Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “His Holiness has once again demonstrated his wisdom,” said La Valette. “And you have proved yourself his perfect servant.”

  Ludovico bowed his head and said nothing.

  “This relic shall lie in San Lorenzo with the Hand of the Baptist,” announced La Valette.

  “With respect, Your Excellency,” said Claramont, “should we not consider removing at least our Holy Relics to the safety of Sant’Angelo?”

  La Valette shook his head. “To do so would be a signal to our soldiers that we expect to be defeated. And despite all that’s been said, defeat I will not countenance. With the help of God we will yet drive the Turk back into the sea. The Hand of John the Baptist, the Sword of Saint Peter, the icon of Our Lady of Philermo are the root of our strength. They will remain in their rightful place until there is no one left to defend them.”

  He had the attention of the whole assembly.

  “And to return to the matter which brought us here, I have one last order. Tomorrow, Castel Sant’Angelo will be evacuated of all except the crews required to supply and man the batteries on the roof. Then the bridge to the Borgo shall be destroyed.”

  A stunned silence greeted this command. Even Ludovico arched a black brow.

  “There will be no retreat,” said La Valette. “Let every man understand—and the Grande Turke too—that we will fight and die where we now stand.”

  Friday, August 31, 1565

  The Borgo—Monte San Salvatore

  If there was any virtue in sustaining a multiplicity of wounds, fractures, and abrasions it was that the global discomfort thus produced diverted one’s attention from any given pang in particular. The last major assault, of August 23, had left Tannhauser with two new cuts to his left cheek, a knee which felt like it was filled with gravel, another broken finger, some cracked ribs over the liver, sundry gashes to the thighs which he doctored himself, and a twisted ankle. He’d also been twice stunned insensible and had awoken half drowned in pools of human filth whose least offensive ingredient was vomit. In all this he considered himself fortunate to have escaped unscathed, for the majority of those still left alive sported wounds and deformities of hideous dimension. Even so, the inability to move without pain made him feel like a man twice his age. Having resisted both logic and the urge of his body for longer than honor required, he’d concocted a batch of the Stones of Immortality and spent the last week in a state of heady indifference to the apocalyptic events unfolding around him.

  The stones also fended off the bouts of black melancholia that had started to afflict him. In such moments he knew he’d never see Orlandu again. Reason always reaffirmed that in leaving him with Abbas, Tannhauser had done what was best. Yet he missed Orlandu. And he was punished by a strange fear: that he’d doomed the boy to a life of shedding blood.

  He was far from alone in suffering troubles of the spleen and brain. Throughout the skeletal remnants of the town he often came upon stunned and mutilated men who gibbered to themselves as they cowered in the rubble, or stared mute into nothingness, or wept over the detritus of their families, their homes, their lives. The battered churches were crammed with such folk and lamentation there was ceaseless. The women of the town seemed made of sterner stuff. With most men dead or wounded, and the slave battalions reduced—in part by the violent suppression of a mutiny—to a few stupefied gangs of hollow-eyed wraiths, the women toiled to rebuild the walls and carry corpses to the rear. Yet they too were spiritless and gaunt, going through the motions of collecting food from the depot and water from the well—and of trying to impose order on their ragamuffin offspring—with the listlessness of the condemned.

  When the alarums rang, provost marshals stalked the wreckage with knotted ropes to drive the laggards to the front. While dead knights were accorded all the honors and obsequies due to martyrs, less-valued corpses lay unburied in the streets, or were tossed into the sea, for there was no spare strength left to bury them and the mass graves had long been glutted and filled back in. The whole town stank of putrefaction. Rats swarmed in daylight, the scuttling black mobs catching one’s eye unawares and turning one’s stomach with an antediluvian disgust. Emboldened vultures colonized whole city sections and flapped and squawked in outrage when dislodged, as if this were now their realm by right and humans the impudent interlopers. Flies plagued every moment of every day and earned themselves a hatred that exceeded even that reserved for the Turks. The Catholics had a horror of cremation, for it precluded resurrection, but Tannhauser reckoned they’d soon have to change their tune and light some pyres.

  Bors alone maintained an admirable buoyancy and proved a tonic to all, for he was never short of a story, a jest, or a ripe observation on the nature of men and Things. He, too, partook of the Stones of Immortality, which he swallowed like nuts when given the chance, and perhaps this, in some degree, accounted for his pluck. The news of the marvelous pills spread wide, and Bors suggested they make hay while this grim sun shone. So coveted were the stones, and so great was the price that the market would bear, that even gold would not suffice to buy them, for it would have proved too heavy to lug away. Instead they were exchanged for emeralds and diamonds and other precious stones, which had been culled in plenty by the Spaniards and Maltese from the extravagant raiment and gear of the Turkish dead.

  When Carla discovered this lucrative trade she shamed Tannhauser into donating ten pounds of opium to Fra Lazaro, a gift he accepted as miraculous and which he believed was Turkish booty. The gift caused Bors much anguish, but Tannhauser argued it would stop the confiscation of their stock, for such had been Carla’s icy and uncompromising threat. Bors kept the kitchen well supplied with foodstuffs, brandies, and wines, which if anything had been more easily procured as the population fell, and the denizens of the Auberge of England ate well.

  Indeed, for the gentlemen adventurers from Italy and England, the Spanish tercios, and those of the German langue not overly committed to austerity, the auberge became a much-loved haven. Holes yawned in the walls and the roof, and the refectory had been partly demolished, but if open gaiety was uncommon, hearty company was always to be found. Tomaso brought Gullu Cakie and his bunch, and conspiracies of smuggling and tax evasion were spun. A handful of the braver town girls chanced their luck and frantic romances flourished in catastrophe’s shadow.

  The best nights, unforgettable to all those present, were when Carla and Amparo were cajoled into dusting off their instruments. They played for the gathered and, as Tannhauser had predicted, their music was more precious than rubies. Even the hardiest among the listeners shed tears at their melodies sublime, and sometimes there was dancing, and sometimes there was song, for the Asturian, Andreas de Munatones, displayed an exquisite tenor voice when in his cups. And sometimes—in defiance of rowdy jeers and if need be discharging a pistol to enforce silence—Tannhauser would recite laments and erotic gazels in the Turkish style, for he insisted that poetry in any tongue be honored, and never more so than in a time and place such as this.

  As Bors pointed out, the ghost of the Oracle had followed them down to Hades.

  After the repulse of August 23, the Turks licked their wounds for eight days and launched no major offensives. The war continued underground, however, as the Mameluke sappers redoubled their efforts to undermine the bastions of the knights. While they tunneled through the limestone of no-man’s-land, La Valette’s engineers crawled about with basins of water and probes festooned with tiny bells, in an attempt to detect the vibrations caused by their tools. When they did so, the Maltese sappers sank countermines to intercept the enemy diggings, and to burn the underground galleries before they reached the walls. If successful, these measures resulted in subterranean duels—with shovels, picks, and knives—of such dark and heinous savagery that even Tannhauser’s blood ran cold to hear them related. The half-dozen mines that the Turks did explode further reduced the enceinte to a jagged-toothed ruin.

  The knights made their own contribution to the chaos when they ble
w up the bridge that connected the Borgo to Sant’Angelo. This eccentric act baffled many of the garrison for days, it being deemed either an accident or an act of sabotage, for which latter crime the slaves who’d helped to haul the explosive charges were drowned in the canal. When it later emerged that the bridge’s destruction was a stratagem to raise morale, the logic of denying this last redoubt was lost on all but the most sophisticated, for it also meant that tons of supplies had to be freighted daily by barge across to the Borgo. But the knights, as everyone knew, were strange folk, and none stranger than the Reverend Grand Master whose order it was.

  Tannhauser continued to worry about the problem of their escape to the boat at Zonra. In darker moments his plan seemed an infantile fantasy, designed only to prevent him from going mad. Bors never raised the matter. Neither did Carla. Both, he knew, thought the plan wanted for honor. That they no longer took it seriously was plain. Yet they hadn’t seen that sleek little boat, as he had in his mind’s eye a thousand times, nor felt the sea breeze in their hair as they flew back to Italy.

  On August 29, a collective fast had been ordered to commemorate the beheading of John the Baptist. In contrast, and perhaps as compensation, Friday, August 31, brought an evening of revelry that exceeded in abandon anything the auberge had seen before. Since Bors was master of ceremonies, it probably exceeded anything seen theretofore on Malta itself. The occasion developed of its own accord, perhaps stoked by some sense of premonition. They’d survived one hundred days in the teeth of Hell and that was reason enough for the mad frivolity. The women played. Wine and brandy flowed. Ballads and airs were sung. Carla essayed a jig with Munatones, and a fine pair they made, and envy and arousal provoked Tannhauser to steal an assignation with Amparo in the tub, and though he loved Amparo more dearly than ever he did not say so, and again did not know why. Stones of Immortality were consumed. Yet as the evening wore on, and despite such revels, Tannhauser could not scratch the itch in the back of his mind. The boat at Zonra called him.

  And so as midnight beckoned, the waxing crescent moon having long set in the west, and despite being the worse for opium and drink, Tannhauser decided on a reconnaissance and he donned the red robes and yellow boots of a Sipahi sergeant, purloined from a corpse.

  Tannhauser’s inebriation proved a boon. Without such narcotic aid the three-hundred-yard crawl to the slope of San Salvatore would have been too arduous by far. Nor would he have thought to take the frequent rests in which he lay on his back and stared, deranged by wonder, at the wheeling stars. To the north the Great Bear was in flight; Orion bestrode the tail of the Milky Way out in the east; Scorpius disappeared below the horizon. Yet who now was the hunter, and whom his prey? And what did it matter? For all things would pass and, as Grubenius averred, even the stars themselves would one day fall. Philosophy added its glow to that of opium and liquor. When he reached the Turkish lines his confidence and bonhomie were such that he found himself within minutes at one of their watch fires, sharing bowls of lentil broth and bread.

  They were Anatolians, four simple men, not much more than boys, brave and bewildered as most boy soldiers are, and he listened to their doleful accounts of this cursed campaign, to their memories of families and sweethearts they might never see again, to their gloomy opinions of Allah’s will and the brute indifference of their commanders. They were cast away in a bleak and hostile land, and while for Tannhauser the teeming sky above brought a measure of succor, these poor levies stared only at their fire, as if by looking at the alien void they’d be robbed of what little remained of their souls and their sanity.

  There was talk of the fiends who inhabited the Christian fortress, manifestly in league with Satan one and all—for what human beings could fight as they fought without diabolic aid? The name of the Christian sorcerer, La Valette, was invoked with superstitious awe. He’d been seen, they said, communing with demons on the walls at the dead of night. He’d conjured up the plague that thinned their ranks. His knights were demoniac phantoms, resurrected from the dead by his spells and incantations. He could fly with the vultures and crows. He could not be killed, for he’d sold his soul to the Devil, and the Devil protected his own.

  Tannhauser reassured them, for they moved him with their easy friendship and were stranded not by necromantic powers but, as were they all, by the greed of emperors and kings, and because in this company and in this tongue he was by experience a leader of men and to raise their quaking spirits was his instinct and duty.

  “La Valette is only a man,” he said. “A great and terrible man, perhaps, but a man just the same. So too his knights. The men and women of the town fight like devils because this is their home, the soil of their forefathers, and we have come to take it by conquest. Would not any of us fight as fiercely for hearth and kin?”

  They nodded and stared at the fire, and rags of flame flew up into the measureless night and vanished just as swiftly as they were realized, as if to show that by the reckoning of a Cosmos so implacable and so huge, the passage of human life was hardly more important.

  “Ibrahim,” said the one named Davud, looking up. “Will the morrow see an end to them? Or to us?”

  “The morrow?” asked Tannhauser.

  “The great attack,” said Davud. “The last battle.”

  This revelation sobered Tannhauser. He fished for more. “We’ve been promised many last battles.”

  Davud grimaced in agreement.

  Tannhauser pointed into the dark, across the saddle toward Santa Margharita. “I’m with the Kirmizi Bayrak,” he said. He’d seen the Red Banners deployed there on many days. “We’ll support the Lions of Islam, in the second wave.”

  Davud glanced at Tannhauser’s scarred face and splinted fingers. “You’ve seen the worst, my friend.”

  “The worst?” replied Tannhauser. He shook his head. “As long as one is alive, the worst lies waiting. What are your orders?”

  “So far Allah the merciful has been kind to us here, up above the bay,” said Davud. “Even those devils can’t walk on water. But tomorrow we are in the first wave.”

  The Anatolians exchanged grim glances. Tannhauser frowned in sympathy.

  “All of you?”

  Davud waved a hand across the invisible bulk of Monte San Salvatore.

  “All except the gunners.”

  Tannhauser’s heart quickened. He leaned forward and in a display of indifference pushed a half-charred stick of wood into the embers. He watched the flames catch and said, “They tell us nothing, of course. But you say our Pasha intends to commit the reserve? The entire reserve?”

  “The time has come,” confirmed Davud.

  The reserve regiments stationed on San Salvatore, besides protecting its siege batteries, had acted to block any repeat of the Christian relief force that had marched across its slopes to Kalkara Bay—with Ludovico—back in July. But the Turks couldn’t walk on water either. To attack the Borgo the reserves would have to deploy to the south and with only the artillery crews left behind, the route to Zonra—and his boat—would be open. Even for a band of four. Tannhauser marked the North Star and just above the rim of the hill in the northeast, toward Zonra, the horns of Taurus. The Bull would guide them home. He thought of Amparo and reckoned it a strong omen. He stretched his arms.

  “The time has come, also, for me to go,” he said.

  The look of a child flitted across Davud’s face.

  A fragment of the Koran floated up through Tannhauser’s brain.

  He said, “With Allah lies the knowledge of the end of the world. He is the One who sends the rain and who knows the contents of the womb. No soul knows what he will earn tomorrow, and no soul knows in what land he will die. Only Allah is all-knowing, wholly aware.”

  The four youths made reverent gestures, but were no less frightened.

  “Have you been in battle before?” asked Tannhauser.

  He glanced around the fire. All four shook their heads.

  “In the charge,” said Tannhauser,
“stick close together and watch for one another’s safety.”

  They all four stared at him intently.

  “In the noise, the smoke, the terror, you’ll think only of yourself—and Allah, most exalted is He. It’s natural but also fatal. Eight eyes are better than two, four swords better than one. Pool your courage and your skill. Where goes one, go all, but do not group tight in the open or you’ll give them a target.”

  He waited so that this sank in, and they nodded.

  “Watch for their Greek fire—the flying hoops. And the cannonballs too—they’ll rise from the clay like cobras, but if you’re sharp, you can straddle them. And avoid the Christians wearing full armor; they may not be devils but they’re devilish hard to kill.”

  They looked at him as if he were Solomon. Their earnest faces moved him. He reached into his robe and took out his box and fingered two stones of opium. Why not? He drew his dagger, its stained blade black and wicked in the flames, and they watched him carve the gold-flecked pills in half.

  “The advantages of being in the first wave are few,” he continued, “but remember this one. Your role is to engage the enemy—on the whole by dying—so that the second wave might overwhelm them. If you survive until the second wave arrives, pull back—but do so slyly, like a cutpurse from a crowd. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Keep your war face. Grab a wounded comrade, and carry him back to the lines. Carry him proudly. If you make it, at worst you’ll earn a flogging, at best a bonus for valor. Now, show me your right palms.”

  They held out their hands. By now, if he’d told them to stick them in the fire, they would’ve obeyed him. He placed half a pill in each palm.