The Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  “Greetings, my child,” he said, in Spanish.

  She curtsied, as if she found the practice unnatural, one hand still steadying the horse. Ludovico held his hand out to the horse’s muzzle and it licked the salt from his fingers. Its tongue was at once rough and soft.

  “This conflict is hard on the animals,” he said. “The noise, the confinement. They also sense death and sorrow.”

  She watched the horse lick him without replying.

  “Amparo, is it not?” She nodded. “Does the horse have a name?”

  “Buraq,” she said.

  “Ah,” said Ludovico, “the horse of the Prophet Mohammed, which was said to have wings. The Arabs love such fanciful myths. But this beast looks fleet enough to deserve the honor. He belongs to Captain Tannhauser.”

  She nodded. Still she didn’t look at his face.

  “And you are Tannhauser’s sweetheart.”

  She shuffled, a little uneasy.

  “Forgive my discourtesy. I’m Fra Ludovico.” He dipped his head, and realized his armor was freshly badged with blood and other unsavory fluids violently spilled. “Forgive also my foul appearance, which you and Buraq both must find quite repugnant.”

  She turned away and set to brushing Buraq’s neck.

  He was entitled to take offense at this, but didn’t. “I’m told by some of the soldiers that you read palms,” he said. “They place great store in your skill.”

  She continued brushing.

  “Will you read mine?” he asked. “I’ll pay you.”

  “I don’t take pay,” she said. “It isn’t something to be sold.”

  “It’s something sacred, then.”

  She didn’t turn. “It’s something that comes not from me, and so is not mine to sell.”

  “From a world beyond this one?” he said.

  “If the power speaks in this world, how can it be beyond it?”

  He hadn’t expected dialectics. Yet she appeared to state what to her seemed utter simplicity.

  He said, “Is it the power of God?”

  She paused, as if she’d not considered this before, then said, “The power of God speaks through all things.”

  “All things? Ravens, choughs, cats?”

  “And stones and trees and the sea and the sky above. Of course.”

  “And the Church?” he said.

  She shrugged, as if she reckoned it by far the poorest of such vehicles. “That too.”

  Ludovico held out his palm. As if it were a chore to be quickly dismissed Amparo stuck the brush beneath her arm and took his hand. She stroked its lines and calluses with her fingertips. Her touch pleased him. Her face revealed nothing.

  “Some hands speak, some do not,” she said. She let go of his hand. “Your hand does not.”

  She said it not as a rebuff, but as a matter of fact. Nevertheless, and even though he set no store by such black mischief, he was disappointed. He also found that he despised her. The feeling came to him suddenly, like nausea. Her manner offended him. This slip of a girl, this exotic slut, whose contribution to the siege was what? Or to anything else of value on this earth? She groomed her master’s horse and spread her legs for him. She traded augury and superstition with the vulgar soldiery. She flaunted her breasts in her flimsy wanton’s dress. He’d seen her like before, in every stratum high and low. Women who justified their existence by the hole between their legs and nothing more. Who traded their flesh for a living; for vanity and a smattering of power; for this abomination falsely labeled Love. They were a disease. He noticed for the first time that her eyes were of different colors. One brown, one gray. As plain a stigma of witchery as any catalogued or known, as authorities as diverse as Apollonides and Kramer and Sprenger had attested. The efflux of beams from such eyes, being the conveyers of evil spirits, were able to strike through the eyes of those they met and thence fly to the heart, from whence they rose to condense in the blood and infect the inward parts. Aristotle himself had averred that a mirror dreads the eyes of an unclean woman, for its sheen grows cloudy and dull at her gaze.

  He said, “Is it God who speaks in so curious a manner? Or the Devil?”

  “I know nothing of the Devil,” she said. “And if he exists, what help needs he from me? Most of all here?”

  A cunning reply, again innocently framed. He considered exploring this subject more, but she’d said more than enough of a necromantic character to condemn her should the need arise, and witnesses to that effect were plentiful. He didn’t doubt the actuality of witchcraft. Who did? It was overdiagnosed to be sure: warts and bristles on an old haggard’s chin and a cow whose milk had gone sour were grounds enough for the peasantry; lurid accounts of flying through the air and the ritual devouring of children were crude fantasies; and the Inquisition was skeptical of supernatural forces, as was he. Yet commerce with Satan took place. On this the Church was unequivocal. Amparo took up her brush and continued her work on the horse.

  “I would have you do me a service,” he said.

  She turned back toward him, her fraudulent mask of innocence replaced by a feral wariness. He realized that she hadn’t once looked him in the face, let alone the eye, as if she knew that if she did so he’d see her true nature. He was more than ever convinced that her soul was polluted and her character pernicious. How easily he’d been fooled into ignoring the facts. How insidious was the Fascination cast by a woman’s erotic allure. Was Carla really any better? Perhaps she was worse. Time would tell. He could have matched the divot in Amparo’s face with another, and dragged her to the bales in the feed room and torn the threadbare linen from her skin, and profaned himself upon her flesh. It would have been no more than his right, earned and sanctified by the blood he’d spilled in battle. But he didn’t. He contained himself.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  He stared at her until she understood that refusal wasn’t a choice. She followed him outside where Castel Sant’Angelo loomed above them. Anacleto rose from a bench. His whole body was rigid with the effort of containing the agony that racked him. His right cheekbone was gone; Ludovico had held him down while the surgeons extracted the fragments, along with his eye. He’d wept at his friend’s valor, for Anacleto had clenched the gag between his jaws and made not a sound. What skin was left had been sutured together like a purse string and pus oozed yellow from the puckered mass. His eye socket was a moist black hole, painted with a poultice brayed from moss found growing on a human skull.

  “This is Anacleto,” said Ludovico. “He is my friend. Mark his deformities well.”

  Amparo wouldn’t look at him. Ludovico grabbed her by the hair and jerked her face upward. She gasped as she saw Anacleto’s wounds and closed her eyes. Anacleto flinched.

  “Mark his deformities well,” Ludovico repeated, “for your captain was likely the perpetrator.”

  Amparo squirmed away and he let go.

  “Anacleto needs opium to heal his wounds and help allay his anguish.” At great cost Ludovico had purchased a thimbleful from the Maltese scoundrel, Gullu Cakie. The time had come where gold had little value, for no one expected ever to be able to spend it. Cakie had told him, under menace, where he might get more. “Tannhauser possesses this medicine, which is in rare supply,” said Ludovico. “You will bring some to me, tonight, at the Auberge of Italy.”

  “You’d have me steal?” she asked.

  “The means of obtaining it are your concern. I’ll be in your debt, which is something you’d be wise to value. See that it’s done.”

  “And if I do not?”

  Ludovico took her arm, in a kindly fashion, and walked her away from Anacleto. He leaned toward her ear and spoke softly. “Tannhauser intends to marry your mistress.”

  Amparo blinked but seemed unperturbed. “It’s their bargain,” she said. “It’s been their bargain from the start.”

  “The marriage is by way of payment?”

  Amparo nodded, her eyes turned down.

  Carla had deceived him, then. F
resh hope flourished in his breast.

  “Nevertheless,” he said, “Tannhauser is in love with Carla now.”

  “He loves her,” she corrected, “as I love her.”

  “He is a man. As you know better than any.” He saw the seed of doubt take hold. “He told me himself that he loved her. And they were seen in the throes of a tryst. You are betrayed.”

  The words pierced her heart. She put both hands to her mouth and shook her head.

  “Ask poor Anacleto—and tell that he lies.”

  She tried to pull away but he held on to her. “Look for yourself and you will see.” He let go. “Now, do as I bid. Regard my request as the errand of mercy which it is, and God will guide you in this, as in all things.”

  Tannhauser sat in his tub and watched the sun go down behind Sciberras. The solar disc was a dark and violent red, and was wreathed with tendrils of smoke that rose from the corpse-choked no-man’s-land below. He tried, briefly, to read some significance beyond the obvious into the spectacle, but his mind was too blunted for such conceits, and he gave in to a stupefied awe that left no space for Philosophy.

  His body was a mass of pain, lacerations, and swellings. His skin was a mottled patchwork of yellow and blue. Sheep-gut stitches protruded here and there, some of his own insertion. The climb into the water had almost defeated him. The brine exacerbated the bite of his wounds. His eyes were gritty with powder black and dust. His hands felt bloated and clublike, his fingers swollen as tubers. If a stone from a Turkish culverin had landed on his head, he wouldn’t have found it cause for great regret, but the likelihood was remote for the siege guns were silent, and their Topchu crews no doubt as weary as he.

  That morning, after launching a number of skirmishes to cover its advance, Mustafa had deployed Abbas’s second siege tower. This time the Turks had reinforced its lower half against cannon shot with gabions full of earth and stone, and sections of iron plate riveted to the stanchions and joists. They’d wheeled it up to the remains of the bastion of Castile and the overtopping janissary marksmen aloft had driven the garrison and workforce thereabouts to cower in the ruins and pray. After some hours languishing in this sorry state, and seeing a massing of troops on the heights that boded a major assault, La Valette had played a variation on the previous day’s tactic.

  They opened a hole through the undamaged wall some distance to the east of the breach, at a spot invisible to the musketmen in the tower. A raiding party went out under Knight Commander Claramont and Don Guevarez de Pereira. A dozen knights of the German langue had thrust themselves to the forefront of the volunteers and the raiders charged the tower like lathered fiends, a belated Turkish volley from the muskets high above striking sheets of sparks from their armor as they ran.

  The detachment of Azeb infantrymen who guarded the ladders to the rear were hacked apart in seconds by the unhinged Northmen, who then clambered up the rungs and swarmed into the galleries and cleansed the tower of Turks one floor at a time. The whole colossal edifice swayed on its squealing guy ropes at the furious violence vented inside its frame. The bellows of rage and cries of agony were hardly distinguishable, and severed limbs and gutted bodies tumbled forth in crimson cascades, as if the structure were an entertainment at a carnival barbarous and wild. When the slaughter was done, the German brethren stood triumphant on the summit and waved blood-splashed borks on the points of their swords, and brandished severed heads and steaming fistfuls of viscera, and stomped the slithering boards with a maniac glee, the still-venting cataracts of gore swilling from the tiered platforms as if from a temple of the Mexica in the wake of atrocious rites. They hurled curses and taunts at the legions of Islam gathered on yonder hills, then they raised their faces to Heaven and sang praises to Jesus Christ for letting them know a moment of such rapture uncontained.

  As preparations were made to burn the tower to ashes, Tannhauser suggested that the engine be rather commandeered, and stationed near the wall, and used to the advantage of their own marksmen. His motive in this was to get a better view of the Turkish lines crisscrossing Monte San Salvatore, but La Valette adopted the plan with relish. The tower was emptied of corpses and rotated and repositioned, and a pair of cannon were installed on the lower tier, while arquebusiers were dispatched to occupy the rest. Tannhauser was among them.

  The prospect from the top was of a sun-parched hellscape blackened by corpses and flies. The Turkish trenches to the east were many and interlaced. How Gullu Cakie had guided him through them he couldn’t imagine. And the Turkish numbers were still huge. Any flight to the boat would have to wait on further decimation. But by now La Valette could muster barely fifteen hundred men still able to walk. Tannhauser squatted in the trodden and reeking offal behind the upper gate, deafened and choked in the brutalizing heat until his powder and ball were exhausted and his arm felt blue to the elbow, and at that he had taken leave of the tower of blood.

  All this he was happy to forget as he lay in his tub. He congratulated himself on its institution. He’d had no idea at that time how vital to his sanity it would prove to be. Perhaps he would lie in the tub all night and watch the stars. Perhaps he would fall asleep and drown, and be found in the morning with a grin of contentment on his face. Then he recalled that Nicodemus had procured some loin chops of mutton for supper and he put all thoughts of dying to one side. He stirred as he became aware of a human presence. Amparo’s face loomed over the tub’s iron rim and his heart sank. Her eyes were swollen with shed tears and they looked at him with reproach. He knew at once that the little tranquillity he’d gleaned from the war-stunned evening was about to be stolen. He mustered a grimace of welcome.

  “Amparo,” he said, “why so sad?”

  She turned her face away to the sky, the very picture of sorrow. With an effort he considered heroic he reached out to stroke her hair. She pulled her head away. He hadn’t seen this aspect of her before, but it had only been a matter of time, since she was female.

  “You have something to tell me,” he said.

  She didn’t look at him. “You are in love with Carla, it’s true?”

  Tannhauser sighed windily. As with most of his tribulations, he had only himself to blame. He was amazed that in the midst of so much turmoil matters so trifling could weigh this heavy. “Let’s talk of this some other time,” he said.

  “Then it is true.”

  “Amparo, I’ve been three days mired in slaughter. A man could be forgiven for thinking that the world was come to its end. Have pity, then, on this poor soldier and leave him to his moment of peace.”

  She looked at him and her eyes filled. It had been too much to hope that his own woes might outweigh hers. She reached out to him like a child and he hauled himself up on his stiff and quavering legs and put a wet arm around her shoulders.

  “He made me afraid,” she said.

  Tannhauser’s sense of aggrievement vanished. “Who did?” he asked.

  “Fra Ludovico.”

  His aches and pains were vanquished by a gust of rage. He felt his jaws and scalp tighten and the blood rush through his brain. “Did he hurt you?”

  She shook her head, without conviction. He lifted her chin toward him with his hand. The memory of the fright Ludovico had provoked was replaced by the fear of whatever it was she saw in Tannhauser’s eyes. He strove for an equanimity he didn’t feel. He ran his fingers through her hair again and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

  “You’re my darling,” he said.

  “I am?” In an instant, her face was again aglow.

  “You’ll always be my darling. Now, tell me what Ludovico did. Tell me everything.”

  Ludovico sat in the office of Del Monte, in the Auberge of Italy, the admiral having granted him its use. On the walls hung portraits of past heroes of the langue and Ottoman banners captured in battles at sea. The red hand standard of the Sanjak Cheder, taken that day, enjoyed the place of honor. The admiral’s chair was a good one from which to conduct his impending conference with the bail
iffs of the French langue.

  He’d yet to complete the commission entrusted him by Ghisleri. The succession of Del Monte to the Grand Master’s throne wasn’t yet secure. Yet of all the challenges he’d faced, this one had proved simpler than he’d dare hope. He’d rehearsed the argument for Del Monte’s candidacy with the heads of the other langues. The Castilians, the Aragonese, the Germans, and the Auvergnoise had already pledged their support. Replete with heroes though the Religion was, Del Monte’s leadership of the defense of Saint Michel had been peerless. No one could match the respect in which he was held. More to the point, after ninety-two days of brutal attrition no one had the stomach for political maneuvering. He anticipated no problem in recruiting the French, though temperament would oblige them to give that appearance.

  He wore the black robe and the freedom from his armor was a relief. His back and ribs pained him and he shifted in his chair. The bullet that had struck him two nights before had punched a divot the size of a hen’s egg in his backplate and for several moments he’d believed himself killed. The experience had been disturbing. He’d felt no fear, no regret. He’d willed into his mind’s eye an image of Our Lord on the Cross. He’d murmured the Act of Contrition. He’d felt at Peace. Then Carla’s face had filled his brain, and his love for her had filled his heart, and then he’d felt fear. Fear that his love would never find expression. Such was the craven emotion he thought he would carry into eternity—until loyal Anacleto had crawled toward him, with his perfect face torn away, and he’d understood that death had not come calling after all.