The Religion (45 page)

He glanced back, mortified, but Stromboli was gone. He thanked Saint Catherine that here in the lee of the wall the flagstones were sound and not pulverized to dust. With both hands he scooped the spillage back into the tub. Fat green flies from the mass of decomposing bodies heaped outside the walls buzzed down in swarms to claim their share and he waved them away without effect. The wine stung his skinless palms but he left not a crust behind. He rolled up his sleeve and buried what he'd scraped up within the unspilled portion and gave it all a good stir and then swallowed another handful. It tasted just as marvelous as the first. The burning in his muscles had gone. He took off his helm and dropped it by the wall. Let the Turks split his skull, he didn't care. He cut the damp sackcloth with his knife and wrapped the pieces around his hands.
The sweat stung too. He'd give himself two more rest stops before reaching the front, and next time only two all told. He looked across the yard to the seething nocturnal encounter.

Flares and incendiary rockets exploded above the toiling man-killers. At a distance from the foot of the slope a fresh section of men had drawn up. At their head Orlandu recognized-in part because he was laughing-the celebrated French adventurer Colonel Le Mas, bravest of the brave and even in this company reckoned a man amongst men. Who else could find something to laugh about in such a dire place? With a thrill Orlandu wondered if Le Mas might take God's bread and wine from this very tub. Imagine. He swore to keep his head up this time. In any case he should wait until he knew he wouldn't obstruct their maneuver. Le Mas gesticulated to two large companions, larger even than he, and they laughed too, and one, a bull of a man, threw to his shoulder the longest musket Orlandu had ever seen, its barrel feathered with silver under the flares, and a plume of white smoke flew toward something high on the unbreached parapet. A body fell, and as the bull lowered the gun with a proud cock of his head toward the others, the second man removed his helmet and handed it to him, and Orlandu saw that this was Captain Tannhauser, and that the other must then be Bors, who'd called Orlandu "my friend" and promised to teach him backgammon. Tannhauser too snapped a long gun to his shoulder and fired, with great speed it seemed. A second bundle of colorful robes plunged from the wall. A pair of Turkish snipers picked off like hares. What marksmen. Tannhauser spoke as he retrieved and replaced his morion and the three of them laughed again. Imagine. Laughing!

Orlandu lifted the tub by the ropes and started forward. His hands sang with pain. No spilling, he swore. He hoped they wouldn't notice him until after his next rest stop, when perhaps he could convey greater strength than he possessed. He began running in short, reeling steps, the mush swilling around, and the burning returned to his muscles almost at once. His face contorted and his lungs roared. He kept his eyes peeled for any sign that the three men might see him, but he was in shadow and they were not. He had to move out from the wall. He felt the ropes slip again and he stopped and grounded the tub and cursed it. He planned the next leg to take him closer than necessary to Bors, who would surely call him over and introduce him to Tannhauser and Le Mas, as any friend
would. Or he could offer them the food. And Bors would tell Le Mas that his good friend Orlandu deserved more fitting duty than hauling a tub of wine through the shit and-

Strange horns ululated and an exhausted cheer intermixed with obscene jeers suggested that the Turkish assault had been driven back. Orlandu thanked the Virgin, for perhaps now the troops could go and get their own bread and wine. The three men looked up the slope, where the mass of defenders were moving aside in good order to open a gap in their center. Tannhauser and Bors handed their long guns to an orderly and donned their gauntlets. Then each drew a sword and rolled his shoulders. Another horn, this time a Christian trumpet. Whistles. Banners with various insignia waved to instruct their respective companies. Le Mas's section formed up in a wedge. The wedge pointed its apex at the gap still opening at the top of the bloody slope, and the reserve started up the embankment through the curtain of hot ocher smoke.

Did this mean the battle wasn't over? Would the Turks be crazy enough to come back? Orlandu grabbed his tub and tottered along the wall to find out.

Le Mas's section spread themselves across the breach and the men who'd held it until midnight withdrew. They were steeped as if in mud by the liquid products of combat, and relief precipitated in them a sudden exhaustion. Le Mas's Spaniards piked the Turkish wounded where they lay and what corpses remained they kicked down into the ditch. Under cover of the fight, the Turkish sappers had filled in several sections of the ditch to form short causeways. They'd also thrown across bridges fashioned from masts. Out among the foul eddies of smoke there must have been four hundred fresh bodies in ragged piles, some still moving and muttering from the Koran. Many were charred and still smoldered in pools of wildfire. Beyond the fallen, Tannhauser saw bands of
yerikulu
limping from the field, dragging maimed comrades between them as they trudged back to the scorn of their aga.

Bors said, "Your janissaries have decided on an early supper."

Tannhauser shook his head and pointed to the green robes and white turbans tangled in the ditch. "Regular infantry, Azebs of the
yerikulu
. The janissaries will come next."

Bors pointed, "What are those in aid of?"

At twenty-pace intervals at the foot of the breach, orderlies had rolled huge butts into place and nailed plank footbridges to their rims. They were filling them with seawater from barrels on a cart.

"If you get a taste of wildfire," said Le Mas, "you jump in the butts to cool down."

He indicated the parapets to either side of the breach, where the wildfire crews assembled their batteries. Brimstone, saltpeter, linseed oil, sal ammoniac, turpentine, pitch, and naphtha. The Turks added frankincense and tow to make the wildfire stick, the Venetians hammered glass and aqua vitae. Against the parapet walls, the crews stacked, mouthupward, rows of trumps-brass pipes fixed to pike shafts that were filled with the incendiary brew. When lit and pointed, the boil within the pipe belched forth streams of fireballs. The crews stacked crates of fire pipkins by the crenels. The Turks called them
humbaras
: fist-size clay pots sealed with paper, pierced by a fuse and filled with jellied wildfire. The most ingenious of the fireworks were credited to La Valette's invention: hoops of pithy cane were soaked in brandy and oil of Peter, then wrapped in wool and steeped in the same inflammable liquors used in the trumps. When ignited they were hurled with tongs into the advancing Moslem ranks to horrible effect. The crews had a hellish job. Tannhauser grabbed Bors and shifted position in the line to be farther out of range of an accidental spill.

A pot of camphorated balsam was passed about and they rubbed it into their beards against the stench. A smatter of sniper fire buzzed overhead. One of the
tercios
was hit in the face and his comrades dragged him to his feet and sent him stumbling rearward.

"Give me some room," said Bors.

He needed it to wield the twelve-inch grip and scalloped sixty-inch blade of his German two-hander. He whirled the sword around his head to warm his sinews and the blade whistled in a huge figure of eight about and before him. With the dexterity of a lady folding a fan, Bors fetched the huge sword in and planted it between his feet.

Tannhauser donned his gauntlets and examined the sword he'd taken from the chapel. The blade was three feet long with a flattened diamond cross-section. He judged it something over two pounds in weight. Italian. Hopefully Milanese. He put his tongue to the edge and tasted blood but
felt no pain. He strode to the stack of fallen arms collected by the orderlies from the breach. He chose a five-pound mace with a steel haft and seven flanged blades welded to the core. A spiked finial four inches long was screwed into the top. He headed back to the line and turned to the man on his right-a short but powerful veteran with flinty eyes.

Tannhauser raised his sword in salute. "Mattias Tannhauser."

The knight returned the gesture. "Guillaume de Quercy."

The man to Guillaume's right, a beak-nosed Provençal wielding paired short swords, bent forward and did the same. "Agoustin Vigneron," he said.

The exchange was enough to cement their fraternity and they said no more. With a Gascon to one side and an Englishman to the other, he couldn't ask for more. The Mehterhane band struck up. Pipes, kettledrums, and bells. Even now there was no sound more stirring to his ears. Trumpets blew. The banner of Saint John was raised, the white cross luminous in the moonlight. A chaplain raised an icon of Christ Pantocrator in one hand and rang a bell with other and began to recite the
Angelus
.

"
Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae
." The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.

Aves
were chanted en masse and the power of the Virgin invoked.

"Pray for us O, Holy Mother of God."

"That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ."

"Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts . . ."

The front line of knights clambered up the scree to the blood-steeped ridge and Tannhauser climbed up with them. He was the only man on that field without a prayer on his lips, for it seemed to him that any deity worth addressing would condemn the elation rising in his chest and that all the gods of mercy would sleep this long night through.

The knights and serjeants occupied the forefront of the line, and the Spanish and Maltese, perhaps three hundred, moved up behind, the points of their half-pikes and glaives filling in the gaps in the armored wall. Tannhauser studied the ground at his feet, kicked some loose debris aside, noted the irregularities and planted his left foot forward, the sword in his right hand pointed down and the mace haft canted against his hip. Awareness now was all. Awareness of his own small sphere whose boundaries were defined by the man to his either side and by whatever appeared from the night at the tip of his blade. He reminded himself to breathe regularly
and deep. It was easy to forget in the fray, and to lose one's wind was fatal. Breathing. Posture. Footwork. Underneath his armor sweat streamed forth from every pore, for the heat of the night was fierce and unforgiving. His mouth was dry. He was stationed at the throat of a Turkish causeway. Three men wide in a pinch, it formed an uneven apron against the gauntlet and he stood on its leftmost edge. The Gascon, Guillaume, stood athwart its center and Agoustin Vigneron braced its far right. To his left Bors commanded the lip of the ditch. Bors rooted in his pocket and brought out a pair of smooth white pebbles. He popped one in his mouth.

"Didn't I tell you this would be grand?" he said.

He offered the second pebble. Tannhauser took it and sucked and his dryness was eased.

Bors said, "Mind you watch my back."

The martial rhythms of the Mehterhane, the stomp of thousands of feet, the clank of metal, the shrill descant of the imam's pleas to Allah fashioned themselves into a mighty wheel of sound which rolled from the flame-lambent shadows beyond the ditch. In its wake five janissary
orta
, horsehair standards aloft and banners writ with the
Shahada
aflutter, roared from the throat of night and flung themselves at the causeways and across the corpse-swollen ditch.

The Christians goaded them on with a howling invitation to the dance. Mixed within it Tannhauser heard a Babel of prayers in Latin and a clutch of vulgar tongues. To Santa Catarina and Sant'Agata. To Sant'Iago and San Pablo. To Christ and the Baptist. Pray for us sinners. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. Now and at the hour of our death. Amen. The most popular invocation, as if the man were beatified already, was La Valette and the Holy Religion.

At twenty yards the oncoming ranks unleashed a shower of
humbaras
, the burning fuses tailing showers of sparks. Tannhauser watched them arc over, poised to leap away, but luck was with him. They sailed overhead and he felt flares of heat behind him and heard squalls of horror and panic but didn't turn. At the same time the Devil's bondsmen in the Order's firework crews unleashed squealing torrents of liquid death from the trumps, and huge burning hoops traced yellow spirals in the air as they sailed forth. The tightly packed janissaries were ensnared by two and threes in these circles of flame. Their blue cotton robes flared up as if
made of paper and like the damned chained together in perdition they tore at each other as they writhed and burned and died.

So fierce was the coruscation on either wing that the field incandesced as bright as noontide. Through this holocaust the vanguard's human tide roared on undaunted. They brandished a gallery of melee arms and with their wild eyes and long mustaches and tall white bonnets embellished with wooden spoons, they suggested a race of deranged cooks who'd been banished from the kitchen of a madhouse. They spilled into the ditch. They charged the burning bridges. They surged across the firedrenched causeways.

Tannhauser picked his first opponent from the horde now pouring down the funnel. The man's boots were black-the
orta
's janitor. He carried a
mizrak
spear over-arm and a rectangular Balkan shield. Tannhauser advanced a step out onto the apron to give himself room and dropped the mace along his thigh. He opened his chest just enough to invite the spear and as the downthrust came he pulled his right leg back in an oblique turn and deflected the shaft with his sword and drove the spike of the mace into the thus exposed armpit, sliding his hand up the haft for a shorter grip. The man bellowed, as any man would, and his lung popped and his feet left the ground, and as Tannhauser took him backward and down, he swiped the sword across his throat and half severed his head.