Venice

‘Are you alive?’ the Turk asked in a lilting Italian.

Swan looked up into the Turk’s eyes.

Eyes with smudges of kohl around the thick lashes. Wide-set, deep brown eyes above a slender, arching nose and a heavy, sensual mouth.

‘You are not a boy,’ Swan said. ‘Oh, my neck hurts.’

She laughed good-naturedly. ‘How . . . kind of you to notice,’ she said. ‘Are you unbroken?’

He sat up.

The second boy was riding towards them. ‘It is – how do you Italians say this? A polite fiction that I am a boy today. Yes?’

Swan rotated his head from side to side. ‘A fiction I will endeavour to maintain, demoiselle,’ he said gallantly. Her very palpable presence at his side – her hand on his arm – reminded him that he hadn’t talked to a woman in two weeks. The siege had emptied the great city of women – there weren’t even prostitutes in the Venetian quarter.

She put a strong hand in his hand and hauled him to his feet. His horse was two steps away, and he mounted as efficiently as he could manage. He knew he looked like a fool to the Turks. He couldn’t help it.

‘My brother has given you this mare?’ she said.

‘Khatun Bengül!’ shouted the second ‘boy’. In Arabic.

‘Shush!’ the Turkish woman said. ‘I am Salim.’

‘You touched him.’

‘He was on the ground and needed help.’

‘And now he knows you are a woman!’

‘You shouted my name across the world!’

‘He is a Frank. They are as stupid as cattle.’ The second woman was ten years older than Khatun Bengül, and several inches shorter. Under her mantle and turban, Swan judged her to be every bit as attractive, with beautiful eyes and high cheeks. Khatun Bengül, however, had a translucent skin that Swan had seldom seen – hers was the colour of oak newly split – not white, but like slightly aged ivory – and her brows were black and strong.

He was staring.

‘Now he will be besotted with you, you little witch.’ The older woman laughed.

‘He does not seem very stupid, Auntie,’ Khatun Bengül said.

‘Bah – all Franks are stupid. I’ve owned dozens. Look at him. He can’t even ride properly.’ The older woman gave him the once-over. ‘Handsome, though. Look at those lips.’

The two women tittered together.

Swan, who had laboured for months at Arabic, had a sudden love for the language that no amount of Rabbi Aaron’s teaching could ever give him.

‘I like his hands,’ Khatun Bengül said.

‘Perhaps we might ride back to the carts?’ Swan said in Italian.

Khatun Bengül nodded.

‘But he rides like a sack of camel shit. Really. What do they teach Frankish boys?’ Auntie asked.

The falconers returned an hour later, and they ate a sumptuous picnic of mutton with a dozen sweet things and some spices that Swan loved, and chicken. They all drank an odd, salty drink that Swan disliked at first taste, but grew used to with practice.

‘What is it?’ he asked Idris.

‘The drink?’ Idris asked. ‘It’s just . . . milk. Hmm. And some salt and spice and water.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a word I don’t know in Italian. When milk . . . isn’t milk any more.’

‘Cheese?’ Swan asked.

Idris shook his head.

After lunch, the falconing party rode off again, leaving Swan with the servants. He didn’t mind – he rode his mare into the fields, going more slowly then faster, changing gaits – learning to ride.

He was resting, drinking more of the salty drink from a glass bottle provided by a servant, when he heard the auntie shriek.

‘You ca

Khatun Bengül – if that was her name – appeared around the wagon, riding as if she was a satyress – the image came quite spontaneously to Swan. There was something erotic in the way she rode.

‘You do not fly the falcons?’ she said in her curious and, to him, very beautiful Italian.

‘I do not know falconry,’ he said, smiling his most ingratiating smile.

‘I could teach you a little,’ she said. ‘We are not . . . expected to gallop over fields. But I was going to fly my birds.’

Her aunt rode around the side of the wagon.

‘Look at him – he knows you are a woman. It’s written all over him,’ said Auntie, in Arabic. ‘Listen, my little filly. I was young once, too.’

‘You are a coarse old woman,’ Khatun Bengül spat. ‘I want to teach him to fly a bird.’

Auntie said something in Turkish.

Khatun Bengül flushed.

Swan would have given a year of his life to know what had been said. He turned the sounds over in his head – one of his special skills, and the reason he could learn languages so very fast. As fast as the two women could spit at each other, he processed the syllables. He had no idea what they meant. But he would.

Auntie seemed to be backing down.

‘If you would care to ride with us,’ Khatun Bengül said, ‘my auntie will keep a very careful watch on us.’ She spat the words.

‘Don’t think I can’t understand when you talk love words to the dirty Frank,’ said the auntie.

Khatun Bengül flushed red. ‘This is Italian,’ she said. ‘Nothing to do with love.’

However, despite their inauspicious begi

‘He really is handsome,’ Auntie said. ‘Pity he isn’t a slave.’

That took the wind out of Swan’s sails. Auntie was looking at him with the sort of appraisal with which older women had been examining him since he had turned fourteen, and ordinarily he’d have arranged . . .

But he couldn’t take his eyes off Khatun Bengül.

Perhaps fortunately for all of them, Idris returned shortly after the adventure of the gyrfalcon and the tree.

He clapped Swan on the back. ‘I see you have learned the first lesson of falconry – how to retrieve a lost bird,’ he said. ‘You have done this before?’

‘One of the boys is teaching me,’ Swan said.

Idris laughed and slapped his thigh. ‘My father will indeed have us all killed,’ he laughed. ‘You know she’s my sister, eh?’

Swan sighed. ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

‘And a force of nature,’ Idris acknowledged. They had turned their horses towards home. Most of the Turks had mounted a second horse.

‘She was very . . . courteous to me,’ Swan said.

Idris laughed, his head thrown back. ‘She makes boys bark at the moon,’ he said. ‘Ah, my Englishman. Do not cast languishing glances on my sister. She spits on the men who worship her.’ He took a flask out of his kaftan, drank, and handed it to Swan, who drank. Greek wine – sweet and strong.

‘All the good Persian poets were drunks,’ Idris said. ‘I’m working on it.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, Holy Koran forbids it. Or so my imam insists.’

Later, after they had passed the Belgrade Gate, Idris said, ‘Listen – I owe you my life, but you must never mention that my sister was here today. When I saw her . . . never mind.’

‘I will swear,’ Swan promised.

‘It’s a hard life for her,’ Idris said. ‘In Thrace, when my father is commanding an army, she rides like a man – shoots a bow, sleeps on the ground. It is how we were raised. My mother – she was a tribal woman, you know?’

Swan didn’t know, but he nodded.

‘Owned her own horses. Owns farms in Anatolia. So we were raised to the saddle. And in this cursed city, poor Khatun Bengül must pretend to be a good girl, a nice girl who stays at home and has slaves take money to the poor, who never shows her face, who never rides a horse.’ Idris shrugged. ‘We don’t always get along.’