The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  “Taste it,” he said. “It’s like a poem melting on your tongue.”

  The cheese was pungent and as good as promised. Her stomach stirred with a hunger she’d been unaware of. They ate.

  “When I left for Saint Elmo,” he said, “your complaint was that the world had little use for you. I return to find you all but a subject for balladry. And justly so.”

  Coming from him, the compliment touched her and she colored. She asked, “What have you accomplished since your return, aside from mischief?”

  “Little of merit, I admit,” he said. “My keenest ambition I haven’t advanced at all.”

  Carla said, “You’ve brought Amparo happiness.”

  Mattias coughed on a crumb of cheese. He recovered. “Well, as is commonly known, lovemaking is vital to good health and in my current state all cures are heartily welcomed.”

  Carla shifted. Her jealousy of Amparo, which she’d labored so hard to contain, flooded her stomach. At the same time, she felt her blood rise to her head. Her eyes roved over his hands, beautiful in their strength for all that they were damaged, and to his face, whose contours and crags she could have studied forever despite its being mantled of grime. She recalled her dream in the cot and was discomfited. She looked away.

  Mattias continued unabashed as he slathered oil from the crock of olives over his bread. “I’m reliably informed, on the authority of Petrus Grubenius, that abstention causes noxious humors to accumulate, especially in the spleen. It’s this that accounts for the ferocity of these knights, for instance, and the crabbiness and malignity of so many priests. Of its effects on women I’m less certain, but while the gentler sex are indeed a creation apart, I’d hazard that, in this respect, their natures are not far different from those of men.”

  “I wasn’t speaking of lovemaking”—he looked at her as if he knew this wasn’t quite true, but she pressed on—“but rather of love.”

  “The difference is often moot—for women, almost always, I should say. But you, as a woman, would know that better than me.”

  Carla was lost for a reply. She was sure he could see right through her fraudulent piety. She who in her dream had taken his cock into her mouth with such vivid bliss. The tension between her erotic and religious natures, both so potent, erased her thoughts. She stared at the cheese in her hands, for which she’d lost all appetite.

  “If I offend you,” he said, “it’s not my intention. But we sit bare inches from our deaths. If we can’t speak openly here, then you must tell me where we can.”

  The challenge and its logic lit her courage. “Do I appear crabby, ferocious, or malign?”

  He arched his brow. “Malign, never. Crabby? Once, perhaps, but not any longer. You now have a vocation and this too drains the stagnant humors, though, if I may say so, to a less efficacious degree.” He grinned, she realized, at the look on her face. “As to ferocity,” he went on, “well, that quality, as before, flows into that damnable viola da gamba of yours.”

  “Why damnable?”

  “Because twice it’s lured me into Hades and this time I can’t see my way out.”

  “Why did you abandon your Turkish friends? You were safe.”

  “As I just said, your siren song called me in the night.”

  “You also said we could speak openly, which I take to mean without fear. You say my music moved you, and I’m honored, but the music alone can’t stand as a reason or an end, much less as your keenest ambition.”

  “You have me there,” said Mattias. He considered her. She waited for him to confess an infatuation to match her own. He said, “My ambition remains to see you reunited with your son. All the more so since I now know him to be a most splendid boy and, I daresay, a good friend and comrade in arms.”

  He spoke from the heart and she was moved. And yet. She felt guilty that she felt more for the man than the boy. She envied the depth of his relationship with Orlandu, whom she yet barely knew. She swallowed these feelings, along with her disappointment, and said nothing.

  “This errand has proved more formidable than I imagined, to say the least,” he said. “And things look set to get knottier still, but obstinacy has its uses and I’m loath to yield to despair. As you know, Orlandu is safe with my patron, Abbas bin Murad, commander of the Yellow Banners and a man of rare kindness and wisdom. Sooner or later Orlandu will be taken to Stambouli, and there I’ll find him again—and a good deal more easily than I did here.” He waved a hand at bedlam. “The problem we face is how to escape this madness.”

  For a moment Carla was bewildered. The very idea had no meaning. “Escape?”

  “If I can find the means, will you come with me?”

  “Abandon Malta?”

  “Abandon, forsake, flee—as you will,” he said. “You, me, Amparo, Bors.”

  “And the others?”

  “The others are perfectly able to die without us, and they have the Pope’s promise of Heaven to give them solace.”

  He appeared quite serious. She said, “I can hardly believe I hear you say this.”

  “You’ve harnessed your fate to that of the Religion. More than that, your heart, your mind, perhaps even your soul. I understand. There’s comfort in belonging. And no mortar binds more strongly than the threat of death. But do not imagine there’s some higher principle at stake. This is just another scabby little war. It will end. A line will change on a map, or not. And then there will be other wars. And others still. And yet more after those. Men like Suleiman Shah and La Valette will fight such wars until the end of human time—it’s a craving inherent to the species—and they’ll never lack for disciples or reasons to do so. And I’ll admit there’s no finer sport. But now I have my eye on other pastimes. Will you join me? Or has the craving bitten you too?”

  “This is no sport to me, but rather an abomination. Yet to run away seems wrong.”

  “Your courage in the face of death begs no further proof. Perhaps it’s your courage to face life that’s yet to be tested.”

  “What if the Religion wins?”

  “Win?” He snorted. “Time renders all such victories null, without exception. Who cares now that Hannibal won at Cannae? Or Timur the Lame at Ankara? Or Alexander at Gaugamela? They’re all dust now, and their mighty empires too, and so it will be with the Ottomans and the Spanish, and all the others yet to come who’ll one day rise and one day just as surely fall. My notion of victory is to grow old and fat, to witness some things of beauty—perhaps even to bring some such into being—to eat some fine meals, to feel the wind on my face and the tender flesh of a lover in my hands.”

  “I have a duty to the sick. A sacred trust.”

  “Your boy means nothing to you, then.” Carla flinched at what she feared might hold some truth. “And Amparo and Bors and I can join the chaff in the ditch—we who came to Hell at your behest.”

  Confusion struck her dumb. She felt a burning shame. She avoided his eyes.

  He said, “I was fair set for Tripoli until I heard you play.”

  “Then why didn’t you leave us to our madness and go?”

  “Because I conceived the foolish notion that I love you.”

  She stared at him. Her heart pounded in her throat. He returned her gaze.

  “Bors tells me that, in war, love is not to be trusted. For war makes men mad, and love makes them madder still, and therefore to speak on such matters is folly, for we say things we may not mean. Even so.”

  He reached out his hand across the space between them and touched her cheek and she pushed her face against his palm and a shiver ran through her. He slid his fingers into her hair and she craned back her neck. She felt his breath on her face and looked at him. His eyes were fiery blue, even in the dim yellow light. Her mind swam, her body melted. With elation, with sorrow, with fear. With the specter of guilt. Her lips parted and she closed her eyes and he kissed her. His beard was rough on her skin. He smelled of powder smoke and sweat, and the sweat stirred the memory of her original longing for him,
in the garden on the hill. His lips shocked her with the delicacy of their touch. He sighed into her throat. His lips pressed harder. She wanted to throw herself against him, to hold him and be held, to slake her thirst, to fall and surrender and forget and vanish forever into his arms. But her limbs wouldn’t move and instead she lay cradled by his hand as if afloat on an ocean of bliss. His mouth pulled away, and his hand too, and she didn’t move and didn’t want to move, for she didn’t want it to be over.

  “You’re weeping,” he said.

  She opened her eyes and her hands flew to her cheeks in distraction. They were wet. She wiped them. She felt foolish. Her rapture was banished.

  Mattias leaned back on his stone. He was bone tired, yet seemed oppressed by something deeper than exhaustion. In the gun black masking his face his eyes appeared huge. He’d always seemed a man who knew his own mind at every moment, yet now she saw a confusion that pained him and which mirrored her own. He blinked and it was gone.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “Today I’ve slain many men whose names I’ll never know, and my brain is addled by gunfire and unjust blood.”

  He reached for the wineskin. A sense of panic fluttered in her belly. She didn’t want an apology. She wanted something so basic she couldn’t even name it. Bors was right. Love and war and madness. Havoc, pestilence, blood. Mothers and sons and men. The sexual hunger that tormented her even now with its revelations. She knew so much, she knew nothing. She blinked at the remnant tears that fogged her vision. The tears of bliss that Mattias had misconstrued. She snatched at his last phrase without thinking.

  “Unjust blood?” she said.

  The wrong phrase. A phrase cared nothing for. She felt the moment slipping from her grasp, the conversation, the kiss, his ardor, all sucked down the wind into the murderous night.

  Mattias shrugged, his eyes on the wine stopper in his hand, and she saw that he’d retreated into himself. “It’s rare to spill any other kind,” he said, “much though all hereabouts are convinced otherwise. Soldiers of Islam. Soldiers of Christ. Each are devils to the other, and Satan sniggers in his sleeve.”

  He offered the wineskin and she shook her head. He drank and wiped his mouth. She flinched, as if it were the kiss he was wiping away. As if the kiss had never existed. As if she’d dreamt it as she’d dreamt of so much else. But the beat of her heart was quickened still and the taste of him lingered on her lips. She didn’t want to talk about killing and war. She wanted to talk of love. She wanted to hear him talk of love. But she had no art in these matters. Her voice felt plugged in her throat and her shoulders were stiff. She’d retreated as much as he. And yet he had not, for retreat was not in his nature. He took a scarf from his sleeve and leaned over and wiped her face. The scarf was filthy and soaked in sweat, yet it felt exquisite.

  “Better by far to spill tears,” he said. He smiled to cheer her. He put the scarf away. “Petrus Grubenius speculated that tears are in fact blood from which the potency has been extracted by the membranes of the brain. He could not prove this, but it’s true that to the taste they are similar: saltier than urine, but not so salty as brine. He believed that weeping was most healthful—nature’s substitute for the bloodletting that surgeons foist upon us with such glee. And many will agree that weeping can restore a jaded spirit.”

  Carla smiled too, her panic banished by his warmth, and she was curious for he’d invoked the name before. “Tell me, who is Petrus Grubenius?”

  “Petrus was a physician, an astronomer, an alchemist, a philosopher of Natural Magick in as many of its infinite forms as he could study—cosmology, physic, the distillation of medicines and elixirs, the transmutation of metals, the design of ciphers, the secrets of lodestones and lenses.” He threw up his hands. “In short, a scholar of all that is Marvelous. Malice and anger were unknown to him, as was that fear of the Other that turns most of us into beasts. More than all that, he was a good friend to me. In him the Quintessence—whose mysteries were his grail—was embodied in its highest form.”

  His passion, and the sadness that shimmered beneath it, moved her.

  “Tell me more,” she said.

  “Well,” said Mattias, rubbing his palms, “the Greeks—of the lost age, before they became the sorry race we know now—identified four fundamental elements of the Universe. Fire, Earth, Water, and Air, as you know. Pythagoras recognized a fifth and higher essence—the Quintessence—which, he said, flew upward at Creation, and from which the stars themselves were formed, along with all other things, living or dead. It is the power not merely of life but of Being.”

  “I meant more about your friendship with Grubenius.”

  For a moment he was crestfallen, as if her interest in the mundane over the infinite were to be expected.

  She said, “I may seem coarse of mind, or perhaps too feminine, but you intrigue me far more than Pythagoras.”

  Mattias took a breath through his nostrils, as if the labor daunted him.

  “I’d not been long in the land of the Franks,” he said. “I fought for Alva against the French in Piedmont, and had just been mustered out. As I’d known little else since boyhood, I was just another soldier, waiting for another war. Petrus was already then an old man, of strange demeanor and habits, for he lived in solitude and cared little for appearances and manners. His ear holes and nostrils and brows were monstrous hairy, his hands were scurfy and blotched from his wondrous experiments, and an ailment of the hip bone caused him to hobble. I brushed away some bravi who were taunting him in the street and he took me to his home for supper. What he saw in me that night, I can’t say, but I went on to share his roof for two years. Years whose like I’ll never know again.”

  She saw that some alternative destiny had been torn from his grasp, but his regrets were swept aside by fond memories.

  “His workshop was a lode of hermetic arts. Every room in the house was crammed with lore, much of it written in his own hand, and scattered willy-nilly, for his mind was ever roving through pastures new. He enjoyed my curiosity, crude as it was, and since age had robbed him of dexterity, my basic skill as a metalsmith was of value. Thus I became his pupil and assistant.”

  At this Mattias glowed with a private pride. He took another draught of wine.

  “All this was well and good, but then Petrus found out that I was able to read Arabic script. Such excitement as he expressed I’ll never forget—you’d think he’d discovered the philosopher’s stone itself—for his wonder at Arab learning was unconfined. And it happened that he had in his library a rare tractate in their language, by Abu Musa Jabir, a sage of Baghdad, and whose secrets he’d never unlocked. In me he found his key. It was a strenuous labor, even so. Many were the words I didn’t recognize, but such was his genius with ciphers that Petrus would unearth meanings where I could not.” He looked at her. “Those were happy days. In Mondovì.”

  “What brought those days to an end?” asked Carla.

  Mattias pleated his brow. “There were rumors of the Lutheran heresy taking root in that town, and of Waldensians moving down from the high valleys—matters of which Petrus and I were contentedly ignorant. Michele Ghisleri, may his soul be cursed, sent the Roman Inquisition to investigate.”

  Carla suddenly felt ill.

  “The worms crawled out from the wood, as they will, and Petrus was summoned to appear before the tribunal. They accused him of practicing witchcraft and necromantic arts, and other crimes too vile to merit repetition. He refused to abandon his home, for it was all he knew, but with the eloquence that he owned in great abundance, he persuaded me to flee. To my shame, I did. I made a league before disgust prevailed and I turned back.”

  Carla watched his features darken further.

  “Night had fallen and I could see the glow of the flames from up the road. I thought the pyre was for Petrus and it was over, but his torment was to be more fiendish and prolonged. The fire was built from his library. Hundreds of books and manuscripts, a life’s work in the assemblage alone, for to acqui
re a single volume he’d travel a thousand miles—to Frankfurt, to Amsterdam, to Prague. Texts by Theophrastus, Trithemius of Sponheim, Ramon Llull, Albertus Magnus, Agrippa, Paracelsus, many more. The knowledge of two millennia turned to smoke. Worse still, Petrus’s own papers were tossed into the flames—a corpus without any peer, and of which no copy exists.”

  Mattias swallowed and his eyes gleamed liquid, though whether with fury or sadness she couldn’t tell.

  “A mob of those same bravi I have mentioned fed the fire, their faces shining with righteousness and evil. Petrus witnessed it all, seated backward on a donkey and stripped to the buff. And in that moment I believe he was already broken, for his mettle was delicate, like crystal, and despite all his wisdom, such swinish rage was quite beyond his ken.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment. Carla said, “What did you do?”

  “You’ve spoken to me of helplessness, and of the odium that attends it in one’s gut.”

  It seemed almost a question, and was the last bond in the world she expected to share with him. She knew how hard a confession it was to make, especially for him. She nodded.

  He said, “What did I do? Why, I stood and watched the bonfire among the crowd. And I did nothing.”

  His eyes were like slots, unreadable in the flicker of shadow and light. She felt chilled. She felt closer to him than ever.

  “Of burning and swinish rage I’d indulged my own share and much more. In Iran we torched whole cities, one after another, and undid monuments older than the Temple in Jerusalem. And it came to me, as I stood there, that I was closer in feather to these jeering bravi than I was to Petrus, and that the dream was over, and that the world is as it is and not as men like Petrus Grubenius would make it.”

  He passed a hand over his face and she almost reached out her own to take it as it fell; but he wasn’t finished.