The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “You must think me less than a man,” he said.

  “I heard you spit in their faces. No man could have been braver.”

  Still Sabato kept his face turned. Tannhauser glanced at Bors.

  “I’ve shat myself for much less, believe me,” Bors declared.

  Sabato looked at Tannhauser. His eyes were haunted. “I’ve never lost everything before.”

  “The Oracle?” said Tannhauser. “They’ve but broken a chain around our ankle.”

  Sabato said, “That isn’t what I mean.”

  Tannhauser nodded. “I know. Yet, in losing everything, you win the chance to discover all that is precious.”

  Sabato saw that he spoke from the heart. He nodded.

  “Now, let me see those hands.”

  Tannhauser took a stoppered bottle from the chest. He’d learned some battlefield medicine out of necessity and had picked up a number of vulnerary remedies from Petrus Grubenius. Apart from the method of their infliction, Sabato’s wounds were unremarkable, being already closed into small puckered holes that hardly bled at all. Tannhauser cleaned them with witch hazel and sealed them with oil of Hispanus. He decided against a bandage.

  “Let the sun and air heal them,” he said. “Keep them dry, for dampness will make them purulent. If you must conceal them, I’ve some kidskin gloves in my armoire to which you’re welcome. They’ll hurt more in the days to come than now, but even so, you must keep moving the fingers or you’ll lose the use of them.”

  Sabato flexed his hands. He was pale and his natural ebullience seemed dimmed, though far from extinguished. Since bravado was the order of the hour, Tannhauser sat down in his chair and nodded to Bors, who filled the crystal tulips with brandy. Tannhauser handed one to Sabato.

  “These things knock the wind from your chest,” he said. “Yet here, in fire such as this, is our mettle retempered.”

  Sabato looked him in the eye. He raised the glass. “Usque ad finem.”

  Bors and Tannhauser raised their glasses too. “Until the end.”

  They tossed the brandy down and Bors recharged the glasses.

  Sabato Svi said, “Burn her.”

  They looked at him.

  Sabato said, “You speak of fire. Let’s burn the Oracle to the ground.”

  Tannhauser looked at Bors and saw that he too, in his mind’s eye, was watching a blazing inferno of all they’d wrought, and with nothing short of awe.

  “Magnificent,” said Bors.

  “Sabato Svi,” said Tannhauser, “you’ve revealed yourself to be a poet at the last.” He raised his glass. “To the fire and be damned.”

  “The fire.”

  They drank. The glow of boldness arising from Tannhauser’s belly was most welcome. He turned to the food and started on the roast fowl. Sabato, as if reluctant to let poetry stand alone as justification for arson, added sound reason to his suit. “Most of our coin and credit is lodged in Venice. When we join it, we’ll be well beyond the reach of the Spanish Crown.”

  “True,” Tannhauser agreed.

  “And a fire in the harbor will keep the city occupied at least until noon, by which time we’ll be gone.”

  “With a dozen quintals of powder still in store, so will half the waterfront,” said Bors. He’d stripped the captain of three fine rings and was testing them on his little finger. Not one of them would fit. He put them in his pocket and drank more brandy.

  Tannhauser said, “I’m to Malta.”

  Sabato looked at him. Bors chuckled and recharged his brandy yet again.

  Sabato said, “So I go to Venice alone.”

  “Your wife and children await you,” Tannhauser said.

  “Only death awaits you, in Malta.”

  “Not for me,” Tannhauser replied. “Like you, I have no squabble with the Turk.”

  “So it’s the contessa, La Penautier—she who stands behind this disaster,” said Sabato.

  “She’s innocent of everything but love,” Tannhauser replied. He ignored the looks which greeted this. “The Inquisitor, Ludovico, is behind our ruin, no one else. He wanted to deny the contessa any chance to disgrace him.”

  “Everything but love?” said Sabato Svi.

  “The kind you will appreciate. Love of her only child. Her son.”

  “And her chance to disgrace the Inquisitor?”

  “I realized this only tonight, but Ludovico is the boy’s father.”

  Both Sabato and Bors looked to him for more. He shook his head.

  “A fatal power beyond all telling has entwined Lady Carla’s path with mine. Don’t press me further. Suffice to say that we all will stand to profit from the relationship.”

  “How so?” asked Bors.

  “When our bargain is successfully concluded, she and I will be married, and you will find yourselves in partnership with an aristocrat. A count, no less.”

  “Count Tannhauser?” said Sabato.

  “I’ve settled on ‘Count von Tannhauser.’ And I have it on good authority that thereafter you must call me ‘my lord.’”

  “I’ll drink to that,” said Bors, and proceeded to do so.

  Tannhauser saw the doubt in Sabato’s face. “Sabato, tell me that such a title isn’t worth a fortune. To all of us.”

  “If you’re dead it won’t matter if you’re a king,” Sabato replied.

  “Fate has labored hard to sever the knot which bound we three to this endeavor. Yet here we are and severed it is. Each must do as he must.”

  Sabato said, “I’ll come to Malta with you.”

  “That’s the only foolish thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Sabato frowned. Tannhauser leaned forward.

  “Sabato. These many years you’ve called me brother, and no name was ever sweeter to my ear. But you must go home, to Venice, and hold our future ready for our return. I’ve no desire to fight in the Maltese war. You may dismiss Bors’s smirking. We’ll be a month behind you at most. Dimitrianos can get you to Calabria by dawn.”

  Tannhauser stood up. He looked at Bors.

  “Under the floor of my chamber you’ll find sixty-odd pounds of Iranian opium.”

  Bors was aggrieved. “Why wasn’t I told before?”

  “If you had been there’d be much less.” Tannhauser tapped the chest of remedies on the table. “Ship this too, and all the liquor and sweetmeats you can find. Give Dana and the girls forty gold scudi apiece—”

  “Forty?” Bors gasped rarely, but he gasped at this.

  “Tell them not to tarry in Messina. If Vito Cuorvo ships them to Naples, he can take our oxcarts as payment.”

  “I’ll take the girls with me to Venice,” volunteered Sabato.

  “No,” said Tannhauser. Dana’s heart would be sore at his disappearance, but circumstance left him little choice; and anyway, perhaps he flattered himself. “Traveling alone you’ll attract little attention. With four luscious girls you’ll attract a mob. The girls must do for themselves, as must we all.”

  Sabato nodded and Tannhauser turned back to Bors. “Wait for me on the Couronne. Don’t let Starkey leave without us.” Tannhauser opened his arms to Sabato Svi. “Wish me good fortune, for Adventure calls and I’ll need it.”

  Sabato Svi stood up. “Let no one rank common friendship alongside ours.”

  They embraced. Tannhauser suppressed the ache of love in his chest. He stepped back.

  “Now,” he said, “I must go, for I’ve two more men to kill before the midnight tide.”

  Tuesday, May 15, 1565

  The Syracuse Road

  The interior of the carriage was pitch-dark and the creak of springs and clatter of wheels were the only sounds she could hear. The only indication of the priest on the opposite bench was a smell—of sweat and onions and stale urine—which turned Carla’s stomach when it wafted her way. She kept her face to the edge of the blind over the window, grateful for the thin stream of air and the occasional glimpse of starlight. When she’d opened the blind earlier on, the priest had drawn it
back down without a word.

  She’d not been told the priest’s name nor upon whose authority he acted. He’d told her only that she was to embrace a life of contemplation, at the convent of the Holy Sepulchre at Santa Croce. Apart from a cloak to cover her red silk dress, she’d been forbidden to bring possessions. She hadn’t argued for she knew she wouldn’t need them. Sicily was the edge of the world. Beyond its cosmopolitan ports—in mountains more uncivilized than any in the vastness of Spain—little had changed in a millennium. A season, a year, a decade, a lifetime, an era. A world in which such notions possessed little meaning. A world that had watched the passing of civilizations one after another, the empires of the mighty falling like leaves. A world ruled by mortification and blind obedience. She could vanish into this wilderness, as inconvenient women had vanished before: her hair shorn, her indecent dress torn off, bound to permanent silence and indentured to implacable icons masquerading as God. She realized, furthermore, that to all practical intents she was already gone.

  Her abduction had been accomplished with a curious lack of drama. An armed man and a priest appear, unannounced. No sign of Bertholdo; thankfully, nor of Amparo. Just two strangers, one wielding—absurdly, for did they expect to shoot her?—a smoking musket. No, she had broken no law. No, she was not placed under arrest. No, she could not know the purpose of this treatment, nor upon whose authority it was ordered. The priest knew nothing about her. He knew only what he was ordered to oblige her to do. All her questions would be answered in time, no doubt, but for now she would serve her best interests by joining the priest in his carriage and keeping her peace. The priest, she felt, saw in her dress alone good reason for arrest and confinement. In the constable’s eyes she’d seen a plea that she not force him to manhandle her too roughly.

  To be dragged to the carriage screaming would have done no good. It would only have added loss of dignity to loss of liberty; and it would have implicated Amparo in the catastrophe. The sense of helplessness evoked Carla’s oldest nightmares. As she mounted the effort required to keep her head high, she was once again fifteen years old and walking to the carriage that took her from her father’s house for the very last time. This time a voice inside her had rebelled and urged her to fight. But fight how? And with what? And to what end? And what of Amparo? At the moment of Carla’s arrest, Amparo was spinning her vision glass. The priest’s costume gave no indication of his order or whom he served, but the fact that he’d been chosen to carry out this sinister task suggested the Inquisition. Tannhauser had warned her that Amparo’s gifts were dangerous. The thought of her being tortured or burned filled Carla with the greatest horror. Amparo was better protected by remaining unknown, even if it meant abandonment. Amparo would survive. She’d make her way to Tannhauser. He’d admired the girl in a way no one else ever had. Not even Carla. He’d protect her. She couldn’t entangle Amparo’s fate with her own.

  These calculations had propelled her into the carriage without resistance. Yet unlike the last time, when her father’s agent had taken her away from Malta, she now saw her role within a larger machinery of oppression. In every moment, and throughout the human world, each was exercising power over another. It was a perfect simulacrum of a painting of Hell she had seen in Naples, in which grotesques trod one another down into the flames, thinking only of themselves. Hadn’t she been rowed to Sicily by hundreds of human slaves? To whom she’d given not a thought beyond protesting their foul smell? She’d known nothing about them or what they had done to deserve such degradation, and she hadn’t asked. Just as this priest, conducting her to oblivion, knew and cared nothing about her and did not ask. In the end she was no better than he. She was just another grotesque, lost—damned—in the self-serving riot of human existence.

  Even so, she wondered what she’d done to provoke her abduction. All that had changed since yesterday, or the day before, was the arrival of Starkey’s letter and Tannhauser’s visit. Her imprisonment in a convent could not possibly profit either. Perhaps she’d been spied on. By Bertholdo? But on whose behalf and for what reason? The only candidate was her father, Don Ignacio, in Mdina. She’d made her desire to return sufficiently public that he might have got wind of it, not least because she’d brandished him as her motive. She could believe that he despised her enough, even now, to prevent her going home. Her confinement among self-flagellating nuns would strike a man of his religiosity as apt. But she still couldn’t find the heart to hate him. There was hatred enough without her donating her portion.

  The carriage rocked on through the night. The priest’s breath befouled the tiny space. They slowed to grind their way up a steep hill. She hoped the coachman would invite them to spare the horse and to get out and walk. She wished, if he should do so, that she might find the means to run away. In her ridiculous boots and her ridiculous dress. She wished she were a man, like Tannhauser, who’d never endured the feebleness of being a woman. No wonder he found them a mystery. They accepted a slavery that didn’t even flatter them with chains.

  The carriage stopped altogether, a speed scarcely slower than they’d been making up the grade, and she felt the clunk of the brake against the wheel. Then she heard a rough, threatening challenge, its words muffled by the blinds. Vague sounds and cumbersome thuds emanated from above, and the challenge was repeated. There was a gunshot, inches away it seemed, shocking in its unexpected violence. The little priest jumped in the dark. The shot was followed by a cry and the crash of someone falling—it could only be the coachman—and the horse started forward and the carriage lurched and then stopped as the brake creaked and juddered against the wheel rim. The invisible priest made no attempt to investigate. Instead he fell quite still and odors more repellent than before seeped forth. Carla opened the blind and the priest didn’t stop her.

  After so much suffocating blackness, the light from the moon and the carriage lamps seemed huge. The landscape revealed—the glittering silver swath of the distant sea, the yellow clusters scattered across the port far below, the pale gray hillside falling from the edge of the road—filled Carla with exhilaration. She looked at the priest huddled opposite. She couldn’t see his eyes but his body was rigid and his lips appeared to tremble in silent prayer. She realized, with some surprise, that she felt no fear, despite the fact that bandits swarmed these hills. Tannhauser was right. She wasn’t without courage of a sort. If the priest feared what lay outside, she did not. She swung open the carriage door and climbed out.

  There was a flash in the moonlight as Tannhauser lowered his sword. The blade dripped a viscous black liquid. He was on foot and in his left hand he held a pistol from whose muzzle curled a last gray tendril of smoke. His eyes were like blue coals afire in the sockets of his face and his hair blew wild and his lip was curled and once again she was reminded of a wolf, this time one who’d been disturbed at the site of a kill. This was no less than fitting, for tangled head-down in the traces, and with its cuirass streaked and gleaming with the same black liquid, was the body of the coachman.

  “Are you hurt, my lady?” asked Tannhauser, as if, perhaps, she’d turned her ankle.

  Carla shook her head. She looked at the coachman. She’d never seen a man recently killed. “Is that man dead?”

  “Dead as a stone, my lady.”

  He paused, as if waiting for her to swoon or otherwise embarrass him. She felt no inclination toward the former and was determined to avoid the latter, yet could think of nothing useful she might say. She looked up at the star-spangled heavens.

  “It’s a beautiful evening,” she ventured.

  Tannhauser favored the sky with an educated glance. He slotted the pistol in his belt.

  “Indeed,” he agreed, as if she’d said something wholly pertinent. “Orion the Hunter is down and Scorpius has risen. The stars have judged in our favor.” He looked at her. “But men, I’m afraid, will not.” He nodded at the carriage. “Is the priest within?”

  She nodded. “I’m afraid I know neither his name nor whom he serves.�
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  “His name is Father Ambrosio and he serves the Inquisition.” It seemed perfectly fair that he should know all this while she did not. “Is he armed?”

  “Only with his faith.”

  “Then from eternity, at least, he has nothing to fear.” He pointed to the far side of the carriage. “Yonder stands my horse—and my good companion—Buraq. He’s mistrustful of strangers but let him take your measure and show no timidity—a warm word if you have one—and he’ll let you mount him. Wait for me at the foot of the hill.”

  She realized that he intended to murder the priest, and in blood so cold she wondered it wasn’t frozen in his veins. She looked at him and he forced a smile to reassure her, and she saw that he was a killer of the darkest stripe, and that for all his broad intelligence and largeness of heart, there was a defect—a hole—in his conscience that was almost as wide. She wondered what had made the hole and how long it had been there. It saddened her, because the cause must have brought him great anguish, and the cost must have been so high that he had forgotten how much he had paid. She thought to object to the murder, but he was taking this stain on his soul for her advantage and she held her tongue. She’d offer no more false faces. She’d not insult the man with pious hypocrisy. She’d embrace the world in which she found herself so bloodily embroiled. She’d learn at last to be true to her inmost self.

  “I wish to stay here with you,” she said.

  “I will join you shortly,” he said. “There’s no need to be afraid.”

  “I am not afraid. Though I know not how, this disaster is of my making. I will not hide from its consequences.”

  “Perhaps you don’t understand,” he said, “but I’m going to slay the priest.”

  A thud rocked the inside of the carriage and she turned to look. Ambrosio had fallen to his knees, his fingers knotted. His thin face beseeched her with a doleful supplication.