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

Idris grinned back. ‘You English are so honest!’ he said. ‘You are like Turks. You think a thing – you say it. Venetians never tell me this horse is wonderful. They are always cautious.’ He looked at the horse. ‘To us, her colour is not so good. That golden coat – we call it yellow – is . . .’ He shrugged. ‘But she is among the smartest of my horses.’ He leaned over. ‘I beg you to accept her.’ He frowned. ‘Or anything else you see that you want.’

Swan laughed. If only you knew, he thought. ‘I love the kaftan,’ he said.

Idris nodded. ‘All that is yours. You cannot ride without it. Indeed, all of your guards know now that we are friends. If you are found in these clothes . . .’ He smiled again. ‘Call for me.’

‘You are very like a prince, I find,’ Swan said.

Idris shook his head. ‘Now you sound like a Venetian,’ he said. ‘Flatterer. Listen – of all my friends, none speaks Italian. So none of these men can speak with you, but all know that you saved my life.’ The other young men bowed from their saddles or saluted with their riding whips as they were introduced – a long string of Turkish names that even Swan had trouble understanding, much less remembering.

Swan’s training as a royal page came in handy. He understood – intimately – that Idris was the great man here, and that he couldn’t monopolise him. So he bowed to the various Suleymans, Murids and Bazayets, and smiled at all of them, and occupied himself riding.

Idris rode superbly, of course. He took a hawk on his wrist and offered another to Swan, who had to profess complete ignorance.

‘Another time I’ll teach you,’ he said. He looked grave. ‘See you at lunch.’

And he was off. He loosed his bird at a series of ground targets, and Swan felt this was vaguely at odds with English practice, but then the prince sent his largest bird into the air after something that was a speck above them, and then the whole cavalcade galloped away across the fields of the Greek farms that ringed the fallen city.

Swan reined his little mare in and stayed with the carts. He noted that the two men who’d joined with the carts – also obviously gentlemen, in that they had rich kaftans and jewels in their turbans – both stayed with the wagons. The nearer young man – a boy, really – flashed a smile at him, and he bowed in the saddle. His mare misinterpreted the shift in his weight forward and went directly to a gallop, stretching away over the fields to the south, towards the sea.

It might have been exhilarating, except that, at the very moment when the horse exploded into motion, Swan’s foot slipped out of his left stirrup. He sat down, hard, and tried with increasing panic to find the stirrup under his left foot. The little mare turned in a very tight circle to the left, and suddenly he hit the ground.

He lay there and his shoulder hurt. And he felt like a fool. His mare came and stood by him.

After a moment, he heard hoof-beats, and suddenly one of the boys was there. He dismounted from a dead gallop, actually running alongside his horse for two or three paces, and flung himself down by Swan.

‘Are you alive?’ the Turk asked in a lilting Italian.

Swan looked up into the Turk’s eyes.

Eyes with smudges of kohl around the thick lashes. Wide-set, deep brown eyes above a slender, arching nose and a heavy, sensual mouth.

‘You are not a boy,’ Swan said. ‘Oh, my neck hurts.’

She laughed good-naturedly. ‘How . . . kind of you to notice,’ she said. ‘Are you unbroken?’

He sat up.

The second boy was riding towards them. ‘It is – how do you Italians say this? A polite fiction that I am a boy today. Yes?’

Swan rotated his head from side to side. ‘A fiction I will endeavour to maintain, demoiselle,’ he said gallantly. Her very palpable presence at his side – her hand on his arm – reminded him that he hadn’t talked to a woman in two weeks. The siege had emptied the great city of women – there weren’t even prostitutes in the Venetian quarter.

She put a strong hand in his hand and hauled him to his feet. His horse was two steps away, and he mounted as efficiently as he could manage. He knew he looked like a fool to the Turks. He couldn’t help it.

‘My brother has given you this mare?’ she said.

‘Khatun Bengul!’ shouted the second ‘boy’. In Arabic.

‘Shush!’ the Turkish woman said. ‘I am Salim.’

‘You touched him.’

‘He was on the ground and needed help.’

‘And now he knows you are a woman!’

‘You shouted my name across the world!’

‘He is a Frank. They are as stupid as cattle.’ The second woman was ten years older than Khatun Bengul, and several inches shorter. Under her mantle and turban, Swan judged her to be every bit as attractive, with beautiful eyes and high cheeks. Khatun Bengul, however, had a translucent skin that Swan had seldom seen – hers was the colour of oak newly split – not white, but like slightly aged ivory – and her brows were black and strong.

He was staring.

‘Now he will be besotted with you, you little witch.’ The older woman laughed.

‘He does not seem very stupid, Auntie,’ Khatun Bengul said.

‘Bah – all Franks are stupid. I’ve owned dozens. Look at him. He can’t even ride properly.’ The older woman gave him the once-over. ‘Handsome, though. Look at those lips.’

The two women tittered together.

Swan, who had laboured for months at Arabic, had a sudden love for the language that no amount of Rabbi Aaron’s teaching could ever give him.

‘I like his hands,’ Khatun Bengul said.

‘Perhaps we might ride back to the carts?’ Swan said in Italian.

Khatun Bengul nodded.

‘But he rides like a sack of camel shit. Really. What do they teach Frankish boys?’ Auntie asked.

The falconers returned an hour later, and they ate a sumptuous picnic of mutton with a dozen sweet things and some spices that Swan loved, and chicken. They all drank an odd, salty drink that Swan disliked at first taste, but grew used to with practice.

‘What is it?’ he asked Idris.

‘The drink?’ Idris asked. ‘It’s just . . . milk. Hmm. And some salt and spice and water.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a word I don’t know in Italian. When milk . . . isn’t milk any more.’

‘Cheese?’ Swan asked.

Idris shook his head.

After lunch, the falconing party rode off again, leaving Swan with the servants. He didn’t mind – he rode his mare into the fields, going more slowly then faster, changing gaits – learning to ride.

He was resting, drinking more of the salty drink from a glass bottle provided by a servant, when he heard the auntie shriek.

‘You cannot, you hussy. Your father would burst himself. He’ll gut me – and you.’

Khatun Bengul – if that was her name – appeared around the wagon, riding as if she was a satyress – the image came quite spontaneously to Swan. There was something erotic in the way she rode.

‘You do not fly the falcons?’ she said in her curious and, to him, very beautiful Italian.

‘I do not know falconry,’ he said, smiling his most ingratiating smile.

‘I could teach you a little,’ she said. ‘We are not . . . expected to gallop over fields. But I was going to fly my birds.’

Her aunt rode around the side of the wagon.

‘Look at him – he knows you are a woman. It’s written all over him,’ said Auntie, in Arabic. ‘Listen, my little filly. I was young once, too.’

‘You are a coarse old woman,’ Khatun Bengul spat. ‘I want to teach him to fly a bird.’

Auntie said something in Turkish.

Khatun Bengul flushed.

Swan would have given a year of his life to know what had been said. He turned the sounds over in his head – one of his special skills, and the reason he could learn languages so very fast. As fast as the two women could spit at each other, he processed the syllables. He had no idea what they meant. But he would.

Auntie seemed to be backing down.