me, for your lives.’

His tone brooked no disagreement, and the Bohemians and the camp servants dropped everything but their own weapons. Swan led them through the gate. He had to guess correctly; he looked back, and saw the men on the hillside were still moving at a deliberate pace; ten minutes away.

With a little luck, they’d never catch him or any of his men. He cursed his own ill-fortune; if he hadn’t sent Clemente away, he could have changed everything in two trumpet-orders, but Clemente was the only trumpeter he had.

He turned to Bembo. ‘Alessandro, may I beg you to act the part of an officer?’

‘As long as it is only acting that is required,’ Bembo said. He smiled. ‘Of course. This is all my fault.’

‘Take the gunners down to the men at the wagon.’

‘Wagon?’ Bembo asked.

‘Blocking the road …’ Swan spat.

‘I understand!’ Bembo said.

‘Collect Kendal and those men and run for the first rally point. You remember? There are horses there …’ Swan pointed.

Bembo nodded again. ‘I have it. Then?’

‘Ride for Nemea. Farther.’ Swan didn’t have time for more. At some point he’d sheathed his sword, and he drew it.

Maestro Crespi had been silent since the fighting started; now he put a hand on Swan’s sword arm. ‘I forbid you to fight,’ he said.

‘That’s nice,’ Swan said, and touched his beautiful mare with his spurs, and she, indignant, leapt forward.

Swan needed Di Silva. He needed to talk to the man, in person; he’d already considered sending Bembo, sending Crespi, even, and disregarded both options. He had to go himself, had to get the Portuguese knight to see the danger and extricate himself from the fight with the spahis.

For their part, the cavalry had spread all across the hillside. The Turks hadn’t broken; instead, they’d collapsed and then exploded in all directions, and then turned, as much as they could, on their pursuers, who they outnumbered. It was a vast, swirling fight; here four armoured men caught a pair of Turks and killed them with lances, there ten Turks shot one of Columbino’s squires with arrows, killing his horse and then shooting him where he lay helpless on the ground.

Swan had no intention of fighting. His drawn sword was his armour; he was merely riding through a battle. He expected Di Silva to be in the midst of it all; he even thought he knew which armet was Di Silva’s, and he moved across the ridge-top at a gallop, threading through fights; his magnificent horse following a series of gaps and eddies in the fighting …

… it was heady; exhilarating; a thousand thousand decisions made without thought; mortality and fate and speed and danger in a rich brew that he drank with every breath. Twice he stopped heavy blows on his sword and then his path was blocked, a wall of Turkish maille and Italian plate between him and his goal; his mare pushed her way between two bigger horses on guts and impetus and his point went home over a younger Turk’s hopeless attempt to guard his face, and Swan was through, his blade angled down over his unprotected back to ward the flailing counter-blow of his third opponent, and there was Di Silva, horse half reared, pulping a man with a Turkish mace.

There was one advantage to being unarmoured in the midst of a cavalry melee; Di Silva recognised him instantly.

‘We need to run!’ Swan said. ‘Look!’

He pointed at the mountainside to the north.

But while he waded through the cavalry fight, the world had changed.

The force on the mountain had moved faster than Swan had expected, and he might have flinched from the fate about to befall him – capture and imminent death – except that as they grew closer, their commanders had moved, and banners had unfurled, and there, not half an English mile away, was Orietto’s golden lion on a field of azure; that meant that the force on the mountainside was Mathew Asan; Greeks, not Turks.

‘What did you say?’ Di Silva asked. He made a heavy cut with his mace and then backed his horse, covering his captain.

Swan had all the time in the world to whisper a prayer to Mary Magdalene. Then, ‘Drive the Turks down the hill!’ he yelled. ‘The battle is as good as won!’

As soon as the Turkish column saw Asan’s men coming down the hill, they ran. It was not so much panicked rout as intelligent calculation; they’d worked out how much trouble they were in, and they broke, heading south and west.

There was no way for the Venetians and the English archers to pursue mounted men on foot, and the mob of infantry who streamed away from the Turkish baggage so vastly outnumbered Swan’s entire force that no one felt an immediate urge to follow. The battle seemed to pause …

And then Asan’s Greeks came over the last lip of the ridge and fell on the fleeing Turks like furies. Swan had no time to count, but Asan’s force, which appeared to look exactly like Scanderberg’s, composed of hard-looking light cavalry, swept into the broken Turkish infantry, threaded them, and went on to pursue the Turkish cavalry.

Michael Asan, as he was known in Venice, was a handsome Greek, roughly of an age with Grazias. Orietto saluted Swan smartly and rode on, headed for the last knot of fighting on the ridge-top, where Di Silva was breaking the last resistance around their own looted baggage.

Swan saluted with his sword. He hadn’t meant to be so showy, but he hadn’t sheathed the weapon yet.

Asan had a small, Turkish-style axe. He saluted with it and reined in.

‘You are Ser Suane of Venice?’ he asked in good Italian.

‘I am Tommaso Swan, an Englishman,’ Swan said in Greek. ‘And I serve Bessarion.’

Asan’s whole demeanour changed. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Bessarion!’ He nodded, or perhaps bowed his head. ‘When your knight came to me, I almost didn’t believe him. It seemed too good to be true. And now?’ He grinned, and his smile was as wolfish as any in Rimini. ‘I will not leave a Turk alive this side of the sea,’ he said. ‘And my devils will make sure of it.’

Swan was watching the dust around his precious wagons.

‘As soon as my men have water and food, we’ll join the pursuit,’ he said. ‘I hear Omar Reis commands them.’

‘And you want him, I hear?’ Asan said. ‘Heh! We’ll see. He is a wily bastard, full of oil and old rope, and I will be surprised if we take him.’

The last dozen armoured Turks at the wagons surrendered. Swan rode over to see that there was no massacre, but Columbino had the Turks together, with Marco the Venetian and two other pages guarding them.

Di Silva bowed to Asan. ‘My lord,’ he said, and then turned to Swan. ‘Capitano?’ he asked. ‘I have sent the pages for remounts. We will pursue?’

‘To the utmost,’ Swan said. He had not expected this kind of victory. In fact, the result stunned him, and he was unprepared; he filed this feeling away; victory required preparation, as much as defeat did, and he had prepared to lose.

But their big horse herd was about to prove a major military advantage.

‘Water for everyone. Wine, if the pages can bring it forward. Keep the men-at-arms together; food.’

Asan bowed. ‘Do you really have water and wine? My devils would be the better for a drink. We have been in the saddle since yesterday.’

In the event, the horse herd came forward immediately because Alessandro Bembo guessed correctly about the end of the battle and ordered it done; the horses and the water seemed to appear out of the dust to the west, like a third army, with Alessandro, Clemente and Crespi mounted among twenty pages left to guard the rear. The water and the remounts became the focus of hundreds of men; it was chaos, but controlled chaos, with corporals bellowing for men to drink up and fall in; the Venetian marines were the most orderly, and the gunners fetched the looted wagons back down the hill; the Turks had cut open many things and ruined a dozen tents, but they had not staved any of the water barrels.

Swan rode along the plain. The English were looting the Turkish baggage, and Swan saw the woman who had carried water for the gun crew pulling silk fabric off a donkey. Fifty of Asan’s Greeks, or perhaps Albanians, were stripping a field forge; farther east on the road, a hundred wagons waited, unlooted, because of the small size of the victor’s army.

Not for the first time, Swan wished he had a dozen household knights, as a real commander would. Or light crossbowmen on horseback, a popular affectation among condottieri in the north. But Grazias was back from his fight off to the west; he had a bandage around his head and another on his bridle hand, but he looked sharp enough, and he had a dozen men with him.

‘I want the baggage intact,’ Swan said. ‘I’ll divide it when the pursuit is done.’

Grazias looked pained, but he rode off among the Albanians, yelling, and Swan did the same with the English archers. Luckily, they had not been blooded; two volleys of arrows had been their entire participation, because the southern end of the ambush had never worked out as Swan intended. But as they had taken no casualties, they were calm; Swan roared at them, and most men calmly pocketed one more bauble and then feigned discipline; a few ignored him, and were treated like awkward sods by the master archer.

‘There’s a fortune ’ere, Cap’n!’ Bigelow said.

Swan was tired, and a lot of him hurt; his wound had taken in all his salty sweat and now burned as if the cut was fresh and not weeks old. But he had to agree with Bigelow.

‘Horses, gentlemen,’ Swan said. ‘I need you to chase the Turks.’

Bigelow looked at the clouds of dust away to the south with the eye of a man who had spent his entire life pursuing beaten enemies. ‘Fresh ’orses?’ He nodded. ‘An’ a fair split on all yon?’

‘My word on it,’ Swan said.

‘Right,’ Bigelow said with an easy smile.

Then Swan crossed the plain to the Venetian marines. He saluted Matteo Corner, their captain.

‘I would take it as a favour if you would be so kind as to take all your people over the baggage train; the Turkish one. Unhitch all the animals; catalogue what’s in the carts. We will distribute the … prizes after the pursuit.’

Corner raised an eyebrow. ‘You are trusting my oarsmen to watch your treasure?’ he asked. ‘Your English must be remarkably rapacious.’

Swan shrugged. ‘You have no horses to pursue,’ he said. ‘And your marines had discipline.’

Corner bowed. ‘Too kind, Capitano Inglese. We will do our best.’

Asan’s stradiotes swept away south, fed and watered. Di Silva followed, with the men-at-arms and most of the pages in loose order; formed in two bodies half a mile apart, to support the Greeks. Swan rode with them until the last of the pages had crossed the gully and the dry stream bed at the bottom, and then he watched them go. His English, well to the east, moved along the plain, also formed; watching the southern end of Asan’s pursuit net.

Swan’s marvellous Arab was still in fine shape; he rode her down into the gully and up the other side, and she didn’t flag, and then he cantered east along the south edge of the gully until he met up with William Kendal, Alessandro Bembo and ‘il dottore’ Crespi.

He was the only man not in armour. Clemente handed him a canteen, and he emptied it, and then they rode south, into the olive trees. It was some time in the mid-afternoon; there were no churches or bells to give the time, but Swan’s estimate was that he had six or seven hours for his pursuit, and every peasant would be on his side. On the other hand, the olive trees were old and mostly wild, or abandoned from a richer, more populous time, and the dust rose through the groves and made any line of sight impossible. He could no longer see any part of his company; he and his companions seemed to be alone and very vulnerable in the dust.

‘There is so much to learn in war,’ Swan said.

Bembo gave him a wry smile.

‘I’ve never commanded a pursuit before,’ Swan admitted. ‘Or much else, really. I’m better off in Rome; at least I know what I’m doing with the Orsini and the Colonna.’

Bembo frowned. ‘It seems to me that you just won a famous victory,’ he said. ‘Venice will think so.’

Swan nodded. They rode on.

They crossed a road half an hour later, and there were guides; a pair of Albanians communicated that the open ground on the far side of the road had already been swept, and pointed towards the hills looming back to the west, almost the way they’d come up that morning.

Swan led his companions south and west, parallel to the road, for several miles as the evening came on, and then they passed the first dead Turks. There was a man alone, his body already stripped naked, pathetic in death, and then a dead man pinned under a dead horse, unlooted, and then three dead men together. And then the crises came thicker; foundered horses, some not dead but just ruined, lying quietly or breathing badly.

Swan was almost immune to the deaths of men, but he felt for horses.

Their path became a trail of death. The Albanians were thorough; there were no wounded. They came to a village of perhaps twenty houses where all the doors were locked, and a dozen Greek men leaned on axes covered in gore. They waved and shouted, and pointed, and Swan and his friends rode on, past the town, and found the tail-end of a desperate fight; some spahis, their horses foundered, tried to sell their lives dearly, holding a barn.

Swan rode up. There were none of his own men, only stradiotes, and he shouted in Greek until they fell back from the barn.

‘Who is in command?’ he asked.

None of the Greeks or Albanians would admit to being in command.

Swan called out in Turkish for the men inside to throw down their arms.

‘Fuck your mother!’ shouted a Turk.

‘I have more than a hundred prisoners,’ Swan called out in Turkish. ‘Throw down your arms. You will not be killed. My word on it.’

The decision took longer than Swan thought possible, but finally a curved sword flew out into the abandoned farmyard, and then a dozen more, and the Turks stumbled out into the evening and threw their bows down as well.

‘Who are you planning to send to guard them?’ Kendal asked.

Swan winced.

‘Thought you wanted to stay with the pursuit?’ Kendal said. ‘Because if you send them back with this lot, they’ll be dead before they cross the gully.’

‘And I wouldn’t leave them with the villagers,’ Bembo added. He smiled gently. ‘Unless you want them dead.’

Swan sighed.

But with a mixture of bribery and shouted Greek, he got some of the stradiotes to join him as guards; they rounded up horses, and after further delay they turned back. Riding along the edge of full darkness and recrossing the gully was more adventure than Swan had expected. There were pickets on the Turkish baggage, and his pavilion was up. He drank a cup of wine by the fire and went to bed, where he lay awake, thinking about how many men had died in the pursuit and how many more would die.

Bembo was no help. He was asleep as soon as his head hit his blankets.

Swan writhed, too hot and then too cold, and then he got up and stumbled out into a surprisingly cool night. The plain between his pavilion and the Nafplion road was filled with men sleeping on the ground, and hastily picketed horses. Swan walked a hundred paces and found a pair of Venetian oarsmen, wrapped in blankets, cursing the darkness and Capitano Suane.

Swan didn’t take it personally. He went back expecting to lie looking at the roof of his tent, but instead fell asleep at last.

There was nothing easy about the pursuit, because it began to turn into an entire campaign, and his men were tired and had seen too much fighting. The day after the battle, Swan moved the whole column to Nafplion; Bembo went from observer to commander, arranging for militia from the city to come and take the baggage train; arranging barracks space and a hero’s welcome. But the welcome was wasted; Swan spent one night in a bed and then rode off to the south with the gunners and the falconet and most of the Venetian marines on nags, with Grazias and his stradiotes scouting. Rumour had it that Omar Reis was holed up in a tower; Swan arrived to find Turks, but not Omar Reis. The Turks would not surrender; to his great sadness, the tower had to be stormed, and Di Silva was wounded. None of the Turks survived.

‘You are not cut out for a life of arms,’ Bembo said. ‘How is it you can kill some bastard you’ve never met without turning a hair, but you cannot stomach the death of a few Turks?’

Swan shrugged, in a black funk. He didn’t feel like a victorious commander. He felt like a man who conducted massacres.

But after taking the tower he went deeper into the Morea. The Hellenistic theatre at Epidaurus healed him; his stradiotes fretted for a whole day while he climbed on the seats and shouted from the stage and wandered among the rubble of the temples of Apollo and Asclepius. The next day, Asan joined him on the coast, and a pair of Venetian military galleys beached close to them, but when they followed the last organised body of Turks out onto the peninsula by ancient Hermione, they were too late, and the local fishermen said two Turkish galleys had come into the harbour and collected two hundred men; Omar Reis, in fact, and his personal spahis.

It all had a curious feeling of impersonality. Swan hadn’t fought much, hand to hand. The new sword was spotless; not a nick, despite the light blade.

He sat in a fine room in Hermione, in the Despot’s palace, or at least his small military tower. Bembo had the other bed. Swan was writing a letter to his lady, to thank her for the sword. He’d intended to sound dashing and romantic and fascinating; rereading, and getting ink on his lips as he chewed the nib of his pen, he knew he sounded tired and cynical and despondent instead.

‘Do you know where we fought the battle?’ Alessandro asked. He was lying on the second bed, reading, or rather, looking at pictures. The Turkish baggage had yielded riches, but the last lot, abandoned outside Hermione by Omar Reis, had included the great man’s erotic library, fantastically illustrated and with the best Persian calligraphy. Alessandro was fascinated; Swan might have been, if he’d been less angry all the time.

‘What battle?’ Swan asked.

Bembo blew out his cheeks. ‘You know, my English friend,’ he said, ‘victories over the Turk are not so frequent that most men forget them.’

‘Oh,’ said Swan. ‘That.’

‘It is going to be difficult for me to ride the coat-tails of your victory if you refuse to write an official letter and claim it,’ Bembo said.

Swan shrugged, trying to think of a phrase to describe what he felt for Sophia.

‘At any rate, do you know where we fought?’ Bembo asked again.

‘West of Nafplion,’ Swan said.

‘Mycenae,’ Bembo said.

Swan took in a deep breath, as the name penetrated his dark mood. ‘Mycenae?’ he asked. ‘Ancient Mycenae? That was a Roman temple!’

Bembo nodded. ‘The bishop of Nafplion told me. He said that Cyriac always meant to go but the countryside was too dangerous. I suppose it never occurred to him to hire an army to help him view antiquities.’ Bembo smiled.

Swan found that he had chewed his pen again, and he spat. ‘Fuck! Bast. Dannazione.’

Bembo was smug. Swan could see his smug look. ‘What?’ he spat. ‘I feel like crap and you think I should be the butt of your jokes?’

Alessandro sat up. ‘No,’ he said. He looked quite serious.

‘I’m sick of it. You and Kendal and Grazias; you all find me so amusing …’

Swan was ready to speak his mind, even though something inside him screamed stop! He was breaking every rule he had for behaviour. But it was like the day of the battle; he’d never been so angry. He felt that he might explode, that no one understood him, that Bembo was a fool, and so was Will Kendal, and so, in fact, was Constantine Grazias …

Bembo swung his legs over the bed. ‘Perhaps I should not tell you this,’ he said. His smile was grim. ‘But I’m tired of putting up with your ill-humours. Crespi has replaced your opium dose with sugar for the last eight days. You are not in the bowels of the blackest mood since Achilles sulked in his tent – you are opium sick. Kindly think before you speak.’

Swan took a breath to speak, but swallowed his words as the import of what had been said hit him. The bad sleep, the bad moods, the anger, the hopelessness. He took a deep breath, and let it go.

‘Have you had too much opium?’ Swan asked.

‘Never,’ Alessandro admitted. ‘And you make me very glad, as I’m ten times the bitch you are. But for the love of god, Tommaso, please shut up.’

Swan bridled. And then clamped his mouth shut.

He managed to get through the next five days on willpower and Bembo’s sneers; he rode back to Nafplion, collected his company, by then spread over half of Greece, and, without wrecking the negotiation, vented a little of his savagery on a factor of the Bank of St Mark who imagined that he could buy all the loot of the Turkish baggage in a single low-cost deal. He was so slippery that Swan’s eyes slid off him, and Bembo gave him a gracious nod to allow him to speak his mind.

‘I’m not in a hurry,’ Swan said to the first offer. ‘I can sell it all myself.’

‘I doubt it,’ said the factor, with a smug self-assurance that cannot have made him many friends in the banking business. Swan reminded himself that this young man was in virtual exile; no Venetian wanted to live in Nafplion, no matter that Swan found it one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen.

He was in a small tavern, near the port; a shabby, comfortable place where Di Silva was recuperating and many of the men-at-arms were at home. At the next table, there were a dozen men and a few women; a loud English soldier with no hair was holding a bottle of Italian wine and talking about it, and a Flemish archer with a pointed beard was mocking him while a red-haired woman laughed unrestrainedly. A beautiful Greek woman held her child in the air and laughed too, and her husband, one of the stradiotes, watched them with something near adoration. A big man made cuts with his sword, and a small woman counted the money on the table while she watched him. An African, perhaps a mercenary mamluk, stood with his arm around a lanky English archer and a woman holding an arming sword and smiling at the world. She was waving vaguely at a tower outside.

It was quite aparty.

Swan watched them for a moment and turned back to the banker. He shrugged. ‘Well, then,’ he said, and stood.

‘My round, Steph!’ called another Englishman, this one as a big as a house. The noise that one table made seemed to fill the tavern; the Moorish archer slammed his fist on the table, not in anger but in agreement, and another tide of laughter rolled in.

The banker looked at the loud table with distaste. ‘My offer will not last. I will offer less tomorrow,’ he said.

Swan looked at Bembo. ‘Goodbye, then.’

The man didn’t even have the good grace to walk out in a huff.

‘Fine,’ he said, as if put out. ‘Make me an offer.’

‘No,’ Swan said. ‘You are a fool. I’ll sell it all myself.’

Bembo laughed. ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘I will. Nonetheless.’

The banker folded his arms. ‘Fool, am I?’ He sneered. ‘Good luck buying provisions or anything else here, condotierre.’

Bembo frowned. ‘Are you a providitore?’

‘No,’ the banker said. He hesitated. ‘And you are?’

Bembo smiled. ‘No one you know,’ he said sweetly. ‘Yet.’

As it proved, they found a representative of a small Florentine banking house who was happy to pay them a fair price for all the silk in the train. There was already a lawsuit about the cask of pearls they’d taken; it had come out of a shipment taken by a Turkish cruiser only the year before, and probably had a definitive Venetian owner.

But Swan knew the law too; he made a bargain with the owner’s agent and took a smaller cask of gold in exchange, and then sold all the animals save the best horses to a Nafplion merchant who took caravans into the Morea. The total was a tidy sum; Swan sent a quarter to Mathew Asan, who’d already returned to his impregnable fortress at Corinth, and hoped that the Greek commander was honest enough to divide it among his men. The rest Swan divided into shares, according to the company’s tradition, and he paid it out from a table laid across two barrels in the courtyard between Di Silva’s tavern and the little Latin church. The total came to almost twenty gold ducats a man; twice that for a stradiote or a man-at-arms; half again as much for an archer. Half a year’s pay for many men, in gold and not promises. Nafplion had seldom seen such a party.

Almost twenty of Asan’s cut-throats had stayed with Grazias; this seemed natural to them. Swan paid them from the Turkish loot and kept back almost an eighth against future expenses, and had new iron tyres put on the all his wagon wheels, and new tents made to replace those destroyed by the Turks. He bought an armload of very fine antiquities in the market; a sword hilt of solid gold, a small bronze animal that might have been a helmet crest, and a bronze knife inlaid with silver, as well as four magnificent seals in a marvellous red stone that glowed as if alive and full of blood, each carved with scenes from a world more ancient even than Greece; a boy jumped over a bull, a bare-breasted woman raised her arms in supplication. There was also a full Greek helmet of a later period, and an Egyptian faience bottle and some other curiosities. Swan paid with his share of the loot, and sent the whole by ship to Rome, for Bessarion. He kept one of the rings; a heavy gold thumb ring that fitted him, which showed a warrior in a chariot.

They had two pleasant weeks in Nafplion; the town was growing tired of their heroism when Swan’s entire company paraded, some men still visibly the worse for drink, in the town square, and then marched out through the gates and over the high ridge behind the town before heading inland. They marched right past the place where they’d fought the Turks; Swan, a much happier and lighter Swan, rode up the hill to the ancient gate, where the two headless lions supported a column carved in stone. It was breathtaking; so were the enormous, inhuman stones of the gate that surrounded it.

‘Perhaps they truly were greater than we,’ Swan said.

Bembo laughed. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘You know what the Iliad is about? Loot. I watched you serve it out to your people. Nothing has changed, I promise you. Kill the men, take the gold, perhaps the women as well.’

‘I’m sorry, is it your turn to be a cynic?’ Swan asked. ‘I am looking at the historical survival of a piece of the Trojan War, and you want to complain about looting.’

Bembo laughed. ‘I put up with weeks of this. Listen – my time with you is drawing to an end.’

Swan turned in the saddle. ‘No,’ he said.

Bembo shrugged. ‘I think our small war with the Sultan is at an end, and my presence will only cause embarrassment. Or just perhaps, the despot Thomas will not like to see a Venetian paymaster.’

‘Everyone knows that I work for Venice,’ Swan said.

‘You are deniable. I am a Bembo.’ Alessandro shrugged. ‘I have enjoyed this last few weeks more than I can say. It was far better than a papal election, for example.’

‘You only say that because I was in command and you had nothing better to do than mock me,’ Swan said.

‘And your point would be?’ Bembo asked. He turned his horse. ‘I will remain here for at least a month; in fact, I bought most of the Turkish loot.’ He smiled beatifically. ‘I will make a healthy profit and the loot will cover my time here. Good luck with the despot Thomas. I wish I was coming. I long to see Mistras.’

‘You have armour,’ Swan said. ‘Come as a man-at-arms. Come, Alessandro!’

Bembo shrugged. ‘I have duties.’

Swan nodded.

They embraced.

‘I suppose you have a letter for me?’ Swan asked.

Bembo shook his head.

‘You had word from Loredan and no letter for me?’ Swan asked.

‘I am not joking this time. I have no letter for you. In fact, my orders come not from Loredan, who is no doubt still in Albania, but from the Ten.’ Bembo lowered his voice to say ‘Ten’ even in the midst of the ruins of Mycenae. ‘And this banking thing …’

‘That idiot,’ Swan said

‘No, not the young fool. Sinelli. The crown. And the Medici. There is money missing; no one told me not to tell you, so I will tell you. The Medici are not happy; factors have been recalled from four of their offices, and they are not going to have a man at the Frankfurt fair; some say their solvency is at risk.’

‘Sweet Christ,’ Swan said, and then looked around. ‘And you are going …’

‘If I succeed here, I will go to Rome,’ Bembo said. ‘For Loredan.’

Swan’s stomach flipped. ‘While I nursemaid the Despot,’ he said.

Bembo shrugged. ‘There’s a rumour that one of the Medici factors has defected to the Turks,’ he said.

Swan shook his head. They’d both met renegades; there were dozens if not hundreds of them.

‘Ever wonder why there are so many renegade Italians and Spaniards, and so few renegade Turks?’ Swan asked.

Bembo looked off towards the sea. ‘If Turks had the individual liberty to defect, they would,’ he said. ‘It is as if education and liberality loosen ties … perhaps they do.’

‘Too deep for me today,’ Swan said. ‘I’ll miss you.’

‘Don’t miss me too much,’ Bembo said.

Ten days of riding; two long rainstorms, and the loss of twenty horses. Swan’s Greek was better, and he had begun to learn Albanian. But the Vale of Sparta was magnificent on a sunny day in December, and by then Swan had a dozen guides, pronoia cavalrymen who served the Despot. They were all but reverential when Swan displayed Bessarion’s banner, now somewhat worn, and they mixed well enough with Grazias and his troopers, although Swan could tell that they thought themselves more aristocratic than the northern Greeks.

Sparta had not a single monument to show for its magnificent reputation, beyond a deep depression in the middle of the plain that local farmers said was the ancient amphitheatre, and it was less than half the size of the one at Epidaurus.

Swan remounted his Arab and cantered along his column. Men saluted or laughed; they were in good spirits despite the rain. He caught up with the vanguard as it wound its way up a series of switchbacks on the western side of the valley, and above them loomed a magnificent city; layers of walls like a fancy Italian cake, and the golden glow of what appeared to be the domes of hundreds of churches.

The officer of the Despot’s cavalrymen, Michael Catacuzenos, smiled. ‘It is good to see that foreigners can still be impressed by us,’ he said. ‘Here at the very end.’

‘The very end?’ Swan asked.

‘Constantinople is gone,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘It is only a matter of time before we are gone, too. This is the very last flowering; the very end, and when we are gone, there will be only Latins and barbarians and Turks.’

Swan smiled. He was English; everyone thought he was a barbarian.

‘And that is why you think you are so much better men than Grazias and my other stradiotes?’ Swan asked.

Catacuzenos shrugged, looking at the magnificent array of golden domes above them on the mountainside; level after level, and a citadel rising above them all, and lower down, a palace greater than Blachernae. The whole view was staggering, in the sun. Swan had seldom been struck with awe by the hand of man. Mistras rose above him and was as much a surprise as Venice would be if suddenly encountered amidst desolation.

‘They are fine men,’ Catacuzenos said. ‘But Plethon taught us that we are Spartans. The last Spartans. I hope that when the end comes, we will fall like Leonidas, and not pass into the east like Themistocles or Pausanias.’

Swan nodded in tribute to the man’s erudition. ‘You know Herodotus,’ he said.

Catacuzenos smiled. ‘I am a Spartan,’ he said. ‘I know the history of my people. Come, Foreigner from Thule. Enter my city. Welcome to Sparta.’

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 6587 3

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