Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  In a time of dire conformism, in which the tongue up the arse was the most efficient way to prosper, original minds found few spheres in which to flourish. To Ludovico, the Inquisition was just such a realm. He was honored to be an inquisitor. Terror and Faith were its tools, but in his view the Black Legend was false. A tiny handful of executions, inflicted with due diligence on the deviant, and with every juridical right of the condemned rigorously observed, had prevented the deaths of many hundreds of thousands. These figures were not in dispute. Luther had played midwife to a Devil’s Era, in which Christian slaughtered Christian in monstrous numbers not for land or power but simply because each was Christian. It was a paradox—an absurdity—that Lucifer alone could have designed. The obscene and constipated monk had drenched the whole of Germany in blood, and that more horror was to come was scorched across the map in letters of fire. In France the carnage had only just begun, at Vassy and Dreux. The Low Countries were a dank pool of Anabaptism. Heresiarchs sat on the thrones of England and Navarre.

  Only in Spain and Italy were people free from being slaughtered by their own countrymen. In Spain and Italy the Holy Office had strangled the Lutheran viper at its birth. The campaign in northern Italy to wipe out the Protestants had been the greatest political achievement of modern times. That it was not widely celebrated was testament to the skill of its execution. If Turin and Bologna and Milan had fallen, as a hundred Catholic cities only a few days north of the Alps had fallen before them, Lutheranism would be lapping at the gates of Rome. Italy would be engulfed in catastrophic violence. And Spain, which controlled the Italian south, would have been drawn into the holocaust. The whole of Christendom would have torn itself apart. And might do so yet. Ludovico never doubted that the Inquisition was a very great force for good. The Inquisition protected Mother Church. The Inquisition prevented War. The Inquisition was a boon to depraved and fallen mankind. Those who opposed the Inquisition dishonored God.

  He rinsed the sacking and squeezed it and wiped the smell of excrement from the pores and hairs of his marble-pale calf and thigh. As he did so he averted his head so as not to see his privities. The vanities of intellect and power he’d held in check. Inspired by Tomás de Torquemada, he’d refused all high preferments, including a red hat offered by two successive popes. He’d remained a simple friar. At very much greater sacrifice, he’d rejected chairs of theology and law in a dozen superb universities. Having grown up in opulence to find it enfeebling and empty, the attraction of riches escaped him. He lived on the road, calloused to need, unshackled by human community, bound only to Christ and his vows, an ambassador of ecclesiastic terror, the wayfaring sword of the Sacred Congregation. In all this his conscience was clear. Yet once he’d been consumed by desire. Once he’d submitted to a power more profound than his Faith. He’d been dragged to the verge of apostasy by Love.

  He rinsed the sacking again and scrubbed his other leg. Lust was the oldest of his enemies and though it no longer plagued him with the tenacity of youth, it was not wholly vanquished even now. Yet lust was of the flesh, and its masks transparent, and could be transformed into an offering of pain. Love had come cloaked in the guise of spiritual ecstasy and had spoken with the Voice of God. Nothing before or since had seemed more sacred and even now he sometimes wondered if all that he had learned was not flawed, and if the accumulated wisdom of centuries was not false, and if that Voice was not indeed the text of the Almighty’s best instruction. And there—again—was the danger. The buried seed awaiting its moment to bloom. The specter of the woman he had loved and, as these meditations now revealed, loved still, had returned from the gloom of the past to challenge his Fidelity. And not merely her specter but her person. Her living flesh. She was here, not an hour from where he stood aroused and naked.

  His yard throbbed monstrously between his legs. He felt it pant and strain like a hell dog on a gossamer leash. He rinsed and squeezed the sacking and wiped the sweat and grease from his groin and his pubes. He wiped his balls. He wiped his member and held on as a spasm of carnality overwhelmed him.

  In his mind, with perfect clarity, he saw her on her back on the grassy bank, splayed amid burgeoning wildflowers whose fragrance besotted them both. Slender and nude and white as milk she was, her face tipped back, lips parted in ardor, her nipples purpled and clenched, her spread thighs open, her vulva swollen, her flawless arms flung wide. She wanted him. She trembled and cried out and her green eyes rolled and fluttered with the extremity of her wanting. It was her wanting—of him—which pushed him to the brink of derangement. Of her wanting of him he’d never have his fill.

  A wave of yearning rose and crested, foaming from the floor of his bowels, and he groaned as demons screamed to let the wave explode. A few seconds stolen from the ocean of time and the agony would pass. But only for a while. He felt his Guardian Angel at his shoulder, felt his cold spectral hand touch his head to remind him: this was how the Devil had lured him before, with the lie that in committing the lesser sin he could somehow forestall the commission of the greater, as if evil was something one could sip from a crystal cup and not a fetid swamp into which one plunged headlong and vanished.

  “God spare me,” he cried. “God forgive me.”

  For an instant he thought he’d succumbed. But the sackcloth was unsoiled, as were the tiles at his feet, and the wave and its demons receded. He dashed his face with fountain water. He gave thanks to Saint Dominic. He rinsed the cloth and wiped his belly and his loins, and rinsed again. He wiped the plates of his chest. He reflected on the circumstances of his fall.

  He was then twenty-six years old, and in Malta on behalf of his patron, Michele Ghisleri, who’d required the resignation of the Bishop of Mdina to make way for a favorite nephew. To be entrusted at such an age with an errand of such delicacy was a tribute to Carafa’s faith in him. But Ludovico met a girl, on the coast road high above the surf, and he fell under her enchantment. Her name was Carla de Manduca. The image of her beauty settled in his heart and kindled a flame that tormented him without cease. Flagellation only exacerbated his salacity and though he prayed for the obsession to leave him, its grip became stronger. He sought her out in the hope of discovering she meant nothing, and his folly was compounded. They walked and he agreed to hear her confession. Amongst sundry trivial sins she admitted to impure thoughts. Of him. She took him to see the idol of the giant pagan goddess that had stood on the island since the race of men was young. And there they made love, he no less virginal than she.

  There followed weeks in which their Fascination grew, and while Ludovico sinned he stripped the Bishop of Mdina of all the dignity he had. He broke his aged spirit with the zeal of the young and reduced him to a worm crawling for forgiveness. Then he banished him to a cell in the Calabrian wastelands. His cruelty was fanned by transgression, and guilt had curdled his bowels and distempered his mind. Madness and apostasy loomed and with it not only perdition but public shame for the Ludovici in Naples and the betrayal of His Holiness in Rome. At the very moment he’d decided to abandon his calling in favor of the girl, Ludovico was betrayed himself. He was summoned by the prelate of Malta to hear that the girl’s parents had made a charge of infamous conduct against him. In panic and despair he fled to Rome and confessed his dire iniquities to Ghisleri.

  The wily Ghisleri, as penance and reward, sent Ludovico to Castile, to learn the art of Inquisition from the foremost Spanish master, Fernando Valdés. In homage to Saint Dominic, Ludovico walked barefoot from Rome to Valladolid. It was a journey of revelation and spiritual rebirth, and he was received on his arrival as a holy fool, possessed by the living spirit of Jesus Christ. And perhaps by then it was so, for by this supreme act of will and mortification he’d forgotten Carla. Now, these many years later, it seemed that he had not. And neither had God, nor the Devil, for one or other had placed her here, again, within his reach, to tempt him into error and menace his soul.

  Ludovico never knew at the time what intrigues informed his sudden disgrace in M
alta. More recent inquiries had revealed that the ruined bishop counted La Valette, then Admiral of the Navy, among his allies, and that La Valette had been behind the charge of misconduct. Ludovico held no grudge against the man. Grudges were for the weak. He would orchestrate the fall of La Valette for other reasons. As to Carla, he meant her no ill. If she had indeed turned against him—a fact which could not be verified—she’d been young and his heart could do no other than forgive her. Yet even if he allowed her to jeopardize his soul, he couldn’t let her jeopardize his work. He was sure she was unaware of his presence in Messina. But if she returned to Malta, his plans would be imperiled. He would be imperiled. His reputation, his authority, and with them the ambitions of his patrons in Rome. Who knew what the woman wanted? Who knew what deformities time had wrought upon her mind? And if the past could recapture him with such violent energy, it could capture Carla—with wayward passions, be they of love or hatred, that no one could foretell or control. His own fate was immaterial. But he was the instrument of the Church. He could not allow her to blunt its edge.

  He rinsed the sackcloth, his ablutions almost complete, and wiped his armholes and his arse. A period of retreat in the company of the Holy Sisters would hardly do her harm. If Carla was safely secluded with the Minims, was there any need, then, to dispose of Mattias Tannhauser as well? Ludovico had been ignorant of the man’s existence—and of Carla’s presence—until the voyage from Grand Harbor on the Couronne, when Starkey had taken Ludovico into his confidence. Starkey was convinced that Tannhauser would not be won over to the Religion’s cause. La Valette, however, had suggested a stratagem in which Carla would recruit the German on their behalf.

  Ludovico hadn’t discouraged Starkey’s plan. When the stratagem failed, he didn’t want Starkey to suspect that he was the cause. “You mustn’t appear to beg for her ladyship’s help,” Ludovico had counseled. “Rather, let her feel she’s the beneficiary of your kindness. Exaggerate the unlikelihood of success. Paint Tannhauser in dark colors, so that the ray of her hope is faint.”

  “Why so?” Starkey’s tone had revealed that he’d plotted the opposite course.

  “Because it will excite her ingenuity to the utmost. In the manipulation of men’s hearts, women love to attempt the impossible. It flatters the only power they’re given to wield, which is the power of desire. As to Tannhauser, use the contrary technique. Exhaust every argument. Push him hard. Push him to the point of giving insult, so that his dignity insists on refusal. Then, when Lady Carla makes her play, it will flatter his vanity that the decision to go to Malta is his alone.”

  Even as Ludovico had supported and refined Starkey’s plan, he’d resolved to thwart it, for it threatened the success of his own schemes. Schemes so fantastic in complexity that they made poor Starkey’s ruse seem a prank. Ludovico’s purpose was to bring the Knights of Saint John under papal control. Many had tried and failed. Two centuries before, the papacy had conspired in the brutal extermination of the Templars, but the Hospitallers were too strong, and too remote and too well loved, for so crude a solution to work. The Turkish invasion created a unique possibility, the study of which had occupied Ludovico on Malta. If the Religion’s stronghold was destroyed, their vast holdings across Europe would be sequestered by local princes and monarchs, most particularly in France. If the knights survived, in glory, they’d be even less vulnerable to the Vatican than before. Unless, that is, the Grand Master’s throne were occupied by a man whose allegiance was strictly to the Holy Father. Ludovico had such a man in mind. His present mission to Rome was to acquire the means to install that man in power. Nothing could be allowed to compromise Ludovico’s dignity and thereby his work.

  He would never let Carla set foot on the island of Malta.

  Ludovico left the lavatorium and donned a clean habit.

  The German, Tannhauser, was formidable, yet the man was willing to indulge in dangerous passions. A vain man. A foolish man. His insolence on the dock had confirmed it. He might well take pity on Carla. He might well be flattered to accept the role of her champion, no common honor for a scoundrel such as he. And no doubt she had the means to pay him. Ludovico had also sensed the man’s sexual potency, as men of similar stripe, like beasts, often do. He felt a stir of jealousy and cautioned himself, yet equivocation was hardly necessary. The man was a blasphemer and a heretic. As Michele Ghisleri had counseled, in regard to prominent noblemen, “Remove the man, and you remove the problem.”

  Ludovico made his way to the abbot’s parlor, where Gonzaga awaited instructions.

  Gonzaga was a commissarius, a local priest who acted for the Inquisition and supplied information. He had a vicious streak, which Ludovico mistrusted, but was well liked, perhaps for that very reason, by the familiars in Messina. These latter, of whom there were many, Gonzaga had flattered by founding a brotherhood, the Congregation of Saint Peter Martyr. Familiars were lay servants of the Holy Office, ready at all times to perform the duties of the tribunal and permitted to bear arms to protect inquisitors. It was an honor eagerly sought, not least because it conferred immunity from secular justice. Highborn or low, limpieza de sangre—purity of the blood—was required, for no convert of Jewish lineage could serve the Holy Office.

  In the parlor, Anacleto, as always as much apparition as human being, stood inside the door. Ludovico had found him in Salamanca, in ’58, where he’d been asked to examine him for signs of diabolic possession. The young nobleman, then eighteen, stood guilty of incest with his sister, Filomena, and of the murder of both his parents when they’d caught the two siblings in flagrante delicto. Anacleto didn’t deny these horrifying crimes, nor did he repent of them. Filomena had been hanged, and her corpse consumed by swine, while Anacleto watched. His execution, too, was a formality. But something in the youth’s black soul had touched Ludovico. Moreover, he’d seen in him a tool of great value: a man without conscience, capable of any heinous deed. A man who would give undying loyalty to the person who redeemed him. Ludovico spent four days with the youth and forged an unbreakable bond. He extracted Anacleto’s penitence and absolved him. More than that, he gave him a higher purpose and a reason to live. Thus immunized by the Inquisition, Anacleto had accompanied Ludovico and Fernando Valdés on their relentless sweep through Castile, which climaxed in extravagant autos-da-fé in Valladolid, where the Emperor Philip himself attended the burnings. Anacleto had been his master’s shadow ever since, always ready to protect him and to keep Ludovico’s hands unstained by blood.

  Gonzaga stood up and bowed. Ludovico gestured that he sit.

  “This being the territory of Spain,” said Ludovico, “and under the jurisdiction of the Congregation’s Spanish arm, I have no formal powers here.” He held up a hand to forestall Gonzaga’s offer of all necessary authority. “Nor do I seek such powers. However, it is in the most urgent interests of His Holiness that by eight o’clock this evening two tasks be accomplished without fail.”

  “Our familiars include the best of the city constabulary,” blurted Gonzaga. “My cousin, Captain Spano, will give us every assistance.”

  “By what means these tasks are accomplished, and by whom, I don’t want to know. Neither action should be seen as the work of the Holy Office, but rather of the civil authorities. Both tasks require subtlety and speed in different measure.”

  “Yes, Your Excellency. Subtlety and speed.”

  “In residence at the guesthouse of the Villa Saliba is a noblewoman named Carla de La Penautier. She’s to be taken to join the Minims at the convent of the Holy Sepulchre at Santa Croce, for a period of prayer and contemplation lasting no less than one year.”

  The Holy Sepulchre was perched on a waterless crag as fissured as the face of woe, some three days’ journey into Sicily’s scorched interior. The Minims were so called because their enclosed order of nuns practiced a Rule of unusual severity. They lived in absolute silence and abjured meat, fish, eggs, and all dairy stuffs. Ludovico thought of Queen Juana of Spain, confined to a darkened room fo
r thirty years, and considered Carla lightly treated.

  “She will not go willingly, but such a retreat can only be of benefit to her soul.”

  Gonzaga assumed a pious expression and bobbed his head.

  “She must not be charged with any crime, civil, moral, or heretical,” said Ludovico. “Commit nothing to paper. Only a fool puts something into writing that he may accomplish by speech alone, and speech, at that, which lays claim to no third witness. Do you understand?”

  Gonzaga crossed himself. “Your Excellency, all will be as you ask.”

  “The second task will require the use of arms—sufficient to subdue a man both skilled in combat and loath to yield. He may have confederates. We met this man this morning, on the dock.”

  “The German,” piped Gonzaga. “I should have acted sooner, for the man is half Moslem and partnered with a Jew, but he’s not without powerful friends in the Religion.”

  “Tannhauser is a criminal. Evasion of customs, bribery of state officials, doubtless more. This must not be seen as an ecclesiastical matter. Have the civil constabulary handle it, but see they move swiftly and with force.”

  “Must the German be taken alive?” inquired Gonzaga.

  “Tannhauser’s life is immaterial.”

  “I shall have them arrest the Jew too,” said Gonzaga.