The Religion

by Tim Willocks

  Tannhauser didn’t know whether to burst into tears or into laughter, in either case as expression of an inexpressible joy. He found that he loved this extraordinary beast, unknown yet present in his inmost heart, and looming large before him in his mind’s eye, as if, even there—as a phantasm—it might bear down and gore him if he looked at it too long.

  “It’s a rum tale,” he said. “The bull has the largeness of spirit not to live—or die—with the common mass. Yet by that act he marks himself out as the one who must be sacrificed by Fate.”

  Amparo reached out her hand and wiped one corner of his eye.

  “This brine is pungent,” he said, abashed. She smiled a catlike smile and he sniffed. “So tell me, how do they get this magnificent fellow to the plaza de toros?”

  “The herdsmen have their ways. They say the only one who knows the bull better than the herdsman is the rejoneador at the moment that he slays him.”

  “By the Rod,” he said, with sudden insight. “You’ve witnessed this very manner of finding the bull with your own eyes.”

  “My papa was a herdsman.”

  “Was?”

  “He found one bull who chose to fight in the mountains, rather than the plaza.”

  Tannhauser took this in in silence. He wondered if it was a bull that had left the indentation in her face. He preferred to think it was so, rather than—as he’d assumed before—the fist of some brute. He didn’t ask.

  “So you’re a nomad too,” he said.

  “A nomad?”

  “One who wanders, always, and claims no home.”

  She touched her left breast and said, “Here is home.” She touched Tannhauser’s chest and said, “And here.” While Tannhauser debated whether this was an erotic invitation, she said, “Where is your father?”

  “Very far away, in the northern mountains,” he replied.

  “Do you love him?”

  “He taught me how to forge steel,” he said. “And how to make fires burn hot, and the meaning of the colors in iron, and the care of horses, and how to be honest, and no end of other fine things, the best of which I’ve forgotten and which he has not.”

  “Then he is alive.”

  “I’ve no reason to think otherwise. He was always strong as an ox. Or as one of your bulls. I haven’t seen him in ten years,” said Tannhauser. “And he hasn’t seen me in almost three times that long.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Tannhauser stretched his shoulders and looked up into the turquoise sky. Abbas had provoked the memory too, and he’d resisted. Not so now.

  After retiring from the janissary corps he’d taken the decade’s wages that he’d hardly had the chance to spend and bought a horse and a fur-lined caftan, and traveled north—through the Sultan’s Christian fiefdoms, to the East Hungarian marches and the Fagaras Mountains, and finally to the village of his birth.

  Tannhauser, or as he was in those days, Ibrahim the Red, had gone at once to the smithy, and there had found a new firstborn son, who shoed his horse with skill and with the deference accorded to a lord. It was then that he realized how far above these remote mountain people his finery placed him. And Ottoman finery at that. He glimpsed the boy’s mother in the yard, a pretty thing not yet too hard worn. The boy had a younger brother. Their father would be back at sundown and, yes, his name was Kristofer. It was clear from the boy’s warmth that this father was greatly loved and respected.

  Ibrahim returned the next morning and Kristofer was there: his father too.

  Ibrahim had last seen his face when the world was young, when he was Mattias the blacksmith’s son, and his mother’s hair was bronze, and Britta sang of the raven while she played with Gerta in the yard. Kristofer had clapped young Mattias on the back, as he left on his circuit of the manors, and had told him to look out for the womenfolk. And Mattias had not done so, though he’d tried.

  Ibrahim found Kristofer in the forge, bent over glowing charcoal with his son, revealing some fascinating intricacy of his art. He wore a long leather apron. His hair had turned gray without thinning. For his fifty years he looked more than hale, his build as solid as ever, his forearms thickly thewed and his hands huge. His back was half turned and Ibrahim stood in the doorway—and he watched, with the forge taste of powdered goat horn and tallow in his mouth, and his ear readjusting to the dialect long unheard, and to the voice that stirred so many echoes.

  “There!” said Kristofer, as if spotting a bird of rare plumage. “That is the blue, like the early-morning sky on New Year’s Day. Remember it. Always. Quickly now.”

  The boy took a length of steel from the fire with his tongs and quenched it in a bucket and recited an Ave Maria. The steel looked like a mason’s chisel. As steam rose from the bucket, Ibrahim sniffed distilled vinegar and liquor of quicklime. Yes: the quench for a stone chisel. The long unremembered instructions flashed through his mind.

  “Not so hard that it will shatter from the blows of the hammer, nor so soft that it will bend at its holy task, for until the cutting of stone men lived in the wilderness—like Cain in the land of Nod—and without the right tools, the wilderness is where we will return.”

  Ibrahim almost stepped forward to grab an apron, but he caught the expression—the smile—on Kristofer’s face as he looked down at his boy and glowed with a primal sentiment and pride. They were feelings unknown to Ibrahim, for he had no son. But that look, that smile, those he’d known, and the face of God could not have been more benevolent.

  And in this moment Ibrahim—who’d faced Death a score of times and called him honest—conceived a fear far greater than any he had known. Kristofer had built his family anew. He had endured, and flourished, and from the ashes of desolation rekindled his fire of family and love and peace, and by its light he taught magic and beauty and the mysteries of creation to his son. He’d borne the slaughter and sorrow that devils had wrought upon him, and upon those he’d loved more than life. Devils like Ibrahim. Whose trade was murder—and the strangling of babes—and not the cutting of stone but its razing to the ground.

  Why revisit such terrible grief upon this gentle man? Why reveal what his firstborn son had become in the meanwhile: a bloodstained servant of the Power that had massacred his children? Why cast a shadow too black to own a name across the radiance of his forge?

  Kristofer sensed him at the door and turned and saw Ibrahim’s Turkish garb but not his face, backlit as he was by morning sunshine from the yard. The smile of God vanished from his face. He bowed, coldly, with a civility that excluded any deference.

  “Good day, sir,” he said. “How may I serve you?”

  Ibrahim remembered that instruction too: the greeting, the poise, the graciousness. His throat tightened and he cleared it.

  He said, “Your boy, here, he shoed and fettled my horse, just yesterday.”

  Kristofer had spoken in the German that Ibrahim thought he had lost. The blacksmith hadn’t expected a reply in the same. Not from this Turk.

  Kristofer blinked. “You have a grievance?”

  The boy stiffened. Ibrahim upraised his palm.

  “Not at all. To the contrary, the beast has never taken better to a new set of shoes, and he and I had traveled many hard leagues.” He stopped, for fear of revealing too much. “I felt I’d paid too little for such expert labor, and wanted to give the boy a bonus.”

  The boy colored with pleasure.

  “This is not necessary,” said Kristofer. “Your satisfaction is reward enough. Thank the gentleman, Mattie.”

  The revelation of the boy’s name further thickened Ibrahim’s throat and intensified his confusion. “Even so,” said Ibrahim, “if I could do so without offense, it would please me.”

  Mattie looked at his father and received a nod, and while the boy walked across the forge, Kristofer regarded the shadowed figure in the door with an odd curiosity. Ibrahim fumbled for his purse, which contained the better part of all his silver and gold. He hadn’t planned this circumstance. By the tim
e Mattie reached him, the impulse could not be debated or resisted. He pulled his purse free and crammed it in the boy’s hands, shielding it, he hoped, from Kristofer’s view. Mattie felt its weight and opened his mouth to protest.

  “Mind your manners, boy,” said Ibrahim, under his breath. “And don’t open this until I’m gone.”

  He glanced once more at Kristofer. Could the man see him or not? Go now, he thought, before it’s too late. He raised his hand.

  “Peace be upon you and all your household,” he said.

  He turned out of the door, where his horse stood waiting.

  “Stay awhile,” said Kristofer’s voice behind him. “Share some breakfast with us.”

  Ibrahim paused on the threshold. An exquisite pain knifed his heart. An abyss gaped at his feet, as another had gaped on that very same threshold so many lifetimes ago. Should he reclaim some small portion of that which had been taken? Or was it already gone forever and would he, in the attempt, lose even more? A familiar voice in his head, in a familiar tongue—the tongue he now thought in, the tongue in which he’d issued commands at the sack of Nakhichevan—cut through the anguish.

  It is over. It is done. They are not your people anymore. Leave them to their peace.

  Ibrahim spoke over his shoulder. “You are very gentle, sir, but urgent affairs await me on the Stambouli shore.”

  He mounted his horse and left without looking back. In doing so he realized that he couldn’t return to Stambouli. That was done too. The Turks were not his people either. If there were one man in the world who had no people at all, it was he. He was alone. And he was free.

  “Instead, of heading south I rode west,” he told Amparo, “toward Vienna and the lands of the Franks, and to wars and follies and wonders of a different character. But that’s another tale.”

  Amparo watched him with wet eyes and seemed even more besotted than before.

  He turned away. “So you see,” he said, “I saw my father, but I didn’t let him see me.”

  Amparo said, “Where was the sense in that? He loved you. He would have given anything to see you.”

  This observation was hardly what he wanted to hear. Tannhauser almost said, I was ashamed. And I could not dare the chance that I’d shame him too. But he’d had enough of such weighty matters. He said, “There is little in the way of sense in much of what I do. Why else would I have returned to this sorry hellhole?”

  “You don’t love me anymore,” she said.

  This charge so took him by surprise that he blurted, “Nonsense.”

  She cocked her head to one side and stared at him, with her air of a wild bird examining an earthbound creature far larger, more cumbersome, and more stupid than she. Clearly his reply was inadequate. Yet be that as it may, he’d been tricked into an admission of love. She waited for him to blunder even deeper within her trap and like a fool he did so.

  He said, “I’ve never adored a woman more entirely in all my days.”

  The truth with which this statement rang was enough to satisfy her for the moment. She said, “Then why won’t you take me to your bed?”

  Her eyes bored through him. They seemed illuminated from within. How and in what fashion he couldn’t say, but it was so. Illuminated. It had been so from the start, when he saw her spinning about in the gloom of his tavern. But looking into her eyes made further thought strenuous; combined with the other contents she brought to the tub, thought was impossible. He battled to keep his hands anchored to her waist; rather, he slid them a little farther around the small of her back, a harmless enough maneuver, to be sure. His fingertips encountered the apex of the cleft between her hams. His head swam.

  “Are you listening?” she said.

  “Of course,” he said, his mind quite blank.

  “Then why?”

  “Why?”

  Her mouth was the color of crushed violets, a small mouth, the lips less than full, but of a wonderful symmetry, swelling at the center with a pertness that matched her nose.

  “Yes, why?”

  Words arrived from he knew not where. They were of paltry value and, he belatedly realized, probably best unsaid. “Sundry ailments and wounds,” he mumbled. “Fierce agues, a touch of plague, fatiguing night duties. All manner of afflictions and woes . . .”

  “I can cure all manner of woes.”

  She kissed him and he surrendered his virtue without further ado. He discovered afresh her nimble, flickering tongue. Her black hair had grown longer and fell about her neck in uncultivated curls. He slid a hand beneath her arse and guided the tip of his organ between the folds of her matrix. The first half-inch was cold, and moist only with brine, and he encountered stiff resistance which, while not without appeal, made him fear for a moment that he might do her an injury if he pressed on with excess zeal. Amparo grabbed the edge of the tub behind him and anchored her heels around his thighs and launched herself down. She cried out with a passion that stoked his own as he gained another crucial inch of entry and paused. She hovered suspended, her limbs as taut as bowstrings, catching her breath. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He took her weight in his hands and straightened his legs, the barrel rim chafing the skin on his back as he stood upright and invaded her to her core. She cried out again, but from somewhere much deeper within, and her eyes rolled back under fluttering lids. He kissed her throat, the salt tart on his tongue, and realized he had more to give, and that it would not be unwelcome, and he grabbed her by the nape of the neck and held her tight as he shunted the last inch home. Her bones banged into his hips and he kissed her full on the mouth and he heard her yowling echo through his skull as he pierced her, long and slow, with lubricious strokes. In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil’s Fire. He was deaf to the rage of the siege guns and the frenzied tintamarre of the alarum horns. He was oblivious, for once, to the foaming spate of rancor from the circle of barbarity beyond. He was aware only of Amparo clinging to his bulk, her nails clenched deep into his loins, her body at once frail and indestructible, her teeth bared in a rapture that looked like pain, his drenched hair plastered to her skin as he sucked her teats.

  The ground beneath the hogshead trembled and lurched, as if some subterranean beast of mythical proportion had rammed it from below. This hardly seemed fantastic in the circumstance, nor did the stupendous percussive blast whose force drew the air from their lungs. She let go of him and lay back and gripped the iron-shod rim, half floating, splayed and convulsing, and whimpering “Yes,” over and over and again, as if her only fear was that he’d stop. He suppressed his own explosive wave, gentleman that he was, and she felt this and it incited her to spasms more frantic yet. He stood stalwart and immobile while she helped herself to her fill, or at least until she arched her back and shuddered and began to slide back down into the water. It was a spectacle to behold, and fortunate he considered himself to witness it. He withdrew and she squirmed. He turned her about to face the parched garden and he entered her from behind and below. Her ardor was far from exhausted. With a sigh he felt the welcome gust of his second wind and, the proprieties duly observed, no obligation to hold back further. In the distance the bells of San Lorenzo began to jangle, with a fury whose significance presently eluded him. Shortly thereafter, or so it seemed, he looked up above Amparo’s brine-slicked hair to find the less than agreeable spectacle of Bors as he lumbered from the rear of the auberge.

  To his credit, Bors’s first instinct was to perform a swift and discreet about-turn, then some higher sense of duty made him turn about again.

  “The bastion of Castile is down!” he called. His head bobbed cannily as he sought a peek at the fabled breasts in the hogshead. “The Turks are inside the town!”

  “What would you have me do about it?” roared Tannhauser.

  Bors waved a vague hand, head bobbing with increased desperation. “I supposed you’d want to know.”

  “Thank you, but as
you can see, I’m in flagrante.”

  Bors retreated, thwarted by the hogshead’s brim. Tannhauser held his own frustration to be rather more properly justified, but was damned if he’d let the situation best him. He withdrew and she protested loudly, and he scooped her up in his arms and hoisted her from the tub. She stood dripping and unmindful of both her nudity and the havoc sweeping the town. Tannhauser clambered out. He picked up her threadbare green dress and handed it to her and she clutched it about her with small enthusiasm. Tannhauser, with fewer concessions to decorum, loaded one arm with his dagger, breeches, and boots, and with the other escorted Amparo back inside.

  “It’s as well,” he said, “if we conclude within easy reach of some decent weapons.”

  By the time Tannhauser reached the front some half hour, or maybe twice that interlude, later—and in neither fit state nor mood for anything more demanding than a nap in Amparo’s arms—the siege appeared to have reached its expected denouement. The streets en route were choked with staggering fugitives and fallen wounded. That sense of mass panic that commanders fear above all other calamities crackled in the air like the prelude to some meteorological cataclysm. The victim of the huge mine, which the Mamelukes had burrowed out of solid rock and crammed with tons of powder, had been the impregnable bastion of Castile toward the eastern end of the enceinte.

  The bastion was now a shapeless talus spanning the outer ditch, at the top of which flew a number of bright silk banners sporting the surah of Conquest, and where an array of janissary marksmen knelt or lay prone. The exploding mine had brought down with it a wide swath of the curtain wall to either side. Worse still the second, interior, wall was also massively breached and Turkish shock troops, having mopped up a desperate resistance, now spilled toward it, around and over the shoulders of the devastated bastion like lava around an outcropping of rock. Many good Christian knights had no doubt been buried in the eruption, and amid the still-smoking rubble a thin line of beleaguered brethren held the Turkish vanguard to a standstill, their armor dripping red in the morning light.