Tim Willocks

by Tim Willocks

  “It is you,” said Abbas bin Murad.

  “Father,” Tannhauser mumbled.

  He stood again and spiraled toward the ground and was captured by Abbas’s arms. He heard Abbas give commands. He tried to speak but failed and strong hands lifted him into a saddle. He held on with his thighs. He craned his head, searching for Abbas. Instead of Abbas he saw something else, indistinctly, as if in a dream. He saw a gang of Algerians emerge from the postern to the wharf. One of them held a rope. The end of the rope was tied around Orlandu’s neck. Tannhauser stared, then pointed, wheeling his head to find his savior.

  Abbas appeared, mounted, beside him, a steadying hand extended to his shoulder. “You’re sick,” said Abbas. His expression was grave. “You will come with me.”

  “The boy,” said Tannhauser. “There.”

  Abbas ignored these ravings and ordered two of his men to take him to his tent. Tannhauser twisted in the saddle and looked about. Contrary to his hopes, Orlandu was no product of the opium or the fever either one. There the boy stood, blood in his eye, and leashed like a dog by corsairs. Tannhauser pointed again and almost fell from the saddle. Abbas grabbed his arm. Tannhauser groped the mist of his pyrexia for a stratagem that might work. He didn’t find one. The mist thickened and his vision turned red. He grabbed at the horse’s mane.

  He said, “I was thirsty and the boy gave me water.”

  Then the sun went out and all turned black and empty.

  The Feast of Saint John the Baptist: Sunday, June 24, 1565

  Castel Sant’Angelo—Auberge of England

  Oliver Starkey prayed for La Valette and for his own contaminate soul. The reason lay in the clotted and hairy heap piled up by Sant’Angelo’s cavalier. Even as he prayed yet more severed heads—human heads—were tipped from bulging sacks onto the roof like the crop of an obscene harvest. The lips of the slain were blue and drawn back from the teeth in rictal agony. The whites of sightless eyes bulged dry and lusterless in the sun. With dire jests and a debate over the most suitable charge of powder, the gunners grabbed the sundered heads by their beards and proceeded to cram them four and five at a time down the muzzles of the cannon. There were dozens of them, dozens of heads, more than Starkey could bring himself to count, and he wondered what penitent impulse it was that forced him to bear witness to this crime. Surely one, at least, who considered it so should be here; for just as surely, Jesus wept in witness too.

  Dawn had seen four wooden boards washed up on L’Isola’s shores. No one knew how many more had been washed out to sea. Crucified to each board was the nude and headless corpse of a knight of the Order. A cross had been hacked into the flesh of each pallid breast. Lamentation flourished and, too, a poisonous hatred for the Turk. La Valette received this news as he emerged from daybreak Mass. On seeing the mutilated corpses, tears of rage and grief had filmed his eyes. Deaf to Starkey’s counsel, he’d ordered every Turkish prisoner captured since the siege began to be hauled out from the dungeons and decapitated.

  “All of them?” said Starkey.

  La Valette said, “Let judgment be administered by the people.”

  This decree was made public and the Maltese rose to the call. The prisoners were dragged to the beach and there, with the zeal of the Devil’s own, the executioners swung their swords through hair and bone. Shackled Turks calling out to Allah were cursed to Hell’s hottest reach as they were slain. Some fled, clanking, for the sea and were butchered in the surf like ravined game. Those who refused to kneel were hacked through the ankles and trodden down and beheaded with their faces in the sand. Stoical courage and pleas for mercy alike were met with scorn, for these were not men but Moslems, and this was the work of the Lord, and none among the killers doubted that God would smile on his work.

  By the time all the cries were silenced, and the most tenacious sinews severed, and the corpses cast on the tide and the heads gathered up by their dripping locks and bagged, an immense burgundy stain befouled the strand and Starkey could not shake the sense that his soul was no less tainted.

  The battery on Sant’Angelo’s cavalier now belched behind him. A shower of smoking skulls, some flaming from the scalp and beard, exploded from the muzzles and arced across the bay toward the Turkish lines. Jeers of malice went with them. If Mustafa would dabble in atrocity, then let him take a lesson from masters of the trade. La Valette showed no further emotion. As Starkey watched the gunners swab the barrels, and the loaders grabbed more heads from the ghastly pile, he said, in Latin, “And many shall rejoice in his birthday.”

  La Valette looked at him.

  Starkey faltered under the gaze. He added, “So said the Archangel Gabriel of John the Baptist.”

  La Valette said, “Many shall rejoice in the death of every Moslem on this island.”

  From there, La Valette went down to the main piazza with his entourage and issued a proclamation to the throng, which declared that every Turkish captive from now on—once the torturers had done their work—would be surrendered to the people, without quarter, to be torn apart as they saw fit. Starkey watched as the populace cheered him to the echo and chanted his name and praised God. Then Starkey walked away. By an appeal to shocking savagery, a defeat had been transformed into some kind of victory. Though a victory over what, Starkey did not dare wonder. La Valette alone knew how to give them a chance to survive, Starkey didn’t doubt it. But he thanked his Lord Jesus Christ that his own duty was to follow and not to lead.

  Carla saw the barrage and thought the projectiles were incendiaries. On learning that the flying objects were burning human heads, a spectacle that in the normal course of her life she would have found impossible to believe, she discovered that she was disgusted but not surprised.

  Cruelty and the grotesque were the normal course of life now. If she was troubled by this realization, it was because she’d never felt more fulfilled. War had condensed her universe to caring for other people and life had never had more meaning. It was not a meaning she could put into words. She was freed from absorption in her own small miseries and concerns. She knew, at last, that living was precious, rather than something to be endured. Anger and horror were futile; so too were victory or defeat. In a world of hatred and woe, she resolved to feel neither. Thy will be done. Jesus was in her heart and He loved her. This was all she needed to know.

  She saw the monstrous barrage as she made her way from the infirmary to the auberge. Father Lazaro had lent her tweezers and a scalpel to remove the sutures from Bors’s face. She met the latter in the street, into which he had blundered on hearing the news of the display. He was gratified to see a second volley—indeed, he let loose a halloo of joy—and for fear of missing a third insisted on fetching a chair so that she could perform her task outside. Since the light there was much better and the task fine, Carla didn’t object.

  The sutures were buried in a thick scab that bisected Bors’s face in a crusty brown diagonal. The symmetry that the surgeon had restored to his features was remarkable, and by his own account Bors would not swap the scar for a ruby ring. By paring the scab back she was able to cut the sheep-gut threads, but to pull them out required more strength than she was happy to use. After a number of ineffectual tugs, Bors said, “Heave away.” She did so and the first stitch slipped free. Bors barely flinched.

  “Five Maltese swimmers escaped from Saint Elmo yesterday,” he said. “They witnessed the final moments.”

  Carla tackled the second stitch. Her hopes for Mattias and Orlandu, like her guilt that they’d met their end through her dereliction, were stored in a deep place in her heart that she’d chosen, for the present, not to visit.

  “I have spoken with three of them,” continued Bors, a little aggrieved that she hadn’t shown more curiosity. “No one has any news of Mattias or your boy. Yet none saw either of them die.”

  “Then there is hope,” she allowed. “And we must pray that they have endured.”

  “If any man alive could intrigue his way out of that bloodbath, i
t’s Mattias. The man is a fox. But the girl has taken it hard,” said Bors.

  Carla nodded. Amparo’s moods were storm-tossed. In some ways she’d reverted to the wild and violated creature Carla found in the forest—withdrawn, mercurial, lost to God. Carla had persuaded Father Lazaro to let Amparo work in his physic garden. She hoped she could persuade Amparo to do so.

  “Did you know she went to visit him?” said Bors. “Ouch.”

  A trickle of blood ran down his cheek as Carla let slip the knife. She said, “Amparo went to Saint Elmo?”

  “Swam across the bay in the night—without a stitch on,” said Bors. “And I’ll admit, that of all the wondrous events I’ve seen since I got here, that was the most agreeable.”

  Carla imagined Mattias and Amparo making love. Her stomach lurched, despite her higher intentions. As if to further feed the snake of jealousy, her pelvis contracted with desire and she felt her cheeks burn red. She wasn’t as full of God’s Grace as she liked to think, then. She tried to bite her tongue, but failed.

  “You didn’t stop her?” she said.

  Bors looked at her. He was a man who wasn’t ashamed to enjoy the sight of burning heads flying through the sky. To ask such a man a question was to ask for truth in its bluntest form. She wondered if the redness she felt on her cheeks was visible.

  Bors said, “Such news is hard for you to bear. I understand. But the chances remain excellent, and improve by the day, that we’re all going to die on this rock. Who, then, would be so mean of spirit as to stand in the way of so fine and unlikely a romance?”

  “I haven’t stood in its way,” said Carla.

  Bors smiled, with great warmth. “And it does you credit. For what it’s worth, Mattias is mightily torn between the two of you lovelies. So, the game is not over.”

  The anxieties, the anguish—the hopes—that she thought she’d banished returned in an instant. She didn’t want to compete with Amparo. She wouldn’t. Yet. She wanted Mattias.

  “Do you truly believe he’s still alive?” she said.

  “Though I’d be making the wager alone,” said Bors, “I’d lay money on it.”

  The guns on the castle boomed and Bors leapt to his feet to watch the skulls smoke by. He shook his head in admiration, then settled back into the chair and picked up his thread.

  “Mind you,” he said, “there is a darker side to that coin. If Mattias and your boy are still alive, they’re in the hands of Moslem fiends.”

  Thursday, July 5, 1565

  The Waterfront—The Kalkara Gate—The Venerable Council

  Amparo slept on the waterfront beneath the stars. The sound of the sea soothed her. It lulled her into dreams of Tannhauser’s forge and of his hands and lips on her body and of his breath on her cheek and his moans in her ear, as did too the balmy heat of the night and the cold of stone on which she lay.

  During the days she tended Father Lazaro’s physic garden and found a patch where the wild roses grew. Their buds were mashed with sage flowers, myrtle, and horehound in one of his many ingenious salves. She otherwise avoided human society as much as she could. She spent many hours grooming Buraq and she rode him bareback around the paddock and soothed his fears when the cannon crashed. These days most of her conversation was with Tannhauser’s golden horse, and she could not have wished for a gentler or lovelier companion.

  The movement of the Turkish guns to the Corradino Heights, the impending attack on the Borgo and L’Isola, the litany of death and suffering, the tales of valor endlessly repeated, the intrigues of the knights, the faithlessness of the viceroy, the fathomless evil of the Turks—none of these things concerned her. People imagined these things mattered and, more astounding to her yet, that their talking about them mattered too, and might even change them. She found their chatter dreary, their recitation of woes without purpose, and their ponderous attempts to involve her in their lives a drain on her energy and spirit. The price of their company was high. It made no sense to pay for what she didn’t want. People sucked her dry. She was happy to stand outside their realm. Her own interior, her communion with wild rosebuds, Buraq’s affection and beauty, all these were far more compelling and gave her strength. Yet others viewed her solitude as a malady, as if they had not troubles enough of their own to attend. So Amparo remained aloof and without regrets. It had always been thus. Let them think her a dolt, as long as they left her alone.

  She awoke to the sound of oars and sat up. A mist the color of milk lay over the water, lit as if from within by the waxing moon. She watched longboats glide through the vapor one by one and head into Kalkara Creek. A dozen at least and all of them empty but for skeleton crews of rowers. They slid through the nebulous dark with a quiet urgency, the disembodied oarsmen faceless and mute, like traffickers in emptiness ferrying no one into nowhere. Then the last boat rounded the point and melted into the mist and all trace of their passing was gone.

  Gone leaving no more of an imprint than she would leave on this world, she thought, and the thought brought her comfort. Only in worlds other than this one did things last forever. Her night with Tannhauser belonged to such a world. It was and then it was not and yet would always be. Only moments of beauty enjoyed immortality. Everything else combined—all the grand vanities for which so many labored and died—could claim not even the magic of a daydream. She lay back down on the rock, the boats forgotten. She stared at the teeming firmament. Would the stars in their courses also one day disappear? She’d ask Tannhauser, when next they met, for despite bleak prospects, she knew that they would. Somehow. Somewhere.

  Bors had volunteered for the night watch at Kalkara Gate. Since the contessa’s pitiless scolding for his—admittedly excess—indulgence, he’d forgone the succor of opium and sleep had since deserted him entire. Even brandy by the bottle proved poor surrogate. And it went to show that if virtue was rarely its own reward, it was sometimes the source of others’, for if he’d been lying besotted in his bed, he’d have missed the latest turn in this remarkable tale.

  A hot, wet wind had blown a mist in from Tunisia and the first he knew of the excitement was a convoy of sparsely manned longboats which threaded their way down the creek and suddenly swung for the opposite shore, which was only six hundred feet distant across Kalkara Bay, but shrouded in fog.

  Next, a party carrying torches marched through the streets and at their head walked La Valette. Bors checked the match on his musket and blew the coal bright. The sally gate below creaked open and he watched the party exit and head to the shore. Starkey, Romegas, Del Monte, and bailiffs galore. As if the Pope himself were expected any moment.

  Then the longboats loomed through the mist and as if returning from some kindred netherworld beyond the veil of this one, they proved full to the gunnels with armed and armored men. Hundreds of them. As each phantom band disembarked, their boat turned back across the creek and returned with yet more men and their baggage. The fresh troops poured into the Borgo through the Kalkara Gate.

  Bors slipped down the steps and bearded one of the new men passing by. An extremeño called Gomez. Four galleys sent by Garcia de Toledo had sailed down from Messina and some days before had disembarked this precious relief, under Melchior De Robles, on the northwest coast of Malta. They’d laid up in Mdina and sent a messenger to La Valette, and on the happy chance of the summer fog had marched beneath its cover for the Borgo, skirting south of the Turkish camp and crossing the slopes of Monte San Salvatore to the farside bank of Kalkara Bay. Daring fellows all, they were forty-two Knights of the Order, twenty Italian “gentleman adventurers,” plus three Germans and two English of similar ilk, fifty seasoned artillerymen, and six hundred Spanish Imperial Infantry. It was hardly the twenty thousand they’d been hoping for, but La Valette embraced them for the heroes that they were.

  A new figure emerged through the gate, a big man who stood for a moment in the torchlight as if to savor his return. Bors’s eyes were drawn by the exquisite quality of his armor—a fluted cuirass in black enamel. He
wore it over white monastic robes. A sword rather than a rosary was belted around his waist. Something in his posture and the set of the shoulders, in the carriage of his giant head, made Bors’s blood run cold. He wore a magnificent black salet, with nose and cheek guards in the old Venetian style, and its vault was crested with a relief of Christ on the Cross. This helm he now removed and held beneath his arm and he genuflected to the cobbles and crossed himself and gave thanks. Lethal as this company was, he looked like a leopard running with the wolves, and as he rose back to his feet his eyes gleamed black as marbles in the flames. He took a deep breath and cast his gaze about, like a man inspecting a soon-to-be conquered kingdom.

  “God’s wounds,” muttered Bors to himself.

  A new figure emerged from the gate behind the first, leaner, more delicate, yet as deadly as a serpent in his poise. He too removed his helm to reveal the depraved mouth—the sensual yet empty eyes—which Bors remembered well from the Messina dock. Anacleto scanned the walls and Bors turned away and climbed up the steps to the parapet.

  Ludovico Ludovici was back. It was time for the mice to tread softly.

  That night Ludovico met with La Valette and all the bailiffs of the Venerable Council. Also present was Melchior De Robles, the commander of the relief, who was not a member of the Religion but a Knight of the Spanish Order of Santiago. Ludovico had won the latter’s confidence on the voyage from Messina. It was De Robles who made it clear to the Venerable Council that Ludovico had persuaded Toledo to send the reinforcement.

  The mood of the council reflected the state of the town, which was grim. Overcrowding was extreme and exacerbated by the knights’ demolition of a swath of houses for defensive purposes. A colony of tents had been established for the refugees, on L’Isola, wherein the newly located Turkish siege guns were wreaking havoc. Food was not a problem. Each inhabitant received three one-pound loaves per day, and the reserves of grain, oil, salted meat, and fish remained vast. However, despite filling the cisterns beneath Sant’Angelo and storing forty thousand barrels, the water supply was approaching a critical level, all wells and springs being located outside the walls. Shaving, washing, and laundry had been prohibited and those who’d broken this rule, most of them women, had been flogged in the piazza. Among the bleating and the gossip of the multitude, violent disorder had flared at the water distribution points, and these riots had only been stalled by providing a supply of prisoners on whom the mob could vent their discontent. Certain of the louder-mouthed grumblers had been birched to the gallows and hanged.