The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  PART I

  A World of Dreams

  Sunday, May 13, 1565

  Castel Sant’Angelo—The Borgo—Malta

  The situation, as Starkey saw it, was thus.

  The largest armada since antiquity, bearing the finest army in the modern world, had been dispatched by Suleiman Shah to conquer Malta. Turkish success would expose southern Europe to a wave of Islamic terror. Sicily would be ripe for the picking. A Moslem reconquest of Granada would not be unthinkable. Rome itself would tremble. Yet these strategic rewards be as they might, Suleiman’s most passionate ambition was to exterminate the Knights of Saint John—that singular band of healers and warrior monks known to some as the Sea Knights and to others as the Hospitallers, and who in an age of Inquisition yet dared call themselves “The Religion.”

  The Grande Turke’s army was commanded by Mustafa Pasha, who had broken the knights once before—and in a citadel immeasurably stronger than this one—at the celebrated siege of Rhodes, in 1522. Since then, Suleiman—who, despite his many achievements, placed his sacred duty to conquer the world for Islam at the forefront of his Policy—had overthrown Belgrade, Buda, Baghdad, and Tabriz. He’d crushed Hungary, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania, and the Balkans. Twenty-five Venetian islands and every port in North Africa had fallen to his corsairs. His warships had smashed the Holy League at Préveza. Only winter had turned him back from the gates of Vienna. No one doubted the outcome of Suleiman’s latest jihad on Malta.

  Except, perhaps, a handful of the knights themselves.

  Fra Oliver Starkey, Lieutenant Turcopolier of the English langue, was standing at the window of the Grand Master’s office. From this prospect, high in the south wall of Castel Sant’Angelo, he could see the complex geography of the battlefield to come. Encircled by surrounding heights, three triangular spits of land formed the boundaries of Grand Harbor, the Sea Knights’ home. Sant’Angelo stood at the apex of the first peninsula and dominated the main town of the Borgo. Here were crammed the Auberges of the Knights, the Sacred Infirmary, the conventual church of San Lorenzo, the homes of the townsfolk, the main docks and warehouses, and all the bristling paraphernalia of a tiny metropolis. The Borgo was barricaded from the mainland by a huge, curving enceinte—a curtain wall studded with defensive bastions and teeming with knights and militia at their drill.

  Starkey looked across Galley Creek toward the second spit of land, L’Isola, where the sails of a dozen windmills turned with a strange and incongruous tranquillity. Squares of militia wheeled in formation, the sunlight winking from their helms, and, beyond them, naked Moslem slaves chained in pairs strained to the overseer’s whistle as they hauled blocks of sandstone up the counter wall of Saint Michel, the fortress that sealed L’Isola from the mainland. Once the siege commenced, the only communication between L’Isola and the Borgo would be the fragile bridge of boats across Galley Creek. To the north, half a mile across Grand Harbor at the seaward tip of the third peninsula, stood Fort Saint Elmo. This was the most isolated outpost of all, and once under siege could only be accessed by water.

  The entire vista seethed with preparations. Fortification and drill; excavation and entrenchment; harvesting and salting and storage; burnishing and honing and prayer. Master serjeants roared at the pikemen and the hammers of the armorers rang. In the churches bells pealed and novenas were held and women prayed to Our Lady by day and by night. Eight out of ten of the defenders were unblooded peasants with homemade leather armor and spears. Yet in the choice between slavery or death, the proud and valiant Maltese had shown no hesitation. A mood of grim defiance hung over the town.

  A movement caught Starkey’s eye and he looked up. A pair of black-winged falcons plunged earthward through the turquoise sky, as if they would fall forever. Then they broke and soared in unison and sailed without visible motion for the western horizon, and in the indefinable moment that they melted into the haze, Starkey imagined them the last birds in the world. A voice from across the spacious room behind him broke the spell of his reverie.

  “He who has not known War has not known God.”

  Starkey had heard this unholy motto before. It never failed to disturb his conscience. Today it filled him with dread, for he feared he might soon discover that it was true. Starkey turned from the window to rejoin the conference.

  Jean Parisot de La Valette, the Order’s Grand Master, stood at his table of maps with the great Colonel Pierre Le Mas. Tall and austere, in a long black habit emblazoned with the Cross of Saint John, La Valette was seventy-one. Fifty years of killing on the high seas had forged his sinew and so, perhaps, he knew whereof he spoke. At twenty-eight he’d survived the blood-soaked tragedy of Rhodes, when the tattered remnant of the Order had been exiled to the waves in the last of their ships. At forty-seven he’d survived a year as a slave in the galley of Abd-ur Rahman. When others would have taken high office within the Order—and on the safety of land—La Valette had chosen decades of ceaseless piracy, his nostrils stuffed with tobacco against the stench. His brow was high and his hair and beard were now silver. His eyes had been bleached by the sun to the color of stone. His face seemed cast from bronze. To him news of the invasion was like some rejuvenating elixir in an Attic myth. He’d embraced the prospect of doom with the ardor of a lover. He was tireless. He was exuberant. He was inspired. Inspired as one whose hatred may at last be unleashed without pity or restraint. What La Valette hated was Islam and all its evil works. What he loved was God and the Religion. And in these the last of his days, God had sent the Religion the blessing of War. War at its apotheosis. War as manifestation of Divine Will. War unfettered and pure, to be fought to its smoking conclusion through every conceivable extreme of cruelty and horror.

  He who has not known War has not known God? Christ had never blessed the pursuit of arms in any fashion. But, then, there were times when Starkey was certain that La Valette was mad. Mad with the premonition of outrageous violence. Mad with the knowledge that the power of God flowed through him. Mad because who else but a madman could hold the destiny of a people in the palm of his hand and foresee the slaughter of thousands with such equanimity. Starkey crossed the room to join the two old comrades talking over the map table.

  “How much longer must we wait?” said Colonel Le Mas.

  “Ten days? A week? Perhaps less,” replied La Valette.

  “I thought we had another month.”

  “We were wrong.”

  La Valette’s office reflected his austere temperament. The tapestries, portraits, and fine furnishings of his predecessors were gone. In their place, stone, wood, paper, ink, candles. A simple wooden crucifix was nailed to the wall. Colonel Pierre Le Mas had arrived that morning from Messina with the unexpected reinforcement of four hundred Spanish soldiers and thirty-two knights of the Order. He was a burly, battle-scarred salt in his late fifties. He nodded to Starkey and indicated the chart on the table.

  “Only a philosopher could decipher these hieroglyphics.”

  The map—somewhat to Starkey’s chagrin, for he’d overseen the delicate cartography himself—was densely annotated with cryptic notes and symbols of La Valette’s devising. The Order of Saint John was divided into eight langues—or tongues—each according to the nationality of its members: those of France, Provence, Auvergne, Italy, Castile, Aragon, Germany, and England. La Valette traced the defensive enceinte that sealed the Borgo in a great stone curve from west to east, pointing out the bastion he’d assigned each langue.

  “France,” he said, and marked the far right, hard against Galley Creek. Like Le Mas, La Valette was of that most belligerent of breeds, a Gascon. “Our noble Langue of Provence is next, here on the foremost bastion.”

  Le Mas said, “How many are we of Provence?”

  “Seventy-six knights and serjeants at arms.” La Valette’s finger moved westward along the chart. “On our left is the Langue of Auvergne. Then the Italians—a hundred and sixty-nine lances—then Aragon. Castile. Germany. In total five hundred a
nd twenty-two brethren have answered the call to arms.”

  Le Mas furrowed his brow. The number was pitifully small.

  La Valette added, “With the men you brought we have eight hundred Spanish tercios and twoscore gentleman adventurers. The Maltese militia number a little over five thousand.”

  “I hear Suleiman sends sixty thousand gazi to drive us into the sea.”

  “Including seamen, labor battalions, and supports, many more than that,” replied La Valette. “The Dogs of the Prophet have pushed us back for five hundred years—from Jerusalem to Krak des Chevaliers, from Krak to Acre, from Acre to Cyprus and Rhodes—and every mile of our retreat is marked with blood and ashes and bones. At Rhodes we chose life over death, and while to all the world it is an episode bathed in glory, to me it is a stain. This time, there will be no ‘surrender with honor.’ We will retreat no more. Malta is the last ditch.”

  Le Mas rubbed his hands. “Let me claim the post of honor.” By this La Mas meant the locus of greatest danger. The post of death. He was not the first to request it, and must have known this, for he added, “You owe it to me.”

  To what this referred, Starkey did not know, but something passed between the two men.

  “We’ll talk of that later,” said La Valette, “when Mustafa’s intentions are better known.” He pointed to the edge of the fortifications. “Here, at the Kalkara Gate, is the post of England.”

  Le Mas laughed. “An entire post for one man?”

  The Ancient and Noble Tongue of England, once among the Order’s greatest, had been destroyed by the bloated philanderer and heresiarch Henry VIII. Starkey was the only remaining Englishman in the Order of Saint John.

  La Valette said, “Fra Oliver is the English langue. He is also my right hand. Without him, we’d be lost.”

  Starkey, embarrassed, changed the subject. “The men you brought with you, how do you rate their quality?”

  “Well trained, well equipped, and all devoted to Christ,” said Le Mas. “I squeezed two hundred volunteers out of Governor Toledo by threatening to burn his galleys. The rest were recruited on our behalf by the German.”

  La Valette raised one brow.

  “Mattias Tannhauser,” said Le Mas.

  Starkey added, “He who first forewarned us of Suleiman’s plans.”

  La Valette glanced up into space, as if to conjure a face. He nodded.

  “Tannhauser brought the intelligence?” said Le Mas.

  “It wasn’t an act of charity,” said Starkey. “Tannhauser has sold us a colossal quantity of arms and munitions with which to prosecute the war.”

  “The man is a fox,” said Le Mas, with no small admiration. “Little takes place in Messina that escapes his notice. He has a way with men, too, and would surely make a stiff companion in a fight, for he was a devshirme, and spent thirteen years in the Sultan’s corps of janissaries.”

  La Valette blinked. “The Lions of Islam,” he said.

  The janissaries were the most ferocious infantry in the world, the elite of Ottoman arms, the spearhead of their father the Sultan. Their sect was composed entirely of Christian boys, raised and trained—through a fanatical and unforgiving strain of Bektasi dervish Islam—to crave death in the name of the Prophet. La Valette looked at Starkey for confirmation.

  Starkey rifled his memory for the details of Tannhauser’s career. “The Persian conquest, Lake Van, the crushing of the Safavid rebellions, the sack of Nakhichevan.” He saw La Valette blink a second time. A precedent had been set. “Tannhauser gained the rank of janitor, or captain, and became a member of the bodyguard of Suleiman’s firstborn son.”

  La Valette said, “Why did he leave the janissaries?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “He wouldn’t give me an answer.”

  La Valette’s expression changed and Starkey sensed that a plot had been born.

  La Valette embraced Le Mas by the shoulders. “Fra Pierre, we will talk again soon—of the post of honor.”

  Le Mas understood he was dismissed and walked to the door.

  “Tell me one more thing,” said La Valette. “You said Tannhauser had a way with men. How is his way with women?”

  “Well, he has an admirable bevy of nubiles working for him.” Le Mas colored at his own enthusiasm, for his occasional lapses into debauchery were well known. “Though I hasten to add that they’re not for hire. Tannhauser hasn’t taken Holy Orders and in his shoes, well, if the man has a taste for women—and good taste, mind—it’s not something I’d hold against him.”

  “Thank you,” said La Valette. “I won’t.”

  Le Mas closed the door behind him and La Valette took to his chair and tented his fingers. “Tannhauser. It’s not a noble name.”

  To be considered for entry as a Knight of the Order of Saint John, a man had to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility in his bloodline. It was a concept in which the Grand Master placed great faith.

  Starkey said, “Tannhauser is a nom de guerre—borrowed from a German legend, I believe—which he took while serving Alva in the Franco-Spanish wars.”

  “If Tannhauser spent thirteen years in the Lions of Islam he knows more about our enemy—his tactics, his formations, his moods, his morale—than anyone in our camp. I want him here in Malta—for the siege.”

  Starkey was taken aback. “Fra Jean, why would he care to join us?”

  “Giovanni Castrucco sails for Messina at noon, on the Couronne.”

  “Tannhauser will not be persuaded by Castrucco.”

  “Quite,” said La Valette. “You will go with him. When Castrucco returns, you’ll bring this German janissary back to Malta.”

  “But I’d be gone for five days—I have innumerable duties here—”

  “We will survive your absence.”

  “Tannhauser wouldn’t join us if we dragged him here in chains.”

  “Then devise another way.”

  “Why is he so important?”

  “Perhaps he is not. But even so.”

  La Valette stood up. He walked back to the map and scanned the terrain that thousands would soon contest with their lives. “This battle for our Holy Religion will not be won or lost by some great stroke,” he said. “There will be no brilliant and decisive maneuver, no Achilleus or Hektor, no Samson with the jawbone of an ass. Such tales are constructions of hindsight. There will only be a multitude of smaller strokes, by a multitude of lesser heroes—our men, our women, our children—none of whom will know the final outcome, and few of whom will even live to see it.”

  For the first time Starkey saw something like dread in La Valette’s eyes.

  “The flux in God’s crucible is infinite in possibility, and in that final outcome only God will know who it was that tipped the balance: be it the knight who died in the breach, or the water boy who slaked his thirst, or the baker who made his bread, or the bee that stung the foeman in the eye. That is how finely the scales of war are weighted. That’s why I want Tannhauser. For his knowledge, for his sword, for his love of the Turk or his hatred, either one.”

  “Forgive me, Fra Jean, but I assure you, Tannhauser will not come.”

  “Does Lady Carla still plague us with her letters?”

  Starkey blinked at this non sequitur and at the triviality of its subject. “The Countess of Penautier? Yes, she still writes—the woman doesn’t know the meaning of refusal—but why?”

  “Use her as your lever.”

  “Against Tannhauser?”

  “The man likes women,” said La Valette. “Let him like this one.”

  “I’ve never met the countess,” protested Starkey.

  “In her youth she possessed a great beauty, which I’m sure the years have done little or nothing to dim.”

  “That may well be, but at the very least she’s a woman of noble birth and Tannhauser is, well, a near barbarian—”

  La Valette’s expression forestalled all further discussion.

  “
You will sail on the Couronne. You will bring Tannhauser back to Malta.”

  La Valette took Starkey’s arm and walked him to the door.

  “Send in the Inquisitor as you leave.”

  Starkey blinked. “I’m not to be privy to your conference?”

  “Ludovico will be faring with you on the Couronne.” La Valette observed his confusion and essayed a rare smile. “Fra Oliver, know that you are dearly beloved.”

  In the antechamber outside, Ludovico Ludovici, judge and jurist of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition, fingered his rosary with the blameless impassivity of an icon. He returned Starkey’s look without expression and for a moment Starkey found himself unable to speak.

  Ludovico was in his forties, Starkey’s own age, yet the bristles of his Pauline tonsure were crow-dark and had not retreated a fraction from its widow’s peak. His forehead was smooth, his face was beardless, and the overall impression of his skull was of a huge stone sculpted by primordial forces. He was long in the torso and broad in the shoulders and he wore the white scapular and black cape of the Order of the Dominicans. His eyes shone like spheres of obsidian and lacked any trace of either menace or warmth. They regarded the fallen world about him, as if they’d regarded it since Adam, with a frankness of perception that excluded the possibility of joy and horror both, and with an extraordinary order of intelligence that sought to breach the inmost core of whomsoever he subjected to their gaze. And behind this dwelt the shadow of a fabulous melancholy—of a regret that evoked some notion of perpetual mourning—as if he’d seen a better world than this one and knew he’d not see it again.

  Make me the guardian of the secrets of your soul, said the fathomless black eyes. Lay your burdens upon my back and life eternal shall be yours.

  Starkey felt both an urge to confide and an ill-defined anxiety. Ludovico was Pope Pius IV’s special legate to the Maltese Inquisition. He traveled a thousand miles a year in search of heresy. Amongst other noted exploits he’d sent Sebastiano Mollio, renowned Professor of Bologna, to the flames of the Campo del Flor. He’d guided Duke Albert of Bavaria in his brutal restoration of the One True Faith. During his cleansing of Piedmont he’d dispatched an entire train of prisoners bearing burning tapers of penitence to the autos-da-fé in Rome. Yet Ludovico’s humility was profound, too profound to be an act. Starkey had never seen so much power worn so lightly. Ludovico’s function on Malta was to seek out the Lutheran heresy amongst the brethren of the Order of Saint John, yet he’d made no arrests. If anything this inaction had made him all the more feared. Did La Valette want Ludovico safe in Sicily? Or were there other intrigues in play? Starkey realized he’d been staring for an unseemly time.