The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  On this side of the breached wall was an apron of open ground where La Valette’s engineers had cleared a section of dwellings two blocks deep to give an open field of fire. A pair of sixteen-pounders had been hauled up and even as the mules were unlimbered, their sweating crews were charging the barrels with grape. From the barricades and breastworks sealing the cross streets, arquebusiers swapped fire with the musketeers on the brow of the talus, to little effect. The air pulsated with Arabic and invocations of the Prophet and His beard. The whole arena was fogged with drifts of gun smoke. The bells of San Lorenzo tolled as if they might do some earthly good. At a forward command post La Valette, armorless and bareheaded, observed the unfolding struggle with Oliver Starkey and a band of Provençals at his side. Several squads of pikemen trotted uncertainly across the open ground toward the melee.

  “Mattias!”

  He found Bors priming the pan of his Damascus matchlock behind the wall of a roofless hovel. “Ready for glory, my friend, now that your appetites are slaked?”

  “I missed breakfast,” Tannhauser replied. “Did you think to bring me some?”

  “I did not, though your portion wasn’t wasted. Where’s the girl?”

  “I told her to find Carla and stick close by her, in case we need to improvise an exit.”

  “We’ll see,” said Bors. “Seems Mustafa has Saint Michel on its knees, again. Piyale’s lot are yonder. They’ve got ladders and ropes up all the way to the bastion of France, but that’s just to soak up our reserves. The sharp end is here.”

  As Bors plowed a ball into the Turks massed on the slope, Tannhauser settled beside him to bench his rifle on the wall and choose a mark. He saw a young chaplain of the Order stumble from the smoke, his arms cartwheeling and his habit filthy and torn, as if he’d recently burrowed out from the rubble of Castile. His face was bloodied and contorted with the absolute conviction that only extreme fear, and states of religious ecstasy, may confer. In his case perhaps both ingredients were at work for he stopped a hundred feet away, framed by the gaudy Moslem pageant just behind him, and raised his hands aloft to deliver a crazed jeremiad, fragments of which reached Tannhauser’s ears through the din.

  “Lost! We are all of us lost! God has turned His face against us! The harvest is over, the summer has ended, and we are not saved! Retreat and make your peace with Christ!”

  Such claptrap coming from a priest was worth a fresh battalion of Sipahis to Piyale. The morale of the Spanish soldiery and the peasant militia had been fragile ever since their maestro de campo, Don Melchior De Robles, had been shot in the head on the twelfth. Sure enough the advancing pikemen stopped and wavered in confusion. They stole looks at one another, deaf to the provost sergeant’s roars, and found little comfort in what they saw. They found even less in the bloody duel for the breach or in the ululating horde trampling over the corpses of their comrades just beyond. They shifted about like leaves in a wind and teetered on the verge of rout.

  Tannhauser scowled and threw down on the raving chaplain and shot him square through the cross spanning his chest. The chaplain’s fingers almost touched his toes as he left the ground and he vanished back into the fog from whence he’d emerged.

  “Well,” said Bors, “someone had to do it.”

  Tannhauser crammed his powder flask into the bore. The pikemen didn’t continue their advance, but at least they were thinking twice about running away. Some of them jerked and fell under gunfire from the slope. The chaplain’s execution provided no more than a hiatus. Someone had to seize the hour and at this most desperate pass only one man had the stature for the job. Tannhauser glanced over to the knot of armored men around La Valette, and found the Grand Master looking in his direction.

  “Come on, you old dog,” shouted Tannhauser. “It’s time to show us what you’re made of.”

  He didn’t know if La Valette heard him, but if not the Grand Master had come to the same conclusion. La Valette grabbed a morion and a half-pike from a startled soldier nearby and, to the consternation of his myrmidons, the old man mounted the breastworks alone and strode across the bullet-scourged ground toward the broil.

  “God’s bread,” said Bors. “He’s taking them on single-handed.”

  The effect could not have been more dramatic if John the Baptist himself had appeared on the field. The pikemen at once formed up in order. The Provençals fought with one another to follow in his wake. As the old man broke into a shambling run, the Christian battle cries rose above the din, and the disheartened felt their blood boil, and knights and militiamen appeared from the ruins where before there’d seemed to be none, and hundreds charged pell-mell for the smoldering slopes where the foemen in their thousands grimly waited.

  Bors grounded his musket and drew his sword. He looked at Tannhauser, who was winding the key of his wheel lock with every intention of sticking to the wall.

  “Come now,” said Bors. “The girl can’t have drained all that much sap from your balls.”

  Tannhauser canted his rifle against the wall and donned his gauntlets. He said, “Because you’ll never let me hear the last of it if you live.”

  They joined the rush to perdition and, as if it sprang from some poisonous wellhead whose source would never run dry, the evil bliss of combat surged once more through Tannhauser’s veins. He wore a salet and half-armor, cadged from the growing stockpile, and as he ran the sweat poured down his flanks like a swarm of lice. His sword was a Running Wolf blade from Passau. He hurdled fellows groaning in their own spilled bowels. He waded into the line with cut and thrust, treading on the dying and the dead. He avoided the flailing elbows and blocked the hissing blades. He carved out a space at the foot of the talus and a figure loomed in green and he doled out a backhand below the knees, felt the woody double clunk through his wrist as the shins gave way, then stabbed the man through the gut as he slithered down the scree. Uphill assaults were damnable, but it was how the janissaries earned their daily bread. Just ignore the sweat and breathe. His arm moved, in part, of its own accord, pulling out strokes that his mind was too slow to foresee, like a player contesting tennis balls on the courts of the Pallacorda, and this was a satisfaction most profound. There was joy in a throat gaping wide. There was something of beauty in the union of action and intent, as your sword clove a skull below the turban and vented brains and eyes in a single blow. It shouldn’t have been so, but it was, and this was the world and this was the day and this was the way to write your name in the book of Life.

  An hour or so’s hard grind passed by in the scorch of the August sun, the air alive with screaming and the drone of the Pater noster. Tannhauser’s armor was caked in indigo mud and the weight was tiresome. The fight was a stiff one, but he and Bors had cleared their share of the talus with reasonable dispatch, and as far as he could see—which wasn’t twenty feet in any direction—the Turks were falling back and the tide had turned. Then a few yards to their right and down the incline, commotion arose.

  “The Grand Master is down!”

  The word spread like a pox along the widely extended line and the news got worse as it did so. Within a hundred yards, by Tannhauser’s reckoning, La Valette would be being buggered by Mustafa’s horse. Besides the resurgent stench of incipient panic, disaster loomed because soldiers and knights rushed in crowds to protect their prince. In the general state of chaos, few in fact knew where he was, and the result was akin to a riot. If the Turks had the wit to take advantage, the tide would turn again, and likely for good. Bors was making a meal of finishing a janissary half his size. Tannhauser stabbed the Turk through the back of the neck with his blood-quenched dagger and shoved him down, then jerked his head at Bors to indicate he follow him.

  They encountered a hedge of fighting as savage as any that Tannhauser had yet seen, as a mob of Gauls turned berserk to shield their warlord. The janissaries, sensing that victory itself was only inches beyond their swords, committed themselves with no lesser courage and furor. Tannhauser and Bors circumvented the melee
and jostled their way to the ring of knights around La Valette.

  Peering over their heads without much trouble, Tannhauser discovered the kind of squabble that only the French know how to muster, most especially in the middle of a battlefield. The exchanges were too florid and swift for Tannhauser to follow in detail, but he gathered that the myrmidons wanted La Valette to withdraw to safety, while the old man, who seemed fairly sprightly, despite being held upright by Oliver Starkey, was having none of it. The skirt of his habit was sodden, and torn apart at the thigh, but if he looked a little pale it was more likely with rage than with blood loss, for tempers were running high enough to boil. Starkey was far too English to advance his master’s cause in the face of such emotion. Gallic obstinacy looked set to triumph where Turkish valor had failed.

  Tannhauser hadn’t inched this far up the bloody talus to be shoved back down. With a loud clang he smacked the nearest helm with the flat of his sword. The victim dropped to his knees and Bors threw in a snigger to rub the point home. In the outraged pause that ensued, Tannhauser spoke in Italian.

  “The soldiers believe their Grand Master is dead. Clear him a way to the top where they can see him and take fresh heart.”

  Bors added, “If you Gauls have the mettle to get up there.”

  Before the Provençals could hack them both apart, La Valette shoved his way forward and limped up the slope. Oliver Starkey was the first to reach his side, he too hobbled by wounds. Pride and bellicosity triumphed over pique and the French knights roared like men deranged and drove in a gore-boltered wedge for the infidel banners. So furious were the Gauls in the violence they unleashed that Tannhauser revised his opinion of them on the spot. Bors made to follow. Tannhauser held him back.

  “Enough’s enough,” he said. “I need to move my bowels and have some food.”

  They trudged back through the reeking sewage of the fray, too hot and fatigued to spare the wounded a glance, and they crossed the open ground and collected their long guns. When they turned to look back, La Valette’s attack had taken him and his men to the ruined bastion’s summit, where the Turkish banners were thrown down amid a rabid orgy of killing.

  The second rout of the day was thus avoided and the whole uneven embankment of blood-slaked debris was back by Christian hands. The eight-pointed Cross of Saint John was wafted aloft; and taunts and obscene gestures were exchanged; and God Almighty was praised for their deliverance from evil.

  Throughout the afternoon the decimated slave battalions, and the mass of the town’s population, toiled to fling Turkish corpses into the ditch and to erect rough breastworks along the devastated walls. Fireworks crews set up shop in sulfurous redoubts. The cannon were entrenched and resighted. The ramparts were braced and remanned. And Gullu Cakie’s confederates trawled the crippled and the slain, to slit the throats of the dying and strip the Moslem bodies of their plunder.

  The long day waned and the dragon-mouthed siege guns rattled again on their chains. As cannonballs and gun stones bounced back from the walls, they raised reeking spouts of filth from the putrefying pudding of dead that clogged the ditch, and the foul vapors thereby expelled kindled a yellow-green ignis fatuus, which glowed like evil in the twilight and necklaced the Borgo’s throat, as if the spirits of the Moslem dead had awakened in protest and were calling on their coreligionists to rise and avenge them.

  And that spectral call to arms was heeded, despite the horror and the squanderment of the day, for, shortly after sundown, the Grande Turke attacked again across the whole enceinte. The darkness blazed as bright as day, and Satan’s chorus sang, and the Gods of East and West alike concealed their faces in shame as Their benighted devotees flocked back to the slaughter.

  Sunday, August 19, 1565

  The Post of Castile—A Fire in the Ruins

  The chaos of the midnight broil transgressed all human codes and circumscriptions, as if every fool on earth had been there assembled and given leave to rave in the dark unfettered. Men hacked one another asunder in the sweltering darkness. Corrosive drifts of smoke nourished the confusion. Arquebuses crackled and cannon crashed. Flares and spouts of flame and spinning wildfire hoops lit up the tumult.

  By these intermitted flashes of incandescence, Carla stuffed handfuls of coils back through the slit in the Spaniard’s belly. It wouldn’t prolong his life but it spared him indecency, and at such a grievous extremity even small dignities were precious. She’d gained some practice in this maneuver, and with the entrails reseated inside him she tucked the lap of his shirt into the wound to keep them in place. If he stood up, or moved overmuch, they’d spill out again, but of this the risk was slight. He lay without movement or demur, his face yellowed and shining in the waver of the flames, his eyes no longer animate with fear but fixed on his eternal destination. A smudge of chrism gleamed on his forehead. On his lips clung some fragments of Communion bread. He was in the arms of Christ. She smiled at him and he nodded with curious contentment. She shouldered her poke and stood up and left him to die.

  She found Mattias watching her, his helmet under one arm, his weight slung over one hip like a piece of statuary. His cuirass was daubed with muck and a rifle hung from his shoulder. His features were in shadow and she wondered what they might have shown her of his thoughts. He came closer, into the light. Powder had blacked his face like a sweep’s and was gathered like ink in the creases around his eyes. He tossed back his filthmatted hair and sweat flew, and he craned his neck to one side to reveal a congealing gash an inch or two in length.

  “I’m sore afflicted with wounds,” he said. “I need your ministrations.”

  She gave the gash a glance. “A scratch,” she said.

  “A scratch?”

  He feigned chagrin, with such conviction that she felt obliged to examine the gash again. He’d been close to death but the wound was superficial. His teeth appeared in a grin, and the creases around his eyes grew blacker.

  “How else can I win the pleasure of your society?”

  She laughed, taken by surprise, and was amazed at the sudden joy the laughter brought her. She smiled often enough, at the mutilated and doomed, but laughter was a habit unpracticed. The last time, she realized, had been on the night of his return from exile, when he’d made his adventures among the heathen sound like farce. She hadn’t seen him since. In one big fist he brandished a goatskin and a scorched wicker basket.

  “Water and wine from God,” he said. “And some bread, pickled eggs, olives, and a sheep’s cheese, perfectly aged.” He jerked his chin at the field. “The dying can wait, and the dead won’t mind. Come, you must take something, I insist.”

  He swapped his booty to the hand that cradled his helm and with his free hand took her arm and led her to a breastwork improvised from the ruins. He set down his load in the lee. He gathered chunks of burning timber from the wrack nearby and threw them together for a fire.

  “Not much of a hearth,” he said, “but better than none.”

  She watched him lay out his wares.

  “I brought enough for three,” he said. “Where’s Amparo?”

  “She’s keeping Buraq company,” she said. “The sight of wounds upsets her, and out here I’d fret for her safety.”

  “But not for your own,” he said.

  “The infirmary is filled twice over, as is the piazza and every house still standing and even the tunnels and cellars underground. The wounded aren’t to be taken to the infirmary anymore. Fra Lazaro has decreed that we now come to them.”

  Mattias cast his gaze about the diabolic nightscape. Oily jets of flame gouted from the mouths of trumps along the outermost breastworks and the glare of the ocher inferno they created beyond—in which numbers unknown of Turkish souls were consumed—threw the jagged rim into sharp relief. The defenders of the Roman Faith strung out thereon lunged into the nether realm at their feet with pikes and glaives, like shadow-puppet demons on a mutinous bank of the Styx. Incendiary hoops skirred sparking into the void and the glowing barrels of m
uskets bucked and slammed. A hot wind keened from the deserts across the sea and sent ragged leaves of flame flying up at the stars, like pages torn from a burning book of prayer condemned and unread. And from shallow pits in the rubble men squalled like abandoned children in a dozen foreign tongues, foreign to one another and foreign to God, for He seemed unwilling to hear their cries for mercy.

  “One would have thought such suffering beyond the design of men,” said Mattias. He looked at her. “Yet that is our Genius.”

  Carla didn’t reply.

  He brushed the dust from a block of stone, and invited her to sit, which she did. Stifling a groan, as if every joint voiced its own bitter complaint, he sat down too. She said grace and to her surprise he joined in. They crossed themselves.

  “You’ll convert me yet,” he said, and offered her the wineskin. His hand was scabbed and bruised. Two fingers, one swollen as a spindle, were bound together with a length of twine. “Your pardon,” he said. “I neglected to bring beakers.”

  She took the skin and drank. The wine was warm and sweet, and not watered as much as she was used to. Perhaps not watered at all. She handed the skin back.

  “Take more,” he said. “Your throat must be dry as clay, and you’ll need your strength tonight.”

  She took another mouthful and wiped her lips. Mattias poured half a pint down his throat and swallowed once. He plugged the skin and set it aside and she watched him pare the rind from a wedge of cheese with a garnet-dudgeoned dagger. He did it with great precision, then cut a delicate slice and proffered it by the dagger’s tip, conspicuous not to touch it with his filth-rimmed fingers.