Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  She let the air dry and cool her. She tipped olive oil, also courtesy of Bors, from a tall bottle into her palms and she anointed it into her face and neck and arms. Her body had become leaner, but not, she hoped, hard. There was no mirror in the room nor in the whole house; monks had little use for them and she hadn’t troubled to procure one. She realized that she hadn’t seen her own face in weeks. She wondered what she’d find when she did so. Matters such as appearance no longer seemed important. But perhaps she was wrong; perhaps, as Mattias had suggested, her appearance was what gave men a reason to live.

  She slipped into a white cotton nightgown, gone gray and near transparent by repeated launderings in brine. She let down her hair and shook it loose and indulged several minutes in the pleasure of brushing and running her fingers through its locks. Since the new springwater had been discovered, Father Lazaro had prepared for her a tincture made from the lees of white wine, honey, and extract of bruised celandine. She’d anointed the tincture into her scalp and let it abide for twenty-four hours before washing with barley lye and rinsing with fresh water. Now, after weeks of grime, her hair felt softer than she remembered. Lazaro had let slip that he had another decoction in progress, of ox gall and cumin and wild saffron and requiring six weeks’ infusion, to bring out the yellow in her hair. Perhaps she’d find a mirror after all. Bors could turn one up in a trice, she was sure, and he wouldn’t hold vanity against her.

  A cannon boomed in the night—Corradino Heights, she thought, her ears by now attuned to the different batteries and their locations. The target would be L’Isola. Sure enough, she heard no dull hum of an approaching ball, nor the sound of its impact. The Turks would attack tomorrow, Lazaro had said. But she’d heard that prediction for the last four days. She laid down the brush. It was time to sleep. When she turned toward the bed, there, across the dimly lit room, stood Ludovico.

  The door was closed behind him and she hadn’t heard a sound. If anyone else had so suddenly appeared she would have been startled. She wasn’t. Her lack of surprise was somehow his doing, as if he had the power to materialize wherever he liked and, having done so, had so natural a claim to being there that his presence was no more surprising than the moonlight. He wore the black, high-collared habit of the Order of Saint John, with the eight-pointed cross in white silk stitched to the breast. A pair of beads were belted around his waist. His powerful skull was evenly covered in short black bristles. His face was sun-beaten, lean as a study in marble. It was nearly fourteen years since she’d last seen him. His prime, more so than his youth, was magnificent.

  These weeks in Malta she’d been surrounded by men who carried in their bones the glamour of the outlands of experience. Mattias, Lazaro, La Valette, Bors, the many dour knights who made the earth shake as they marched down the street: men who had determined that this world was there for them to stamp their mark on. Each carried his own distinctive essence. They carried it into a room, like they carried their shadows. Ludovico carried the aura of an envoy whose masters ruled a nether realm as yet uncharted by God. Or by Satan or by Man. He’d sat at the table with popes—with kings—and had felt their hearts, not his, beating faster. He’d waded through wide rivers of innocent blood. He’d fathered her child.

  He looked at her from the door without speaking, his coal-black eyes inscrutable. He could have been studying his next victim, or looking at the love of his life. With a certain dread she realized that the latter was the likelier reading. She wondered how long he’d been standing there, watching her toilet. He watched her now without expression. As, perhaps, he’d watched the heretics flaming with pitch and screaming to God, as they’d flung themselves in agony from the cliff top.

  She found that she wasn’t afraid of him. Not yet. She felt, rather, a strange and unexpected affection, a tenderness tinged with sadness. A pity. How beautiful he’d been, and how beautiful he was, and how terrible was the path he’d walked in the meanwhile. Perhaps affection always lingered, come what may, for a man one had loved to the brink of youth’s madness. A man who’d not only broken her heart but had scorched the structure of her life to its blackened cornerstones.

  Ludovico had seemed to her then a wild creature, willfully self-imprisoned in the chains of his calling. Chains that she’d possessed the power to break. In breaking his bonds she’d believed she would escape from her own, for was not freedom love’s first and brightest promise? They’d made love in the shade of steep valleys, the rough grass chafing the bones of her back red raw. They’d made love in the caves and temples of the long-vanished tribes, and by the pagan statue of the great stone mother at Hal Saflieni. By the Blue Grotto’s sparkling phosphorescence, and to the amorous whisper of the sea, he’d woven early-morning flowers into her hair. Yet the promise had been broken and all the while she’d been forging a cage, the cage that was all she’d been left with when Ludovico vanished into his own.

  From the other side of the chamber, Ludovico watched her still.

  Was he recalling that same heady liberty, when passion had made them immortal and immune to all fears? She closed her eyes for a moment to quell her thoughts and break his spell. This man, for all that she had loved him and had borne his son, had engineered the torment and slaughter of thousands. He was the Pope’s black hand. Whatever she might have said to him, and there was so much, conversation could only draw her into a web of her own weaving. Somehow she knew this very clearly. She knew that this was what he intended, and that the web would be one about which he could scuttle at will. She yearned with an alarming intensity to open her heart, to chronicle the years of their estrangement; her heartache, her rage, her self-pity. Her quest to find her boy—their boy—and with the boy, the lost and missing pieces of her wholeness. But this was what he wanted. This was what he was counting on. She summoned the will that had empowered her to scrub the wounds of the screaming with salt. She opened her eyes. Still he watched her.

  “Please,” she said. “Leave. Leave now or I will call for Bors.”

  Ludovico examined the room, as if looking for the first time at anything but her. He took in the bed, the sea chest studded with brass, the windows open to the breeze, the wash bucket and the dresser and her tiny wardrobe where it hung from a pair of hooks in the wall. His eyes lingered briefly on the bulky brown leather case of her viola da gamba, where it stood stacked and neglected in a corner. On a writing desk, which she’d been careful not to disturb, were some papers, an inkpot, a stack of manuscripts and books. Before it was a single chair. Ludovico walked over. His eyes roved briefly over the papers. He turned the chair about to face her and sat down, carefully, as if favoring unseen wounds. His rosary beads clicked in his lap.

  “This is Fra Starkey’s room,” he said.

  His voice vibrated through her spine. Deep and unhurried, matter-of-fact, it conveyed comfort and menace in a single breath.

  “It is a lady’s private chamber,” she said, trying to match his imperturbable strength. “My chamber. Your presence here, uninvited—and like a thief in the night—is at best an outrage. At worst it is a crime, even in these barbaric times.”

  Ludovico tilted his head toward the viola da gamba.

  “I’m happy to see that you still play.”

  “You force me to be unmannerly. Get out.”

  “Carla,” he said. Her name in his mouth felt like a caress. “The years have been long, and the byways many, since last we two met together. The morrow will be bloody and this side of eternity may not grant me another chance to look on your face.”

  “You’ve seen my face. I ask you again to leave.”

  “I strove to keep a prudent distance between us. The Divine Will dictated elsewise.”

  “You had me abducted at the point of a gun,” she said, “and the Divine Will did not require you to climb my stair tonight.”

  “You would have been safe at the convent of the Holy Sepulchre, in body and in spirit. In coming here to Malta, you’ve put both in great danger.”

  She said,
“Never more so than at this moment.”

  “How can you imagine I would harm you?” he asked.

  “Because you are a monster.”

  He lowered his head so that she couldn’t see his face, and for a moment his shoulders sagged, as if the load they carried were Herculean and suddenly too great. Then he straightened his back and looked at her from under his brow. The melancholy that she’d always sensed, deep in his nature, was for the first time undisguised.

  “I am a man of God,” he said.

  He said it as if this were a viler confession by far, and as if he would risk too much in saying more. Carla wanted to hear more. She wanted to hear everything. The things that he would reveal to her alone and could never in any particle reveal to any other living soul. Against that wish was stacked the fear that if she asked him to do so—and if she did, he would—she would bind him to her in an embrace that death alone could break. She turned away and walked to the paneless window and looked up at the stars. They were as enigmatic as ever and offered no counsel.

  “I am told,” he said, to her back, “that you are that rarest of creatures, a good human being. Deeply good. Without malice. Without greed. Without vanity. Full of Grace. But then I knew that already.”

  She didn’t turn around. With all the resolution she could muster she said, “What do you want from me?”

  Ludovico didn’t answer. His silence twisted inside her and though she knew she should respond in kind, she also knew that she could never match him. Confusion stirred, as was no doubt his intention. Should she try to leave the room? Scream for help? Plead with him to go? Or should she summon the rage she didn’t feel and would be hard-pressed to find? She didn’t turn. She spoke the truth.

  “You’re frightening me,” she said. “But you must know that. It’s your trade.”

  “My trade?”

  “Inflicting fear. On those unable to defend themselves.”

  “Nothing could be further from my purpose.”

  The words slipped out before she could stop them. “Then tell me, what do you want?”

  Ludovico said, “I want you.”

  Her flesh prickled and she was glad he couldn’t see her face. This time it was she who stayed mute.

  He said, “Should I take your silence for surprise? Or revulsion?”

  Carla didn’t answer. She stiffened as she heard him rise from the chair. She felt his presence behind her, his heat, his breath on her hair. She flinched as his hands came to rest on her shoulders. Only the thin cotton shift separated her skin from his. His fingers seemed huge. He squeezed, tenderly, as if afraid of breaking her. His thumbs dug into the muscles between her shoulder blades. Her body’s memory of his touch—of this exact same caress—arose as if it had been yesterday. But where was yesterday? She heard him sigh, as if a boundless yearning had at last found its fulfillment. She trembled, involuntarily, by now so distracted that she didn’t know whether in fear or in pleasure.

  “Forgive me if I’m too rough,” he said. “I have not touched a woman since I last touched you.”

  She believed him, completely. She felt it in his hands. They were not the hands of some lascivious priest. They were hands whose inner purpose was to touch her alone. The knowledge flattered her, frightened her. Some instinct of survival told her that if she didn’t elude him now, she wouldn’t elude him at all. She would be his. Forever. For he’d never let her go. She ducked from his grasp, felt his fleeting impulse to tighten his grip, felt him master it. She slipped away several paces across the room but not, she realized too late, toward the door. She turned to face him.

  His black eyes pierced her. He let his arms fall by his side and didn’t pursue. He was too intelligent to force her, though not to be hurt by her flight. By the same token, he was too shrewd, too knowing, for her to feign what she did not feel. Any attempt to do so would only goad him. Ludovico had come to hunt the big beasts, Bors had said. She sensed that the biggest lived in Ludovico’s heart, and that that beast was hunting him as well as her.

  “When you last touched me I was fifteen years old,” she said. Tears, and the rage she thought she’d never find, sprang to her throat. “I gave myself to you without reserve. I gave you all I had. I gave you everything. And you fled. I ran after you, crying, but you were gone. The hardest faces I have ever seen assured me so—gone forever—and they looked down on me as if I were a whore, and lower than a whore. As if I were the Devil’s dam. I lost myself to Love and I was not found.” She crammed the tears back down. “Why did you steal my heart and then abandon it?”

  “I was afraid.”

  She stared at him. She felt herself shaking, her face burning, nauseated by an anger she could neither express nor contain. She whispered, “You were afraid?”

  Ludovico blinked, slowly. “Afraid for my duty.”

  “Your duty to spread terror? To torture and burn? You chose that over valleys and flowers? Over the beauty we shared? Over love?”

  “Yes, Carla. I chose all that over love. Isn’t that what duty requires? Isn’t that what honor demands?”

  Whatever emotion he felt, he kept it from view. Carla fought to stop her own from boiling over. “I damn your honor,” she said. “As you damned mine.”

  “Now I would make a different choice.”

  “The only choice to be made tonight is mine and I tell you once again: Get out.”

  “Hear what I have to say.”

  It was all she could do not to scream in his face.

  “I carried your child.”

  He said, “I know.”

  “You know?”

  She felt robbed of the revelation. Her privacy was more violated by this than by his outrageous visitation. “How did you know?” she said. Before he could answer she said, “When did you find out?”

  “Since I returned with the relief I’ve learned many things.”

  “From your spies and familiars.” Her voice reeked with contempt. He was unmoved.

  “There is little in this town I am unaware of. Little in this world. Your search for an unknown boy was hardly a secret. A boy twelve years old. Born on All Hallows’ Eve in 1552. Who else’s could he have been but mine?”

  “He was the fruit of our love. He was all I had to value. Even though you were gone, I carried him without shame.”

  “From you, I would have expected nothing less.”

  “I watched him stolen from my arms before I could put his tender mouth to my breast. I watched my father, whom I adored, turn into a fiend. I watched my mother broken by sorrow, by disgrace, by the ruin of every dream that she held dear.”

  Ludovico said, “I’m sorry.”

  The lamp was behind him. The pale silver light from the window cast half of his face into darkness. He said, “I am told our son died a hero’s death, at Saint Elmo.”

  Carla took a sudden, heaving breath and held on to it, afraid that if she let it go she would sob, and that he would then, in some obscure sense, have won.

  “If I could quench your suffering, I’d do anything to do so,” said Ludovico. “But these things of which you speak happened long ago and we are neither of us now who we were then.”

  She said, “Do not you—of all men—try to comfort me.”

  Suddenly all the heat drained from her anger. She let the breath out. She felt only a desperate need to be alone.

  She said, “My son died a fool’s death and I failed to stop him.”

  “To blame yourself for that is madness.”

  “He was here, at my table, and I did not recognize him.” She recalled the evening with bitterness. It was less than two months ago, here in this house, yet seemed to have taken place in a different universe. And to a different woman. A trivial and foolish woman, blinded by prejudice and conceit. “I was searching for something of you and I didn’t find it.”

  “A man’s features are only half formed at such an age. And perhaps he favored you.”

  “I searched for my own heartbeat and I didn’t hear it.”

>   “It’s difficult to see oneself in another. Perhaps in one’s own flesh most of all.”

  “He was vulgar. He was rude.” She felt a sour relief in her self-contempt. “I thought him beneath me. Beneath us. Now I bathe such boys as they die in their own filth. And I count such service God’s gentlest gift to me.”

  Ludovico raised his hand from his side and held it out to her—not in solace but as if he wanted her to take it and let him lead her. “War has worked its bitter alchemy on each of us. Perhaps we both now see our path in life more clearly.”

  “Perhaps. But my path is my own.”

  Ludovico said, “With God’s Grace, we could make another son.”

  Carla stared at him as if he were mad, and perhaps he was.

  “If the Cross prevails, and we survive this siege, my work by then will be complete,” said Ludovico. “No man has done more for Mother Church than I, or with greater purity of intention. You call me a monster. Yes.”

  She saw again how deeply this had cut him.

  “I will not deny it, nor will I offer apology. The world is monstrous—do we not stand in Hell at this moment?—and horror must be inflicted as well as endured in order to forestall greater evils. Even so, my heart is weary of the labor and would set the burden down.” He indicated the habit he wore. “As you see, I am now a Knight of Justice of the Order of Saint John. The precedent exists in their customs that would allow me to renounce my monastic vows and become a Knight of Devotion. That is, one who is no longer a full member of the Order, but entitled to spiritual consolation and certain privileges of rank.”

  He paused as if he intended her to draw some conclusion from this. Instinct said it would be better if she did not.