Tom Swan and the Head of St George
Part Three: Constantinople
Christian Cameron
Foreword
There’s something very . . . historical, about writing an historical serial for e-publication. If it’s been done recently, I haven’t heard about it, and yet it has impeccable historical credentials – before we had the epub, we had the magazine, and in that format Dumas did it, and Conan Doyle, and a host of other authors with magnificent credentials; Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, and Charles Dickens.
It’s a fine format. Instead of a single pulse of seven hundred manuscript pages, the author can write in blocks with independent storylines that may still have an arc and a complex interweb of characters and motivations. I was resistant – but not for long.
So here is Tom Swan, my first serial character. Tom is firmly based in history; Italy was full of itinerant Englishmen, especially soldiers, throughout the period, and so was Greece. I confess that the man who forms the basis for the character was not English but Italian – Cyriac of Ancona, sometimes known as the ‘Grandfather of Archaeology,’ who roved the Levant in search of antiquities and manuscripts that he could beg, borrow or steal for the Pope and other rich clients in their burning zeal to rediscover the ancient world. Ancient manuscripts were then, and remain, incredibly valuable; recent re-discovery of a complete text of Archimedes in a palimpsest shows that such manuscripts are still out there, and give us an idea of the kind of treasures for which Tom Swan – and Cyriac of Ancona – searched.
If this serial has some success, I’ll write more – the format, as I say, is fun, and allows me to explore some nooks and crannies of history – and even some characters that I’d love to take to greater depth; Philokles, in the Tyrant series; Archilogos (Arimnestos’s Ionian adversary) in the Long War series; Geoffrey de Charny in the late Middle Ages – the list goes on and on. And I’ll add pieces rapidly – perhaps even one a month.
Readers of my other books are aware that I’m a passionate re-enactor and also a military veteran, and that these experiences inform my writing. Those who are new to me deserve the following reassurance – I’ve worn the clothes and armour, and shot the bows, and rowed, and even ridden some of the horses. In the process of working as an intelligence professional, I met people who exercise real power every day, and I got an idea of how they work – and how history works. But I don’t do this in a vacuum and I receive an amazing level of support from friends, fellow re-enactors, veterans, academics crafts people and artists. In those last categories, I’d like to thank Dario Wielec, who drew the illustrations; he has a passion for historical detail that delights me every time I see his drawings, from any period, and you can see more of his stuff at http://dariocaballeros.blogspot.ca/. Finally, the ‘covers’ for the Tom Swan series are provided by Albion Swords, who are, to me, the premier manufacturers of accurate replica swords in North America. I use their products every day. How many people can say that – about swords?
Chris Cameron
Toronto, June 2012
Tom Swan – Part Three: Constantinople
Swan had the worst headache of his life. In fact, he found it hard to think, difficult to concentrate, almost impossible to understand what the people around him were saying.
After a long time, he decided that he couldn’t understand them because he didn’t know the language they were speaking.
After more time, he decided that they were speaking Turkish. But that made no sense, as they often used words he knew.
Once awake, he realised that he was lying in the servant’s yard of a house. A house in Constantinople.
He couldn’t seem to remember. He had gone riding with Idris. Met the man’s sister.
After that – nothing.
Damn.
He went to sleep again.
He woke again, and it was dark. Oil lamps lit a bare room, painted white, with the edges of the walls decorated in bright stucco. There were a dozen people eating on cushions at a low central table.
‘He’s awake!’ said a child’s voice.
He looked at the foot of his couch, and saw a small black boy. He smiled – he couldn’t help himself, the boy was so small and imp-like. The boy smiled back.
A tall African man rose from the table. He approached, and knelt by Swan’s low bed. ‘Can you understand me?’ he asked, in slow Italian.
Swan nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.
The African smiled, and the smile lit his face like an internal lamp. ‘Good! I feared that I hit you too hard.’
Swan remembered the man – something about a message.
‘Where am I?’ he asked.
The African smiled. ‘Nowhere you need to remember,’ he said. ‘How do you feel?’
Swan swung his feet to the floor, sat up, and groaned as the blood hit his head. ‘Argh,’ he moaned.
The African snapped his fingers and a veiled woman brought him a tall pottery cup.
‘Drink this,’ he said.
Swan drank.
The drink had the same bitter salty taste as the stuff they’d drunk during the hawking – suddenly he remembered it all. Hawking, Khatun Bengul, the note.
He met the African’s eyes, just as he realised who the man was.
As the drink hit him.
‘Sweet dreams, Englishman,’ said the African. ‘We will not meet again.’
When he came to, he was hot – boiling hot. His skin seemed to give off steam. He had oil on his skin – he could feel it. He smelled odd.
His head was exceptionally clear. There was pain, in his left temple, but mostly this wonderful clarity. The room he was in was dark, perfumed, and a single lamp glowed on a table. It lit magnificent wall hangings full of patterns in which his eyes lost themselves, and a silver lamp that hung, unlit, a ball of reflected sparkles, and in his clarity of sight, those reflections spoke to him of the infinity of spheres that Aristotle said made up the universe.
