Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  Nicodemus’s face brightened with a smile. He bowed and left. Tannhauser went to the door and the sunlight struck bursts of radiance from the bangle. Only gold looked and felt like gold. All else was prone to deceive, which was why men loved it. He felt a faint tremor through the soles of his boots as the sound of dozens of explosions reached the auberge. The siege guns had opened up from the slopes of Monte Sciberras. Another day had begun at Fort Saint Elmo.

  Friday, June 8, 1565

  Infirmary Piazza—Castel Sant’Angelo

  Bors swallowed his disgruntlement at missing a cooked breakfast and wolfed a round of bread and cheese and swigged wine as they walked across the town.

  “The women are driving me mad,” Mattias said.

  Bors feigned surprise. “What have the fair and tender maidens done now?”

  Mattias blew his cheeks. “Do they need do anything, other than breathe?” He spread his palms, as if the victim of forces mightier and more cunning than he. “I have the one but I want the other too.”

  “The contessa?” said Bors. “I’d have thought her too haughty for you.”

  “She casts a Fascination without even knowing it.”

  “Well, I daresay you’d find a torrid welcome in her arms—if you stopped swiving her dearest friend and abased yourself. By the look of her she hasn’t been molested since her boy was born. Though, of course, they’re much craftier in concealing these matters than we.”

  “If it were only a question of lust there’d be no great riddle. But I have affection for each.”

  “Hold now,” said Bors. “Love at the best of times is a faithless pimp.”

  “I did not say love.”

  “Then let us argue the number of angels that may dance on the head of a pin.”

  Mattias said, “Go on.”

  “In war, love becomes a contagion,” expounded Bors. “Much-loathed rivals become brothers, malice becomes firm fellowship, and strangers clasp each other to their breast. Look at La Valette. I’d wager that six months ago any number of the Spanish or Italian knights would’ve danced a jig of joy to see a knife between his shoulders. So at least I’ve heard. But the man now walks on water. But why?” He paused for drama. “Because Love is the horse that pulls the gut cart of War. Why else would we come back for more? As for women and war, never is their flesh softer or their virtues more bright or their gentleness more welcome to the soul.” He looked Mattias in the eye. “And never is the hole between their thighs a deeper pit in which to fall.”

  Mattias was silent for a while as he took this in and Bors was gratified. In the normal run, Mattias had an answer for everything. “So what is your advice?” Mattias said.

  “Advice?” A short laugh escaped Bors’s throat. “There’s a whore in the lee of Galley Creek that I can warmly recommend, though she tips the scales at not much less than I do. The sight of her naked is alone a marvel never to be forgotten.”

  “My question was in earnest.”

  “Then so is this answer. The only game here is to stay alive. And to be in love—or in lust—is to play with a dangerous handicap.” He shrugged. “But I waste my breath, for the game unfettered is no game at all, at least for the likes of you. My advice, then, is to swive them both and let the Devil take his due. It won’t be until all this is over that you’ll know what any of it means. And even then.”

  Mattias brooded on this as they entered the piazza outside the Sacred Infirmary. His attitude changed as he saw Father Lazaro come out and walk down the steps.

  “Hold,” said Mattias, “for I’ve a bone to pick.”

  He bowed to Lazaro, who gave a cautious nod in return.

  “Father Lazaro, Mattias Tannhauser, late of Messina. I hope you won’t find me insolent, but I’ve a boon to ask. Lady Carla is eager to bring some comfort to the wounded, a fact of which you are aware, yet she is denied any opportunity to serve. I was hoping you and I might reach some bargain in this matter.”

  “The care of the sick is the most sacred work of the Order, and is not a fit subject for bargaining,” said Lazaro. “In any case, only we have the necessary skill.”

  “What skill does it take to hold a man’s hand and whisper some words of hope?”

  “She is a woman.”

  “The sound of a woman’s voice will give a man better reason to live than all your elixirs and potions mingled together.”

  “Our men will survive through prayer and the Grace of God,” said Lazaro.

  “Then the contessa is sent by God. She’s spent half her life on her knees.”

  “No laywomen are allowed in the Sacred Infirmary.”

  “The only thing that excludes them is your pride—or should I say vanity?”

  The monk gaped at his effrontery. “Should we open the doors to every woman in the Borgo?”

  “No doubt you could do worse,” said Mattias. “Nevertheless, it can be no great feat to make exception for an aristocrat like her.”

  Lazaro seemed unwilling to yield. Mattias placed a hand on the monk’s shoulder. Lazaro flinched, as if no one had taken such a liberty in his life. “Father, you are a man of God and, if you will forgive me, advanced in years. You cannot imagine what the sight—the presence, the perfume, the aura—of a beautiful woman can do for a fighting man’s spirit.”

  Lazaro looked up into the battered and barbarian face looming over his own. “I’d hoped to avoid raising this objection, but I have heard that the Lady Carla is not as pious as you claim.”

  Mattias raised one brow in warning. “You have me at a disadvantage, Father.”

  “Is she not living with you in a state of mortal sin?”

  “You disappoint me, Father,” said Mattias. “Bitterly so, if I may be so bold.”

  Lazaro’s mouth puckered into something resembling the anus of a sheep. Mattias glanced at Bors. Bors turned away to stifle a snigger.

  “Such gossip is both idle and pernicious,” Mattias continued. “Did not Moses himself list the bearing of false witness as a crime?” His eyes darkened. “I myself have no good name worth defending, but as the lady’s protector I would advise you against such slurs upon her honor.”

  “Then it’s untrue,” said Lazaro, nervously.

  “I’m shocked that the brethren should entertain such salacious tittletattle.”

  Lazaro, somewhat embarrassed, offered a feeble defense. “Perhaps you do not know this, but the lady left this island under a cloud.”

  “She told me so herself, for she’s quite without guile. The shame you refer to—and there was plenty to go around—belonged to others more powerful than she and to her not at all. Besides, it was long ago. Is your piety so exorbitant that you’ve abandoned Christ’s message of forgiveness? Would you banish the Magdalene from the foot of the Cross? Shame on you, Father Lazaro.” As Lazaro reeled under this tirade, Mattias took a step back and softened his tone. “If you chose to be more Christian, a pound of Iranian opium might find a way of reaching your apothecary. Perhaps even two.”

  Lazaro blinked, by now quite confused. “You’re hoarding opium? While the infirmary is filled with direly wounded?”

  Bors recalled the weighty stash beneath the water tub. Mattias feigned a sad smile.

  “Perhaps I’ve earned the low esteem in which you hold me, Father Lazaro, even though we were strangers before today. But hoarding opium?”

  Lazaro retreated. “Perhaps the plight of my patients provoked too hasty a conclusion—”

  “However,” went on Tannhauser, hand palm-raised, “at great personal risk, and considerable expense, I might acquire said drugs on your behalf from the Turkish bazaar.”

  In a seizure of repentance, Lazaro grabbed his hand. “Forgive me, Captain, I beg you.”

  Mattias inclined his head in a gracious gesture. “Lady Carla will be honored to accept your invitation.”

  Lazaro’s face corrugated with worry. “But will Lady Carla have the strength for such grim work?” Lazaro looked up the steps to the cloistered infirmary. “Th
ere are sights in there that would turn the strongest stomach—and break the stoutest heart.”

  “The contessa’s heart is of gold. But if her stomach proves too weak, then your pride will be vindicated and hers justly chastised. You will find her and her companion at the Auberge of England.”

  “Her companion?”

  “Amparo. If it’s vulgar gossip you seek, she’s the woman with whom I’m living in sin.” Lazaro blinked. Mattias made the sign of the cross. “Dominus vobiscum,” he said.

  And off they went.

  Dominus vobiscum, thought Bors. To a priest. Only an ignorance of manners could produce such cheek; but ignorance played little part in anything Mattias did.

  Castel Sant’Angelo rose above Grand Harbor like a huge floating ziggurat, its sheer walls descending in stepped sandstone tiers to the water’s edge. From Sant’Angelo’s roof, the view across Grand Harbor to Fort Saint Elmo was unequaled and as they ascended the last stone stairway Bors’s heart hammered hard with more than just exertion. He’d been invited to the emperor’s box and not even Nero had ever staged a circus as spectacular as this.

  They emerged into the blinding sun in time to be deafened by a salvo from Sant’Angelo’s cavalier. The great gun platform, whose timbers shook and creaked with the force of the blast, had been constructed to provide a better field of fire on the Turkish positions. Spouts of smoke barreled above the crystal waters far below and Bors shaded his gaze to watch the gunners. They fell upon the sixteen pounders as if upon dangerous animals in want of restraint. They were stripped to the waist for all that the day was yet cool, their red mouths heaving in the sulfurous air and every inch of them painted black as tar with powder waste and grease. Their filthy hides were runneled with sweat and patched with weeping ulcers caused by the burns that went with the job. And all of them, nine to a crew, cursing God and the Devil and the dear old mothers who had borne them as they wrestled the great bronze beasts back into position, the whites of their eyes rolling bloodshot and their faces all covered in soot, as if this were a satanic commedia and they its minstrels infernal and deranged.

  “I was a gunner’s mate at the age of nine,” said Bors, “in the army of the King of Connaught. I still bear the marks.”

  “Concussion to the brain can last a lifetime,” agreed Mattias.

  Bors laughed. “As will my oath never to work with artillery again.”

  In the high clear morning sky dozens of vultures on broad black wings wheeled above Fort Saint Elmo in placid counterclockwise gyres, their orbits perfectly stacked one above the other by that mysterious science known only to their breed. A tall, slender monk stood on the alure of the northwest wall, studying the monstrous birds as if he would fathom their secret. Starkey cut as scholastic and unwarlike a figure as one could imagine, yet he’d done his time on the Religion’s caravans, ravaging the Levantine coast and Aegean Isles and mauling Ottoman ships in the Ionian Sea.

  Mattias said, “There’s our man.”

  As they circled the vast flat roof toward Starkey, Bors said, “What news of the contessa’s boy?”

  “I’ve one last place to look. If I find no sign of him there, it’ll be time to take our leave.” He looked at Bors. “Sabato waits in Venice. And you can boast that you stood with the Religion.”

  “Desertion’s not something to boast about. And if they catch us, they’ll hang us.”

  “I’m deserting no one,” said Mattias. “I gave no bond and signed no contract. Despite which I’ve given priceless service for not a penny piece in pay. That debt I intend to collect.”

  Bors knew Mattias of old. “You have a boat?”

  “Not yet. La Valette has concealed a score or more of feluccas all about the coast, for use by his messengers to Sicily. It can’t be more than a day’s work to find one.” Mattias read his expression and stopped at the foot of the stone stairs to the alure. “We’ve both better things to do than die in this manure pile. At present the country to the south is but sparsely patrolled, but when Saint Elmo falls, Mustafa will invest this city and the risks of escape will be multiplied. My notion is to sell off our opium in the bazaar—where we’ll get a better price and may trade for pearls and precious stones rather than gold—and make sail for Calabria within the week.”

  “What if Lady Carla decides to stay?”

  “I can’t create her son out of clay. And love is no more worth dying for than God.”

  “Praises be.”

  “Will you leave or stay?” asked Mattias.

  Bors shrugged. “I suppose the smell of glory will have to do.”

  “Good.”

  “But how will all four of us get through the Kalkara Gate?”

  Mattias didn’t answer.

  They mounted the stair and as Bors cleared the parapet he gasped. Less than half a mile distant across the harbor the entire Turkish army surrounded the small, beleaguered outpost of Fort Saint Elmo. Monte Sciberras bulged from the water like the back of a half-submerged ox, its spine tapering down toward the fort, which was perched on the seaward tip of the rocky peninsula. The hill gave a fine advantage to the Turkish artillery but its flanks claimed not a stalk of vegetation, nor even a handful of dirt in which such might have thrived. Virgin nature offered nothing in which to entrench either guns or troops, but like a virgin the mountain had been raped by the engineers. From as far away as the Bingemma basin thousands of African blackamoors and Christian slaves had scraped hundreds of tons of earth from the island’s meager topsoil and hauled it in sacks to the mountain’s barren slopes. They’d woven gabions—huge wickerwork baskets—from willow branches brought in by their ships. Then they’d filled the baskets with boulders and rubble and with the corpses of those fellow laborers shot down in droves by the marksmen of the fort. These gabions were formed into a series of redoubts from which the muzzles of the Turkish siege guns pointed and roared, vomiting iron and marble at Saint Elmo’s walls.

  At further prodigious cost in Turkish lives, trenches had been hacked into the rock and now extended, weblike, down the slopes to wind all the way around the fort’s southern aspect. From these slits in the stony ground, janissary marksmen picked at the men on the ramparts and at anything that sailed across the water, which in daylight was nothing at all. From the shore of Marsamxett Harbor beyond the fort, where timber and brushwood screens provided concealment, more snipers fired at any Christian who showed his head on the western walls. Below the massive gun batteries, the whole steep hillside swirled with the regimental pennants of the Moslem warriors thereon massed in their thousands. Canary yellows vied with vivid scarlets and parrot greens, the silk all shiny and the sun winking silver from the hieroglyphs adorning the flags. At the center of all this pageantry and gunfire, Saint Elmo smoked like the throat of an awakened volcano.

  “How they love bright colors, these Moslem swine,” said Bors. “What do those banners say?” he asked.

  “Verses from the Koran,” said Mattias. “The surah of Conquest. They exhort the Faithful to slaughter and vengeance and death.”

  “And there you have the difference between us,” said Bors, “for when did Jesus Christ ever call for such horrors?”

  “Evidently, Jesus Christ knew He did not need to.”

  The embattled fort itself was shaped like a star with four main salients. Its landward curtain and bastions were presently obscured by smoke and dust. Its rear and eastern flanks fell sheer into the sea. After fifteen days’ bombardment its original shape and design could only be guessed at. The walls that faced batteries on the hill were rent by breaches and the masonry gaped like teeth in an old crone’s mouth. Masses of rubble had cascaded into the ditch beneath the wall and these hillocks were brightly carpeted with the bodies of Turkish fanatics already slaughtered. Ferocious wave attacks, lasting hours at a stretch, had alternated with bombardments, and more were expected that day.

  Despite all this, the bullet-tattered standard of Saint John—a white Crusader cross on a bloodred field—still flew above the ruin
s, and from the crumbling battlements and improvised counter-walls came a steady crackle of muskets and the blast of cannon. So far, against every calculation of attackers and besieged alike, the massed Turkish assaults had been repulsed. As the defenders died by day, La Valette replaced them by night, with men rowed out across the harbor from Sant’Angelo’s dock. There was never any shortage of volunteers and Bors did not wonder. He clenched his fist on the hilt of his sword and wished that he were with them. A hand squeezed his arm.

  “You’ve tears in your eyes,” said Mattias. “I thought you English knew better.”

  Bors scowled and swatted the offending orbs with either hand. “No, all we are fit for is boasting in alehouses—of the feats of valor we saw but did not take part in.”

  Mattias glanced over at Starkey. “Your countryman seems a good deal more phlegmatic.”

  It was true: Starkey was observing the holocaust with no more emotion than a spectator at a game of bowls. “Starkey doesn’t plan to steal away like a thief in the night.”

  Mattias ignored this and walked along the alure and Bors followed.

  Starkey turned in greeting. “I hear you’ve turned my house into a sink of iniquity.”

  “As Jesus told us,” Mattias replied, “man cannot live by bread alone.”

  “Christ spoke of spiritual matters, as even you well know.” Starkey turned to Bors and spoke in English. “You’re a son of the Church, I’ve seen you at Mass.”

  Bors heard his native tongue so rarely that its sound seemed peculiarly foreign, yet its music always moved him. “Yes, Your Excellency. A good son.”

  “How did you come to fall in with so godless a man?”

  “On a cold night, in a damp ditch, when Mattias wasn’t long for this world. With God’s help, I nursed him back to life.” There was no point flattering a man of Starkey’s influence, but a stab at piety could do no harm. “Now, God willing, I hope to guide him toward eternal life too. That is, back into the arms of Mother Church from whence he came.”