Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “You told me they were building two engines,” said La Valette.

  “So I believe,” said Tannhauser. “If I were Mustafa, on the evidence of this one I’d be building a third.” He rasped his beard with a thumbnail. “I couldn’t see the foot of the tower.”

  “It rolls on six spokeless wheels,” said Starkey. “The lowest platform is twice the area of the uppermost. The four main stanchions are galley masts. Spars, rigging, cross bracing, stones for ballast. The lower gallery is open and unarmored, to allow them to mass their fire against a ground assault—as they did earlier.”

  Tannhauser hadn’t encountered such machines before. He rifled his mind for lore, the ten thousand tales of a thousand battles that he’d heard swapped and embroidered over the years. Despite such an archive he could dredge up no memory of towers or how to thwart them. Yet something else stirred. He leaned over the edge of the stair to look at the foot of the inner wall forty feet below. It was composed of massy limestone blocks of various sizes, up to three feet by two, and laid in an ashlar bond.

  “How thick is the wall at the base?” he asked.

  “Through the batter?” said Starkey. “About twelve feet.”

  The idea in Tannhauser’s mind almost withered there and then; but La Valette looked at him and Tannhauser could see that he got it and was already making calculations for the task.

  “When Suleiman invaded Hungary in ’32,” said Tannhauser, “the stiffest fight was for a little town of such paltry importance I can’t recall its name. Guntz? No matter. Eight hundred defenders held off thirty thousand Tartars and Rumelians for more than a week. At one point, as I heard it told, the Magyars knocked a hole through their own wall so as to train their cannon point-blank on the enemy charge.”

  Bors and Starkey peered down simultaneously at the huge blocks below, and then upward at the titanic weight of masonry stacked above.

  “It was no doubt a puny wall,” added Tannhauser, “and I’m no engineer. But if it were possible to cut a passage through twelve feet of stone without giving notice, and run out a sixteen pounder, you could blow the legs from that engine and watch it fall.”

  “Aye,” snorted Bors, “if we haven’t watched the wall fall first and the bastion with it.”

  Starkey appeared about to voice his own objections when La Valette hobbled back down the stair with that bigotry of purpose that characterized his happiest moods. He paused and turned back to Tannhauser.

  “Captain, about Father Guillaume,” he said.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know the man, Your Excellency.”

  “You denied yourself the opportunity. You shot him down, yesterday. The chaplain at the post of Castile.”

  Tannhauser recalled the near rout and the panic-stricken priest. It seemed like weeks ago, but was less than twenty-four hours. He was about to deliver an exculpatory discourse on the chaos of battle, the fog of war, and the unreliability of firearms when La Valette raised his palm.

  “I’m sure your conscience is troubled—” he said.

  “Most sorely, Your Excellency, most sorely.”

  Both men knew that this was a bald-faced lie.

  “Then set it at rest,” said La Valette. “Father Guillaume lost his senses, rest his soul. The shot was well advised.”

  “Thank you, sire.”

  “But don’t be overzealous. We need every man, including our priests.”

  Tannhauser studied his eyes. Was this a coded reference to his attempt to murder Ludovico? It was impossible to tell. La Valette turned to Starkey and the matter was over.

  “Send for the master mason and his crew.”

  Since he felt he’d earned it, and since it was a shady and comfortable perch with a fine old view of the afternoon’s frolics, Tannhauser sat on the top step and watched events unfold.

  Leather-aproned Maltese masons armed with chisels, crowbars, and lump hammers collected around La Valette at the base of the wall and a brief discussion ensued as to how best to excavate a passage to the foot of the tower. The master mason sized up the arrangement of stones in the ashlar bond and, on an instinct that he made no attempt to explain, quickly marked them with chalk in a numbered sequence. They then went at it with a phlegmatic proficiency that astounded all who watched. The mortar and stones were cut out as if the wall was made of biscuit, and within half an hour a crude arch yawned through the batter, wide enough for two men to enter abreast. Beyond was a mass of tight-packed rubble, the average rock the size of a goat’s head. Timbers, crowbars, and shovels were plied and as the rubble was prized free and stacked aside, carpenters braced the roof of the emerging cavern.

  The cannon was wheeled up—a bow chaser stripped from a galley and mounted on a carriage—and the gunners charged and primed it. The bow chaser could take a forty-eight-pound iron ball. La Valette’s choice for the first load was that exact weight of musket balls at twelve to the pound. He ordered the balls commingled with a shovelful of lard. The carpenters laid and trued a gangway of planks over the rough floor of the cavern and within an hour of the rubble’s first exposure two masons toting sledgehammers went inside to dislodge the outer stones of the batter.

  Tannhauser nudged Bors and they took their long guns up to the embrasures. A peek revealed the Turkish marksmen on the platform just as one of them pointed groundward and alarm flared among them and together they angled their muskets down toward the hole now erupting from the wall. Tannhauser and Bors rose up and benched their guns on the merlon and fired. Twin gouts of brain matter showered the platform’s occupants and the dead were flung in a tangle among their comrades. As the Turks fought to master their confusion, a dozen arquebusiers rose up along the bastion of Provence and plowed a raft of lead into the tangle.

  Tannhauser craned his head over the battlement.

  From the hole in the wall half-a-thousand musket balls and a torrent of flaming pork fat vomited point-blank into the unlucky mass of men exposed inside the tower’s lowermost gallery. A vortex of smoke befouled the engine’s base and within its reeking coils seethed a gruesome microcosmos best not imagined. Powder stores and fire grenades ignited in deafening bursts, and burning and mutilated bodies tumbled forth to writhe and flail the dirt in anonymous anguish. The captains and overseers screamed at the mass of blackamoors huddled in the lee of the wall and they rushed to unfasten the guy ropes that anchored the tower. With spear point and lash, others were driven into the choking smog to breast the hauling spars and stanchions, and the Christian marksmen took to gunning them down from their embrasures. As the engine creaked into retreat along the roadway of larded planks, slaves slipped in the blood and grease beneath the enormous spokeless wheels and there were dismembered, their screams and the crunch of their bones hardly noticed in the commotion.

  The overloaded tower had crawled but five yards when the bow chaser roared again from its tunnel in the wall. The Religion’s gunners had honed their skills through firing at enemy shipping from the rise and fall of a galley deck. The tower thirty-odd feet distant was the easiest mark they’d ever had. The ball smashed into the right main corner stanchion where it was cross-braced by the lower gallery roof. A whirlwind of splinters blew through hapless flesh, and the blinded and eviscerate donated their portion of sorrow to the howling carnage. The tower lurched out of true with a loud groan. Men began leaping from the upper tiers, aiming to cushion their landing on their squirming comrades below. Two gazi drew swords and charged into the hole to take out the bow chaser and its crew.

  Tannhauser stepped back from the wall to swab and reload his rifle.

  As he measured powder down the bore he looked down into the fort where the gunners reprimed their cannon. When the two invading gazi emerged from the smoking archway, the Maltese masons set about them with their hammers, and with aprons swiftly besmeared like those of meatcutters they dragged the pulverized remnants aside so the cannon could trundle down its gangway once again.

  It was a testament to the tower’s construction that five more blasts
were required before it buckled and toppled to the clay. The draft of its fall stoked the burning base and a column of flame shot skyward, and a triumphant roar from the defenders drowned the wails of the last living wretches trapped inside. The surviving blackamoors and soldiers fled for the high ground, while the arquebusiers had sport in shooting them down. Tannhauser studied the surrounding hills and took no part in the merriment. It wouldn’t last long. Despite the thousands decomposing in the moat of human decay around the walls, the heights were still alive with the Sultan’s hordes and their horsetail standards stood tall. To Mustafa their blood was but rain for the irrigation of the Padishah’s soil. A fragment of a surah wailed by an imam drifted out across the field.

  “Has Allah not caused the earth to contain the living and the dead?”

  The stench of smoldering hides and burning flesh turned Tannhauser’s stomach. He’d eaten nothing all that day. More than that, he was tired of this monstrous game. The strength drained from his limbs and his feet felt heavy; a black humor throbbed up the nape of his neck and settled behind the sockets of his eyes. He shouldered his rifle and climbed down the stair. He saw the masons go back into the cavern to restore the wall, and the artillerymen swapped jests and felicitations as they swabbed out the cannon. La Valette watched Tannhauser leave. He proffered neither word nor gesture, and Tannhauser was glad that it was so.

  His heart yearned for the women, Amparo and Carla; for the softness in their glances and their voices; for that absence within them of anything cruel; for their tenderness; for their love. These were the things he fought to protect. The siege was sustained by blind faith. Only faith could endure such horror. The love that had come to bind him was the only faith he had.

  Bors caught up with him and saw his face.

  “Why so glum? It was well done and the Religion are in your debt yet again.”

  “Let them keep their religion,” said Tannhauser. “Leave me to tend mine.”

  The fighting had been continuous for all of thirty-six hours, but that night the guns at last fell into silence. A pall of exhaustion seemed to cover all Creation. An obscure presentiment of doom clung to Tannhauser’s mind and he couldn’t sleep. He rose and went to the Kalkara Gate and sensed the shuffle of the Turkish watchmen in the gloom. In moods such as he was in it was easy to act rashly, to cast the dice and be damned out of dejection rather than wit. But escape would better wait on Turkish dejection, not his own. Their morale was on the wane. He’d heard it in the frenzy of the imams as they exhorted the Faithful to die. He’d heard it that evening in the tone of the muezzin’s call. But how many more repulses would it take before their spirit was truly broken? And could the Religion effect them? To his certain knowledge, the Turkish spirit in war had never been broken before.

  The constellations turned above him, aloof to mortal cares, and he wished he could hear the melody that kept them aloft. But perhaps he could best them.

  He woke Amparo and she dressed and he grabbed the instrument cases. Amparo roused Carla from the infirmary and he took them down to Galley Creek, and there they played for him by the shore, with the crescent moon yet unrisen and Scorpius wheeling over the southern rim of the world. He wept in the dark to their music, and his heart was filled, and his spirit was restored. Such moments were fragments of eternity, like pearls on the bed of an ocean unexplored. Let the morrow bring on what it would, he thought, for it didn’t exist. Only now could lay any claim to forever and in this forever he was indeed a fortunate man. After all, he was encompassed by ravishing Beauty.

  Monday, August 20, 1565

  The Corradino Heights

  Orlandu grabbed his chickpeas and flatbread and ran to the crest of the hill to watch the battle. He wasn’t alone in this habit for the spectacle was not to be resisted and he stood among a collection of fellow grooms. The Sanjak Cheder, one of Suleiman’s most famous fighting generals, had led eight thousand janissaries in an all-out assault against Fort Saint Michel, and as Orlandu arrived to watch, the ramparts were awash yet again with Turkish colors. There was a great deal of fire and smoke and among the silks and fog he saw flashes of the sun on Christian armor. The valor of the knights and his own Maltese brothers brought tears to his eyes. Yet he was also moved by the resolution of the janissaries. Tannhauser had been a janissary. Now Tannhauser stood somewhere on those Christian battlements.

  Each Sipahi cavalryman had at least two spare horses. In the tradition of Genghis Khan, Abbas had five. Orlandu was not permitted near these latter, as they were the finest mounts in the army, but he tended those of the lower ranks and found the labor a pleasure. Compared to careening galleys it was a frolic. He’d lately been shown how to clean and trim a horse’s feet and now believed himself skilled in all aspects of grooming. There’d been no role for the cavalry so far, and he was glad, for he knew what the spares were for. The beasts would suffer as horribly as the men. He wished Tannhauser were here. Before opening his bowels he’d pop out the big gold ring from his arse—it was a simpler matter than he’d imagined—and he’d clean it and slip it over his thumb until he was done, and Tannhauser would feel close.

  The Turks, he’d discovered, were fine men, almost as brave as the knights themselves. Abbas radiated majesty. Those Anatolian troopers whose mounts he tended brought him almond cakes, if he’d done good work. There was the occasional kick or cuffing, but nothing near the casual violence of the dockyards. Another groom, a Rumelian older than he, had one day tried to take his cakes and Orlandu had almost brained him with a horseshoe. He’d not been bothered thereafter and had even earned a wink from the chief hostler, who was a Serb. He heard the word devshirme uttered and wondered what it meant. As Tannhauser had instructed, he struck a manly bearing and took pride in his manners. He joined the Moslems for their prayers and mimicked their various postures. He even grew to feel comfort in the muezzin’s call. At night, he prayed to Jesus and John the Baptist, and begged them not to damn him as an infidel. Yet, strangely, at the moment of prayer, he didn’t feel dishonest in either practice.

  His new life, then, was tolerable and in living it he felt more than ever that he walked in the footsteps of his master. He was becoming “a man of the world.” The thought of the Stambouli shore now gave him excitement rather than dread. If he felt pain or sorrow it was watching the latest slaughter down below—now three days and two nights with hardly a pause. The other grooms, like Orlandu, observed the carnage with mixed feelings. None of them were ethnic Turks. Albanians, Thracians, Bulgars, Hungarians, and Serbs. All nursed some hatred of the Turk in their inner hearts and hoped for the Religion to win, though, like him, not one of them said so. A Serb pointed out a big banner on which a red hand was painted. The banner bobbed up a scaling ladder thrown against Saint Michel’s wall.

  “Sanjak Cheder,” said the youth.

  The Sanjak had vowed to take Saint Michel or die in the attempt. Orlandu said a silent prayer for Admiral Del Monte. There was a rough shout from behind and Orlandu turned. The hostler was calling them back to work. Orlandu took one last look at the distant battle. The Turks occupied the wall in fantastic numbers.

  Monday, August 20, 1565

  Grand Master’s Stables—Auberge of England—Auberge of Italy

  The Spanish girl was comely. Few men of refinement would have called her pretty; indeed, she was strange in looks and manner both. Yet she evinced her own wayward aura, an unpredictability of temper, a sensuality in movement, an inborn lasciviousness primal as an unmapped forest. He knew that the German had chosen her and this incited the voluptuary within himself. Tannhauser was everything he was not, the antithesis of everything he’d set himself to be and represent. An apostate, a criminal, a libertine; a consort of atheists, Moslems, and Jews; a man proud to be steeped in cupidity and sin. Despite that, Ludovico felt that they were bound together, twinned in contrariety, mirrored as in a glass darkly.

  Amparo worked in the broad central passageway that ran between the facing rows of box stalls. In the shafts of ligh
t that fell from the high windows, motes of straw and dirt danced about her. She was brushing scurf from the flank and stifle of Tannhauser’s golden horse. She wore a leaf-green dress, faded by the sun to the color of early autumn and worn ragged and thin by use. She wore nothing beneath it, like a street whore. At first glance she was all bone and sinew, lean as a greyhound, but as she brandished the dandy brush the fullness of her buttocks and breasts was revealed, and the cloth clung to her loins in patches of sweat and her hair swayed in luxuriant curls, and Ludovico was persuaded of her beauty.

  He stood inside in the stable doorway, out of the sun, and watched her for a long time. The raw smells of the place were a tonic for he’d come direct from the fouler stench of the battle renewed that day for Saint Michel. It was strange that the shit of horses should be so much less noxious than the shit of men, but so it was. War generated shit in even greater abundance than blood and Ludovico was sick of both.

  The janissaries had attacked that morning for the third day running and had almost overwhelmed the crumbling fortress. Ludovico, his newly cracked ribs robbing him of breath, had been dispatched with a contingent of Italians and Aragonese across the boat bridge. After hours of rabid killing amid rivers of fire, their counterattack had left the Sanjak dead on the field and his ravaged corps in retreat. There’d been no pursuit. Saint Michel had started the day with less than seven hundred men, none of them lacking for wounds, and they hadn’t the numbers. More than that, those still standing by the finish hadn’t the heart.

  After such an episode it was sweet to watch a pretty girl as she groomed a horse, and reason enough to be here of itself, but he had another purpose. Sweeping a patch of the stable floor that was already quite spotless was a wrinkled Sicilian crone inches shorter than her broomstick. As Ludovico entered he glanced at her and she bent in a servile curtsy and shook her head. He motioned to the door. She scurried out. He walked on down the passageway and Amparo looked over her shoulder and saw him and stopped and straightened up. She put a protective hand on the horse’s flaxen mane and continued to stroke his shoulder with the brush. She looked Ludovico in the chest, rather than the face, but without alarm. Her odd, asymmetrical face was untouched by either weariness or fear, and it occurred to him that no one in Malta looked this way, not anymore. He wondered what power had allowed her to sustain such serenity. The mere sight of it lifted his spirit. His insight deepened into Tannhauser and his choice. He smiled and bowed his head.