Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes by Christian Cameron Read Free Book Online Page A

was getting at , Swan thought. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
    ‘It’s a razzia. A raid. They’ll burn our crops and kill our Greek peasants and sail away.’ The older knight shrugged.
    Swan might have agreed, except that the men he was watching on the hillside opposite him were men he’d seen in Constantinople – sipahis, or elite cavalry. They had no horses, but they were the Sultan’s best assault troops, and Swan had a difficult time imagining that the Sultan had sent his best troops – noblemen’s sons, no less – to burn crops.
    ‘They seem very interested in our section of wall,’ Swan noted.
    Sir John fingered his beard. ‘So they do.’
    Swan decided to take the plunge. ‘Those men there – in the silvery armour – are sipahis. Noble cavalry. The Sultan’s own.’
    Sir John raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘I had no idea.’ He smiled the sort of smile that older men give to young enthusiasts who assume that older men have never seen or done anything themselves.
    Swan was defensive. ‘I saw them in Constantinople,’ he said.
    Sir John nodded. ‘I’ve been fighting them for my whole adult life,’ he said.
    Swan went down the windmill, determined to keep his mouth shut in future.
    Late afternoon of the first full day. Thus far, not a single man had been killed or wounded. The Turks had summoned the town, sending a messenger and shooting arrows with demands for immediate surrender on very lenient terms. The knights, of course, refused.
    Shadows lengthened, and the word came along the walls that everyone was to watch carefully. Dawn and dusk were the times when both sides would try stratagems, alarms and surprises.
    Swan was at his ‘frame’, as the little gonne was called. He and his three Burgundian gunners were the crew. The Burgundians were less fiery than they had been in the days before the siege. The Turkish camp was like a city, larger than Rhodos itself. The Turkish fleet was vast and seemed to cover every beach in every direction.
    ‘How many men do you think they haf?’ one of the Burgundians asked him. ‘Sir?’ he added.
    They all sounded like Peter. Their English was pretty good – half of the Duke of Burgundy’s army was made up of Englishmen, and the language was a lingua franca, but among themselves they spoke Dutch.
    Swan shrugged. He was in half-plate, with a chain shirt under and a fustian arming coat under that – he was very hot, and emptied every canteen of water that was brought to him. He now owned leg harnesses – courtesy of the order’s armoury – and they were polished and ready, lying on his narrow bed. He wore Alexandro’s thigh-high leather boots instead.
    He wiped his face with a linen rag. ‘About twenty thousand, give or take a thousand,’ he said.
    ‘Christ crucified, we will all be horribly kilt,’ muttered the senior Burgundian, Karl. The man had the nose of a heavy drinker and something was wrong with his eyes.
    Swan ignored him, although he wasn’t too happy himself. His burst of enthusiasm for the Church militant had landed him in this desperate outpost …
    There were men moving on the hillside opposite.
    Swan plucked his armet off his head and put it on the stone walkway. He leaned out over the crenellations and looked.
    A pair of arrows leapt from bowmen hidden in the rocks near the beach. Swan saw the bows move and ducked back. A pair of light arrows struck the parapet.
    ‘Let’s fire,’ he said. He pointed at where a dozen Turks were pushing big siege shields.
    Next to him, Peter suddenly stood up to his full height and loosed a shaft. He didn’t loose at the men with the bows, but at the small crowd huddled on the hillside opposite, with wicker shields – siege mantlets.
    His arrows struck a mantlet and pierced it.
    The Burgundians hung back, as if actually using the gonne frightened them.
    Swan ladled powder into the bore and ran it down. Then put a heavy patch of raw cotton atop it and rammed that down, and finally pushed a