Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “Tell Bors and Lady Carla to endure until I see them again—and don’t let them think I mean in the hereafter. Tell Amparo she is in my heart.”

  Orlandu blinked as his eyes filmed. He threw his arms around Tannhauser in a sudden, emotive embrace. Tannhauser suppressed a flinch as his wound was mauled. He returned the embrace with one arm.

  “We’ll meet again, too,” he said. “Mark my words. Now, be off.”

  Orlandu turned and loped away across the yard and was lost to the blackness beyond the flames. Tannhauser was hugely relieved. He tracked down Le Mas. The Frenchman was monstrously afflicted by sword cuts and burns, but despite all that was still on his feet, dispensing words of encouragement to the brethren and relaying the cannon at the breach in time for the morrow. Having already confessed his sins to Chaplain Zambrana, and taken Communion, he was able and willing to share in Tannhauser’s brandy.

  They sat in two splendid chairs that Tannhauser had rescued from the bonfire and he thanked Le Mas for the favor of dispatching Orlandu. He told him something of the boy’s story, which Le Mas acknowledged a tale, though by no means the most unlikely that one might cull from their fellow adventurers.

  “Many an account of folly’s wildest escapades will die here untold,” said Le Mas. “In the end, every man’s life is but a tale told to him that’s lived it, and to him alone. Hence are we all alone, except for God’s Grace.”

  They drank and dwelled on what had passed. Less than four hundred defenders were still able to stand at the breach, and of those only a handful lacked serious wounds. That day alone, the bloodiest yet, two thousand Moslems had been slain, and by Le Mas’s reckoning seven thousand or more lay rotting outside the walls. The Religion’s total loss, when it came, would amount to fifteen hundred.

  “Five for one isn’t bad,” he said, “considering how badly we’re outgunned. We gave your heathen pause. If they had any sense they’d pack for home tomorrow.”

  Neither said, though both knew, that Mustafa could afford to lose seven thousand far more readily than the Religion their fifteen hundred.

  “Sense is generally in short supply on this island,” said Tannhauser. “I should tell you that if I can work the masquerade, I intend to join the foe in the guise of one of your Turkish prisoners of war.”

  Le Mas looked at him, then poured brandy down his throat, then looked at him again.

  “Taking account of the fact that you are a German,” he said, “you are the wiliest man I ever knew. If you were French, you’d be the equal of La Valette himself.”

  “Then I have your blessing.”

  “Godspeed,” said Le Mas and handed him the bottle.

  “Tell me,” said Tannhauser. “How many Turkish slaves do we have left?”

  Le Mas said, “I should say no more than a dozen. Why?”

  Tannhauser took a swallow. “If they’re liberated, they’ll be mining the walls of the Borgo within the month. Perhaps even fighting in the Turkish line.”

  “Very true,” concurred Le Mas. “An observation that had escaped me. And it would be a pity, would it not, if one of those filthy swine were to betray your stratagem?” He looked at Tannhauser. “Perhaps more than a pity.”

  “A catastrophe,” said Tannhauser.

  “Marvelous,” said Le Mas. He threw his head back and laughed. “Marvelous. God forgive me, but I do love men who have no scruples about war. After all, without them, how ever could we fight one?” He seized the bottle again, wincing at the pain the movement caused him. “Rest easy. I’ll have them all put to death, after breakfast.”

  Tannhauser soothed his conscience with the thought that at least the condemned prisoners would have time to say their morning prayers. He soothed it further by digging out a pair of the Stones of Immortality. He showed Le Mas their marbling of gold and explained their properties, both healing and mystic, and they each washed one down with the brandy and then they sat and watched the mighty constellations wheel about the sky above. The Great Bear straddled the north. To the south, Scorpius was bright. A perfect half-moon had risen in Aquarius. Tannhauser—as was his habit whenever the bounds of augury could be stretched—read into this sequence a favorable omen. Speaking for himself, he would need it.

  All about the bailey, the remnant of the garrison bedded down, each man pondering the knowledge that this would be his last night on Earth. The crackle of the bonfire died away and a balmy silence enfolded the two good friends, a silence in which they could believe themselves the last living men in the world. They linked their arms in the darkness and this was a boundless comfort to both, and Le Mas sang a Psalm of David into his beard and tears rolled down the scars on his face as he made his peace with God. After a while, the brandy and opium wrought their spell. Le Mas fell asleep. Now alone, or so it felt, and swaddled in darkness, Tannhauser gazed at the firmament and slipped into a blissful trance wrought by stars and eternity.

  And in that trance he wondered just how it might be that in a Universe as beautiful as this one some room had been put aside for the likes of him.

  Saturday, June 23, 1565

  Saint Elmo’s Fall

  Tannhauser counted himself fortunate to have indulged the comfort of opium the night before. Its soothing effect lingered on and made the task of keeping his nerve seem almost plausible. This advantage was welcome, for the Turks today forwent their usual bombardment. The dragon-mouthed muzzles of the siege guns gaped from heights in silence. Saint Elmo’s last battle would be settled toe-to-toe with cold steel.

  Forty-odd professed knights of the Italian and three French langues, a hundred or so Spanish tercios, and two hundred stalwart Maltese squared up on the gore-blackened stones of the southern breach. Juan de Guaras and Captain Miranda, both too badly injured to stand, commandeered the chairs from which Tannhauser and Le Mas had been roused. They had themselves strapped into the seats. The chairs and their mutilated occupants were ferried to the top of the embankment and there they both sat, swords across their laps, and watched the Turkish army on the slopes above. There, janissaries, dervishes, Iayalars, Sipahis, and Azebs waited for the cries of their imams and the blast of the horns.

  Since honor had long been banished from the field, some savage and primeval pride must have directed the final Turkish assault, for they ignored the unmanned walls, which they might have escaladed with ease, and the abandoned gatehouse, and the numerous lesser breaches through which they might now have swarmed unimpeded. Instead, the entire army, with a deafening assertion of Allah’s greatness, foamed roaring down the mountainside like some river provoked to boil by the End of Days. Its only mark was the bloody gauntlet where so many of their comrades had died—and where the Christian devils even now sang hymns and jeered them on. The disparity in their numbers was almost comic. Yet the defenders would not go down without shoving the thorn a final inch through Mustafa Pasha’s side. To Tannhauser’s astonishment, as he watched the unhinged bloodfest from a squint in the fore of the keep, the Religion held their ground for more than an hour.

  Sword and dagger, half-pike and mace. Bellows of rage and agony. Heartfelt prayers. Luigi Broglia, Lanfreducci, Guillaume de Quercy, Juan de Guaras, Aiguabella, Vigneron, all of them bathed in blood in the ferocity that bloomed around the chairs. Tannhauser saw Le Mas’s halberd carving bright arcs in the early light, and his heart went out to him. If not for the heady tranquillity bequeathed by the poppy in his gut, Tannhauser would have been hard-pressed not to join him. He ached to do so. But the die was cast once more. There would be no Glory for him today, just survival or an ignominious death. If the latter, he was at least dressed for the part.

  He was naked but for his boots, already long tattered, which he’d cut down to six inches below the knee and rubbed down with ashes and charcoal. They now looked looted from a corpse. Nicodemus’s golden bangle, with the inscription that now mocked him but which he was loath to abandon, he’d clasped around his ankle and bound up with rags. In the other boot he stowed the last of his Stones of Immo
rtality. He’d caked his torso with the filth in which the fort abounded. Although he’d not the benefit of a mirror, he was confident of looking every inch a heathen slave. Le Mas, closer to the Divine than he’d ever been and with much expression of mirth, had assured him so when they bade each other farewell. Le Mas, engaging with the spirit of Tannhauser’s deception, had had the Turkish prisoners penned in the stables and shot dead, rather than knifed as might have been expected. Now Tannhauser’s bullet wound would further validate his pretense to be the only survivor.

  Tannhauser needed just one more prop for his performance and as he studied the last-ditch stand, there it was. A half-armored figure reeled down the embankment and crashed among the rubble in a rise of dust. He rolled prone and dragged off his helm, as if he were drowning, then rose to his hands and knees and vomited blood. He crawled a few feet, back toward the battle, then slumped to his elbows. He raised his right hand to his forehead, then to his breast and his left shoulder, then collapsed on his face without moving with his sign of the cross incomplete.

  Tannhauser turned to go, then heard the shrill calls of the marshaling horns and looked back. To the blood-elated cheers of the Christian remnant, the Turks were withdrawing. It was only to re-form for the last push, to be sure; but even so. Le Mas had held the breach one last time. No more than ninety men yet stood alive on the gauntlet. Most of the Spanish and Maltese were dead, the core of knights preserved by their superior armor. As they gathered in a phalanx around the chairs of Guaras and Miranda to await the end, Tannhauser ran down the stairs and into the bailey.

  He’d awoken with a dappling of fever on his brow and his legs felt unsteady and the wound in his back burned like hot charcoal. He stumbled to the dead knight, still propped up by his knees, and he joined him in the dust and hauled him up by his arms. The head flopped back. It was Agoustin Vigneron. Stabbed in the throat. In conception this had seemed simple. The execution was more taxing. He grabbed the corpse under the crotch and shunted him over his shoulder, the cuirass stripping the skin from his sunburned neck. He clenched the dead thighs tight and planted one foot solid and pushed himself upright. He heard the roar of combat and a mighty clash of colliding steel nearby. The river would soon swamp the rampart and flood down into the fort. He staggered across the bailey toward the stables.

  The burden of corpse and metal almost broke him. His skull pounded fit to burst and his legs were tubes of jelly and his chest wheezed and bile scalded his throat. Only fear gave him the strength to reach his goal. He let the corpse fall from his back in the stable doorway and fell to the cobbles. When he caught his wind he looked up.

  Inside the stable a swath of tangled and naked dead lay heaped upon the straw. A mere dozen amongst thousands. But these unarmed and wretched few had been murdered for his sake alone. He stilled the prick of conscience, for conscience was the truest madness here. He turned away and looked across the yard and saw the end. The tall white hats of the janissaries closed with the men in steel. In a frenzied terminal ecstasy of gore and blades, the chairs of the brave went over and Fort Saint Elmo fell.

  Broglia. Guaras. Miranda. Guillaume. Aiguabella. Men with whom he’d fought and drunk fine brandy. Lives committed to war at last swept into eternity by its tide. Le Mas was torn to pieces, his severed limbs brandished aloft. Moments later his great head appeared, bobbing on the point of a spear.

  Tannhauser needed see no more. He looked down at his chest. He too was slaked in blood. He felt more of the same dribbling down his back. He looked at Vigneron sprawled at his knees. Tannhauser drew the dead man’s sword and dropped it nearby. He drew a dagger from the dead man’s belt and with its tip dug the poultice from the wound in his hip and freshened the edges until it bled. He drove the dagger into Vigneron’s neck. Then he draped himself across the corpse in a sculpture of struggle.

  He closed his eyes, his hand on the hilt, and unconsciousness drifted toward him. And with it came pictures. Of Amparo and the boy, and of Carla and Bors and Buraq, and of Sabato Svi. His mind began to slip away and he hauled it back. He opened his eyes and saw the tanned complexion of Agoustin Vigneron’s face, the bristles in his nostrils, the boils on his chin, the lifeless sheen of his eyeballs. He inhaled the yeasty stench of weeks of privation, of urine evacuated by death and so rectified by thirst it was almost black. He felt the obscene resistance of the dense dead flesh that pillowed his cheek. Tannhauser had crawled through the bowels of human darkness and here now he lay in its excrement, fighting druggy sleep on a comrade’s corpse with spilled blood cooling on his skin, surrounded by the fetor of the still-rotting dead in a charnel house of murdered slaves, and pretending to be that which he was not. And yet what was he not? Everything a man might hope to be except alive. He told himself to think Turk. To dream of Old Stambouli. To pray in the language of the Prophet. He heaved for breath and sang, and his parched and cracking voice was as hollow as the breast of desolation.

  “By the winds that winnow with a winnowing, And those that bear the burden of the rain, And those that glide with ease upon the sea, And those Angels who scatter blessings by Allah’s command, Verily that which you are promised is surely true, And verily Judgment and Justice will come to pass—”

  Footsteps bored through his raving and a rough hand seized his shoulder. He rolled free, taking the dagger with him, and with his last strength rose up on one knee, one foot coiled to spring, letting madness whisper in his ear, his teeth bared, the blade out-flung.

  A pair of janissaries, lean and young, stood over him, scimitars raised, the heat of victory upon them. Yet at the sight of him they stepped back and the younger reached out a hand and pushed the sword of his companion down. They took in Vigneron’s corpse and the littered Moslem dead. They saw the Sacred Wheel of the Fourth Agha Boluks tattooed on Tannhauser’s arm in dark blue ink. They saw the twin bladed sword of Dhu’l Fiqar in red. They saw his circumcised organ. On his thigh they saw the surah of Al Ikhlas : “He is Allah, the One. Allah-us-Samad, the Eternal, Absolute. He begetteth not, nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him.” Comradeship filled the janissaries’ eyes.

  “Peace be upon you, brother,” said the younger man.

  The elder said, “By Allah’s will, you’re among friends at last.”

  Their swords came up at a sudden sound behind him and Tannhauser turned. Old Stromboli emerged from the stable’s shadows. He had an ax in his hands. He saw Tannhauser and gaped. Tannhauser sprang as if crazed and covered the ground between them in two lupine strides and he stabbed Stromboli in the heart and watched him die. He let the old man fall. He turned to the young lions. They looked at him with renewed respect.

  Tannhauser said, “Allahu Akabar.” Then he fell back to the ground.

  They wrapped him in a blue silk cloak and fed him honeyed tea and dried beef, and he sat on a giant gun stone in the shade and watched as the Turks slaked their anger on those few of the Christian defenders still breathing.

  Nine knights had been taken alive, Quercy and Lanfreducci among them. They were stripped stark naked and forced to kneel in the yard. They sang Psalms of David until horns and drums announced Mustafa Pasha’s arrival. He crossed the ditch on a pearl-gray horse and looked at them only once before ordering them all beheaded. One by one their raised voices died until Lanfreducci sang alone, and the executioner’s sword hummed, and his body splashed forward into the crimson lake that stained the yard. The wounded splayed in the open outside the hospital were speared where they lay. The chaplains were dragged from the chapel and butchered like hogs on the blood-soiled steps. The uncounted wounded within, by the clamor of their screams and orisons, were slaughtered where they lay on the chancel floor.

  So ubiquitous were the dead on this scorched acre, so monotonous had the sight of atrocity become, that Tannhauser felt little beyond a dulled sense of shame. Even when they brought out Jurien de Lyon, and hacked off his limbs and privities and cleaved his skull, his horror was merely abstract. Jurien, who had sewn Bors’s face back c
omplete, whose vast and sacred knowledge of Healing could not be redeemed from fifty thousand minds thereabouts, whose fingers held skills that entire nations could not muster: all that extinguished in a spasm of triumphant malice. When all such extinctions were multiplied, even by the few that Tannhauser had seen of the many in which the world overbrimmed, one could see the clock of civilization running backward. Aye, and old Stromboli too had been a wonderful cook.

  The heads of the knights were gathered and spiked on top of palings on the seaward walls, where observers from Sant’Angelo might see them. The banner of Saint John was hauled down, and stomped into the dirt and drenched in urine, and the standard of the Sultan fluttered up the halyard in its place. It was over and it was done.

  Despite the heat of the day Tannhauser shivered and he pulled his cloak about his shoulders. His ague was now beyond doubt and rising within him. The wound in his back was a red-hot lobster crawling beneath his skin. His blood was poisoned. A throbbing circlet of fever tightened around his skull. The possibility crossed his mind that he’d escaped a glorious exit only to rot on a filth-soaked palliasse and die of plague. He winkled his last opium pill from his boot and washed it down with tepid water. He threw himself upon Fate. Then Fate rode through Saint Elmo’s gates to greet him.

  “Ibrahim?”

  Tannhauser looked up from gun stone and the movement caused the sky to spin above him. The sun had crested the wall and blinded his vision and sweat poured stinging into his eyes. He pushed back the sudden blackness that loomed in his skull and wiped his face. He raised his hand for shade and blinked and saw a knot of men on horseback and the Yellow Banners of the Sari Bayrak, oldest of the Sultan’s cavalry. He rose to his feet and swayed and sat back down. A silhouette dismounted and a face loomed over his own. A face polished and austere and engraved by the decades that had passed since last he’d seen it. But the eyes were unchanged in their refinement and compassion afflicted them still. A hand reached out and scraped the hair back from Tannhauser’s face.