The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  Despite these efforts they would shortly face the gravest extremity of want. What water there was had to be preserved for the garrison. A diviner had been deployed and was digging holes all over both peninsulas. If he failed, La Valette explained, it would be necessary to expel a large section of the little people outside the walls, to fling themselves upon the mercies of the Turk. Since in this circumstance the risk of rebellion would be great, it was a decision he would take when left with no other choice. But he wanted the council, and them alone, to know that they might have to turn their weapons on the populace.

  No one protested. Admiral Pietro Del Monte, a sturdy, powerful man with a beaky nose and velvet eyes, sat through these exchanges in silence, casting the occasional glance at Ludovico. Like La Valette, Del Monte was a study in old age held at bay by a life of action. La Valette caught one of Del Monte’s glances and turned to Ludovico.

  “Fra Ludovico,” he said, “what is your reading of Garcia de Toledo’s intentions?”

  Ludovico paused, as if to gather his thoughts, then answered in the calm bass tones that he knew would elicit rapt attention. “At present no reinforcement of the size you dream of exists.” He spread his hands in an appeal to reason. “Bear in mind that the recruitment, transport, and disposition of such an army, in which tasks Toledo is vigorously engaged, will represent the largest Mediterranean adventure by a Christian power since his predecessor attempted the capture of Jerba.”

  He said this innocently as if, unlike every other at the table, he was unaware that La Valette had been one of the advocates of that luckless expedition. La Valette made no comment.

  Ludovico continued: “A fleet is gathering in Seville to bring four thousand troops, and men from every garrison in Italy are being dispatched with the greatest urgency. I understand that it will take some time to muster them. Weeks at least.”

  A murmur of dismay rippled about the table. La Valette stilled it with a hand.

  “You would be mistaken to read into this delay any sign of conspiracy,” said Ludovico. “As pledge of his good intentions, Toledo has sent his own son, Federico, to fight alongside us.”

  Federico had accompanied the relief; Ludovico had persuaded him in person to join the cause. The pressure on Toledo was now private as well as political. Nods of approval, vigorous from the Spaniards, grudging from the French, went around the table.

  “I can also assure you,” Ludovico went on, “that His Holiness Pope Pius is making every effort on our behalf.” He noted that his use of “us” and “our” passed without any demurrers. “The Holy Father has urged all right Italian gentlemen to join the Order’s colors, in particular, the Knights of Santo Stefano.”

  A number of contemptuous snorts were unsuccessfully stifled. The Order of Santo Stefano, crudely modeled on the Religion, had been established only four years ago by the Pope and his distant relative, Cosimo de’ Medici. In this company they were regarded, not altogether fairly, as a gang of bloated plutocrats barely able to climb aboard their horses.

  “Perhaps they can send us some paintings,” growled Del Monte.

  There was a round of welcome laughter and Ludovico smiled along with them. The moment was ripe to play the first of the several instruments with which he’d been equipped, before leaving Rome, by Pope Pius and Michele Ghisleri. From his lap he produced a leather satchel bearing the papal arms and handed it to La Valette, who recognized at once the round lead seal that signified an apostolic letter of the highest significance.

  “When the right moment comes,” said Ludovico, “His Holiness hopes that this will prove more formidable than cannon.”

  La Valette broke the lead seal to a breathless silence and removed the vellum within. The letter’s red wax bore the imprint of the Fisherman’s Ring. He broke this seal too and unfolded the letter. The council waited while he read it. La Valette, visibly moved, indeed too moved to comment, passed the document to Oliver Starkey, who sat at his right hand. Starkey scanned the Latin text and cleared his throat.

  “It is a bull, promulgated June eighth, which grants plenary indulgence of all sins to all Christians who fall in our war against the Moslems—brethren of the Order, soldiers, slaves, civilians, women. All.”

  Murmurs again circulated the table. The bull meant that every man, woman, and child who died in the battle for Malta was granted absolute remission of all temporal punishment for their sins, whatever the latter might be. For a people more than familiar with hardship, torture, and suffering of every kind, the knowledge that in the hereafter they’d spend not an hour enduring the rigorous toils of Purgatory—as opposed to the centuries that each expected as his lot—would have an effect on morale beyond all reckoning.

  “His Holiness in His wisdom spoke truer than we can know,” said La Valette. “This is worth five thousand men, though I trespass to put a price on it.”

  He turned his iron-gray eyes on Ludovico and Ludovico knew that whatever expectations the Grand Master had harbored of his mission to Rome, he had exceeded them.

  “At the right moment, as you say, this will restore faith and courage to the faintest heart.” La Valette stood up. “Let us each acknowledge that in helping to effect the relief, and in delivering at such hazard this precious Blessing from Our Holy Father in Rome, we owe Fra Ludovico a debt we’ll be hard-pressed to repay.”

  The other bailiffs rose and dipped their heads toward Ludovico. Ludovico stood and humbly returned their bows. He bowed to La Valette last. “Your Excellency,” he said, “I have not returned to Malta to conduct the affairs of the Vatican or of the Holy Office, but rather to fight. I have Our Holy Father’s special dispensation to do so.”

  Someone hammered the table in approval.

  La Valette said, “We’re honored that you should make such a spiritual sacrifice.”

  If irony was intended by this comment, no one but Ludovico seemed to hear it. He turned to the Admiral of the Fleet, and head of the Italian Langue, Pietro Del Monte. “I therefore beg your permission, Admiral, to be quartered with your soldiers and to serve in their ranks.”

  “With the soldiers?” Del Monte shook his head. “As a son of Naples, you are invited to berth with the knights at the Auberge of Italy, and most welcome.”

  After the council was adjourned Ludovico accompanied Del Monte to the Auberge of Italy. He declined the offer of a private cell, insisting instead on a strip of flagstone in one of the dormitories, where some hundred and forty Italian knights were berthed. He learned that more than thirty of their fellows had died at Saint Elmo. He was indifferent to luxury, and in the dormitories information would be plentiful. As Del Monte took his leave, Ludovico detained him for a moment and played his second card.

  He showed Del Monte a silver chain from which hung a silver cylinder, the size of a finger, and showed him the ingenious screw which secured the cap. The silver was engraved with the Cross and the Lamb of God, the Baptist’s symbols. The interior was padded with kidskin, which protected a slender crystal vial nestling within. The vial, on removal, was seen to contain a quantity of dark umber residue at the bottom.

  “I’m instructed to deliver this personal gift to you and the Langue of Italy from Cardinal Michele Ghisleri, who prays hourly for your safe deliverance and trusts that this sacred relic—duly attested by the most eminent and exalted authorities—may afford you protection and deliverance in the days to come.”

  Del Monte took the vial in his sea-weathered hand as if afraid his mildest touch would shatter the glass.

  Ludovico said, “It is a drop of the Blood of Saint John the Baptist.”

  Del Monte’s eyes filled and he fell to his knees and his hands shook as he pressed the vial of Holy Blood to his lips and prayed. Never was true devotion more sincerely embodied. The sight gave Ludovico satisfaction. Del Monte’s favor was certain and though the man didn’t know it—and never would—he already formed the foundation stone of Ludovico’s plan. These first steps in the intrigue had been neatly taken. Yet much else remained. For
emost was the task of establishing his fitness to join the Order.

  And that required battle.

  On the day following the arrival of the small relief force, Mustafa Pasha sent an envoy to sue for peace. The terms were identical to those that the Religion had accepted at the siege of Rhodes and were as generous as possible short of a Turkish withdrawal. If La Valette would surrender possession of the island at once, then he and all his knights were guaranteed a safe passage to Sicily, with their arms, relics, standards, and honor intact. The lives of the population would be spared and they would become the subjects of Suleiman Shah and as such enjoy his protection, including the freedom to worship any deity in any manner they chose. For any number of good reasons, any intelligent and peace-loving man would have grabbed this offer with both hands. La Valette listened with the appropriate courtesy. Then he ordered that the envoy be taken to the gallows at the Provençal Gate and hanged.

  PART III

  The Winnowing Winds

  Sunday, July 15, 1565

  Saint Michel—L’Isola—The Sacred Infirmary

  Ludovico stood on the bastion of Fort Saint Michel and listened to the unhallowed wail of the call to prayer. Devils in thrall to the rantings of a desert lunatic. By the standards of his own erudition he knew little of Islam, but more than enough to recognize a creed that was antithetical to higher reason and designed to excite and beguile the most primitive minds. As such it would no doubt continue to find a large constituency among the lower races. Yet as long as it could be contained to the barren lands in which it thrived, history would consign it to irrelevance—or at worst to the role of a shackle on the stride of mankind.

  Ludovico’s informers had told him everything that had taken place here in his absence. Mattias Tannhauser had died at Fort Saint Elmo. Tannhauser’s oafish confederate, Bors, was a dog to be left sleeping. The story of the boy that Tannhauser had tracked down, and who had also perished, had caused Ludovico anguish. More than he could have imagined. He’d fathered a son. Where he might have expected shame, he felt pride. Where indifference, a penetrating sadness. The boy was an abstraction, yet he stalked Ludovico’s mind. So did Carla. Ludovico had made no attempt to seek her out. He feared the power she wielded over his heart and thereby his will, and larger priorities loomed, not least this day. From a quarter-mile distant, in the pitch-dark shadows of Santa Margharita, came the clatter of gear and the rumble of footfalls by the thousand. The Red Beast of Islam was awake and eager for blood.

  Anacleto was beside him on the alure. Matchcords glowed along the ramparts, as if in clandestine observance of forbidden rites. Interspersed between the musketmen, the Knights of Saint John stood tenebrous and silent and grim, like the sentinels of some outpost in a land where entry was forbidden to all but the damned. Ludovico turned to watch the sunrise. Against the backdrop of the eastern sky, slashed with crimson cirri as if by knives, he saw a clutch of human silhouettes in the middle distance. There was a struggle. Then an emaciated figure was launched from the gallows on the foremost bastion of Provence.

  As if with that macabre spectacle something in the unseen enemy snapped, the darkness of the overlooking heights exploded with muzzle blasts and a hail of metal and stone lashed Saint Michel. A wedge of masonry and a cloud of rocky spicules swept a cluster of defenders into the yard. Fierce sounds buzzed in Ludovico’s ears, which, never having been shot at before, he belatedly understood to be Turkish bullets skirring by. In the rising light he watched a lone and terrified jackhare flee its violated den in the Ruins of Bormula. It scampered for the fortress as if its gates might swing open to offer sanctuary. Then hard on the jackhare’s dust and scarcely less swift, a bedlamite horde roared out from the purpled badlands, weapons and banners aloft, and baying like dogs in praise of their false god and his degenerate prophet.

  Chain shot, grape, and ball erupted from the bores of the Christian guns. Yet the swaths of execution that scourged the Moslem ranks failed to slow their progress by an inch. They charged for Saint Michel as if for the door to Paradise, great scaling ladders strung out between them, grapple ropes draped about their shoulders, and festooned with arms of every length and variety. To greet their arrival, cauldrons of simmering pig fat were manhandled to the machicolations. The Maltese porters spewed curses in their alien tongue, not only at the noxious fumes that scathed their eyes but at those bleeding and dismembered comrades who squirmed underfoot, and onto whose caterwauling flesh scalding gobbets of the sizzling brew now spilled. The clamorous babel and the brimstone vapors and the anguished throes of the afflicted soon swamped whole sections of the alure, as if Hell had overflowed through some warp in the fabric of Creation and here had its escapees at last found refuge. Ludovico was a scholar of power and fear. In this his first battle, he witnessed the apotheosis of their union.

  Mustafa Pasha’s war engine had labored toward this moment since the fall of Fort Saint Elmo. The vast architecture of siege guns and gabions had been dismantled piece by piece and hauled from the slopes of Monte Sciberras to those of Santa Margharita, Corradino, and San Salvatore. Trenches hacked in the sandstone by his pioneers wound through the Bormula toward the walls of L’Isola, and, beneath the ground, mines advanced toward the citadel’s foundations.

  Because the entrance to Grand Harbor was denied to his fleet by the batteries of Castel Sant’Angelo, Mustafa had built a highway of greased timbers across the back of Monte Sciberras itself. Then his blackamoor slaves spent three days under the lash and—in a feat which filled the watching knights with wonderment and dismay—they dragged scores of Piyale’s war galleys, one at a time, directly over the mountain from Marsamxett Harbor. As they loomed above the rimrock the ships squealed down the tortured planking like beasts goaded into a shambles. The ropes and chains that retarded their descent hummed from the monstrous strain, some snapping with lethal force to scythe the laborers. And as the massive boats teetered down the scarp toward the waters flanking L’Isola, their keels smoked black in the tallow and flickered with gouts of flame as the grease ignited, as if this were a convoy from Hades and its captains so impatient for cargo they’d come to take the living rather than the dead. Now eighty such vessels all told, and their deck cannon too, menaced the fortifications that lined the shore.

  From every point of the compass, from the high ground and the harbor and Gallows Point, the two Christian peninsulas, the Borgo and L’Isola both, were thus entirely enfiladed by Turkish artillery and for the last ten days had been bombarded from dawn till dusk. Scores of women and children in the overcrowded town had been battered to death. Dozens of homes had been destroyed. Now every Turkish gun pounded Saint Michel.

  Ludovico ignored the Turkish missiles and watched the carnage wreaked on the Moslem horde. He took his lead from Admiral Del Monte and Zanoguerra and Melchior De Robles, who observed the bouncing cannonballs, and the suffering strewn in their wake, with the grim sangfroid of pallbearers. Their bastion overlooked the harbor and Bormula both, and provided a panorama of the onslaught as it surged from land and sea. In the spearhead of the assault were the Algerians.

  Hassem, Viceroy of Algiers and victor of the sieges of Oran and Mersel-Kebir, had arrived the week before with five thousand gazi and the corsairs of El Louck Ali. Hassem led the attack from the heights of Margharita on Saint Michel’s landward walls. His lieutenant, Kandelissa, led seaborne troops from the shores of the Marsa to the west. The latter came in scores of foaming longboats, oars and weapons flashing in the rise of the sun and imams chanting surahs from the prows.

  The shore of L’Isola was defended by a palisade of stakes, lodged in the sea floor and linked by lengths of chain. The longboats rammed this barrier at maximum speed but the chains shrieked as the stakes keeled over and snarled the desperate vessels in a lethal web. The Christian arquebusiers on the overlooking walls raked the disembarking troops with volley after volley, yet the fanatics breasted the blood-swollen tide and plowed through abandoned oars and corpses with a calm Ludovico found astounding.
They dragged their ladders with them from the bullet-whipped spume and regrouped on the shore, and they interlocked their shields against the rain of shot and fire pipkins from above, and there on the beach the Star and Crescent was unfurled. Kandelissa rallied the faithful and a black flight of arrows arced through the dawn. On his word, and declaring God’s greatness, the Algerians began their escalade of L’Isola’s walls.

  Ludovico was dressed in half-armor down to the cuisses; his diamond-black carapace—a gift worth a baron’s ransom from Michele Ghisleri—was made by Filippo Negroli of Milan. It was so perfectly articulated that movement was hardly more difficult than in his robes. By his profession as a priest he was not allowed to shed blood, but Pope Pius had granted him a dispensation in foro interno to fight in this Crusade. Like a plague of gargantuan vermin the Algerians mastered the ditch and infested the walls. Boiling oil sluiced smoking down the murder holes and scalded the clamoring infidels seething below. Pipkins of wildfire bloomed and the smell of burning flesh rose to choke the besieged. As the sun climbed toward its zenith and draped the furnace plain in a shimmering veil, Algerian battle standards fluttered atop the walls and God ushered Ludovico to his moment of Truth.