The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  “Through this holy unction may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins or faults thou hast committed.”

  The evacuees brought with them the tang of the siege across the harbor: gaping wounds, raw fear, the whiff of violent chaos. La Valette made a point of seeing off the fresh volunteers; that Tannhauser couldn’t see him boded ill. They pushed on. A captive Turkish officer—bloody and half naked and festooned with chains—was driven past them, and Tannhauser heard a fragment of his murmurings.

  “Hold fast to the rope of Allah . . .”

  “That fellow’s in for a nasty shock,” observed Bors.

  Tannhauser pressed forward, hardly listening. Bors was undeterred.

  “In the dungeons of Saint Anthony, the torturers keep a giant blackamoor on hand—treat him like a king, food, wine by the bucket. When they want to loosen a fresh Turk’s tongue they strip him down and bend him over a hogshead and have the blackamoor sodomize him, while they stand about cheering and laughing, and reminding him that that’s how old Mohammed took his pleasure.” Bors laughed himself. “The results, they say, are a wonder to behold.”

  Tannhauser made no comment and looked about. The waters of Grand Harbor shone like quicksilver, its surface shimmering in the wake of two departing longboats and their dipping oars. Each contained twenty-odd men and sundry supplies. At a lamplit table sat a brother serjeant with a ledger and a quartermaster whose manifests were swimming in a spilled pot of ink. Unbrotherly words flew back and forth. Tannhauser recognized the serjeant, a Lombard called Grimaldi, and he rapped his knuckles on the table to draw his attention.

  “Brother Grimaldi, I must know if a certain man left with the volunteers.”

  “Tonight?” asked Grimaldi.

  “Tonight. By the name of Orlandu Boccanera.”

  The quartermaster didn’t appreciate the interruption. “You’ve no authority here. We have work to do.”

  “Work?” Tannhauser leaned his hands on the table and looked down on him. “This morning I directed the raid on Gallows Point. So tell me, bookkeeper, how many Turks have you slain today?”

  The quartermaster rose to his feet, his hand crossing his waist to the hilt of his sword. Despite that Tannhauser remained bent forward, the man was still obliged to look up at him.

  “Who are you, sir?”

  “I advise you to keep to spilling ink, my friend,” said Bors, “and leave the spilling of blood to such as we.”

  “Sit down,” said Grimaldi. “This is Starkey’s man.”

  The quartermaster walked away, muttering a Pater noster to calm his ire. Grimaldi leafed through muster roll. His finger stopped near the end of a column of names.

  “No Boccanera here. But we have one Orlandu di Borgo,” said Grimaldi. “The fellow was as impudent as his name.” He tipped his beard toward the harbor. “He’s in the last boat yonder.”

  Tannhauser straightened and turned and gazed across the water. Far out in the night, and beyond all hope of recall, the oars of the rearmost longboat feathered the quicksilver. For the sake of a fantasia on pepper, one cup of coffee too many, or a quick dip in his tub, the cornerstone of his policy lay in pieces. Orlandu was on his way to the post of certain death. For all the ups and downs of recent weeks, Tannhauser had never succumbed to a feeling of dismay. But he did so now. He turned from the water and his spirits sunk yet lower.

  Running barefoot through the blood, her hair flying wild about her shoulders, was Carla. She saw his face and stopped. And Tannhauser felt as if he’d stabbed her through the heart.

  Pentecost: Sunday, June 10, 1565

  Philermo Shrine—Auberge of England—Castel Sant’Angelo

  The icon of Our Lady of Philermo hung in a chapel in the church of San Lorenzo. After the Right Hand of John the Baptist, the knights considered the icon their most sacred relic. Saint Luke had painted it, so some said, and a miracle had carried it to Rhodes on the waves of the sea. When Suleiman conquered Rhodes, the surviving knights had taken the icon with them. The Madonna’s face was primitive, almost without expression, yet Her eyes contained all the sorrow of the world. She’d been known to weep real tears and numerous miracles had been credited to Her powers. Carla knelt before the icon and prayed, if not for a miracle, then for guidance. On this day, when the Holy Ghost had descended upon the apostles, surely she could hope for that. Outside it was dead of night and the church was empty.

  “Fate is against us,” Mattias had told her, as she stood stunned and ankle-deep in the blood of the wharf. “Let me take you back to Italy. To France. To stay here is to die, and for what? Put this business behind you and start life anew.”

  She’d promised him an answer by morning. She’d come to the shrine of Philermo to find one. She was yet in shock from the knowledge that Orlandu was her son. At a distance of inches and despite an exposure lasting hours she’d failed to recognize her own flesh. She’d allowed him to slip through her hands into certain death.

  She didn’t doubt his identity. As soon as Amparo had told her she’d known it was so. Ruggiero’s story of the baptism, the letter of Father Benadotti: of these confirmations she’d had no need. She’d felt a bond with the boy, had warmed to him at once, yet she’d put it down to his urchin charm, his friendship with Amparo, the power of Christ’s love that had filled her soul in the Sacred Infirmary. Amid all that she’d felt no explicit sense of maternal recognition. Vanity. Vanity. What had she expected? To feel pangs and spasms in her womb? To see a halo glow about his head? She was no mother. She’d never given suck. How could she expect to know him? Her fantasy of herself had condemned him. That and also, she realized with shame, her social bigotry. Charming as he’d been, he was filthy and uncouth, a barefoot lout who’d boasted of killing dogs. Some inbuilt sense of station had blinded her eyes and stifled her heart, the curse of her supposed nobility. She thought of her father, Don Ignacio. Mattias had seen him.

  “Your father begged your forgiveness for stealing your child,” said Mattias. “And for condemning the boy to a life of such lowly character. The most bitter of his regrets were for the heinous cruelty he inflicted upon you. If I may quote his very words: ‘I loved her more dearly than any living soul.’”

  At this she’d wept, for the thought of her father’s hatred had been a wound.

  “Don Ignacio was dying,” said Mattias. “When I left he could count his time in this world in hours. The priest was with him. Your father took great consolation in the thought that you’d returned. I presumed to tell him that he still enjoyed your affection and respect, and that your forgiveness was already certain, and for this he blessed me. Perhaps I misrepresented you, but a dying man deserves charity, despite that his sins were vile.”

  Carla wept again before the icon. With love for the kindness of Mattias. With grief at her father’s passing. With desperate gratitude for Don Ignacio’s love, for in some small corner of her heart she’d never lost her belief in it. With sorrow for Orlandu and the pain of her own folly. She sensed a figure enter the side chapel behind her and she stopped her tears.

  It was La Valette.

  He knelt at the rail beside her and fell at once into deep devotions. He did not acknowledge her. He seemed almost in a trance. She thought of the burdens upon his conscience. His fears for the Maltese people. The men he dispatched daily across the harbor to their deaths. The mistakes—his own most of all—that must have dispatched even more. Carla looked up at the figure of Our Lady and asked Her what she should do. And Our Lady told her.

  After his labors of recent days Mattias was entitled to his rest and Carla waited until he awoke before seeking him out. He stayed in bed into the afternoon and she wondered if he’d taken a soporific. Or perhaps he was preoccupied with Amparo. The thought of them still caused waves of nausea, but for this she chastised herself and not them. When Mattias at last emerged he seemed low in spirits. They met alone in the refectory, where he ate his food without appetite. They talked of this and that, then he asked after her intentions concerning the future
.

  “My right place in the world is here,” she said.

  He took this with a grim glance across his coffee cup. The cup was tiny and beautiful and looked absurdly dainty in his walnut-knuckled fist. “Orlandu won’t be coming back,” he said. “At least not whole.”

  “My place is here whether I ever see Orlandu again or not.” She watched him attempt to contain a bleak frustration. He was not a man much given to dejection—indeed his resilience in the face of misfortune astounded her—and it hurt her to see him so dispirited. Especially on her part. She reached out her hand and touched the back of his. “You want me to leave the island and I understand why—”

  “That I doubt very much.” His voice was curt and she felt rebuffed. He added a rider. “You’ve never seen the Turks sack a town. You’d be raped for hours, perhaps days. Then, with luck, you would be butchered. Without luck, you’d be sold and shipped to a brothel in North Africa.”

  She flinched at the brutality of his language. “But it’s impossible to leave Malta.”

  “Have I lost your confidence?” he said.

  “Certainly that is impossible.” She smiled but he didn’t reciprocate. “No. God has granted me the vocation—the calling—that’s eluded me all my life. That’s why I must stay.”

  “We’re surrounded by the Called,” said Mattias. “They’re hacking each other to pieces as we speak.”

  “I will be doing no hacking,” she said. “I wish only to serve the people—those who suffer in the footsteps of Christ. I’ll accept whatever Providence ordains.”

  He turned away and flicked the grounds from his cup and refilled it from the copper ewer. Then he stared into his brew and avoided her eyes. She knew he thought her a fool, but for once she knew that she was not.

  “Mattias, please, hear me.” He looked at her. She continued. “You’ve done everything that any man could and much more. You’ve brought me on a great journey, you’ve been my guardian and guide. I was searching for my son and I lost him, yet again, but I’ve been given something else—something infinitely precious—that I didn’t expect to find.” She remembered their first conversation in the rose garden. She said, “Let us call it the Grace of God.”

  Mattias nodded. He said nothing.

  “If my quest to find Orlandu has led me to this knowledge—of my own soul, my own place in God’s heart and creation—then I will not count it a failure. And neither should you.”

  “And Amparo?” he said. “Must she stay and die with the fanatics?”

  “I am no fanatic.”

  “I speak of those who between them will reduce this city to dust.”

  “Amparo has always been free. I do not command her. She loves you, Mattias.” She hesitated. “I love you. I love you both.”

  Mattias flinched, as if this information only added to his burdens. He retreated once again into his coffee.

  “As to our bargain,” she continued, “I will gladly keep it if you wish. We could marry before you leave and draw up the papers. You would have your title.”

  He waved his hand. “We’re beyond such trifles now. And you deserve a better mate than me. Your commitment is to something noble. More than noble. Do you want my blessing?”

  “There’s nothing I would cherish more deeply.”

  He smiled his smile of old. “Then it’s yours, free and full,” he said. He stood up. “But there are matters I must ponder for myself.” He bowed, with the primitive gallantry that had touched her before. “Will you excuse me?”

  Carla stood up too. “Of course. In any case I must go to the infirmary.”

  He offered her his arm. “Then I’ll claim the honor of escorting you.”

  Carla put her hand on his arm and it felt good. She feared she’d never see him again. She still yearned for his love. And yet, she’d made her peace with herself. She could ask for no more.

  When she got to the infirmary, Lazaro told her that Angelu was dead.

  Tannhauser and Bors sat between the merlons on Sant’Angelo’s battlements like two idling boys, their feet dangling over the clear blue water a hundred feet and more far below. They shared a goatskin of wine and a crock of olives and watched the set of the sun behind Monte Sciberras. The ocher smoke of the siege guns lent the sundown an infernal glow. From the cavalier behind their grandstand the cannon spouted a salvo of iron and woe. Across the bay, Fort Saint Elmo seemed not much more than a heap of disintegrating boundary stones, yet in breach of every statute of probability, its blasted precincts teemed with unhinged defiance.

  “It’s a paradox,” said Tannhauser, “that men committed to dying should cling with such tenacity to life.”

  “Glory,” said Bors.

  He looked at Tannhauser and Tannhauser’s heart lurched with an unexpected sadness at the wild gray eyes and the gnarled Northern face.

  “All mortal chains broken, all moral debts waived,” continued Bors. “Not praise or honors or grand renown—but rapture, and a foreshadowing of the Divine. That is Glory.” He filled his throat with wine and swallowed and wiped his lips. “But you know that joy as well as I. Deny it if you will and I’ll call you a liar.”

  “Glory is a moment that can only be known in Hell.”

  “That’s as may be, yet what else in this world compares? Money? Fame? Power? The love of women?” He snorted. “A moment, yes, but having once seen its light, all else is gloom.”

  Tannhauser’s gloom was rooted in other causes. “Getting my hands on this boy is like trying to catch lice in someone else’s crotch. Unpleasant, frustrating, hazardous, and with no happy end in sight.”

  “The lice usually find you, though the boy came close.” Bors emptied another prodigious draught down his gullet and offered the skin to Tannhauser, who shook his head. “Are we for Calabria, then?” asked Bors. “And will the fair and tender ladies come with us?”

  “After praying to Our Lady of Philermo, Carla has decided that her place is here, in the Borgo. Divine Providence, the Grace of God, will guide her way henceforward. She will martyr herself to the sick, or some such nonsense.” He waved his hand. “Such was the gist.”

  “Well there’s no gainsaying Providence,” said Bors. “Do I recall it was a pound of opium that oiled her way through Lazaro’s door?”

  Tannhauser did not need this reminder. His motives for arranging that favor now seemed wholly unfathomable. “I asked her if Amparo was obliged to stay in this splendid theocracy.”

  “And?”

  “Amparo is free to do as she pleases.”

  “Surely these are glad tidings,” said Bors. “All are content, so it seems, and you can leave with conscience clear and a gaudy girl on your arm.”

  Tannhauser scowled. “If ever I were to hear the Voice of God, this would be a welcome moment.”

  “So you’re not content.”

  Tannhauser gazed across the bay. Saint Elmo had been scourged by marksmen and bludgeoned by cannonades since first light. Here and there, the rosy glint of the sunset reflected from helmets and pauldrons in the overclouding dust. Somewhere among the rubble, Orlandu di Borgo was getting his first taste of warfare; if he’d survived this long.

  “It doesn’t sit right with me to leave a thing unfinished,” Tannhauser said. “And most especially to be thwarted at the last.”

  “You’ve taken beatings before. The bruises will fade.”

  “The boy’s brain was stuffed with evil myths.”

  “We talked of weapons and such. Is that a crime?” Bors sniffed and raised the wineskin and lowered it again without drinking. “What else could we have discussed? The price of pepper?”

  “He’s a child. If he doesn’t die they’ll ship him back crippled. In either event he’ll never be the things he might have been. He’ll never do the things he might have done. He’ll never know the things he might have known.”

  “Such is life.” Bors raised the wineskin again and poured at length.

  “He’ll be robbed of his birthright before he’s had the chan
ce to collect it. As were you and I both.”

  “Us?” said Bors, almost choking. He wiped his lips. “Do we not walk tall?”

  “Only among apes.”

  “Surely this war is righteous, even if I might allow that others are not. We can’t have a crowd of greasy heathen forcing us to rub our faces in the dirt, while we spout their gibberish and bend our heads to Mecca. Look what they did to you.”

  Tannhauser said, “When you know that men can be trained like dogs to believe and do anything—anything at all—it makes you value your own counsel and be suspect of every other.”

  “Cheer up, man, and quit this dreary philosophizing. It will change nothing. Besides, you love killing. So do I. And a good thing too, for without killers there’d be no war and without war—” He stopped as his thought ran into the ground. “Well, there you are—without war we’d have nothing to talk about at all.”

  Tannhauser took the skin and rifled a drink. He stared at the sea between his feet. The thought of the drop made him dizzy. There were other falls just as sheer. Perhaps more sheer still. He looked up across the bay at Fort Saint Elmo.

  “So,” said Bors, who knew him all too well, “you’ve decided to go over to the cauldron and bring back the boy.”

  Tannhauser didn’t answer.

  Bors said, “If you want my opinion, that is the Voice of God.”

  “After dark, Mustafa plans to storm the breaches,” Tannhauser said. “A night attack by the Turk is something to behold.”

  “Then let me bring him back for you,” said Bors.

  Tannhauser laughed. “I’d never see either one of you again.”

  “You doubt my good faith?”

  “Never. But a madness rages out there which even at this close range cannot be imagined, and you’re too prone to catch it and rave. Even I fear its glamour.”