Fra Tommaso set his mouth and didn’t utter a curse. Fra Domenico shrugged. ‘No great loss. In a galley fight, one only wants ships that have the stomach to stay until the end.’
Prince Dorino made a moue. ‘Have you suggested to these other gentlemen that the surest way to slow the Turk is to attack his shipping?’ He smiled, his lips thin as sword-edges. ‘Of course you have. You are a pirate for God, yes?’ He laughed.
Fra Tommaso’s face was red. ‘We are accomplishing nothing here,’ he said. ‘We should go.’
Prince Dorino nodded. ‘I will not loan you my fleet to make war on the Turks and bring the fighting to my own shores,’ he said. ‘I will allow you to take on water and food in my ports. The Bay of Kalloni is virtually impregnable, and from there you can cover the whole north coast of Chios.’
‘I need no lessons in strategy from you, my lord,’ Fra Tommaso said.
Prince Dorino sat back again. ‘Do you not? Very well.’
Fra Domenico glared at his partner and bowed – again – to the prince. ‘May we have two days to rest our rowers and dry our hulls, my lord?’
‘How graciously asked,’ Dorino said. ‘Of course. And tomorrow, we have a small festivity to celebrate the end of Lent. We will have a play – an ancient Greek play. And music and dancing.’
‘None of those vanities will appeal to us,’ said Fra Tommaso.
Swan’s heart fell.
‘Perhaps this fine young English prince will come and represent you,’ Prince Dorino said. ‘I fancy him. I suspect he’d make a fine ancient Greek warrior – Achilles, perhaps, or Aeneas.’
Swan smiled and bowed. ‘I would be delighted, my prince,’ he said. ‘But Aeneas, surely, was a Trojan?’
‘So you are literate, young man? Come, then, and leave your nursemaids to their wine and their priests. My young cousin will speak briefly to you on the matter of dress. We all dress as Greeks. It is my will.’ He waved dismissively.
The Lord of Eressos followed them down the hall and bowed deeply to the beautiful ancient Greek maiden. ‘Princess, this is the noble Lord Tommaso Suani of England.’ He bowed and indicated Swan.
Swan bowed – again.
Fra Tommaso laughed, but kept quiet otherwise.
The other women gathered around Swan, as if examining him for flaws. Each of them dropped a curtsy to the knights.
‘I’m sure there’s a chiton to fit him. Something with a stripe in red,’ said one girl.
The princess inclined her head graciously. ‘Ancient Greek clothes are not difficult to make fit, Master Swan,’ she said in an accent as foreign as it was glorious. Swan felt as if someone had put a hand on his heart and given a gentle squeeze. She smiled, and again, just for a moment, her eyes brushed past his. ‘As he is a prince, perhaps he can wear a stripe of purple. Is this allowed by your king?’
Swan thought for a moment, looking for an answer that would show a ready wit and a willingness to fall at her feet. But he had to settle for the truth. ‘No, Your Grace,’ he said.
She put a hand on his arm. ‘Surely, as you are a prince of mighty England and I am a princess of decadent Rome, we may call each other by our names. I am Theodora.’
‘I am Tommaso,’ he said. He could feel where her fingers had touched the back of his hand as if she’d struck him.
The other women giggled.
The knights fidgeted.
‘I shall not be able to sleep, so anxiously will I look forward to tomorrow’s entertainment,’ Swan said.
‘Ah, please sleep,’ Theodora said. ‘You will want to be well rested.’
With that, she smiled to herself and sat, and the other women gathered around her. And the Lord of Eressos walked them down the great staircase, and accompanied them silently to the door, where he bowed.
Outside, in the perfumed air of a Lesbian night, Swan sighed.
Fra Tommaso shook his head. ‘Shall I name you a penance before you commit the sin? You are like an oarsman …’ He sighed. ‘With better taste.’
Fra Domenico shook his head. ‘You are married, young man. And in the service of the order.’
Swan sighed heavily, a young man set upon by older men. He thought of stinging comments like We’re not really married, and I’m not proposing to murder a boatload of Islamic pilgrims. In fact, he thought of such responses all the way down the hill to the great gates, and then all the way to the taverna, where a Greek man was singing and wine was being served.
And Fra Tommaso handed him a cup of wine, and said, ‘Hard as it may be to believe, we were young, once.’
Fra Domenico laughed – head thrown back – the first uncalculated thing Swan had seen the man do. He laughed, and the ring on his finger caught the light from the oil lamps and winked. Fra Tommaso laughed so hard he had to stand up, and in the end, Swan had to laugh himself.
Swan attempted to sleep late. He wanted to sleep late. He’d drunk wine with the two older men until it was quite late, and they’d swapped tales, and Fra Tommaso’s friend the Greek priest had joined them – three old men and one young one.
But he had lost the habit of indolence. His eyes opened with the change in the sound of the wind, and he got up and pissed in a pot and went back to his narrow bed. Fra Tommaso snored a few feet away, and despite his cacophony of barnyard noises, Swan went straight back to sleep, but when the soft pink fingers of rosy-handed dawn crept across the horizon and brushed his eyelids, they snapped open, and he was awake.
No ship. No pitching deck, no orders to give, no tiller under his hand. No masts to examine. Very little wind.
He let his mind wander – to Violetta, to Khatun Bengül, to Tilda and any other woman he could imagine, but what came to him instead were the sound of an assassin’s footsteps in an alley in Venice and the feeling of a skull popping under his weight.
‘Christ,’ he cursed, now fully awake. He sat up and shivered in the pre-dawn cold.
He got up and found his writing kit, and carried it down to the beachfront littered in tables and chairs, and sat in the dawn and wrote a letter to Violetta. It was only the second letter he could remember writing, on his own, and it took him quite some time to compose – he wanted it to sound witty.
He was not altogether pleased with the result, and one paragraph in particular sounded the wrong note. He’d tried to explain about fighting – about how he felt when he fought. It sounded … foolish.
He took his sharp quill knife and cut the parchment. Then he rummaged again in his writing kit, looking for a scrap of parchment to glue on for a better paragraph, and instead found Cyriaco of Ancona’s little book.
He had forgotten about it altogether.
He opened the book to Mytilini, and sure enough, there were four names, with addresses and amounts of money. None of them, he noted, were women, and for a moment he wondered how he could write a letter to Violetta while contemplating finding a nice warm …
He smiled and sighed.
He found the four houses easily enough. The nearest was in the street immediately behind the taverna – the farthest was all the way on the other side of the fortress, just a ten-minute walk. The air was pleasant and the Greeks greeted him as if he, too, lived there, despite his sword and dagger and Italian clothes, and he responded in kind, with the saint’s day and the local benison.
When he came to the most distant house, a man was sitting in a chair by his front doorstep, mending a net.
‘Khairete!’ Swan greeted the man.
The man frowned and went back to his net.
‘You fish?’ Swan asked.
‘No, I use this to catch demons, and to imprison rude fellows who ask impertinent questions.’ The man raised his eyes and smiled. He was fifty or more years old, and he had the eyes and nose of a heavy drinker. He shrugged. ‘Eh, and sometimes I catch fish. You? You kill people, eh?’