The Religion (29 page)

"No day is the same as the next."

The boy was undeterred. "You have seen the world. Is it as wide as they say?"

"Wider than anyone can know," said Amparo. "It is beautiful and it is cruel."

"There are many green trees," he said, to prove his learning. "More than you can ride through in a week. And there are mountains too high to be climbed. And snow."

"Trees and snow and flowers and rivers so wide you can't see one bank from the other," agreed Amparo. The boy nodded, as if this confirmed what he'd heard. There was in his eyes the passion of a fabulous dream, and the thought that their light might be extinguished made her sad. "But what if you die here, in the war?" she said.

"I will be welcomed into Heaven by Jesus and all His apostles." He crossed himself. "But I'm too clever to die, like the gremxula. You are the one in danger. You don't believe me, but don't worry, I know Guzman, an
abanderado
with the
tercio
of Naples, and he knows the English bull-Barras?"

Amparo nodded. "Bors."

"Bors. Yes. I will ask Guzman to speak with Bors, and they will take you back in. Tannhauser would not put you to live on the docks, of this I am sure, but perhaps he is out there"-he threw an arm toward the darkness beyond the bay-"killing Turkish generals, or setting fire to their ships."

As his fantasies became more extravagant, Amparo was disturbed. "How do you know what Tannhauser does?"

"The men on the Post of Castile talk of him," he said, as if to imply that he was to be counted among their number. "
Los soldados particulares
. Even the knights regard him. The door of La Valette is open to Tannhauser as to no other. Only Tannhauser dares to go out among the fiends." As if noting her distress he added, "Don't be afraid for Captain Tannhauser. They say he will never die. Tannhauser knows the Turk. Tannhauser knows the Sultan Suleiman himself. And perhaps the Devil too. But tell me, was it the belle dame who cast you out? What did you do?"

"I'm not cast out," she said. "I live at the Auberge of England."

He studied her afresh, and with a shadow of awe. "Then why are you here?"

"I came here for the peace."

"The peace?" The idea seemed to baffle him. He stood up. "I will guard you back to the auberge. It is the home of Starkey, the last of the English. I know it well, very well, yes."

He rose to his feet. He seemed so set on gallantry that Amparo couldn't refuse. She stood up too. She slipped the blanket from her shoulders and handed it back. He took it, as if he now considered it a shabby and offensive thing to have offered a woman so obviously grand. He balled it and tossed it in the lumber stacks. He noticed the leather cylinder around her neck.

"What is this?" he said.

Amparo slid the case beneath her arm. "It is a curiosity," she said. He pursed his lips as he realized that this was all she'd let him know. She said, "Tell me your name."

"Orlandu," he said. He added, "When I leave to see the wide wide world, and become a fine person and a man of honor, I shall be Orlandu di Borgo."

"Why do you live here, on the waterfront?" she asked.

"Here I am free."

"Where's your family?"

"My family?" Orlandu's lip curled. He made a short, ax-like gesture with the edge of his hand. "I have cut them," he said. "They are not fine people."

She would have asked more, but his face suggested he would not give it, and that it was a subject that caused him pain.

"And your name?" he said.

"Amparo."

He smiled. "Very fine. Spanish, then. Are you a noble, like the belle dame?"

She shook her head and his smile broadened, as if this bound them even closer. She wondered if he wanted her, and having wondered knew that he didn't. He wanted to be a man, with so palpable a desperation it made her ache too, but he was still too much a boy to know real desire. In a flash she wondered, also, if this was Carla's boy.

She said, "You will meet Tannhauser when he returns. I will tell him you are a gallant, who protected me from the
tercios
, and that it would please you to shake his hand."

Orlandu's eyes boggled.

"Would that please you?" she asked.

"Oh verily," said Orlandu. "Verily indeed." He scrubbed at his hair, as if already grooming himself for the occasion. "When?"

"I will speak with him tomorrow," she said.

Orlandu grabbed her hand and kissed it. No one had ever done so before.

"Come now," he said. "Let me take you home, before the moon goes down."

Amparo hoped he was the boy Carla sought. She liked his heart. If he was not the boy, she wondered if they couldn't make believe that it was so.

Friday, June 8, 1565

Auberge of England-The Outlands-Castel Sant'Angelo

"
Allahu Akabar!
God is most great!
Allahu Akabar!

"I bear witness that there is no God but Allah.

"I bear witness that Mohammed is the Apostle of Allah.

"Come to prayer!

"Come to prayer!

"Come to prayer!

"Come to success!

"
Allahu Akabar!
There is no God but Allah."

Tannhauser woke at the break of day to the poetry of the muezzin's
call. For seventeen dawns the
adhan
had drifted from the Corradino Heights and through the windows of the auberge. After so many years among the Franks, the music haunted him-depending on his dreams-with awe, with dread, with pride, with a readiness for battle, with an obscure anguish whose nature he could not define. It didn't matter that the words were indistinct. The
Al Fatihah
was engraved on what passed for his soul and would never be erased.

"Guide us to the straight way, the way of those upon whom You have bestowed Your Grace, not the way of those upon whom lies Your wrath, nor of those who wander astray."

There was a void in his heart as large as the universe around him, and within it he found no Grace, no way that seemed straight, nor any guide thereto. And even by his own lights, he'd wandered as far astray as a man might get without running into the gallows. Amparo's arm stirred across his chest and her fingers, propelled by some tender dream, caressed his neck and she sighed. Tannhauser breathed in her scent and with it the hope inherent in the bright new day.

A pale citrus light breached the deep-silled, glassless windows and awakened the glow of her skin where she lay coiled beside him. The sheet had been thrown back and was twisted about her thigh. Her head lay in the bight of his shoulder and her hair lay black across her cheek and her shadowed lips were half parted and the color of precious garnet. Her flanks revealed the outlines of her ribs as she breathed and he craned his head an inch or two to study the curve of her arse. She appeared to him quite a beauty, despite that her face and her mind were imperfect and strange. His privities were engorged and became more so as he ran his palm down the muscles of her back. His fingertips palpated the burls of her spine and slid down them one by one, until they abandoned the hardness of bone to nestle between the curves that so delighted him. To such sensual abundance a man could abandon himself forever, if the world would but permit it. But of all worlds this one would not, for its very heart was stone. He considered arousing her slowly, with kisses and dexterous wiles, for he knew by now that her body was as greedy for his hands as his hands were for her. Thereafter he'd engulf her with his bulk and slide inside her and pound her into the mattress, a practice for which, he also knew by now, her appetite was admirably large.

His desire lurched toward the overpowering and he shifted his weight
and reached down to unlimber his balls. As he did so Amparo murmured and rolled onto her back. Her breasts sloped to either side of her chest, the skin faintly marbled with blue where they hung fullest, and he watched her nipples, no longer softened by the warmth of his body, grow dark in the cooling air. No void within troubled him now. The turbulent ache that filled it, the thoughts of her that increasingly filled his mind, the consuming abandon that filled as much of his days as he could spare would all stand condemned as sinful and abhorrent by the Believers of the various camps amongst whom he was stranded. Yet willing as he was to admit vices and crimes without number, he could find no wrong in the transport Amparo brought him. Half a mile from where they lay entwined, other interwoven bodies were crammed by the thousand in a reeking ditch for the nourishment of seagulls and crows. Both those whose corpses filled it and those whose hands had made it so were destined for the fields of Paradise shrived of all sin; but of the Guilt of the fornicators dozing the sunrise away, there was no doubt.

He scooped Amparo's hair back from her face and looked at her, and so peaceful were her features, so innocent of care and of any knowledge of the madness into which she had thrust herself-so like a child's-that he couldn't bring himself to expel her from such an Eden. And so uncharacteristic was this impulse to restraint that he wondered if this feeling in his heart were not Love. He studied her further: the faint creases encircling her throat, the various textures of her unflawed complexion, the smooth contours of her belly, the sheen on the swell of her thigh, her pubic hair. He brushed his lips over hers, so softly that she didn't stir. He blinked and sat back against the wall.

This was absurd. What manner of man was he becoming? They'd barely left the room for two days, a commendable indulgence even by his standards, and it had addled his brain. With as much stealth as possible, he rose to his feet. He turned and looked down on her. He kissed her again. Addled indeed. He heard the clank of armor and muffled protests of despair in the street outside, and though he knew what he would find he went to the window.

Two serjeants at arms of the Religion, Aragonese by the look of them, marched a naked, manacled Turk up Majistral Street. The scars that corrugated the latter's back, like a subcutaneous infection of bloated worms, marked him as a galley slave. In his mouth was a knot of old rope to stifle
the prayers he tried to utter on his way to the gibbet. In accord with La Valette's decree, this slave was the eighteenth Moslem to be hanged since the puppeteer had been launched from the bastion of Provence. It was a drawback of this billet that the condemned trudged by the window every morning, and Tannhauser made a note to ask Starkey if some other route might not be used. The eighteenth slave reminded him that he'd already tarried on Malta for far too long.

He'd hunted high and low to find the name-and less than a name, a memory, a trace, a rumor-of a boy born on All Hallows' Eve in the year of '52, and he'd found nothing. If Carla's boy was still alive, Tannhauser was having doubts that he was on the island. He'd considered persuading Carla to leave right now, before war devoured them, but his pride balked at admitting to defeat. Anyway, Carla would not give in. He collected his boots and clothes from the bare oak floor and made his way naked down the stairs.

In the garden at the rear of the auberge he'd had two slaves install a double hogshead filled with seawater. In the ground beneath this tub, Tannhauser and Bors had buried a chest containing fifty pounds of their opium. As the war progressed, its value would soar, and they aimed to make a killing on their departure. Tannhauser relieved his bladder in the dust and vaulted into the barrel, cursing as the cold water shocked him. He slid down onto his haunches, the brine rising to his throat, and he settled back to watch the sky as it turned from a seashell pink tinged with gray to a pale and gentle blue. He'd pass the rest of the day in sweltering heat and in these frigid moments he found a comforting nostalgia for mountains and snow. It was thanks to the tub, at least in part, that his affair with Amparo had started.

One morning as he lay soaking, she'd skipped over the garden wall, as if, to her mind, walls were constructed for that precise purpose alone, and had come over to the tub without any discernible bashfulness or shame to admire his tattoos.

He'd explained the tattoos' significance, and told her something of the sacred cult of the janissaries, who lived in barracks with their
babas
, their dervish fathers, and who shunned the company of women and recited poetry at their fires, and who craved death in the service of Allah above all
things. But while in the content of this lecture she feigned not a scrap of interest, he found her more than fascinated by his flesh, which she poked and stroked with her long, almond-nailed fingers, and this proved a provocation far beyond his endurance. He'd not intended to make sport with either of his female charges, for in the thicket of love disaster was always lurking, but, he had reasoned, life was short and could get shorter at any time. He'd clambered from the tub in a state of unconcealable arousal and by some mutual and spontaneous combination of leaping and sweeping she'd wound up cradled across his arms, whence he'd carried her to the room where she now lay sleeping.

He was a fool but there it was and here he sat. As the water's cool cleared his mind of sleep and lust, and of morbid memories of Islam, and of the conundrum of loving one woman-if love it was-while planning to marry another, he reviewed his situation in what was surely the strangest of all the places on the Earth.

Since the first, inconclusive, battle on May 21, Tannhauser hadn't taken part in any fighting, a fact entirely to his satisfaction. The Turks had not yet sealed the Borgo from the country surrounding, for their attentions were elsewhere-upon Fort Saint Elmo-and it was no great feat to sneak out the Kalkara Gate before the sun was up. He'd thus made numerous sallies into the outlands beyond the enceinte in the guise of an opium trader from the
ordu
bazaar, the Turkish army's mobile commissariat, which was pitched beyond the hills on the Marsa plain.