by Tim Willocks
“I’ve sullied you,” he said.
His crooked teeth flashed bright in his sooty face.
Then she watched him lope away toward the front.
Carla found Amparo asleep on the cot. She lay down beside her and the girl shifted without waking and Carla wrapped her in her arms. She felt no self-reproach for her heart was too full of love. Love for all of her beloved. She thanked God for the companionship in which she was rich. She prayed to Jesus to understand, and to forgive her, though what, exactly, it was that required absolution she wasn’t certain. Surely, amid so much cruelty, love in any form was good. Mattias’s for both women; even Ludovico’s for her. She prayed for Mattias and Amparo. She prayed for Orlandu. She prayed for Ludovico that his madness and pain might be healed.
She fell into a deep and exhausted slumber. She dreamed in vivid, fantastical spasms in which her spirit flew through uncharted astral realms and mystic vortices unknowable to waking sense, and which left her breathless and in awe and yearning for worlds whose discovery prohibited return. And of these worlds, when she woke, she remembered little, except that they contained nothing of horror and fear.
And as well that was, for the new day dawning brought more of both in plenty.
The night assault on the wall had given out at first light. Casualties were heavy. Carla woke to find Amparo gone, and she ventured out with her poke of bandages and needles and twine to do what she could. Burned timbers subsided in sparking gusts. Children watched her walk by with the stunned and vacant expressions evoked by Mattias. Knights and soldiers—and lamenting widows searching for the source of their grief—staggered about the calamity amazed, like the Angels expelled from Paradise to their smoking and infernal fiefdom newly arrived. The sun crawled up as if loath to illuminate such squalor. And vultures descended from their gyres on silent wings and roosted on the ricks of carrion unperturbed, like hunched and black-robed arbiters of some dispute on the essence of woe.
From Lazaro she heard in passing that, during the night, Fra Ludovico, of the Italian langue, and his shield-bearer, Anacleto of Crato, had both been shot down during the battle by a volley of musketry. Both were still alive in the Italian infirmary, though Lazaro was uncertain of their condition.
Carla’s intuition, by contrast, was in no doubt. While she’d traveled to distant worlds on a chimera of Peace, Mattias had attended—directly—to his military matters. But she had no chance to ponder this news any further, for as the sun cleared Monte San Salvatore the Turks attacked again along the whole of the front.
Siege guns bellowed from the heights. Tambours rolled and pipes and imams shrilled. And with ominous creaks and groans, and to the snapping of whips and a chorus of anguish from the numberless blackamoor slaves straining at the ropes, the Moslems hauled up with them from the Marsaxlokk road a siege tower of gigantic proportion. As this cyclopean engine shunted across the Grande Terre Plein, the slaves laid greased planks beneath its wheels, laying a roadway toward the bastion of Provence. In the monster’s train came a winding column of musketmen.
Carla watched the tower’s progress with a giddy sense of lunacy. If her lost dreams that night had seemed fantastical, the outlandish spectacle unfolding in the arid dust made them seem banal. She looked at the faces of the defenders. The approach of the Leviathan sowed a crop of despair in every Christian breast. Yet to a man and a woman they rose from the ruins when the alarum trumpet called, and they unlimbered their arms and unfurled the colors of the Baptist, and stepped up once more to the gore-boltered rim to defend the Holy Religion against the heathen.
Sunday, August 19, 1565
Auberge of England—Bastion of Provence
Tannhauser awoke to the squeeze of a thick-fingered hand upon his shoulder. As he emerged from a world free of pain and erotic limitation, and in which he’d hoped to abide forever and a day, he opened his eyes and saw Bors.
“No,” grunted Tannhauser.
“Yes,” said Bors.
Bors proffered a bowl from which arose the smell of coffee. Over previous weeks he’d broken all of Tannhauser’s Izmit cups. Somewhere in the distance the sound of gunfire was general. Tannhauser hoisted himself on one elbow and took the thick-rimmed bowl and drank. Despite the rim, the taste afforded him bliss, but he didn’t let on.
“You skimped on the sugar,” he said.
“I don’t know how you can drink that swill.”
“Its properties are medicinal and I’m in need.”
Bors disappeared. With luck he would never return. Tannhauser glanced sideways and found Amparo peering at him from beneath the sheet. In a state of reckless arousal he’d stolen her from the infirmary while Carla slept. His bargain with the latter, after all, had been to maintain the status quo. Amparo’s eyes were bright and saucy. He felt her hand slide across his belly to locate what he realized was an especially splendid erection. He realized also, with dismay, that it would be wasted, for a harsh clatter drew his attention. Bors had returned with Tannhauser’s harness and rattled it before him.
“We’re summoned before the Grand Master,” said Bors.
“I’m sick of the sight and sound of the Grand Master,” said Tannhauser. “I’m sick of the war. I’m sick of the Turks. Most of all, I’m sick of you interrupting my connubials.”
A snort. “So that’s what you call them.” With an even more disagreeable racket Bors dropped the armor by the bed and left.
With a deal of unmanly groans and foul blasphemies, Tannhauser clambered to his feet and got into his clothes. With every bone and joint proclaiming its anguish, he felt close on a hundred years old. Amparo pranced around him and helped where she could, but undermined her efforts, not to say his own, by virtue of being quite nude. As he contemplated the armor and its evil weight, and being still in possession of the means, his spirit rebelled against the Grand Master’s authority and he wrestled Amparo to her knees on the mattress’s edge. Still standing, he entered her from behind. She made no protest, though the maneuver was accompanied by screams of delectation that might have been mistaken for such. He heard Bors cough violently outside the door and as a concession to public seemliness he clapped one hand around Amparo’s mouth. She bit the web of his thumb and the screams were muffled to whimpers. Both the bite and the sounds served to further fan his abandon. His other hand he cupped around her breast and with the leverage thus provided he swived her with gusto until his seed erupted inside her. In the normal run he wouldn’t have been quite so brisk, for in indulging his pleasures he inclined toward the leisurely rather than the frantic, but if the Grand Master was kept waiting overlong, agents less delicate than Bors might happen along, and that wouldn’t do. To Amparo’s strident chagrin he withdrew, his sweat dripping onto her arse. He smothered her mouth with a compensatory kiss.
“You’re a treasure,” he said, and disengaged her hand from his wilting member.
Overwhelmed though he now was by the urge to go back to sleep, he struggled into his armor and she buckled the straps. Unwholesome scabs of congealed filth flaked from the metal and tumbled about the floor. He resolved to recruit a slave—if he could find one alive—to give it a burnish.
He said, “Will you visit Buraq today?”
“I visit him every day,” she said. “He misses you.”
“Convey my affection. And mind you stick to the backstreets, there are snipers about.”
He grabbed his sword and baldric and went to the door.
“Don’t die,” she said.
“I’ll do my best.”
“If you were killed, I don’t think I should want to live.”
He looked at her face, which was an error, for his heart began to melt. He ran his fingers through her hair. Memories of doing something similar to Carla only scant hours before stirred in his mind, and he felt like a swine. It was all too much for a simple soldier.
“I won’t tolerate such morbid nonsense,” he said. “The sun is shining, the sea is blue, and you’re the picture of health and beauty.”
S
he hugged herself with woe and unwittingly created a stunning cleavage with her arms. From the crook of her elbow peeked the umber rim of one nipple. His own woes multiplied on the spot. Couldn’t La Valette and the Turks wait another hour or so? The short respite notwithstanding, he was more than game to give her another seeing-to. From beyond the door came a gruff voice.
“Mattias! If you don’t want to share her with an Algerian, put it away.”
Tannhauser resolved to be cheerful.
He smiled and Amparo smiled too. Carla had told him that, to her knowledge, Amparo never smiled for anyone else, and this flattered his vanity hugely. “Kiss me,” he said.
She did so, careless of the foul matter caking his breastplate. He squeezed her hams in farewell and tore himself away. In the corridor Bors detached himself from the wall and followed him toward the stair.
“Do you think this concerns Ludovico?” Bors asked.
“I thought the Algerians were hammering at the door.”
“I’m serious.”
“Has La Valette sent a page or the serjeants at arms?”
“Andreas, his page.”
“Then there’s your answer. If I’m wrong we’ll brass it out. Amparo will vouch for our whereabouts, and in any event, who can trust any witness from yesternight’s havoc? Turkish marksmen shot him, and there’s an end to it.”
“They’re still alive,” said Bors.
Tannhauser stopped on the steps and turned to look at him.
“Ludo and his lyme hound too,” said Bors. “We missed both of them.”
“We missed both of them? I saw them go down.”
“You caught Ludo square between the shoulders, but he was wearing Negroli plate. Cracked ribs and a bad back is all you gave him.”
Tannhauser cursed the Milanese. “And Anacleto?”
“He turned in alarm as his master fell, took my ball in the face. I’m told he lost an eye—and his gorgeous looks—but will likely survive.”
Tannhauser scowled. “I should’ve knifed him by the fireside.” He’d feared swordplay with Carla so close. He recalled the aplomb with which she’d witnessed his murder of the priest and cursed his timidity. But it was done. “Don’t fret,” he said. “La Valette values our swords too much to hang us on a rumor, if rumors there be.”
“None that I’ve heard.”
“Then Ludo will play the hand himself. Or throw it in. In any event, he’s now more reason to fear us than vice versa.” Tannhauser continued down the stairs. “Let’s find out why we’re wanted.”
They found La Valette with Oliver Starkey at his command post in the square: some chairs and a table, his famous maps and charts, all shaded from the sun by a red lateen sail strung from ship’s spars sunk into the ground. From the enceinte came the din of battle, now no less familiar, and hardly more distracting, than the splash of the waves on the shore. For the first time the Grand Master looked careworn. His skin was sallow, his hair wispy, his shoulders frail, the veins and tendons in his hands prominent and fragile. The wounds sustained to his leg the previous day had left him lame, and when he rose from his chair to greet them, he almost had to sit down again. Tannhauser made the most of his own limp, both to mitigate the fact that he’d been loafing in bed and to minimize the extravagance of La Valette’s expectations. He bowed.
“Your Excellency,” he said.
“Captain.” La Valette dipped his head. “The siege tower you promised has arrived.”
Tannhauser cursed the noble Abbas; it was his infernal machine that had robbed him of a morning in bed. He wondered what his old patron’s genius had inspired.
“Come,” said La Valette. “I would have you advise me.”
The four of them made their way through the ruins toward the bastion of Provence. The wall that had appeared so impenetrable a few weeks before now had more gaps than a beggar’s smile. Its height varied from the original forty feet to huge banks of rubble not much taller than a man. Holes yawned between broken stumps of masonry, and cracks and sags and subsidence caused by the Turkish sappers gave the entire curtain an air of ramshackle debility. Whole sections of the rampart had been blown away at erratic intervals and it was no longer possible to walk the alure for more than a hundred-foot stretch in one go. The bastion of Castile wasn’t much more than a glorified barricade, and the breach to its either side, though still the focus of frenzied rebuilding, invited fresh invasion at any moment.
The Turkish strategy on this the second day of their sustained assault was to launch a tide of skirmishes, whose aim seemed not to break through but to exhaust the thin line of defenders. Instead of fighting to the death, the gazi would retreat in good order, and with minimal loss, to make way for a fresh detachment, and then another, and so on and so forth, like waves grinding down the shale of an embankment. Alongside the Christian soldiers, wherever the wall gaped open, women and children in tattered raiment, and naked slaves chained in pairs, toiled to collect and restack the broken masonry. This work on the fortifications never stopped and labor gangs worked through the night. Musket fire by daylight exacted a brutal toll, but no one was permitted to stop working. Of groans and lamentations there were plenty and, in counterpoint, the chaplains laboring with the rest conducted decades of the rosary in an endless chant and refrain, the voices weaving an elegy through the toil like a golden thread in a tapestry of despair.
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.”
“Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”
“Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.”
“Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”
La Valette made no comment on the spectacle. As they climbed the external wall stair to Provence, he stopped and pointed west and Tannhauser turned to look. Across the bridge of boats spanning Galley Creek, L’Isola smoldered in a desolation all its own.
“Del Monte inspires the defenders of Saint Michel to prodigies of valor,” said La Valette. “But if they collapse, they can expect no assistance from us.”
They’d paused below the rim of the circular bastion. The wall shook beneath them as a cannonball slammed into the batter on the other side. Along the alure above, arquebusiers and knights huddled under the parapet, not daring to raise their heads. The price for doing so was displayed by bodies laid low by slags of lead. From beyond the rim came volleys of musketry, so close that the smoke from their muzzles wafted overhead. A humbara lofted down to explode on the scorched wall walk, and a Maltese waddled on his haunches like a cumbersome toad to empty a bucket of sand on the blaze. The whole sorry portrait was one of men waiting to die. La Valette pointed at the embrasure to the east of the bastion.
“Take a look,” he said. “And beware.”
Tannhauser crept along the alure and peered around the merlon. Although the presence of the siege tower was no surprise, the sight at close range filled him with a bowel-watering terror. It was at most twenty feet away and he could see the upper third, which tapered to an open-topped platform that permitted four musketmen abreast to squat behind an iron-sheathed gate. From here they fired directly down into the fort. Behind the first four men waited a second rank of four, and behind those a third. The front rank had just discharged their guns and Tannhauser watched as these men peeled off, two to each side, and scurried past the rear ranks and down ladders at the back to a lower gallery, where they could reload in safety. The second rank now moved to the fore and scoured the Borgo for prey. He reckoned that from that vantage their range took in a good third of the town, the workers on the breaches of Castile, and anyone exposed on the wall walk as far as the bastion of Germany. Plus anyone else, such as himself, fool enough to show their face any closer. He saw the bore of a musket seek him out and pulled back as the match fell. A moment later the ball carved a groove from t
he merlon and threw splinters of sandstone in his hair.
He shuffled along the alure to the next embrasure and took another look. The whole tower was proofed against bullets by layers of raw ox hides and sheets of chain mail. Here and there the hides were scorched and smoldering and the smell of burned hair mixed with the gun smoke. Voices shouted orders and praised Allah within. Fresh marksmen clambered the rearward ladders to refill the third rank. They were eager and well drilled, the alliance of men and machine as smooth as it was ingenious. The tower creaked and swayed with the antics of the snipers and the recoil of the nine-palm muskets, but taut ship’s cables ran from stanchions at each upper corner and were anchored to stakes in the ground to provide stability. The whole conception, for all its demented appearance, bore the signature of Abbas’s intelligence.
From this angle Tannhauser saw that the front gate protecting the marksmen was hinged two stories below and could be lowered outward on chains to form a footbridge to the ramparts. But of that, as yet, there was no need. At something over a thousand shots per hour—and more to the point, at close range—the siege engine had paralyzed the defenders and was grinding them away for negligible Turkish loss.
Tannhauser rejoined La Valette, Starkey, and Bors on the stair.
“She’s a beauty,” said Tannhauser.
La Valette grimaced in agreement. “And cunningly placed too. None of our cannon can mark it and we can’t locate a new battery under their fire. We tried. The lower galleries of the tower are also loaded with musketmen. When Sieur Polastron launched a sally from the gate they were cut down on the threshold. Not a man reached the end of the drawbridge. If I committed, we could overwhelm it, but Mustafa would launch his cavalry from the heights. The cost in lives would be ruinous and, unlike Mustafa, lives is the one resource we can’t afford.”
“Wildfire?” asked Bors.
“The hides won’t burn,” said Starkey. “They keep them watered with brine. They’re pouring aimed shots into the fort for no reply. If they have the patience, they can whittle us to the bone before launching their next assault.”