Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  She dropped the washcloth in the bucket and made her way to the door. She crossed the dusk-shadowed vestibule, where torchlight flickered on the grimacing faces of the damned. She heard her name called. Or was it a voice within? She didn’t stop. The stone arch loomed above her. The light here lingered longer. She was halted by what she saw beyond the portal.

  Mutilated bodies carpeted the whole piazza. The cloisters extending to her left and right writhed with countless injured. Men, women, boys of every age. Maltese soldiers, Spaniards. Civilians of either gender. Each lying supine in the puddles that shone on the flagstones. Sisters and mothers and wives knelt among their beloved, wafting at the snarls of flies and the waning heat. Black-robed chaplains shuffled back and forth, and also the physician Jews, still not welcomed in the infirmary’s sacred precincts despite the many lives they’d labored to save. The bleak red radiance of the eventide, and the murmur of prayers and lamentations, lent the whole tableau the semblance of an apocalypse foretold, as if Judgment Day was come and these war-scourged penitents had dragged themselves en masse to eternity’s gate to confess their sins and petition God for mercy.

  Carla stood stranded between the horrors crammed within and those without. Whatever contribution she might make to their survival seemed trivial. And to what end? Those who recovered enough of their strength to stand would only be thrown back into the fire, to inflict the same monstrous crimes on other men, for surely beyond the walls the Mohammedans languished in comparably promiscuous anguish. Her breath came too quickly and her chest tightened like a fist. Her heart pounded in her breast as if it would burst from its moorings and lay her on the ground with the rest. For a moment she desired this outcome with a passion. To lay down the burden of being the only sound body in a mob of broken and maimed. To stop rolling this stone up the mountain. To be released from duty and panic and failure and care.

  Something tugged at her skirts and she looked down. A clawed hand grasped the blood-sodden linen. A youth not twenty years old lay at her feet, his shoulders trembling with the strain of raising his arm. His cheeks and eyes were hollows carved out of the dusk. Moist pinpoints of fading life gazed up at her face and a black hole moved between his lips without a sound. Her throat clenched and she tried to swallow but could not. She glimpsed purple coils, and a blue knot of flies, which bulged from a lean, ridged stomach. She clenched her eyes against a surge of tears. She turned away. She turned away from this unknown youth, who would never embrace his sweetheart, who would never again breathe the air of a bright blue morning, who in dying here in the reeking dark would rob the world of all he might have given it. She blinked. Through the blur she saw her pathway across the piazza. Through the mist of her tears it didn’t seem so far. Our Lady of Philermo would forgive her, She who’d seen Her Son scourged to His end on a barren hill. The clawed hand snatched at her again and she begged him silently to release her from her pledge. She took a step toward the piazza. It wasn’t so far. And what price in horror could it cost her that she’d not already paid?

  She felt the hand fall away and for an instant she felt free. Then, with a crushing shame, she knew that it was not the hand that had fallen, but she. The youth had not reached out for succor, but to save her, to pull her back from the oblivion into which her soul now plunged. She turned back, desperate, dragging a sleeve across her eyes to clear her sight, and as she went down to her knees by his side, she saw that she was too late and that he was gone. The pinpoints of light had vanished from his soft brown eyes; his mouth was fixed in a silent howl; his chest, when she laid her hand upon it, was clammy and still. Even the bulging purple coils had lost their luster. Friendless and nameless and forsaken he had died, denied so much as a stranger’s parting glance. Was this how Tannhauser had died too? And Orlandu, the son she’d never known and never claimed? She wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t or she could not endure. She closed the brown eyes and the gaping mouth and held his cooling face in her hands and she sobbed in the scarlet twilight and felt herself unworthy even of prayer.

  Hands took her shoulders from behind and raised her to her feet and pulled her face into a black-robed shoulder. Arms enfolded her, and she clung to a cross-emblazoned breast, and wept, with the bewilderment and abandon of a child. She wept as she’d not wept in a lifetime. A thousand sorrows coursed through her: for the nameless youth at her feet and all those like him; for Tannhauser and Orlandu, whether they lived yet or not; for her father whose heart she had broken and whose honor she’d stained; for the love she had known and had lost; for the love she’d never lived at all and missed more keenly than any.

  She caught her breath and looked up. It was Father Lazaro, wizened, and himself sore drained, the sorrow in his own eyes no less infinite than her own; yet from the greatness of his heart he mustered a smile of boundless kindness.

  “Up that staircase,” he said, nodding toward a passageway, “is a small room and a cot. The cot is narrow and hard, but I promise you it will feel like a cloud. Go there now and rest.”

  Carla stepped back and wiped her face. She stared at the dead man.

  “I denied him,” she said.

  Lazaro turned her face back toward his. “Saint Peter denied Our Lord three times. It proved no barrier to his sainthood.” He essayed another smile, then his expression became stern. “If we exhaust our spirit, we can be of no use to those we serve. And if we do not serve, our lives have no meaning. The cot is mine and I use it, believe me. Do as I say. Rest. And remember that God loves you.” He indicated the sick lying all about. “There’ll be more than enough to do when you return.”

  The cot was narrow and hard and felt like a cloud. She lay on it for an hour and though she closed her eyes she was too tired and overwrought to sleep. Ribbons of thought and half dreams entwined in her mind. She thought of Tannhauser, his scarred brawn and visionary flamboyance, the frankness of his gaze—upon her, upon a world gone mad. She imagined them married, and at peace, and concerned only with life’s small hazards. She heard his voice reassure her that all Things would pass. And perhaps she slumbered after all, for he stole into the tiny cell and he was naked. She’d seen him—she’d spied on him—in his tub, and memory stoked the fire of imagination. He pulled her from the cot and stripped her bloody dress to the floor. Unbidden, she knelt before him. Her fingers clung to his dense, illuminated thighs. She closed her eyes and opened them and moaned. She twisted and convulsed with an ache so intense she awoke, and the dream fled, and she found herself alone in the echoing dark. The echoes were real, from the monstrous drama below, and other images violated her fantasia. And this conjunction of war and erotism filled her with confusion and she cried and wrapped her arms tight about her chest.

  She lay there thus for some time. Then her tears waned and she found herself restored. Though reason dictated otherwise, she, like Bors, refused to believe that Tannhauser was dead. Something inside her insisted on it. And if Tannhauser were alive, so was Orlandu, for Tannhauser was his shield. She loved each of them, without condition or limit. In a world of hatred ascendant, she could at least do that. Something eternal had to endure amid so much death and only Love could. Her love; Father Lazaro’s love; the love of the nameless soldier; the love of Jesus Christ. She rose from the hard, narrow cot that felt like a cloud and returned to the pit below, and she prayed that Christ’s love would heal them all.

  There would be more assaults, and yet more, she knew, for of all the foolish and impossible hopes she entertained, the hope that the combatants might lay down their arms was most foolish of them all. Mustafa, it was said, was enraged by failure and another Turkish blow was expected soon. The walls of the Borgo and L’Isola were crumbling in half a dozen places and every human being who could lift a stone or hold a shovel now toiled alongside the slaves to repair the damage and to build new breastworks and barricades.

  The infirmary’s supply of medicaments and drugs—of black wine, mandrake, and betony, of belladonna and rose oil and opium and Saint-John’s-wort—which ha
d seemed inexhaustible when the siege began, had all but run out. The physic garden had long been stripped of every leaf and petal. Immense bales of bandages and lint had been exhausted, and the serving brothers went about those discharged from care to collect old dressings for washing and reuse. The fight against rampant purulence spread by miasmas had replaced the fight with raw wounds and the stench of pus was pervasive. The mass graves had been filled and fresh pits dug. Every large house in town had been seized to accommodate the less gravely ill.

  In welcome counterbalance to such hardships, a man digging a shelter for his family in the basement of his house had unwittingly unearthed a freshwater spring of considerable daily yield. This miracle, for such it was and as such it was acclaimed, had resolved the waterless town’s most desperate problem, and was sullied only by the violent disputation that broke out as to whether Saint Agatha, Saint Catherine, or Saint Paul should get the credit.

  Whatever came next, Carla would endure. She’d discovered the peace that comes with immersion in suffering. It was a strange peace, an awful peace, a peace to be wished on no one, for war’s victims paid its price. In their vulnerability and helplessness they were stripped of all malice—of everything but the most primitive courage and faith—and recaptured the lost innocence of the child. Wounding revealed something of a person’s core, in a way that nothing else could, and what was revealed was something marvelous, something noble, something that, despite the agony and filth and humiliation, contained more of true dignity than anything she’d ever seen. The sick were indeed closer to God and she’d learned to accept the peace that they had brought her as Christ’s gift. The same gift He Himself had promised on the Cross, at the price of his own bleak Passion. Her pride had been vanquished and without regret. Her own fears and concerns had come to seem petty, and yet they remained. As she walked to the auberge she thought of Amparo, and wondered if she would be waiting.

  Sometimes she found the girl curled in bed and Carla would lie beside her and they’d wake in each other’s arms and the day would begin with something close to happiness. At other times Carla wouldn’t see her for days and she’d hear that Amparo slept by the waterfront, or in the stables by Buraq, to whom she was devoted. With each of their intermittent meetings Amparo seemed to have retreated a little further into the untamed waif she’d found mute and bruised on a forest floor. She played with the children as if she were no older than they. She read palms and ate bread and olives with the vicious Spanish tercios, who seemed to count her friendship a charm against misfortune. She’d stopped going to church, except when Carla asked her to join her. Many in the town thought her daft, but none dared harm or affront her, or even speak of her unkindly abroad, for Bors had put it about that he was her champion, and had already drubbed a detractor or two with a fury that only stopped on the verge of murder. In a world turned upside down, such as this one was, Amparo was undaunted in a way that no one else could be.

  Carla thought of Ludovico.

  Almost a month had passed since Carla had learned of his return. Bors had seen his arrival and had warned her. Then she’d heard that Ludovico had collapsed in the infirmary, a hero of Fort Saint Michel. His comrades had taken one look at the horror contained therein and had carried him on a door to their own small infirmary by the Auberge of Italy. Carla hadn’t seen him, then or since. Yet Ludovico’s presence lingered in her mind. It lingered in the minds of many.

  “The Inquisition isn’t welcome in Malta,” said Bors, who had made a study of the matter.

  They sat at the refectory table while Bors worked his way through a tray of custard tarts. Where the eggs and sugar had come from, only he knew. Thanks to his nose for spoil and his prowess as a trader—matched to that of Nicodemus as a cook—he enjoyed the distinction of being the only man on the island who’d managed to gain weight during the siege.

  “Is the Inquisition welcome anywhere?” asked Carla.

  Bors snorted. “Evil always turns a profit for someone. Why else would it flourish?” The shiny pink scar that divided his tanned features lent an added grotesquerie to his expression. “In Messina the Inquisition number in thousands—only a handful of Church officials, yes, but backed by an army of toadies, familiars, and leeches. Barons and thieves, merchants and priests—as they will tell you: all the rich, all the police, and all the criminals. They have a hand in every pie and do as they please. At least to those who’ll let them.”

  He smiled at some gratifying memory and Carla remembered the priest in the carriage and how he’d died.

  “The Religion wouldn’t have let them into Malta, but for the deviousness of the Pope,” continued Bors. “He appointed Domenico Cubelles as Inquisitor General, and since he was already Bishop of Malta, the knights could hardly put a dagger to his throat. The knights have their bad apples. How could it be otherwise amongst such a band of killers? Rape, buggery, assassination, black magic, heresy—so forth—they’ve seen it all. And why not? But they’ve always settled their own affairs. The bishop made a poor fist of confronting them—some halfhearted denouncements of the knights of the French langues, for Lutheran sympathies, but no arrests. The Inquisition only works if you have the men on the ground, and the bishop is a creature of the palace. Even so, the foot was in the door and six months ago the Pope sent Brother Ludovico.”

  Carla’s memory of Ludovico was of a young man bright with scholarship and spiritual ardor. Gentleness had seemed his natural state. She still couldn’t match that image with the man who inspired such fear.

  “Is he truly such a fiend?” she asked.

  Bors paused to maneuver another tart into his mouth, issuing several grunts of pleasure before wiping the back of his fist across his lips.

  “Ludovico is the Pope’s black hand. Cardinals and counts have gone up in flames on account of him.” He considered her, as if expecting her to mirror his own view that cardinals and counts were fit for little else. “Guzman, one of the tercios here, served in Calabria in ’61—in Grand Inquisitor Ghisleri’s campaign to exterminate the Waldensians of the high valleys. He remembers Brother Ludovico well. In order to quicken the zeal of the local marquis, Ludo arranged a red hat for his brother, just like that. Then they wiped out the village of San Sisto—to the man, woman, and child. Hunted the runners through the woods with bloodhounds starved for the task. Imagine. The night, the torches, the barking of the dogs, the screams. Two thousand all told, they say. At Guardia they tortured confessions out of seventy, then painted the survivors with pitch and set them alight on the top of a sheer cliff. Made bets on how many would jump and in what order. At Montalto, they penned up eighty-eight believers in the parish church, then took them out one at a time and cut their throats on the steps.”

  Carla felt sickened to the core. She had loved this man.

  “Then there was the cleansing of Piedmont, where Ludovico first crossed paths with Mattias—”

  Carla could hear no more. She said, “Who are the Waldensians?”

  Bors shrugged. “People who worship Christ, but not in the approved fashion.”

  Carla didn’t reply.

  “Ludovico never soils his own hands with heretic blood, but he has a long reach. Has informers and spies all over the shop, high and low, from palazzos to brothels. Familiars. They love it, intrigue, betrayal. Make a man feel important, he’ll do anything. Or a woman. Tell them it’s for God, Pope, and empire, that Heaven will be their reward, and throw in a pocketful of gold plus the prospect of some blackguard going up in flames, and few can resist. If they’re scared witless to boot, well, so much the better.”

  “Why is Ludovico here—risking his life?”

  “No one knows. But since he blooded himself at Saint Michel, and bandied around a few relics, for which the brethren are notorious fools—why, if I’d known I’d have brought some splinters of the Cross myself—he’s been ordained into the Order.”

  “Ludovico is a Knight of Saint John?”

  “He was sworn into the Convent last Sunday,” said
Bors. “And they’ll be sorry, mark my words. A wolf in lion’s clothing, you might say. I saw his face the night he got off the boat. Ludovico’s come to hunt the big beasts, not the rabbits.”

  He slaked down another custard tart in a single gulp. The ecstasy was so evident she thought he was going to cry. Instead he ate the last and smacked his lips.

  “We’re the little people,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll stay that way.”

  The stars above the Auberge of England glimmered without number. Carla wished she could see in their disorder the archetypes and meanings that others could. That Mattias could. Was he looking at these same stars now? She wished he were here, to take her in his arms. She thought of Amparo and felt unworthy. She put such thoughts aside. The auberge, as yet undamaged, was no longer the sole preserve of what she thought of as Mattias’s band, his vagrant family of wayward souls. Nicodemus would be sleeping in the kitchen, where he tended the fire, and where he would have left her a lamp to light her way up the stairs. Bors would be on the graveyard watch at the Kalkara Gate, for he favored the cool of the night and swore that, sooner or later, Mattias would emerge from the blackness. Two other English gentlemen were now resident at the auberge and other space therein was given over to convalescents from the ward. But she still had her own room in Starkey’s house adjoining and this was a treasure.

  At the entrance she took her shoes off and entered in silence. She saw Nicodemus asleep on the kitchen flags and took the low-flamed lantern from its cranny by the pantry. She went up to her room and closed the door. She peeled off her blood-stiff dress, one of three in plain black linen that she’d had made, loose in the sleeves so she could roll them up and high in the throat for modesty. After a week spent restocking the water barrels from the new spring, laundry had once again been permitted, to the rejoicing of at least some, and she had one clean dress for tomorrow. Naked, she wiped herself free of dust with water from a bucket. The water was fresh and gave off the scent of oranges, and she told herself to thank Bors when next she saw him, for it was he who’d brought it.