by Tim Willocks
As darkness fell, he concluded his bargain with the serjeant who marshaled the departures from the wharf, and a random pair of would-be evacuees were abandoned on their wattles by the postern. Orlandu staggered gamely down the steps, brutally overburdened with Tannhauser’s knapsack and tackle. They shouldered their way to the edge of the quay through a press of stretcher-bearing slaves and crippled fugitives, cleared out a spot on which to stack their gear, and waited for the longboats to glide in.
“Why do we retreat?” asked Orlandu.
“Retreat?” scoffed Tannhauser. “You begin to sound like Bors. If we stay, we will die, and popular though that ambition is hereabouts, it forms no part of our plan.”
“Everyone here will die? Guaras? Miranda? De Medran?” He paused as if stunned by his own imagination. “Colonel Le Mas?”
Perhaps battle had so befogged his wits that he thought his heroes immortal.
“All of them,” Tannhauser replied. “It is their choice and their calling, but not mine. Nor should it be yours.” He inclined his beard across the water. “Somewhere beyond this lunacy a wider world awaits, in which men such as we may prosper and make a mark more seemly than a florid inscription on a tomb. Indeed, no one at Saint Elmo will leave so much as that.”
“They will leave their names.”
“Those few who will are more than welcome to. I’ve already outlived Alexander and that’s a mightier comfort to me than his name is to him. For what that name was worth, the poet Dante consigned him to the bowels of Hell.”
“Alexander?” said Orlandu.
“You see? Your ignorance shames you. You’re equipped for little more than lugging a tub of swill through the mire. Is that craft or achievement to be proud of?”
The light in Orlandu’s eyes dimmed and he lowered his face to hide his hurt at amounting to so little in his hero’s reckoning. Tannhauser quelled a pang. It would do the boy good. To aim high required some knowledge of where one stood.
“Couple your vitality to my counsel,” he said, “and you’ll learn that there are joys beyond the worship of martyrs.”
Orlandu rallied. “What is your plan?”
“Our plan, boy.”
Orlandu brightened. Not a sulker then. Good.
“Yes,” repeated Tannhauser. “Our plan. But if we don’t get off this wharf we fall at the first rub, so more of the plan later, for here come our transports.”
The first of three longboats had appeared to the southeast, the oars sparkling silver as they rose and fell. The Milky Way teemed about the Archer, and the moon, only two days on the wane, was an hour up. The bay, then, could not have been brighter. The longboat was loaded with men and supplies and, as became lamentably apparent at thirty yards’ distance, a chest-high barrel of fresh Greek fire was roped into place amidships. It was at this range that the Turkish guns opened up.
Tannhauser realized at once that this was the purpose of the new Turkish palisade whose location had baffled the onlookers from the fort. It was a screen of wooden piles, earth, and gabions that ran down the eastern slope of Monte Sciberras right to the water’s edge. Here, it was now clear, a battery of light cannon and a unit of Tüfekchi musketeers had been stationed, thus craftily shielded from the guns of both Saint Elmo and Sant’Angelo. The flash of their muzzle blasts on the surface of Grand Harbor and the unspooling tendrils of gun smoke were all that could be seen. That and the calamitous results of their marksmanship.
A spray of splinters, water, and airborne body parts exploded from the foremost transport, which foundered, oars wheeling, as Tannhauser’s gut roiled inside him. An instant later, the butt of wildfire, smashed open by a ball and ignited by the gun match of a seaborne arquebusier, erupted in a yellow volcano which lit up the bay for a quarter of a mile around and sent flaming balls of the sticky incendiary liquor spouting aloft.
A number of fiery projectiles arced toward the crowd of lame and wounded on the wharf, and panic swept the throng and a frenzied scuffle for safety broke out around him. Agonized screams vied with shouts of desperation as loaded wattles tumbled in the scrimmage. Tannhauser, his prime site at the quay’s edge now precarious, started to claw his way farther landward. Then a pair of fist-size fireballs splattered square among the press and the whole mass recoiled in two separate and expanding circles from their respective points of impact. One circle collided with the other and chaos was compounded as those scourged with flame barged to find relief in the water. The pressure of the mob was irresistible. For all his strength, Tannhauser was shoved backward. The Milky Way flashed overhead and his back crashed into the water and his ears fell abruptly deaf to the dockside uproar.
For an instant the coolness was a delight, then he realized he was sinking with a flailing, human millstone atop his chest. He shoved and caught a kick in the gut and sank farther down. The coolness reached his feet as his high boots filled to their tops. He kicked out with no more effect than if he’d been buried alive in sand. He ripped off his helmet and waved his arms, his bearings lost in the void. Nothingness gaped beneath him. His lungs refused his commands not to burst and convulsed of their own accord. Panic shot through him, as swift and brief as lightning. When the water rushed through his nostrils and throat, the sensation was a marked improvement. The blackness in which he was immersed spread like warmth through his mind and with it came a relief he hadn’t thought possible. An image of Amparo came and went. And then he heard, as clear as a bell, his mother’s voice call out his name. “Mattie.”
So that was it, he thought. That was my life. Did I do so badly?
He thought: You could have done worse. But it would have taken a mighty effort.
He came to with his face pressed into a slab of wet capstone. It was dark and he had the sensation that someone was jumping on his back. Salt water gushed from his mouth and stung his sinuses. He couldn’t move and the pounding continued. He realized he was alive and that the place he was returning from had been one of a peace so profound it could only have been his death. The pounding on his shoulder blades was more than he could bear and he mustered the strength to throw an elbow behind him. He hit something solid and the assault stopped. Hands rolled him over onto his back and he flopped there and wheezed. Orlandu, his hair dripping water, looked down at him and grinned.
“Lugging a tub of swill through the mire?” he said, with glee. “Oh yes, and lugging a tub of lard out of the water.”
Friday, June 15, 1565
Amparo’s Rock
Amparo sat on a craggy outcrop of the island of Sant’Angelo and watched two bullet-splintered longboats return across the black-and-silver bay. She shivered in the cool of the night and her heart ached inside her breast and she felt inconsolably alone, and this she found strange, because alone was her most familiar home and hearthstone.
She knew that Tannhauser wasn’t with the boats, as he’d not been with the boats of previous nights. She’d watched them all since Bors had returned. She’d watched every oar stroke, every ripple that they’d made on the water. Why Bors and not Tannhauser? From the bloody cargoes of the boats now pulling past her, from the explosion that she’d seen light up the harbor, she knew that from now on the desolated fort across the bay was beyond all help and reinforcement. But she knew Tannhauser was alive. She’d seen his face just moments ago. He’d found a great peace and had wanted her to know it. Then he’d gone, and she’d been afraid, for she couldn’t find him in her heart and she thought him dead. And then she’d felt him again. No longer at peace, it was true, but alive. In that moment she conceived the notion that as long as he knew she loved him, he wouldn’t die. Yet of her love she’d never spoken. How could she? There were no words sufficient to convey it. How then could he know? And how could she make it so?
From the leather cylinder around her neck she took out her vision stone and put her eye to its bore and pointed the brass tube at the moon. She spun the wheels of stained glass. She saw nothing but a vortex of colors. Since coming to the island she’d lost her pow
er to see. Perhaps her loss was due to the malign aura of war. Or perhaps because she had fallen so far in love.
She sat on the rock until the moon completed its journey through the night and hung as if sad and haunted over the western rim of creation. The eastern horizon purpled at her back and in the pale violet light she saw that twoscore Turkish warships had entered the bay, and were drawn up stem to stern in an unbroken chain that curved out of sight beyond the headland where Tannhauser was trapped. At the seaward tip of the peninsula flares bloomed in a garland of fire around Saint Elmo’s throat. A vast arc of gunfire rippled across the mountain’s slopes as four thousand musketmen, in a single immense rank, discharged their pieces. The galleys rolled at anchor as their deck guns boomed. The face of Monte Sciberras seemed to vomit forth the contents of the molten earth beneath it as a hundred diabolic siege guns roared in unison. Somewhere at the center of that inferno stood her love.
A stain spilled down the mountainside and she watched without blinking and her heart shrank within her and her blood ran cold as ten thousand voices raised in hatred raped her soul. From the fractured rim of the fort a meager salvo crackled in reply and a tattered banner was brandished against the retreat of the night.
She realized that she had seen this in her shew stone after all. Endless chaos. The rule of misrule. The abyss into which all harmony and structure had been cast forever. She raised the vision glass one more time and aimed it at the not-yet-risen sun. She spun the wheels. The colors turned and slowed, and redness flooded into her, and drenched her mind, and she thought it was blood, then for an instant, an instant terrible and infinite and true, the red became a dress, and a woman wore it, and the woman in red swung from the end of a rope tied about her neck.
The glass fell from her hands into her lap. For a moment she was deaf to the roar of the guns and blind to their fire, and to the birth of the day and the smell of the sea she was numb, and to the cool of the morning breeze her skin was callused. On her tongue was a taste as flat and lifeless and bitter and cold as brass. She sealed the vision glass in its leather case. She stood up on the rock. And she threw the glass into the sea.
It disappeared without a splash. And if with the vision stone’s vanishment something precious inside her died, something new was born. She would face the future without prognostication, and the present as she’d never dared face it before: with Hope. The Angels had abandoned her. And she didn’t know how to petition Almighty God, for she’d never thought to call on Him before. She turned her back on mortal chaos and closed her eyes and laced her hands.
“Please God,” she said. “Protect my love from harm.”
She opened her eyes. From beyond the far-most curvature of the world, a vermilion sun ascended the cloud-bruised sky. And in answer to her prayer she heard nothing but the rage of Moslem guns.
Saturday, June 16, 1565
Saint Elmo—The Ramparts—The Forge
The most surprising discovery Orlandu made about battle was that it was work. The fear, the stench, the horror, the rage, the random gusts of panic and exhilaration, the hatred and loyalty and valor, all these had formed some part of his fantasy, erected upon the tales he’d heard all his life. Because the tales were brief, the battles in his imagination were settled with a few rousing moments of crisis and high drama. But six, eight, ten hours of massed combat was mostly composed of grinding and exhausting tedium, like quarrying stone in blistering heat while somebody tried to stab you in the back. It was the most arduous and backbreaking labor ever devised and Orlandu, who’d spent his days scraping galleys, was no stranger to toil. At times a pair of depleted warriors from either camp would stop in the middle of a duel by mutual agreement, and lean upon their spears as if upon shovels while they caught their breath. Then they’d nod and start again and fight until one or the other of them was slain.
The first assault that day had been by maniacs: fiends dressed in the skins of leopards and wolves and wild dogs, the sun flashing from gold-plated helms, and utterly careless of their lives. Iayalars, Tannhauser called them, who chewed hashish and smoked hemp and chanted through the night to stoke their frenzy. Some even charged stark naked, their privities all adangle between their thighs. They waded across the swill of feces and maggots, and trampled through the black and bursting corpses that enswathed the enceinte, and kicked a path through the flap and squawk of vultures too glutted to fly. They came at the walls with scaling irons and ladders and were slaughtered by the arquebusiers and the enfilading cannon of the salients, as if their only purpose was to fill the groaning ditches with their meat.
As the remnants crawled back up the mountain, a host of dervishes howled their way to Paradise. After them came the Azeb infantries. And from the blinding glare of the meridian sun, to the jangle of their bands and the pounding of their drums, the janissaries joined the fray. Time and again they rolled down the hill and up the pestilent counter-scarps to scale the walls, there only to tumble from the ramparts like bloody surf.
It made no sense.
Tannhauser had elected to avoid the rigors of the line by employing his marksmanship. Along with his wheel-lock rifle, he picked a Turkish seven-palm musket from the stockpile of captured weapons and with Orlandu to load the latter he crawled about the ramparts behind the pikemen, sniping from the embrasures and wreaking a horrible toll on Mustafa Pasha’s officers. Half a dozen times he took a shot at the Pasha himself, who directed the theater of madness from the ravelin, with Torghoud Rais at his side. But Allah must have protected the wizened commander, for though Tannhauser dropped three guardsmen at Mustafa’s very feet, that was one mark he couldn’t make, nor could anyone else.
For Orlandu, carrying twelve pounds of musket, a ten-pound sack of balls, and a heavy flask of powder was hardly less brutal than dragging the tub of mush, and more terrifyingly onerous by far. It took twenty-two steps to load and fire a musket, and twenty-one of them were left to him. Under fire, the game became a nightmare. The misfires shamed him. The overloads and double loads, whose recoil almost blew his hero off the alure, earned him a curse and a clout. The pike butts and elbows were as heedless as before. And the overheated barrel scorched his hands. Sparks fell in streams down the neck of his breastplate, which was itself an oven. Black powder stung his eyes and smoke peeled his throat. At times he found himself weeping as his fingers dropped the flask. He wasn’t allowed to shoot because he’d waste a precious shot. Yet despite his bouts of anger, Tannhauser carried him through. With a word of praise or a piece of advice. With a slap on the back or a grimy smile. With a jest and a peal of laughter. With unguarded looks of affection that Orlandu had never seen in his life before.
The maelstrom roiled about the teetering walls from one end of the day to the other. When the bloodred round at last went down on another festering harvest of bloating dead, the Moslems bent before Allah’s will and retired, and the defenders knelt by their weapons and praised Christ. Orlandu had no breath left for his Savior. He slumped against a merlon, musket in his lap, and fell at once into a slumber. Before he could dream a hand hauled him upright and held him firm while he found his wits. Tannhauser cradled both long guns in his arm. His eyes were shadowy hollows in his skull.
“Come, boy,” he said. “Keep me company while I eat.”
That evening Tannhauser fell into melancholy and said little. As soon as he’d finished his meal, Orlandu fell asleep on the ground where he sat. He woke on an instinct, in the silence of the early hours, and saw Tannhauser’s long silhouette cross the moonlit bailey. Sleep called Orlandu back and his aching body begged him to pay heed, but something stronger pushed him to his feet and he followed, picking his way through the gun stones that littered his path.
Orlandu caught up with him at the door to the armorer’s workshop. Tannhauser carried a helmet and a lamp and seemed amused yet glad to see him. Neither spoke as they went inside and there Tannhauser paused to inhale the smells, which were of sacking and bear grease and cinders and coal, and notably wholesome af
ter the pestilential miasma that reigned outside. Orlandu watched as he strode to the forge and set down the lamp and helm and raked the ashes for a coral-pink residue of embers. From these he coaxed flames and he called Orlandu to work the bellows—gently now—and showed him how to feed in the coke and build the coal bed, and once again Orlandu was in awe of his expertise and felt the crush of shame that he was such a know-nothing. Tannhauser stripped the helm of its padding and laid it on the coals and they watched the seep of color into the steel.
“When I was your age,” said Tannhauser, “this was my intended trade. A blacksmith was all I wanted to be, and I thought it the greatest art in the world.” He shrugged. “No doubt I was right. But it wasn’t to be. I’ve lost what little knack I had, but it soothes me to shoe a horse from time to time, or work a piece of metal in the fire.” Orlandu was about to ask him why it wasn’t to be, but Tannhauser said, “See how the color turns.” He pointed. “Fetch me that peen hammer.”
Tannhauser grabbed the helmet with tongs and set the heated portion over the anvil’s horn and set to working it four inches from the crown.
“After I lost my own in the harbor last night I couldn’t find another helm to fit me.” He looked up from the anvil. “You’re a fine swimmer. A strong one too.”
Orlandu glowed. “I could teach you,” he said.
Tannhauser smiled and went on hammering. “I daresay so, but not in the time we have left. Could you swim the bay to Sant’Angelo, as the messengers do?”
“Oh yes, easily.” Easily was a boast, but he could do it.
Tannhauser returned the helmet to the coals and pumped the bellows.
“Then that is what you must do. Tonight.”