The torchlight illuminated the floor of the tunnel for five yards. They still hadn’t seen Swan, and he couldn’t stand the tension any more.
He leaped forward and cut, a rising snap from a low guard that sheared through the big Turk’s cheek and nose, so that the tip cut through his left eye and stopped on the ocular ridge. Swan leaned into the weapon and pushed it home into the skull and the man died instantly. The sound of his own wild scream echoed and roared and he wasn’t fully aware that it was his own as he recovered, again low, this time into Fiore’s dente di cinghiare. He was afraid of catching his sword on the walls or the ceiling – but his first strike had made him calm, and having recovered, he struck again, gliding, feet flat, slightly offline to the right and thrusting over the corpse even as the dead man’s torch went out on the cobbles.
The second Turk made a parry – but some of the blow caught him. Swan stepped in and caught his sword with his left hand, halfway down the blade, and thrust it – almost blind in the dark. He thrust three times, sure he’d hit, and then flicked a cut from his wrist as he backed a step. Now the only torch was held by the last Turk, or perhaps an escaped slave, and there were two corpses and Swan could see – a little. He doubted that they saw much of him.
‘Back! Back! The knights know we are here! Back, you fools!’ shouted the one with the voice of iron.
But it was chaos in the corridor.
An older, more experienced man would have leaped at them in that moment, but Swan was still amazed at his initial success and still cautious.
The third man had time to ready his weapons – a light axe, and a curving sword.
‘It is just one man!’ he shouted. ‘Aiiee!’ and he attacked.
Swan ignored the sabre and cut at the axe. The sabre blow rang on his helmet, and his pommel struck something – he had one of the man’s arms, and he broke it at the elbow, and punched his armoured right hand into what he assumed was the face as yet another weapon struck him – he dropped his opponent and stepped back, looking for balance. Two weapons struck him together – a blow to his visor that almost brought him down and a cut to his left arm that rang like a bell on his left vambrace. He had his sword up, and he cut down, into the darkness, and connected – and there was a vicious pain in his right calf. He screamed – or roared.
Someone had his left arm. He slammed his right fist and his pommel at this new threat – connected, and the man fell away – then he took a kick or a punch to his knee that caused him to fall backwards.
His head struck the stones that had almost tripped him as he entered the corridor. He hit hard – but his armet took the blow and his thickly padded liner saved him.
He could hear them coming, and he knew he was hurt, and more on impulse than by training he hauled himself over the rock – under his desperate hands, it became a stone column with deep fluting. He knelt because his left leg was having trouble supporting him, took his sword in both hands, and put the point up.
Forty feet down the tunnel, there was a scream and the last torch went out.
‘One, two, three! Charge!’ called a voice in Turkish. They had taken twenty of Swan’s gasping breaths to ready themselves.
Swan had used the time to get against the right-hand wall, crouched down behind the fallen pillar. He couldn’t see them. But he could certainly hear them.
They all screamed together – the long, undulating scream that had taken Constantinople.
The two leaders hit the pillar together. And fell.
Swan cut – in panic – at the sounds. Hit something soft, cut again, and again. And again. Cut – thrust, cut.
A desperate Turk, heroically brave, seized his sword-blade – probably in his death throes, but his sacrifice was not in vain. By luck, or fortuna, he plucked the blade right out of Swan’s hands. Swan felt it go – heard it fall.
A man hit his chest. And tried to wrap his arms about Swan’s shoulders.
Swan pulled the man over the column – every Turk had to discover the downed column for himself, and it had become Swan’s greatest advantage. He used it to break the man’s balance and threw him, and then fell atop him, steel-clad arms and hands working brutally.
A heavy weapon rang off his helmet. And there was suddenly weight on his back – he rolled, a man screamed, and Swan got his right hand on his rondel dagger. It was still there. He got it out – reversed – and stabbed with it.
He realized that the roaring sound was his own voice.
He felt the man’s neck go just as he pounded the blade into the man’s skull. The skull cracked like an egg and then the whole head collapsed under his weight. Then he felt himself repeat the blow, even though he knew the man had to be dead.
He tried to rise off the new corpse, but his leg failed him and he sank back – now kneeling on both knees. He could see nothing. He could hear at least two men dying. Everything smelled of blood, and faeces, and despair.
Perhaps he whimpered. He certainly wanted to.
That was how Fra Tommaso found him, when he came at the head of a dozen knights. Swan was still kneeling, facing the corridor. His armour was caked in blood and dirt, and he had a dagger blade in both hands, and he was weeping. He couldn’t stop it, and he couldn’t get his helmet open. As soon as he heard the Italian voices coming, he’d burst into tears.
He was ashamed of his weakness. But that only made him sob. He choked.
Fra Tommaso clutched him to his chest – steel to steel. Torches illuminated the charnel house – seven dead men, all looking as if they’d been savaged by demons or wolves.
‘Ave Maria!’ muttered Sir John Kendal.
Swan couldn’t speak. The man with the crushed skull had been Salim. He had time to see that before he vomited.
‘He’s bleeding,’ said Fra Tommaso.
It took them an hour to get him above ground, and in the end, he lost consciousness.
Swan dreamed about it and awoke, screaming. And Fra Tommaso comforted him.
Either this happened many times, or it was all part of the same nightmare. The dark. The choking heat, the faceplate, the smell of blood, the pressure of a man on his breastplate and the feel of the face caving in under his knife. Again, and again.
And again.
And again.
When Swan recovered himself, he had a moment of extreme disorientation as the man at the end of his narrow bed was Fra Domenico Angelo, known the length and breadth of the Inner Sea as Fra Diablo. The conqueror’s ring burned on his finger like the fire of God.
Swan tried to remember where he was. It probably said something about him that he knew the ring – and felt lust for it – before he came to the conclusion that he was in the Hospital of Rhodos.
He could taste the opium in his mouth. His left leg was wrapped like an Egyptian mummy’s.
The slightest flick of thought and he was in the dark with the weight of a man on his chest and—
‘The conquering hero,’ Fra Domenico said.
Down the ward, a man screamed.
Swan’s body spasmed. And he leaned over the bed and vomited into a basin.
Fra Domenico sat on his bed and kept his long hair out of his chamber pot. ‘Ahh,’ he said, in his disturbingly gentle voice. ‘It was bad, under the earth, wasn’t it, boy?’
Swan felt a disobedient temptation to punch the brother knight.
‘Listen, lad,’ the other man said. ‘That’s what it is like. And will be like, in your dreams, for many nights.’
Swan flashed on … darkness. Hot darkness. A skull bursting under his weight like a hot chestnut on the frozen Thames. He got hold of himself. ‘Sir …’ he panted. ‘What do I do?’
‘Pray,’ Fra Dominco suggested. He knelt, and began to pray – simple words; the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria.