Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Five: Rhodes by Christian Cameron Page B

suddenly felt too small.
    He drew his sword. He did it very carefully – left hand reversed, a long, slow pull.
    ‘Son of a whore, we can take the town now!’ one man shouted, in Turkish. His voice rang off the walls.
    Swan estimated that they were about sixty feet away. He could see two tongues of flame – oil lamps, or lanterns – and a little bit of red which was someone’s cloak, or hood.
    He took a cautious step forward and almost fell – there was something lying across the corridor. He felt it with his sword-tip, slid a foot across it, slid the other foot across it. He was sweating so much that he was afraid he would drown in his armour.
    Very, very carefully he felt his way another step along the corridor.
    And another. Whatever the blockage behind him, he now had space in which to fight.
    He checked his dagger.
    ‘And I say now!’ shouted the most aggressive Turk.
    And the torches began to move.
    Swan’s hands were shaking so badly he had trouble finding the top edge of his visor. He reached up with his sword-point and touched the ceiling overhead. There was a hissing fall of gravel over his armour, but the ceiling was at least four feet above him.
    He brought his visor down. In the stinking darkness, the visor did nothing to limit his vision.
    And the torches, or lanterns, crept closer.
    ‘Pig! Dog! Heretical scum of the underworld!’ a man swore.
    It sounded to Swan as if the man had just stubbed a booted toe on something. Swan had a moment’s fellow-feeling for a man he was about to fight.
    He brought his sword into a low guard position and waited, knees weak, hands shaking, and breath short. It was very different from being on the deck of a ship in the sunlight, surrounded by friends.
    Now he could see the lead man – who walked slightly bent because he was huge, both tall and fat, with dyed red hair and a dyed beard and a short axe in his hand. Swan assumed the man was the aggressive one. He had the look. The torchlight made the man’s red kaftan glow. It almost hurt Swan’s eyes.
    Of course, they were all watching the floor.
    Swan watched the axe. The sheer size of the first man intimidated him. Intimidation made him angry – always had. Bigger men had bullied him his whole young life.
    The torchlight illuminated the floor of the tunnel for five yards. They still hadn’t seen Swan, and he couldn’t stand the tension any more.
    He leaped forward and cut, a rising snap from a low guard that sheared through the big Turk’s cheek and nose, so that the tip cut through his left eye and stopped on the ocular ridge. Swan leaned into the weapon and pushed it home into the skull and the man died instantly. The sound of his own wild scream echoed and roared and he wasn’t fully aware that it was his own as he recovered, again low, this time into Fiore’s dente di cinghiare. He was afraid of catching his sword on the walls or the ceiling – but his first strike had made him calm, and having recovered, he struck again, gliding, feet flat, slightly offline to the right and thrusting over the corpse even as the dead man’s torch went out on the cobbles.
    The second Turk made a parry – but some of the blow caught him. Swan stepped in and caught his sword with his left hand, halfway down the blade, and thrust it – almost blind in the dark. He thrust three times, sure he’d hit, and then flicked a cut from his wrist as he backed a step. Now the only torch was held by the last Turk, or perhaps an escaped slave, and there were two corpses and Swan could see – a little. He doubted that they saw much of him.
    ‘Back! Back! The knights know we are here! Back, you fools!’ shouted the one with the voice of iron.
    But it was chaos in the corridor.
    An older, more experienced man would have leaped at them in that moment, but Swan was still amazed at his initial success and still cautious.
    The third man had time to ready his weapons – a light axe, and a curving sword.
    ‘It is just one man!’ he