The Religion (21 page)

At an over-respectful distance from the women, and looking at the vanishing shore of Europe, were a score or so of knights in black doublets. Their breasts bore white eight-pointed crosses cut from silk, and these crosses shone with an eerie glow in the moonlight. They spanned forty years in age, but most looked under thirty. All sported strong, warlike beards. All murmured
Pater nosters
. The knights were obliged to recite one hundred and fifty
Pater nosters
every day, but since accuracy in the count was hard to keep, they rarely stopped, and at sea they prayed for hours in a mystic trance. Each man gradually fell into the rhythm of another, until they chanted the prayer in unison, and Bors felt a chill down his spine, for the sound of so many killers in perfect harmony was a sound to set a block of stone atremble. He saw that the contessa had joined the knights in their incantation, and that the girl had not.

Bors looked back to Sicily. They were sailing to a bloodbath, yet he craved it. Craved it more than gold, more than honor. Only in battle were the shackles of morality broken. Only on the field of blood, where all prior investitures were rendered null and void, was a man stripped to the nub of his being. Only there could transcendence be found. The greater part of humankind toiled and died without ever knowing such ecstasy. Once known, all else lost its savor. Horror-in which the world abounded anyway-was a small price to pay to know it again. With a rattle of blocks and the snap of canvas and rigging, the huge red lateens dropped from the yards and swelled in the breeze. An enormous cross of gold shone on the mainsail. Mattias appeared at his side and slipped an arm through the crook of Bors's elbow.

"So," said Mattias, "your wish is granted. The natural order is fulfilled."

"I wouldn't have wished it at quite so hefty a price," Bors replied.

"At the least you'll fetch back some tales to tell by the fireside."

Bors tipped his head toward the women. "And you've brought minstrels in skirts to accompany our revels."

"Where we're going, music will be more precious than rubies," said Mattias. "But mark me now and remember. I've no mind to see this fight through to its end. We're going to spirit a boy from the jaws of war."

At the age of nine, or thereabouts, Bors had struck his father to the ground with a hoe and stowed away on a curragh out of Carlisle to join the army of the King of Connaught. Thinking of this, he frowned. "What boy would want to be thus spirited?"

"Perhaps he will not. But I don't intend to offer him the choice."

"Whoever he is," said Bors, "I'm in his debt."

Mattias shook his head and grinned. And Bors thanked God Almighty that somehow on the long and crooked road he'd earned such love. Bors would have ridden with Mattias if he'd planned to kidnap Satan from his deep and fiery throne. With a squeeze of Bors's arm, Mattias disengaged and joined the women.

Bors turned back to the spume churned up from the deep by the blades of the oars. On some other quarter of this ancient sea, tens of thousands of
gazi
approached their own moment of truth. Fifty grueling days crammed cheek by jowl in the Sultan's ships. After such confinement, landfall would see them howling for Christian blood. Bors had never fought the Lions of Islam, but if Mattias was any guide they'd be a handful. The prospect made his thighs and bowels shake. The reasons that had brought them here, Mattias and his women too, no longer mattered. The God of War had spoken and they'd rallied to his call. The rhythmic litany of the knights seeped into his chest.

"Pater noster, qui est in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen
."

On a red-and-black ship, across a black-and-silver sea, they sailed by the light of the moon toward Hell's Gate. When the knights began their litany afresh, Bors joined them.

Friday, May 18, 1565

Kalkara Bay-The Borgo-Malta

Orlandu had hunted the greyhound since first light, when a cannon shot had woken him from his roofless billet by the creek and he'd seen the animal's lean silhouette against the sky. Crimson corrugations of cloud broke from the east, like an army of the night in flight from the scourge of day, and the breeze, never cooler or sweeter than at dawn, carried on its wings the voices of men singing Psalms.

At the second cannon shot the greyhound turned toward him. They weren't more than a dozen feet apart, the dog looking down from a stack of canvas-bound crates on the Kalkara dock. A beam of early light escaped the clouds and he saw that the dog was pure white. Its ears snapped erect and they studied each other, the dog and the barefoot boy, the one as clean of limb as God could have made him, the other scabbed with bites and tarnished with gore. Orlandu grabbed his butcher knife from the capstones by his head and slowly stood up. The hound's eyes were mournful and bright. His soul was unconcealed. His nobility pierced Orlandu's heart.

As far as Orlandu knew, this white greyhound was the last living dog on the island. Whether it was so or not, not a bark or a howl was to be heard throughout the town. Whether it was so or not, Orlandu intended to kill this beautiful white hound before the morning was done.

At the third cannon shot, the greyhound leapt from his station and vanished into the streets with the stealth of a phantom. Orlandu plunged into the Borgo in pursuit, and so intent he was on tracking down his prey that the sun had cleared the horizon before he remembered. He stopped. Three shots from Castel Sant'Angelo was the signal all had awaited with measureless dread. The Turkish armada had been spotted out in the offing. The Hordes of Islam had arrived at Malta's shores.

The slaughter of the dogs had taken three days. This was the fourth. Their extermination had been decreed by Grand Master La Valette. In the siege of Rhodes, it was said, La Valette had seen the people eat rats and dogs. Furthermore, the dogs had eaten the corpses of the slain. He
had determined that, on Malta, death would come to all before any such degradation would be tolerated. Orlandu had heard it said also that of all living things La Valette's most tender love was reserved for his hunting dogs. Before making his decree public, La Valette had taken his sword and killed his six beloved hounds by his own hand. Afterward, it was said, La Valette had wept with pity.

If the decree was simple enough, its execution proved more taxing than anyone expected. Many whose dogs were to hand followed La Valette's example and killed them themselves. But the policy couldn't be concealed from the animals so condemned. By nightfall of the first day, alerted by the yowls of their fellows and with their masters turning against them on every side, dogs domestic and feral alike had banded together in wild-eyed packs in which they roamed the streets and alleys of the city. Since the city was walled and surrounded by the sea, escape was not possible, and sanctuary was denied.

Since dogs are strangely like men in this respect, the packs were led by the most savage and cunning among them. In such large numbers, and fueled by terror and the stench of the pyres on which their carcasses were daily burned, these packs proved highly dangerous and ever more bold. Since the hunting and killing of dogs was a lowly task, beneath the dignity of the fighting men and knights, and since everyone who could walk was engaged in preparations for the war, and since it was not fit work for women, a serjeant at arms lit on the idea of using the water boys recruited to serve the battlements during the siege. Orlandu, who'd been assigned to the bastion of Castile, had been among the first to volunteer.

For the Religion he would have volunteered for anything. Like all the lads, he looked upon the knights as gods on earth. He'd been given a boning knife-honed to a crescent by long use and razor sharp-and told that since they'd soon be killing Moslems, they might as well start on dogs, who before God were but beasts of a similar order, the principal difference being that the latter smelled less vile and would not go to Hell. This observation set Orlandu to wondering whether or not dogs had souls. He was assured by the chaplain, Father Guillaume, who blessed the juvenile butchers before they set off on their crusade, that they did not, any more than a sheep or a hare, but so particular was the way in which each canine met its death, and so poignant was its love of life, that by the first sundown Orlandu was convinced to the contrary.

When each dog was killed the boy took the carcass to a wagon by the Provençal Gate, where the dead dog was gutted so that its entrails could be used to poison the wells of the Marsa once the Turks arrived. What remained was taken to the bonfire of hair and bone outside the walls. By the end of the second day, by which time most of the boys had begged to be excused these hideous duties, Orlandu's tattered clothes were stiff with the excrement and gore of the animals he'd killed and gutted and hauled off to the pyre. His inflamed flesh ached with more bites than he could count. He was nauseated. He was drained. He was glutted and revolted by slaughter. And he decided that Father Guillaume was right about their souls after all, for to believe otherwise made the work too harrowing to bear.

He slept on the docks alone, on a pallet of sacked grain. When he rose and scouted the alleyways for prey, people stepped aside, as if he were a bedlamite lately escaped from a refuge for the deranged. At first he imagined that this was because he stank, but the look in the eyes of the baker from whom he bought a breakfast loaf told him that it was because he inspired a repellent awe. The baker feared him. After this he walked taller and wore a stern and impassive countenance in the manner of the knights. From the tanner he procured a piece of sheepskin, and he rubbed the hide in chicken fat, and tied it nap-to-skin around one forearm. Thus armored, he was able to tempt a dog's jaws before cutting its throat.

Even so, the teeth bruised his arm to the bone, for it was the fiercest and canniest of the outlaw curs that had survived the cull to date, and by the second nightfall his left hand was blue to the knuckles. The watchmen on the docks shared sweetbreads and kidneys, roasted on the coals of their brazier, and they pressed him for news of the hunt, and he joined in their vulgar laughter at things he'd not found funny at the time. They asked him how many he'd killed. He couldn't remember. Twenty, thirty, more? They glanced at his bruises and wounds when they thought him distracted and exchanged mysterious looks and thought him strange. He left them to their fire, and by the time he lay down again upon his sacks and looked up at the stars, he was not the boy who'd risen the day before. Not yet a man, perhaps, but a killer of sorts, which was almost as good. How much harder could it be to kill a Moslem?

He was a bastard and, because an outcast whether he liked it or no,
he'd chosen a life on the waterfront over slavery on the pig farm where he'd been raised. He labored in the docks, careening the galleys, boiling pitch and graving the filth-sodden hulls. Repulsive work, but he was free. And free to dream: of being a pilot in the Religion's navy. Tonight he stared at the sky and watched the polestar in the Little Bear's tail. He fell asleep and his slumbers were troubled by malevolent spirits and menacing dreams, which were dark and bloody and bereft of consolation.

Daybreak brought the beautiful pure white greyhound, watching Orlandu as if it knew his dreams and had stood a sentinel's vigil over his sleep. At first he thought it a spirit, and with that his belief in canine souls was restored, not to be shaken again even when the vision proved corporeal. When the white greyhound fled into the purple-shadowed streets, Orlandu followed.

Like a ghost in a fable that expounded the nature of futility, the white hound led him through the hovels of Kalkara Creek, and on into the city, and toward the voices raised in praise of the reborn day. The conventual church of San Lorenzo stood shrouded in a spectral violet light. Its open doors pulsed yellow against the monumental façade and Orlandu's soul was drawn through the sacred portal. He left his knife by a buttress and tiptoed through the arch. The flagstones were cold against his feet. The plainsong made him shiver. He dipped his fingers in holy water, genuflected and crossed himself, and crept toward the yellow shimmer within. San Lorenzo was the church of the Knights of Saint John the Baptist. Orlandu had never been inside its doors before. His heart pounded and he hardly dared breathe as he pushed on through the vestibule. Beyond the two broad pillars that flanked the nave, the interior opened before him and his senses were stunned.

The whole convent of the Religion stood assembled as one and the stones shook as half a thousand soldiers of the Cross raised their voices to God. The monks of war stood rank upon rank in their plain black robes, meeker than lambs and fiercer than tigers, bound by love of Christ and Saint John the Baptist, proud of bearing and fearless, and singing, singing with a roaring exaltation. Smoking incense drifted about the aisle and made him dizzy. The vast space glowed and flickered with countless burning candles. Yet it seemed that every ray of light emanated from the tortured figure of Christ raised high above the altar. That was where Orlandu's gaze, along with that of every other in that mighty congregation,
was drawn: to the gaunt and noble visage of He who'd suffered and died for all mankind, to the bloody crown of thorns and the hands clawed in pain, to the pierced and emaciated body that twisted on the Cross, as if His final throes were not yet over.

Orlandu was filled with sorrow. He knew that Jesus loved him. A sob escaped from his chest and he clasped his bruised and bloody hands and fell to his knees.