The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  It was a moment in which Tannhauser understood, and he was not alone, that whatever any man might accomplish on this field, this battle was just another marker on a grave-strewn road. A road stretching back seven centuries before any man here was born and which would carve its bloody furrow for centuries uncounted yet to come.

  Tannhauser might have wished himself elsewhere, but he was here, and could be nowhere else, for this was his fate. The straight and the winding road at last were one. And he realized—for the first time since a cold spring morning in the glow of a mountain forge—that the Moslems were the enemies of his blood. He was a Saxon. A man of the North. Now, as he confronted the implacable men of the East, he felt his origins flow through his deepest marrow.

  Bors, whose presence on the post of honor had also been contrived, turned from the Grande Turke’s display and inhaled, as if of a toothsome aroma, and looked at Tannhauser.

  “Can you smell it?” whispered Bors.

  Tannhauser watched his gray English eyes as they creased up in a smile.

  “Glory,” said Bors.

  Tannhauser didn’t reply. Glory was more potent than opium. He feared its grip.

  Bors looked along the fortress walls, then at the vast and shining panoply on the heights. “Can it be possible?” he said, with awe. “That most of these men are to die?”

  Tannhauser looked at them too. Again, he gave no answer, for there was no need.

  With their jewel-encrusted display the Grande Turke had struck the first blow against the morale of the defenders. The Religion now struck back. La Valette gestured to Andreas and the page bowed and strode to the bulwark, where he delivered the Grand Master’s order to a brother knight. The knight raised and lowered a sword that winked in the sun.

  Tannhauser turned.

  Beneath the gallows above the Provençal Gate stood the naked and trembling figure of the old puppeteer, whom Tannhauser had found himself following, step for step, from Majistral Street. A serjeant at arms stepped up and with the butt of a spear he struck the puppeteer between the shoulders. What dignity the ancient had clung on to was robbed and his legs buckled under him like weeds, and he befouled himself, and with his dying cry muffled by the knot crammed hard betwixt his gums, the old man toppled into space. The drop seemed long. Then the rope cracked like a gunshot over the plain and both armies watched the karagöz as he jerked and danced like a puppet in his own theater, sixty feet above the floor of the ditch below.

  La Valette had decreed that a Moslem be hanged for every single day the siege continued. Tannhauser thought this a brilliant ploy, not just because its ugliness was the perfect rebuff to the splendor of the Turk but because it declared to both armies that this conflict’s end would only be marked by the extinction of one or the other. As regarded the defenders, the choice of the karagöz as inaugural victim was also inspired. The old puppeteer was known to every islander and, indeed, was held in a certain communal affection. For most, he was the only human face that Islam had. Now he squirmed beneath the gallows’ arm with the contents of bowels and bladder dripping from his gnarled toes. With this single stroke La Valette had made the whole population accomplice to a cruel and iniquitous murder. He’d rendered every heart there stony. He’d bound them together as monsters in the eyes of their foe. If this fight was to be fought at a savage and amoral extreme, every man on the Christian walls now knew it.

  At the end of the rope, the old man’s spasms ceased, and he rotated lifeless and obscene above the Grande Terre Plein.

  Colonel Le Mas raised his sword and threw his voice across the flatlands in a roar.

  “For Christ and the Baptist!”

  As Le Mas’s voice faded, the Christians crowding the ramparts took up the cry. It rolled outward to left and right and from one crowded bastion to the next in a crescendo of fury, and it spilled across Galley Creek and along the walls of Fort Saint Michel, and on its way the pledge was garnished by the taunts and obscenities of the soldiery. The battle cry found its echo across the waters of Grand Harbor on the ramparts of distant Fort Saint Elmo. Then it was gone.

  The Turkish horns wailed again and the culverins on the heights bucked like dragons in chains and flame spouted from their mouths and guerre à outrance was commenced.

  A score of stone cannonballs arced visibly toward the Borgo. As the missiles punched great divots in the walls of Castile and set the masonry atremble beneath their feet, a regiment of Tüfekchi janissaries charged down the hills and across the plain. Tannhauser watched as they fanned into triple firing ranks—the perfection of their geometry astounding—and their long-barreled pieces rippled with light as the muzzles swung down to the aim. The muskets issued a volley and the marksmen vanished behind a bank of smoke. They seemed to many to be out of range, but Tannhauser knew better. He ducked behind a bulwark and the hum of the balls was lost in the loud, bright bangs of those that struck the armor of the knights. La Valette’s young page was shot in the throat and Tannhauser watched him fall at his master’s feet. La Valette flinched not at all and motioned for the bearers to remove him.

  Tannhauser straightened up and laid his rifle across the wall.

  His armor and helmet were stifling and there was no shade. He mopped his brow with the scarf he kept tucked in his sleeve. The smoke unrolling on the plain thinned out and he watched the front rank janissaries reload their guns. Beneath their tall white bonnets their faces were blurs. He braced the Spanish butt against his shoulder and took aim at a man in the center of the line. He made a reckoning for the drop and squeezed the trigger. The wheel sang against the pyrites and the rifle thundered. He’d neglected to bring wax for his ears. He peered above the plume of the discharge. His victim lay without moving in the dust. A comrade stepped on his corpse to take his place. And that was that. Tannhauser, once again, was at war. He felt a hand clap him on the shoulder.

  “God’s bread!” said Bors. “I’d say you could lay claim to the first kill.”

  “No,” said Tannhauser. “That prize belongs to the hangman.”

  Christian arquebuses exploded down the length of the enceinte but they couldn’t match the Turkish nine-palm muskets. On the plain a sheet of red dust was kicked up as every shot fell short. The provost marshals screamed at their men to hold their fire and before the dirt could settle a fresh wave of gazi came howling through the haze and unleashed a second volley of their own. From the bastions of Italy and Castile the Religion’s cannon belched flame into the thickening fog and the gun teams fell on the recoiling beasts to drag them back into place and swab the bores. The big brass cannonballs bounced from the clay as if Satan himself had cast them and clove screaming tunnels of gore through the Ottoman ranks. A cheer went up from the battlements and musket fire sang from the stones and a battalion of enraged knights invested the Provençal Gate and hollered that it be opened that their bloodlust might be appeased.

  Tannhauser turned from this theater of the crazed and found Bors grinning.

  “That brass is likely our munitions,” said Bors.

  Tannhauser grounded his rifle butt and measured a charge of powder down the barrel. Glory? No. Not yet. Not at this distance. And he hoped not to get any closer. At least the better part of him so hoped. Like killing priests, killing former comrades was much like killing anyone else. If he felt anything at all it was a dark shade of joy and the thrill of that power which was once the jealous preserve of vicious gods: to strike a man’s life from existence by a single bolt of thunder. Through the taste of the gun smoke the kisses of Amparo and Carla yet lingered on his lips. What a splendid pair they were. And what a splendid life this was.

  Tannhauser resolved to be cheerful.

  He turned to Bors as Bors squinted down the length of his wall gun.

  “Did you bring any wax?” said Tannhauser.

  Bors jabbed a finger at his ear to indicate that it was plugged.

  “Did I bring any what?”

  Monday, May 21, 1565

  The Heights of Santa Marghari
ta—The Grande Terre Plein

  According to Allah’s Will, they’d been fighting hand to hand for six hours. In the rays of the westering sun the exhausted belligerents cast elongate shadows that danced on the blood-slaked plain, as if not merely men but their ghosts were possessed by a delirium. And yet this was only an overture to a drama yet unconceived.

  Abbas bin Murad, Aga of the Sari Bayrak, sat on his coal-black Arabian at the head of his brigade and could not but note that amongst the hundreds of corpses strewn like laundry across the field, the ratio of the Faithful to the Infidel looked not less than ten to one. This in itself could be accepted. There was no greater joy than to die for Allah and in the service of Suleiman Shah, the Refuge of All the People in the World. But the spies who’d assured Mustafa that Malta could be taken in two weeks would forfeit their lives. Abbas hadn’t fought the Franks since the wars in Hungary decades ago. At the Drava they’d slaughtered Ferdinand’s Austrians wholesale and sent their commanders’ heads to Constantinople in clay jars. And when, in ’38, Ferdinand had been rash enough to retake possession of Buda, the Sultan’s campaign along the Danube had been a promenade. But these Knights of John the Baptist—these Children of Satan—were of a different mettle altogether.

  The two knights, French and Portuguese, taken prisoner outside Zeitun, on Saturday, had been tortured for thirty hours by Mustafa’s most experienced interrogators, and neither had uttered a word beyond prayers to their god. When, finally, they’d broken, each knight—independently and in absolute ignorance of the other—had sworn that the weakest spot in the Christian defense was the bastion of Castile. In fact, as this afternoon’s assault had made brutally clear, Castile was the strongest point on the whole enceinte.

  Abbas glanced at the ancient slave, still scorching on the gibbet above the plain like a manikin in some demoniac invocation. The execution was a barbarous insult, which Abbas had taken for bravado at the time. But when the gates of the fortress swung open and a throng of knights clanked forth to wade with sword and mace among the janissaries, this illusion had been banished. The Hounds of Hell had attacked with such rabid savagery that it seemed that the janissaries would have no choice but to retreat. They did not do so, despite the cost, for the Tüfekchi would have rather died to the last man. Honor had been satisfied and a murderous standoff obtained. The knights were confined to a square of steel around their drawbridge. The long day waned and Abbas sat and watched the anarchic morass of dust and gun smoke and arms, the flash of muskets and blades, the lamentations of the maimed and disemboweled. The hard-baked clay of the plain had become a moist red mud of blood and urine and soil, and slithering in the filth of this opening sally, each side had taken some measure of its foe.

  Abbas, still waiting for his orders to join the fray, turned to look at his men. As expected he found them undaunted and eager for action. But the sun had clipped the edge of the mountain to the west—Monte Sciberras, he believed—and if they didn’t go in soon, they wouldn’t be blooded at all, at least today. His aide-de-camp pointed and Abbas wheeled his mount. From Mustafa Pasha’s golden pavilion on the hill, a messenger hurtled down the slope.

  Mustafa was an Isfendiyaroglu. His ancestor had carried the Prophet’s war banner during the conquest of Arabia. At seventy years old his personal valor was legend, as was his violent temper and his profligacy with his men. Mustafa had personally humbled the Knights of Saint John at Rhodes, in ’22, when only the august mercy of the youthful Suleiman had spared the Order from annihilation. The dogs had rewarded this beneficence with forty years of terror, inflicted for the most part on Moslem pilgrims and merchants. This error would now be corrected. The stronghold of the Hounds of Hell would be razed to the dirt and only their Grand Master spared to kneel before the Padishah in chains. But this would not be accomplished in two weeks. The grim thought entered Abbas’s mind that it might take as long as two months.

  He cast about the battlefield once more. The Christian ditch was deep and the walls formidable. The fortifications were crude but shrewdly conceived. The gallows on the bastion again caught his eye. It was said that after death human souls could meet, in the dreams of the men and women of this world. Would anyone, Abbas wondered, welcome the hanged slave into his sleep? Or the janissaries bloating in the scarlet heat of the twilight? The messenger’s dust drew closer. Abbas knew that he brought orders for the silahadar to attack. He beckoned the regimental trumpeter to his side. He drew his sword. He murmured:

  “All praises and thanks be to Allah, Lord of all worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Ruler of Judgment Day. You Alone we worship, and of You Alone we ask help. Show us the straight way, the way of those upon whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not the way of those upon whom lies Your wrath, nor of those who wander astray.”

  PART II

  Maltese Iliad

  Monday, June 4, 1565

  The Monastery of Santa Sabina—Rome

  Ludovico completed the ride from Naples to Rome in a shade more than three days. The way was dusty and grueling. Anacleto rode at his side. They prayed as they rode and folk of every estate bowed down as they passed, as if they believed them vengeful revenants committed to some fell purpose whose nature was best unknown. They passed numberless pagan catacombs and tombs, markers of a mighty power now consigned to oblivion. They ate in the saddle and lost count of the number of horses they exhausted on their way, and Ludovico’s endurance too was tested to its bounds. Yet this he welcomed, for he needed to steel his sinews for the ordeals to come.

  Through this state of extreme fatigue the streets of Rome, seething under the starlight of a torpid summer night, seemed more than usually dreamlike and depraved. He entered the Porta San Paolo with cowled head, for spies were always abroad and he shunned recognition. Along the streets of the Ripa, pimps and prostitutes brazenly sought his custom, undeterred by his monastic garb and offering tender boys if such were his fancy. Exotic birds and animals—parrots squawking obscenities, spider monkeys, lemurs, tiny green dragons on red silk leashes—were brandished in his face. Toothsome aromas from the vendors’ cooking fires assailed his palate, but he resisted their call. In this squalid latter-day Sodom there was much to resist.

  Rome was a theocratic dictatorship yet its ruling influence was not Jesus Christ but Lust. Lust for gold and property and beauty, for sex, food, and wine; for titles, grandeur, and ostentation, for intrigue and betrayal; above all, for power. Raw power in more myriad incarnations than existed anywhere else in the world. Even piety was craved and was for sale alongside all other commodities. In contrast to the industriousness of the north and the Spanish domains of the south, idleness abounded in Rome, both among the teeming masses of the destitute, who prowled the wretched slums like toothless dogs, and the rapacious legions of the rich in their opulent palazzos. Vast quantities of cash—milked from the faithful in every corner of Christendom, borrowed from the rising clans of international bankers, and extorted from the rural economy in papal taxes—poured down Rome’s throat in a ceaseless bacchanal of carnal indulgence. The churches and cathedrals were theaters of bathhouse art where the genitals and arses of leering pederasts were plastered over every wall, and boylike martyrs writhed in erotic torment, and pedophiliac fantasies posed as aids to devotion. Teenage cardinals who could barely recite a blessing swaggered down the Via della Pallacorda—from tennis court to gambling den to brothel and back—protected by insolent bands of hired bravi. In a city that could not boast a single great guild or profession—in which it was no easy task to get a horse shoed—the only industry that flourished was prostitution, and with it the French disease and anal warts, and every doe-eyed girl, every smooth-skinned boy, seemed destined for a semen-soaked mattress. Outside the city, whole armies of bandits—jobless soldiers, the dispossessed, a vast criminal detritus from the Franco-Spanish wars—ravaged the countryside. And through the high passes of the Alps the poison sea of Protestantism—Calvinists, Lutherans, Waldensians, Anabaptists, heretics of every breed and persuasion—
swelled toward the shores of the Holy See.

  Ludovico walked across this cesspool as Christ had walked on the water. The prelates who gorged themselves in marbled halls—beneath pornographic tableaux of rutting dryads and at tables that groaned with fat meats, pastries, and liqueurs—regarded his raw-boned austerity with fear. And so they should, for he despised them. During his last sojourn Ludovico had destroyed the Bishop of Toulon, one Marcel D’Estaing, who was a notorious homosexualist with a weakness for diamonds and women’s clothes. While the Bible, Saint Paul, Aquinas, and numerous other authorities condemned both fornication and sodomy, a close reading revealed that nowhere was sex with boys listed as a sin, either venial or mortal. This oversight explained the great ubiquity of cherubic males—the bardassos—in the city’s many bordellos. In neglecting to exploit this loophole and indulging in sex with adult men instead—it was said he was more familiar with the sight of his toes than with the inside of his church—the Bishop of Toulon had sealed his fate. Ludovico had the blubbering prelate sewn up in a sack and thrown in the Tiber.

  Yet laced through this sordid estate of sodomites, voluptuaries, and thieves was that network of remarkable men to whom Rome owed its survival as the fulcrum of the Christian world. Men of devotion, ruthlessness, and ability who, without soldiers, without ships, and with coffers filled with little more than promises, attempted to steer the policy of nations and secure the moral destiny of Mankind. Men possessed by the most potent lust of all: the compulsion to shape the clay of History as it spun on the wheel around them. Ludovico and Cardinal Ghisleri were two such men. Their army was the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition.

  At last the two travelers dismounted in the Dominican fortress-monastery of Santa Sabina. Ludovico sent Anacleto to take his supper with the monks. Officially, Ludovico served Pope Pius IV, Giovanni Medici. In truth he served Medici’s sworn enemy—and, with luck, the pontiff-to-be—Michele Ghisleri. Ghisleri greeted Ludovico with joy and they retired to the cardinal’s rooms for a simple meal.