Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes Read Free Page B

intrigued. ‘I am merely a soldier of the order,’ he said.
    ‘Save it for the knights,’ Drappierro said. ‘I know what you are. I saw you take my purse.’ He smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘How about that wife of yours, in Ancona?’
    Swan had been caught in too many lies to fall easily for such stuff. ‘What’s that, messire? I’m afraid I do not understand.’
    ‘I think you understand me very well, Englishman. Fra Diablo will come out to Rhodos this summer. You get the ring, and bring it to me, and I will see to it that your fortune is made. Or – fail me, and see what happens.’
    ‘You want me to steal a valuable ring from a knight of my own order?’ Swan said, standing up carefully and raising his voice.
    Drappierro grew red in the face.
    Swan slipped out from behind the table. ‘I’ll pretend I never heard that,’ he said, with all the outraged innocence that a bastard son of a Southwark whore could learn to muster in a childhood spent in taverns, brothels and the English court. He stalked to the cabin door and slammed it on his way out.
    He went and finished his chess game. Fra Tommaso raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
    East of Delos, they finally paid the price of sailing in winter. The blow came off Africa, full of sand, and then, without warning, the wind shifted through half the compass and blew off Thrace, and came full of snow. The Burgundians laughed – at first. They helped clear the snow away, and the sailors laughed and played in it until it began to clog the rigging and all the blocks, and then the ropes began to freeze, and darkness fell. The big lateen sail was shortened twice, and then taken in altogether, and they ran downwind towards Africa with the whole weight of the Thracian storm under their stern, and Tom Swan had his first experience of staying on deck and on duty until his knees wouldn’t hold him. For hours, he and the old knight were lashed to the tiller, a heavy linen tarpaulin impregnated with red lead and linseed oil wrapped around them with two old wool blankets, the whole thing flapping in the wind.
    The morning of the fourth day crept up on wolf’s feet, the grey enveloping the ship so slowly that they were shocked to find how much they could see before a long squall hit and blinded them again, and pushed the long, slim ship over on its beam ends for so long that Swan, standing in water and the whole weight of his body against the starboard rail, thought the ship was lost.
    They righted, the central deck full of water, and the oarsmen made a desperate attempt to bail. Men were soaked, and cold, and the wind was unrelenting.
    The old knight rose to the challenge, calling orders into the waist of the ship and being obeyed. As the wind slackened towards noon, he called for more sail, and they slanted away to the west.
    By nightfall, Antoine had a small fire going amid the stinking sand of the forward bilge, where galleys lit fires in times of dire need. The sand stank because in storms men feared to relieve themselves over the side, and did their business in the sand of the hold – despite a thousand orders to the contrary.
    But Antoine’s special talent was his ability to light a fire in any weather, and he added bits of wood salvaged from the storm – a broken chest, a fractured stool – to the firewood kept for just such moments. Then he produced a pair of copper pots and began to heat water, and served a hot concoction of malmsey wine, water, sugar and spices that raised spirits above the masthead. He went on making the concoction until the galley lumbered into Rhodos with two men dead of exposure and a badly sprung bow where the ship had hit a floating tree in the darkness of their last night. They were long since out of food, and the men were not exactly sober, but the ship glided down the long harbour, the oars frothed the water as they slowed, and Fra Tommaso, at the helm in person, put the ship alongside the quay as neatly as a whore