The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  Orlandu hesitated, as if battling with a notion he knew to be foolish but which had plagued him with more tenacity than any other. Finally, he blurted, “You are not my father.”

  Tannhauser smiled, and again he was moved. “No, I’m not, though I’d be more than proud to be so. However, if luck is with us, it’s possible that a variant on such a relation may come to pass.”

  This was too oblique for the boy, and Tannhauser didn’t elaborate.

  “Why, then, is he not proud to be so?”

  “Who?”

  “My father.”

  “He doesn’t know you exist, at least in my understanding. Your mother never told him, to protect his honor.” Tannhauser saw other unasked questions in his eyes and added, “Do not think ill of Lady Carla for abandoning you. It was not her wish to do so. Powerful men robbed her of any choice in the matter, and treated her most cruelly, when she wasn’t much older than you.”

  Orlandu took this in gravely, and nodded.

  “Your mother has traveled very far and risked many perils to find you again. I know you’re always present in her heart.”

  Orlandu blinked twice and Tannhauser wondered if this was the moment to persuade him to leave. He’d been a fool, looking back, not to educate the boy sooner. If he had, they might not be sitting here now but rather running up the sail on his boat. But that milk was spilled and here was indeed where they sat. Let the boy come to the notion of leaving by himself.

  He said, “Noble or blacksmith, each must work out his own destiny as best he can.” He stood up. “Speaking of which, I’ve a deal of work to do here. If you’re willing, I could use a good hand.”

  They spent the day planishing divots and freeing seized joints and for each it was as happy a day as he could remember. At sundown Orlandu went to the chapel to hear Mass and take Communion and to give thanks for the knowledge of his origins. Tannhauser finished his repairs to a twisted couter and vambrace. He drank some brandy and fell into a doze on a palliasse on the floor. He awoke from oblivion by the fading light of the forge and he thought himself quite lost in an erotic dream: for Amparo stood in the shadows looking down on him.

  He climbed to his feet, making, he hoped, a good fist of hiding the aches and pains that wracked his joints. When he turned he expected the apparition to have vanished in the air. But he looked at her again and it had not.

  Amparo was wrapped in a ragged crimson war coat emblazoned with a cross. Her hair was plastered to her skull and dripped with water. It was the water that made him realize this was no dream and that she stood there in the flesh. Her slender arms and muscular calves were bare, her feet were coated in wet dust. The baggy linen surcoat adhered to the peaks of her breasts and he knew that beneath it she was nude. He was at once aroused. The slit between the coat’s shoulders revealed pale white collarbones and a long, tanned neck. Her eyes shone in the glow of the embers and her face was as enraptured as a mystic’s. He wondered how long she’d stood there watching him sleep.

  He glanced about the forge. They were alone. He looked down into her face and questions either pointless or to which he knew the answer slipped through his mind unvoiced. You swam the bay? Who brought you here to the forge? Why did you come? She was here. He searched for the anger to scold her, for two dependents in Hell he did not need, but found only gladness. He slipped his right hand through the surcoat’s open flank and took her by the waist.

  Her skin was cool and smooth, barely dry. The muscles against his thumb below her ribs were taut. His left hand brushed damp locks from her cheek and stroked her scalp and cradled the back of her skull in his palm. Emotion so intense that it caused him pain welled up in his chest. She was no dependent but an Angel come to give him the strength to endure. The touch of her—the existence of her—was so gentle, so lovely, so utterly other than all else that stood around him, that his senses were overwhelmed and his limbs trembled beneath him and he thought for a moment he might fall. Amparo threw her arms around him.

  “Lean on me,” she said.

  He rallied and smiled and pulled her closer. He said, “Amparo.”

  Her lips parted and he bent his face to hers and kissed her and pulled her against him closer still, as if he’d squeeze her body inside his own, if he could. He felt her fingers digging through his shirt as if she felt the same, and he felt the bristling of his beard against her skin, and his palm against the small of her back, and his member pressing hard against her belly. She lifted one knee and wrapped her leg about his thigh and pushed herself against him with a passion both artless and exuberant.

  He took his lips from hers and looked at her again. She was immaculate. She was, in all things, true. He slid his hands onto her breasts, moisture lingering in the creases beneath them, and his memory of their magnificence was shamed by the beauty they embodied now. Love and desire became one, each as overmastering as the other, and he pulled the red surcoat over her head and sucked her nipples and stroked her swollen vulva until she trembled and clung on to him and mewled with pleasure in his ear. He turned her about, her eyes bedazed and rolling with transport, and he bent her across the cold steel face of the anvil. He unfastened his flies and unlimbered himself and she rose up on tiptoe to receive him. He bent his knees to get beneath her and entered her from behind and her feet left the floor and she called out to God and convulsed with each slow stroke, her head thrown back and her eyelids aflutter, and her cries filled the forge until she squeezed him from inside and he exploded to a prayer of his own within her body. They fell to the surcoat on the ground and Tannhauser held her in his arms and he stroked her hair while her body was racked by sobs.

  He didn’t ask her why she wept for he doubted she had an answer. When she quieted, he rose and stoked the firepot bright and stripped off his clothes and made love to her again on the crimson war coat spread across the ground. She gave herself to him like some creature wild and untamed and so did he give of himself and neither one spoke, for this cradle of insanity and horror had been made by men and words, words perverted from the very lips of Gods, and so here were all words lies and they did not need them.

  He amused her with small acts of tomfoolery and they laughed, and they slathered in his sweat and pawed at each other’s skin with the wonder of simpletons. He toasted heels of bread and sugar on the coals and they ate, and he brewed tea in an old helmet and they drank. She explored the tattoos on his arms and legs with her lips. The eight-spoked wheel, the Zulfikar sword, the crescent moons and sacred verses. She sang him a song in some dialect he didn’t understand but whose sentiment he did. He recited erotic gazels in Turkish while he aroused her. They made love again and when they were done they lay sated on the palliasse and watched the red light from the coals grow dim.

  At last he sensed people moving in the yard and went naked to the door to peer outside. Armored monks were clanking across the bailey toward the chapel and their predawn prayers. There were few who did not limp and many leaned on pike shafts or comrades for support. The night was almost over and its spell would soon be broken, and for all that it had seemed an eternity, it was now revealed as an instant, and like a conjuror in a carnival show Time had worked its paradox once again.

  He went back into the forge and dressed and wrapped Amparo in the surcoat. He picked her up and she cupped her hands around his face and he carried her out beneath the stars and across the wasteland. As he walked he felt as if he held in his arms a being from another world, where violence had no purchase and all living things were kind, and it seemed to him that she weighed no more than the breeze. He took her through the postern and down the steep stair hacked in the rock to the quay. He kissed her and he looked at her and he didn’t want to let her go. But go she must, and before the dawn and the Turkish guns made the journey too hazardous. He set her down on the capstones and she made no fuss.

  “I’m watching over you,” she said. “Did you know?”

  He said, “I’ve felt your breath on my cheek a time or two.”

  Sh
e stroked his face, his beard, his lips, her eyes liquid and dark.

  She said, “I love you.”

  His throat tightened. He didn’t reply and didn’t know why. He didn’t know how to. Amparo pulled the war coat from her shoulders and she dropped it to the quay. For a moment she stood before him, nude and pale as ivory. He kissed her again and released her. Then she turned and dived into the water and foamed away and Tannhauser wished he’d said more.

  From the chapel came the sound of singing and from the mountain came the muezzin’s call and in the east the indigo paled over San Salvatore. Thus the world turned, though Tannhauser did not. He stood and gazed across the bay until Amparo’s fragile figure had long been swallowed up by the last of night.

  Friday, June 22, 1565

  Saint Elmo—Sant’Angelo—The Bailey

  The violent circus of murder and prayer recommenced at first light and raged throughout another broiling day. The Turks wallowed through a moat of corrupting bodies and spilled viscera, their feet puncturing distended bellies that sometimes exploded into flame from the vapors therein. As the sun crawled past its meridian, griddle-hot armor sizzled and smoked with sprayed gore and men collapsed for want of air in the fetor and their brains boiled inside their skulls and they spasmed and died, and if the Devil was looking on he must have rubbed his hands, for even in his own demesne there could be no spectacle more demoniac than this.

  Tannhauser wished for the fort’s final hour to come, for with it—according to his plan—would come his only chance of survival. Yet each time the line of defenders wavered or was breached, and the crazed escalade of the Turks seemed about to overwhelm them, some madman would rally—Lanfreducci, Guaras, or, time and again, Le Mas—and in a delirium of butchery that would spread like a contagion, the Christians would drive the slithering invaders backward into the ditch.

  Tannhauser plied his rifle from the alure, cursing God, cursing them all, cursing the recalcitrant boy at his heels. He kept Orlandu alive. He fought vertiginous waves of lunacy of his own, when the urge to plunge in would importune him and reason itself seemed insane and death the only logic to be embraced. The hallowed music of self-sacrifice rang in his ears, with its promise of eternal renown and a swift release from sorrow; but he’d heard it before and the tune was false and its notes were the screams of the dying.

  “Keep your head down, boy,” he roared.

  He grabbed Orlandu by the throat and hauled him to cover. In the storm of unhinged courage, the fear in the boy’s rolling eyes was a beacon to steer by. He let go and squeezed the bewildered youth by the arm. “We will see this day through, do you hear me?”

  Orlandu nodded. At that moment Tannhauser was down on one knee, his rifle canted on his thigh. A vicious blow took him in the side and spun him around and almost pitched him over the alure. He teetered over a drop of forty feet onto jagged rubble. Orlandu grabbed the arm that squeezed him and held his master fast. Tannhauser righted himself and shuffled behind the protection of the merlon and explored himself with his fingers.

  He’d taken numerous hits on his fluted cuirass, and a couple more to his helmet, without sustaining anything worse than bruises. This ball had caught his left hipbone below the plating’s edge and had plowed on into the muscle of his lower back. He could feel the hard lump of lead beneath the skin. It hadn’t gone deep into his organs and wouldn’t kill him soon. Putrefaction, however, though slower, was as sure a way to go. From his pouch he took a damp rag in which he’d wrapped pellets of comfrey and featherfew. He chewed one briefly and inserted the cud into the hole. The bleeding stopped and on reflection, he didn’t feel too poorly. Orlandu stared at him with anguish. Tannhauser mustered a grin.

  “That’s twice you’ve saved me, boy. Now fetch me some water, for I’m parched.”

  On the roof of Castel Sant’Angelo, Oliver Starkey and La Valette watched the sun go down behind a veil of vermilion fog. Many of the senior knights stood with them, murmuring Pater nosters and the Little Office. Over on the headland, Saint Elmo sat in a blazing round of fire. From time to time the smoke lifted to reveal the scaling ladders raked against the walls, and the colorful teeming of the Moslem horde, and incendiary liquids cascading down the blackened sandstone, and the bright flash of armor along the battlements and breach. At times the fight appeared to rage in silence. At others, bedlamite gusts of noise would carry across the bay. Above the inferno of violence the banner of Saint John still fluttered, tattered but unvanquished above the flames.

  The Turks had been sure that it would take no more than a week to conquer the star-shaped fort. Even La Valette had not expected his boast of three weeks to be fulfilled. Yet, for the valiant of Saint Elmo, this grim Friday was the thirtieth day of defiance.

  Starkey looked at La Valette. The old man remained tireless, even when Starkey stood swaying on his feet, and he nightly sacrificed an hour of sleep to pray to Our Lady of Philermo. His labors were prodigious. He’d supervised the design and construction of the new inner walls almost brick by brick. He’d completed yet another audit of the stockpiles of food and wine in the caverns beneath the town. He’d then repeated his calculations and repeated them again, and on that basis had doubled the rations of the slave battalions, from whose limbs he would now squeeze an extra two hours’ labor every day. He’d ordered mass graves to be dug over on L’Isola and covered them with wicker wattles to prevent alarm. He made daily tours, randomly timed, of the infirmary, the bastions of the various langues, the gun batteries, the markets and armories. His dour, masculine charisma gave people wherever he went the strength to endure. His religious demeanor bolstered and nourished their fidelity, for he was the Defender of the Faith made flesh. In his weather-beaten face, which evermore looked cast from bronze, they saw an absolute absence of self-doubt and a perfect absence of pity. The daily hangings of the Moslem prisoners of war reminded them that much as they feared the Turk, they should fear the Grand Master more.

  As he watched his brethren dying across the water, La Valette appeared as serene as a portrait of Jerome. He knew that even the epic of Saint Elmo was but a prelude to the greater fight to come—for L’Isola and the Borgo. Yet this was one moment when Starkey found La Valette’s composure unsettling. Almost inhuman.

  Starkey said, “The Greek poets used the word ekpyrosis to describe their heroes. Achilles, Diomedes, Ajax. It means, ‘to be consumed by fire.’”

  “Our heroes are not consumed yet,” said La Valette. “Listen.”

  Turkish horns wailed forth from Monte Sciberras, heavy as the breast of anguish in the crimson gloaming. The watchers held their breath. Then, from the embattled walls across the water came a ragged cheer. Starkey could hardly believe it.

  “Was that a huzzah?” he said.

  The cheer was raised again from the smoking ramparts. The voices of the doomed brethren pierced the heart of every man there standing on Sant’Angelo’s lofty alure. Some burst into tears and felt no shame. As the Turks withdrew up the hill, La Valette turned to Starkey, and Starkey saw that he had been unkind, for the eyes of the old man too were filmed with tears.

  La Valette said, “Even the Ancients knew not such men as these.”

  To advance his climactic stratagem, Tannhauser buried his last five pounds of opium, along with his Russian gold ring, under a stone in the floor of the forge. He extinguished all signs of the disturbance with ashes and straw. In the less secure hiding place of the splintered timber vaulting of the solar, he’d earlier concealed his wheel-lock rifle and its key, along with powder and ball. He took the last bottle of brandy from his knapsack and walked out into the bailey, favoring the wound in his hip. The Turkish lead was still in him, but as hundreds of horribly wounded carpeted the stones outside the chapel, he felt in no position to beard the surgeons. In any case, the untreated wound might yet prove useful to his escape.

  In the middle of the open ground a bonfire blazed, wherein the knights burned everything that might be valued by the Turks. Food, lumber, furniture, t
apestries, wildfire hoops, pike staves, arquebuses, even those sacred icons and paraphernalia that might be desecrated by the fiends. There was no surer sign that Saint Elmo was facing its end. The chapel bell tolled and the flames were sucked up into the darkness. A strange sense of peace reigned over the night.

  Orlandu sought him out by the bonfire’s light. He was naked but for his breeches, and his scrawny body and dirty face and wide dark eyes made him look even younger than his years. Around his neck by a cord hung a cylinder sealed with oilcloth and wax. This latter Tannhauser was gratified to see. It contained a letter to Oliver Starkey, in his own hand, detailing certain observations on the state of Mustafa’s forces and the number and size of his siege guns and, in anticipation of Orlandu’s desire to return to Saint Elmo, a request that under no circumstance was the boy to be allowed to do so. He also asked that Starkey do what he could to ensure the comfort and safety of the women.

  “I have a commission from Colonel Le Mas,” announced Orlandu.

  “A great honor,” said Tannhauser. “Tell me more.”

  “I’m to deliver these dispatches to La Valette and tell him what has taken place here.”

  “I hope you’ll include the saga of my own brave doings.”

  “Oh yes. You’ll be mourned as much as any other hero. Probably more.”

  Tannhauser laughed. “Do not bury me yet, my friend. Tell La Valette that the fox plans to run with the hounds.”

  “What does this mean?”

  “He will know.” He held out his hand and Orlandu shook it. “Mind the Turkish marksmen on the shore. Swim underwater until—”

  “I know how to swim.”

  “So you do. Bear north a quarter of a mile before you turn.”

  “I know the way too.”

  “Tell Bors and Lady Carla to endure until I see them again—and don’t let them think I mean in the hereafter. Tell Amparo she is in my heart.”