The Religion (53 page)

He'd awoken with a dappling of fever on his brow and his legs felt unsteady and the wound in his back burned like hot charcoal. He stumbled to the dead knight, still propped up by his knees, and he joined him in the dust and hauled him up by his arms. The head flopped back. It was Agoustin Vigneron. Stabbed in the throat. In conception this had seemed simple. The execution was more taxing. He grabbed the corpse under the crotch and shunted him over his shoulder, the cuirass stripping the skin from his sunburned neck. He clenched the dead thighs tight and planted one foot solid and pushed himself upright. He heard the roar of combat and a mighty clash of colliding steel nearby. The river would soon swamp the rampart and flood down into the fort. He staggered across the bailey toward the stables.

The burden of corpse and metal almost broke him. His skull pounded fit to burst and his legs were tubes of jelly and his chest wheezed and bile scalded his throat. Only fear gave him the strength to reach his goal. He let the corpse fall from his back in the stable doorway and fell to the cobbles. When he caught his wind he looked up.

Inside the stable a swath of tangled and naked dead lay heaped upon the straw. A mere dozen amongst thousands. But these unarmed and wretched few had been murdered for his sake alone. He stilled the prick of conscience, for conscience was the truest madness here. He turned away and looked across the yard and saw the end. The tall white hats of the janissaries closed with the men in steel. In a frenzied terminal ecstasy of gore and blades, the chairs of the brave went over and Fort Saint Elmo fell.

Broglia. Guaras. Miranda. Guillaume. Aiguabella. Men with whom he'd fought and drunk fine brandy. Lives committed to war at last swept into eternity by its tide. Le Mas was torn to pieces, his severed limbs brandished aloft. Moments later his great head appeared, bobbing on the point of a spear.

Tannhauser needed see no more. He looked down at his chest. He too was slaked in blood. He felt more of the same dribbling down his back. He looked at Vigneron sprawled at his knees. Tannhauser drew the dead man's sword and dropped it nearby. He drew a dagger from the dead man's belt and with its tip dug the poultice from the wound in his hip and freshened the edges until it bled. He drove the dagger into Vigneron's neck. Then he draped himself across the corpse in a sculpture of struggle.

He closed his eyes, his hand on the hilt, and unconsciousness drifted toward him. And with it came pictures. Of Amparo and the boy, and of Carla and Bors and Buraq, and of Sabato Svi. His mind began to slip away and he hauled it back. He opened his eyes and saw the tanned complexion of Agoustin Vigneron's face, the bristles in his nostrils, the boils on his chin, the lifeless sheen of his eyeballs. He inhaled the yeasty stench of weeks of privation, of urine evacuated by death and so rectified by thirst it was almost black. He felt the obscene resistance of the dense dead flesh that pillowed his cheek. Tannhauser had crawled through the bowels of human darkness and here now he lay in its excrement, fighting druggy sleep on a comrade's corpse with spilled blood cooling on his skin, surrounded by the fetor of the still-rotting dead in a charnel house of murdered slaves, and pretending to be that which he was not. And yet what was he not? Everything a man might hope to be except alive. He told himself to think Turk. To dream of Old Stambouli. To pray in the language of the Prophet. He heaved for breath and sang, and his parched and cracking voice was as hollow as the breast of desolation.

"By the winds that winnow with a winnowing, And those that bear the burden of the rain, And those that glide with ease upon the sea, And those Angels who scatter blessings by Allah's command, Verily that which you are promised is surely true, And verily Judgment and Justice will come to pass-"

Footsteps bored through his raving and a rough hand seized his shoulder. He rolled free, taking the dagger with him, and with his last strength rose up on one knee, one foot coiled to spring, letting madness whisper in his ear, his teeth bared, the blade out-flung.

A pair of janissaries, lean and young, stood over him, scimitars raised, the heat of victory upon them. Yet at the sight of him they stepped back and the younger reached out a hand and pushed the sword of his companion down. They took in Vigneron's corpse and the littered Moslem dead. They saw the Sacred Wheel of the Fourth Agha Boluks tattooed on Tannhauser's arm in dark blue ink. They saw the twin bladed sword of Dhu'l Fiqar in red. They saw his circumcised organ. On his thigh they saw the
surah
of
Al Ikhlas
: "He is Allah, the One. Allah-us-Samad, the Eternal, Absolute. He begetteth not, nor is He begotten. And there is none like unto Him." Comradeship filled the janissaries' eyes.

"Peace be upon you, brother," said the younger man.

The elder said, "By Allah's will, you're among friends at last."

Their swords came up at a sudden sound behind him and Tannhauser turned. Old Stromboli emerged from the stable's shadows. He had an ax in his hands. He saw Tannhauser and gaped. Tannhauser sprang as if crazed and covered the ground between them in two lupine strides and he stabbed Stromboli in the heart and watched him die. He let the old man fall. He turned to the young lions. They looked at him with renewed respect.

Tannhauser said, "
Allahu Akabar
." Then he fell back to the ground.

They wrapped him in a blue silk cloak and fed him honeyed tea and dried beef, and he sat on a giant gun stone in the shade and watched as the Turks slaked their anger on those few of the Christian defenders still breathing.

Nine knights had been taken alive, Quercy and Lanfreducci among them. They were stripped stark naked and forced to kneel in the yard. They sang Psalms of David until horns and drums announced Mustafa Pasha's arrival. He crossed the ditch on a pearl-gray horse and looked at them only once before ordering them all beheaded. One by one their raised voices died until Lanfreducci sang alone, and the executioner's sword hummed, and his body splashed forward into the crimson lake that stained the yard. The wounded splayed in the open outside the hospital were speared where they lay. The chaplains were dragged from the chapel and butchered like hogs on the blood-soiled steps. The uncounted wounded within, by the clamor of their screams and orisons, were slaughtered where they lay on the chancel floor.

So ubiquitous were the dead on this scorched acre, so monotonous had the sight of atrocity become, that Tannhauser felt little beyond a dulled sense of shame. Even when they brought out Jurien de Lyon, and hacked off his limbs and privities and cleaved his skull, his horror was merely abstract. Jurien, who had sewn Bors's face back complete, whose vast and sacred knowledge of Healing could not be redeemed from fifty thousand minds thereabouts, whose fingers held skills that entire nations could not muster: all that extinguished in a spasm of triumphant malice. When all such extinctions were multiplied, even by the few that Tannhauser had seen of the many in which the world overbrimmed, one could
see the clock of civilization running backward. Aye, and old Stromboli too had been a wonderful cook.

The heads of the knights were gathered and spiked on top of palings on the seaward walls, where observers from Sant'Angelo might see them. The banner of Saint John was hauled down, and stomped into the dirt and drenched in urine, and the standard of the Sultan fluttered up the halyard in its place. It was over and it was done.

Despite the heat of the day Tannhauser shivered and he pulled his cloak about his shoulders. His ague was now beyond doubt and rising within him. The wound in his back was a red-hot lobster crawling beneath his skin. His blood was poisoned. A throbbing circlet of fever tightened around his skull. The possibility crossed his mind that he'd escaped a glorious exit only to rot on a filth-soaked palliasse and die of plague. He winkled his last opium pill from his boot and washed it down with tepid water. He threw himself upon Fate. Then Fate rode through Saint Elmo's gates to greet him.

"Ibrahim?"

Tannhauser looked up from gun stone and the movement caused the sky to spin above him. The sun had crested the wall and blinded his vision and sweat poured stinging into his eyes. He pushed back the sudden blackness that loomed in his skull and wiped his face. He raised his hand for shade and blinked and saw a knot of men on horseback and the Yellow Banners of the Sari Bayrak, oldest of the Sultan's cavalry. He rose to his feet and swayed and sat back down. A silhouette dismounted and a face loomed over his own. A face polished and austere and engraved by the decades that had passed since last he'd seen it. But the eyes were unchanged in their refinement and compassion afflicted them still. A hand reached out and scraped the hair back from Tannhauser's face.

"It is you," said Abbas bin Murad.

"Father," Tannhauser mumbled.

He stood again and spiraled toward the ground and was captured by Abbas's arms. He heard Abbas give commands. He tried to speak but failed and strong hands lifted him into a saddle. He held on with his thighs. He craned his head, searching for Abbas. Instead of Abbas he saw something else, indistinctly, as if in a dream. He saw a gang of Algerians emerge from the postern to the wharf. One of them held a rope. The end of the rope was tied around Orlandu's neck. Tannhauser stared, then pointed, wheeling his head to find his savior.

Abbas appeared, mounted, beside him, a steadying hand extended to his shoulder. "You're sick," said Abbas. His expression was grave. "You will come with me."

"The boy," said Tannhauser. "There."

Abbas ignored these ravings and ordered two of his men to take him to his tent. Tannhauser twisted in the saddle and looked about. Contrary to his hopes, Orlandu was no product of the opium or the fever either one. There the boy stood, blood in his eye, and leashed like a dog by corsairs. Tannhauser pointed again and almost fell from the saddle. Abbas grabbed his arm. Tannhauser groped the mist of his pyrexia for a stratagem that might work. He didn't find one. The mist thickened and his vision turned red. He grabbed at the horse's mane.

He said, "I was thirsty and the boy gave me water."

Then the sun went out and all turned black and empty.

The Feast of Saint John the Baptist: Sunday, June 24, 1565

Castel Sant'Angelo-Auberge of England

Oliver Starkey prayed for La Valette and for his own contaminate soul. The reason lay in the clotted and hairy heap piled up by Sant'Angelo's cavalier. Even as he prayed yet more severed heads-human heads-were tipped from bulging sacks onto the roof like the crop of an obscene harvest. The lips of the slain were blue and drawn back from the teeth in rictal agony. The whites of sightless eyes bulged dry and lusterless in the sun. With dire jests and a debate over the most suitable charge of powder, the gunners grabbed the sundered heads by their beards and proceeded to cram them four and five at a time down the muzzles of the cannon. There were dozens of them, dozens of heads, more than Starkey could bring himself to count, and he wondered what penitent impulse it was that forced him to bear witness to this crime. Surely one, at least, who considered it so should be here; for just as surely, Jesus wept in witness too.

Dawn had seen four wooden boards washed up on L'Isola's shores. No one knew how many more had been washed out to sea. Crucified to each board was the nude and headless corpse of a knight of the Order. A cross
had been hacked into the flesh of each pallid breast. Lamentation flourished and, too, a poisonous hatred for the Turk. La Valette received this news as he emerged from daybreak Mass. On seeing the mutilated corpses, tears of rage and grief had filmed his eyes. Deaf to Starkey's counsel, he'd ordered every Turkish prisoner captured since the siege began to be hauled out from the dungeons and decapitated.

"All of them?" said Starkey.

La Valette said, "Let judgment be administered by the people."

This decree was made public and the Maltese rose to the call. The prisoners were dragged to the beach and there, with the zeal of the Devil's own, the executioners swung their swords through hair and bone. Shackled Turks calling out to Allah were cursed to Hell's hottest reach as they were slain. Some fled, clanking, for the sea and were butchered in the surf like ravined game. Those who refused to kneel were hacked through the ankles and trodden down and beheaded with their faces in the sand. Stoical courage and pleas for mercy alike were met with scorn, for these were not men but Moslems, and this was the work of the Lord, and none among the killers doubted that God would smile on his work.

By the time all the cries were silenced, and the most tenacious sinews severed, and the corpses cast on the tide and the heads gathered up by their dripping locks and bagged, an immense burgundy stain befouled the strand and Starkey could not shake the sense that his soul was no less tainted.

The battery on Sant'Angelo's cavalier now belched behind him. A shower of smoking skulls, some flaming from the scalp and beard, exploded from the muzzles and arced across the bay toward the Turkish lines. Jeers of malice went with them. If Mustafa would dabble in atrocity, then let him take a lesson from masters of the trade. La Valette showed no further emotion. As Starkey watched the gunners swab the barrels, and the loaders grabbed more heads from the ghastly pile, he said, in Latin, "And many shall rejoice in his birthday."

La Valette looked at him.

Starkey faltered under the gaze. He added, "So said the Archangel Gabriel of John the Baptist."

La Valette said, "Many shall rejoice in the death of every Moslem on this island."

From there, La Valette went down to the main piazza with his entourage and issued a proclamation to the throng, which declared that every Turkish captive from now on-once the torturers had done their work-would be surrendered to the people, without quarter, to be torn apart as they saw fit. Starkey watched as the populace cheered him to the echo and chanted his name and praised God. Then Starkey walked away. By an appeal to shocking savagery, a defeat had been transformed into some kind of victory. Though a victory over what, Starkey did not dare wonder. La Valette alone knew how to give them a chance to survive, Starkey didn't doubt it. But he thanked his Lord Jesus Christ that his own duty was to follow and not to lead.