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

Начало книги

It was the English ship that had brought the warning and sounded the alarm.

By the time the sun was high in the sky, Tom Swan had worked himself into a state of exhaustion. Working side by side with all the oarsmen, the mercenaries, the sailors and a hundred Greek fishermen, he’d helped to haul all five of the order’s galleys up the beach on rollers, and then, one by one, to haul the town’s fishing boats ashore.

The only ship still lying in the harbour was the very ship that had warned them. The Katherine Sturmy, an English vessel whose owner and captain were working stripped to the waist, at his side, was a round ship — her stern castle was almost fifty feet above the water, and her cavernous holds made her too big to beach in a crisis.

Out beyond the new-built breakwater in carefully dressed stone lay the reason for the near-panicked movement of the hulls — a two-hundred-ship Turkish fleet lying easily at anchor on a sea so calm that the west wind scarcely riffled it.

Читать дальше →