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

more real here than in England.’
    Cesare shook his head. ‘And you waited tables in an inn? What a fascinating country England must be.’
    At Naxos, the bishop, who hardly ever showed his face on deck, went to pay a visit to the Duke of Naxos, who was, of course, a Venetian.
    The Bishop of Ostia was a papal courtier. It was not his first trip outside of Rome, but one would never have guessed it. The man’s world view was utterly dominated by Rome, and he seemed to feel that the world existed to serve the Pope, which, as Alessandro said, was going to make his visit to Constantinople very exciting.
    Alessandro went with him to the Duke of Naxos. Swan looked at a temple of Apollo, paying two local men to be guides. He took Giannis, who was at least as bored as Cesare had been. The temple of Apollo was on an islet just off the coast. The local men spoke a dialect of Greek that Swan found incomprehensible at first, but by the end of the day he could joke with them and buy sausage from a woman in the streets of the principal city. While the bishop was feted in the palace, he sharpened his spoken Greek every day.
    On the third day Cesare was summoned to the palace, and he joined Swan in the cool of the evening, sitting on a terrace – really the roof of a large taverna. ‘This is more like it,’ Cesare said, drinking wine and admiring the girl serving at the next table.
    ‘What did the bishop want?’
    ‘A letter to the Pope. He thinks he’s the legate. I think the Pope will not thank him for dabbling in local politics, but I’m a mere notary.’ Cesare knocked back his wine. ‘I met a monk – a Greek monk. We had a bit of a debate.’ He smiled. ‘I liked him and invited him to come over for a cup of wine.’
    In fact, when the monk came, the tavern owner treated him with the kind of respect that an Italian tavern keeper kept for beautiful women and the very, very rich. The wine at their table was taken away, and replaced with a fresh pitcher that was, upon tasting, of much higher quality. The monk, who insisted that they call him Fra Demetrios, waved at the wine and said it was from Nemea.
    ‘With the lions,’ said Swan, in Greek.
    Fra Demetrios laughed. ‘Not bad. You are Florentine?’
    ‘English,’ said Swan.
    Fra Demetrios nodded. ‘Fine men, the English.’
    ‘You know England?’ asked Cesare.
    ‘I am from Lesvos,’ Fra Demetrios said. ‘The Gatelusi have maintained English soldiers to guard us from the Turks for . . . oh, I don’t know. A hundred years.’ He smiled. ‘The English are great pirates – but like good sheepdogs, they prey only on the wolves, eh?’
    The wars of the Gatelusi led to the fall of Constantinople.
    ‘The end of everything,’ said Fra Demetrios, and he shrugged. ‘Venice does not yet realise with what she is dealing. The Turks are ten – twenty – fifty times as powerful as Venice. That foolish old man – Foscari – is busy fighting petty lordlings in Italy, and the Turks will take all Greece.’ He looked at a pair of Turkish soldiers lounging in the street. They were mercenaries, serving with the Duke of Naxos, but they were, nonetheless, Turks. ‘In truth, they have already conquered us. We merely await the axe.’
    After another pitcher of wine, he laughed at Cesare’s pretensions to learning. ‘Any Greek monk has read all the ancients,’ he said. ‘Not just the bits that have wandered out of our libraries to the west.’
    Cesare didn’t rise to the provocation, but smiled agreeably. ‘What texts do you have that we don’t?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I’ve read Aristotle.’
    ‘How many books?’ the monk asked.
    ‘Of Aristotle? All three.’ Cesare nodded. ‘ De Anima , Ethics and The Athenian Consitution .’ He winked at Swan.
    ‘Three!’ said the monk. ‘By Saint George, my Latin friends, Aristotle wrote more than twenty books.’
    By the fourth pitcher of wine, Demetrios was writing the titles of every Greek book he’d ever read on Cesare’s