The Religion (56 page)

Mustafa Pasha's war engine had labored toward this moment since the fall of Fort Saint Elmo. The vast architecture of siege guns and gabions had been dismantled piece by piece and hauled from the slopes
of Monte Sciberras to those of Santa Margharita, Corradino, and San Salvatore. Trenches hacked in the sandstone by his pioneers wound through the Bormula toward the walls of L'Isola, and, beneath the ground, mines advanced toward the citadel's foundations.

Because the entrance to Grand Harbor was denied to his fleet by the batteries of Castel Sant'Angelo, Mustafa had built a highway of greased timbers across the back of Monte Sciberras itself. Then his blackamoor slaves spent three days under the lash and-in a feat which filled the watching knights with wonderment and dismay-they dragged scores of Piyale's war galleys, one at a time, directly over the mountain from Marsamxett Harbor. As they loomed above the rimrock the ships squealed down the tortured planking like beasts goaded into a shambles. The ropes and chains that retarded their descent hummed from the monstrous strain, some snapping with lethal force to scythe the laborers. And as the massive boats teetered down the scarp toward the waters flanking L'Isola, their keels smoked black in the tallow and flickered with gouts of flame as the grease ignited, as if this were a convoy from Hades and its captains so impatient for cargo they'd come to take the living rather than the dead. Now eighty such vessels all told, and their deck cannon too, menaced the fortifications that lined the shore.

From every point of the compass, from the high ground and the harbor and Gallows Point, the two Christian peninsulas, the Borgo and L'Isola both, were thus entirely enfiladed by Turkish artillery and for the last ten days had been bombarded from dawn till dusk. Scores of women and children in the overcrowded town had been battered to death. Dozens of homes had been destroyed. Now every Turkish gun pounded Saint Michel.

Ludovico ignored the Turkish missiles and watched the carnage wreaked on the Moslem horde. He took his lead from Admiral Del Monte and Zanoguerra and Melchior De Robles, who observed the bouncing cannonballs, and the suffering strewn in their wake, with the grim sangfroid of pallbearers. Their bastion overlooked the harbor and Bormula both, and provided a panorama of the onslaught as it surged from land and sea. In the spearhead of the assault were the Algerians.

Hassem, Viceroy of Algiers and victor of the sieges of Oran and Mersel-Kebir, had arrived the week before with five thousand
gazi
and the corsairs of El Louck Ali. Hassem led the attack from the heights of
Margharita on Saint Michel's landward walls. His lieutenant, Kandelissa, led seaborne troops from the shores of the Marsa to the west. The latter came in scores of foaming longboats, oars and weapons flashing in the rise of the sun and imams chanting
surahs
from the prows.

The shore of L'Isola was defended by a palisade of stakes, lodged in the sea floor and linked by lengths of chain. The longboats rammed this barrier at maximum speed but the chains shrieked as the stakes keeled over and snarled the desperate vessels in a lethal web. The Christian arquebusiers on the overlooking walls raked the disembarking troops with volley after volley, yet the fanatics breasted the blood-swollen tide and plowed through abandoned oars and corpses with a calm Ludovico found astounding. They dragged their ladders with them from the bullet-whipped spume and regrouped on the shore, and they interlocked their shields against the rain of shot and fire pipkins from above, and there on the beach the Star and Crescent was unfurled. Kandelissa rallied the faithful and a black flight of arrows arced through the dawn. On his word, and declaring God's greatness, the Algerians began their escalade of L'Isola's walls.

Ludovico was dressed in half-armor down to the cuisses; his diamond-black carapace-a gift worth a baron's ransom from Michele Ghisleri-was made by Filippo Negroli of Milan. It was so perfectly articulated that movement was hardly more difficult than in his robes. By his profession as a priest he was not allowed to shed blood, but Pope Pius had granted him a dispensation
in foro interno
to fight in this Crusade. Like a plague of gargantuan vermin the Algerians mastered the ditch and infested the walls. Boiling oil sluiced smoking down the murder holes and scalded the clamoring infidels seething below. Pipkins of wildfire bloomed and the smell of burning flesh rose to choke the besieged. As the sun climbed toward its zenith and draped the furnace plain in a shimmering veil, Algerian battle standards fluttered atop the walls and God ushered Ludovico to his moment of Truth.

Ludovico was assigned to Knight Commander Zanoguerra, who led a flying section of a score of Spaniards and Italians held in reserve for the greatest crisis. Among them were three brethren who had special orders from Del Monte to watch for Ludovico's safety. Two were Italians: Bruno
Marra of Umbria and a young Sienese novice called Pandolfo. The third, a fierce Castilian, was Escobar de Corro, seconded from the cavalry in Mdina. They all of them turned.

Beyond the grinding windmills just to the north a vast explosion and a fountain of limbs and flame consumed the seaward extremity of L'Isola's wall. Even here, at the opposite end of the peninsula, where the fortifications angled inland from the water to face the heights, fragments of airborne debris clattered against their harness. Only the explosion of a powder magazine could explain such vast destruction. They watched as a bastion and its curtain wall slid down through the dust cloud and into the water. Kandelissa's Algerian banners bobbed up the slope for the smoking ruins. Zanoguerra turned to his section.

"The time has come to perish for our Holy Faith."

Zanoguerra led them along the seaward alure at a run. Their route lay through chaos and was slippery as the floor of an abattoir. The angle and weight of the enemy's scaling ladders made them difficult to dislodge from the wall-when burdened by dozens of men, quite impossible-and all along the battlements Moslem and Christian panted in sweating embrace for possession of the walls.

Some paces ahead a Maltese militiaman paused while spearing a Moslem on the rampart's edge-held him piked through the chest and coughing blood, his Mohammedan comrades screeching from their perches on the scaling ladder behind him. The Maltese pulled down his breeches with one hand, and squatted, and with the speed and aplomb of a man clearing his throat he squirted forth a large and steaming turd. Then he whipped his breeches back up and returned to the task of shunting the steel spike deeper through his victim's lungs. As Ludovico got closer, another Algerian scrambled over the shoulders of his impaled comrade, who stubbornly clutched the pike shaft with both hands to prevent its withdrawal from his breast. The Maltese relinquished the pike but too late, for, as he drew his dagger, the Algerian gained the crenel and hacked him with a scimitar in the neck. The Maltese charged the Algerian about the knees, stabbing him with his dagger in the thighs, the crotch, the loins, bringing him down, crawling on top of him between the merlons, their heads bobbing above the sheer drop to the beach, each man grunting, wheezing, each man drenched in the blood of the other and both in that of the first-still speared, still perched on a slippery rung, still coughing
scarlet spray, still fighting as he ripped off the Maltese's helm and pulled his hair and gouged at his eyes and jammed his thumbs into the gaping wound in his neck to tear it further open.

Ludovico lunged across the dying Maltese and ran his sword into the speared man's gaping mouth. He felt the snap of breaking teeth and the crunch of the sword as it penetrated skull or spine. His own spine shivered at the sensation. He withdrew the blade in a spout of bloody vomit and guided the gore-tarnished point beneath the body of the Maltese and rammed it deep into the Moslem flesh there pinned beneath. Anacleto joined him and thrust his sword through the melee. The tangle of squirming men convulsed in a grotesque and frantic spasm, and Ludovico stepped back, his foot detecting the moist surrender of the turd, then all three men, Algerians and Maltese alike, teetered over the edge and cartwheeled into space and plummeted down to swell the mass of bodies heaving below.

Ludovico caught his breath. In his chest-in his limbs, in his throat-a nameless ecstasy arose like the force of Revelation. He looked at Anacleto, who nodded once and turned away. Ludovico was a killer of men. The knowledge elated him.

He raised his face into the blinding light and thanked God.

They plunged onward.

Zanoguerra's elite closed with the Algerians at the breach and left the debris reeking with brains and limbs and bowels. The sails of the windmills cast intermittent bands of shade across the disputants and Ludovico plunged into the fray. Ignoring the clatter of blades on his pauldrons and salet, he hacked and thrust two-handed, and smashed his steel-clad elbows into narrow brown faces, and stabbed with all his might into the fallen who crawled at his feet. He heaved on the dust-choked air and called on Saint Dominic for strength. Anacleto seemed to flank him on every side at once, darting between the scimitars and striking underhand blows at the otherwise engaged, and saving his master's life more times than he knew.

Zanoguerra exhorted the cowed militia from the ruins, stoking their spirits with invocations of Christ and urging them to lay down their lives for the Holy Religion. Then a musket ball bored him through the chest and he fell among the dead. As the jackals of the Prophet mobbed his corpse, panic swept again through the militia and they fled the bloody
couloir to shelter among the mills. An exuberant hurrah swept the Moslem throng and they rallied and turned to surge once more up the rubble. Ludovico and Anacleto and the few Castilians left formed a cordon around their stricken commander, and a steadfast handful of Maltese joined their band athwart the rupture, and they chanted the
Paternoster
in readiness for the end.

"
Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . .
"

"
. . . sanctificetur nomen tuum.
"

"Thy kingdom come."

"Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

"Give us this day our daily bread . . ."

". . . and forgive us our trespasses . . ."

". . . as we forgive those who trespass against us . . ."

"
Et ne nos inducas in tentationem . . .
"

". . . but deliver us from evil . . ."

"Amen."

"
Pater noster, qui es in caelis . . .
"

The Algerians stormed up the rock-strewn grade and Ludovico glanced down. For the first time he noticed that an arrow jutted out from his thigh. He had no memory of its impact. Anacleto cut a niche in the shaft with his sword and snapped it short. Ludovico thanked him.

"My God," said Anacleto. "Look."

Ludovico turned. The refugee women of the tent town were climbing up the scree in a crowd. Their skirts were hitched around their waists and they scavenged weapons from the slain, and as they took to the ramparts and closed hand to hand with the fiends, Ludovico felt his eyes blur with tears. Beyond these Maltese Amazons, the Langue of Auvergne under Sieur de Quinay and a company of Spanish infantry crossed the bridge of boats spanning Galley Creek. Ludovico plunged back into the fray and tremendous slaughter was joined all along the shore.

It took two hours to drive Kandelissa and his
gazi
back to their boats. Those among the Moslems who surrendered were butchered in the sand. Those found half drowned were knifed in the shallows by the Maltese women. With the news that their shorefront assault had failed the heart drained from the landward assault. Del Monte's Italians drove Hassem
and his Algerians from the walls, then sallied out from the gates and massacred the laggards in the Ruins of Bormula. The sun sank behind Monte Sciberras in a multihued fantasy of saffron and pink, and as Ludovico watched the last of the Moslem boats pull out of range, flocks of vultures circled the corpse-glutted beach. In the waters surrounding the peninsula countless lifeless bundles bobbed in the surf and swimmers splashed out from the beach to harvest the floaters of their jewels and silver and gold. Thousands of Algerians would never see home. But the cost to the Religion had been high. In the dolorous exhaustion of the aftermath Del Monte appeared by Ludovico.

"Battle is a monstrous business." Del Monte shrugged. "But it gets beneath your skin."

Ludovico looked at him. He felt light-headed, his vision slashed with instants of absolute blackness. He raised his scorched voice to an audible rasp. "With your blessing, I wish to make my profession as a Knight of Saint John."

His legs buckled and Del Monte held him upright. Ludovico rallied. He followed Del Monte's gaze and saw that his boots were filled to their tops with murky fluid and curdled blood. Del Monte called a younger knight and told him and Anacleto to take Ludovico to the infirmary.

"As to your induction into the Convent," said Del Monte, "leave it to me."

Of the walk to the infirmary, across the bridge of boats, which heaved and rocked with the exodus of halt and maimed, he remembered little. To make better progress through the rabble his escorts laid about them with the flats of their swords. An unknown peasant woman gave him wine from a skin; he didn't know why. When they reached the Sacred Infirmary they found such chaos and confusion that his escorts refused to abandon him. They made to carry him the extra few hundred yards to the Auberge of Italy, or so, in his dazed condition, he vaguely grasped. As they turned, Ludovico stopped and fought against their hands.

There, across the gore-caked anteroom, he saw a woman bent over a convulsing mass of wounds, which he realized was a naked man that she pinned to a table. Her arms were crimson to the shoulders. Her hair had fallen loose and was plastered to the gouts that smeared her face. But neither
this nor the carvings of exhaustion on her brow could mar her beauty, still less the tenderness of her countenance. He tried to call out but his throat failed him. He envied the man on the table. Jealousy pierced his bowels. And more than his bone-deep fatigue, more than his wounds, more than the ecstasy and horror that had taxed his soul, it was the sight of her that brought him to his knees.