Christian Cameron - Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Four - Rome

In the end, Swan bought his ring from a jeweller, a middle-aged man whose daughters were his apprentices. The elder girl made his ring up while he waited — engraved garnet in gilded silver. The jeweller’s was in the same street as four swordsmiths and a vast suite of armourers who shared work space and sheds, but all of the armour looked clumsy, and Swan knew that Di Brachio never bought weapons in Rome. Gaudy stuff for the pilgrim trade, covered in crosses and encrusted in jewels. He poked about, saw nothing he wanted, and returned to the jeweller in time to have hippocras served while the elder girl tried the ring on him and then tapped it gently on to an anvil stake until she liked the fit on his finger.

Back in his rooms, he packed a pair of valises and a big leather malle, or horse-sack. It was early afternoon. He checked in the stables and secured four riding horses and a pack animal and a mule.

Giannis was currying his favourite horse. ‘You are leading an army?’ he asked.

Swan shrugged. ‘I’m off east,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the new Frenchman.’

‘Antoine?’ Giannis asked. ‘He’s not a soldier, he’s a cook. But he’s a good cook, as we all learned at breakfast.’

‘Take care of Di Brachio,’ Swan said. He found that he was embracing the Greek. He wanted to say something like ‘I’m not sure I can do this alone’. But he didn’t.

He promised to have dinner with his friends, and then he went back to his room and changed into plain workman’s clothes.

Swan crossed the city carefully. He was by himself, and wasn’t even wearing a sword. He was dressed like a labourer, applying some of the lessons he’d learned in Constantinople. He moved from street to street like a man in enemy country, and when he saw a party in red and yellow he avoided them even when he saw that they were escorting two women. He was pleased to see some puffy faces and some bandages.

Madame Lucrescia’s was closed. Swan went to the servants’ entrance and watched until he saw three workmen carrying something heavy, and then he joined them. It was a heavy marble altar top. Swan admired it while it tore at his fingers. It had the curled shape of Greek temple capitals on columns — it weighed four hundred pounds, and even with four strong men and a small wheeled cart, it took everything they had to get it in through the kitchen and into the main room.

The great room looked different, empty, and the erotic paintings and mosaics, bereft of both customers and courtesans, looked showy and tawdry, perhaps even vulgar. Flaws in art and execution showed up more readily.

They moved the thing to the back of the room while a housekeeper chided them to be quick. The smallest man, a redhead, was clearly their foreman, and he began to argue with the housekeeper about what would happen next.

‘I’d like to come here,’ said the biggest workman. He looked at the walls. ‘Think these fancy bitches are worth the money?’

The other man spat. ‘Whores. Tools of Satan to snare men.’

‘I can’t be snared by what I can’t afford,’ said the first man. ‘Anyway, who gets his pump primed behind Saint Paul’s every feast day?’

Swan nodded agreeably as the two started what sounded like an old and well-established quarrel. He walked out of the great room and went straight up the staircase. Then along the corridor, counting doors. The rooms weren’t much wider than the beds inside them, and he counted — sixteen.

He looked both ways — there was movement in the other rooms, he could hear it — then he turned her door handle and slipped in.

She was asleep.

He watched her for a moment. Smiled, leaned over, and kissed her awake.

She tasted like old wine and too much sleep, but as wonderful as ever, and her eyes opened.

‘Want to go to Ancona?’ he said.

The winter ride across the spine of Italy to the east coast was so brutal that the pleasure of having a pretty young wife was mostly drowned in sleet and buried in snow. The Frenchman cursed his ill luck and looked after the horses with remarkable skill, reminding Swan each day of how many skills he still hadn’t mastered. The Frenchman could start a fire and maintain it, and he could find straw under snow.

And he had a name — Antoine — just as Giannis had said. ‘I had another name,’ he said with his shrug. He shrugged almost every sentence. ‘Mostly, they call me Le Coq.’

‘The cock?’ Violetta asked. She was bundled like a painting of the Virgin Mary, nothing feminine about her but the slope of her smooth forehead. They were in a barn, wearing every item of clothing they owned, and the Frenchman was pressing Violetta as hard from her left as Swan did from the right. Deep in a pile of straw.

‘Ah, no, madame. That is, I think, your Italian or your innate woman’s lechery,’ Antoine said ‘In French, I am the cook.’

‘I thought you said you were a soldier?’ Swan said.

‘People respect soldiers more than cooks,’ Antoine answered.

Another night, Antoine asked — after some hesitation — ‘I mean no disrespect, monsieur and madame, but — if I understand the situation — will not the — ahem — esteemed owner of the house wherein Madame worked — will she not be very angry?’

Swan had been thinking that very thing himself.

Violetta shrugged and burrowed deeper into the musty hay. ‘We’d have to live through the night and go back to Roma for that to concern me much.’ Later, when the Frenchman was snoring, she leaned over and kissed Swan. ‘It’s fucking cold, my feet feel like the devil breathed on them, and my rump must be bruised, to say nothing of the insides of my thighs. I can’t imagine putting myself on that mule again tomorrow.’ She rubbed her nose on his. ‘Despite which, this is in every way superior to being a whore.’

Ancona was as cold as everywhere else, and the knight commanding the order’s galley of war, Blessed Saint John , was older than Pontius Pilate and far from ready for sea.

‘Cardinal Bessarion is not a sailor,’ the knight said. He wore the brown robe of the order all the time — something that the knights seldom did in Rome, where they wore their formal black robes with richly embroidered eight-pointed stars all the time. He read Bessarion’s letter and a short note from the Pope. They were sitting in a waterfront wine shop with a big central hearth and most of the town’s male population to add to the warmth. The Knight of St John had a table to himself.

He read the Pope’s note after crossing himself, kissed the seal when he was done, and nodded. ‘I see that His Holiness is not a sailor either,’ he noted.

Swan sat as demurely as he could manage.

‘Well, I’m bound for Rhodos, lad. But not until I get some sign of clear weather. Or a rumour that the Turk is at sea. Says here you are a Donat?’ he said.

Swan stiffened. ‘Yes, sir.’

The old man smiled, and the thousand folds of his face all became more pronounced. He was quite pleasant looking when he wasn’t cross. ‘Welcome aboard. I haven’t had a volunteer in — bah. Three years.’

‘I look forward to serving.’ Swan said piously.

The knight shrugged. ‘Do you care to save your immortal soul? Do you hate the Turk? Would you give your life to save another? Give your soul to see another man go to heaven? Care for the sick?’

Swan nodded. ‘Yes?’ he managed.

The old man all but choked on his wine, he laughed so hard.

‘Do you play chess?’ he asked.

Swan shook his head. ‘Not well,’ he said.

‘But you do play. Eh?’ The old man was reading again. ‘Why Monemvasia?’

‘I left a man there — in the hospital.’ Swan shrugged. ‘He’s my friend. His Eminence said he’d ask you to take me there.’