The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “It’s easier than it sounds,” Tannhauser assured him. “And when your belly is full and the silks are soft against your skin, it becomes easier still.”

  “And my mother?”

  Tannhauser blinked, unprepared for the matter to be raised. “She is in God’s hands, as either faith would attest. You and I must see to ourselves.” Orlandu blinked at the harshness of this prescription, and, in truth, Tannhauser felt something of a fraud. He did not, however, admit it. Instead he leaned forward and squeezed the boy’s shoulder. “You’ve witnessed the thick of battle, boy. The madness and the waste. The sorrow, the terror, the pain. Can you tell me that there’s any use to it?”

  Orlandu didn’t answer.

  “If there is a God, He’s blessed you with a keen wit,” said Tannhauser. “You would honor Him best by employing it. And now let’s away.”

  Tannhauser took Orlandu to the bazaar and refreshed some acquaintances and exchanged two ounces of opium for silver akçe. He subjected Orlandu to a bath shared with two Sipahi cavalrymen, and bought him some clothes and slippers appropriate to his station, and a knife and a small iron cooking pot, which he promised would make him popular. He taught him to say the Shahada—Ashhadu Alla Ilaha Illa Allah Wa Ashhadu Anna Muhammad Rasulu Allah: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His Prophet—which would endear him to the faithful in an emergency, and since Maltese and Arabic were not far distant tongues, Orlandu mastered it readily. He told him not to bow his head to any man, even a vizier, for one bows to Allah alone, and he discovered that “Asalaamu alaykum” was a greeting with which the boy was already familiar.

  He impressed on him that they were not to appear too friendly before Abbas or his entourage. They were to believe that Tannhauser was repaying a modest debt, out of charity and reverence for Allah rather than out of affection for the boy, and no more than that. He then took him back to Abbas’s camp and introduced him to the staff, and bribed the hostler to instruct him in the care of horses, a skill always in demand. Orlandu, with his street urchin’s instinct to the fore, played his part with conviction and Tannhauser, his black bile purged, congratulated himself on a fair day’s work.

  Later, he made a gift of a pound of opium to Abbas, and told him that, with his blessing, he planned to take a ship for Tripoli the very next day. Abbas gave his blessing, and a letter of commendation, but his mood was preoccupied and dark, though he did not say why.

  Tannhauser retired to his cushions to contemplate a brighter future than had recently seemed possible. He’d parlay the remaining opium into gold at the bazaar, for it was worth far more here than elsewhere. In Tripoli the gold, artfully distributed, would buy him a line of credit with the grain merchants. His knowledge of the Maltese situation, and his contacts in the army bazaar, would purchase something even more precious: their confidence. And Abbas’s letter would be worth more gold than he could carry. Tannhauser had started out before with much less capital. He’d be back in Malta in a month with a cargo of goods that would make the quartermasters drool.

  He’d done what he could for the boy. A place on Abbas’s staff was as safe as any station on the island. He’d stood by his bargain with Carla and more. He’d paid his dues to the War God. Someone had to rise from the ashes yet to come; better he than some other. As he laid his head on the pillow and closed his eyes, what passed for his conscience was as clear as a polished mirror.

  Some hours later he awoke. The light of the fires burned outside the tent. He’d been dreaming, he knew not of what. He glanced down for the Ethiop, but the Ethiop wasn’t there. The dream had been haunted by a distant thread of music that had made his heart ache with sadness, that left a blurred impression of possibilities unfulfilled and paths not taken. He lay back on the pillow and scratched his privities. Then he realized that he heard the music still.

  His gut clenched tight. He told himself to go back to his dreams. Come the dawn he had a ship to catch, for Tripoli. Instead, he rose from the cushions and pulled on his caftan, and as if under the spell of some enchantment he wandered out into the night.

  Watch fires speckled the vast pooled darkness of the Marsa, and he imagined the janissaries fettling their arms and binding each other’s wounds by the oçak’s warmth, and, as was their practice, reciting heroic ballads around their kazan. Part of him yearned to join their hearth for an hour or two, to revisit the sacred fellowship of his youth. His tattoos would guarantee a cordial welcome. A quarter-pound of opium would ease their dismay at events. But the past was past and better left so, and the melody’s golden thread drew him on elsewhere.

  The music on the crystalline air was faint but real. It pulled him to the rim of Corradino and he overlooked the Christian harbors jumbled down below. The half-moon was in Sagittarius and a lunar beam slashed the waters of Galley Creek. He imagined she sat at the moonbeam’s farther end. Wherever she sat, she sawed at her viola da gamba with that same extravagant union of hope and despair that had charmed him in the rose garden, and had launched him into the core of Hell’s creation. As then on that perfumed hill, so now on this one which reeked of putrefaction, he felt his eyes fill with tears and her music fill his soul where it had always been empty. Amparo was his darling. And yet. Had he chosen the wrong woman? He didn’t wonder that he’d dared not choose Carla. She wielded a power to which he feared submission. But one woman or the other was hardly the present predicament. In his present predicament, all his choices were carried away on the wings of her nocturnal heart song.

  He heard steps in the dirt behind him and turned. It was Orlandu. He looked up with an unspoken question, his tongue stilled by what he saw in Tannhauser’s face. Tannhauser smiled. In his mind’s eye, he saw the galley for Tripoli pulling out of Marsamxett Harbor without him.

  “You hear that, boy?” he said.

  Orlandu cocked an ear. He nodded.

  “That’s your mother.”

  Orlandu gazed out across the bay.

  Tannhauser said, “She plays like an angel in chains.”

  Orlandu looked up at him smartly, as if Tannhauser had let slip out a secret that he’d meant to keep to himself. Tannhauser scraped a thumbnail through his beard. He studied the vast terrain of darkness which enswathed the town.

  “It’s the Devil’s bounty I’ll need if I’m going to set her free. But he’s always been more than happy to extend my credit.”

  Tuesday, August 7, 1565

  Santa Margharita—The Mdina Road—Monte San Salvatore

  The day dawned windless and still and a fetid aroma infested the air throughout the camp. As Tannhauser rose for prayer the stench told him the reason for Abbas’s dour humor of the night before. The prelude to all battles included, if nothing else, a mighty swill of feces, and feces of a uniquely malodorous character at that. It was not a measure of cowardice, rather a fact of nature; thirty thousand men were preparing to sacrifice their lives for Allah, and even the fearless were wise to rid their bodies of the excess weight.

  The battalions had maneuvered into place in the dark and by the time he’d collected his chestnut mare and ridden across the saddle between Corradino and Margharita, the surah of Conquest was proclaimed over the neighboring heights. The tympani and pipes of the Mehterhane band struck up and the marshaling horns summoned a colossal twin-pronged offensive by the Grande Turke’s legions. Admiral Piyale commanded the assault on the Borgo; Mustafa Pasha that on L’Isola.

  Since the intention was to take both citadels at any cost, Tannhauser spent the morning on the Margharita ridge, in the feigned role, when necessary, of Abbas’s aide-de-camp, and from there he watched the prodigies of violence and valor unfold below. After all, there was no point sneaking into the Borgo—his plan since hearing the contessa’s untimely nocturne—if the Turks were already streaming in through the walls. In that event he would ride down the hill and join them, in the hope that he could salvage at least Amparo and Carla from the rampage that would follow. And a rampage it would be. Suleiman himself had failed to restrain the
janissaries—at Buda, Rhodes, and elsewhere—and the grudges nurtured in this war ran deeper than most. La Valette had made sure of that. The streets would run red for a day, perhaps two or three. Atrocities would abound. Men would knife each other over tawdry scraps of booty. The knights would take the brunt of the torture and execution, which was only fair. But sooner rather than later the abscess would be lanced, and once it dawned that the property, human and otherwise, being destroyed belonged to the Sultan, Mustafa would start hanging his own men in droves.

  Tannhauser wondered if he’d be able to reclaim Buraq—after, he supposed, seeing the women safe—and reckoned it would take light footwork, a good deal of opium, and probably some killing.

  As the opening bombardment ceased, the clearing smoke and dust revealed a huge breach in the Borgo enceinte, where a forty-foot section of the curtain wall had collapsed onto the corpses in the ditch. The banners of the Sultan surged across the Grande Terre Plein and Piyale’s Tartar levies, in brilliant yellow uniforms and headdress, unleashed a whickering rain of arrows from their bows. They flung themselves at the Religion’s arquebusiers. Scores were cut down on the gore-steeped clay of the approaches. Those who could hauled themselves up and stumbled on into the inferno, for such it became as wildfire and bubbling pig fat vomited into the breach from the enfilading crownworks. As Azebs freighted ladders in an attempt to escalade the post of Castile, a scarlet wedge of Sipahi foot soldiers drove forward in the Tartars’ yellow wake.

  On the hilltops more battalions, and yet more—as if Piyale could conjure them up from thin air—shunted over the rim to join the fray. The high white borks of the janissaries swayed like a field of giant lilies. Dervishes stomped in impatience and brandished glittering blades and cried out, “Woe to the Unbelievers, on account of that Day of theirs which they have been promised.” And Iayalars delirious with hemp tore at their clothes and screamed out to Allah to grant them their right share of blood.

  Above the foremost of the Catholic bastions, the seventy-ninth slave of the siege to grace the gallows on the Provençal Gate dangled over the catastrophe like a wingless and blue-tongued Harpy sent by the forces of darkness to observe the day.

  As the Borgo fought for existence, three hundred yards to Piyale’s left, and separated by the inlet of Galley Creek, Mustafa Pasha fell on Saint Michel. A red mass of Sipahis flung their scaling irons high amid a flaming pandemonium of fire hoops and pipkins. The stench of burning hair and fat reached Tannhauser’s nose through the already dense miasma of the decomposing dead, from which multitudes of blowflies rose in snarling and iridescent pillars blue and green. It seemed impossible that even gazi could endure such demonic treatment, yet they did; and as minutes and then hours crawled by, they climbed the bodies of the roasted and the slain, and scaled the fire-blacked walls and wormed through the embrasures, and combat at close quarters erupted high above the Ruins of Bormula.

  As if to sound L’Isola’s death knell, Mustafa himself appeared on that broken plain at the head of his guards. Musket balls kicked dust spots from the sun-baked ground about him. He disdained them. Ostrich feathers surmounted his immense white turban and his pearl-gray courser was dressed in cloth of gold and red horsetail standards towered to his either side, as they’d towered over Temujin and Timur the Lame in the hecatombs of yore. Alongside the Pasha’s guard, a dozen orta of solaks, the janissary elite, accompanied by their Bektasi dervish fathers, drew themselves up, in bronze helms and ocher robes, and Mustafa rode among them, goading their pride, exhorting them with verses from the Prophet, courting their souls with the prospect of a palm-shaded paradise and whetting their greed with that of bonuses and pillage. He and La Valette were well matched, Tannhauser thought. Both seventy years old and each still crazed with blood. The solaks formed up for the charge and his throat tightened, for he felt their hearts beat. If Sipahi could mount the ramparts of Saint Michel—and they had—the Lions of Islam would take them down entire.

  Then a great roar—of vengeful triumph intermingled with despair—rose from the breach in the Borgo wall and Tannhauser urged his horse back along the ridge for a better view. Piyale’s shock troops had cleared the fiery breach and crowded pell-mell into the vacant ground beyond. There they met the unblemished stone of the concealed interior wall—the new second wall that Tannhauser himself had suggested and which La Valette had killed slaves by the hundreds to construct. Instead of finding themselves in the town, Piyale’s invaders were trapped in a couloir of slaughter, penned up in front by the wall and crushed together from behind by the scarlet wedge of gazi seeking glory.

  The killing floor was superbly conceived. At either end of the corridor casemates and oilettes accommodated cannon charged with grape, and these plowed the frantic press with tempests of gore. From above, arquebusiers and archers fired at will, and Maltese women in pairs poured cauldrons of boiling lard and dropped blocks of masonry, and the incendiary crews plied their baneful wares, all of them conspiring in the infinite ruin of the caterwauling mortals below.

  The entrapped wheeled this way and that, like a herd of panicked cattle set about by predators, and as they finally understood that their only chance of salvation lay in rout, a convulsive migration exploded toward the breach, and sally gates creaked open in the new-wrought works, and grim squads of knights ventured forth to hack their prey to pieces with axes and swords. And as the quarry rose waist-high in bloody stacks, and the refugees on the Grande Terre Plein were shot in the back as they ran, the knights raised their weapons skyward and praised God.

  The Borgo would stand. At least for today.

  Tannhauser rode back to view the progress of the fight for Saint Michel. Howling columns of solaks were mounting the ladders and had already pitched their Star and Crescent banner alongside the Cross. The knights and the Maltese were contesting every inch, but with immediate support unlikely from the Borgo, and Mustafa’s reserves effectively unlimited, the forecast for Saint Michel seemed bleak indeed. If Saint Michel fell, the Borgo would follow within a week. Mustafa would fill L’Isola with his siege train, blast the city’s undefended flank from a distance of a few hundred feet, and traverse Galley Creek with his longboats while the enceinte was being stormed from the Grande Terre Plein.

  Tannhauser didn’t know the byways of the island well enough to make his way into the Borgo under darkness, at least not from here, nor did he know the disposition of the Turkish lines to the east. He needed one of the Religion’s Maltese scouts to get him through. They knew every nook and cranny of the rugged terrain and ferried messages to and from Mdina at the Grand Master’s will. As far as he knew not one of them had been caught. Mdina was four miles away. If he wanted to return to the Borgo, Mdina was where he’d have to start.

  Tannhauser wheeled his horse and rode across the heights with as much haste as he dared. He climbed the flank of Corradino and swung past Abbas’s tent and found Orlandu shoveling horse manure into a barrow. Orlandu abandoned his shovel as Tannhauser dismounted.

  “We’ll not be seeing each other for a while,” Tannhauser said.

  The boy was at once crestfallen but squared his narrow shoulders.

  “You’ll stay with the entourage of General Abbas. He’s wise and fair, and will see you come to no harm. Tell him nothing of our fellowship. Tell him, if you must, what I’ve told him myself: that you did me a kindness when I was enslaved at Fort Saint Elmo. I was dying of thirst and you gave me a drink from a goatskin water bag. That’s all. In ransoming you from the Algerian, I’ve repaid that boon, as Allah commands. Do you understand?”

  Orlandu nodded. “A goatskin water bag.”

  “Remember, you’re now a man, and a Maltese at that, and I know no tougher of the species—and as Saint Paul wrote, you must put boyish manners behind you. Work hard, pray with the heathen, learn their tongue. You survived the captivity of Salih Ali; in this berth you’ll live like a duke.”

  He took a step nearer and stooped over, hands on thighs.

  “Now listen to me
close, Orlandu. If Malta falls, and I’ve not returned, and Abbas takes ship for Old Stambouli—as sooner or later he will—you must go with him.”

  Orlandu blinked. “Across the sea?”

  “Look on it as an education, for it will certainly be that. Give me your word, now. On the Tears of the Virgin.”

  “I give you my word, on the Tears of the Virgin.”

  “Good. As long as you’re with Abbas, I’ll be able to find you again, be that it takes months or even years.”

  This was rather harder to take, but Orlandu swallowed his fear and did not demur.

  “Do you have faith in me?” pressed Tannhauser.

  “That’s the only thing I do not need to fake,” said the boy.

  At this Tannhauser almost wavered himself, but he swallowed too, and contented himself with a solemn nod of approval. He slipped the heavy gold ring from his finger and pressed it into Orlandu’s palm.

  “Keep this as a memento of our friendship. While you carry it, you shall not come to harm.” This was a piece of nonsense, no doubt, but Orlandu looked at the ring as if it were the Grail, and Tannhauser knew it would give him heart in the trials that lay before him. “Let no one see it or you’ll have to defend it with your life. Hide it up your arse.”

  Orlandu said, “My arse?”

  “I’ve known men carry knives up there, and no end of contraband besides. If Abbas ever seeks to abandon you, or sell you, show him the ring, and him alone. Tell him it is my pledge—he will recognize it—and that you beg him to honor it until I return.”

  Orlandu nodded. “Where are you going?”

  “As far as you—and Abbas—are concerned, I’ve gone to Tripoli.”

  Orlando looked to the sound of guns across the bay. He looked back at Tannhauser, who saw him hover on the verge of begging to go with him. To his credit, Orlandu kept his peace, and from this Tannhauser took confidence.