Castillon: Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part One

Alessandro blocked some of it with a sweeping downward parry, but the cut was low and he had no leg armour, and he stumbled and went down.

‘Fuck you, you bitch!’ screamed the count. ‘I’ll kill every fucking one of you, you whores!’ He was on one knee.

He began to drag himself to Alessandro, who tried to roll away.

Swan had no armour, and he had a feeling that the count was far out of his league as an opponent. And he wasn’t sure he owed Alessandro anything.

He considered intervening, and thought, I don’t have to do this.

But he wanted to be a knight, and not a thief. He had a feeling – in a long moment between stillness and an explosive leap – that this was his moment to choose. As was so often the case, in one moment of decision, he dared himself.

I don’t have to do this.

I really don’t have to do this.

He leaped over the Italian.

The count cut down.

He caught the cut on his high guard, as his uncles had taught him. The count twisted, but he was on one knee and probably not as powerful as he was used to being, and their blades locked, the two keen edges biting into each other just a little.

Swan had the enormous advantage of being on his feet, armour or no armour. He lunged with his left foot and rotated his sword on the point where the two blades were locked, and punched his pommel into the count’s unprotected face.

He was very fast. People always underestimated his speed.

The count’s teeth exploded over his pommel, and the man fell back, and Swan, almost as surprised as the count by his own success, cut wildly, his point bouncing up from the count’s gorget and cutting across the man’s lips and left eye.

He stumbled back.

The count screamed a long, drawn-out scream. Swan had only ever heard such a scream from a woman in childbirth. He looked like some sort of nightmare monster.

The count got his good leg under him and powered himself to his feet, his scream now a roar.

Peter’s arrow struck his breastplate right over the heart. It didn’t penetrate. But it knocked the count back, and he unbalanced and fell down again, and the spell was broken.

Giannis was shouting in Italian, ‘Get out of the way! Get out of the way!’

But Swan stood between the monster in armour and Alessandro, who he wasn’t sure he liked.

Alessandro was staunching the flow of blood from his ankle. ‘You have to kill him,’ he said.

Swan walked over to the count, who was lying on his back with one leg cocked and the other flat on the ground. He was breathing as if he’d run a race.

‘Je me rends,’ he said heavily. ‘Je me rends.’ He waved his sword-hand.

Swan put his right foot on the hand, pinning it to the earth.

‘Jesu! Get off it, you little bitch. I have yielded.’ The fire in the count’s eyes was unholy. Even with a foot on the man’s sword-arm, his face ruined by the pommel strike, a crossbow bolt in his thigh, he was terrifying in his full plate, and his size. Swan feared him, even now.

‘Pray, Messire Count. You are about to die.’ Swan placed his sword-point near the man’s face, and found that his point was wobbling from the trembling of his hand.

‘I’m worth a thousand ducats, sodomite. Get off my hand.’

‘Pray, messire.’ Swan found his hand was steadying.

‘God is a fucking lie, boy.’ The man lay there, his one good eye staring.

Swan wished he would make one more attempt to rise – to fight. Anything to justify what he was about to do.

His point wavered.

Alessandro said, ‘Just kill him, for the love of God.’

He took a deep breath and . . .

Giannis leaned over and pulled the latch on his crossbow, and his quarrel blew through the man’s skull and killed him instantly. ‘There’s money wasted,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You hit bad, messire?’

Peter was hobbling, favouring his side.

In the distance, four dust clouds on the plain gradually merged to two, and then to one. By the time Stefanos came riding back, Alessandro was on horseback, one foot out of the stirrup and dangling, with Swan’s neck cloth around his ankle.

Stefanos had Marcus over his horse. He shrugged at his capitano. ‘Bad luck,’ he said.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘Dead?’ he asked.

Stefanos nodded.

‘What a waste,’ Alessandro said. ‘You get them both?’

‘Yes,’ Stefanos said.

‘Where are the bodies?’ Alessandro asked.

‘In the river. In armour. What do you think – I was born yesterday?’ The Greek spat. ‘Any of them have anything worth taking? Those two had nothing but their swords.’

‘Leave it. Take nothing but coins. Nothing to mark us.’

‘What about the horses?’ Giannis asked with a whine in his voice.

Alessandro was in pain, and his temper was short. ‘What did I just say?’

‘Fuck. What do we get out of this?’ complained Stefanos. ‘Marcus is dead. I got less than an ecu.’

Alessandro glared.

Giannis, Swan, Ramone and Giorgos dragged each corpse into the wood. It was hard work, and disgusting. Ramone put a knife into each corpse’s neck under the chin, just to be ‘sure’, and searched the corpses for cash.

Peter picked up the count’s sword.

‘Leave it,’ Alessandro said.

‘It’s a fine weapon,’ Peter said, putting a touch of ‘v’ into the ‘w’ of weapon. A vine veapon.

‘It could get us all beheaded,’ Alessandro said.

Swan noted that the capitano spoke to Peter almost as a peer.

Peter nodded the way a man nods when he disagrees utterly. He dropped the sword in the grass.

In twenty minutes, they were done.

‘Put fire to the wood,’ Alessandro said.

The soldiers got a fire going, and spread it. The summer woods caught very fast.

‘Let’s go,’ Alessandro said.

Paris was dull after the road. Alessandro’s ankle cut was worse than it had looked in the field, and he had to go to a surgeon to be bled. The cardinal had apartments in the Louvre, but the rest of them were housed in the Convent of the Ursilines, and the cardinal introduced Swan to the King’s Librarian. He was shocked to be given the run of the Royal Library. Days passed very quickly while he read. He did little but read.

That was good, because every night he dreamed. He dreamed of the four men on the road, of the count’s one remaining eye, of the blood. Every night. Sometimes in the day.

He fantasised about every young nun in the convent, went out with the notaries and drank too much on the silver of the men he’d killed, and diced and played cards until he felt tired enough to sleep without dreams.

It never worked.

After they’d been in Paris a week, the cardinal summoned him. A servant fetched him from Aristotle, and he walked up through the labyrinth of halls to the cardinal’s apartment.

He bowed, was summoned forward, and kissed the cardinal’s ring.

‘Your Eminence,’ he said.