The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  He paused as if he intended her to draw some conclusion from this. Instinct said it would be better if she did not.

  Ludovico said, “By these means, and with the blessing of certain individuals whose benevolence I may count on, I could then wed you without loss of honor.”

  The statement hung in a silence that his eyes expected her to fill, and Carla felt a chill of absolute fear. A chill such as she’d not felt since her father told her she would never see her babe again.

  She said, “You talk to me of madness and then ask me to marry you?”

  “Madness.” He considered the notion and nodded. “After the battle for Saint Michel, I saw you, by chance. In the Sacred Infirmary. I glimpsed you. The work of a single moment. And I have thought of nothing else since. Nothing but you.”

  His voice remained steady, the same deep, even resonance. Yet Carla felt herself step backward. Her shoulder blades touched the wall.

  He said, “Do you know with what self-command I had until then avoided you? Every moment since I stepped on this shore I yearned to see your face. I denied myself. I saw only to my duty. Because I had some faint inkling of the power that you might wield to re-enchant my soul. But that was not to be, and, once again, enchanted I am.”

  Carla realized why he would have banished her to the convent. Not for the protection of her soul, but of his own. She made no answer.

  Ludovico nodded again. “The work of a single moment, and it has damned me. Just as another such glimpse, at another such moment, damned me before, on a high hill above a gold-and-turquoise sea. It was never my intention to devote my life to the Sacred Congregation. To the Inquisition. I was already a learned doctor twice over. A jurist. A theologian. I threw myself into the work of purging heresy to purge myself—of the malady of love. For I could find no other cure. How could love survive, I reasoned, in a man who would be the object of so much hatred? So much anguish. So much fear. I burned apostates and Anabaptists and unbelievers of every feather, in order to burn your memory from my brain.”

  Carla stifled a sob. “You blame me for your crimes?”

  The look Ludovico gave her said as much, yet his answer belied it.

  “Philosophical nicety bars my way to such a charge,” he said. “As to crimes, both dogma and jurisprudence contradict you.”

  “Did you feel nothing for your victims?”

  “I saved their souls,” said Ludovico.

  She stared at him and wondered if he believed it. Perhaps he read the question in her face, for he gave her an answer.

  “And they left me something more haunting than love unfulfilled. The memory of human lives snuffed out like candle flames.”

  Carla wanted to turn away, but his eyes wouldn’t let her go.

  He said, “When one has seen so much light extinguished, the world becomes dark indeed. Yet it never turned dark enough to stop me from seeing your face.”

  Carla understood the stab of pity that she’d felt on first seeing him at the door. It returned like a hot iron stuck through her heart. “God forgive you,” she said.

  “He does,” said Ludovico. “For I’ve served Him well. My question is, can you forgive me?”

  “For snuffing out all that light?”

  “For breaking your heart.”

  Her heart almost broke again. “Oh, Ludovico,” she said, “I forgave you the instant I knew I was carrying your child. How could I carry a child and have room for anything but love? Especially for him who’d helped create him.”

  He stared at her. For a moment the coal-black eyes shone wet. In their depths was the look of a man who found himself stranded in a bottomless pit. A pit whose fiendish design was his own work. And whose confines he was desperate to escape.

  “I have never known another woman,” he said.

  “Nor I another man,” she replied.

  “Can we two not rekindle that amorous fire?”

  Carla shook her head. “I cannot.”

  “Because of my work?”

  “Because what passed between us is past.”

  Later, she would not understand why she said what came next. She wanted to be rid of him. She wanted to spare him futile heartache. She wanted to tell him the truth.

  She said, “And because I love another.”

  The wetness cleared from Ludovico’s eyes so swiftly that she wondered if she’d seen it at all. Looking at her now was a man for whom that bottomless pit was home. With that tone of disbelief that betrays an expectation to the contrary he said, “The German?”

  Carla had left her instincts too far behind. She had wandered out too far onto the web. She didn’t know how to get back. She went forward.

  “Mattias Tannhauser,” she said.

  “Tannhauser is dead.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Only the swimmers escaped Saint Elmo. The Turk put the rest to the sword.”

  “Even if Mattias is dead, my feelings live on.” She needn’t have said more, but couldn’t stop. “He and I were to be married. It was my desire. And with all my heart, I desire it still.”

  And it was done. The work of a single moment. Ludovico’s eyes turned hard as pebbles and he stared down into her, and she knew at once that something irrevocable had changed, and that she’d regret it more desperately than anything she could imagine. Under his gaze she felt herself dwindle into something fragile, like the last burning candle in a world already given over to impenetrable dark. She expected his hands to tear the gown from her body. She could feel that urge boil within him, a desire perpetually crushed now matched to a huge and voiceless fury and the hurt to match it. His self-command exerted itself. Nothing else could have restrained the demon that was panting and raging just beneath the surface of his calm.

  “We will speak again,” he said.

  He turned and walked away to the door.

  Carla’s relief was tainted by the uncertainty and dread he’d leave behind him. He opened the door and stopped on the threshold and turned. She could hardly see his features in the gloom.

  He said, “The men who told you I’d gone forever—who regarded you as lower than a whore? I knew them well. They were my masters. They said you’d made a charge of infamous conduct. Against me.”

  “They lied.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you believed them.”

  “I was a young priest. They were exalted dignitaries of the Church. You were a girl. With a jealous father, who had powerful friends.”

  He paused. Carla didn’t speak. Of the tragedy that bound them, she had no more to say.

  “I didn’t know until tonight,” he said, “that they’d given me my first lesson in the use of power. Their other lesson they made clear enough at the time. For the needs of the flesh, there are brothels and boys. The crime is to fall in love. And for that, the punishment is terrible.”

  The gloom of the corridor swallowed him. The door closed without a sound. And Carla was left alone with the guttering lamp, and with her memories of all she had lost, and with her fears of what she yet had left to lose.

  She lay on her bed without sleeping and found no consolation in prayer. She rose and put on her dress and pinned up her hair. She wrestled the big brown case from out of its corner and, taking the lantern, she stole as softly as she could down the stairs and tiptoed through the kitchen and out into the night.

  She found the spot she needed on the rocks by Galley Creek. Because the entrance to the creek was blocked by the massive iron chain, the waterfront here was one of the few unfortified stretches of the whole perimeter. There were no guards. There was a sense of peace. She unpacked her viola da gamba and tightened the bow and tuned the strings. Her fingertips felt soft, their calluses faded. It was the first time she’d taken the instrument from its case since she’d played for Mattias, at the Villa Saliba, in another world and in a different age.

  Across the water lay L’Isola, its windmills gay silhouettes against the stars. Beyond L’Isola—somewhere—lay the Turkish camp. If Mattias w
as still alive—if the whisper of hope in her heart was something more than a desperate illusion—perhaps he would hear her music and her anguish. And perhaps he would return. Carla took a deep breath. She shook the fatigue from her shoulders and she summoned her bruised spirit to find its voice and she began to play.

  Monday, August 6, 1565

  The Marsa—The Pink Pavilion—Marsamxett Harbor

  Tannhauser crossed the Marsa and the spoliated slopes of Monte Sciberras wearing a snow-white turban and a scarlet caftan that made him look far more lordly than he felt. At his side was belted a dagger with a ruby pommel and a garnet sheath. His mount was a splendid chestnut mare from the personal string of Abbas bin Murad. He was on his way to find a rogue boy. As before, Orlandu had proved elusive and this was by no means Tannhauser’s first foray. Today he would try his luck among the corsairs.

  As he rode through the smoke-charred barbican of Saint Elmo, his costume had the desired effect on the guard at the gate, a Bulgar by the look of him, who bowed low before the sneer that Tannhauser mustered as he trotted past. He crossed the fractured courtyard where the last of the knights had been beheaded and where he’d shared Le Mas’s last night. A Turkish siege battery boomed from the seaward wall overlooking the Borgo, but apart from the gun crews the fort was barely manned at all. Once it had seemed a whole world, seething with heroic madness and holy love; now it was a small, shabby ruin and its deserted aspect gave him chills. He rode into the forge unnoticed and dismounted. It was empty and cool but he spent no more time on reminiscence. With a pair of tongs he set to levering up the flagstone in the floor, to recover the five pounds of opium and the heavy gold ring he’d buried underneath. It was hardly a labor to tax an Atlas, but his forehead was rapidly filmed with a sickly sweat. He was hardly in the best of health, but at least he was back on his feet.

  The ague had almost carried him away. He didn’t remember the first fevered days that had followed Saint Elmo’s fall, nor did he care to. They passed in a not unwelcome delirium, in which he felt little and was aware of less, including, most happily, the excision of a large abscess that swelled to the size of a fist behind the musket ball in his back and from which a pint and more of pus was ultimately drained. Had he died during this period it would have been as a shivering, mumbling bag of bones incapable of anything so refined as regret or even fear. What followed his return to consciousness was somewhat more taxing.

  He found himself nursed, in as much luxury as the circumstances allowed, in the flamingo-pink campaign tent of Abbas bin Murad. An Ethiopian slave fanned away the flies and sponged his brow in the deadening heat. He burned frankincense and placed heated glass cups upon his skin. He poured honeyed water, salted yogurts, and medicinal elixirs down his throat in such great quantity that Tannhauser felt he would vomit if he’d had the strength to do so. The same mute and patient fellow disposed of his stool with exquisite dignity, a humiliation Tannhauser bore with the tight-lipped fortitude of one who had no choice in the matter. In a clay jar the Ethiop collected his increasing yield of urine with great satisfaction, as if this were his primary reward for his ministrations.

  For some days Tannhauser endured these episodes with embarrassment—on his nurse’s part as well as his own—for it seemed to him a poor way to make a living; but then he reasoned that the Ethiop might well be the luckiest of all his brethren on the island, for if he hadn’t been fanning and sponging and collecting in the shade of a tent, he would most likely have been hauling cannon and baskets of rocks around the mountains. After this, Tannhauser submitted with an easier conscience and even found himself inclined to mutter his gratitude.

  When, for brief moments, he regained the power to raise his head from the pillow, he became aware that his body, and in particular his legs, were promiscuously blotched with brown-and-purple lesions of alarming appearance. Had he seen another man in such a state he would have granted him a wide berth, for if the Black Death were to return to smite the ungodly it would surely look like this. The thought that a blackamoor might easily be sacrificed to such a fate only increased his fear that his diagnosis might be accurate. That his penis seemed immune to this scourge brought a sense of relief that was profound, if only fleeting. However, when subsequently visited by a succession of Arab and Jewish physicians, all of whom exhibited aplomb in the face of his stigmata, he felt reassured. The consensus among his doctors was that the lesions represented the expulsion of toxic humors from his body, the detritus of his battle to stay alive. They were unanimous in their confidence that if he lived, they would disappear, a fact which the Arabs, if not the Jews, attributed to the beneficence of Allah rather than their own expertise. The numerous half-healed cuts and bruises that otherwise adorned his body aroused no comment.

  The physicians had prepared a confection of red gillyflowers, deer musk, and cloves infused in vinegar, which the fortunate among the high command rubbed about their nostrils thrice a day against contagion by the plague. Tannhauser enjoyed this rare protective benefit as well, and was told that it was good against nocturnal sweats and all the effects of melancholy. In this last regard, if not in the others, it proved less than effective. His care, then, was of the highest quality, and thus was he denied the chance to leave this mortal realm in a state of happy oblivion. Instead, he spent several weeks in a helplessness more complete than he imagined possible. For a man who invested a substantial portion of his pride in his physical strength, this was a singular experience.

  Abbas came each night—night after night, for weeks, his face drawn gaunt by the rigors of watching good men die in the field—and he sat by Tannhauser’s cushions and read passages from the Koran in a voice that called from the text a beauty so inherent that its origin in God’s throat seemed quite beyond question. During these visits Tannhauser feigned an inability to speak, for Abbas’s tenderness was so simple and so untarnished that it almost broke his heart. In conditions of such debility as he was in, sentiments escape their bonds and melancholy swells the liver, and his feelings for Abbas were unbearably intricate and haunting. Friend and abductor, savior and master, father and brother and foe. Tannhauser lay there in deceit, and perhaps in treachery. So he spoke not at all and soaked in the healing love that Abbas bestowed on him.

  He lay in the great silk womb and between bouts of sleep in which horror stalked his dreams, and which followed no rhythm or pattern, he watched the changing light as it coaxed from the superbly woven fabric more shades of pink than even the painters of Suleiman’s court could know existed. It was a color for which he had never had any regard and he thought he’d sicken of it, yet he didn’t. Rather, he fell ever deeper beneath its spell, as if the color, forged as it was from silk and warp and weft, and light and dark, and the genius of the dyer’s art, were a piece of music, or a woman, or a vista of high-country snow, or any such cosmic fabrication that on first acquaintance seemed one thing but on repeated study proved itself many, and each always different from the last. Many, also, were the hours of night that he spent gazing at the pinkness by the yellow light of the lamps. And when the pomegranate hues of twilight gave way to what seemed like utter blackness, the blackness too revealed itself as something more, leavened as it was by the flicker of campfires and starlight, and by the wax and wane of the moon. Pink was life. And it reminded him of what Petrus Grubenius had told him, which was that every Thing existent bears some influence on every Other, no matter how far flung from each other that they might be, for if, as is clear to any man, two events in close conjunction alter the nature of each, then each must change that of a third and fourth, for nothing is disconnected entire, much though we might sometimes wish it, and that is why the stars, most distant of all known bodies, even so exert an influence over every human destiny, a fact no intelligent man would ever dispute.

  What profit or meaning could be gleaned from this study in pink, Tannhauser was unable to fathom. It was a matter that proceeded of its own accord. And he found that something similar, but more enigmatic yet, evolved with
regard to the silent Ethiop, who more than any other agent was the force that restored his health and saved his life.

  No one told Tannhauser that his nurse was an Ethiop, and certainly not the man himself, but he didn’t doubt his judgment in this matter. No race was more distinctive, being high boned and long fingered, hard as ironwood and slender as reeds. He’d seen them on the block in Alexandria and Beirut, and few slaves were as highly prized, not least because they were a very fierce lot indeed and not inclined to submit to Arab slavers without a fight. Adult males were rarely taken alive; this man had probably been abducted as a boy. Ethiopia was the land of the Queen of Sheba, and Prester John and the Lost Tribes of Israel, and it was said that the Arc of the Covenant itself was hidden there, guarded by warriors wielding swords with six-foot blades, in a vast red mountain cathedral hewn from the rock. They believed in a black Jesus, and why not? And as proof of their manhood, he’d heard, they hunted wild lions in the red savannah, alone, and with no more than a simple spear, and wore the beast’s hide and teeth when they went to war. No wonder, then, that the fellow who nursed him could clean another man’s soil with more pride than a prince at his own coronation; who, despite being doomed to this lowly estate, walked as tall as any janissary or knight.

  After Tannhauser’s first attempts at conversation failed, he limited himself to bows of his head and grunts of thanks and blessings. The Ethiop slept on the ground by his bed, and when Tannhauser in his insomnia waited for the first light of dawn, and turned to study the fine ebony features in repose, the man’s eyes would already be open, always, as if he never slept at all but only rested, his eyes black mirrors in which all things were reflected yet no one thing that Tannhauser could name.

  Beyond the thin walls of the tent cannon thundered and whips cracked, and cruelties without number were recorded in the unread archives of Time. But here a stranger, whose name he did not know and did not ask, cared for him day and night as if he were a babe, and no matter what coercion had brought the Ethiop to this task, he performed it with a boundless kindness, in the midst of a boundless evil, and it seemed to Tannhauser that this was as close to purity as human goodness ever came.