The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  Ludovico was assigned to Knight Commander Zanoguerra, who led a flying section of a score of Spaniards and Italians held in reserve for the greatest crisis. Among them were three brethren who had special orders from Del Monte to watch for Ludovico’s safety. Two were Italians: Bruno Marra of Umbria and a young Sienese novice called Pandolfo. The third, a fierce Castilian, was Escobar de Corro, seconded from the cavalry in Mdina. They all of them turned.

  Beyond the grinding windmills just to the north a vast explosion and a fountain of limbs and flame consumed the seaward extremity of L’Isola’s wall. Even here, at the opposite end of the peninsula, where the fortifications angled inland from the water to face the heights, fragments of airborne debris clattered against their harness. Only the explosion of a powder magazine could explain such vast destruction. They watched as a bastion and its curtain wall slid down through the dust cloud and into the water. Kandelissa’s Algerian banners bobbed up the slope for the smoking ruins. Zanoguerra turned to his section.

  “The time has come to perish for our Holy Faith.”

  Zanoguerra led them along the seaward alure at a run. Their route lay through chaos and was slippery as the floor of an abattoir. The angle and weight of the enemy’s scaling ladders made them difficult to dislodge from the wall—when burdened by dozens of men, quite impossible—and all along the battlements Moslem and Christian panted in sweating embrace for possession of the walls.

  Some paces ahead a Maltese militiaman paused while spearing a Moslem on the rampart’s edge—held him piked through the chest and coughing blood, his Mohammedan comrades screeching from their perches on the scaling ladder behind him. The Maltese pulled down his breeches with one hand, and squatted, and with the speed and aplomb of a man clearing his throat he squirted forth a large and steaming turd. Then he whipped his breeches back up and returned to the task of shunting the steel spike deeper through his victim’s lungs. As Ludovico got closer, another Algerian scrambled over the shoulders of his impaled comrade, who stubbornly clutched the pike shaft with both hands to prevent its withdrawal from his breast. The Maltese relinquished the pike but too late, for, as he drew his dagger, the Algerian gained the crenel and hacked him with a scimitar in the neck. The Maltese charged the Algerian about the knees, stabbing him with his dagger in the thighs, the crotch, the loins, bringing him down, crawling on top of him between the merlons, their heads bobbing above the sheer drop to the beach, each man grunting, wheezing, each man drenched in the blood of the other and both in that of the first—still speared, still perched on a slippery rung, still coughing scarlet spray, still fighting as he ripped off the Maltese’s helm and pulled his hair and gouged at his eyes and jammed his thumbs into the gaping wound in his neck to tear it further open.

  Ludovico lunged across the dying Maltese and ran his sword into the speared man’s gaping mouth. He felt the snap of breaking teeth and the crunch of the sword as it penetrated skull or spine. His own spine shivered at the sensation. He withdrew the blade in a spout of bloody vomit and guided the gore-tarnished point beneath the body of the Maltese and rammed it deep into the Moslem flesh there pinned beneath. Anacleto joined him and thrust his sword through the melee. The tangle of squirming men convulsed in a grotesque and frantic spasm, and Ludovico stepped back, his foot detecting the moist surrender of the turd, then all three men, Algerians and Maltese alike, teetered over the edge and cartwheeled into space and plummeted down to swell the mass of bodies heaving below.

  Ludovico caught his breath. In his chest—in his limbs, in his throat—a nameless ecstasy arose like the force of Revelation. He looked at Anacleto, who nodded once and turned away. Ludovico was a killer of men. The knowledge elated him.

  He raised his face into the blinding light and thanked God.

  They plunged onward.

  Zanoguerra’s elite closed with the Algerians at the breach and left the debris reeking with brains and limbs and bowels. The sails of the windmills cast intermittent bands of shade across the disputants and Ludovico plunged into the fray. Ignoring the clatter of blades on his pauldrons and salet, he hacked and thrust two-handed, and smashed his steel-clad elbows into narrow brown faces, and stabbed with all his might into the fallen who crawled at his feet. He heaved on the dust-choked air and called on Saint Dominic for strength. Anacleto seemed to flank him on every side at once, darting between the scimitars and striking underhand blows at the otherwise engaged, and saving his master’s life more times than he knew.

  Zanoguerra exhorted the cowed militia from the ruins, stoking their spirits with invocations of Christ and urging them to lay down their lives for the Holy Religion. Then a musket ball bored him through the chest and he fell among the dead. As the jackals of the Prophet mobbed his corpse, panic swept again through the militia and they fled the bloody couloir to shelter among the mills. An exuberant hurrah swept the Moslem throng and they rallied and turned to surge once more up the rubble. Ludovico and Anacleto and the few Castilians left formed a cordon around their stricken commander, and a steadfast handful of Maltese joined their band athwart the rupture, and they chanted the Paternoster in readiness for the end.

  “Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . .”

  “. . . sanctificetur nomen tuum.”

  “Thy kingdom come.”

  “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

  “Give us this day our daily bread . . .”

  “. . . and forgive us our trespasses . . .”

  “. . . as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .”

  “Et ne nos inducas in tentationem . . .”

  “. . . but deliver us from evil . . .”

  “Amen.”

  “Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . .”

  The Algerians stormed up the rock-strewn grade and Ludovico glanced down. For the first time he noticed that an arrow jutted out from his thigh. He had no memory of its impact. Anacleto cut a niche in the shaft with his sword and snapped it short. Ludovico thanked him.

  “My God,” said Anacleto. “Look.”

  Ludovico turned. The refugee women of the tent town were climbing up the scree in a crowd. Their skirts were hitched around their waists and they scavenged weapons from the slain, and as they took to the ramparts and closed hand to hand with the fiends, Ludovico felt his eyes blur with tears. Beyond these Maltese Amazons, the Langue of Auvergne under Sieur de Quinay and a company of Spanish infantry crossed the bridge of boats spanning Galley Creek. Ludovico plunged back into the fray and tremendous slaughter was joined all along the shore.

  It took two hours to drive Kandelissa and his gazi back to their boats. Those among the Moslems who surrendered were butchered in the sand. Those found half drowned were knifed in the shallows by the Maltese women. With the news that their shorefront assault had failed the heart drained from the landward assault. Del Monte’s Italians drove Hassem and his Algerians from the walls, then sallied out from the gates and massacred the laggards in the Ruins of Bormula. The sun sank behind Monte Sciberras in a multihued fantasy of saffron and pink, and as Ludovico watched the last of the Moslem boats pull out of range, flocks of vultures circled the corpse-glutted beach. In the waters surrounding the peninsula countless lifeless bundles bobbed in the surf and swimmers splashed out from the beach to harvest the floaters of their jewels and silver and gold. Thousands of Algerians would never see home. But the cost to the Religion had been high. In the dolorous exhaustion of the aftermath Del Monte appeared by Ludovico.

  “Battle is a monstrous business.” Del Monte shrugged. “But it gets beneath your skin.”

  Ludovico looked at him. He felt light-headed, his vision slashed with instants of absolute blackness. He raised his scorched voice to an audible rasp. “With your blessing, I wish to make my profession as a Knight of Saint John.”

  His legs buckled and Del Monte held him upright. Ludovico rallied. He followed Del Monte’s gaze and saw that his boots were filled to their tops with murky fluid and curdled blood. Del Monte called a younger kn
ight and told him and Anacleto to take Ludovico to the infirmary.

  “As to your induction into the Convent,” said Del Monte, “leave it to me.”

  Of the walk to the infirmary, across the bridge of boats, which heaved and rocked with the exodus of halt and maimed, he remembered little. To make better progress through the rabble his escorts laid about them with the flats of their swords. An unknown peasant woman gave him wine from a skin; he didn’t know why. When they reached the Sacred Infirmary they found such chaos and confusion that his escorts refused to abandon him. They made to carry him the extra few hundred yards to the Auberge of Italy, or so, in his dazed condition, he vaguely grasped. As they turned, Ludovico stopped and fought against their hands.

  There, across the gore-caked anteroom, he saw a woman bent over a convulsing mass of wounds, which he realized was a naked man that she pinned to a table. Her arms were crimson to the shoulders. Her hair had fallen loose and was plastered to the gouts that smeared her face. But neither this nor the carvings of exhaustion on her brow could mar her beauty, still less the tenderness of her countenance. He tried to call out but his throat failed him. He envied the man on the table. Jealousy pierced his bowels. And more than his bone-deep fatigue, more than his wounds, more than the ecstasy and horror that had taxed his soul, it was the sight of her that brought him to his knees.

  It was Carla.

  As the last of his senses slid from his grasp and the young knights let him fall, he realized that he loved her still, and an abyss as deep as eternity opened inside him. He loved her despite the years of virtue and discipline. He loved her despite the jeopardy to his duty. He loved her with as dark a desperation as that which had bewitched him once before.

  Wednesday, August 1, 1565

  The Borgo—The Sacred Infirmary—The Auberge of England

  Beneath the light of the Milky Way the streets of the Borgo lay silent and derelict and pale, like a ghost’s faded memory of a civilization ruined long ago. Midnight was near when Carla left the Sacred Infirmary and crossed the piazza. The flagstones stank from the vinegar used to cleanse them of blood and waste, and the smell increased the dizziness of her exhaustion. For the last two weeks the night had been rent by random Turkish bombardments, and she picked her way through the streets with an eye for cover. Everything—including those sleeping outdoors—was powdered with sandstone dust. Gun stones would crash without warning through the roofs of overcrowded hovels. The Sacred Infirmary had been hit several times. Cannonballs bounced down the narrow cobbled alleys like playthings in an awful game. Even at rolling speed they were capable of shattering a limb and it had taken several gruesome incidents to teach the town’s children not to try to catch them.

  Without religion to comfort them, bind them, and, most of all, keep them occupied, the spirit of the people and the soldiery would have broken long ago. At La Valette’s command a more or less constant flow of holy rites had been maintained. Funerals and mass burials were conducted with great ceremony. Requiem Masses, Benedictions, novenas, vigils, and public processions were a daily occurrence. Rare icons and relics were displayed for public veneration and then removed. The feast days of saints scarcely recognized, even by the pious, were announced and commemorated. A handful of baptisms and three unlikely marriages had been conducted with special joy. In these ways, and in their fortitude and courage and in their kindness to one another, the people proved themselves worthy of God’s protection.

  But the other tie that bound them was a fervid hatred of Moslems, whom they considered inherently murderous, treacherous, and cruel. Much conversation concerned their inhuman character. The Order’s two thousand galley slaves, most of them repairing walls under Turkish gunfire, bore the brunt of this spite. The random acts of violence that they suffered went unpunished. When a line of women at the food depot had been chopped into raw meat by a Turkish cannonball, dozens of slaves had been murdered with shocking cruelty. Nicodemus, when he ventured out—and he did so more and more rarely—was treated like a man with a pestilent disease, even in church. Carla walked past the slave gangs, past their skeletal frames and suppurating sores and haunted faces, with a burning sense of shame.

  “You can do nothing,” Fra Lazaro told her. “War makes villains of us all.”

  Seventy-two days had passed since the old puppeteer had been hanged. Everyone had lost something of their sanity and their soul. Terrified and insomniac and sheltering in cellars and tunnels by night, and cowering in the debris from musket fire and arrows by day, the population lurched ever closer to despair. Some even hoped for the next Turkish attack: it would at least break the grinding, fear-soaked monotony, and maybe it would bring their trials to an end. Carla was not amongst these latter. She had not forgotten—she could never forget—the aftermath of the assault on Saint Michel.

  The wounded had started to arrive when the battle was done, when the bridge of boats had been opened—at last—to the injured. Until then the casualties, who’d swollen since early morning into a parched and wretched horde, had been detained by armed guards on the far side of the creek. Fra Lazaro had sent across three of the town’s Jewish doctors to do what they could and with the din of the slaughter a mere three hundred feet distant the Jews had toiled like angels in the scorching and bloodstained chaos. Carla hadn’t been alone in her desire to volunteer, but Lazaro had some notion of what was to come and refused to risk the lives of his staff.

  Even Lazaro was stunned by the scale of what followed. The exodus of the wounded across the slippery, lurching planks was too harrowing to describe. The knights were favored first, an injustice accepted by all as the way of the world. Then came a torrent of panic which the provost marshals tried and failed to control. People slipped through ropes into the creek, where they drowned. Others fell into the boats and expired in tangled, suffocating piles. Others yet were trampled to death. From the Borgo end of the boat bridge the townsfolk bore the fallen on blankets and wattles to the infirmary; those with strength to do so hobbled or crawled; members of either group expired in droves along the way. By the time the evacuation was complete the streets along the route displayed a wall-to-wall mantling of russet sludge.

  The Sacred Infirmary was the best equipped and staffed in the known world—the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem had made it so—and with two hundred beds it was also one of the biggest. Large-scale slaughter was itself no innovation, but the human detritus was usually left on the battlefield to die. No institution had ever attempted to handle such numbers of casualties before. To try to save them at all was an act of Madness harnessed to Faith. But try they did, and they were overwhelmed.

  The walls and floors of the operating room were awash with gall and gore. Crews of Maltese women sloshed back and forth, swabbing up the crimson slime with mops soaked in vinegar. Then the mops became inadequate, and they were driven to using shovels to clear the fat, blackening clots, which multiplied under the slabs like obscene forms of life. Sweating surgeons wielded mallets to induce unconsciousness in their charges. They exhausted sheep-gut twine by the spool and called for their instruments to be resharpened time and again. Rotten teeth snapped on wooden gags, for the precious narcotic sponges quickly ran out. Arrowheads and musket balls and shards of bloody masonry—plucked and quarried from the depths of groaning flesh—skittered about the tiles underfoot. The smells of cauterization hung in a pall. Among competing yells of agony and command, chaplains knelt in habits saturate with blood and dispensed extreme unction with unseemly speed. With nauseating regularity, tubfuls of amputated limbs were ferried to the growing heap outside. Larger still were the stacks of the dead.

  Necessity voided the rules that had restricted Carla’s duties. Fra Lazaro set her to strip and wash the casualties before they braved the surgeon’s slab. Armor still hot to the touch had to be unbuckled and levered free of its convulsing occupants. There was clotted clothing and padding to peel from gashes and blistered skin; boots to cut away from shattered feet and shins; deformed and embedded helme
ts to pry from skulls. Without exception, the men stretched out on the trestles were befouled with excrement and dirt. To clean them, brine by the barrel was hauled from the harbor. And the wounded screamed. They screamed as they were stripped and they screamed as they were washed and they screamed as they were portered to the slab. Carla felt like their torturer. She ground her teeth and choked on her own dry retching. She avoided their flailing hands and rolling eyes. As she scrubbed their wounds with salt, she begged their forgiveness.

  There was no component or aspect of the human form, it seemed to her, that could not be punctured, slashed, crushed, burned, or severed, nor was there limit to the medleys thereof. Pain and Fear and Chaos, robbed of the theater of battle, now bestrode the stage of the infirmary with glee. They danced all about her and played on her every sense, assaulting her vision with pallid, twisted faces and violated flesh, harrowing her brain with piercing pleas and shrieks, fouling her mouth and nostrils with ruptured bowels and leaked urine and sweat and rancid breath. Even her hands tormented her, for they conveyed to her gut and spine every spasm of agony and the waste-polluted seawater burned her abraded fingers like a bane.

  Darkness fell early in the infirmary and by the flicker of lamp and candle Death was more present and Terror more palpable than ever. Now the shadows thrown onto the walls screamed too. Carla tried. She dug deep into whatever she contained of courage and worth, but it wasn’t enough. The moment came when she knew she’d have to flee. With the last of her self-command she made a promise, to herself, that she wouldn’t actually run. She’d drop the bloody washcloth in the bucket and slip away. No one would see her. She’d step across the bodies to the doorway, then over those splayed supine in the vestibule, then she’d reach the archway and the piazza. And then she’d run. San Lorenzo beckoned, and the shrine of Philermo, and Our Lady’s all-absolving gaze. Surely in Her embrace she would find some ease, and if not ease, at least the company of One who knew all sorrows.