Tim Willocks

by Tim Willocks

  The nap proved too brief for rejuvenation. By the time he and his Maltese guide had covered a fraction of the distance to the Borgo, Tannhauser was staggering and felt close to the utter ignominy of collapse.

  The Maltese guide went by the name of Gullu Cakie. He was a good thirty years Tannhauser’s senior and looked hewn from the rock over which they traveled, in his own case with the agility of a monkey. Gullu observed his companion’s pallid face, and his sweaty, reeling gait, with a mixture of disgust and awe. Since Gullu spoke only Maltese, and the effort required would have been considerable, Tannhauser didn’t explain that he’d just survived a near-fatal ague, plus a nauseating day of slaughter, and suffered on in silence. The frequent swigs he took from Gullu’s skin of water garnered further grunts of contempt. His yellow Turkish riding boots—which were a poor match for his brigandine and breeches, but for which no substitutes of the necessary size had been found—earned him Gullu’s suspicion. This was eased when Tannhauser asked him by way of signs to carry his rifle, which had grown heavier by the yard and for the last mile had felt like a culverin. Gullu slung it from his right shoulder. Over his left he draped the wallets containing the coffee and three-and-a-quarter pounds of opium—contents that Tannhauser felt ever closer to plundering. Thus laden, Gullu Cakie sprang onward and within a few more paces of pursuit, Tannhauser felt his lot but little improved.

  Gullu carried the dispatches in a brass cylinder, and on his belt was a firepot with a glowing coal. The cylinder also contained a charge of gunpowder: if capture looked imminent, Gullu would cram the coal inside and resign himself to torture. The wiry Maltese took a wide sweep to the south and west of the Marsa, down steep valleys and over jagged rims, and through terrain that seemed more rugged than any Tannhauser had seen since he marched across Iran. Had he had the strength to look upward through the sweat stinging his eyes, he might have guessed their location from the stars. The Turkish guns were silent and offered no guide. Instead, he stared at his feet and stumbled onward in the wake of Gullu Cakie, who, though he vanished time and again into the blackness, always waited up ahead as if for a backward child.

  They were climbing bare rock toward a ridge cut sharp against the indigo when Tannhauser caught a whiff of decomposition. Without the hope it offered he might not have made it up the ridge, but he did, and with a whimper of relief looked down upon the watch fires of the Borgo. They were on some spur of San Salvatore and the enemy lines couldn’t be far, yet they hadn’t seen a Turk all night and Tannhauser couldn’t see one now. He considered himself a fair hand at field craft and stealth, but Gullu was a master of the art. His elation faded as Gullu pointed down to Kalkara Bay and made a froglike motion with his arms. He was suggesting they swim. Tannhauser shook his head and performed a mime, based on close experience, of a man drowning. Gullu’s disgust, which had gradually abated, returned in full; nevertheless he seemed little deterred. He again vanished into the dark and Tannhauser lurched after him.

  Monte San Salvatore, which Tannhauser had conceived as a glorified hill and had indeed ridden over more than once, was, away from the trails, as wrinkled as an elephant’s hide. The wrinkles were deep enough to conceal a man. They crawled back and forth among them for, by his own estimate, an hour, again without a sign of human life. When next they raised their heads, they were among rocks at the southernmost lobe of Kalkara Bay. The bastion of Castile stood not five hundred feet distant from where they lay. A hundred feet to Castile’s left, overlooking the next lobe of water and sealing the enceinte, stood the bastions of Germany and England. At its base was the Kalkara Gate.

  To their left the narrow tail of the Grande Terre Plein, which separated the city walls from the saddle between San Salvatore and Margharita, was thick with Moslem corpses, already bloating in the decline of the moon and casting elongate shadows across the silvered clay. The Turkish-held heights above them were silent, as if in mourning for the disaster that had befallen them that day, and here and there he caught the glimmer of campfires among the mute emplacements of siege guns. To their right, he saw that the Turkish trench works extended all the way down San Salvatore to the Kalkara shore. Fires winked there too, and their flames struck from the night the occasional turbaned silhouette with a canted musket. It was from these earthworks that they could count on receiving fire.

  Gullu Cakie offered Tannhauser his rifle, and Tannhauser took it. Gullu indicated that he intended to crawl across the intervening ground, a feat he would no doubt accomplish with the speed of a cobra. Gullu further indicated that he would get the gates to open, a potentially dangerous moment even for him, and that it was then that Tannhauser should follow. This would give Tannhauser a free run to the interior, and would also give the dispatches from Sicily the greatest chance of safe delivery, a goal which Gullu valued higher than Tannhauser’s life. However, the wily old dog was not entirely indifferent to his fate, for he thrust a bony finger toward the sky.

  Tannhauser followed it, and for a moment was baffled. The finger pointed at Scorpius. What did he mean? Then Gullu opened his hand and moved it slowly toward the waxing three-quarter moon, now low to the southeast, and Tannhauser belatedly noted that at some considerable distance a blue-gray cloud was doing just the same. It was a small, solitary cloud, and Tannhauser would not have bet a ducat on it masking the moon, and thereby darkening the land below. Instead he was going to bet his life. Gullu mimed a sprint and stuck a finger into Tannhauser’s chest. Then Gullu gave him a nod and squirmed out from the rocks toward the walls.

  Tannhauser looked up at the cloud. Now that he was alone it appeared smaller than before, and its course more erratic, and the likelihood of it giving him any cover more remote. He watched Gullu work his way across the open ground. In the event he moved more like a crab than a snake, but no less swiftly than predicted, skittering this way and that on his palms and tiptoes, stopping at random to flatten himself to the ground, then breaking back into movement as abruptly as he’d stopped. Even if he’d been spotted he would’ve looked more like a nocturnal creature than a man.

  Tannhauser watched the cloud again. It looked hardly to have moved at all and the more he stared at it the more clearly static it became. There was no wind down here, and up there the case seemed the same. When he looked back from the relative brightness of the heavens to the ground, Gullu Cakie had disappeared.

  His solitude was complete. He was armed only with the wheel lock and his dagger, and neither was any great comfort. His powder flask and ball pouch, he belatedly recalled, were in the wallets on Gullu’s back. He gave up watching anything but the cloud and he watched for twenty minutes before he was convinced that it still moved at all. Indeed, it seemed suddenly to bear down on the moon with considerable speed, but such are the tricks that the heavens play. He levered himself into a crouch, grabbed his rifle, and watched the cloud skim Sagittarius. It would cover the ice-white moon but it would pass quickly. He considered crawling to the gate, but his elbows and knees were raw and his chest was a bed of coals. Thirty seconds’ exposure was better than ten minutes on his belly with his arse in the air. The cloud’s foremost edge cut into the whiteness, and then covered it, and darkness fell across no-man’s-land. Tannhauser lurched to his feet and ran.

  In the service of Suleiman Shah he must have run fifteen thousand miles—a janissary spent his life running—and the technique hadn’t left him, breathing deep and steady in the putrefying air, elbows in, rifle held firm across his chest. His stride was long and fast, weight tilted forward at the waist, the fatigue of the journey banished by the prospect of its end. Straight ahead the water of the bay loomed black as ink; to his right impenetrable shadows and the Turkish lines. The musket blasts started when he was seventy feet out, shocking in sound and brightness. He didn’t slow but he threw a few zigzags. One of the blasts caught the glitter of a double-curved sword and he saw a fleet silhouette as it sped along the shore to cut him off at the bulge of Castile. Tannhauser pulled more speed from his hams. The distance closed. Bu
t a thin strip of silver light widened across the clay and unrolled toward him as the cloud drew its curtain from the moon.

  The gazi was revealed, his robes hissing round him and his lips peeled back in effort or perhaps in rage. He’d intercept Tannhauser just short of Castile, and if the musket fire didn’t take him down, the blade of the yataghan would. Tannhauser’s rifle pointed across his body to the left. He could reverse the gun for a left-handed shot, which was cumbersome, or he could stop and turn and fire, which would squander his hard-won impetus and give the edge to the Turkish marksmen in the trench. Another muzzle bloomed and he felt the wind of the ball. Then the gazi was before him, his arms stretched like a discus thrower, the blade cocked back to strike him on the run.

  On the verge of their collision, Tannhauser spun clockwise in a backward sprint. The rifle came around with him. The gazi’s yataghan flashed toward his skull and Tannhauser fired a six-inch flame and a half-inch ball point-blank into his chest.

  At least he’d thought he’d done so. But at the same instant the gazi’s turbaned head flew apart in shower of gleaming gobbets, and before the airborne corpse hit the ground Tannhauser spun back around, the whole maneuver complete in a single pace, a single turn, and he sprinted, head down, to cover the last hundred feet to the Kalkara Gate.

  He rounded the wall of the mantlet with bullets drilling dust spouts from the bricks. Entrance to the sally port beyond was through a wicket in the large main gates. It wasn’t much wider than his shoulders. A torch flickered within. The first thing Tannhauser saw on barging inside was Bors, who stood measuring powder down the still-smoking bore of his black-and-silver musket. Bors looked up and sniffed.

  “What was the pirouette in aid of?” he said. “I was leading that devil from the moment he left his trench.”

  Tannhauser caught his breath. “Then why didn’t you shoot him sooner?”

  “Why,” said Bors, “then you might have slowed down, and that would not have done at all. You were already flagging under the weight of all that gold.” He indicated the bangle on Tannhauser’s right arm. “Glittered like a tabernacle the instant you rose up. No wonder they almost had you.”

  Tannhauser declined to respond. A pair of guards sealed the wicket with an iron-shod door, which they reinforced with a complexity of buttresses and bolts, a process he watched with an eye to getting back out again, and as soon as circumstance allowed. Bors stooped and handed Tannhauser his saddle wallets.

  “Gullu Cakie told me to give you these, with his thanks.”

  “Gullu doesn’t speak Italian.”

  “He speaks Spanish as well as King Philip and Italian better than you. In his trade he needed to. You should be honored to have such a guide.”

  The wallets felt distinctly light to Tannhauser’s hand. He opened them. Only a single wax-paper package remained inside: the one containing the miserly quarter of opium. More woundingly, in a way, his package of coffee had vanished too.

  “The old bugger has robbed me.”

  Bors clapped him on the back and a grin distorted his hugely scarred face. “By the Rod, it’s good to have you back,” he said, “for mirth has been in very short supply.”

  “In his trade?” said Tannhauser. “What trade?”

  “In his day, Gullu Cakie was the most notorious thief and smuggler of these islands. Dodged the gallows a score of times and never once was caught. It looks like you’ve put him back in business.”

  The sally port corridor turned at an obtuse angle. Above the angle a murder hole gaped in the ceiling. Intruders could be waylaid at this junction while incendiaries and gunfire were showered from above. At the inner end was a portcullis and beyond that, to provide another killing floor in the event that the port was breached, was a small, roofless blockhouse furnished with oilettes. As Tannhauser headed through the blockhouse, Bors took his arm.

  “Come and see this,” said Bors.

  Tannhauser followed him up the wall stair. They reached the top and turned and Tannhauser stopped dead, and blinked, as the prospect from this vantage was revealed.

  It was nearly two months since he’d left the town, at which time hardly a shot had been fired against it. Now it was a formless wasteland dense with rubble—paved with rubble, stacked with rubble, and by yet more rubble surrounded. Holes and fractures scarred the masonry of San Lorenzo, the Sacred Infirmary, the Arsenal, and the Courts of Law. Whole streets had been leveled down to the cobbles. Iron balls and gun stones littered the ruins. Countless roofless houses gaped to the sky. Castel Sant’Angelo brooded like the seat of a vanquished kingdom and apart from a flicker of watch fires nothing in that wide desolation stirred, as if the place had been sacked and forsaken when history was young, and its denizens were savages yet dressed in the skins of beasts.

  “The women,” said Tannhauser. “Carla, Amparo, are they alive?”

  “They’re sound enough,” said Bors. “At least in body.”

  “And otherwise?”

  “There are few in this benighted burg who aren’t heartsick to the core. Even I have moments of weariness, and I wouldn’t miss all this for a palace on the Lido.”

  Tannhauser’s eyes sought out the Auberge of England on Majistral Street. It was one of the few buildings that appeared to be undamaged. Bors caught the look and as Tannhauser started down the stair he said, “The women don’t live at the auberge anymore.”

  Tannhauser looked at him.

  “Carla moved out with her belongings just short of a week since. Left as if she’d found that the place was haunted, but wouldn’t say why. She says she has a cot in the infirmary, where she can sleep as she will and always be on hand for the sick.”

  “And Amparo?”

  “Amparo lives in the stables on the straw, with Buraq. Don’t worry, I’ve kept one eye on both of them. Both women, that is, and the horse too.” He shrugged at Tannhauser’s frown. “They’re a willful pair. What else could I do?”

  When they reached the foot of the stairs, La Valette’s page, Andreas, who’d survived a bullet in the throat on the first day of the siege, informed them that Gullu Cakie had presented his dispatches to the Grand Master, who was now awaiting an immediate report from Tannhauser on the standing of the Turk. To the youth’s shock, Tannhauser replied that he had no intelligence that would prolong the city’s resistance beyond the morning, and that, with all appropriate homage and salutations, the Grand Master could wait until then to learn what he knew.

  Tannhauser left Andreas stranded in the street and struck for the infirmary. He did so on instinct, on a whim he was too tired to question or resist. He wanted to see Carla. He wanted to see what was in her face when she saw him. Perhaps it was the boy. He wanted to tell her Orlandu was alive. Perhaps it was something more.

  When they reached the piazza that fronted the Sacred Infirmary, they found it wholly covered with the bodies of wounded men, the harvest of that day’s battle laid out in bloodstained rows. They languished under the stars, their sundry mutilations and truncated limbs swaddled in blankets made threadbare by launderings and use. Brother monks and chaplains and Jews and Maltese women gave what comfort they could to their charges and loved ones. After what Tannhauser had seen that afternoon in the Turkish camp, he had no reason to be unduly moved; these men, at the least, enjoyed more succor than the lances and hooves of fiends; and yet moved he was, and he didn’t know why.

  Then he heard a thread of music wind a sinuous path through the night. It was fainter than that he’d heard upon the hill and he looked at Bors to be sure it wasn’t his fancy. Bors tossed his head toward Galley Creek.

  “They make the music by the water.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Every night since Carla abandoned the auberge.”

  Bors held out his hand and Tannhauser gave him the rifle and the empty wallets, then he turned to go.

  “Mattias.”

  Tannhauser stopped.

  “Brother Ludovico is back.”

  Tannhauser’s hand gripp
ed the hilt of his dagger.

  “My thought also,” said Bors, “but killing him would be no easy matter. Brother Ludo is now a Knight of Justice. The Italian langue.”

  “Ludovico has joined the Religion?” said Tannhauser.

  “Courted them with relics and done his share of slaughter.”

  “I didn’t think La Valette was such a fool.”

  “Ludovico’s respected by all and the Italians love him.”

  Tannhauser passed a hand over his face. “This is more a madhouse than I expected.”

  “The fortunes of war,” shrugged Bors. He added, “He’s caused no trouble to date, so far as I know, but his spies have their noses to the ground, so beware.”

  “Beware?” said Tannhauser.

  The very notion was folly. As were all his strivings. He’d waded in folly more deeply than he’d waded in blood, and he’d wade on yet in both till one or the other drowned him. The evils of the day had almost broken him and for a moment he found himself teetering, between a fit of rage too vast to admit of any object and a fit of mirth from which he might not return. Then the music once more drifted down the evening, and the moment passed.

  “You look like a man not long for this world,” said Bors. “Come and take some brandy with me. We’ll get drunk, and talk of better times.”

  “Bors,” said Tannhauser, “embrace me, my friend.”

  Tannhauser clasped his arms about the immense shoulders as a drowning man might clasp the trunk of a tree. The tree was so bewildered it staggered but it did not fall. Then Tannhauser turned away and walked through the crumbling streets toward Galley Creek.