The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  Tannhauser raised his sword in salute. “Mattias Tannhauser.”

  The knight returned the gesture. “Guillaume de Quercy.”

  The man to Guillaume’s right, a beak-nosed Provençal wielding paired short swords, bent forward and did the same. “Agoustin Vigneron,” he said.

  The exchange was enough to cement their fraternity and they said no more. With a Gascon to one side and an Englishman to the other, he couldn’t ask for more. The Mehterhane band struck up. Pipes, kettledrums, and bells. Even now there was no sound more stirring to his ears. Trumpets blew. The banner of Saint John was raised, the white cross luminous in the moonlight. A chaplain raised an icon of Christ Pantocrator in one hand and rang a bell with other and began to recite the Angelus.

  “Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae.” The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.

  Aves were chanted en masse and the power of the Virgin invoked.

  “Pray for us O, Holy Mother of God.”

  “That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.”

  “Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts . . .”

  The front line of knights clambered up the scree to the blood-steeped ridge and Tannhauser climbed up with them. He was the only man on that field without a prayer on his lips, for it seemed to him that any deity worth addressing would condemn the elation rising in his chest and that all the gods of mercy would sleep this long night through.

  The knights and serjeants occupied the forefront of the line, and the Spanish and Maltese, perhaps three hundred, moved up behind, the points of their half-pikes and glaives filling in the gaps in the armored wall. Tannhauser studied the ground at his feet, kicked some loose debris aside, noted the irregularities and planted his left foot forward, the sword in his right hand pointed down and the mace haft canted against his hip. Awareness now was all. Awareness of his own small sphere whose boundaries were defined by the man to his either side and by whatever appeared from the night at the tip of his blade. He reminded himself to breathe regularly and deep. It was easy to forget in the fray, and to lose one’s wind was fatal. Breathing. Posture. Footwork. Underneath his armor sweat streamed forth from every pore, for the heat of the night was fierce and unforgiving. His mouth was dry. He was stationed at the throat of a Turkish causeway. Three men wide in a pinch, it formed an uneven apron against the gauntlet and he stood on its leftmost edge. The Gascon, Guillaume, stood athwart its center and Agoustin Vigneron braced its far right. To his left Bors commanded the lip of the ditch. Bors rooted in his pocket and brought out a pair of smooth white pebbles. He popped one in his mouth.

  “Didn’t I tell you this would be grand?” he said.

  He offered the second pebble. Tannhauser took it and sucked and his dryness was eased.

  Bors said, “Mind you watch my back.”

  The martial rhythms of the Mehterhane, the stomp of thousands of feet, the clank of metal, the shrill descant of the imam’s pleas to Allah fashioned themselves into a mighty wheel of sound which rolled from the flame-lambent shadows beyond the ditch. In its wake five janissary orta, horsehair standards aloft and banners writ with the Shahada aflutter, roared from the throat of night and flung themselves at the causeways and across the corpse-swollen ditch.

  The Christians goaded them on with a howling invitation to the dance. Mixed within it Tannhauser heard a Babel of prayers in Latin and a clutch of vulgar tongues. To Santa Catarina and Sant’Agata. To Sant’Iago and San Pablo. To Christ and the Baptist. Pray for us sinners. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. The most popular invocation, as if the man were beatified already, was La Valette and the Holy Religion.

  At twenty yards the oncoming ranks unleashed a shower of humbaras, the burning fuses tailing showers of sparks. Tannhauser watched them arc over, poised to leap away, but luck was with him. They sailed overhead and he felt flares of heat behind him and heard squalls of horror and panic but didn’t turn. At the same time the Devil’s bondsmen in the Order’s firework crews unleashed squealing torrents of liquid death from the trumps, and huge burning hoops traced yellow spirals in the air as they sailed forth. The tightly packed janissaries were ensnared by two and threes in these circles of flame. Their blue cotton robes flared up as if made of paper and like the damned chained together in perdition they tore at each other as they writhed and burned and died.

  So fierce was the coruscation on either wing that the field incandesced as bright as noontide. Through this holocaust the vanguard’s human tide roared on undaunted. They brandished a gallery of melee arms and with their wild eyes and long mustaches and tall white bonnets embellished with wooden spoons, they suggested a race of deranged cooks who’d been banished from the kitchen of a madhouse. They spilled into the ditch. They charged the burning bridges. They surged across the firedrenched causeways.

  Tannhauser picked his first opponent from the horde now pouring down the funnel. The man’s boots were black—the orta’s janitor. He carried a mizrak spear over-arm and a rectangular Balkan shield. Tannhauser advanced a step out onto the apron to give himself room and dropped the mace along his thigh. He opened his chest just enough to invite the spear and as the downthrust came he pulled his right leg back in an oblique turn and deflected the shaft with his sword and drove the spike of the mace into the thus exposed armpit, sliding his hand up the haft for a shorter grip. The man bellowed, as any man would, and his lung popped and his feet left the ground, and as Tannhauser took him backward and down, he swiped the sword across his throat and half severed his head.

  He turned his face from the spray and snapped the sword back up to block a scimitar blow from above and he brought his head up with it and straightened his legs, hammering the crest of his morion into a face. Blood and sweat flew and he lunged up with the mace, still held short, and drove the spike through the belly of the man’s jaw and heard the crunch of bones, the man squirming like a gaffed tunny, blood streaming down from his nostrils and eyes, and Tannhauser shielded himself with this new prey, and shuffled head-on into the melee, breathing and blowing as Turkish blades hacked the man’s arms off, thrusting with the Milanese sword, chain mail scraping on the steel as it pierced a gut and encountered spine. He twisted it back out, and sucked and blew, teeth gritted, and flung the gaffed and armless wretch at the charging feet of the next, who stumbled and fell to his elbows. Tannhauser lengthened his grip on the mace and coshed him and killed him with a blow, the flanges biting through the rear of the skull and dyeing the white bonnet red.

  Straighten up, breathe and blow, shake the sweat. He wheezed. His chest was tight, his gorge scorched. He felt nauseous and weak. He was too far forward. Get back.

  The horde shouldered one another in their frenzy to get through the choke point, their weapons constricted, one shield obstructing another. Spot the openings. Swallow the scalding bile. Kill him, kill them, kill them all. A blow glanced off his helm and hammered into his pauldron. Spike him in the privities, stab him in the neck. The fellow fought on from his knees, blinded by the fountain from his arteries, still scrabbling with his blade for the joints in Tannhauser’s plate. Tannhauser drove the finial through his temple and stepped back. Now back step again. Keep them at bay. He threw an upward sword cut to the thighs and a backstroke to the guts and a thrust to the chest, in deep and twist. Don’t look in his eyes. He’s done. And breathe, you fool, keep the knees loose, ignore the battle cries. Get back. Movement to the left—below—a face in the ditch, slash him in the eyes, forget him, face front, step back, here he comes, X-block, no room to swing, struggling face to chest, breath hot and sour, he’s strong—oh yes?—pommel strike, open him up, cosh him on the shoulders, collapse his chest, die, die, stab him in the belly, and out, and again, and out, and some steel in the throat for the Sultan, and step back—but over there—no, step back now, patience, breathe, shake the sweat, blow it off. Still too far down the causeway. Exposed. Ten seconds’ rest. Or five. He had no choice.

  He l
eaned on his sword and panted.

  The first ten minutes were over and he felt sick to the gut and drained. His body already begged for light refreshment and eight hours’ sleep. Where was the strength and wind he’d once possessed in abundance? He was shaken. He’d never fought men so difficult to kill, so reluctant to die even when they were dead. These janissaries were maniacs and he was not—not any longer. The night stretched before him and he couldn’t see its end. He was afraid, not of death but of the effort. Yet his second wind would come. That or a shared grave in the bloody ditch. To the clank and hiss of hammer and sword, Guillaume de Quercy and Agoustin Vigneron drew level on the causeway, each soused from helm to greaves in sweat-speckled gore, and their beards all matted and agleam, as if they’d supped from a barrel of molasses.

  Tannhauser roused his pride. He couldn’t let himself be shamed by a pair of Frenchmen.

  The three of them stood abreast at the mounting redoubt of corpses piled at their knees, and proceeded to impale the Turkish foemen as they scrambled over their dead. Swift and cruel it was, with bludgeon and spike and blade, and the Maltese ventured up behind them with their pole arms and gave them some respite from the sheer weight of flesh. The blue-robed assault began to founder on the wall of spears, and a fresh shower of humbaras arced across the charnel. Tannhauser crouched beneath them and the pikemen stumbled back in disarray, ash staves aclatter as flames bloomed yellow among them. Those drenched in burning jelly fled for the water butts, and each man for himself it was, for the butts couldn’t hold them all. And in that instant the tables were turned, for onto the vacant ground the pikemen had abandoned behind them, the Sultan’s gazi sprang up from the ditch, and the assault across the charnel pile renewed, and out on the causeway the three armored brothers found themselves surrounded and outflanked.

  “Back to back!” roared Quercy.

  Quercy’s war hammer flashed and the pick sank up to the haft in a face and tore it half away. Tannhauser swiveled and the pauldrons of the three clashed together. Shoulder to shoulder in a circle of woe they stood, and woe was all their assailants found to greet them. Like a band of cornered wolves they ravaged and butchered all that stirred in reach, hostile blows ringing from their harness as they gave up the ground they’d won and shuffled back through the flames toward the line, their footing unsteady on the smoldering mattress of the mutilated and slain.

  The dense smell of roasting human meat was repulsively appetizing, and Tannhauser’s mouth filled with juices. A fair-skinned youth ran himself through on the point of Tannhauser’s sword, and with such frenzy did he come that his chest hammered hard into the quillions. He spiked the squalling youth in the head with the finial and like a farmer pitching a wheat bale he hefted him aside, and a slash came at his head and Tannhauser parried with the mace haft and he chopped the Italian blade into a leg as hard as cedar. The fellow dropped to his knees and Tannhauser worked the sword down into his chest, and an uncontrollable nausea exploded up his gullet and his mace dangled by its wrist loop, and he doubled up over the sword, with both hands gripping the cross guard, and he vomited a torrent of gall and phlegm in the dying man’s screaming face. Tannhauser clenched his watering eyes, the gastric spasm shunting the blade in deeper. He leaned on the hilt until the fit had passed, then he spat and hauled his blade free, and kicked the corpse aside, and blinked and shook his head, and sweat and mucus flew, and through the blur he saw two tall-hatted heads bearing down the causeway toward him. He braced himself to take their blows, then a scalloped blade whistled by and both heads vanished as one, the skulls splintering apart in a welter of eyeballs and brains and liquid ropes. A gaping gorge and a half set of teeth topped the second pair of shoulders, and as it toppled out of view he saw Bors wrangle in the huge two-hander and plant its point down into a third head as it bobbed up from the ditch.

  Bors paused, his mouth heaving wide in his blood-boltered face. “I asked you to watch my back.”

  Tannhauser also battled to catch his breath. “Fighting fit I’m not,” he admitted.

  There was a lull in the assault and the four men fell abreast and they bludgeoned and stabbed those wounded within reach, and then they rested, and for a moment the causeway boasted no life standing but their own.

  “The queer thing is,” said Bors, “they look—well—much like us.”

  “Slavs, Greeks, Magyars, Serbs,” said Tannhauser. “Even some Austrians.”

  “Never did warm to the Austrians,” said Bors.

  They regained the line and assumed their stations. Tannhauser felt improved. The purge of his stomach had done him good. As he spat out the sour residue his eyes caught a tub of bread and wine shunting by. He cradled his sword in his elbow and stooped and shoveled up a gauntlet of mush and slaked it down his throat in one. It was marvelous. Sweet and salty at once. With a hint of rosemary? He called Bors and pointed to the slowly disappearing vat. Bors bent to help himself. Tannhauser turned back to the shambles and recruited his spirit.

  Thus the second ten minutes had passed, or so he guessed. His body felt limber, his chest as sound as a drum. His mind was crystal clear. He had his second wind. He rolled his shoulders and loosened his hips and settled down to meet what was yet to come. It could only get worse, but he was up for it. A fresh wave of fanatics foamed from the dark toward the causeway. They wore yellow dolamas and bronze helms: janissaries of the elite Peyk division, toting sneaky lassoes and halberdlike gaddaras and zemberek crossbows with bolts as thick as your thumb. He blew out his breath and took a deep one. As the champions of the Religion braced themselves, Bors fetched up alongside him smacking his lips. He caught Tannhauser’s look.

  “Well?” said Bors.

  Tannhauser clapped him on the back and smiled and said, “Glory.”

  Monday, June 11, 1565

  No-man’s-land

  When dawn broke above the eastern battlements its uncertain light lent the oily banks of smoke a yellow hue, and somewhere beyond that ocher gloom the Turkish horns sounded recall, and the vanquished remnants of a dozen janissary orta drifted into the fog like scourged wraiths and then they were gone. Along the blood-slaked crest the tatterdemalion soldiers of the Cross watched with stunned indifference as the foemen disappeared, too exhausted to comprehend that the night was theirs and that their banner would greet another day.

  Tannhauser sank to one knee and leaned on the cross guard of his sword and rested his forehead on his gauntlets and closed his eyes. For a few precious moments he was alone in a measureless silence, into which he voiced no questions and from which no answers came. Then he heard the ululating murmur of the wounded, and a succession of hoarse sobs, and prayers raised not to praise God but to beg Him for forgiveness.

  Tannhauser lifted his head. His neck was stiff and painful from the weight of his helm and the numerous blows it had borne. His gauntlets were caked in a burgundy mud, which crumbled away in flakes as he eased them off. His hands were blue with bruises and his knuckles ached as he flexed them. The bangle on his wrist bore the imprint of two scimitar cuts in the gold. Not for riches or honor, but to save my soul. He stowed the gauntlets and planted the mace into the ground and rose to his feet. He sheathed his sword. The air was unwholesome and turning putrid as he breathed. The brightening day unveiled a hellscape so baneful and repugnant that no artist would dare portray it for fear of placing a curse upon his gift.

  Beyond the shattered ramparts on which he stood—and steeped in a fetid marinade of blood, human offal, entrails, brains, and the evacuated contents of thousands of bladders and bowels—lay the bodies of some fifteen hundred Moslems. They overflowed the groaning ditch and spilled across the befouled and pestilent no-man’s-land like the stain of some unnatural catastrophe. And Tannhauser felt ashamed. Then he felt ashamed of his shame, for it was a lie, and killing, at least, was honest. Here and there pools of wildfire flickered still, and an arm rose and fell, and a contorted shape struggled vainly from the reeking broth before yielding to the pull of the fresh-slain de
ad and falling back into the mire to struggle no more.

  “All these men were born Christian?”

  Tannhauser turned to Agoustin Vigneron. The Frenchman’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot and his voice was scorched to a rasp.

  “Most of them,” Tannhauser said.

  Agoustin shook his head. “How terrible that their souls are now damned forever.”

  Tannhauser denied his own despair the luxury of expression. He left the mace standing upright in the rubble, like a pagan shrine to his own evil, and went to find Bors.

  He found him out in no-man’s-land, slumped facedown and helmless against a yellow-costumed mound of janissary dead. His right hand still clutched a dagger in a corpse’s chest. Tannhauser lumbered toward him in his tattered boots, stumbling through the debris as wounds to his ankle and knees made themselves apparent. Bors was insensible, and to judge by the rattling stridor in his throat he was choking on his own blood. It took two attempts to roll his steel-clad bulk onto his back. Tannhauser recoiled, momentarily repelled by what he saw. Bors’s face appeared half cut away. A broad deep slash gaped from above his right brow to the left angle of his jaw, the nose and cheek so split that bones and cartilage and gums and teeth gleamed along its course. The right side of his face was so severed from its moorings that it was sliding down over his chin. His contorted lips were blue. The bleeding was spectacular but could not, on rapid reflection, be called torrential.

  Tannhauser mastered his horror and with his left hand pushed the drooping flesh up into place and pulled open the mouth and reached inside with his fingers. He scraped out a thick gelatinous plug and a broken tooth and flung the mess aside. Bors wheezed. Tannhauser shoved his hand back in, deeper still, and evacuated another viscid mass. Bors retched and threw his head and shoulders forward, and he heaved up a dark red swill into his lap, and his hands flailed to grab onto his knees, and his chest exploded in a violent spasm of coughs.