The Religion (61 page)
As he rode through the smoke-charred barbican of Saint Elmo, his costume had the desired effect on the guard at the gate, a Bulgar by the look of him, who bowed low before the sneer that Tannhauser mustered as he trotted past. He crossed the fractured courtyard where the last of the knights had been beheaded and where he'd shared Le Mas's last
night. A Turkish siege battery boomed from the seaward wall overlooking the Borgo, but apart from the gun crews the fort was barely manned at all. Once it had seemed a whole world, seething with heroic madness and holy love; now it was a small, shabby ruin and its deserted aspect gave him chills. He rode into the forge unnoticed and dismounted. It was empty and cool but he spent no more time on reminiscence. With a pair of tongs he set to levering up the flagstone in the floor, to recover the five pounds of opium and the heavy gold ring he'd buried underneath. It was hardly a labor to tax an Atlas, but his forehead was rapidly filmed with a sickly sweat. He was hardly in the best of health, but at least he was back on his feet.
The ague had almost carried him away. He didn't remember the first fevered days that had followed Saint Elmo's fall, nor did he care to. They passed in a not unwelcome delirium, in which he felt little and was aware of less, including, most happily, the excision of a large abscess that swelled to the size of a fist behind the musket ball in his back and from which a pint and more of pus was ultimately drained. Had he died during this period it would have been as a shivering, mumbling bag of bones incapable of anything so refined as regret or even fear. What followed his return to consciousness was somewhat more taxing.
He found himself nursed, in as much luxury as the circumstances allowed, in the flamingo-pink campaign tent of Abbas bin Murad. An Ethiopian slave fanned away the flies and sponged his brow in the deadening heat. He burned frankincense and placed heated glass cups upon his skin. He poured honeyed water, salted yogurts, and medicinal elixirs down his throat in such great quantity that Tannhauser felt he would vomit if he'd had the strength to do so. The same mute and patient fellow disposed of his stool with exquisite dignity, a humiliation Tannhauser bore with the tight-lipped fortitude of one who had no choice in the matter. In a clay jar the Ethiop collected his increasing yield of urine with great satisfaction, as if this were his primary reward for his ministrations.
For some days Tannhauser endured these episodes with embarrassment-on his nurse's part as well as his own-for it seemed to him a poor way to make a living; but then he reasoned that the Ethiop might well be the luckiest of all his brethren on the island, for if he hadn't been fanning
and sponging and collecting in the shade of a tent, he would most likely have been hauling cannon and baskets of rocks around the mountains. After this, Tannhauser submitted with an easier conscience and even found himself inclined to mutter his gratitude.
When, for brief moments, he regained the power to raise his head from the pillow, he became aware that his body, and in particular his legs, were promiscuously blotched with brown-and-purple lesions of alarming appearance. Had he seen another man in such a state he would have granted him a wide berth, for if the Black Death were to return to smite the ungodly it would surely look like this. The thought that a blackamoor might easily be sacrificed to such a fate only increased his fear that his diagnosis might be accurate. That his penis seemed immune to this scourge brought a sense of relief that was profound, if only fleeting. However, when subsequently visited by a succession of Arab and Jewish physicians, all of whom exhibited aplomb in the face of his stigmata, he felt reassured. The consensus among his doctors was that the lesions represented the expulsion of toxic humors from his body, the detritus of his battle to stay alive. They were unanimous in their confidence that if he lived, they would disappear, a fact which the Arabs, if not the Jews, attributed to the beneficence of Allah rather than their own expertise. The numerous half-healed cuts and bruises that otherwise adorned his body aroused no comment.
The physicians had prepared a confection of red gillyflowers, deer musk, and cloves infused in vinegar, which the fortunate among the high command rubbed about their nostrils thrice a day against contagion by the plague. Tannhauser enjoyed this rare protective benefit as well, and was told that it was good against nocturnal sweats and all the effects of melancholy. In this last regard, if not in the others, it proved less than effective. His care, then, was of the highest quality, and thus was he denied the chance to leave this mortal realm in a state of happy oblivion. Instead, he spent several weeks in a helplessness more complete than he imagined possible. For a man who invested a substantial portion of his pride in his physical strength, this was a singular experience.
Abbas came each night-night after night, for weeks, his face drawn gaunt by the rigors of watching good men die in the field-and he sat by Tannhauser's cushions and read passages from the Koran in a voice that called from the text a beauty so inherent that its origin in God's throat
seemed quite beyond question. During these visits Tannhauser feigned an inability to speak, for Abbas's tenderness was so simple and so untarnished that it almost broke his heart. In conditions of such debility as he was in, sentiments escape their bonds and melancholy swells the liver, and his feelings for Abbas were unbearably intricate and haunting. Friend and abductor, savior and master, father and brother and foe. Tannhauser lay there in deceit, and perhaps in treachery. So he spoke not at all and soaked in the healing love that Abbas bestowed on him.
He lay in the great silk womb and between bouts of sleep in which horror stalked his dreams, and which followed no rhythm or pattern, he watched the changing light as it coaxed from the superbly woven fabric more shades of pink than even the painters of Suleiman's court could know existed. It was a color for which he had never had any regard and he thought he'd sicken of it, yet he didn't. Rather, he fell ever deeper beneath its spell, as if the color, forged as it was from silk and warp and weft, and light and dark, and the genius of the dyer's art, were a piece of music, or a woman, or a vista of high-country snow, or any such cosmic fabrication that on first acquaintance seemed one thing but on repeated study proved itself many, and each always different from the last. Many, also, were the hours of night that he spent gazing at the pinkness by the yellow light of the lamps. And when the pomegranate hues of twilight gave way to what seemed like utter blackness, the blackness too revealed itself as something more, leavened as it was by the flicker of campfires and starlight, and by the wax and wane of the moon. Pink was life. And it reminded him of what Petrus Grubenius had told him, which was that every Thing existent bears some influence on every Other, no matter how far flung from each other that they might be, for if, as is clear to any man, two events in close conjunction alter the nature of each, then each must change that of a third and fourth, for nothing is disconnected entire, much though we might sometimes wish it, and that is why the stars, most distant of all known bodies, even so exert an influence over every human destiny, a fact no intelligent man would ever dispute.
What profit or meaning could be gleaned from this study in pink, Tannhauser was unable to fathom. It was a matter that proceeded of its own accord. And he found that something similar, but more enigmatic yet, evolved with regard to the silent Ethiop, who more than any other agent was the force that restored his health and saved his life.
No one told Tannhauser that his nurse was an Ethiop, and certainly not the man himself, but he didn't doubt his judgment in this matter. No race was more distinctive, being high boned and long fingered, hard as ironwood and slender as reeds. He'd seen them on the block in Alexandria and Beirut, and few slaves were as highly prized, not least because they were a very fierce lot indeed and not inclined to submit to Arab slavers without a fight. Adult males were rarely taken alive; this man had probably been abducted as a boy. Ethiopia was the land of the Queen of Sheba, and Prester John and the Lost Tribes of Israel, and it was said that the Arc of the Covenant itself was hidden there, guarded by warriors wielding swords with six-foot blades, in a vast red mountain cathedral hewn from the rock. They believed in a black Jesus, and why not? And as proof of their manhood, he'd heard, they hunted wild lions in the red savannah, alone, and with no more than a simple spear, and wore the beast's hide and teeth when they went to war. No wonder, then, that the fellow who nursed him could clean another man's soil with more pride than a prince at his own coronation; who, despite being doomed to this lowly estate, walked as tall as any janissary or knight.
After Tannhauser's first attempts at conversation failed, he limited himself to bows of his head and grunts of thanks and blessings. The Ethiop slept on the ground by his bed, and when Tannhauser in his insomnia waited for the first light of dawn, and turned to study the fine ebony features in repose, the man's eyes would already be open, always, as if he never slept at all but only rested, his eyes black mirrors in which all things were reflected yet no one thing that Tannhauser could name.
Beyond the thin walls of the tent cannon thundered and whips cracked, and cruelties without number were recorded in the unread archives of Time. But here a stranger, whose name he did not know and did not ask, cared for him day and night as if he were a babe, and no matter what coercion had brought the Ethiop to this task, he performed it with a boundless kindness, in the midst of a boundless evil, and it seemed to Tannhauser that this was as close to purity as human goodness ever came.
The day dawned when Tannhauser awoke and knew, for no particular reason, that it was over and that he was well: weak and shriveled to a bag of
sinews and bone, but free of whatever it was that had so ailed him. He looked at the Ethiop and saw that he knew too. He rose from his bed on enfeebled legs and walked out into the daylight, with the Ethiop at his side. Abbas's tent was pitched on a hill overlooking the Marsa, the broad flat plain between Monte Sciberras and Corradino Heights at the landward end of Grand Harbor. The Marsa was filled by the sprawl of the Turkish camp-the bivouacs and kitchens and supply dumps; and the spreading stain of the field hospital, where those less fortunate than Tannhauser lay dying beneath scraps of canvas and the violence of the midsummer sun. They walked the quarter-mile to the rim of the hill and from there looked down on what might have been the bore of Mount Etna.
A dense gray cloud hovered over the coastal arrangement of peninsulas and bays, and spouting smoke and muzzle blasts formed the spokes of a giant wheel that took in Gallows Point and Saint Elmo, and the heights of Sciberras, San Salvatore, Margharita, and Corradino, where they stood. At the center of the holocaust's ire were the Borgo and L'Isola, themselves all acrackle and aflame with musketry and cannon fire. A howl rose through the morning and the Sultan's legions surged across the Grande Terre Plein, and over the corpse-choked ditches, to splash against the smoke-blacked bastions of either fortress. Ladders were thrown up, and fire hoops and pipkins sailed down, and hand-to-hand butchery was joined along the devastated ramparts.
After his sojourn in the timeless pink womb, the frenzied broil below seemed an aberrant phantasm not of this world, a devil's joke whose actors were recruited by deception.
But this was the world, and his world most of all, and the knowledge that he must soon plunge back in, for one flag or another, filled him with dread and nausea, and a yearning to retreat into the helplessness from which he'd just emerged. He glanced at the Ethiop, and for once caught him unguarded. The man had the look of a cat who sat on a window and watched two rival packs of dogs fighting in the street. He looked at Tannhauser, and saw whatever he saw, then turned and walked back toward the camp.
Tannhauser watched him go. His nausea was transformed into hunger. A bestial, raving hunger. A lust for meat. He didn't look back at the battle. If the Religion was to fall, this was as good a day as any. Clearly
that was Mustafa's hope and intention. Tannhauser went to find some breakfast. At the kitchen he learned that it was August 2, and that he'd been inside the tent for close on six weeks. When he returned from the kitchens, the Ethiop had gone, and Tannhauser never saw him there again.
The Religion did not fall on August 2. Tannhauser watched from the hill as dusk fell and the muezzin wailed the evening call and the mauled battalions of janissaries trooped by with their tattered colors and their wounded, heading for their campfires and what comfort they could find around their cauldrons.
Abbas returned to his tent in a dark mood and Tannhauser, or as Abbas knew him, Ibrahim, joined him in prayer. Afterward, they dined at a low table made of polished cherrywood. Abbas was now in his fifties, much admired by his peers and revered by his men, whose welfare, horses, and equipment he fostered with subsidies from his own purse. His beard was steel gray and two pale scars marked his brow and cheek. Otherwise he remained as lean and elegant as the day he'd found Mattias by his mother's corpse.
On the three-month journey they'd taken together, twenty-five years ago, from the wilds of the Fagaras Mountains to the greatest city in the world, Abbas had taught Ibrahim the rudiments of Turkish, the rituals of daily prayer, how to conduct himself as a man when he entered the Enderun military college in Istanbul. In return, Ibrahim had proved his skill in repairing tackle and in the care and fettling of horseflesh. Though it had been the men under Abbas's command who had murdered his mother and sisters, Ibrahim had not held him to blame. Robbed of every other ally, perhaps he lacked the wit to do so. Rather, he adored the man, and in some sense his abandonment to the discipline of the Enderun had been more desolating than his departure from the village of his birth.