The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “Swallow these as you draw up on the hill, when your heart begins to knock against your ribs. Not before. They are a taste of Paradise and will help to banish your fear. And if Paradise is where you’re bound, they will make the journey easier.”

  He wondered if he should ask about Orlandu, for the boy’s health was often on his mind, but here at the opposite end of the front the likelihood that they’d know him was remote. In any case, he knew that the silahadar cavalry hadn’t been committed since the first day. There was no point sending horses to scale walls. He stood up.

  They reached their feet before him and showered him with blessings.

  “Say nothing of what has passed between us to anyone else,” he said. They nodded. “Assalaamu alaykum,” said Tannhauser. He added, “May Allah keep you safe.”

  As he walked away he saw the watch fires on Corradino and was tempted to go and find Orlandu, and perhaps share his fire too. But he’d pushed his luck far enough, and it wasn’t long until sunrise. Let the boy sleep. He needed some rest himself. His return to the Kalkara Gate was without incident. Bors covered his approach and opened the wicket. Before he went to give Starkey the latest intelligence, Tannhauser explained his findings. Bors was skeptical.

  “The road to Zonra will be open?”

  “The boat is ours for the taking,” Tannhauser assured him. “It’s time to pack our opium and jewels. We sail tomorrow night.”

  “All that stands in our way is Mustafa’s last battle.”

  “I’ve fought more last battles than I can count on this bloody island. Have some faith, man, and it will be our last, even if no one else’s.”

  Saturday, September 1, 1565

  Bastion of Germany—Sacred Infirmary—Post of Castile

  At dawn, timed as always to the muezzin’s call, the one hundred and fourth Moslem captive of the siege was strung from a greasy rope above the Provençal Gate. It had been many weeks since anyone on either side had paid much attention to this ritual—the victims excepted—yet had it failed to take place the consternation would have been as great as if a flag of surrender, not a body, had been hung above the gate. This morning, as the garrison prepared to meet their end, the genius of this macabre practice was reaffirmed in Tannhauser’s mind, for as the rope snapped tight the garrison raised a hoarse and defiant cheer.

  The gallows thus replenished, a Mass for the island’s deliverance was held in the church of San Lorenzo. At the same time, chaplains stationed at intervals along the enceinte said Mass for the ragtag soldiery. In the infirmary, and the pain-choked piazza outside, other chaplains did the same for the afflicted. The service was solemn and yet, as on the last day at Fort Saint Elmo, a curious calm pervaded the population. There was nothing left to fear. The only task remaining was to die. As the last Amen rose heavenward, La Valette pulled off another brilliant stroke.

  The Order’s silver processional cross was carried down the aisle of San Lorenzo and behind it came the holy icon of Our Lady of Philermo. As the icon passed by, there were many who saw real tears stream down the Madonna’s pale cheeks. Some fainted away with ecstasy. Next came the Sword of Saint Peter, the lid of its silver casket open so that the fortunate might glimpse the heroic relic therein. Finally came the Religion’s most sacred possession, the Right Hand of John the Baptist, sealed in a jeweled reliquary. An honor guard of knights drawn from each of the eight langues brought up the rear, led by La Valette himself.

  The procession left the church and toured the blasted streets, wending by the infirmary and the fragile line of defenders strung out along the bastions and walls. All genuflected and crossed themselves as the Holy Relics passed by, and everyone felt the power of Jesus Christ and Our Lady and Saint Peter and the Baptist surge through their hearts. The thought of Moslem dogs desecrating the Hand of Saint John fueled the rage and redoubled the strength of every Christian soldier on the ramparts. By the time the procession repaired back to San Lorenzo, the spirit of the depleted garrison was as undaunted as at any time during the siege.

  Tannhauser missed the Eucharistic rites due to his indulgence in baser forms of worship; but while searching for Carla, with Amparo at his side, he caught a portion of the grand procession marching by, and marveled that a piece of theater could have so profound an effect. By any reckoning the parade of relics was worth an extra thousand men, and maybe more than that, for to fight for oneself is one thing, but to fight for the right hand of the man who baptized Jesus is quite another. The hand that lowered His head beneath the Waters of Jordan, no less. Even Tannhauser felt his blood rise, and wondered if the Way of Christ were not after all the path to Transcendence.

  He found Carla in the infirmary piazza, looking not far short of Blessedness herself. She held a cup of wine to the lips of a man both of whose foreshortened arms were swathed in clotted lint. She was haggard and worn, her hair tangled with filth, and her faded black dress was tattered, but when she turned to him and smiled he swore she’d never looked so lovely. He realized that appearing with his mistress on his arm was poor form, but Carla took this in her stride. He wondered if the arrangement might be continued beyond their union, and decided that, even if that were so, it would create a new touchstone for folly. Compared to the complexities of loving two women at once, war was a mere bagatelle. He let go of Amparo and assumed a military demeanor.

  Before he could open his mouth, Carla said, “I trust you slept well.”

  Tannhauser thought the remark rather cutting, and perhaps her smile too. He took an added step away from Amparo and resorted to bluster. “Since you ask, I was up the better part of the night,” he said, “risking life and limb behind enemy lines in pursuit of our shared ambitions.”

  “Our keenest ambition?”

  “The very same.”

  Carla looked about the serried wounded, and he saw the doubts resurface in her mind.

  “Of every ten men who took up arms in this city’s defense, nine are dead or very close to it,” said Tannhauser. “You’ve served them with more heart than honor or valor—or even God—can demand. If we can see out this day, we’ll have a chance to save Orlandu. And ourselves.”

  She looked at him. He smiled. She nodded. He motioned to Amparo to join her.

  “Stay here and stick together,” he said. “No wandering. I’ll be back after dark. Be ready.”

  Tannhauser learned that there had been other nocturnal actions besides his own. During the predawn hours, Andreas de Munatones, the singer, dancer, and Asturian knight of Santiago, had led an underground foray through the Christian countermines. After savage fighting by torchlight the Mamelukes and Laghimji sappers had been vanquished, and two of the timbered Turkish galleries snaking under no-man’s-land had been set ablaze with incendiary pipkins. The Maltese sappers dragged Andreas back from the second with a pickax through his chest and carried him to San Lorenzo, where he died during dawn Mass.

  These sorties, though brave, had failed to detect several other mines packed with gunpowder that the Turks had built beneath the enceinte. Three of these mines exploded with great destruction as a prelude to the attack.

  Tannhauser and Bors, who’d decided to throw their lot in with the Northmen, saw the mines blow as they reached the bastion of Germany on the far Christian left. The painstaking weeks of repairs to the inner wall of Castile were demolished in an instant. Between the bastions of Italy and Provence a thirty-foot section of curtain collapsed into the ditch. A score of defenders were buried beneath the stones. On the summit of Santa Margharita the Sanjak i-sherif was unfurled. A rippling barrage from the Turkish siege guns illumined the rim of the heights. And as the smoke rolled down onto the flatlands and jihad was once more rejoined, thousands of gazi reeled across the Grande Terre Plein to determine the judgment of Allah.

  “Allahu Akabar!”

  The plain had the look of a lake of reeking mud glazed hard by the sun, but no rain had fallen all summer and the native clay was pale. The encrusted black pan across which the heathen charged was bake
d from spilled gore and the last evacuations of the dying. The dust kicked up by the gazi ’s feet wasn’t dirt, but the desiccated blood of their dead comrades. Iridescent swarms of blowfly spiraled skyward green and blue and some men fell as they sank up to the ankles in seething nests of maggots invisible to the eye. When the Religion’s cannon opened up, scores more were mowed down with atrocious wounds and they writhed in the fetid corruption like creatures primeval. Yet still they came. At three hundred feet a volley of musketry raked them and the carnage was redoubled.

  Tannhauser rammed a fresh ball down the barrel of his rifle and wiped his brow. The army laboring toward them was no longer the implacable force that had landed at Marsaxlokk. The tenor of the Moslem battle cries was reedy, their fervor scraped from the dregs of a harrowed spirit. They no longer stormed the ramparts for their Sultan, or for booty or for honor, nor to slake the hatred of Christ that had animated previous assaults. They came not even to see the Face of God. They charged forward now out of that blind collective impulse which is the curse and doom of mankind. Each man went forward because the next man did, and with the same purposeless courage. Tannhauser cranked the wheel lock’s key and primed the pan.

  As he rose up to fire again a cluster of four young levies caught his eye as they stumbled for the gap in the post of Castile. They moved as if they’d have held one another’s hands if they could, like children wandering lost through a degenerate bazaar. He lowered his gun. A brass cannonball bounced across the field and a futile pity clawed his heart as he foresaw its intersection with their path. The youths saw the cannon shot too and exchanged frantic yells, and if one hadn’t grabbed at the others they might have eluded its calamitous arc. But he did and panic froze them. They watched, as did Tannhauser, as the ball skipped up from the clay at knee height and chopped them down one and all before bounding on. A figure struggled free from the limbless and tangled melee, screaming as much as his friends though he appeared unharmed. He looked down on the dismembered mass. He threw up his guts. Then he raised both arms and his mouth gaped soundlessly at the bastions above, as if surrendering not to the enemy but to a Power more vicious and unfeeling than them all.

  Tannhauser recognized Davud.

  Bors’s Syrian long gun bucked across the merlon and Davud’s head was shrouded in crimson mist. When the mist cleared, his body stood erect for a moment, his skull a half-sheared nubbin, bubbling and obscene, then he keeled over into the still-convulsing bodies of his mates, his impact exacerbating their agony.

  Tannhauser turned away.

  From the escarpment a thousand feet distant he watched the second wave of Turkish infantry hazard the anguished plain. He looked along the enceinte. Beyond Galley Creek flames and smoke marked embattled Saint Michel. Before the breach in the ruins of Castile, the sacrificial remnant of the first Turkish wave had faltered as the wildfire bloomed. Those few who scrabbled up the talus were speared and hacked to pieces by the knights. The arquebusiers on the ramparts recharged their pieces and unleashed a volley into the charge renewed. The tumbling bodies were trampled into the filth by the oncoming tide. On the left flank of the advance, an orta of Tüfekchi marksmen drew up at the limit of arquebus range and laid down a blanket of fire with their nine-palm muskets. A blare of horns released a third torrential wave that rolled in hard on the second. The Grande Terre Plein now seethed with martial finery and with fluttering pennants of red and yellow and green. Iayalars, dervishes, Mamelukes, Azebs. Their blood was up and their cries had gained conviction and so numerous they were, and so quickly did they close ranks, that the cannon shot scything through them now left hardly a wake.

  Oliver Starkey joined Tannhauser at the bastion of Germany and brought the English langue with him, all two of them, the Catholic adventurers John Smith and Edward Stanley. They each unloaded a musket into the advance. Then Starkey grounded his gun against a crenel and drew his sword. He evinced an adamantine ruthlessness, made the more unnerving by his scholarly mien. Tannhauser noted, with chagrin, that the Germans, Swedes, and Poles were unlimbering axes and swords.

  “With me,” said Starkey to the brethren. “To the post of Castile.”

  They were more than ready. Starkey glanced at Tannhauser, as if for comment. Tannhauser pointed to the rubble of the post of Castile, where Turkish lassoes whirred above the fray and barbed spears and melee arms glinted in the rising sun. From the second wave a formation of chainarmored janissaries braved the wildfire and came up short against the thin and wavering echelon of Christian knights. Another fight boiled about the foot of the captured siege tower, from the top of which a crew of Maltese and tercios poured gunfire and incendiary pipkins into the mob.

  “If Mustafa’s sent in the Zirhli Nefer at this early stage,” said Tannhauser, “he’s gambling on a rapid victory.”

  “Then we’ll deny him,” said Starkey. “Close quarters it is.” He addressed the score or so knights of the German langue. “Our brothers won’t hold the line without us. Form up in a wedge to their rear and keep your order. Drive through on my word. And remember, when the Turk breaks, we are not to pursue.”

  Tannhauser hefted his rifle. With bullets he could reliably drop a man every five or six minutes, a better rate than was likely at close quarters. “I can lay more to rest from up here.”

  Starkey did not quarrel. “As you will,” he said.

  “God’s wounds!” said Bors, staring over the parapet.

  A dull subterranean rumble reached Tannhauser’s ears and he turned.

  Before his eyes two broad deep trenches unraveled across the Grande Terre Plein and palisades of orange flame, stoked high by the sudden draft, erupted through the advancing Moslem ranks. The horde swerved in confusion and as if Satan had drawn the bolts on Hell’s roof, droves of men vanished wholesale into the fire-choked chasms underfoot.

  Tannhauser understood at once that the underground galleries Munatones had set ablaze earlier that morning had collapsed under the weight of the charge. No doubt Starkey understood it too, but that did not dissuade him from a deft invocation of Divine favor.

  “There is our sign!” said Starkey. “God is with us yet.”

  Bors roared, “For Christ and the Baptist!”

  Tannhauser looked at him with horror. The German langue echoed the cry with zeal. With Starkey and his Englishmen in the van they clanked along the wall walk toward the stair. Tannhauser grabbed Bors’s arm. Bors unslung a two-hander and shook his head.

  “Prithee peace,” said Bors. “The English langue will not go in without me.”

  Bors stumped off after his compatriots. Tannhauser quelled a sudden uprising in his belly. The sweat running down his back and chest in pints turned icy cold and he shivered in his armor. He threw the rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the tall white bonnets pressing the breach and fired. Without marking the result he stacked the rifle with the rest and pulled his gauntlets from his belt. His heart sank. He dreaded the grinding toil that lay in store. He looked out to the east across Monte San Salvatore. The Turkish tents and trenches were deserted. Only the Topchu artillery crews remained. Come nightfall, freedom was a brisk stroll hence; but the sun had only just cleared San Salvatore’s rim. As he was about to don his gauntlets he saw the gold bangle on his wrist. The mouths of the lions still roared. On a superstitious impulse he slipped it off and read the Arabic graving on its inner face.

  I come to Malta not for riches or honor, but to save my soul.

  That prospect seemed as unlikely as ever, yet the motto gave him comfort. He replaced the bangle and pulled on his armored gloves. He drew his sword and headed for the stair. Moments later he joined Bors and the other Northmen in the wedge of steel, and Bors laughed at him, and Tannhauser devil-damned him black. On Starkey’s command they mounted the talus and, to the dismay of the Zirhli Nefer who crowded the breach, the langues of Germany and England plowed into the delirium.

  Shortly after midday, and with a hushed urgency, the staff of the Sacred Infirmary were assembled in the laundry
room and Carla listened to Fra Lazaro impart the Grand Master’s command that every wounded man who could make the journey was to join the defenders on the ramparts, and with all possible speed.

  Since patients no longer qualified for admission without losing a limb, or sustaining the most heinous mutilations, a moment of incredulity greeted this decree. The look in Lazaro’s eyes, and the grayness of his pallor, suggested that he shared their confusion, but he had had more time, and the benefit of La Valette’s presence, to accept that the order was in earnest. There was no great expectation that the wounded plunge into combat, but they were to dress in helmets and red surcoats—this was most important—and display themselves at the battlements to give the Grande Turke the impression of a strength they no longer possessed. Hundreds of women and boys were already wielding spears alongside the soldiers. To fight to the last drop of blood was no longer rhetoric. It fell to the assembled to prepare the volunteers and help to convey them to their posts.

  Lazaro asked Carla to stand by him while he harangued the casualties in the great ward, for her presence, he said, would stir them more than his words. The alacrity with which the sick tried to rise from their beds moved them both to near tears, and when they repeated La Valette’s plea to those carpeting the piazza and choking the nearby streets, the response was just as valiant. Lazaro calmed their fervor while gear was collected and some form of order imposed, for chaos threatened to overwhelm the endeavor before it could begin. Carla and Amparo were in the crew sent to gather up helmets and it was here, more than during the harangue, that Carla’s emotions overcame her.

  They rounded the rear of the Arsenal and she found herself confronted by a mountain of discarded steel helms. Thousands of them, banked up against the wall to thrice her height like some profane and careless monument to the slain. Many were dented and tarnished with blood, and fat blue flies took flight and buzzed around the pile in swarms, as if to defend their squalid treasure trove. The infirmary had inured her to a stream of afflicted individuals, but not to loss represented on this huge scale. Beyond the mountain of helms lay stacks of pikes and short swords in similar abundance. A pair of monks pulled up a twowheeled handcart and they helped them fill it to the brim with clattering refuse. The monks hauled the cart back to the piazza. As Amparo, mute and dispirited, made to follow, Carla took her hand and held her back.