by Tim Willocks
“Then take me with you. Let me sip from the chalice and I’ll row you back to Venice by myself.”
Tannhauser shuffled back between the crenels of the embrasure and managed to stand up without plunging to his death. He looked east across Bighi Bay. In the thickening twilight Gallows Point was a hive of Turkish industry as Torghoud’s men drilled out the spiked cannon and rebuilt the batteries and constructed a defensive palisade against further attack. Yesterday’s dawn seemed a long time ago, and tomorrow’s seemed far away. Perhaps Carla was right. Perhaps they were all right. Embrace Providence. And let God’s Will be done.
“It’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks,” he murmured.
“What?” said Bors.
The guns of the raised cavalier bellowed again and balls sucked the air above their heads as they passed by. Some seconds away, in the dusk beyond, another handful of lives were about to be blighted and didn’t yet know it.
“Come,” said Tannhauser. “Let’s see if the Grand Master has granted my wish.”
Pentecost: Sunday, June 10, 1565
Auberge of England—The Crossing—The Post of Honor
Tannhauser bent over his war chest and stacked various items into a knapsack. Ten slabs of opium wrapped in oilcloth, various medicaments and decoctions, two bottles of brandy, half a dozen crocks of sweet preserves—quince, apricot, and strawberry. The knapsack’s contents comprised such gifts, bribes, and wheel grease as might be needed. He didn’t dwell on any eventuality that might leave him prone to consuming these goodies himself. Carla hadn’t yet returned from the infirmary, and he was content to avoid the explanations and farewells.
“What are you doing?”
He turned toward the soft, musical voice with a clenching in his gut. Amparo lingered in the yellow light and shadows at the door of his monastic cell. He smiled. “Where I am going two things become priceless above all others, while gold and precious stone become worthless as dirt. Can you guess what those things might be?”
She replied without hesitation. “Music and love.”
He laughed. “You’ve out-riddled me, and I daresay you’re right. My answer is less poetic.” He hefted the knapsack on the bed where his armor was baled. “Things that ease pain and things that taste sweet. But at least I can put them in a bag.”
“Are music and love not welcome in Hell?”
He walked over to her. Her eyes were dark and fearless and he fought the inclination to lose his soul within them. “On the contrary, the Devil himself craves them.”
“You go to bring Orlandu back from the war,” she said.
He nodded. On impulse, he said, “Can you keep a secret?”
“Better than anyone.”
To his surprise, he found he didn’t doubt it. “After that, I plan to escape the war itself, and return to Italy. Will you come with me?”
“I’ll go anywhere you want me to.”
Her mouth half opened and her body swayed, as if to counter the desire to press herself against him. He pulled her into the room by her arm and took her by the waist and pushed her against the wall. She raised her face and he kissed her. She didn’t close her eyes and neither did he. Hers were full of questions. Perhaps they mirrored his own. They’d already slaked certain needs not an hour before yet his nether parts swelled with lubricity. He let go of her, before retreat became unfeasible, and stepped back.
“When will you be back?” she said.
“Tomorrow night.”
He shouldered the knapsack and grabbed the baled armor and his wheel-lock rifle, freshly oiled and primed. The pistol he’d left in the chest. He pointed to the Damascus musket, still wrapped in a blanket and stacked by the wall. The elaborate Ottoman powder flask and the pouch of balls hung from it.
“Would you bring those for me?” he asked.
In the refectory, Bors brooded over his wine. As Tannhauser dumped his gear on the table, Bors made a point of not looking up.
“Well, this is a sour farewell for an old friend,” Tannhauser remarked.
Bors scowled and fended him off with a hand.
Tannhauser took the blanketed gun from Amparo. “Since you never fail to have one, give me an opinion.” He tossed the musket broadside across the table.
Bors stood up and caught it with both hands and by reflex tested its weight. His eyes gleamed. He laid it down and unfastened the ties. He unwrapped the blanket, and as the silver, ebony, and steel were unveiled he let out a connoisseur’s sigh. The weapon leapt into his hands as if it was alive, and he threw it to his shoulder and sighted and swept it in an arc across the room, the silver chasing and the nine-palm damascened barrel winking in the light above the table lamps.
“Perfection,” he muttered. “Perfection without price.” He lowered it and with the effort of one extracting his own teeth he laid it back on the blanket in a pointed display of the triumph of good manners over covetousness. “Unique. Exquisite. With that I could shoot the bollocks off a Mussulman at five hundred feet.” He added, teeth gritted, “If I ever get that close to one.”
“It’s yours,” said Tannhauser.
Bors stared at him and Tannhauser thought he saw his lip tremble. Bors’s hands moved to seize the musket, then stopped and hovered above it. “You’re sure, now? If I pick it up again you’ll have to take it from my corpse.”
Tannhauser nodded. “It will come in handy at Saint Elmo.”
Bors seized the gun and caressed it, marveling, his face shining. As his eyes pored over the scrollwork he froze and his head snapped back toward Tannhauser. “At Saint Elmo?”
Tannhauser said, “Get your gear.”
Carla made her way back from the infirmary in darkness. Today was Pentecost, Pascha Rosatum, when the Holy Ghost had descended on Christ’s apostles in tongues of fire, and at Mass in the ward they’d strewn the altar with rose leaves and the nature of what God required of her became clearer. Angelu had died the previous night and his body had been removed before she arrived. With Angelu’s death, certain of her vain fantasies had been laid to rest. Jacobus, with whom she’d spent the morning, had died at noon. A man no one could identify, and whose face was too dismantled by saber cuts to identify himself, had died with his hand in hers in the minutes before she left. They would have ejected her at sundown, but she’d fought with the monks and won. At last her habit of getting her own way had been put to good use. She’d grieved with each man, and had found that each time that she thought her heart was about to break, it had become stronger, and the living presence of Christ more powerful yet. If she held hands of men, then Jesus held hers.
When she reached the auberge she thought no one was there, until she searched the monks’ cells and found Amparo crying quietly. She lay on the palliasse clutching her ivory comb. Lying on the sheet was the brass cylinder of her vision glass. Carla had never seen her cry before. Without speaking, Carla knelt down and stroked her hair.
“They’ve gone across the water,” said Amparo. “To Hell.”
“To Saint Elmo?”
“I’ve heard many people talk of it. They all call it Hell.”
“And who has gone there?”
“Tannhauser. Bors. They say they’re going to bring Orlandu home.”
A pang of anxiety and guilt pierced Carla’s stomach. But she was learning to master those old enemies too. “They act out of Charity, and God protects them. They’ll be back.”
“I looked in the shew stone, and I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see Tannhauser.” Wetness bubbled from her nose. She wiped it with the back of her hand and took a deep breath. “Oh, how I love him so.”
Carla saw how overwhelming and bewildering this notion was to her. She took hold of Amparo’s hands and squeezed. “Mattias is a good man,” she said. “With a large heart.”
“Do you love him too?”
“Yes, in my way.” She smiled. Almost to her own surprise, it was not a false smile. She said, “I’ve seen how he looks at you. I saw it from the earliest moment, when yo
u showed him the roses in the garden.”
“He told me the nightingale was happy in death, for he knew love. But perhaps Tannhauser does not.”
Carla didn’t understand the meaning of the nightingale. But it wasn’t time to ask. She said, “I’m sure he does. And I’m just as certain that he will not die.”
“I’m afraid,” said Amparo. “I’ve never been afraid before.”
“Love always brings fear,” said Carla. “They travel hand in hand, for to know love is to know that you may lose it. To love takes courage and strength. But you have both.”
“Will you stay with me tonight?”
Carla lay beside her on the palliasse.
Amparo said, “Can we play our music again? Together?”
“Yes,” said Carla. “Soon.”
With a flick of her finger she snuffed the wick of candle in the molten wax and darkness fell. They lay in each other’s arms and neither spoke, neither did they sleep, and each eased the terrible aching inside the other. After a while, the guns that had been silent since sundown exploded with renewed thunder, and they pulled each other closer in the dark.
The water was as still as the night and the only sound they heard as they left Sant’Angelo was the dip and sweep of the oars that drove them onward. The moon was three days short of full and apart from the charcoal crescent pared from its leftmost face it was as radiant as joy. It had just passed through the meridian and a few degrees shy of its shaded rim the Scorpion’s head shone as bright. In this Tannhauser read a benevolent augury.
At the worst it could do no harm.
The men in the boats were silent, each huddled in his own round of darkness. Each knew that the only way to be carried back home was in the cradle of his own mutilation. They took comfort in the knowledge that death, when it came, would be a martyr’s and that their sacrifice might purchase life and freedom from the yoke of Islam for those they loved.
Tannhauser and Bors sat in the rearmost of three boats, among which were disbursed fifty Maltese and Spanish soldiers, twelve professed knights and serjeants at arms of the Order, sundry supplies, ten shackled slaves, and a number of sheep which were hooded to stay their bleating. The great black shadow of Monte Sciberras loomed to their left and such a multitude of torches and fires glowed thereon that they rivaled the teeming firmament laid out above. At the seaward edge of the slope, beyond the sharp angulation that bent the shoreline south of Fort Saint Elmo, a Turkish labor battalion was throwing up what looked like a palisade, though as a defense against what Tannhauser could not tell. Then a keening song threaded through the stillness. The graceful rise and fall of the imam’s voice, its rhythmic repetition, stirred his heart. The Koran was Allah’s instruction to Man and Arabic the language in which He’d spoken. It couldn’t be translated into any other. Though the words at this distance were indistinct, the reaction it evoked within him—the reflexive tightening in his belly, the sudden thinness of the air in his lungs, the throbbing in his ears and temples—left him in no doubt, for he had heard them too many times before, on too many bloody fields.
The words and rhythm were those of Al-Fath, the surah of Conquest.
To the beat of the Imam’s song, Tannhauser murmured in Arabic.
“If any believe not in Allah and His Messenger, we have prepared for those who reject Him a Blazing Fire.”
Bors gave him a look.
“Hark,” said Tannhauser, “the Lions of Islam roar.”
A holocaust of frenzied explosions rent the darkness of the mountainside asunder, as not far short of fivescore siege guns unleashed an opening salvo that sucked the breath from their chests. Flames roared orange and yellow and blue from the dragon-mouthed bores of the culverins and showers of sparks wafted upward on the balmy night air. In the brief but dazzling light thrown by the muzzle blasts, they saw soldiers massed on the slopes in enormous squares. Soldiers massed by the thousand and the tens of thousands.
And all of them eager and willing to see the Face of God.
“Christ’s wounds,” said Bors.
In the stunned silence that followed the monstrous barrage an imam shrieked an exhortation to the thronged Believers. The gazi horde responded as one with a roar of exaltation that was louder and more terrifying by far than the anger of the cannon.
“Allahu Akabar!”
The cry swept across the water like the wind from Hell’s gate. None in that Christian company had ever heard its like and the blood of every man ran as cold as the waters of the Styx.
“Allahu Akabar!”
“For Christ and the Baptist!” shouted Bors, for he did not like to be outdone, and the men in the boats took up the riposte. Yet they were few, and they went unheard, and the horde’s throat opened yet again.
“Allahu Akabar!”
And Tannhauser knew in that moment, as did other men there, and not among the Moslem ranks alone, that this was the primordial howl of his inmost heart. The howl that had echoed down millennia. It was the Voice of a God whose power had been ancient when all other deities were unborn, Whose dominion subsumed all lesser faiths and creeds, Whose reign would see all other idols crumble into dust. It was a behest to kneel at the Altar of War. An invitation to relieve that thirst which would afflict men always, and which would never be wholly quenched. Tannhauser’s breath caught in his chest and tears sprang to his eyes. He brushed them away and breathed in the quintessence of the meaning of mortality. This was what it was to be a man. This, and not something other than this; be that high or be that base.
“Oh my God,” said Bors. And his eyes too were all ashine. “Oh my God.”
The Moslem battle cry subsided into a formless din of rage and the martial janissary bands struck up and volleys of musket fire blazed. Then horns trilled and the banners flaunted high and the horde invincible rolled down the slope toward Saint Elmo.
The fort replied with cannon blasts, and arquebuses crackled along the bastions. Turkish flares exploded high above and as the first wave hit the ditch and strove across the improvised bridgeworks, dazzling jets of wildfire erupted from the trumps on the Christian ramparts and burning hoops spun down through the banished dark to ensnare the foe. Within minutes the entire southwest salient was ablaze with burning men and erupting fireworks and pools of flame. Enough light was thrown for Sant’Angelo’s sixteen-pounders to open up, and balls screamed high above the convoy and plowed furrows of bloody outrage through the Moslem charge. Acrid smoke crept out across the water toward them and roiling spirals climbed across the face of the moon. The oarsmen bent to their looms and pulled and the boats slid on through the heat and the fog as if ferrying their lading of Argonauts to the far-side shore of Damnation. Then a volley of gunfire barked, not three hundred feet alee, and a cry in Spanish went up.
“The infidels are on us!”
Tannhauser peered ahead through the silvered gloom. A Turkish flatboat had slipped beneath the smoke and had raked the leading transport with a broadside of musket fire. The transport was a turmoil of screaming sheep and desperate men, oars tangled and askew, drifting without direction as the Turks laid off at thirty feet and recharged their pieces. A number of Turkish archers harried the stunned Christian survivors with vicious flights of arrows from their goat-horn bows. There were few guns on the Christian boats, the shoulder arms of Saint Elmo being passed on from the dead to the living. The second transport swung clear of the first and pulled hard for Saint Elmo’s dock. A wise choice in the circumstance. There was every chance that Tannhauser’s lot would receive the second volley. Then the Turks would be at leisure to extinguish them all. Bors threw the Damascus musket to his shoulder.
Tannhauser stopped him. “Save it, man.”
“I haven’t come this far to drown like a blasted sailor.”
“Nor I.”
They were seated in the front third of the boat, near five brethren of the Aragonese langue dressed in full battle harness. Caballero Geronimus Aiguabella, of the Priory of Gerona, was in command. Tannhauser grab
bed him and Aiguabella, a razor-faced fanatic with eyes as black as glass beads, turned to listen.
“Move your brethren to the stern, so that their weight will raise the prow.” Tannhauser pointed, then illustrated with his hands. “Then order the helmsman to ram the Turk amidships, on the oblique. Do you understand?”
Aiguabella blinked and looked across the water to envisage Tannhauser’s ploy.
“At the last moment, on your order, our rowers must ship their oars,” Tannhauser said. “The Turkish sweeps will form a ramp to carry us over, and the infidel’s craft will be left capsized in our wake.”
Aiguabella took this in and looked at him. He seemed dubious.
Tannhauser said, “It’s that or take their fire. If we slow down enough to take them on hand to hand, they’ll rake us stem to stern.”
Aiguabella said, “Bueno.”
He rapped out orders to his knights and led the unsteady, clanking procession to the stern. The Maltese helmsman, singing out the rhythm in a calm and salty voice, had the rowers already heaving at a full pelt. The whoosh of their breathing matched the rattle of the oarlocks and sea spume topped the gunwales with every stroke. If one had to attempt so reckless a maneuver at sea, Tannhauser thought, one could not wish for better than a Maltese hand on the helm. As he unlimbered his rifle the longboat changed course to bear down on the Turkish vessel, now just two hundred feet distant. He and Bors were the foremost of their crew and they could see the Moslem musketeers as they struggled, cramped and pitching, to reload and prime. They were dressed in a motley of costumes and numbered twoscore. Shouts of alarm were exchanged as they saw the Christian prow foaming through the quicksilver, and their frenzy increased and their rowers hoisted their oar blades out of the water to pull away.
“Corsairs!” said Bors. He blew his gun match to a fierce yellow glow. “It’s sweet to pull a corsair’s trick upon them.”
“Their helmsman,” said Tannhauser. “Do you see him?”
