The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  The day dawned when Tannhauser awoke and knew, for no particular reason, that it was over and that he was well: weak and shriveled to a bag of sinews and bone, but free of whatever it was that had so ailed him. He looked at the Ethiop and saw that he knew too. He rose from his bed on enfeebled legs and walked out into the daylight, with the Ethiop at his side. Abbas’s tent was pitched on a hill overlooking the Marsa, the broad flat plain between Monte Sciberras and Corradino Heights at the landward end of Grand Harbor. The Marsa was filled by the sprawl of the Turkish camp—the bivouacs and kitchens and supply dumps; and the spreading stain of the field hospital, where those less fortunate than Tannhauser lay dying beneath scraps of canvas and the violence of the midsummer sun. They walked the quarter-mile to the rim of the hill and from there looked down on what might have been the bore of Mount Etna.

  A dense gray cloud hovered over the coastal arrangement of peninsulas and bays, and spouting smoke and muzzle blasts formed the spokes of a giant wheel that took in Gallows Point and Saint Elmo, and the heights of Sciberras, San Salvatore, Margharita, and Corradino, where they stood. At the center of the holocaust’s ire were the Borgo and L’Isola, themselves all acrackle and aflame with musketry and cannon fire. A howl rose through the morning and the Sultan’s legions surged across the Grande Terre Plein, and over the corpse-choked ditches, to splash against the smoke-blacked bastions of either fortress. Ladders were thrown up, and fire hoops and pipkins sailed down, and hand-to-hand butchery was joined along the devastated ramparts.

  After his sojourn in the timeless pink womb, the frenzied broil below seemed an aberrant phantasm not of this world, a devil’s joke whose actors were recruited by deception.

  But this was the world, and his world most of all, and the knowledge that he must soon plunge back in, for one flag or another, filled him with dread and nausea, and a yearning to retreat into the helplessness from which he’d just emerged. He glanced at the Ethiop, and for once caught him unguarded. The man had the look of a cat who sat on a window and watched two rival packs of dogs fighting in the street. He looked at Tannhauser, and saw whatever he saw, then turned and walked back toward the camp.

  Tannhauser watched him go. His nausea was transformed into hunger. A bestial, raving hunger. A lust for meat. He didn’t look back at the battle. If the Religion was to fall, this was as good a day as any. Clearly that was Mustafa’s hope and intention. Tannhauser went to find some breakfast. At the kitchen he learned that it was August 2, and that he’d been inside the tent for close on six weeks. When he returned from the kitchens, the Ethiop had gone, and Tannhauser never saw him there again.

  The Religion did not fall on August 2. Tannhauser watched from the hill as dusk fell and the muezzin wailed the evening call and the mauled battalions of janissaries trooped by with their tattered colors and their wounded, heading for their campfires and what comfort they could find around their cauldrons.

  Abbas returned to his tent in a dark mood and Tannhauser, or as Abbas knew him, Ibrahim, joined him in prayer. Afterward, they dined at a low table made of polished cherrywood. Abbas was now in his fifties, much admired by his peers and revered by his men, whose welfare, horses, and equipment he fostered with subsidies from his own purse. His beard was steel gray and two pale scars marked his brow and cheek. Otherwise he remained as lean and elegant as the day he’d found Mattias by his mother’s corpse.

  On the three-month journey they’d taken together, twenty-five years ago, from the wilds of the Fagaras Mountains to the greatest city in the world, Abbas had taught Ibrahim the rudiments of Turkish, the rituals of daily prayer, how to conduct himself as a man when he entered the Enderun military college in Istanbul. In return, Ibrahim had proved his skill in repairing tackle and in the care and fettling of horseflesh. Though it had been the men under Abbas’s command who had murdered his mother and sisters, Ibrahim had not held him to blame. Robbed of every other ally, perhaps he lacked the wit to do so. Rather, he adored the man, and in some sense his abandonment to the discipline of the Enderun had been more desolating than his departure from the village of his birth.

  Since then they’d met again only once, in Iran, when the Turks had ravaged the Yerevan and razed the palace of Tahmasp Shah and in Nakhichevan left no stone mortared to another. Stones that had stood since before the birth of Christ, until the janissaries came. It had been a formal occasion, an inspection of the troops and disbursement of rewards on the outskirts of the latter devastation before continuing their pursuit of the Shiites toward the Oxus. Ibrahim, as janitor of his orta, had accepted the bonus money due his men for their ruthlessness and bravery. Abbas had congratulated him on his distinguished career and invited him for tea, and they agreed that at some future time when circumstances allowed they should renew their special friendship. But circumstances never did.

  During Tannhauser’s sickness they’d talked little, Abbas being preoccupied with military matters and the intrigues of the war council, which as always on Turkish campaigns were potentially lethal. Tonight they ate pilaf and roast pigeon and sugared almonds. They drank coffee. Abbas had changed into a caftan of watered white silk, woven through with gold-and-silver thread. From his ear hung a perfect gray pearl the size of a hazelnut. He owned lands and shipping interests in the Golden Horn. He was a man of high refinement and great culture. He was one of those warriors to whom war was abomination. They were altogether too few, and Tannhauser found that his affection for the man had not diminished despite the years.

  Tannhauser thanked him for yet again saving his life and Abbas gave thanks to Allah for the chance to do so, for Charity was a sacred obligation.

  “In a time of great evils such as this one, when the wings of the Angel of Death are everywhere felt and heard, small acts of kindness are as jewels from Heaven, and more so to the giver than to he who receives them, for as the Prophet, blessed be His name, said, ‘Be compassionate to others, that you may be granted compassion by Allah.’ ” Abbas added, “If you once save a man’s life, you become his guardian forever.”

  Thinking of Bors and Sabato Svi, as well as the noble gazi seated before him, Tannhauser said, “In that I’ve known the greatest fortune, for I’m guarded by lions.”

  Abbas asked him how he’d come to be taken by the Christian dogs. It was distasteful to lie into the luminous brown eyes of the man who had twice been his savior, but it was the least of his recent crimes.

  “A cavalry patrol surprised me on the road to Marsaxlokk,” Tannhauser said. “It was a little after dawn, in early June, and they came on me like demons from Gallows Point, which I’d understood was ours.”

  Abbas nodded. “That was the morning they destroyed Torghoud’s batteries. As for demons . . .” His lips twisted and he shook his head. “These knights are the Children of Satan. Some say La Valette is a necromancer and that devils have been seen by his side.”

  “He is only a man,” said Tannhauser.

  “You have met him?” asked Abbas.

  Tannhauser said, “I have seen him. La Valette is one of those old men whose only true love is war. If there is necromancy at work it is that. Without war he would be shriveled or dead, useless, decayed. But war renews his blood, lightens his step, sharpens his eyes. His own men regard him as a demigod, but there’s no reason we should do the same.”

  “He’s proved himself a formidable adversary.”

  “He plays to his strengths and our weaknesses. He has a genius for siege and defense in depth. He knows the soldier’s heart, for such is his own. We’re not fighting Shiites or Austrians.”

  Abbas’s brow rose in a weary gesture. “Would that the council knew it.” The reason for his earlier black mood became clear. “Mustafa lacks the patience to let the cannon and the miners do their work. Dig, I tell him, mine their walls and destroy them from below. But mass assaults thrill his blood, like a gambler with too much gold who must risk losing all to find enjoyment. At least he’s accepted my demand to construct a pair of siege towers. Two galleys at Marsax
lokk are being dismantled for the timbers.”

  Abbas had once studied architecture under the famed Greek devshirme Sinan, commander of the Sultan’s war machines and builder of a thousand mosques. He added, with a muted pride, “They’ll be constructed to my own design, but will take two weeks or more to complete. In the meanwhile, the lives of our men will continue to be squandered.”

  It seemed to Tannhauser that if the Turks were building war engines more suited to antiquity than to the modern age, the besiegers were approaching desperation. He kept this thought to himself and said, “And Piyale?”

  “Kapudan Pasha Piyale is the wiser strategist, but his fear for our Sultan’s fleet dominates his thought. He’s desperate to conclude the siege before the high winds of autumn. Once the winds come, the fleet will be stranded here throughout the winter. We’re a thousand miles from home. Sometimes it seems farther than that.”

  Words of comfort or encouragement escaped Tannhauser’s effort to conjure them. He let the silence stand.

  “We will conquer, if that be Allah’s will,” said Abbas. “But the cost will be high. Especially to the janissaries.”

  “The cost to the janissaries is always high.”

  “It is their vocation.” Abbas studied him for a moment. “You are known in the bazaar as a trader in opium. They say that when Malta falls you plan to trade in pepper, from Alexandria.”

  Abbas had kept his ears open but Tannhauser’s masquerade was proven sound. He thought of Sabato Svi and inwardly smiled. Sabato would have been amused to know that his faith in the market for pepper had now spread to the heart of the Turkish high command.

  He said, “The future of the empire lies in trade. If I may say so, more than in war.”

  “Why did you leave the janissaries?”

  The question was asked without either warning or threat. Tannhauser gave his stock answer. “There are only so many times a man can march across Iran before his feet ask if there isn’t another way of serving our Sultan.”

  Abbas smiled. “The kullar of the Sultan’s sword have little choice in such matters. You retired before the age at which it is normally permitted, and with the prospect of high advancement before you.”

  Tannhauser had not expected Abbas to be so well informed. He didn’t answer.

  “I will tell you a story I heard,” said Abbas. “The tragic fate of our Sultan’s eldest son, Prince Mustafa, is widely known. As a member of his personal guard, you would know it better than most.”

  “Indeed,” said Tannhauser. “I saw the prince’s body thrown onto the carpet outside our Sultan’s campaign tent.”

  At the time, Suleiman had had four sons alive of the eight his two wives had borne him. Prince Mustafa’s mother was Gulbahar, who had long been supplanted in the court, and in Suleiman’s heart, by Roxelane, “the Russian woman,” who was mother to the other three. Roxelane knew that if Prince Mustafa were to ascend the throne—and, since his talents were great and both the army and the aristocracy were behind him, this was likely—he would have his three half brothers murdered. The Osmanli tradition of fratricide was hallowed by time. Suleiman himself was the only survivor of five full-blood brothers. Their father, Selim the Grim, had murdered the other four, leaving only Suleiman to rule.

  By means of a series of intrigues Roxelane convinced Suleiman that his son not only was planning to dethrone him but had even established relations with the Safavid heretics of Iran, with whom Suleiman was at war. Suleiman summoned Prince Mustafa to his camp in Karamania, and with characteristic ruthlessness had him strangled by the deaf-mute eunuchs.

  “If Prince Mustafa had meant to overthrow the emperor, he would never have responded to the summons,” said Tannhauser. “I knew the prince. The plot was a grotesque invention by the Russian woman.”

  “We will never know,” said Abbas, discreetly. “But that is not the subject of my story. The army’s fury at the prince’s death was great, especially amongst the janissaries. If there’d been a man prepared to lead them, nothing could have stopped them from overthrowing our Sultan on the spot, perhaps even killing him. The cauldrons would have been tipped over.”

  The brass cauldron from which the janissaries ate their single daily meal was the symbol of their Order. To tip it over was the signal for revolt, an event to which at least two previous sultans owed their reigns. While the janissaries were numerically the smallest corps in the army, their political power was immense.

  Tannhauser said, “There was no such leader.”

  Abbas looked at Tannhauser keenly. Tannhauser felt nothing. Whatever feeling he had harbored had been exorcised long ago. He said, “Even if there had been such a man, and such a revolt, it would only have unleashed war between Prince Mustafa’s son, Murad, and the other brothers. Better that one man die than countless thousands. Our Sultan, as always, was wise.”

  “Exactly so,” agreed Abbas. “Which brings me back to my subject. Certain powers required that all trace of the prince’s bloodline be extinguished. Forever. Murad was strangled soon afterward. Prince Mustafa’s other son was only three years old. Suleiman sent a court eunuch and a janissary captain to put the child—his grandson—to death. This captain was chosen by lot from the dead prince’s bodyguard, as a guarantee they’d renewed their loyalty to their Sultan.”

  Tannhauser was suddenly bone tired and filled with melancholy. He wanted to return to his bed. He wanted the Ethiop to watch over him. He craved his healing silence. But the Ethiop wasn’t here. Only politeness prevented him from leaving Abbas’s table.

  “The child’s elected executioner was the janissary captain,” Abbas continued. “But when he saw the boy walk toward him—with his little hands outstretched to offer a kiss—the janissary fainted.”

  The janissary had in fact left the tent to vomit in the dust, but there seemed no merit in correcting Abbas’s version of events.

  Abbas concluded: “The black eunuch performed the deed in his stead.”

  “Why do you tell me this story?” asked Tannhauser.

  “Is the story true?” said Abbas.

  Tannhauser didn’t answer.

  “I can understand,” said Abbas, “why that janissary might lose his taste for military service, and why the Sultan’s gratitude might extend to permitting his honorable retirement.”

  In Abbas’s eyes was a look that Tannhauser recalled from the first time he’d met him, on a cold spring morning in a mountain valley whose rivers he sometimes heard in the landscapes of his dreams. A look of recognition that crossed an unbridgeable gulf for no other reason than that it was able to do so, and was therefore ordained by some higher power, be it human or Divine. Tannhauser blinked and looked away.

  “At the height of your fever,” said Abbas, “when you were insensible, and the physicians told me there was little hope, you murmured a chant, over and again. I put my ear to your lips to listen. What you repeated were the first verses of Adh-Dhariyat.”

  The Arabic cadences rolled through Tannhauser’s mind like a haunting strain. Still he didn’t speak, and Abbas quoted them for him.

  “By the winds that winnow with a winnowing, And those that bear the burden of the rain, And those that glide with ease upon the sea, And those Angels who scatter blessings by Allah’s command, Verily that which you are promised is surely true, And verily Judgment and Justice will come to pass.”

  He nodded. “It was the first of the verses of Al-Kitab that you taught me, because that was the surah from which you chose my name.”

  “God chose it, not I.”

  Tannhauser nodded. He did not much dwell upon those days, but for a moment the memories caught him, and he realized that this tranquil night with Abbas was precious, and that the time comes when even dark days are remembered with something like affection.

  He said, “I learned the verses you speak now as you spoke them then, which pleased you, even though I couldn’t understand them.”

  “No man can wholly understand the word of God,” said Abbas.
/>   “So you told me at that time. Would that others knew it.”

  Abbas nodded, somewhat somberly.

  “You also told me,” said Tannhauser, “that the word of Allah cannot be spoken in any other tongue, for Arabic is the tongue in which He chose to speak to the Prophet, blessed be His name. Yet you translated the name of the Adh-Dhariyat for me: ‘The Winnowing Winds.’”

  Abbas laughed, surprised. “I did?”

  “It was a comfort to me, I don’t know why. And a great mystery. I pressed you on its meaning. ‘What is a winnowing wind?’ You were very patient. You considered it. ‘The wind that separates the wheat from the chaff,’ you said. I wondered if I were one or the other—for I felt that a wind had swept me away.” He smiled. “It sweeps me still. And I asked you, ‘What is the difference between the wheat and the chaff?’ And you considered again, and said, ‘The difference between those who love life and those who love death.’”

  Abbas seemed taken aback. “I said that?”

  “I forgot it for many years,” said Tannhauser. “But the day I saw the eunuch put the bowstring around the prince-child’s throat, I remembered it. I’ve never forgotten it since.”

  “It is for the scholars to interpret the ulema. If I said such things, I was young, and prone to unwitting blasphemies. Forgive me.”

  Abbas rose to his feet. Tannhauser followed, so weak that he had to use his hands to push up from the table. He swayed slightly and Abbas took his arm.

  “Ibrahim,” said Abbas. “When I found you at Fort Saint Elmo, you called me ‘Father.’”

  “I have always thought of you as such,” said Tannhauser, “though it’s a presumption to which I have no right. I hope I did not offend you.”

  “You could not have honored me more highly.” Abbas turned his face away to conceal an excess of sentiment. When he turned back, his eyes were clear. “Did you ever meet your own father again?”