Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “A posset of brandy and opium,” said Bors, as they handed over the watch on the Kalkara Gate. “That would give the blockhouse sentry a fine night’s sleep.”

  “I don’t know how to extract the quintessence of opium and bind it to a tincture,” said Tannhauser. “Petrus Grubenius went to the stake before he could teach me the method, which is intricate. But brandy in the posset and the opium in a cake—a honey cake, say—would give as good a result. If we feed him such delicacies every second night, but without the poppy, he won’t suspect when the right moment comes.”

  Bors said, with callous curiosity, “I wonder if they’ll hang the fellow for it.”

  For a moment Tannhauser wondered if he were the one deranged, if his godlessness, his contempt for mindless sacrifice and blind loyalty both, his determination to care only for those he cared about, and by whatever treacherous and sordid means necessary, were not indeed as wicked as they sometimes seemed. It was not a form of nobility anyone hereabouts would easily recognize.

  He said, “It’s a queer thing to be the Devil’s man, when all else about are for God.”

  Bors said, “I’ve told you many times but you never listen: philosophy is bad for your health. But this talk of cakes has whetted my hunger. Let’s to breakfast.”

  Along the bastion of Germany they passed two Scandinavian brethren from the last Baltic priory to survive Lutheranism. Bors waved cheerily. Neither waved back.

  “Swedes,” he said. “A shy lot. They and the rest of the German langue feel affronted that they haven’t seen serious action yet. A downright gallimaufry they are—all manner of Poles, a Norwegian, two Danes, and one strange cove from Muscovy who claims to know Ivan the Terrible. My God, imagine what he had to do to earn that nickname—and we think ourselves men to be reckoned with. But when the Northmen do go in, it will be a sight, mark my words.”

  “The sight I’ll be happy with,” said Tannhauser. “Just don’t drag us in with them.”

  As they made their way down the wall stair, the stones vibrated around them as a sudden huge barrage thundered from the hills. They emerged in daylight to see black specks arcing through the sky toward L’Isola, where their impact raised clouds of splinters. The fishing village of L’Isola no longer existed. Not a house remained undamaged and few were still standing. The windmills were long demolished and their ragged sails stood canted and forlorn. Fort Saint Michel resembled Saint Elmo in its last days. Members of the garrison stationed there rarely crossed the boat bridge to the Borgo anymore, as if they feared that having once done so the prospect of going back would be too much to bear. Instead they abided in the havoc, with the blowflies and corpses and rats. To the best of Tannhauser’s knowledge, Ludovico was among them. The bombardment this morning was dense and presaged the first major assault in more than a week.

  “Let’s hope they’re bent only on Saint Michel,” said Bors.

  “Losing your taste for the broil, then,” said Tannhauser.

  “I’ll allow its appeal is diminished when I’ve had no sleep or food.”

  As they reached the auberge a slave was herded by with a knotted rope in his mouth and the point of a glaive pricking notches in the scars bunched on his back. The route to the gallows had never been changed, it seemed, and Tannhauser was seized by the conviction that nor would anything else. He would never leave this island. None of them would. And not in the morbid sense that they would all die here, but that they were trapped in an endless loop of Time where neither the fighting nor his part in it would ever end.

  “Did you know,” said Bors, “that they use that very same rope gag every day—take it from the corpse before they cut him down and cram it in the mouth of the next?”

  “How many days has it been?”

  Bors called out to the Spaniard escorting the prisoner. “Hey, Guzman, what’s this wretch’s number? Eighty-eight or eighty-nine?”

  “Ninety,” replied Guzman.

  “My thanks.” Bors turned back to Tannhauser. “They scratch the count on the wall of the jail, by fives. There’s been a lottery on the final tally for some time, though they closed the book at fifty. I’m still in with a shout.”

  “Who collected the Saint Elmo purse?”

  “You’re looking at him,” said Bors. “At thirty-one days you fellows exceeded even my wager—by a hair, but I was closest.”

  “Ninety days,” said Tannhauser. “Sometimes I can’t remember why we came here.”

  “As I recall, it had something to do with your women.”

  “Yes, the women,” he said. “They’re driving me mad still.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “I’ve been trying to remain faithful to my future bride,” began Tannhauser.

  Bors brayed with laughter. “Why? Has Amparo contracted the pox?” He grounded the butt of his musket and leaned on the muzzle. “Forgive me,” he said between breaths, “but you are a sight. Please, go on.”

  “Amparo’s in fine health. She’ll survive thee and me come what may. And it’s with regret I tell you that I don’t expect to see a more exquisite pair of breasts as long as I live.”

  “So the charm of the contessa has triumphed, despite such splendid obstacles.”

  Tannhauser couldn’t bring himself to confess that he’d been captured, then and now, by the way she played a piece of music. “Charms or my own folly, it’s much of a muchness.”

  “Love,” said Bors. “I warned you.”

  “And I paid heed, hence my intention to clear my mind for the trials ahead. Rutting addles matters, you’ll agree—”

  “Without a doubt.”

  “—and when sentiment is confused, not least by the lunacy abroad, it provokes headaches, excess bile, and other ills best avoided until we’re on safer ground. We’ll be several days at sea, and while one paramour in a boat is hazard enough, paramour plus betrothed is to court disaster.”

  “You’ve kept your hands off the splendid breasts since your return?” said Bors, in awe.

  “Since the sun rose on the following day, La Valette himself has not been more chaste.”

  “Are you willing to place a wager on the outcome?”

  Tannhauser ignored this impertinence with a scowl. They entered the auberge, which Carla had converted into an adjunct to the infirmary and which, to Tannhauser’s exasperation, groaned with recovering wounded. He kicked a pair of loafers in the ribs.

  “Have these idlers sent back to the ramparts,” he said. “I’m for the tub.” He tossed his rifle to Bors. “Tell Nicodemus to double our rations.”

  “That would be easier said if you hadn’t dragged us down to Gullu Cakie’s.”

  They’d located the lair of Gullu Cakie the day before, among the dense press of dwellings that crowded the angle between Galley Creek and the bastion of France. They meant the fellow no serious harm—they weren’t bravi after all—but he had to be called to account for thieving the opium and the coffee, lest Tannhauser come to be seen as an easy mark or, worse, a laughingstock. On the way Bors paid a visit to his man inside the army commissary, where all supplies of food were now impounded, and came away with a bulging sack and his basket filled with eggs, a crock of butter, and a loaf of white cane sugar. Cakie’s door was opened by a young woman, whose skin, Tannhauser couldn’t help but notice, was luscious, and they were welcomed inside.

  All beauty and refinement ended with the woman at the door as the hovel was revealed. Two hovels in fact, each a single large room, for part of the roof and the wall that had once separated them had been destroyed. There were upward of a dozen souls crammed inside, sheltering, he supposed, from the sun. Several dark-eyed children swatted at the flies on their cheeks. Three thickset swarthies rose from a parley at the rear of the first room and glanced at their short swords stacked by the wall. One of them was missing an arm at the elbow. It was Orlandu’s friend, Tomaso. Uncertainty crossed his face, and he said nothing. In a niche in the remains of the wall a votive light burned before a small stone figure of the
Virgin. The farther room hummed with flies in greater ubiquity, which plagued five badly wounded men stretched out on straw pallets. Two more women knelt among them, waving fans plaited from straw, and they looked at the visitors over their shoulders. Tannhauser’s resolve to be stern wavered at once.

  He glanced at Bors. “Was this your notion?” he said.

  “I told you we’d not see your goods again.”

  “Then you should have dissuaded me.”

  Gullu Cakie appeared, as if from nowhere. The beady eyes above the beaky nose were cautious. He extended a bony hand, and Tannhauser shook it.

  “Welcome,” said Cakie, in Italian. “You bring honor on our house.”

  Tannhauser shuffled. “These are your children?” he asked.

  “Children, grandchildren, nephews.”

  Tannhauser smiled, with what he hoped was warmth, at two of the youngsters. He trawled his mind for something intelligent to say. “A handsome brood. God has blessed you.”

  Gullu Cakie nodded, still wary. One of the little girls asked him a question in Maltese. Cakie answered her, indicating Tannhauser, and the girl asked him something else, and received a nod, whereupon a titter of amazed laughter spread among the children. The women smiled too, but not the three men. Cakie looked at Tannhauser and noted his curiosity.

  “She asked who you were, and I told her I had guided you from Mdina,” said Cakie. “She wanted to know if you were the one I carried over Monte San Salvatore on my shoulders.”

  Bors augmented the rising mirth with a guffaw.

  “He hauled my rifle and pack is all,” corrected Tannhauser.

  “He had to carry your rifle?” said Bors.

  Bors chortled again and triggered another round of giggles, which now drew in the men along the wall. Tannhauser looked at Cakie, who’d allowed himself a smile. The fact was that in Cakie’s shoes, Tannhauser would have reckoned some opium no less than fair payment for seeing him home. His resolve suffered a further collapse. But three pounds? He pressed on.

  “That very occasion is the reason for my visit,” said Tannhauser. “I hear tell you’ve been selling my opium.”

  The laughter abated somewhat, at least among the adults.

  “I’ve sold a little to the knights,” said Cakie, unabashed.

  “Three pounds would throw the entire Order into a stupor for a week.”

  “Was it three?” Cakie shrugged. “The rest is for my blood—my family, my friends.”

  Tannhauser took in the misery in the far room.

  “If you were in need,” said Cakie, “I could sell a little to you.”

  Whatever exception Tannhauser might have taken to this gall was forestalled when Bors set down his basket to slap him on the back with another rude guffaw.

  “What did I tell you, Mattias? The man is a prince of thieves.”

  Tannhauser found himself bested. He sought a dignified solution.

  “It’s true,” he said to Cakie, “that I mightn’t have made it across the mountains alone.”

  He ignored Bors’s snort and gestured that Cakie translate, and he did, the children listening with awe as they took in the vastly disproportionate statures of the two men.

  “For I was sick—indeed close to death—and sorely weakened by the ague,” continued Tannhauser, with what he hoped was stoic gravitas.

  He waited for Cakie to make this public too, but the old Maltese smuggler merely smiled and bobbed his head and said not a word. The children stared at Tannhauser with brown-eyed fascination, as if he were a friendly giant come to ease their woes. Tannhauser coughed.

  “And so,” he said, “it is to thank you for that boon that I’ve come here today, with these small tokens of my gratitude.”

  He stooped and took the basket of luxuries and, as Bors’s jaw dropped, presented it to the young woman. She hesitated and looked at Cakie. Cakie nodded and she took it with a most alluring curtsy. Tannhauser looked at Bors, whose mirth had evaporated, and slapped him on the back with a laugh of his own.

  “Come, Bors, the knights are feeding these people on sea biscuit and salted fish. And didn’t I hear some clinking from that sack? Hand it over to your prince.”

  With a scowl for Tannhauser, and a smile and bow for the woman, Bors did so. Cakie looked at Tannhauser. He was too hard to be moved and too seasoned not to know that the visit could have climaxed in a far less cordial fashion, but he inclined his head in a salute which conveyed that the message, nevertheless, had been received. He put the sack down and indeed it clinked.

  “And now we have pressing business,” said Tannhauser. He bowed to the pretty girl. “So, with your permission, if you will excuse us.”

  “Stay,” said Cakie. “We’ll make a feast and you’ll share in it.”

  Tannhauser looked in his eyes and saw that a thieves’ bond had just been sealed between them. Such alliances were to be treasured more than gold. Or even opium.

  “We’ll drink a brandy to your health and enjoy your company,” said Tannhauser. “But I warn you, a feast shared with Bors would leave precious little for the rest.”

  Cakie laughed. Bors glowered. Tannhauser indicated the children, who had followed these exchanges with amazement.

  “For Bors’s benefit, please, would you translate?”

  In such dire straits as all were adrift, the value of small comforts was hugely multiplied and in this vein Tannhauser had resorted to his morning habit of a soak in the big double-hogshead at the rear of the auberge. It had remained undisturbed during his absence, which news was welcome as it concealed his hoard of opium, but a thick skein of dust, bird dung, and slime had coated its surface. It had been the work of a day to empty, scour, and replenish it, but he’d seconded a pair of slaves from the endless breach works to perform the task. And a happy pair they’d been to discover so generous a master for so light a labor. He’d let them stop to pray, had fed them salted fish and weevil-free bread, and didn’t know the use of a lash. They wept and kissed his feet and clutched his knees when he sent them back, and he’d felt a deeper stab of guilt in so doing than for all the many recent murders that were stacked upon his soul. The tub was covered with a sheet of canvas, for dust was now a constant nuisance, and this he stripped off, along with his clothes, and sank into the bracing cool.

  He was dozing on his haunches, arms folded, head back against the rim, and happily thinking of nothing in particular when the water splashed over his face and he opened his eyes to see Amparo climb in.

  Her nipples disappeared beneath the surface before he could study them, leaving two buoyant and glistening meridians to mock his resolution to be celibate. Her face and throat were tanned dark gold by the sun and he found the stark contrast with the milk-white paleness below a powerful intoxicant. The tub was not so roomy that he could avoid contact, even if he’d been so inclined. Her smooth, serpentine legs slid around his thighs, and her arse—a feature so indistinguishable in splendor from her bosom that only a churl would think to rank one above the other—nestled down into his lap. He felt the unseen nipples brush his chest. He was afflicted at once by a burgeoning tumescence that nothing in Creation could forfend, and by which Amparo appeared to be scandalized not at all.

  “Did Bors put you up to this?” he asked.

  “Bors?” she said. Innocent as a spring morning.

  He shook his head to dismiss the notion. He groped without success for something to say. She put her hands on his shoulders and jiggled with impatience. He held her around the waist. Marvelous. In his experience women were deft enough at eluding congress when it suited them, but woe betide a man who attempted the same, no matter how enlightened his reasons.

  “In Spain,” she said, “men fight bulls with spears, did you know?”

  The question took him unawares, but no more so than her self-invited entry into his tub. Perhaps it was provoked by his flagrant state of arousal.

  “Of course,” he said. “I heard that Charles Quintus himself lanced bulls, in Valladolid.”
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br />   Such pedantry impressed Amparo not a bit.

  She said, “Do you know by what means they find a fighting bull?”

  His hands wandered beneath the brine. “I do not. But I should love to know. Tell me.”

  “They gather the bulls from the finca in great herds—fifty bulls, a hundred, an enormous mass of enormous beasts—then the herdsmen drive them along, whipping them, shouting, goading, until they form one heart, one mind, one soul, one wild and headlong creature rushing forward, rushing on. If a gorge lay before them, they would run into the gorge and die as one. If the sea was before them, they would run into the sea, and drown as one.”

  Despite other powerful distractions, Tannhauser found himself captivated. She paused and watched him, until she was satisfied that this was so. She went on.

  “But from that great herd—that single wild creature hurtling into nowhere across the sunset-crimson plain—one bull will at last break free from the rest. One bull who will not run with the others—into nowhere, or into the gorge, or into the sea. He does not fear the herdsmen or their whips. He reclaims his heart, his mind, his soul from the headlong rush of the many. He runs apart, he runs alone, in a direction of his own choosing.”

  Tannhauser felt breathless at the thought of such a sight, and of such a beast.

  “Magnificent,” he said. “And so this is the fighting bull.”

  Amparo shook her head. She leaned closer and fixed him with her twin-hued eyes, and he realized she was no mean teller of tales.

  “This might be the fighting bull,” she said. “For the herdsmen take him far away, far into the mountains, far away from his brothers, far away from anything the bull has ever known. There they leave him, lost and alone in a strange new land, and they go.” She threw her hand toward some far-flung horizon.

  Again she paused, looking at him. Then she leaned back again.