Religion: A Novel

by Tim Willocks

  The fist of dread in Tannhauser’s gut unclenched. He grabbed the dagger from the corpse and cut through the straps down one side of Bors’s cuirass. With the convulsions racking Bors’s frame it was a job, but he got it done and he stripped the heavy plates onto the ground. With his chest freed from this constriction, Bors coughed his lungs clear and his mind quickly followed, or at least to the extent that he tried to take Tannhauser by the throat. The bloody flap masked one eye and the other was swollen shut and for the moment Bors was blind. Tannhauser seized the groping wrists to avoid being throttled.

  “Bors, it’s Mattias. The fight is done. It’s Mattias.”

  “Mattias?” The bloody and sightless face swung up.

  “Yes. The fight is done,” he repeated. “We bested them, for now.”

  “Am I undone?” His voice was slurred by the deformities.

  “No, you’ve just acquired a badge to justify your boasting for the next twenty years.” Tannhauser pulled off Bors’s bloody steel mittens. “Can you stand? Take my hands.”

  Bors spat and hauled himself upright and caught his balance. “Hold still,” said Tannhauser. He pushed the drooping flap of brow back into place against the exposed skull bone and an eye blinked in the early light. “Here.” Tannhauser took Bors’s right hand and guided it so that he could keep the flap pinned in place with his own fingers. Tannhauser slung the stripped cuirass over his shoulder by its surviving straps.

  “Hang on to my arm,” he said.

  “Do you take me for a woman?”

  Bors located his two-hander and stubbornly retrieved it and used it as a stick. They crested the dire embankment and Bors stopped and turned to take in the vista with his one good eye. “Christ’s wounds!” he said.

  It was as good an inventory of the night’s work as any and Tannhauser, with nothing to add, just nodded in accord. But Bors’s exclamation was in response to something other than the carnage. He pointed with his free hand and Tannhauser looked.

  Twenty-odd paces distant a slender, bareheaded figure squatted on his heels atop the tangled monstrosity of corpses choking the ditch. His filth-rimed leather cuirass was too big for his chest and with his long thin arms poking out it gave him the look of a scarab on a hill of dung. In his fingers he examined something that glittered when it caught the light, perhaps a brooch or a jewel-encrusted dagger. Some lupine intuition made him raise his head and he stared right at them, his face as soiled as his harness. Teeth gleamed in the dirt and he raised one hand in salute.

  “Yes indeed,” said Bors. “By my oath that’s Orlandu di Borgo.”

  The boy ran over at their beckoning, pausing to grab Tannhauser’s abandoned mace. The boy had been watching him, then. The feeling was curious. Orlandu stopped before them, proud as a gamecock to have been summoned by two such giants of the field, and he saluted. Beneath the grime, and lean as he was, his features were flushed with the sap of youth. His eyes were a strong yellowy brown. A fine nose and delicate lips. A quick-witted lad by the look of him and, at a guess, capable of low cunning. All of which met with Tannhauser’s approval. He fancied he could see the ghost of Carla—an innate sensitivity perhaps—and, more surely, the long limbs and capacity to brood in the brow of his father, Ludovico.

  “So you are Orlandu Boccanera,” said Tannhauser.

  “Orlandu di Borgo, my lord,” corrected the youth, sassy as you please. He dipped his head. “And you are the bold Captain Tannhauser.”

  Tannhauser said, “You’ve led me a merry old dance.”

  The boy assumed a guarded expression, as if accused of mischief but puzzled as to what. The glittering object was nowhere in sight.

  “What did you steal from the dead?” said Tannhauser.

  He watched Orlandu contemplate deceit. Tannhauser held out his hand. The boy’s arm fluttered and a dagger appeared in his palm. Artfully sleeved. He gave it to Tannhauser with the rueful air of one seeing something precious vanish forever. The sheath was of moss-green leather, tipped and chased with silver. He slid the dagger free. Its hilt was set with an emerald.

  “This is a hancher,” he said. “The accoutrement of a corbacy at least. A Turkish knight carried this. You could shave with it if you could but lay claim to a beard.” Orlandu shrugged, determined to mount a brave face to his loss. Tannhauser slid the blade back home. “To the lion belongs whatever his hand may seize,” quoted Tannhauser. He handed the dagger back and the boy licked his lips. “Don’t let the Spaniards see it, or you’ll have to stick it through their ribs.”

  The dagger vanished as quickly as it had appeared and Tannhauser smiled.

  “Come,” he said. “Bors is in need of some needlework, and I don’t want him to stand in line, for it’s going to be a long one.”

  “Am I to serve you, my lord?” asked Orlandu. The prospect seemed to delight him.

  Tannhauser laughed. The weariness begat by the tragic nocturne eased. It was an auspicious place to have caught up with the boy. They were alive, after all, and across the bay, and beyond the Kalkara Gate, his famous boat was waiting at Zonra. Amparo’s arms waited too and a smile on Carla’s face. The tide had turned at last. More. It was already sweeping him home to the coast of Italy.

  “Are you to serve me?” said Tannhauser. He unslung Bors’s armor and dumped it in Orlandu’s reedy arms. “Why not? At this date it will make a welcome change.”

  Friday, June 15, 1565

  Saint Elmo—The Barbican—The Solar—The Wharf

  By the time Tannhauser got Bors to the chapel a pyre of amputated limbs already filled the bailey with the smell of burning meat. The sheeted dead were stacked outside in the dust and they had to fight their way inside through a morass of mutilated bodies, to whose groans for mercy Tannhauser closed his ears. Inside the chapel, a Mass in thanks for their victory was in progress at the altar. Mere inches from the chaplain, the scarlet-aproned surgeons plied their bone saws. Hoping to spare Bors as much agony as possible, Tannhauser located his knapsack and produced a bottle of brandy, which Bors rifled down his throat while employing the flat of his sword to defend his greed.

  Tannhauser picked his way through the afflicted, slithering here and there on the ubiquitous clots, and braced the surgeons. Beleaguered by his entreaties, Jurien de Lyon forsook a Spanish soldier whose congealing entrails dangled about his crotch, and inserted twenty-seven sheep-gut sutures into Bors’s face. By the finish—and the improvement was quite remarkable—Bors’s reassembled features were the color of a rotting aubergine and so swollen that he was sightless altogether. Tannhauser shouldered the knapsack, drained the surviving inch of brandy, and guided Bors’s blind and staggering frame back out across the carpet of the hapless.

  They found some shade and Orlandu raised his standing by providing a fine breakfast of ox liver, red onions, and a skin of wine. Shortly thereafter, Orlandu was assaulted by an enraged and withered monk wielding a copper ladle and only Tannhauser saved this Stromboli from being knifed with the hancher blade. Yet so odious and ungrateful did the old man prove to be that Tannhauser, a mite testy after six hours in the breach, dispossessed him of the ladle and bent it so tightly around his throat that it turned him blue.

  “Go and peel your onions and whatnot,” Tannhauser told him, “while the fighting men replenish their energies.”

  As he settled to his nap, Tannhauser noted that this exchange had further endeared him to the boy. He awoke as stiff as a board and in more agony by far than he’d felt at the battle’s close. As evening came and the day cooled it became clear that Bors was unwilling to “flee to the Borgo” on account of “this scratch.”

  “I will never live it down!” he bleated.

  Bors’s passage across the harbor had already been secured, in exchange for a crock of apricot jam, ahead of a large number of far worthier cases. The boats would be so crammed with the sorely afflicted that Tannhauser was unable to acquire berths for himself and Orlandu. Anything was possible, but pride, or shame, or exhaustion, or some regrettable c
ombination of the three, persuaded him to delay their return until the following night. After so brutal a reverse, Mustafa would need days to prepare another assault and the danger was acceptable. To mollify Bors’s drunken truculence, Tannhauser fed him a lump of raw opium that would have killed two lesser men, shoved a pound of the stuff inside his shirt, and three hours later herded him like a steer to the waiting transports. Bors, who’d been further gentled by the return of his Damascus musket, was by this time under the illusion that he was being dispatched to Saint Elmo rather than sent away from it, and it was with relief that Tannhauser finally watched him slide across the water.

  On Tuesday and Wednesday the boats were again filled to the gunwales with the limbless, the dying, and the blind. Standing side by side on the wharf with both Le Mas and the noble Jurien, Tannhauser quailed at presenting so cowardly a spectacle. He spent these days sleeping as much as the continued bombardment allowed. He helped Le Mas in deciding where best to lay the batteries and was careful to take no part in repelling the minor but vicious night raids by which the Turks continued to harass them. While taking care not to make a nuisance of himself, Orlandu stuck to him like a shadow, thus evading many arduous chores, and was solicitous to as many of Tannhauser’s needs as he could satisfy.

  Tannhauser saw no logic in bewildering the boy by revealing the true nature of his interest in him. Who knew what effect such shocking revelations might have on his callow brain? The instinctive liking he’d felt for the boy on first meeting deepened and grew. Orlandu laughed easily, the most admirable of virtues in Tannhauser’s book, and his stoicism was commendable. Given the right education, he would make a fine rogue and adventurer. Carla would have him studying the quadrivium, no doubt, but that was surely the superior road to travel. It occurred to him that—as the boy’s stepfather-to-be—he would have some say in these matters, and he resolved not to encourage him in sin and to set an upstanding example wherever possible. In the meantime, man and boy took pleasure from the latter’s education in the use of firearms.

  At sundown on Thursday, with the fiery orb’s departure tinting the gun smoke pink, an emissary of the Pasha, nervous as a fledgling thespian, climbed atop the ravelin before the barbican and requested a parley. At Governor Luigi Broglia’s request Tannhauser attended the battlements to translate for the commanders.

  Tannhauser and the Turkish ambassador shouted across the twenty yards that parted them. Mustafa, it turned out, was offering terms for the fort’s peaceable surrender. This gave the morale of the grandees a considerable fillip. Broglia was a gnarled Piedmontese in his seventies who bore several fresh wounds with insouciance. He produced an unkindly smile, his lips puckered by the prominent gaps in his teeth.

  “Mustafa’s arsehole must be raw,” he said. “What terms does he offer?”

  “Mustafa swears by his beard,” rendered Tannhauser, “and by the tombs of his holy ancestors, and by the beard of the Prophet, blessed be His name, that he will grant safe passage to any member of the garrison who wishes to leave tonight.”

  Le Mas pointed to the noxious mire of decomposing corpses that more or less begirded the fort. “Tell him—by the beards of his women—that we’ve tombs aplenty for him and his offspring too.”

  “Safe passage to where?” said Broglia.

  Tannhauser asked the emissary. He would have accepted the offer in a trice.

  “To Mdina,” he reported. “No man who retires will be molested.”

  “Is he to be trusted?” asked Broglia.

  Tannhauser’s heart fluttered with hope. “These are grave oaths, comic as they may seem to you, and publicly made. He wouldn’t blaspheme in front of his own troops. And Mustafa kept his word to you at Rhodes, did he not?”

  Broglia, along with La Valette, was one of the tiny and dwindling elite who’d survived that legendary epic. He grimaced, as if the memory of that surrender still soured his tongue.

  “Tell Mustafa we’re resolved to die where we stand.”

  Tannhauser turned to convey this unwelcome riposte.

  Broglia stopped him with a hand. “Better yet, let his ambassador die where he stands.” He indicated the German wheel lock cradled in Tannhauser’s elbow. “Shoot him.”

  Tannhauser blinked. It was all the time he needed to decide that moral delicacy would earn him no distinction with those present. He threw the rifle to his shoulder and the emissary, alert to the likelihood of such perfidy, caught the movement and turned to retreat from his perch. With a matchlock gun against him, he might have succeeded, but the wheel lock ignited its charge on the instant the trigger was pulled. The sixteen-bore lead ball punctured the unfortunate ambassador mid-spine and pitched his broken body down the ravelin’s far side. Le Mas chortled and as a furious but inconclusive musket duel brought the peace conference to a close, Tannhauser retreated to the gatehouse. Before he could take his leave, collect Orlandu, and head smartly for the wharf, he was invited to a war council in the solar, and his excuses were not accepted.

  The solar—the grand chamber of the fort’s inner stronghold—itself bore signs of battery. The groins in the vault sported cracks, a pair of trusses clung on by dint of wedged splinters alone, piles of fallen plaster scattered the floor, and dust motes danced in the light of the candles and lamps. But Stromboli provided well and Tannhauser found himself tucking into one of the sheep that had accompanied him across Grand Harbor. He dined with Broglia, Le Mas, De Medran, Miranda, Aiguabella, Lanfreducci, and Guaras. They ate and talked at a splendid oak table, still wearing their gore-scabbed harness in case the alarums sounded. The topic was of how best to extend their defiance at the most exorbitant cost to the Turk. Maimed and enfeebled though most at that table were, the talk of combat vitalized their spirit. Their conviction that God’s design and their own were one and the same was irrefragable. A singular jocundity reigned, from which Tannhauser felt excluded. He was feasting with madmen. Then Captain Miranda, not a professed knight but a Spanish adventurer, asked Tannhauser for his opinion.

  “As the Arab proverb has it,” he said, “an army of sheep commanded by a lion would defeat an army of lions led by a sheep.”

  Guaras almost rose from the table and Tannhauser hastened to assure the fierce Castilian that he was not the sheep commander in question.

  Tannhauser said, “If Mustafa had more patience and cunning—which are virtues just as leonine as courage—he would leave some few batteries, solidly defended, on the hill along with those on Gallows Point, and move the bulk of his army to besiege the Borgo. He could batter this fort from three directions at his leisure, you’d receive no further reinforcements, your morale would wither quickly, and the apple would fall from the tree. It’s the fact that Saint Elmo is cast as the prize of this epic that keeps you fighting so hard. If you were relegated to a sideshow . . .” He shrugged.

  “Well?” said Le Mas. “Is the dog that cunning?”

  “No,” said Tannhauser. “Mustafa’s methods were forged in other wars, in times now past, and the leopard won’t change his spots. Mustafa’s counsel is his rage and the thrill of sending men to die in battle. He’ll continue this offensive to the bitter end. Since you murdered his ambassador—an insult hard to surpass—Mustafa will determine to overwhelm the fort at his next attempt. Which I guess will be in no more than three days.”

  A certain gloom hovered about and Tannhauser thought this the moment to make his exit. But Le Mas clapped him on the shoulder, which since it was still black-and-blue almost made him gasp with pain. “An admirable shot, by the way,” said the brawny Frenchman. “Plucked him like a quail from the covey.”

  “At that range I could’ve hit him with this table,” Tannhauser said.

  Le Mas smiled. “I wasn’t commending your marksmanship but rather your élan.”

  There was a ripple of mirth and their spirits were restored. A toast was raised to the hardness of Tannhauser’s heart. His attempts to escape their company and sneak away to the boats were roundly thwarted, and a fine brandy
from Auch was produced, and they cajoled him to tell tall tales of distant campaigning in Nakhichevan and the Shiite marches, and to describe the Temple in Jerusalem, which no other there had ever seen, and to expound on the bloodstained career of Suleiman Shah. Their prejudices were affirmed to hear that the Suleiman had ordered the strangling of his own two sons, and of their sons too, by the notorious mute eunuchs of the seraglio. They were amazed to discover how like their own were the sacred rules and customs by which the janissaries lived, and they were moved to learn that Tannhauser had once worn their colors, and the grandees looked at him through altered eyes, and Tannhauser didn’t feel so alien in their company anymore. Guaras asked him why he’d left the janissaries, and Tannhauser gave a false answer, which was that he’d rediscovered Jesus Christ, and this pleased them. But not even Bors knew the true reason, for of the many dark deeds that might have caused Tannhauser shame, the deed that lay behind his disaffection was the most despicable of all.

  By the time he finally left, and somewhat unsteadily, the transports had long vanished into the night. As Tannhauser made his bed in the shelter of the chapel, with Orlandu curled at his feet like a watchful dog, he felt sad for the old men of the Religion, for all of them were old in spirit, shackled as they were to a world and a dream long dead. And he thought of Amparo, and his heart knew a different ache. And he thought of Carla and her green eyes rimmed with black and her red silk dress and her martyr’s heart. And of Sabato Svi in Venice and the money they’d make. And he reminded himself, as he fell asleep, that the rare and noble brotherhood of the knights was not a thing to be seduced by, for in the end it was a cult of death, and of such fellowships as those he’d had his fill.

  On the day following, Friday the 15th, the Turks renewed their bombardment. The bakery was destroyed. Sixty- and eighty-pound balls bounced around the bailey, dismembering anyone in their way. Hunched behind the breastworks and crumbling curtains, the dust-powdered defenders scuttled about like ants under assault by barbarous children. No one doubted the end was near. Tannhauser resolved to leave that night no matter what the cost.