‘Swan, messire. I am English.’ Swan nodded agreeably. ‘I suspect the knight would sell it – for a substantial sum. I heard him mention ten thousand ducats.’

Drappierro frowned. ‘I will consider this. The man who brought me that ring would be … my friend.’ He settled his mad eyes on Swan. ‘In the East, my friends prosper. Cyriaco recommended you to me. See what you can do.’

Swan decided that this had gone far enough – although he was intrigued. ‘I am merely a soldier of the order,’ he said.

‘Save it for the knights,’ Drappierro said. ‘I know what you are. I saw you take my purse.’ He smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. ‘How about that wife of yours, in Ancona?’

Swan had been caught in too many lies to fall easily for such stuff. ‘What’s that, messire? I’m afraid I do not understand.’

‘I think you understand me very well, Englishman. Fra Diablo will come out to Rhodos this summer. You get the ring, and bring it to me, and I will see to it that your fortune is made. Or – fail me, and see what happens.’

‘You want me to steal a valuable ring from a knight of my own order?’ Swan said, standing up carefully and raising his voice.

Drappierro grew red in the face.

Swan slipped out from behind the table. ‘I’ll pretend I never heard that,’ he said, with all the outraged innocence that a bastard son of a Southwark whore could learn to muster in a childhood spent in taverns, brothels and the English court. He stalked to the cabin door and slammed it on his way out.

He went and finished his chess game. Fra Tommaso raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

East of Delos, they finally paid the price of sailing in winter. The blow came off Africa, full of sand, and then, without warning, the wind shifted through half the compass and blew off Thrace, and came full of snow. The Burgundians laughed – at first. They helped clear the snow away, and the sailors laughed and played in it until it began to clog the rigging and all the blocks, and then the ropes began to freeze, and darkness fell. The big lateen sail was shortened twice, and then taken in altogether, and they ran downwind towards Africa with the whole weight of the Thracian storm under their stern, and Tom Swan had his first experience of staying on deck and on duty until his knees wouldn’t hold him. For hours, he and the old knight were lashed to the tiller, a heavy linen tarpaulin impregnated with red lead and linseed oil wrapped around them with two old wool blankets, the whole thing flapping in the wind.

The morning of the fourth day crept up on wolf’s feet, the grey enveloping the ship so slowly that they were shocked to find how much they could see before a long squall hit and blinded them again, and pushed the long, slim ship over on its beam ends for so long that Swan, standing in water and the whole weight of his body against the starboard rail, thought the ship was lost.

They righted, the central deck full of water, and the oarsmen made a desperate attempt to bail. Men were soaked, and cold, and the wind was unrelenting.

The old knight rose to the challenge, calling orders into the waist of the ship and being obeyed. As the wind slackened towards noon, he called for more sail, and they slanted away to the west.

By nightfall, Antoine had a small fire going amid the stinking sand of the forward bilge, where galleys lit fires in times of dire need. The sand stank because in storms men feared to relieve themselves over the side, and did their business in the sand of the hold – despite a thousand orders to the contrary.

But Antoine’s special talent was his ability to light a fire in any weather, and he added bits of wood salvaged from the storm – a broken chest, a fractured stool – to the firewood kept for just such moments. Then he produced a pair of copper pots and began to heat water, and served a hot concoction of malmsey wine, water, sugar and spices that raised spirits above the masthead. He went on making the concoction until the galley lumbered into Rhodos with two men dead of exposure and a badly sprung bow where the ship had hit a floating tree in the darkness of their last night. They were long since out of food, and the men were not exactly sober, but the ship glided down the long harbour, the oars frothed the water as they slowed, and Fra Tommaso, at the helm in person, put the ship alongside the quay as neatly as a whore hooking a customer at the fair.

Every oarsman and every sailor bent and kissed the stones of the quay as they disembarked.

Messire Drappierro stood on the quay in a dry wool gown and looked sour. ‘Now I’m days out of my way,’ he said. ‘I have no need to visit Rhodos.’

Fra Tommaso was supervising the unloading of the corpses of the men who’d died at sea. He glanced at the Genoese. ‘You and your entourage are welcome to catch a different ship,’ he said quietly. ‘I warned Your Excellency when you came aboard that no ship of the order would be welcome in the Golden Horn.’

‘And I told you not to be an old woman.’ Drappierro curled his lip. ‘I can see to such things.’

Fra Tommaso’s face remained unchanged. ‘Perhaps, but, as I am an old woman, it is not a risk I choose to run. There are two Genoese ships across the harbour. I’ll see to it that one of them takes you up the coast.’

Drappierro shrugged. To Katzou, he said, ‘Find an inn. Get our kit unloaded.’ He looked at Swan. ‘Don’t forget the ring,’ he said.

‘He’s insane,’ Swan said after the ambassador was gone.

The knight shook his head. ‘No. Merely full of a sense of his own power. Money and worldly power do this to men. They become … less than human. He cannot see a world beyond himself. It is sad – I knew him slightly as a younger man. He was a bold adventurer, a charming man. He made too much money, and now he sees himself …’ The knight caught himself.

‘By Saint John, young Englishman – that’s the effect that Drappierro has. I’m gossiping like a fishwife. He is what he is. Will you stay with my ship?’ he asked.

Swan was watching Drappierro. Bessarion had ordered him to watch the Genoese and work with him, but Bessarion had also asked him to visit Rhodos and Chios and Lesvos.

‘Are you still bound for Chios?’ he asked.

Fra Tommaso waved at a group of approaching knights. But he turned back to Swan. ‘I am. I may wait for the weather to break. Fancy a month on Rhodos?’

Swan thought of Violetta. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Will it be relaxing?’

After a month on Rhodos, Swan longed to return to sea. As a Donat, he rose every morning an hour before dawn, and walked out of the barracks with sixty other volunteers to exercise in the stone-flagged courtyard for an hour – lifting rocks and drawing bows and running like antic madmen. The first meal was dried bread and small beer, although Antoine could usually be counted on for an egg.

Some days, Swan drew various duties, all of which involved being mounted in full armour – patrolling walls, riding abroad on the island, or sitting with the knight on duty as tolls were levied or visiting merchants questioned. Winter still had the Ionia in its grip, but the traffic was already moving – the small traders who hopped from island to island never ceased business, and a month before Greek Easter, the bigger boats were moving, as well, with wares from Egypt, Turkey and Palestine.

The knights were not unnecessarily cruel to their Greek subjects, but neither were they the fatherly protectors that Bessarion imagined. The island’s Greek inhabitants paid a heavy tax for the ‘protection’ of the order – an order that they could not join. Swan, by virtue of his languages, was soon party to almost every property negotiation, and he saw the Greek gentry bridle at any suggestion that the knights should own more land. He heard the order referred to as ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’ by old women in the street. The island’s oldest icon sat in the hospitallers’ chapel where the natives could not revere it; the island’s cathedral church was Latin, not Greek.