Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  As La Valette disappeared, Father Lazaro came up to Carla and indicated it was time for her to leave. He offered no words of praise, yet his manner seemed warmer than before and she sensed she’d acquitted herself with honor. As Lazaro walked away, she turned to Angelu.

  “I must go now, Angelu,” she said. “Thank you for all you’ve given me.”

  She stood up.

  “Will you come back again, my lady?” said Angelu.

  She looked at him. It was the first time he’d spoken all day. And by the way he asked the question she felt as if he’d placed his life in her hands. For a moment she was choked.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “First thing tomorrow.”

  Angelu held out his two congealed fists, as if he’d clasp them together if he could. “God bless you, my lady. May He guide you safe and sound to your boy.”

  Carla’s eyes filled. Her voice deserted her. She turned and hurried away for the arch.

  Carla left the ward with her chest constricted by turbulent emotions. She’d given something of herself, something pleasing to God. The feeling was unfamiliar. And marvelous. Her life had been one of taking and being taken from. She’d bobbed like a cork on its waters. Her acts of charity had been abstract, investments in an eternity she didn’t deserve. She’d adopted Amparo to assuage her own isolation. To have someone to mother. Even her quest to find her boy was, in part, to allay the guilt that gnawed at her heart. But today Christ had filled her with Divine Love, a love of all Creation, a love even of her own wretchedness, for it was true, after all, that it was here among the wretched that Christ was most readily found. She passed back between the rows of the wounded, their pain transmuted into murmured prayer, their moans stifled by the stoical pride that bound them. Later, when the night boats from Saint Elmo brought fresh mayhem, there would be screams from the surgical slabs where Lazaro would spend the hours of darkness steeped to the elbows in gore.

  The evening air at the threshold was so sweet that her senses swooned and her head whirled about and she stopped and closed her eyes for fear of falling. Cannon still crashed to the north, louder out here. As her throat cleared of incense she detected on the breeze the smell of cooking fires and meat and she felt hungry. Hunger as she’d never known it. Hunger earned. How strange to feel so alive at the center of so much death. How terrible. In all the world there was no more tragic place than this, yet she wouldn’t have wished herself anywhere else. The life she’d known, the woman she’d been, seemed infinitely far away. What would she become when this was over?

  She felt a hand on her arm. “Carla?”

  She opened her eyes and found Amparo looking at her. There was a brightness in her eyes, a love that filled her. In her hair was the ivory comb, beautifully worked. Carla found that this gift no longer galled her, and she was relieved. Amparo appeared radiant. Or was it that Carla now saw the world anew and could see the radiance in things she’d been blind to before? Emotion rose again in Carla’s throat, joy and sadness intermingled. Without speaking, Amparo embraced her and Carla clung to the girl and felt strangely like a child, the more so for the strength in Amparo’s arms, a strength she hadn’t known was there for she’d never leaned on it. Carla’s world was turned upside down. Yet, suddenly, she felt free. Amparo stroked her hair.

  “Are you sad?” Amparo asked.

  “Yes.” Carla raised her head. “No. Sad but in a good way.”

  “Sadness is never bad,” said Amparo. “Sadness is the mirror of being happy.”

  Carla smiled. “I’m happy too. Especially to see you. I’ve missed you.”

  Amparo said, “I want you to meet my friends.”

  Amparo had never claimed friends before, but she’d changed too in these days. No longer confined to the round of Carla’s life, she came and went like a bird uncaged. She was closer in spirit to these people than Carla could ever be, and she wandered their streets and wharves with an anonymous liberty that Carla could never know. Carla looked down the hospital steps, where two young Maltese stood waiting. The older of the two, perhaps twenty, had a freshly bandaged stump where his right forearm had been. She recognized him from the ward. He’d arrived last night and had been discharged this evening. His face was still gray with pain, his eyes still hollowed and stunned by the shock of battle.

  The younger, not much more than a boy, perhaps fourteen, was barefoot and unwashed. The smooth adolescent flesh that might have softened his features had been burned away by the life he’d led to leave razor cheekbones and an aquiline nose. His eyes were dark and wild, as if he could scarce contain the energies locked within him. He carried a cuirass and helmet slung across the blade of a sheathed sword, which she assumed belonged to the other. Unlike his companion, who’d dropped his eyes when she looked at him, he looked at her with a brazen curiosity. She wondered, in her heightened state of mind, what it was that he saw.

  Amparo introduced the armless man as Tomaso. He backed away, dipping his head in respect. The younger, taller youth made a poor job of stifling a grin of delight.

  “This is Orlandu,” said Amparo.

  Orlandu gave an elaborate bow and she wondered if he were not mocking her. “Orlandu di Borgo,” he said. With glee he added, “At your service, Madame.”

  His teeth were bright in his dirty, sunburned face. Carla stifled a smile of her own. “You speak French,” she said.

  He shrugged. “French, Italian, Spanish. All. Spanish, very good. Very good. From the harbor, the knights, the voyagers.” He pointed a finger at his ear, then his eye. “I listen, I watch. Some Arabic too, from the slaves. Assalaamu alaykum. This means ‘Peace be upon you.’”

  His showing off suddenly reminded Carla of Mattias. “And your friend?” she asked. “Does he speak many tongues?”

  “Tomaso speaks only Maltese, but he is brave, very brave. We work with the ships. Now he fights with the heroes, at Saint Elmo.” His French had degenerated into a mixture of languages but remained fluent enough. Carla nodded. Tomaso, unhappy to be the center of attention, ducked his head in silence. Orlandu said, “You are the contessa who searches for the lost boy. The bastard.”

  Carla blinked. She looked at Amparo, whose eyes contained the vital question. At the same time they overbrimmed with hope. Please tell me it’s him.

  “Have you found him yet?” asked Orlandu, bold as brass.

  Carla felt suddenly beleaguered. “You know about this matter?” she said.

  “Of course. Everyone knows. The great captain asks. Tannhauser.” He spoke the name as if exceedingly proud to know it. “The big English too. They ask, the people hear, they talk. You are surprised?”

  Orlandu’s surprise that she might be so made her feel stupid, yet she found his bravado too charming to care. Could it really be him? She searched in her belly and her heart, and felt no yearning. She felt a flutter of panic. She shook her head.

  Orlandu said, “I don’t think you will find him.”

  “Why not?” said Carla.

  “Twelve years old, yes? Born on the Eve of All the Saints, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He flashed his teeth. “I know the news. I hear. I watch.” He pointed into the night with the sword. “This morning, Captain Tannhauser razed the cannon of the Turk on Gallows Point.”

  Carla’s anxiety took a new turn. “Where is he now?”

  “Tannhauser?” Orlandu shrugged with exaggerated mystery. “He comes. He goes. They say his horse, Buraq, has wings.” He glanced at Amparo, as if she were the source of this legend and he wished to confirm its authenticity. “Amparo says I may meet him. With your permission.”

  “Surely. But tell me, why won’t I find the boy?”

  “Because you have not found him yet,” he said, as if nothing could be more obvious. “No one knows such a boy.”

  “How old are you, Orlandu?”

  He groped for the word, his fingers coiling and uncoiling in his palm. He said, “Seventeen.” He saw her total disbelief and backed down. “Fifteen! Ye
s, I think. Soon. At least.” He shook the sword. “Old enough to fight the Turk, when they will let me. I’ve killed dogs, many dogs, and the Moslems are no different.”

  “When is your birthday?” asked Carla.

  Orlandu’s confidence was momentarily blunted. He shrugged. “Birthdays are for children. Rich children.”

  “I also have no birthday,” said Amparo.

  “It’s true?” said Orlandu.

  Amparo nodded and Orlandu’s sense of worthiness was restored.

  “I was born in spring,” said Amparo.

  “And I in autumn,” said Orlandu. “This much I know.”

  He looked at Carla and must have seen the turmoil within her for he recoiled a little and smiled and shook his head. “Me? Your boy?” he said. He shook his head again. “I would like, oh yes, but I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged and confirmed the prejudice that she’d dared not admit to herself. “You are too fine,” he said. “Look at me.” She did so. The flurry of hope died within her. Orlandu smiled in vindication. He said, “Do you think I’m the boy you seek?”

  Tomaso shifted his weight and Carla felt ashamed for keeping him standing in the street. She didn’t give Orlandu an answer. She looked at Amparo.

  “Why don’t you invite your friends to come and eat with us?”

  Orlandu’s eyes bulged. Amparo nodded to him.

  “Yes,” said Amparo. “Come and eat with us at the auberge.”

  Orlandu spoke rapidly to Tomaso, who shuffled with reluctance and shyness. Orlandu, without discernible sympathy for his friend’s injured state, grabbed him by his good arm and smiled at Carla. “Thank you, your lady, very much. We come.”

  At the Auberge of England, Nicodemus cooked flatbread and lamb and Orlandu’s excitement was uncontained when he learned that at some point in the proceedings the great Captain Tannhauser was expected to arrive. In the meanwhile, he did not want for thrills, for Bors returned from the batteries of Sant’Angelo’s cavalier, his face black with powder and hauling a two-gallon demijohn of wine, and found himself more than fit substitute for the youth’s blind adoration. Orlandu sat at the refectory table with the barbarous Englishman and Tomaso, hero of Saint Elmo, and he translated between the three, and who could deny him his pride at being accepted as a man by two such men as these?

  As they ate and drank they talked of the grim and murderous siege across the water, of the prodigious valor of the defenders and the suicidal courage of the janissaries, and of the miracle it was that the fort had already held for seventeen days. Even the hardiest of Saint Elmo’s knights, related Tomaso—Le Mas, Luigi Broglia, Juan de Guaras—did not believe they could survive another three or four sunsets, despite the nightly reinforcements. No man there expected to live, except, perhaps, the Maltese swimmers who’d been ordered, when the fall came, to take to the water and fight another day. At times Orlandu’s eyes shone with tears, and Carla wondered why gallantry moved men’s hearts with a power nothing else could match.

  As dessert Nicodemus served bread fried in butter topped with marzipan and sugar, and was roundly declared a cook of genius, and the talk turned to the future of the campaign. Maps were traced by candlelight on the tabletop, with fingers and the tips of knives in spilled wine. Strategies were argued, for and against, and the cunning of Torghoud, whom Bors had sworn to kill from the cavalier, and the rage of Mustafa Pasha were pitched against the brilliance of La Valette. Bors told tales of his late adventures in the wars of Charles Quintus, and of Tannhauser’s exploits under Suleiman’s horsetail banners. And at each account Orlandu’s eyes became wider and more brimful with martial yearning. And though she did not speak, Carla was saddened, for thus were the myths of war nourished and replanted, even by those who must have known that they were warrants for cruelty and madness.

  Yet perhaps they did not know, or could not so allow it, for their fascination was inexhaustible and the subject turned to weapons and the supremacy of Turkish musketry and the weakness of Turkish armor and the merits at close quarters, respectively assessed, of ax and mace and halberd and dagger and pike, of the various widths and cross-sections of swords and of their hilts and lengths, and of the war hammer, which Bors thought much underrated and a tool without compare.

  Throughout this the women were as shadows on the wall, and while Amparo seemed content to enjoy the warmth and convivial company, Carla was overcome by fatigue. In any case, she couldn’t square this celebration of fighting with the sorrow crammed into the ward of the Sacred Infirmary. Mattias did not return and none knew when he might. She excused herself, to a chorus of blessings and thanks, and retired to a deep and instant sleep.

  She awoke to a hand on her shoulder and found Amparo standing by the bed with a candle in her hand. The girl was wrapped in a towel and could hardly contain her excitement.

  “Carla,” said Amparo. “It is Orlandu! It is Orlandu after all!”

  Carla swung her legs from the mattress and stood up. Her heart was ahead of her mind for it had leapt into her throat. She grabbed Amparo’s hand. She managed to say, “Orlandu?”

  “Tannhauser says Orlandu is your son.”

  Carla’s head spun and she almost sat back down. She felt a trembling desperation constrict her chest. She took a deep breath. Orlandu was her son. Orlandu was her son.

  Tears blurred her vision. She said, “Orlandu is my son.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” said Amparo.

  Carla hurried past her and grabbed her cloak. Then she hung it up again. She couldn’t go to greet him in her nightgown. She turned to her plain black dress spread over the table. Her hair, she thought. It was tangled from sleep. The boy would hardly care, of course. But even so.

  She took another deep breath. “Tell Orlandu I will be down in a few moments.”

  Carla stripped her nightgown over her head and threw it on the bed.

  Amparo said, “Orlandu isn’t here anymore.”

  Carla swayed with a terrible premonition. She closed her eyes and opened them and looked at Amparo. The girl’s joy, still real, was now overshadowed. Carla steeled herself.

  “Where is he?” she asked, with all the calm she could summon.

  “I don’t know. Tannhauser and Bors have gone to find him, on the wharf.”

  Carla retrieved her nightgown and pulled it back on. The cloak would have to suffice after all and her hair be damned. “The Kalkara wharf?” she said. She took the cloak from its hook and looked about the floor for her boots.

  “No,” Amparo replied. “Sant’Angelo’s.”

  Carla stopped with the cloak half unfurled about her shoulders.

  Her day in the infirmary had made her all too keenly aware that Sant’Angelo’s wharf was the point of embarkation for the slaughterhouse of Fort Saint Elmo.

  A cry escaped her throat.

  Carla ran barefoot down the stairs and out into Majistral Street.

  Saturday, June 9, 1565

  Zonra—Marsaxlokk Harbor—Auberge of England—The Wharf

  A long day but a good one, reflected Tannhauser, as he trudged bone tired through the Borgo for the Auberge of England. Good for him, at least. He’d just reported to Starkey, where his various deeds had received all due admiration, and where he’d found the Christian high command in a state of shock following twenty-four hours of crisis at Fort Saint Elmo.

  After seventeen solid days of desperate hand-to-hand violence, the Turks held Saint Elmo’s ditch, had captured the defensive ravelin outside the main gates, and had built steps and bridgeworks to a colossal breach that gaped in the southwest perimeter. This extremity had provoked a mutiny among the younger knights, who had determined to sally forth to die like men, rather than wait like penned sheep in an indefensible ruin. La Valette, with characteristic genius, had sent word to the rebels “to flee to the safety of the Borgo.” Accused of something very close to cowardice, despite the inhuman courage they had proven time and again, the sorry mutineers—doomed to return t
o the contempt of the entire Order—had begged the Grand Master not to relieve them of their duties and swore absolute obedience to his every command.

  As Tannhauser left Sant’Angelo, a reinforcement of fifteen knights and ninety Maltese militiamen was mustering on the wharf to cross the water. And welcome to it, Tannhauser thought. For, with a modicum of luck, he would by this time tomorrow be making his own shameless retreat—across the wine-blue sea to the coast of Calabria.

  After leaving De Lugny’s cavalry that morning on Gallows Point, Tannhauser had traced the coast for two miles south in search of the Order’s hidden sailboats. He reached the sea hamlet of Zonra without finding one. The hamlet—a dozen fishermen’s cottages—had been sacked by the Turks and the houses stripped of everything that would serve as firewood—furniture, doors, architraves, window frames, roof joists. All that remained of what had been a tiny jetty were timber pilings sawn off below the waterline. He followed the shore for another hour, skirting every foot of a Y-shaped bay without success, and began to wonder if La Valette hadn’t stationed all his boats to the north. Most boats would be hidden to the north, for that placed them closer to Mdina and Sicily too, but all? He pressed on until the water’s edge threw up a rocky outcrop. It was sheer enough to defy all but determined mountaineering and extended some twenty yards out into the waves. His smuggler’s instinct was aroused.

  Like most men, he’d never learned to swim. He stripped and waded out along the rock face. By its seaward tip he was throat-deep and forced to fend off flares of panic as the brine washed into his mouth and the shale shifted about beneath his feet. He held his nerve and rounded the apex. There was a shallow cove beyond—less a cove than a wrinkle in the shoreline—and with the salt stinging his eyes and setting him to cough, he saw nothing to remark. He was about to curse his own cleverness and grope his way back to dry land when a movement on the surface caught his eye. It was no more than a false note in the bounce of the light on sea and rock, but he wiped his face and looked again, and there it was: the hull of a twelve-footer in the bight of the rock face. A cunning length of canvas had been nailed along the landward gunwale and draped across the boat so that the free edge hung in the water. Thus sodden, it gave the boat the appearance, at more than a few feet distance, of just another shelf of gray coastal stone. From a passing galley a hundred yards out or more—the only viewpoint any Turkish eyes would enjoy—the vessel would be quite invisible.