by Tim Willocks
“You accuse me of tormenting you?”
“I merely state a fact. I didn’t ask you to return to Malta. I tried to prevent it.”
A too-familiar guilt twisted inside her. She’d brought disaster in her train.
“I’ve sought to rid myself of this malaise,” said Ludovico. “I’ve mortified the flesh. I’ve contemplated acts so atrocious they would place me forever beyond redemption in your eyes. In that result, at least, there would be a resolution, and some kind of peace.”
Fear uncoiled in her belly. On this matter of atrocious acts she didn’t doubt his word.
He said, “If I’ve refrained from committing them, it was out of horror at inflicting further grief, on you.”
A shudder ran through her. She clenched her shoulders to suppress another.
He stood and pulled the second chair closer to his own. “Come, sit down, please.”
She walked to the second chair and sat down. He returned to his seat. He sat for a moment with his elbows on his thighs and his fingers laced into a fist and his head held down. His knuckles turned white. She took a deep breath. He looked up at her. The deep-seated eyes were like tunnels bored into something abominable beyond.
“I’ve asked myself,” he said, “how do I win back the affection of a woman I’ve injured so gravely, and in such a multiplicity of ways. A woman whose pride I have trampled. Whose liberty I have stolen. Whose most beloved friends I have consigned to darkness and chains.”
Carla felt tears rise in her throat. She swallowed.
“To these questions I’ve found no answers,” he said. “For I am chained in a darkness thicker than any. If I’ve cut the knot of many riddles, and unraveled many more, this one is beyond my genius, for its most tangled threads are those of my own emotions. Their strength exceeds all ligatures and compulsions. War and its rapture have drawn them even tighter. Anger, pity, and lust have throttled me each in turn. Love has suffocated me, so that I’ve woken in the night and believed that my last hour was come. Aye, and as oft as not wished that it were so. But it was not so. Even on the field of battle, even when your German fired an assassin’s bullet in my back, death eluded me. And so things are not as I might wish them, but as they are. Thus I come to throw myself upon your compassion.”
Carla looked away from his eyes to find her own thoughts. She had prayed, yes. Mattias had told her to be true to herself, no matter what the cost. She’d wrestled with that conundrum night and day, for what did it mean? That under no circumstance was she to submit to Ludovico’s demands? That all were to be consumed on the pyre of her honor—and in a world that reeked already of sacrifice and death? She’d decided that it did not mean that, but that that was only one choice amongst many, and that Mattias, as always, had meant only what he said: that she should be true to her highest conception of herself, not to some conception held by others. She looked back at Ludovico.
“Can you not let us live our lives and find your consolation in God?”
“Did you find such consolation?”
“Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“And yet you came back to Malta.”
“Despite your accusations, I didn’t come back to cause you harm.”
“Even so.”
“You haven’t answered me.”
He said, “You haven’t slept with Tannhauser. Yet.”
How did he know this?
Ludovico nodded. “There’s little I don’t know. There’s less that I won’t do. I will not leave you to the German, even though I be damned for it. My sin is already mortal. I cannot root it out. God sees the truth in my heart, and my lack of contrition. And so, if I must, I’ll be damned for my deeds rather than my thoughts.”
If she’d ever doubted his resoluteness, she did so no longer.
He said, “Hear me, Carla. Abhorrence, though it stalks me, need not find its prey. What we once had can never die. Resurrection is the heart of our Faith, and so is Love, and the one is at the heart of the other. I love you. More than I love God. Together we’ll find peace. Amparo will remain your companion. We will be reunited with our child. And, in time, you will rediscover the tenderness you felt for me before.”
“Our child?” she said.
“Orlandu is in the entourage of Abbas bin Murad, Aga of the Yellow Banners. When the relief arrives from Sicily, and the Turk is thrown into confusion, my knights and I will pluck Orlandu from their grasp.”
“So you seek to steal Tannhauser’s part in more ways than one.”
He flinched. “I’ll not let my son be shipped to Constantinople and turned into an infidel. I would rather he perished before he thus lost his soul.”
This last she didn’t want to dwell on. She said, “The relief is on its way?”
“When Toledo’s army arrives, you and I will go to Mdina. From there I will join the relief and effect Orlandu’s rescue.”
“And Mattias?”
“I will free him to rejoin the Turks and among them he will prosper and thrive. He will forget you, as you will forget him. And unless you give me reason to do so, I will bear him no more injury or malice. His life then—like Amparo’s—is in your hands.”
He stood up.
“You have my answer,” he said. “Now give me yours, for I won’t come to ask you again.”
Carla stood up too. She’d made her decision. She’d made it before he’d entered the room, for his demands in general terms were hardly unforeseen.
“If my surrender spares Mattias and Amparo, it’s a price I will pay free and full, and glad to do so.”
Ludovico took a breath.
“When the relief arrives,” she said, “we will go to Mdina. And all shall be as you wish it.”
Saturday, September 8, 1565
The Courts of Law—Amparo’s Cell
He’d visited several times a day for more days than she’d counted, and each time he stripped his breeches and splayed her legs and raped her on the mattress. The rapes were brutal and prolonged, for Anacleto struggled to climax and seemed to hold this against her. He was possessed by something that she knew was evil, something which gave his single eye a peculiar light. His half face gasped and contorted above hers, his breath sour, his fingers hard and full of rage. When at last he exploded inside her, he cried out, “Filomena.” Then he would crawl from on top of her, as if extricating himself from a hill of dung, and he would dress with his back turned to her and leave. The mysterious name was the only word he uttered.
Amparo bore these assaults as she’d borne others far in her past. Tannhauser had told her to endure and that was all the strength she needed. She’d been prepared for worse. She’d known worse. Anacleto was of unremarkable dimensions. When she heard him at the door she would spit on her fingers and moisten her parts. She closed her eyes and submitted. She squeezed the comb of ivory and silver in her hand until her palm bled. And while Anacleto thrashed between her thighs, she thought of Tannhauser, her bloodred rose. Though his thorns had pierced her heart, he had made her sing. And how she’d sung. And how she sang still. Teeth clenched tight, Amparo made not a sound. Yet in that Realm within her which was wider and more intricate than the mighty Cosmos without, and over which nothing held sway except her soul, she sang with Love. She sang. She sang. She sang. After Anacleto left, his seed leaked out between her legs and this humiliation upset her more than the pain in her belly and the bruises on her arms. But as she washed she reminded herself that Tannhauser would come.
He would come and take her away. And she would sing for him.
In between the rapes she lay naked on the bed and retreated into herself and far away. The Sicilian crone brought her food. The same dried out and spider-fingered hag who had haunted the stables for weeks. She looked at Amparo with disgust, her rheumy gaze as possessed in its way as Anacleto’s. She would mutter beneath her breath and spit with words that sounded like curses. She gave her the evil eye. Then the key would twist in the lock and the crone would be gone.
Amparo ate little
. In the days she waited for the light from the high window to fade, for Anacleto never came in the dark. In the nights she watched stars maunder across the tiny patch of sky that she could see. She thought little of her ordeal. Cruelty was part of Nature, like a winter frost, something to be survived and then forgotten. She didn’t let it reach her inmost heart. She thought of Nicodemus and Bors, who’d befriended her and cared for her for no reason she could imagine. She thought of Carla and the last—horrifying—image revealed in her shew stone: of the woman hanged, in the red silk dress. And she thought again of Tannhauser, who had made her feel so beautiful when no one else ever had. She brushed her hair with the ivory comb. She watched the play of light on its silver arabesques. She relived their hours together. She conjured the feel of his skin and the blue of his eyes and the sound of his voice. She smiled at the memory of his tomfoolery. She thought of the tale he’d told her, of the nightingale and the rose.
She cried.
She started in the mortuary darkness before dawn as the door to her prison creaked open. A lamp illuminated Anacleto’s face. Her stomach turned with nausea. She prepared herself. She turned to face him so he would not twist her by her arms. Anacleto raised his hand. He held a length of dark fabric. It shimmered like something alive where the lamplight caught it. It possessed an unmistakable gorgeousness. And it was red. It was Carla’s dress.
Carla’s beautiful red dress.
Amparo’s mouth went dry and for the first time she felt terror.
Anacleto threw it at her.
The dress landed on her thighs and slithered over her skin. She knew the dress signaled her end, yet its touch was lovely. She looked at Anacleto. The rope she expected to find in his hand wasn’t there, but in his face was a black, childish fury that she hadn’t seen before. A fury instilled by some other but directed at her. Anacleto pointed to the dress in her lap.
Amparo shook her head.
“Wear it,” he said.
Amparo squeezed on her ivory comb. Its teeth dug into her palm.
“No,” said Amparo. “Never.”
The Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin: Saturday, September 8, 1565
The Guva
Silence. Darkness. Stone.
Time without days. Time without nights.
Without sun. Without stars. Without wind.
A purity of absence designed to strike despair into the dishonored.
Those ignominious wretches who had suffered the unscalable geometry of the Guva had withered for want of hope. Like the knotted tails of rat kings, the contents of their brains had tangled and drawn tight. Like castaways driven to feast on human flesh, their thoughts and nightmares and fears had consumed their minds.
Not so the brain or thoughts of Mattias Tannhauser.
Of the Guva’s many occupants, Tannhauser was the first to enjoy his dark sojourn.
Suffused by a heady elixir decocted from exhaustion, solitude, opium, and peace, he wandered through far-flung dreams, where faces smiled and wine flowed in rivers from the rocks, and where all women were comely and all men mild, and where many a strange beast prowled without offering harm. The relief from battle, from the clamor of war, from the anxious burden of companions—from the need to ponder, determine, and act at the turbulent core of Chaos—was as profound a tonic as the drug. He pissed often, and in small quantities, distributing his urine around the inverted cone’s surface where it would dry rather than puddle at his feet. He pitched his infrequent stool into the void beyond the rim. He braced his hands and feet against the curved interior, for hours, and strengthened and refurbished his sinews. He dwelt upon the mysteries of Quintessence, for from Nothingness Absolute sprang all Things, and so it might be again, and he recalled the deeds and teachings of Jesus Christ, in which not dissimilar philosophies were contained, and he found them noble, and here, in the Guva, where the boundary between the Infinity without and the Infinity inside his mind seemed at moments to dissolve, he sought the Grace of God. He sensed It in the near distance, as forest creatures sense the approach of spring, but he didn’t find It, and he concluded that the Devil’s lien on his soul was yet to be paid. He did not dwell upon the fate of his loved ones, for it served no useful purpose. He did not dwell on the plots of the Inquisitor, for he was powerless to affect them. Thus he made the Guva his fastness, and he used his desolation to refortify body and mind. He slept in prolonged bouts, curled around the Guva’s bell-shaped bilge, and he coaxed himself back into oblivion when consciousness summoned. The stone was cold against his skin yet after the months of crippling heat this too was not unwelcome. He awoke cramped and with his spine chafed raw, but such discomforts hardly compared to those of the battlefront. He was woken twice while sleeping by someone unknown, when a light that could only have been dim but which dazzled his senses, appeared above the Guva’s edge and a cloth-wrapped bundle of bread and dried fish was thrown down. Ludovico did not want him starved, but only broken by isolation and uncertainty. The Inquisitor would be disappointed, though Tannhauser made a note not to let him know it.
When the black monk at last came calling, it was with that peculiar faculty for theater that was the Inquisition’s own.
Tannhauser heard the door unlocked and opened. The sound, and the footfalls and the clank of armor that followed, were strident in the stillness to which he was inured. One man or two? Two, yes. A torch flame emerged from the formless blackness and circled half about the Guva’s maw. The torch stopped and guttered, suspended in thin air, and Tannhauser realized its shaft had been slotted through a bracket on the chamber wall. While his eyes adapted to the shock of its incandescence, the footsteps hurried back and forth. A figure passed by the torch. A ladder was lowered down the side of the Guva farthest from the door. He glimpsed a flash of steel helmet. Then the shadowy figure skirted the pit and his footsteps retreated and the door opened, and closed, and silence fell once more.
Tannhauser waited, for it struck him as unseemly to show too ardent a desire to escape his prison. With his ears sharpened by quietude he could hear the gutter of the flames. And he could hear a man’s breathing. The breaths were slow, and calm, as were his own. In the light bouncing down from above he was aware of his nakedness, the heathen tattoos on his arms and thighs, the luster of the golden lions around his wrist. Yet to his gilded nakedness too he was now accustomed. He climbed the ladder, aware of eyes on his back, and stepped out of the Guva onto the rim. He turned.
Across the diameter bisecting the pit between them stood Ludovico. Though the darkness beyond was impenetrable, Tannhauser sensed no one else inside the chamber. Ludovico was resplendent in his black Negroli harness. Its newly fettled plate glimmered, as if the origin of the flames were not the torch but the enameled steel. His head was bare. He appeared unarmed. The illumination from the wall torch threw half of his face into shadow. His eyes were stygian pools. If he was surprised at Tannhauser’s vigor, he gave no signal. Ludovico inclined his head in greeting. Tannhauser sat himself cross-legged on the Guva’s edge, and rested a palm on either knee. He nodded in return and the two men studied each other across the void.
Some minutes passed. Perhaps many. After the timeless silence of the pit it seemed natural enough. Then Tannhauser realized that some act of submission was in order.
Tannhauser said, “What day might this be?”
“The feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. Saturday the eighth.”
Six days. It had seemed both longer and shorter.
“Day or night?”
“We have two hours until sunrise.”
“And the city still stands.”
“Not only does the city stand,” said Ludovico, “but the siege is broken.”
Tannhauser stared at him. No news could have been more unlikely, yet Ludovico could have no reason to deceive him.
“Yesterday morning, close on ten thousand soldiers came ashore at Mellieha Bay,” said Ludovico. “They’re encamped out on the high ground of Naxxar Ridge.”
“And the Turks
?” asked Tannhauser.
“They’ve dismantled their siege guns and are retreating to their ships as we speak.”
“Mustafa runs from ten thousand?”
“Our Grand Master released a Moslem prisoner, and gave him to understand that the relief was twice that number.”
Tannhauser took this in. The Religion had won. And he had tried to escape the island at a moment when, in the event, it had no longer been necessary. As Ludovico shifted, and the light caught his eyes, Tannhauser saw that this irony was not lost on him either.
“It’s true, upon my word,” said Ludovico. “The timing of your flight could hardly have been worse.”
Tannhauser said, “I trust you didn’t come here simply to share these glad tidings.”
Ludovico glanced down behind him, then sat on a chair placed at the Guva’s edge.
“If I’ve understood your history, you’re a man more than able to abandon the past when circumstance requires it. Family, country, religion, emperor, cause. Even your beloved Oracle.”
Tannhauser knew no solid ground on which to contest this.
Ludovico smiled. “Even Sabato Svi.”
The ominous ring of this slur almost provoked Tannhauser to take exception. But his purpose was better served by letting Ludovico believe him a knave.
“So Sabato didn’t make it back to Venice.”
“He never left Messina, for which credit belongs, I’m told, to one Dimitrianos.” Ludovico’s mouth twisted in distaste. “The denunciation of Jews is ever a popular sport.”
Tannhauser had thought himself by now immune to horror and pity. He closed his eyes. Had he not, he might have circled the pit and torn the black monk limb from limb. Or revealed the depths of his grief. Neither would have served him well.
For a moment Ludovico left him to his mute and silent mourning.
Then he said, “The Jew you will forget. As, too, you must forget Lady Carla.”
Tannhauser mustered the necessary callousness. “My contract to marry Carla was payment for services rendered. I fancied myself a count. It was never an affair of the heart.”
