Tom Swan and the Head of St. George Part Six: Chios by Christian Cameron

shook his head. ‘Don’t be, my lord.’ He smiled, and glanced at the ring on his finger, the crystalline head of Athena sparkling in the sun. ‘You and Domenico read me aright.’ He shrugged. ‘It is hard to explain. But I think – I think that I cannot betray you.’ He flashed the ring. ‘Besides, I’m invincible.’
    Tommaso rose and crushed him in an embrace. ‘Well, boy, you are my kind of fool, and no mistake. If you live – I’ll see that your patents of nobility pass the chapter, even if they’re as false as a tartar’s heart.’
    While Tommaso embraced him, he dropped the order’s command seal back on the man’s sea table.
    Then Swan bowed deeply. ‘I think I’d make a very poor knight,’ he said. ‘But I promise that if I survive this, I’ll always be at the order’s service.’
    Ten minutes later, the wherry was over the side, and he had the little sail up, and was skimming the waves like a boy on the Thames, headed south. At his feet was a bundle of Turkish clothes, stripped from a corpse on the beach – there had been a selection on the small tide. When he was well clear of the Christian fleet, he stripped and went over the side with a painter around his waist and a lead-weighted keg – just a small keg, the kind in which men shipped valuable cargoes of alum or such. He went under his own hull twice, and then surfaced, and almost ruined his plan by being so tired he had trouble getting back aboard.
    But he finally got a leg over the gunwale, and as he rolled back aboard, he saw the order’s galleys under full sail, line astern, obviously making for the Bay of Kalloni. And to the south, he could see the pickets of the Turkish fleet. Fra Domenico had wanted the Turks to see the order sail into the Bay of Kalloni.
    At the last command meeting, he’d smiled – wryly – at the knights, and Richard Sturmy. ‘We do not have to win,’ he said. ‘We do not have to provide a massed Christian fleet. We only have to sow doubt. Doubt is our greatest ally. The Turks think their traitor sent the Genoese Grand Fleet away.’ Domenico had paused. ‘What if Domenico is not a traitor? Omar Reis has to consider that.’
    Nor had Swan wasted his writing time solely writing to his mother.
    He concealed the forged letter to Messire Drappierro very carefully behind the wherry’s backboard – a location every London boy knew. He hoped that Turks knew the trick too, because he wanted the letter to be found.
    Drappierro thought he was so very smart.
    Whistling, Swan got the sail back up, picked up speed, and put the bow south again.
    To Chios.
    The only problem with Swan’s plan was that it depended on several people behaving in predictable ways, and Swan knew that at any point, he could simply be killed. Some parts of the plan would then continue to function, but – despite the order’s teachings – Swan wasn’t very interested in the functioning of his plan after his own death.
    And what if they haul the boat out of the water? he asked himself. What if they haven’t landed their oarsmen?
    He thought of a hundred flaws.
    He landed with the dawn on the northern tip of Chios and saw the Temple to Zeus as the sun crossed the mountains and kissed the still-standing columns. He lay on the warm marble and slept – all day. He awoke to watch half the Turkish fleet sailing away on a long reach west, probably headed for the entrance of the Bay of Kalloni, and he grinned at the ring and the head of Athena on his hand and thought of Fra Domenico.
    Then he worried that Auntie’s galley was heading south.
    Eventually, he decided that it was, truly, out of his hands, and he went back to sleep.
    As darkness fell, he woke, and swam off the east pediment of the temple, in what might have been the most beautiful place he’d ever seen. And then dried himself, and put on the dead man’s clothes, tied his turban, and launched his boat.
    He took the time to say a prayer. And to look at the ring, and the temple.
    The