Tim Willocks

by Tim Willocks

  Tannhauser spat in his face.

  So shocked was Corro by this insult that he reeled back and lost his footing and almost tumbled into the pit. Had he done so, Tannhauser’s restraint would have been in vain, and Pandolfo and Marra would have had to die right there. With a determination that could only be rooted in the strictest possible orders from one they feared, Marra and Pandolfo restrained the trembling Castilian from hacking Tannhauser apart. All then was fair and proper: for if it was Ludovico who forestalled their rage, and it could be no other, then it was this proof—that Ludovico wanted him alive—that prevented Tannhauser from slaying them.

  “Next time we meet,” said Corro, “it will be to the death.”

  Marra dropped a goatskin of water over the edge and Corro moved to push Tannhauser after it. Tannhauser denied him the satisfaction. He vaulted into the pit of his own accord, one hand clasping its edge to gentle his fall. He landed without fresh injury, sliding onto his arse in the pit’s nadir. Tannhauser stood up and looked at the wall and he saw once more by the evanescing flames the gallows carved therein. The torches retreated from the rim of his desolate habitat and with them the light.

  Tannhauser resolved to be cheerful.

  And for a while, at least, he had the means. He popped a Stone of Immortality under his tongue. He molded the other two pills into cones and crammed them into his ear holes to keep them safe and at hand. The bitter flavors of opium and citrus and gold filled his mouth. The bitterness reassured him, he knew not why. Then the door to the Guva crashed shut and darkness absolute descended and with it an enormous silence that was scarcely less profound.

  PART V

  Bloodred Roses

  Thursday, September 6, 1565

  The Courts of Law—The Oubliette

  Ludovico sat on the Grand Inquisitor’s throne, in the tribunal chamber of the Courts of Law. Here were souls cleansed and the temporal fates of guilty and innocent alike determined and fixed. The beauty of Law lay in its purity, its clarity of instruction and purpose, its absolute exclusion of feeling. Within its halls all confusion and doubt were vanquished in favor of Decision, right or wrong. And as long as that purity, that process, was honored, any error in regard to Justice was the province of eternity. Yet what Law could root out his own doubt, his own confusion and guilt?

  He was alone. Shafts of light from the south-facing windows fell on the empty benches and bounced in random flares from the varnished oak. Dust milled through the yellow beams, disturbed by the draft from the shot hole in one wall. Here, in the seat of power, he brooded on his powerlessness. His body ached from wounds. His heart ached from wounds more obscure and less readily healed and more heavily borne. Carla’s face, her eyes, haunted him. Were the theories of Apollonides true? Had those eyes bewitched him? Should he relax her to the flames and have done? Certainly no poison or ague could make him suffer so evil a malaise. He had neither counselor nor confessor. In this he was friendless. The only one whose wisdom, he sensed, might best guide him was confined to the darkest pit in Christendom. If there was such a thing as a Guva of the mind, Ludovico was immured within it.

  The staff of the Courts of Law had been either evacuated or conscripted, and its precincts were Ludovico’s to do with as he pleased. He’d kept his prisoners segregated, each woman in a more or less comfortable room; the grotesque English brute in a basement dungeon. He’d seen none of them since their arrest. In the whirlwind of debate that consumed his mind there remained an eye of tranquillity. It contained two words: Patience and Time. He had waited weeks. He had waited years. A few days more he could endure.

  The Turks had maintained an attrition of musket fire, bombardment, mining, and sluggish raids. After the great repulse of September 2 a mood of low-grade despair had settled over the city, as another famous victory became just another reprieve won at tragic cost. The question in the minds of the high command was: Where was Garcia de Toledo? The promised relief force was more than two months late. Where were the knights from the far-flung priories of the Order, who must have gathered in Sicily throughout the summer? Was the viceroy really content to let Malta fall?

  Since the Grand Master’s pleas had taken little evident effect, Ludovico had sent his own Maltese messenger, a cousin of Gullu Cakie, to Messina some weeks ago. He carried two letters to a trusted familiar in the high Sicilian nobility. One letter was to be opened only in the event that Malta fell without Toledo’s aid. It contained material and instructions that would ensure the viceroy’s downfall and disgrace. The second was delivered to Toledo in person.

  This letter was prefaced by an account of the sufferings endured by the besieged, the valor of the Christian defenders, and the heroic death, in the fight for the first siege tower, of Toledo’s own son, Federico. Only the direct intervention of Divine Will could justify their survival to date, for it defied all human and military explanation. If Toledo intended to set himself against that Will, his eternal destiny would be a matter for God to decide. In the temporal realm, however, there were those, such as Michele Ghisleri, who would feel obliged to honor the dead by chastising those who had so dishonorably failed them. It would be a very great sadness if a soldier of Toledo’s reputation were to end his days as the basest coward in Europe.

  Threatening a Spanish viceroy was unexampled, but Ludovico knew Toledo. The letter would inspire a fury awesome to contemplate, and fury would provoke him into action.

  Despite Ludovico’s faith in Providence and his own diplomatic ploys, there was yet no sign of reprieve. Until there was, he did not dare execute the final stroke that his intrigue required. More than ever the Grand Master’s leadership was vital to the garrison’s spirit. The miracle required to withstand the next Turkish assault would, as had the last, hinge on La Valette’s person. When the relief landed, Ludovico would advance his cause. If it did not, he’d die with the rest. Death caused him no great anxiety. If he feared Death at all, it was because it would deny him the consummation with Carla that he craved. Thither did his mind turn yet again. Her proximity troubled him. She was here, waiting, in this very building. Waiting for his visit, as were they all, for on his appearance hinged their futures. Yet he didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know how to bend her to his will. All others, always, yes; but not her. And if he could not bend her, how could he cut her from his brain?

  Anacleto entered the chamber. A scabbed mass distorted his eye socket and cheek: the purulence had resolved but not yet the pain. The deformity to his beauty never would. The sight filled Ludovico with pity. Tannhauser’s English brute, Bors, had fired the bullet. The man had boasted as much as they’d thrown him in the cell. Anacleto walked toward the throne. His gait was odd: not unsteady, yet less nimble than usual. He bowed.

  “The English screams your name,” said Anacleto. “He’s banging the door of his cell, the turnkey says with his head. His own head.”

  “He’s emptied the keg already?”

  Anacleto shrugged. “It seems so.”

  “Let him bang. What news of the women?”

  “All is quiet.”

  Anacleto’s single eye focused on him. It oscillated minutely from side to side, as if unhinged by the loss of its fellow. The pupil was tiny. Opium. Hence his gait. Yet there was something else amiss.

  “What more?” asked Ludovico. “Tell me what troubles you?”

  Anacleto shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “The pain?” said Ludovico.

  Anacleto didn’t answer. Tolerance of pain was a matter of honor.

  “You have enough opium?” asked Ludovico. Tannhauser’s packs had been crammed with slabs of the stuff. And with gunnysacks stuffed with jewels. Anacleto nodded.

  “The relief will come.” Ludovico took his arm. “I believe it. So should you. The war will soon be over. Our work is almost done. There will be less of horror and, by God’s grace, our lives will change.”

  “Life will always change,” said Anacleto. “And of horror there is always an abundance. Why would I w
ish it otherwise?”

  “You were lost when I found you,” said Ludovico. “In some ways you are lost still. Let me be your guide.”

  Anacleto took his hand and kissed it. “Always,” he said.

  “Good,” said Ludovico, but his mind was already elsewhere. A revelation so bright he’d been blind to it. The boy lost. His own boy.

  “I will see the English after all,” he said. “Have him taken to the oubliette and restrained.”

  Bors did not dare open his eyes, for they’d left it on a stool right in front of him, and of that fell vision he could take no more. God had abandoned him. And why not? He was the bad thief. He too would have taunted Christ to call down His Father’s vengeance on the rabble. It had taken only four of them to drag him from one cell to another and chain him to this wall, and only two had been carried out insensible, hopefully dead. Thus had his strength abandoned him too. Was that any surprise? Gallons of brandy he’d poured down his throat. Gallons. Gallons of poisoned brandy. And worse than poisoned. Defiled. Polluted. A decoction of evil, the squeezed juice of madness. He retched but there was nothing left in his stomach. His beard and chest hair were matted with old puke. Nothing could cleanse his blood now. Or his brain. Nothing short of death, and that they would not allow him. Not yet. He felt the tendrils of insanity growing inside his skull, strangling his reason, cracking the container of his fears and undermining the walls of his courage. All was lost. But what of it? Losing had never broken him before. Nor hardship nor poverty nor pain. Bring on pain. Bring on the hot irons and the lash. Rope him to the rack and heave away. He craved pain. At least it would fill his mind with something he could embrace, something he understood and knew, something more tolerable than this crawling venom in his veins, his gut, his spine. Something to uproot these weeds of delirium. He’d never greatly warmed to the Jew, it was true. But he’d admired him, had stood by him, had never shied from admitting their association. And woe betide any man who whispered an insult within his earshot. Even so. An act of madness to sow madness. There was blood in his mouth for he’d bitten off the turnkey’s nose. Human flesh he could stomach; it was a bite he’d enjoyed before, a time or two. But this? This—this what? Was it a phantasm born of liquor and the evil of his heart? He opened his eyes. And there it was. Pale and wrinkled as a maggot. The hair curled into obscene clumps and spikes. The dead eyes gelid and opaque. And it was no phantasm. He’d felt its monstrous weight with his own hands. They’d brought it all the way from Messina. Imagine. Shipped it across the sea, and lugged it through the Turkish lines and stored it, through the grimmest siege in the books, for just such a moment as this. A moment such as he’d now inherited and somehow deserved. He closed his eyes.

  The lock rattled in the door and a bolt was thrown back. He retched again. He spat bile.

  He heard Ludovico’s voice. “Take it away.”

  Tasso, the Sicilian bravo, shuffled in. He walked half bent, his arm wrapped around his side. Bors had fed a fist into his liver and had felt the ribs crackle like burned pork. Tasso balked before the stool, halted by revulsion. All that was left to Bors was his bestiality. He lunged to the limit of the chain around his neck and roared, and though the chain held Bors well short, Tasso reeled back in terror and Bors laughed at him, and at himself and at his fate, and at the puckered and pickled head of Sabato Svi, which sat before him on the stool.

  There was a comfort in madness too. An annulment. A soaring as on wings of eagles.

  They’d left him in the dungeon with a box of candles and a spiled keg on the sleeping bench, and for a night and a day he’d stared at that keg, for though he was no fox, as was Mattias, he knew there had to be some object behind these particulars. He’d finally turned the spigot and discovered the brandy inside. And object and particulars be damned in the light of such joy. He’d drunk himself blind while hours and days without reckoning slipped him by, and he’d dozed through reveries long, of glory and comradeship and blood, and had drunk again, and had plunged, as a man decided on drunkenness will, into an oblivion reckless and without imaginable end, until that end had come, and like a mother’s teat the spigot at the last had given no more, and the keg sat empty as his belly and his soul. And yet not empty, for as he’d raised the keg above his mouth, and tilted it to liberate the dregs, something had shifted inside. Something solid and substantial, that bumped against the wood like a seed in a gourd, which in his blurred mind he recalled was the sound of folly. He’d set the keg down, with a sickness in his gut, and let it be. But curiosity is a torment as keen as any and it bested him. He’d smashed the keg apart upon the flagstones, and from inside rolled the head of Sabato Svi. Severed at the neck and pickled like an onion in the brandy. And with that all his notions of what was vile had been dwarfed, and his own cruelty humbled, and the thread that connected his mind to his soul had snapped, and with that he had howled to a God he no longer had faith in.

  Tasso found a lice-raddled blanket on the floor and netted the severed head inside it and disappeared, with Bors still laughing all the while. Then Ludovico walked in, and Bors’s laughter stopped. The monk halted and looked at the floor at Bors’s feet, as if noticing something striking for the first time. Bors followed his gaze. A trapdoor was set into the flagstones. In the wood was set a hoop and an inch-thick bolt.

  “Do you speak French?” asked Ludovico.

  Bors didn’t answer.

  “This is an oubliette,” said Ludovico. “It’s a place where one is forgotten.”

  Ludovico stooped and threw the bolt and lifted the door by its hoop. A foul miasma gusted forth and Bors grimaced and looked down. Beyond the trapdoor’s maw was a space as cramped as a coffin. Inside lay Nicodemus. His face was the color of a jellyfish. Wormlike grubs crawled over his half-closed eyes and his motionless lips.

  Bors’s throat convulsed with rage and sorrow. No more rounds of backgammon. No more custard tarts, the most delicious he’d ever eaten. Bors closed his eyes. His mind reeled with sudden vertigo. He leaned back against the wall. The urge to vomit assailed him afresh. He swallowed. He imagined Mattias. Hold on to the rage and sorrow both, Bors heard him counsel, for while we breathe, we may yet prevail.

  Ludovico let the trapdoor fall and sat down on the stool without a qualm and rested his hands on his thighs, and it was strange, for Bors didn’t fear him, nor anything else Ludovico might do, for somehow, in pickling the head of a man he had not liked but whose side he had taken—in pickling the head of Sabato Svi, the Jew—Ludovico had done all that he might, and so much more.

  “Bors of Carlisle,” said Ludovico, as cordial as you please. “So tell me, where is Carlisle?”

  And Bors thought: Forgive me, Mattias, my friend, for this is a game I cannot win.

  A crone brought her food and wine while Anacleto lingered at the door, but neither had responded to her questions. When Ludovico finally came to visit her, Carla found that a primitive gratitude for company overwhelmed all other sentiments. She turned away from him to conceal it. She despised her weakness. She despised him for knowing that such would be her reaction. She turned back to face him. His eye sockets receded into his skull as if into endless night and they returned no light from the window high in the wall. Yet their shadows did not conceal the torment therein. In some ways he looked like the man she had once fallen in love with. In others he was quite unknown to her.

  “Where is Amparo?” she said.

  “Nearby,” Ludovico replied. “The comforts you’ve enjoyed, though mean, are better than most in this city. Amparo enjoys the same. You seem in good health; I’m assured that so is she.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “No.”

  “I wish to see her.”

  “Soon,” he said.

  “At once,” said Carla.

  “May I sit down?”

  He advanced into the room. It was furnished with a bed and two chairs and was otherwise bare. Its original function she hadn’t been able to deduce. He limped, though it was no attempt
to win her sympathy. Her request would not be met, she knew. She remembered Mattias’s advice not to cross swords with the Inquisitor. She nodded and Ludovico sat down.

  “I regret these circumstances,” said Ludovico. “But you must understand that I’m committed to a certain course and will not be swayed. Some aspects of my design concern you, others do not.”

  “And Tannhauser?”

  “His quarters are less opulent, but he’s not been ill-treated. Your companions can survive this ordeal unscathed. In part that depends upon them, in part upon you.”

  “So you’ve come with threats against the lives of those I love.”

  “I’ve come to illuminate the nature of things as they are. How they will be is contingent on the role we each play.”

  “Is the role required of me still that of your lover? Your wife?”

  “I’ve prayed upon this matter, as I’m sure you have too.”

  She let silence stand as her reply.

  He said, “I believe it’s God’s Will that we be joined. I believe it always was.”

  “You presume to speak for God, as do many who are wedded to evil. I’d rather you spoke for your own will and desire.”

  “I desire your happiness. I know you regard me with loathing, at this moment, and view my proposal with revulsion. But in time you will appreciate that your happiness is indivisible from mine.”

  “So you presume to speak for me too.”

  “Scorn ill becomes you and will profit no one.”

  Anger crushed her chest like a heavy stone. “Scorn?”

  Ludovico blinked.

  “Can you imagine how much I despise you?”

  “I have tried,” he said. “And failed. But there is another face to that coin. You cannot imagine what torment your presence has inflicted upon me.”