by Tim Willocks
This was absurd. What manner of man was he becoming? They’d barely left the room for two days, a commendable indulgence even by his standards, and it had addled his brain. With as much stealth as possible, he rose to his feet. He turned and looked down on her. He kissed her again. Addled indeed. He heard the clank of armor and muffled protests of despair in the street outside, and though he knew what he would find he went to the window.
Two serjeants at arms of the Religion, Aragonese by the look of them, marched a naked, manacled Turk up Majistral Street. The scars that corrugated the latter’s back, like a subcutaneous infection of bloated worms, marked him as a galley slave. In his mouth was a knot of old rope to stifle the prayers he tried to utter on his way to the gibbet. In accord with La Valette’s decree, this slave was the eighteenth Moslem to be hanged since the puppeteer had been launched from the bastion of Provence. It was a drawback of this billet that the condemned trudged by the window every morning, and Tannhauser made a note to ask Starkey if some other route might not be used. The eighteenth slave reminded him that he’d already tarried on Malta for far too long.
He’d hunted high and low to find the name—and less than a name, a memory, a trace, a rumor—of a boy born on All Hallows’ Eve in the year of ’52, and he’d found nothing. If Carla’s boy was still alive, Tannhauser was having doubts that he was on the island. He’d considered persuading Carla to leave right now, before war devoured them, but his pride balked at admitting to defeat. Anyway, Carla would not give in. He collected his boots and clothes from the bare oak floor and made his way naked down the stairs.
In the garden at the rear of the auberge he’d had two slaves install a double hogshead filled with seawater. In the ground beneath this tub, Tannhauser and Bors had buried a chest containing fifty pounds of their opium. As the war progressed, its value would soar, and they aimed to make a killing on their departure. Tannhauser relieved his bladder in the dust and vaulted into the barrel, cursing as the cold water shocked him. He slid down onto his haunches, the brine rising to his throat, and he settled back to watch the sky as it turned from a seashell pink tinged with gray to a pale and gentle blue. He’d pass the rest of the day in sweltering heat and in these frigid moments he found a comforting nostalgia for mountains and snow. It was thanks to the tub, at least in part, that his affair with Amparo had started.
One morning as he lay soaking, she’d skipped over the garden wall, as if, to her mind, walls were constructed for that precise purpose alone, and had come over to the tub without any discernible bashfulness or shame to admire his tattoos.
He’d explained the tattoos’ significance, and told her something of the sacred cult of the janissaries, who lived in barracks with their babas, their dervish fathers, and who shunned the company of women and recited poetry at their fires, and who craved death in the service of Allah above all things. But while in the content of this lecture she feigned not a scrap of interest, he found her more than fascinated by his flesh, which she poked and stroked with her long, almond-nailed fingers, and this proved a provocation far beyond his endurance. He’d not intended to make sport with either of his female charges, for in the thicket of love disaster was always lurking, but, he had reasoned, life was short and could get shorter at any time. He’d clambered from the tub in a state of unconcealable arousal and by some mutual and spontaneous combination of leaping and sweeping she’d wound up cradled across his arms, whence he’d carried her to the room where she now lay sleeping.
He was a fool but there it was and here he sat. As the water’s cool cleared his mind of sleep and lust, and of morbid memories of Islam, and of the conundrum of loving one woman—if love it was—while planning to marry another, he reviewed his situation in what was surely the strangest of all the places on the Earth.
Since the first, inconclusive, battle on May 21, Tannhauser hadn’t taken part in any fighting, a fact entirely to his satisfaction. The Turks had not yet sealed the Borgo from the country surrounding, for their attentions were elsewhere—upon Fort Saint Elmo—and it was no great feat to sneak out the Kalkara Gate before the sun was up. He’d thus made numerous sallies into the outlands beyond the enceinte in the guise of an opium trader from the ordu bazaar, the Turkish army’s mobile commissariat, which was pitched beyond the hills on the Marsa plain.
As was the Ottoman way on major campaigns, this market constituted a town—transplanted from across the sea—of some one hundred and fifty tents and silk pavilions. From these premises, a multitude of merchants plied their crafts and trades. Barbers, butchers, and surgeons; confectioners, grocers, metalsmiths; tailors and bootmakers; apothecaries; armorers, gunsmiths, harness makers, farriers; chandlers, wheelwrights, and masons; there were even jewelers and goldsmiths to tend the many riches with which the officers and beys festooned their garb and their weapons. These merchants serviced the army but were independent. Since the Ottoman gentry nursed a mistrust of banks, they carried their wealth in their baggage wherever they went, and the money that swilled through the bazaar made Tannhauser glad.
From beyond the bazaar came the sweet smell of thousands of bread kilns, the bricks freighted in the ships from Old Stambouli. A stream of camels and oxcarts toiled back and forth between the Turkish camp and Marsaxlokk, the natural harbor on the island’s southern shore where the Sultan’s armada was anchored. Here Tannhauser saw displayed the administrative genius that lay behind Ottoman supremacy. Hundreds of supply ships and galleys discharged hundreds of thousands of quintals of barley, flour, and rice; iron, copper, lead, and tin; honey, butter, hardtack, oil, lemons, and salted fish; flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; firewood and timber and fascines; pavilion furniture and tents; gunpowder in vast quantity; the enormous four- and five-ton screw guns of the siege train; silver and gold coin for the soldiers’ wages; ice for the generals’ sherbet; and every ounce weighed and calculated in a tour de force of logistical insight and finesse.
Tannhauser wished Sabato Svi could see it too. A thousand Oracles in a thousand years could not have accomplished anything near such a feat. Tannhauser considered himself a fellow of uncommon resourcefulness, and even daring, but before this vast and teeming portrait of Suleiman’s audacity, he felt dwarfed. To place at hazard, in the ultimate game of chance, so many lives, and so much pride and prestige, and the ransoms of so many kings, and with the whole world watching on, was an act of near madness that made Tannhauser’s wagers on Fortune seem timid indeed. Suleiman Shah was indeed the King of Kings. Yet, large or small, it was the gamble that gave life its savor and which made war, above all other endeavors, so eternally irresistible to the species.
Thus emboldened by Suleiman’s example, Tannhauser rode through this ceaseless torrent dressed in fine green robes, a white turban, and a scimitar of discreet splendor. Buraq, whose golden coat and Asian blood aroused a deal of admiration, completed his disguise.
The smells, the colors and sounds, the refined precision of the Ottoman machine despite the chaos of conquest rekindled in Tannhauser something more than memory. Beyond the walls of the Borgo, Malta was already part of the Sultan’s realm and it evoked for him a way of being—of feeling and perception, of walking, talking, and laughing—that was forged through his mettle to its core. Like any man returning to a world he’d once inhabited but had abandoned, he felt a sweet pain in his heart, most poignant when an orta of janissaries marched by, with their tall white borks and nine-palm muskets and warlike bearing. But if ambiguities of the heart sometimes troubled him, the clarity of his mind remained unmuddled. In the janissaries he’d been a kullar, the Sultan’s slave, chanting prayers to a faceless and monstrous idol and killing with blind obedience on behalf of a rapacious race not even his own. Now he was a free man. The follies in which he might entangle himself at least were of his own choosing and design.
Since the Ottoman civil service and merchant classes were largely composed of Islamicized Christians, his fair skin and blue eyes provoked no suspicion. Since he could discuss with erudition the
problems of damp powder, the price of nutmeg, the quality of steel, and the perpetual lack of patience displayed by military officials high and low—and since he joined their daily prayers with absolute fluency—no one questioned his legitimacy. He made discreet gifts of opium and gold, as if to ensure future favors but in fact to loosen tongues. On occasion, to establish his preeminence over quartermasters and merchants, he’d reveal by an inadvertent gesture the janissary wheel or the Zulfikar sword tattooed on his either arm and at this they would blanch with respect and change their tune. He avoided contact with the encamped divisions of officers and fighting men against the slim chance of being recognized. In any case, all gossip flowed through the bazaar and the merchants and victuallers had, in sum, a far better knowledge of Mustafa’s troop disbursements and morale than did most of his army’s captains.
By such means Tannhauser learned that the island was presently occupied by something over thirty thousand gazi of the Sultan and more than as many again in labor battalions, engineers, oarsmen, and auxiliary supports. He learned also that at least a further ten thousand reinforcements were expected from a variety of pirate and North African allies. Hassem, Viceroy of Algiers, had embarked from the Barbary Coast with six thousand elite Algerians. El Louck Ali, Governor of Alexandria, was to bring a corps of Egyptian engineers and Mameluke troops. The great Torghoud Rais, “The Drawn Sword of Islam,” was en route with a dozen galleys and two thousand seasoned corsairs. Killers from twoscore nations and two great Creeds and dozens of tribes swarmed this Tower of Babel, in which all carried swords in their hands and hate in their hearts. Only War could invite so many to such a carnival.
The intelligence Tannhauser gathered was of such value to La Valette that he earned the kind of access to Oliver Starkey that only the seven priors of the langues routinely enjoyed. On returning from each reconnaissance, he made sure to bring some small gift for the guards on the Kalkara Gate—honey, choice cuts of lamb, pepper and mace, sweet cakes of almonds and raisins—and to ask their views on the campaign and to share some piece of news from the Turkish lines. This stoked their sense of importance and with it the trust in which they held him and which he knew he would one day exploit. His reputation was thereby established at either end of the Religion’s hierarchy and, since fighting men like little more than to discuss one another’s deeds, therefrom it spread through all those in between. This process was done no harm when he produced a dramatic coup from his first solitary foray, on the night of May 21, in the aftermath of the initial clash of arms.
That evening—with the war’s first corpses cooling on the Grande Terre Plein—Mustafa Pasha had convened a war council with Kapudan Pasha Piyale, High Admiral of the Fleet, and all his generals. Present throughout this meeting was a member of Mustafa’s bodyguard, a Macedonian youth of remarkable beauty who was a Christian by birth. After the council ended, by a stroke of luck, Tannhauser fell into a parley with this same young Greek.
Campfires guttered in the dark of the Marsa plain and in the distance he and the youth heard tambours and pipes, and the drone of the janissary poets chanting their tales. They roasted wild garlic on the points of their knives and they talked of their origins and their travels and of the kin they’d left behind. They discussed the fighting to come and the fearsome reputation of the Religion. And after an hour, with a pantomime of reluctance overcome by good fellowship, Tannhauser gave him a Stone of Immortality, of which he carried a supply in a mother-of-pearl box.
Tannhauser had learned of the stones from Petrus Grubenius, who had learned, in his turn, in Salzburg, from the great Paracelsus himself. In truth, Tannhauser had a poor conception of the true alchemical recipe, but his own worked admirably well. In the kitchen of the Auberge of England, he rolled out pills of raw opium and marinated them overnight in a brew of citrus oils, brandy, and honey. Next day he sprinkled them with fine-flaked gold, pared from a Venetian ducat, and glazed them hard in the sun. What contribution the gold made to their potency, he didn’t know, but it gave the stones a compelling allure, by firelight or by day, and contributed no end to his promotion of their powers. He showed the youth the pill flecked with yellow in his palm.
“In Eternity,” he told him, “there is no sorrow.”
The Macedonian’s eyes suggested that he’d known his share and more.
“Neither is there fear, nor anger, nor desire, nor even will,” continued Tannhauser, “for in Eternity, all men partake in the Divine Intelligence as a drop of water partakes in the wide blue sea. Thus are we freed, and thus are we made whole, and thus do we return to the fundament and source of all Things.”
He placed the gold-and-black pill in the Macedonian’s hand as if it were a Host.
“These stones—the Stones of Immortality—open a window to that metaphysical realm. They give a glimpse of what it might be to exist as pure spirit—of the infinite peace that awaits us—unyoked from the many shackles of our mortality.”
Tempted though he was to indulge, Tannhauser feigned popping a stone in his mouth, and the Macedonian swallowed his. His name was Nicodemus and he was eighteen years old. Tannhauser instructed him to look at the fire around which they sat cross-legged and Nicodemus did so, and they passed another hour in silence, and while Tannhauser tended the blaze Nicodemus fell under the mystic spell of the stone. When he saw the youth rocking back and forth to some internal rhythm all his own, Tannhauser pointed at the fire.
“In the dance of wind and flame,” he explained, “and in the transmutation of the wood into heat and light, and at the last into ashes and dust, we see a portrait—or as the Ancients would say, a microcosmos—not only of our lives but of the Chaos into which all Creation will one day subside.”
Nicodemus stared at him, as if he were a very great sage indeed.
“You understand,” said Tannhauser, knowing that it mattered little whether he did so or not. Nicodemus nodded. His eyes sparkled in the firelight, pupils small as the heads of pins, and quavered in their sockets like oiled marbles. “Good,” said Tannhauser. “Now let us watch the fire as it dies, and take courage therefrom for the hazards yet to befall us.”
They watched. And the fire at last collapsed into ruby embers and lay throbbing in the night like the excised heart of an infernal beast, and by then Nicodemus was in that place where all disconsolation had been banished and was no more. And in this mute and ecstatic state, Tannhauser loaded him onto Buraq, and stole him away to the Borgo.
Bors had mounted a long watch for Tannhauser’s return and he ensured that the two were not shot down as they approached the mantlet and wicket of the Kalkara Gate. For Nicodemus, as Tannhauser led him through the narrow city streets and across the broad wooden bridge to Castel Sant’Angelo, it was a strange reconversion and rebirth, but no less real for that. The city was proliferate with crucifixes, icons, and shrines, many smoking with incense and votive lights, and Nicodemus began to cross himself at each. The stern faces and pious aura of the knights who flanked the way, and who escorted them through a labyrinth aflicker with torches to the Grand Master’s office, filled him with trembling and awe, as did the symbol of the Christ, everywhere to be seen on surcoats and robes. Though midnight was past, La Valette was in conference with his piliers, and on meeting him the Macedonian fell to his knees, as if at the feet of a living saint, and professed his love for Christ Our Lord, and begged to be rebaptized and to be accepted back into the fold of the Lamb of God.
When La Valette learned that the youth was called Nicodemus, he raised one brow, and there were murmurings from the brother knights, because it seemed there was a character of some significance in the Gospel of Saint John—who had, indeed, spoken with John the Baptist himself—who bore that very same name. If Tannhauser found this unremarkable, for after all every man there present, including himself, bore some name from the Bible, the brethren took it as a sign of God’s favor and told Nicodemus that gladly would the chaplains be called and gladly would his soul be born anew. Nicodemus then told them all that had p
assed at the latest Turkish war council. And it was this.
Following the rebuff before the bastion of Castile, there were fierce divisions in Mustafa Pasha’s camp, which was no surprise to Tannhauser at all. If the Turks had a weakness it was that the army on campaign, unless led by the Sultan in person, was plagued by latent jealousies and by the rivalries and intrigues of the commanders. Mustafa had been in favor of capturing the northern city of Mdina—where La Valette had stationed his cavalry under Copier—before pressing home the siege of L’Isola and the Borgo. But Admiral Piyale had insisted that his armada was not safe in its present anchorage of Marsaxlokk, exposed, as he mistakenly believed it to be, to the Gregale winds.
Piyale was the conqueror of Oran, Minorca, and Jerba. He was husband to Suleiman’s granddaughter. He was the Sultan’s favorite. And Piyale had argued for the capture of Fort Saint Elmo as the first step of the campaign. This would open the safe, adjacent, anchorage of Marsamxett to the Turkish fleet. Not only that, but the capture of the fort would allow them to enfilade Sant’Angelo and the Borgo with naval cannon fire from Grand Harbor. Since the Turk’s chief engineer had attested that the tiny fort was weak and would fall in less than a week, the council had concluded that their next assault should be focused against Saint Elmo.
Nicodemus’s account caused consternation. There were some eight hundred men stationed at Fort Saint Elmo, premium troops that comprised a third of all the trained soldiers and knights at La Valette’s disposal. Arguments were advanced for the fort’s evacuation and destruction. For a token resistance by a skeleton crew for the sake of honor. For its immediate reinforcement. But that the fort would indeed fall was not in question.