The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “Then that is what you must do. Tonight.”

  Orlandu stared at him. The fierce blue eyes were in earnest. Orlandu felt sick without knowing why. He shook his head.

  “I order it,” said Tannhauser.

  Orlandu felt a pressure in his chest he couldn’t resist. He said, “No.”

  “Have you not had enough of battle? Of weariness and filth?”

  “I serve you,” said Orlandu. He took a step backward.

  “That is a start. The first rule of serving is to obey.”

  “I’m not a coward.” Such was the strange panic in his gut, the heat inside his head, that this statement seemed false on his tongue. He was full of fear.

  “Nothing could be clearer. Nevertheless, you must go.”

  “Nevertheless, I will not.”

  “You have the makings of a very poor soldier.”

  The words seemed an insult yet Tannhauser spoke them with approval. He transferred the glowing steel to the anvil and for some time said nothing, lost in his smithing as he extended the newly fashioned bulge around the helm’s circumference and expanded the heat-dulled steel toward the rim. Orlandu prayed that the argument was won and that he wouldn’t be banished from Tannhauser’s side. The prospect of such exile filled him with a horror so intense he wanted to vomit. Nothing he’d felt while crawling along the gauntlet came close to the terror that filled him now. He watched Tannhauser’s hands, drawn in by the hypnotic rhythm of the hammer and the gradual submission of that which wasn’t meant to yield.

  “It takes earth and water and fire and wind to make steel,” said Tannhauser. “Therein lies its strength. My father told me that God forged men from the same materials, but simply in different proportions. It is the proportions allocated of each that determine the qualities of a piece of steel. This helm must be hard but not flexible, therefore the heat we use is gentle and we will quench it only once. But a sword must bend without breaking or losing its fettle, and a gun barrel must contain the explosions unleashed within it, so these steels require diverse techniques and proportions proper to their purpose. And so it goes. Do you understand?”

  Tannhauser looked at him and Orlandu nodded, again lamenting his ignorance but thrilled by the thought of such mysteries. His terror was fading away.

  Tannhauser continued. “The solving of these riddles—of matching the most apt of an infinitude of possible proportions to a particular purpose—has been the work of millennia, passed down from fathers to sons, and from master to pupil, each, with luck, learning more than the last. And so it should be in the blending of those elements that make up the temper of a man. The knowledge is there, if we would but listen. But in the matter of forging their own mettle, men are stubborn and vain, and place more faith in the voice of their own inclinations than in the counsel of the wise.”

  Tannhauser treated him to a smile, but one which disturbed him.

  “Yet stubborn though men are, and hard to believe as it may be, boys are more stubborn still.”

  Orlandu shuffled and the panic returned as he realized that the argument was far from over. He tried to change the subject. “Where is your father?” he said, with exaggerated curiosity.

  Tannhauser chortled at the crudity of this stratagem. He returned the fire-blackened helm to the coals and exchanged the hammer for a lighter one.

  “My father is far away, and my prayer is that his peace is rarely disturbed by any thought of me. But you will not escape the issue. I came to this cesspool for one reason only, and that was not to die—for Jesus Christ, the Baptist, the Religion or anyone else. I came here to take you back to the Borgo.”

  “You came for me?” said Orlandu.

  Tannhauser nodded.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve asked myself that question many times over, and found many different answers, none of them satisfactory. At a certain point ‘Why?’ is no longer important. De Medran died today and so did Pepe de Ruvo. Miranda has a bullet in his chest. Le Mas is burned by wildfire. Again, there are many reasons why, and at this point none of them matter. You’ll swim back to the Borgo, if not because I order it then because I ask it. Go to the Auberge of England. You may serve Bors and Lady Carla until I return.”

  “But how will you return? The boats were shot to pieces again tonight and, well—I’m sorry to say this—but you can’t swim.”

  Tannhauser pulled the helmet from the fire, frowned, buried it in the ash to cool. “I have my own way out of here, but it’s not for you. Now do as I say. Go.”

  Orlandu felt his eyes film with tears, and a sadness clenched his throat with a pain more intense than any he could remember. He felt grief and the fear that verged once more on blind terror. He would lose Tannhauser forever. He’d never had anything to lose before. Without Tannhauser there was—what? These days in his company, despite the exhaustion and madness, were the most precious of his life. The fullest. The dearest. Before Tannhauser there had been nothing. All he could recall of it was emptiness. To be cast out, to return to that emptiness, seemed worse than death. Tannhauser took him by the shoulders and stooped so their faces were level. The eyes that had looked at him—smiled at him—with such comradeship now stared at him from the shadows with no more warmth than a pair of blue stones.

  “The Borgo is where I need you. You have no place here. I don’t want you around.”

  Tannhauser pushed him away and turned back to the forge.

  “Now go.”

  Orlandu stifled his tears and a violent rage swept through him. Words and thoughts were lost in the thicket of emotions choking his chest. He turned and ran from the armory and out into the bailey. He ran on, sobs breaking from his throat. He ran on across the courtyard and through the postern and down the stone stairs to the quay. A pair of guards dozed on the steps. They watched him with that absolute lack of curiosity that attends bone-tiredness. Orlandu caught his breath and stood staring into the water at his feet.

  A single idea sprang from the turmoil inside him. He stripped off his boots and breeches and shirt. He dived into the harbor. He knew the spot. On the fourth dive to the harbor bottom, twelve feet below, his fingers brushed against it at the limit of his breath and he came up empty-handed to gasp for air. On the next plunge he found it at once and kicked his way back to the surface and climbed up onto the quay holding Tannhauser’s helmet.

  He sat with it in his lap and used his shirt to wipe it clean of mud and weed. If he must leave, at least he could do something to make Tannhauser smile, to make him proud. Something to wipe out the memory of those stone-cold eyes. And of the child’s tears that had stung his own. As he polished the steel until it shone bright in the moonlight, he stopped with a sudden understanding and his gut turned over inside him.

  He—Orlandu—was the boy the contessa had been seeking.

  And Tannhauser was in her pay. He cared nothing for the Religion. Or Christ. Or for him either. Orlandu was no more than merchandise, something to be sold and passed on, forever in pawn to the will of others, as he’d always been before. As he’d been since the day he was born. In himself, he was nothing. The rage inside returned and consumed him.

  He pulled on his breeches and his too-big boots. When the sound of the hammer reached his ears he realized he was back in the armory, with no memory of the distance in between. He could hardly breathe, not with the exertion of running but with the band of anger and heartache crushing his chest. Tannhauser looked up from the anvil and saw his face and blinked.

  Orlandu threw the helmet. It clattered across the flags to Tannhauser’s feet.

  Orlandu fought the stinging in his eyes. He said, “I do not serve you any longer. And I stay here—because I am free—and I will die like a man for the Religion.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply. His anger was already waning and in its place rose a terrible yearning to be taken into Tannhauser’s arms. He ran to escape the confusion bursting his skull. Outside he sat down against the wall and hugged his knees and tried to return to that state wh
ich had existed before all this had happened. Before Tannhauser had beckoned him to come across the field of dead. Before he’d known the scourge of love. Lady Carla his mother? He didn’t believe it. His mother was a whore, as Boccanera had told him a thousand times as accompaniment to a kick. Across the bailey, knights were making their way to the chapel as dawn broke. He heard Tannhauser’s hammer strike up again and Orlandu felt abandoned.

  Agoustin Vigneron stopped as he passed by. He looked down at him.

  “Come to chapel, boy, and ease your woes,” said Vigneron. “It’s Trinity Sunday.”

  Corpus Christi: Thursday, June 21, 1565

  The Borgo—Saint Elmo

  The predawn dark seemed more impenetrable today, its gloom thicker, its resonant promise broken, and the sun when it rose was pale and sickly and wan. Or perhaps, thought Carla, it was only a spell cast by thousands of somber hearts as they tried to excite their spirits for a feast overclouded by doom. She woke Amparo with difficulty and dressed her like a child, for she’d fallen to a black melancholia and rarely left her bed. Bors too took some rousing from his stupor of opium and drink, a state sought more to dull his anguish than the pain of his healing wounds. Carla’s own anguish, her guilt at the disaster she’d wrought for Tannhauser, was keen enough. But someone had to spread Christ’s love and she felt blessed that it was she. She extracted Bors’s oath to see that Amparo attended the procession, for it might inspire her. Then she left to take her own place, dressed and veiled in black.

  Carla had been invited by Father Lazaro to join the brethren of the infirmary and those of the wounded who could walk. Without intending it, she’d become a revered figure in the infirmary. Her prayers and companionship were craved by the maimed. Her name was called out in the darker watches of the night. If someone survived against expectations, her powers were given credit. When someone died holding her hand, none doubted that he was accepted at once through Heaven’s Gate. She attributed none of this to herself. She knew she was no more than a channel for God’s love. Yet in this she found a kind of ecstasy.

  The general sense of grief that pervaded the city was induced by the ordeal of brave Fort Saint Elmo, whose survival for so long was perceived as a miracle and whose fall was expected any hour. The relief that Garcia de Toledo, Viceroy of Sicily, had promised by June 20 had not arrived, and no one any longer expected it. Every prayer was offered for the souls of Saint Elmo’s dead and the souls of those soon to join them. With a breaking heart, Carla prayed for Mattias and his deliverance, and for Orlandu, her son, whom she’d known so briefly and failed to claim, but whom she loved no less for that.

  The Corpus Christi pageant was as grand as the hard-pressed townsfolk could make it. Apart from the soldiers on watch, every Christian who could walk or be carried turned out to take part. The streets teemed from wall to wall as the procession wound its way to San Lorenzo. The Grand Master led his knights in escorting the Blessed Sacrament—Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ—in a magnificent gold monstrance wreathed with lilies, and some folk wept that such flowers still existed in the wasteland their world had become. The icon of Our Lady of Philermo, dressed in red damask and pearls, and the icon of Our Lady of Damascus were carried aloft. Men mocked up as demons mimed their terror of the Divine Presence. At the head of the pageant, preceding the Holy Eucharist, children dressed as angels sang the Panis Angelicum in a portrayal of the Nine Heavenly Choirs.

  At points the procession stopped for the casting of holy water and for Benediction, and the Tantum Ergo Sacramentum of Aquinas was sung. Candles burned and incense smoked and a child led a lamb by a harness of red ribbons. Banners waved to Santa Catarina and Santa Juliana, and to John the Baptist and the Virgin of Sorrows. And the brethren of the Sacred Infirmary carried the precious Madonna and Infant standard of Rhodes: AFFLICTIS TU SPES UNICA REBUS.

  In all that afflicts us You are our only Hope.

  Bands played and church bells pealed while the Turkish siege guns thundered across the bay. By the time the procession reached the square of San Lorenzo, the power of God flowed through them like a sacred river and their hearts were lifted in spite of all that they endured and in all that twenty thousand there was not a soul present who wished to be anywhere else in all Creation, for they knew that here, above all places in this mortal and fallen world, the Lamb of God loved each and every one.

  On her return from the Mass, Carla glimpsed Amparo in the crowd. The dullness in her eyes had gone and the luster of her skin had returned and her body was once again as lithe as a cat as she wove through the press. Then Amparo was gone and Carla’s heart felt lighter. She made her way to the infirmary to pray for the wounded, and for Mattias and for her son.

  The solemnity of the Corpus Christi celebration did not forestall the daily ritual at the slave pens. Though few but his executioners bore witness, the thirty-second Moslem prisoner of the siege was picked from his fellows. They gagged him with rope to stifle his heathen gibbering and they dragged him through the backstreets where the procession for Christ did not go, and they prodded him up the wall stair to the gallows of Provence and there they noosed his neck and watched him die.

  In the smoking shell of Saint Elmo across the water, Tannhauser searched the grounds and found Orlandu at work with a gang of Maltese soldiers. They were hauling rocks up the scarp to the western breach, where the heat was intense and the sky was dark with flies. The boy was naked to the waist and sweating and caked with dust. As Orlandu stooped down in the rubble, Tannhauser placed a crock of quince jam on the rock he intended to lift. Orlandu blinked, as if dispelling a mirage, then straightened and looked at his former master.

  “That,” said Tannhauser, of the jam, “is the most coveted prize left to this entire company.” He brandished a hand. “Your companions here would fight for it as fiercely as they fought for this breach—if they knew it was here—for all of them will die without ever again tasting anything so sweet. What say you help me finish it?”

  Orlandu wiped the back of a hand across his mouth. He glanced at the jam without replying. Tannhauser picked up the crock and tossed it in the air and Orlandu’s hands flashed out to catch it before it smashed. Tannhauser laughed and wrung a grin from the boy.

  “Come,” said Tannhauser. “We’ve pouted like women long enough. And comfort yourself with the fact that no man ever sold his pride for a higher fee.”

  While the Turks from four points of the compass had sniped and bombarded without cease, Orlandu had avoided Tannhauser day and night. It was clear that he nursed wounded feelings and that his Latin blood seethed over insults of his own concoction. Tannhauser had left it to hard labor to cool him down. He’d kept an eye out for his safety and employed certain others to do the same. Tannhauser took him now to the forge, which he’d seized as his own domain following the death of the armorer. Three days’ solitude at the anvil, refurbishing damaged harness and drinking nostalgia’s wine, had restored his inner contentment. The big news from the front—the Drawn Sword of Islam, Torghoud Rais, mortally wounded in the head by a cannon shot from Castel Sant’Angelo—had reached him as if from far away. The end was nigh for Saint Elmo’s ragtag garrison. By his calculation this weekend would see Mustafa conclude the siege. Time, then, to mollify the boy for his departure.

  Tannhauser brewed the last of his coffee on the firepot and while gun stones battered the donjon above and shook showers of plaster from the vaulting, they ate the jam with a wooden spoon and both of them were hard-pressed not to weep with pleasure. Tannhauser didn’t push the boy as to his intentions, for the cult of death had swallowed him and his intentions were plain. Instead, Orlandu pressed him.

  “I am the boy you were looking for, born on All Hallows’ Eve, yes?” asked Orlandu.

  “You are he,” said Tannhauser.

  “How do you know this?”

  “It was writ down by the priest who baptized you and sworn to by a man of devout character. Orlandu Boccanera.”

  “I disown the name Boccanera, f
or he was a pig, and the father of pigs, and never claimed me for his own. He sold me like a mule to the ship scrapers. I will die as Orlandu di Borgo.” He looked at Tannhauser as if expecting disputation.

  “Orlandu di Borgo it is,” Tannhauser replied. “Though you might claim another name—and a truer one—if you had the wit.”

  “Then it’s so? I am the bastard of Lady Carla?”

  “You are her son.”

  “Boccanera told me my mother was a whore.”

  “Perhaps he considered her such, if indeed he knew who she was, which I greatly doubt. In that he wasn’t alone. Men, and pigs, are hard on women who sacrifice their virtue, especially for love.”

  “True love?” said Orlandu.

  “I know Lady Carla,” said Tannhauser. “She wouldn’t have given her virtue for anything less.”

  Orlandu’s eyes shifted, excited, absorbed. “And my father? Who was my father?”

  Tannhauser expected this query and masked his answer with a smile. “That’s a secret Lady Carla keeps to herself, as is a woman’s right.”

  Orlandu, clearly, had already explored this conundrum. “One of the knights of the Religion, yes? Such a lady would never sacrifice her virtue to anyone less.”

  “I’m sure her taste was as refined as one would expect.”

  “Perhaps one of the great knights here at Saint Elmo—or in the Borgo, yes?”

  At the sight of the boy’s joy an unexpected sadness squeezed at Tannhauser’s heart. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that your father was a most extraordinary man.”

  “Then I have noble blood?” asked Orlandu.

  “If you wish,” said Tannhauser. “Those who boast of it value it higher than virtue, but in my view blood counts for little—or nothing—in itself. Jesus and his disciples were humble men, as were Paracelsus and Leonardo, and the great majority of men of proven genius in every age. And more than a few of the vilest scoundrels alive may call themselves noble. Superiority of mind and character—if such is our ideal of nobility—does not flow in our veins but stems from the manner in which we conduct our lives. To answer your question, I’d say that by either measure, you have a just claim.”