Christian Cameron: Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he was not accomplishing his mission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They looked at each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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