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

town to Venice. Turkish soldiers still roamed the town.
    ‘It was bad here,’ Alessandro said, after he’d been ashore.
    Swan had his armour off for the first time in four days. He had open sores despite his heavy leather and linen arming doublet, and a wound he’d missed altogether, a long cut that had somehow gone up under the skirts of his fauldand cut above his buttocks into the base of his back. It wasn’t bad, but it explained why he’d hurt so much.
    He stank.
    The pus kept coming out of his leg.
    ‘Fuck it,’ he said to Alessandro, and jumped into the sea.
    The pain was intense, but he swam through it as the salt searched out every abrasion, every wound. It felt to him as if tiny doctors were cleaning him with tiny, sharp brushes. He swam and swam, until his arms wouldn’t support him, and then he climbed up the anchor cable, feeling curiously heavy.
    Dr Claudio hauled him inboard. ‘You are the merest Empiric,’ he said. ‘You don’t know that salt water is good for wounds.’ He leaned over. ‘Let me look at your back.’
    He scrubbed the wound with vinegar and then did something that hurt like fire. Swan screeched like a small girl who burns herself on a candle.
    Claudio laughed. ‘Alum,’ he said. ‘Nothing cleans a wound like alum.’
    The bishop disembarked and moved into a house in the town. Swan heard about his embassy from the doctor, who, as it proved, was much happier caring for the soldiers than being ignored by the churchman.
    ‘I was the tenth choice for the embassy,’ Claudio admitted. ‘He fancies himself a great man on an important mission, whereas the rest of us know that he’s the only man who’d take the job, and what he’s doing is a formality.’ The doctor shrugged. ‘He wanted a famous medico, and he got me.’
    ‘You are very good,’ Swan said.
    ‘You are very kind,’ Claudio said. ‘Before I threw my little loop over Ser Marco’s artery, I had never – in a practical way – manipulated a human body. One that was alive, anyway.’
    ‘By God!’ Swan said.
    ‘Oh, I have experimented on myself,’ the little doctor said, as if that made it all better.
    A Turkish boat came across and the embassy loaded up to move to Constantinople. Giannis came down to the ship and took Swan, Peter and the doctor and their gear to the Turkish boat, and they were rowed across the Horn – a curious and very exacting piece of small-boat handling, given the current. Giannis chatted with the boat’s crew in Greek.
    ‘What do they say?’ asked Alessandro.
    ‘That the taxes are lower,’ Giannis said. He was angry. ‘They are traitors.’
    Swan shrugged. ‘I’m not sure they are,’ he said, thinking of the Gascons and the ‘Englishmen’ of the Dordogne. ‘People need peace in order to live.’
    Giannis glared at him, and he hid his smile and watched the rapid current sweep them north towards the Euxine.
    It took twenty days for the bishop to present his credentials. He was outraged by the wait.
    Swan was in heaven, and would happily have had the embassy delayed another twenty days.
    It was like a journey to some exotic dream, peopled by the best of classical antiquity and a thousand Sir Palomides, the Saracen knight of King Arthur’s court. The Greeks looked haunted, but shops were open. If there were gaps – enormous gaps, where fifty buildings had burned, where a whole square of shops had been looted and destroyed – there were also whole quarters that looked untouched by war. Many establishments smelled of fire, and in one small square, Swan could smell the unmistakable smell of human corpses rotting. The magnificent Hagia Sophia was a stable for the Sultan’s horses. Swan paid a ducat – a staggering sum – and was allowed to walk around. Earth had been put over the floors, and men on scaffolds were painting whitewash over the mosaics of gold and lapis and marble.
    He kept his thoughts to himself.
    At the great doors, he met a young man who bowed to the ground.