Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Two: Venice

The ports were pleasant – small towns, carefully fortified. The Venetian fortifications were always modern and well maintained. The guards of their garrisons turned out with a flourish.

Venice took care of its overseas empire, that much was obvious.

On the west coast of the Peloponnese, Genoa still held sway, and the Venetian galley stayed out to sea and didn’t touch land except for headlands. Swan stayed on deck all the time, watching the distant shore and trying to guess what part of the classical world they were passing. That low-slung isthmus – was that Sphacteria? Was that towering summit Mount Olympus?

He got used to donning and wearing armour. He fenced with Alessandro every morning, and with Giannis, and with the three Venetian men-at-arms. The oarsmen would watch them, sometimes wager, and always offer raucous comments. They were not slaves.

Around Attica, they put in at Piraeus, and the scarred Parthenon towered in the distance.

‘I must see it,’ Swan said. Cesare agreed, and when the capitano said they had a day, the two men rented mules and rode up from the port to the ruins of Athens. The Dukes of Athens maintained a residence on the summit of the Acropolis, but the duke wasn’t present. Swan climbed to the summit of the Acropolis in a state of near-awe, and stood on the steps of the Parthenon, looking up at its dazzling white stone, the miraculously intact roof, the carved coffers in the ceiling, the frieze of endless, marvellous statues – the gateway . . .

He spent three hours wandering the crown of the Acropolis. Cesare sat down in the shade of an ancient olive tree.

‘Too damned hot. Enjoy yourself,’ he said.

On the way back, Cesare cursed his mule, and then said, ‘You really love all that.’

‘It is right there,’ Swan said. ‘It’s . . . as if Pericles might come out and speak.’

Cesare shook his head. ‘Insects and hot sunlight and greedy peasants,’ he said. ‘Much like home, but without the good wine and the taverns. And the cities and the money and the good roads.’

‘I copied down some of the epitaphs,’ Swan said excitedly. ‘Aeschylus!’

‘You sound as if you didn’t believe he was real before.’ Cesare shook his head.

‘The long haired Persians remember me in the grove of Marathon,’ Swan quoted. He looked at his tablets. ‘The wax is melting,’ he said, disgusted. ‘I copied one about another solider – Diodorus something. Fought in Egypt.’ He looked at the Italian. ‘Yes. It seems more real here than in England.’

Cesare shook his head. ‘And you waited tables in an inn? What a fascinating country England must be.’

At Naxos, the bishop, who hardly ever showed his face on deck, went to pay a visit to the Duke of Naxos, who was, of course, a Venetian.

The Bishop of Ostia was a papal courtier. It was not his first trip outside of Rome, but one would never have guessed it. The man’s world view was utterly dominated by Rome, and he seemed to feel that the world existed to serve the Pope, which, as Alessandro said, was going to make his visit to Constantinople very exciting.

Alessandro went with him to the Duke of Naxos. Swan looked at a temple of Apollo, paying two local men to be guides. He took Giannis, who was at least as bored as Cesare had been. The temple of Apollo was on an islet just off the coast. The local men spoke a dialect of Greek that Swan found incomprehensible at first, but by the end of the day he could joke with them and buy sausage from a woman in the streets of the principal city. While the bishop was feted in the palace, he sharpened his spoken Greek every day.

On the third day Cesare was summoned to the palace, and he joined Swan in the cool of the evening, sitting on a terrace – really the roof of a large taverna. ‘This is more like it,’ Cesare said, drinking wine and admiring the girl serving at the next table.

‘What did the bishop want?’

‘A letter to the Pope. He thinks he’s the legate. I think the Pope will not thank him for dabbling in local politics, but I’m a mere notary.’ Cesare knocked back his wine. ‘I met a monk – a Greek monk. We had a bit of a debate.’ He smiled. ‘I liked him and invited him to come over for a cup of wine.’

In fact, when the monk came, the tavern owner treated him with the kind of respect that an Italian tavern keeper kept for beautiful women and the very, very rich. The wine at their table was taken away, and replaced with a fresh pitcher that was, upon tasting, of much higher quality. The monk, who insisted that they call him Fra Demetrios, waved at the wine and said it was from Nemea.

‘With the lions,’ said Swan, in Greek.

Fra Demetrios laughed. ‘Not bad. You are Florentine?’

‘English,’ said Swan.

Fra Demetrios nodded. ‘Fine men, the English.’

‘You know England?’ asked Cesare.

‘I am from Lesvos,’ Fra Demetrios said. ‘The Gatelusi have maintained English soldiers to guard us from the Turks for . . . oh, I don’t know. A hundred years.’ He smiled. ‘The English are great pirates – but like good sheepdogs, they prey only on the wolves, eh?’

The wars of the Gatelusi led to the fall of Constantinople.

‘The end of everything,’ said Fra Demetrios, and he shrugged. ‘Venice does not yet realise with what she is dealing. The Turks are ten – twenty – fifty times as powerful as Venice. That foolish old man – Foscari – is busy fighting petty lordlings in Italy, and the Turks will take all Greece.’ He looked at a pair of Turkish soldiers lounging in the street. They were mercenaries, serving with the Duke of Naxos, but they were, nonetheless, Turks. ‘In truth, they have already conquered us. We merely await the axe.’

After another pitcher of wine, he laughed at Cesare’s pretensions to learning. ‘Any Greek monk has read all the ancients,’ he said. ‘Not just the bits that have wandered out of our libraries to the west.’

Cesare didn’t rise to the provocation, but smiled agreeably. ‘What texts do you have that we don’t?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I’ve read Aristotle.’

‘How many books?’ the monk asked.

‘Of Aristotle? All three.’ Cesare nodded. ‘De Anima, Ethics and The Athenian Consitution.’ He winked at Swan.

‘Three!’ said the monk. ‘By Saint George, my Latin friends, Aristotle wrote more than twenty books.’

By the fourth pitcher of wine, Demetrios was writing the titles of every Greek book he’d ever read on Cesare’s tablets.

In the market, Swan found tables of curios – dozens of classical seals and coins, as well as several small statues, rings, heads of gods, a bronze spearhead, a butt spike. He bought several of the seals, and the spearhead and butt spike.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘What will you do with this junk?’

Swan handed over a silver coin with the owl of Athena on one side and a magnificent head of the goddess on the other. Alessandro pursed his lips in appreciation. ‘That is pretty,’ he admitted.

‘Worth money in Rome?’ Swan asked.

Alessandro shook his head. ‘I have no idea.’

Giannis looked at the coin. ‘You’ll find mountains of this old rubbish in Constantinople,’ he said.

‘How will we ship the cardinal’s things back to Rome?’ Swan asked.

Alessandro stroked his beard. ‘Christ on the cross, I had forgotten. The bishop has me dancing attendance every day – I think he imagines I actually work for him.’

Swan nodded. ‘Each port we’ve visited, they are expecting a Venetian squadron bringing soldiers.’

Alessandro shrugged. ‘I heard of it in Venice. Genoa is losing a great many towns. They’ll need garrisons.’

‘Galata, too?’ asked Swan.

‘I see where you are going. I’ll ask around.’ Alessandro nodded. ‘You think the troopships will go home empty?’

‘Even if there’s cargo, chances are we can get some space,’ Swan said.

If Swan thought that Ser Marco was cautious before Naxos, he redoubled that caution after they sailed for the Golden Horn. Twice they made long legs out to sea to avoid Turkish ships along the coast.

But off Samothrace, they ran into thick morning mist, and when the hot sun burned it off, they were hull up