Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  As far as the unknown boy was concerned, Amparo had few feelings at all. It was a quest that required events long dead be linked to those of a future that didn’t exist, and this riddle perplexed her. A few hours either side of the present moment were as far as her imagination ever extended. Tomorrow was far away and yesterday was gone. Ambition was a mystery and her memories few. She hoped the boy would be found, for it would make Carla happy. Until Carla had appeared from the willows, like an Angel from her glass, Amparo’s life had been one of enduring all things. Since then her life had been sown with wonder and beauty. Amparo loved Carla. But the search for the boy was an enterprise in which she felt she had no part.

  As to Tannhauser, she loved him, with a wild and terrible passion that shook her to her blood, to her core, to her inmost heart and soul. She’d loved him since he’d told her the tale of the nightingale and the rose. The bloodred rose who’d killed the one who adored her. Tannhauser had brought her the yellow leather slippers she was wearing now from the Turkish bazaar. He’d brought her the ivory comb, chased with silver and floral arabesques, which she wore in her tangled hair. He made her howl in the night when she lay beneath him. He made her weep as he slept while she lay on his chest and feared he would die. Amparo knew herself to be unlike all other women. How or why she could not explain, but always had it been so. She thought she’d known sex. It had always been around her: in the rutting of the bulls that her father had raised; in the squalid hovels she’d shared in the course of her wanderings; in the cramped and violent streets of Barcelona; in the figure of the sweetmeats vendor who’d kicked her face in; in the farmhands who’d laughed while they held her down and who’d pissed on her when they were done. In the world she’d shared with Carla, of music and horses and peace, such things had been unseen, never spoken of, so utterly excluded that Amparo at first had found it strange. Then years had passed, and she’d forgotten them, and for her, as for Carla, sex had become a mystery left neglected and unknown. And then she’d seen Tannhauser naked. Her heart had almost stopped to witness the calligraphies and wheels and crescent moons and the red forked dagger with a dragonhead hilt, with which his arms and thighs and calves were bravely tattooed. Truly he was the man she’d seen in her vision stone. She’d shown him her own nakedness, with a wild and shameless joy, and she’d given herself to him, and he’d taken her.

  Tannhauser and Carla would be married, perhaps. This fact left her unmoved and she did not dwell on it, for it was a matter for a future far away. It did not seem to her that they were in love. It did not seem to her that Carla wanted him, for she hadn’t said so. Amparo had seen her flinch from his kiss in the garden of the auberge. And if Carla never spoke of such things, then what could she know of them? Her dejection must be for the boy alone, Amparo reasoned, and with a lighter heart she gave the matter no more thought.

  “Hola.”

  She turned to the voice without alarm, even though its owner had appeared without a sound. It was the youth, rather, who seemed startled to have come across her. His face was lean and smooth and unbearded, his features not yet fully grown; yet he was as tall, if not as broad, as many of the Maltese men. His hair was stiff with dirt and he wore a leather jerkin crudely studded with brass-head nails. His breeches were ragged and tied up with a rope and his feet were callused and bare. A butcher knife was shoved through his rope belt. A man-boy. She recognized him, from the dock when they’d first arrived. He’d been caked in crusted blood and the old puppeteer had danced him a crazy jig. She looked at him without speaking. He shuffled and regained his wits.

  “You speak the French?” he said, in that tongue, and then in Spanish, “Spanish?”

  She nodded and perhaps he took this to mean both for he went on to speak in a patois composed of both. “Are you hurt?” he asked, seeing the way she hugged herself.

  She shook her head. He looked back and forth along the waterfront.

  “This is not a good place for you,” he said. “It’s not safe, for a girl.”

  Amparo pointed up to the sky and he looked up. For a moment she thought he’d find this nonsensical, but when he looked back at her he nodded, as if her meaning couldn’t be clearer.

  “The stars, yes.” He swelled his chest and pointed about the firmament with his finger. “The Virgin. The Great Bear. The Little Bear.” He glanced at her to see if this impressed her. “But here is not safe. The soldiers. The tercios.” He paused as if he’d suggested something indelicate. He studied her, fists on his hips as if this were his domain. He said, “You’re cold.”

  Without waiting for an answer he turned and ran out of sight, his feet slapping on the capstones until silence fell. She wondered if Tannhauser had returned. She was about to leave for the auberge to find out when the footsteps returned and the boy reappeared with a threadbare length of fabric whose original function was obscure but which now, it seemed, served him as a blanket for he draped it over her shoulders and pulled it around her. It smelled of brine. She took up the slack and wrapped it tight.

  “You’re kind,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I saw you. With the German.”

  “The German?”

  “The big man.” He spread his chest and put a hand on the hilt of his knife and mimed a manly swagger. “The great Captain Tannhauser. He spies on the Turks for La Valette. He moves among them like a wind. He cuts their throats while they sleep.”

  This account of Tannhauser’s activities disturbed her. She didn’t believe it.

  “And the other, the English, like a bull,” continued the boy. “And the belle dame. You came with them on the Couronne, when the warships of the infidels were first seen. Yes?”

  Amparo remembered the way he’d looked at Tannhauser and how the boy’s eyes had met her own and how in them she’d seen the ghost of the life she’d left so far behind. She saw it again now, in his unvarnished honesty, in his poignant and desperate pride. She nodded.

  “I saw you too, with the old puppeteer.”

  “The karagöz,” corrected the boy. He looked sad.

  Amparo had returned to the dock later that day and the old man, unprompted, had laid on a performance in his theater of dancing shadows, squawking in a fantastic mixture of tongues. It seemed to portray a rich man asking a poor man to die on his behalf, with the promise of great rewards in the blessed hereafter, but if the meaning had been less than clear the choreographed paper figures of his puppets had brought her delight. When she’d indicated that she carried no coin and couldn’t pay him, the karagöz had fallen to his knees and kissed her feet. She hadn’t seen him again since the soldiers had dragged him down the street on the day of the battle.

  “Where is he now?” she asked.

  “In Hell,” said the boy.

  “No,” she said. The thought wounded her. “Hell wasn’t made for such a soul.”

  He thought about this, and perhaps he agreed. “But for sure the karagöz is dead.” He mimed a noose snapping about his neck and dropped his head, and she flinched. The boy grinned, as if this were what made him a man and her a mere girl. Then his eyes snapped toward something in the dark and he put a finger to his lips and pointed to the ground.

  “Look,” he whispered.

  A long, slender lizard scuttled across the dock in the pale light and stopped a yard away to observe them with protuberant eyes. The boy dived and his hand flashed out and Amparo cried “No!” and he grabbed it by the tail. The lizard squirmed and its tail snapped off in his hand. The shorn creature scampered away into the dark. The boy squatted on his haunches beside her and showed her the scaly object.

  “Gremxula,” he said. “Very clever. They break so they can live. They survive.”

  He threw the tail away and looked at her, their faces now level.

  “So,” he said, “they have cast you out.”

  Amparo blinked at this absurdity. He gave her a rueful smile, his teeth white and uneven in his sunburned face.

  “Me too. In, out. In, out. That is the game. Bu
t I am not sad. When the Turks have killed very many, the chevaliers will let me fight with them in the line and if I don’t die, I’ll become a big man too. That’s the way forward in this life, to kill many. Tannhauser, La Valette, all of them. For killers the world is open—it is free—and I want to see it. This island is all I know. It is small. It is mean. Each day the same as the next.”

  “No day is the same as the next.”

  The boy was undeterred. “You have seen the world. Is it as wide as they say?”

  “Wider than anyone can know,” said Amparo. “It is beautiful and it is cruel.”

  “There are many green trees,” he said, to prove his learning. “More than you can ride through in a week. And there are mountains too high to be climbed. And snow.”

  “Trees and snow and flowers and rivers so wide you can’t see one bank from the other,” agreed Amparo. The boy nodded, as if this confirmed what he’d heard. There was in his eyes the passion of a fabulous dream, and the thought that their light might be extinguished made her sad. “But what if you die here, in the war?” she said.

  “I will be welcomed into Heaven by Jesus and all His apostles.” He crossed himself. “But I’m too clever to die, like the gremxula. You are the one in danger. You don’t believe me, but don’t worry, I know Guzman, an abanderado with the tercio of Naples, and he knows the English bull—Barras?”

  Amparo nodded. “Bors.”

  “Bors. Yes. I will ask Guzman to speak with Bors, and they will take you back in. Tannhauser would not put you to live on the docks, of this I am sure, but perhaps he is out there”—he threw an arm toward the darkness beyond the bay—“killing Turkish generals, or setting fire to their ships.”

  As his fantasies became more extravagant, Amparo was disturbed. “How do you know what Tannhauser does?”

  “The men on the Post of Castile talk of him,” he said, as if to imply that he was to be counted among their number. “Los soldados particulares. Even the knights regard him. The door of La Valette is open to Tannhauser as to no other. Only Tannhauser dares to go out among the fiends.” As if noting her distress he added, “Don’t be afraid for Captain Tannhauser. They say he will never die. Tannhauser knows the Turk. Tannhauser knows the Sultan Suleiman himself. And perhaps the Devil too. But tell me, was it the belle dame who cast you out? What did you do?”

  “I’m not cast out,” she said. “I live at the Auberge of England.”

  He studied her afresh, and with a shadow of awe. “Then why are you here?”

  “I came here for the peace.”

  “The peace?” The idea seemed to baffle him. He stood up. “I will guard you back to the auberge. It is the home of Starkey, the last of the English. I know it well, very well, yes.”

  He rose to his feet. He seemed so set on gallantry that Amparo couldn’t refuse. She stood up too. She slipped the blanket from her shoulders and handed it back. He took it, as if he now considered it a shabby and offensive thing to have offered a woman so obviously grand. He balled it and tossed it in the lumber stacks. He noticed the leather cylinder around her neck.

  “What is this?” he said.

  Amparo slid the case beneath her arm. “It is a curiosity,” she said. He pursed his lips as he realized that this was all she’d let him know. She said, “Tell me your name.”

  “Orlandu,” he said. He added, “When I leave to see the wide wide world, and become a fine person and a man of honor, I shall be Orlandu di Borgo.”

  “Why do you live here, on the waterfront?” she asked.

  “Here I am free.”

  “Where’s your family?”

  “My family?” Orlandu’s lip curled. He made a short, ax-like gesture with the edge of his hand. “I have cut them,” he said. “They are not fine people.”

  She would have asked more, but his face suggested he would not give it, and that it was a subject that caused him pain.

  “And your name?” he said.

  “Amparo.”

  He smiled. “Very fine. Spanish, then. Are you a noble, like the belle dame?”

  She shook her head and his smile broadened, as if this bound them even closer. She wondered if he wanted her, and having wondered knew that he didn’t. He wanted to be a man, with so palpable a desperation it made her ache too, but he was still too much a boy to know real desire. In a flash she wondered, also, if this was Carla’s boy.

  She said, “You will meet Tannhauser when he returns. I will tell him you are a gallant, who protected me from the tercios, and that it would please you to shake his hand.”

  Orlandu’s eyes boggled.

  “Would that please you?” she asked.

  “Oh verily,” said Orlandu. “Verily indeed.” He scrubbed at his hair, as if already grooming himself for the occasion. “When?”

  “I will speak with him tomorrow,” she said.

  Orlandu grabbed her hand and kissed it. No one had ever done so before.

  “Come now,” he said. “Let me take you home, before the moon goes down.”

  Amparo hoped he was the boy Carla sought. She liked his heart. If he was not the boy, she wondered if they couldn’t make believe that it was so.

  Friday, June 8, 1565

  Auberge of England—The Outlands—Castel Sant’Angelo

  “Allahu Akabar! God is most great! Allahu Akabar!

  “I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.

  “I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of Allah.

  “Come to prayer!

  “Come to prayer!

  “Come to prayer!

  “Come to success!

  “Allahu Akabar! There is no God but Allah.”

  Tannhauser woke at the break of day to the poetry of the muezzin’s call. For seventeen dawns the adhan had drifted from the Corradino Heights and through the windows of the auberge. After so many years among the Franks, the music haunted him—depending on his dreams—with awe, with dread, with pride, with a readiness for battle, with an obscure anguish whose nature he could not define. It didn’t matter that the words were indistinct. The Al Fatihah was engraved on what passed for his soul and would never be erased.

  “Guide us to the straight way, the way of those upon whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not the way of those upon whom lies Your wrath, nor of those who wander astray.”

  There was a void in his heart as large as the universe around him, and within it he found no Grace, no way that seemed straight, nor any guide thereto. And even by his own lights, he’d wandered as far astray as a man might get without running into the gallows. Amparo’s arm stirred across his chest and her fingers, propelled by some tender dream, caressed his neck and she sighed. Tannhauser breathed in her scent and with it the hope inherent in the bright new day.

  A pale citrus light breached the deep-silled, glassless windows and awakened the glow of her skin where she lay coiled beside him. The sheet had been thrown back and was twisted about her thigh. Her head lay in the bight of his shoulder and her hair lay black across her cheek and her shadowed lips were half parted and the color of precious garnet. Her flanks revealed the outlines of her ribs as she breathed and he craned his head an inch or two to study the curve of her arse. She appeared to him quite a beauty, despite that her face and her mind were imperfect and strange. His privities were engorged and became more so as he ran his palm down the muscles of her back. His fingertips palpated the burls of her spine and slid down them one by one, until they abandoned the hardness of bone to nestle between the curves that so delighted him. To such sensual abundance a man could abandon himself forever, if the world would but permit it. But of all worlds this one would not, for its very heart was stone. He considered arousing her slowly, with kisses and dexterous wiles, for he knew by now that her body was as greedy for his hands as his hands were for her. Thereafter he’d engulf her with his bulk and slide inside her and pound her into the mattress, a practice for which, he also knew by now, her appetite was admirably large.

  His desire lurched toward t
he overpowering and he shifted his weight and reached down to unlimber his balls. As he did so Amparo murmured and rolled onto her back. Her breasts sloped to either side of her chest, the skin faintly marbled with blue where they hung fullest, and he watched her nipples, no longer softened by the warmth of his body, grow dark in the cooling air. No void within troubled him now. The turbulent ache that filled it, the thoughts of her that increasingly filled his mind, the consuming abandon that filled as much of his days as he could spare would all stand condemned as sinful and abhorrent by the Believers of the various camps amongst whom he was stranded. Yet willing as he was to admit vices and crimes without number, he could find no wrong in the transport Amparo brought him. Half a mile from where they lay entwined, other interwoven bodies were crammed by the thousand in a reeking ditch for the nourishment of seagulls and crows. Both those whose corpses filled it and those whose hands had made it so were destined for the fields of Paradise shrived of all sin; but of the Guilt of the fornicators dozing the sunrise away, there was no doubt.

  He scooped Amparo’s hair back from her face and looked at her, and so peaceful were her features, so innocent of care and of any knowledge of the madness into which she had thrust herself—so like a child’s—that he couldn’t bring himself to expel her from such an Eden. And so uncharacteristic was this impulse to restraint that he wondered if this feeling in his heart were not Love. He studied her further: the faint creases encircling her throat, the various textures of her unflawed complexion, the smooth contours of her belly, the sheen on the swell of her thigh, her pubic hair. He brushed his lips over hers, so softly that she didn’t stir. He blinked and sat back against the wall.