Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  He bowed and said, “His Excellency, the Grand Master, awaits you.”

  Ludovico rose to his feet. With a swift movement and a rattle of beads he tied the rosary around his waist. Without a word, he walked past Starkey into the office. The door closed. Starkey’s relief was tempered by the thought of two days’ voyage in the Dominican’s company. He headed for his quarters to prepare for the trip. He did not excel at subterfuge and dishonesty; but in these modern times only a fool confused devotion to God with morality. He loved La Valette. He loved the Religion. In the service of either one—and no matter the cost to his soul—Starkey was prepared to do anything at all.

  Tuesday, May 15, 1565

  The Villa Saliba—Messina—Sicily

  . . . In short, military considerations continue to prevent me from authorizing your passage to the island of Malta. However, I am able to suggest other means by which your most earnest ambition might be realized.

  In the port of Messina is a man called Mattias Tannhauser, whose origins are far too raveled to illuminate here. Suffice to say that he marches to the beat of his own drum. While he is a denizen of the lower orders, has little respect for the law, and is rumored to be an Atheist or worse, I can warrant he is a man of his word and have no reason to believe he would do you any harm. Neither do I have any reason to believe he will help you. At the same time, I cannot predict the power with which a gentlewoman of your grace and beauty might appeal to such nobler instincts as he may possess.

  I will not deceive you, my lady. Captain Tannhauser’s presence on Malta would be to our advantage in the fight against the Grande Turke. To date, owing us no loyalty and being cognizant of the dangers, he has shown no inclination to join us. If you were to persuade him to make the voyage on your behalf, I would be in a position to grant your passage as his escort. The Couronne leaves Messina at midnight, tonight. If the most recent intelligence proves accurate, it will be the last Christian ship to beat the Turkish blockade.

  You will find Tannhauser at a tavern, at the southern end of the waterfront, called the Oracle. I can hardly bring myself to recommend that you visit such a sordid establishment in person, but you will likely find him unresponsive to the usual couriers. How you approach him, then, depends upon the urgency with which you wish to press your suit.

  Conscience obliges me to repeat my previous warnings: that a state of war exists upon the island and the danger of death or enslavement for all those there resident during the coming days is grave in the extreme. If I can offer you any further help or counsel, you will find me in Messina, until the Couronne sails, at the Priory of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem.

  Starkey’s handwriting was the most beautiful Carla had ever seen. She wondered how many hours he had spent as a boy perfecting the graceful curves, the elegant transitions between the broad downstrokes and fine upstrokes, the unvaryingly accurate spacing between each letter, word, and line. It was writing as emblem of power. Writing to make a king mark exactly what was said—as indeed kings did, for Starkey drafted the Order’s diplomatic correspondence. Carla had never met him. She wondered if he was as polished as his calligraphy, or if he was a dusty, withered monk bent over a desk. She thought of her own boy and wondered if he could read or write at all. And at yet another such reminder of her failure in her duties as his mother, her stomach clenched with pain, and her desire to return to Malta—and her fear that she’d never do so—climbed a new pitch of urgent intensity.

  Carla folded the letter and squeezed it in her hand. She’d been corresponding with Starkey for six weeks. His previous prohibitions of her return had been the replies of a busy man dealing with trivia and making the effort only out of respect for her noble origins and family name. Over the same period, she’d asked many of the sea captains and knights passing through Messina if they’d take her to Malta. She’d been heard with the utmost chivalry, and the occasional promise of action, yet here she remained, watching the rise of the sun from the Villa Saliba.

  Grand Master La Valette had decreed that anyone unable to contribute to the island’s defense was a “useless mouth.” Hundreds of pregnant women, the elderly and infirm, plus an unspoken number of the dwindling Maltese aristocracy, whether infirm or not, had been shipped across the Malta Channel to Sicily. Any native Maltese who could hold a pike or a shovel remained on the island, regardless of age or sex. Carla—in their eyes a feeble noblewoman they would feel obliged to protect—was deadwood. Furthermore, all space on the galleys returning to Grand Harbor was reserved for fighting men, matériel, and food, not for idle ladies with an inexplicable wish to die. Carla despised idleness and certainly did not consider herself feeble. She managed her own modest estate in Aquitaine alone. She was under no man’s authority or sway. She and her good companion, Amparo, had ridden across the Langue d’Oc under the protection of nothing more than God’s Grace and Carla’s wits. The recent Huguenot war had left scars and a modicum of peril in its wake, but they’d reached Marseilles unscathed and shipped for Naples and Sicily without disaster. The fact they’d come so far unaided and unaccompanied had shocked many they had met, and, in retrospect, Carla admitted an impetuous, perhaps even foolhardy, aspect to their journey, but once she’d made the decision the thought that they might not get at least this far had never crossed her mind. For a woman long resolved to dictate her own existence, then, the weeks spent sweltering in Messina had been infuriating. Starkey’s letter was her first intimation of hope. She now had potential military value. If she could get this man Tannhauser on the Couronne, by midnight, she’d be allowed to travel with him.

  In all her negotiations with Starkey, sea captains, and knights, she’d never revealed her reason for wanting to go home. To have done so would have confirmed her in their eyes as the unbalanced female they already believed her to be. Only Amparo knew. Yet Carla guarded her motives out of more than mere diplomacy. She kept her secret out of shame. She had a son. A bastard son, stolen from her arms twelve years ago. And her son, she believed, was in Malta.

  She opened the glass-paned doors that overlooked the gardens. The Saliba, distant relatives of her own family, the Manduca, had retreated to Capri to escape the Sicilian summer and had given Carla use of their guesthouse. It was elegant and comfortable, and came with a cook, a maid, and an openly contemptuous steward named Bertholdo. She’d already asked Bertholdo to arrange delivery of a message to Captain Tannhauser, at the Oracle, but the elaborately counterfeited shock which had greeted her request had convinced her it would take days to get him to obey. In any case, Bertholdo’s inveterate hauteur would likely ensure the failure of his mission, if not life-threatening injury to his person by the Oracle’s proprietor.

  Carla looked out into the garden. Amparo knelt in the flower beds, rapt in communion with a tall white rose. Such eccentricities were normal for the girl and the freedom of spirit to indulge them made Carla feel jaded. An idea crossed her mind as she watched. Carla had no fear of going to the Oracle in person. To do so had been her first impulse. She’d negotiated often enough with the merchants of Bordeaux. She knew, rather, that to beard the notorious Tannhauser in his lair would be to assume the weaker position. If he could be lured to come to her, here amid the trappings of power, the advantage would be hers. Amparo, she now sensed, would bring Tannhauser to the Villa Saliba far more surely than she could herself. If the usual couriers would not do, Amparo would be the strangest messenger the man had ever received.

  Carla walked out under the palm trees, upon whose shade the flowers depended for survival. Amparo kissed the white rose and stood up to brush the dirt from her skirts. Her eyes remained on the flowers as Carla stopped beside her. Amparo seemed calm. On rising she’d remained overwrought by what she’d seen in her vision glass the night before. The images she reported from her glass were so diverse, so extraordinary, that when one of them achieved some overlap with reality, Carla was inclined to believe it mere coincidence. If one laid coincidence aside, symbols could bear any meaning according to their
interpreter’s desires. Yet Amparo never interpreted. She only saw.

  She’d seen a black ship with red sails crewed by tiny monkeys blowing trumpets. She’d seen a huge white mastiff with a collar of iron spikes and bearing a burning torch in its jaws. She’d seen a naked man, his body covered in hieroglyphs, riding a horse the color of molten gold. And as the man had ridden by, an angel’s voice had told her, “The gate is wide but the path thereto is like a razor’s edge.”

  “Amparo?” said Carla.

  Amparo turned her head. There was always an instant when Carla expected her to keep on turning and gaze into the distance, as if eye contact caused her pain and she’d rather seek something of beauty invisible to all but her. This had been Amparo’s habit during their first months together and it remained her habit still with everyone but Carla. But Amparo looked at her directly. Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.

  “Is it time to play?” asked Amparo.

  “No, not yet.”

  “But we will.”

  “Of course we will.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Only for your safety.”

  Amparo glanced at the roses. “I don’t understand.”

  Carla hesitated. So ingrained was her habit of caring for Amparo that to ask her to enter a den of thieves seemed a crime. Yet Amparo had survived the streets of Barcelona, childhood years of violence and privation that Carla dared not imagine. Cowardice was not Amparo’s flaw, even if in her heart of hearts, Carla believed it her own.

  Carla smiled. “What need starlight fear of the dark?”

  “Why, nothing.” Amparo frowned. “This is a riddle?”

  “No. There’s something I want you to do for me. Something of the greatest importance.”

  “You want me to find the man on the golden horse.”

  Amparo’s voice was as soft as rain. She saw the world through the eyes of a mystic. Carla was so familiar with the lens of Amparo’s imagination that she no longer found it strange. Carla said, “His name is Mattias Tannhauser.”

  “Tannhauser,” repeated Amparo, as if testing the integrity of a newly cast bell. “Tannhauser. Tannhauser.” She seemed satisfied.

  “I must talk with him today. As soon as possible. I want you to go into the port and bring him back here with you.”

  Amparo nodded.

  “If he refuses to come—” continued Carla.

  “He will come,” said Amparo, as if any other outcome were unthinkable.

  “If he will not come, ask him if he would receive me at his earliest convenience—but today, you understand. Today.”

  “He will come.” Amparo’s face shone with the strange joy that was as close as she came to a smile and which, in its way, was more than compensation.

  “I’ll tell Bertholdo to prepare the carriage.”

  “I hate the carriage,” said Amparo. “It has no air and it’s slow and cruel to the horse. Carriages are a nonsense. I’ll ride. And if Tannhauser won’t come with me, he’s not the man who will walk the razor’s edge—and so why would you want him to receive you later on?”

  Carla knew better than to argue. She nodded. Amparo started to walk away, then stopped and looked back. “Can we play when I return? As soon as I return?”

  There were two unvarying elements in Amparo’s days, without which she became distressed: the hour they spent each afternoon playing music, and the session she spent at her vision stone after dark. She also went to Mass every morning, but in order to accompany Carla rather than from any sense of piety.

  “Not if Tannhauser is with you,” said Carla. “What I have to say to him is urgent. For once our music must wait.”

  Amparo seemed astonished at her foolishness. “But you must play for him. You must play for Tannhauser. It’s for him that we’ve practiced for so long.”

  They’d played for years and so this was absurd and, in any case, Carla found the idea quite unthinkable. Amparo saw her doubt. She took hold of Carla’s hands and pumped them up and down as if dancing with a child.

  “For Tannhauser! For Tannhauser!” Again she made his name peal like a bell. Her face shone. “Imagine it, my love. We’ll play for him as we’ve never played before.”

  The beginning with Amparo had been hard. Carla had found her while taking her early morning ride, on a crystalline February day when the mist still smoked around her horse’s knees and the first cherry trees were in bloom. The mist concealed Amparo from view and their paths might never have crossed if Carla hadn’t heard a high, sweet voice piping like the sorrow of angels across the landscape. The voice sang in some dialect of Castilian and to a melody of its own devising which carried the wing-beat of death. Whatever its meaning, the song’s otherworldly beauty made Carla draw in her mount.

  She discovered Amparo in a break of willows. Had she not already known from the voice, she’d have been hard-pressed to say whether what lay curled around a trunk, half buried under a mass of rotting leaves against the frost, was female or male, or whether it was human at all but a woodland creature of fantastic origin. Apart from a filthy pelt drawn about her throat, and the remains of a pair of woolen hose, she was naked. Her feet were large for her build, and blue, as were the hands clasped together between her breasts. Both of her arms, from shoulders to wrists, were blemished by livid bruises, as was the pale, translucent skin stretched across her rib cage. Her hair was raven black and coarsely chopped and pasted to her skull by clots of mud. Her lips were purple with cold. Her eyes of different hues showed no sign of anguish or self-pity, and in not so doing seemed to Carla more piteous than any she’d ever seen before. Amparo would never say how she came to be in the forest, starved and filthy and frozen near to death. She would rarely speak of any past at all, and only then to answer yes or no to Carla’s guesses. But later that day, when she submitted to Carla bathing her with hot water, there was blood and slime clotted around her pudenda, and some of the marks on her body were from human teeth.

  On this first encounter, Amparo would not look her in the eye. It would take weeks before she would do so and it remained an honor seldom granted anyone else. When Carla dismounted and took her by the arm, Amparo screamed so piercingly that Carla’s horse almost broke free of its tether. The animal’s distress brought Amparo springing to her feet. She comforted the horse and murmured softly in its ear, quite unconcerned for her own pathetic estate. When Carla wrapped her cloak around Amparo’s shoulders, Amparo didn’t demur, and though she declined the saddle, she was content to walk alongside holding the bridle. Thus, seven years ago, had Amparo arrived at Carla’s household, accompanying her mistress home with the long green cloak trailing behind her, like some barefoot and ragamuffin page in a tale untold.

  The members of Carla’s household, her priest, her very few acquaintances in the village, and those local gossips whose numbers were far greater, were unanimous in thinking Carla ill-advised—indeed, as mad as the girl herself—in taking the waif to her bosom. Amparo, then hardly in her teens, was prone to violent outbursts at obscure provocations and to spending hours in conversation with the hors
es and dogs, whom she serenaded with a passion in her silvery voice. She refused to eat meat or fowl of any kind, sometimes disdained fresh bread, and on her preferred diet of nuts, wild berries, and raw vegetables never added an ounce to the emaciated condition in which she’d been found. Her refusal to look the priest in the eye, and the fact that her own were of different colors, were sure signs, it was commonly agreed, of diabolic leanings.

  Carla stood by the girl through tantrum and trance, through the sudden disappearances that could last for days, through the social humiliations and offers of exorcism, and through Amparo’s apparent inability to reciprocate her affection. She seemed insensible to the feelings of others; or if not insensible, entirely indifferent. Yet in the loyalty Amparo developed toward her, in her sharing of the discovery of her vision glass and the revelations it provoked, in her struggle to learn basic etiquette and the tenets of proper bearing, and most of all in the naïve genius she brought to their study of music, Amparo revealed a love deeper and more enduring than most mortals know. They were strange friends, then, yet no two friends were ever closer.