The Religion (67 page)

The cavalry heard the horns too. They regrouped and began their withdrawal across the scorched earth, extinguishing what cowering pockets of life they found on their way. The destruction of all the Turkish livestock must have been beyond them, for they drove before them a throng of frighted horseflesh. And as on Gallows Point, De Lugny had lost not a single man or war mount.

Tannhauser rubbed at the miasma stinging his eyes. His back ached and he was famished. He flexed his shoulders. Though it wasn't yet long past noon his energy was bankrupt and he'd far to go before the sun rose on the morrow. He pulled the mare about and threaded his way up the rock-strewn trail to Mdina.

The food Tannhauser ate when he got there was plentiful but poor, or maybe his appetite was soured. Marshal Copier quizzed him about Turkish losses and morale. The Maltese scout to the Borgo was provided, or rather, Tannhauser was invited to accompany the scout already assigned:
the latest message from Viceroy Garcia de Toledo, in Messina, required dispatching. They would leave after dark, on foot. Tannhauser discarded his clothes, for they stank so high of smoke as to betray him to a sentry in the night. Then he retired to a palliasse to sleep and he dreamed of the enormities in which he'd played his part.

The nap proved too brief for rejuvenation. By the time he and his Maltese guide had covered a fraction of the distance to the Borgo, Tannhauser was staggering and felt close to the utter ignominy of collapse.

The Maltese guide went by the name of Gullu Cakie. He was a good thirty years Tannhauser's senior and looked hewn from the rock over which they traveled, in his own case with the agility of a monkey. Gullu observed his companion's pallid face, and his sweaty, reeling gait, with a mixture of disgust and awe. Since Gullu spoke only Maltese, and the effort required would have been considerable, Tannhauser didn't explain that he'd just survived a near-fatal ague, plus a nauseating day of slaughter, and suffered on in silence. The frequent swigs he took from Gullu's skin of water garnered further grunts of contempt. His yellow Turkish riding boots-which were a poor match for his brigandine and breeches, but for which no substitutes of the necessary size had been found-earned him Gullu's suspicion. This was eased when Tannhauser asked him by way of signs to carry his rifle, which had grown heavier by the yard and for the last mile had felt like a culverin. Gullu slung it from his right shoulder. Over his left he draped the wallets containing the coffee and three-and-a-quarter pounds of opium-contents that Tannhauser felt ever closer to plundering. Thus laden, Gullu Cakie sprang onward and within a few more paces of pursuit, Tannhauser felt his lot but little improved.

Gullu carried the dispatches in a brass cylinder, and on his belt was a firepot with a glowing coal. The cylinder also contained a charge of gunpowder: if capture looked imminent, Gullu would cram the coal inside and resign himself to torture. The wiry Maltese took a wide sweep to the south and west of the Marsa, down steep valleys and over jagged rims, and through terrain that seemed more rugged than any Tannhauser had seen since he marched across Iran. Had he had the strength to look upward through the sweat stinging his eyes, he might have guessed their location from the stars. The Turkish guns were silent and offered no guide.
Instead, he stared at his feet and stumbled onward in the wake of Gullu Cakie, who, though he vanished time and again into the blackness, always waited up ahead as if for a backward child.

They were climbing bare rock toward a ridge cut sharp against the indigo when Tannhauser caught a whiff of decomposition. Without the hope it offered he might not have made it up the ridge, but he did, and with a whimper of relief looked down upon the watch fires of the Borgo. They were on some spur of San Salvatore and the enemy lines couldn't be far, yet they hadn't seen a Turk all night and Tannhauser couldn't see one now. He considered himself a fair hand at field craft and stealth, but Gullu was a master of the art. His elation faded as Gullu pointed down to Kalkara Bay and made a froglike motion with his arms. He was suggesting they swim. Tannhauser shook his head and performed a mime, based on close experience, of a man drowning. Gullu's disgust, which had gradually abated, returned in full; nevertheless he seemed little deterred. He again vanished into the dark and Tannhauser lurched after him.

Monte San Salvatore, which Tannhauser had conceived as a glorified hill and had indeed ridden over more than once, was, away from the trails, as wrinkled as an elephant's hide. The wrinkles were deep enough to conceal a man. They crawled back and forth among them for, by his own estimate, an hour, again without a sign of human life. When next they raised their heads, they were among rocks at the southernmost lobe of Kalkara Bay. The bastion of Castile stood not five hundred feet distant from where they lay. A hundred feet to Castile's left, overlooking the next lobe of water and sealing the enceinte, stood the bastions of Germany and England. At its base was the Kalkara Gate.

To their left the narrow tail of the Grande Terre Plein, which separated the city walls from the saddle between San Salvatore and Margharita, was thick with Moslem corpses, already bloating in the decline of the moon and casting elongate shadows across the silvered clay. The Turkish-held heights above them were silent, as if in mourning for the disaster that had befallen them that day, and here and there he caught the glimmer of campfires among the mute emplacements of siege guns. To their right, he saw that the Turkish trench works extended all the way down San Salvatore to the Kalkara shore. Fires winked there too, and their flames struck from the night the occasional turbaned silhouette
with a canted musket. It was from these earthworks that they could count on receiving fire.

Gullu Cakie offered Tannhauser his rifle, and Tannhauser took it. Gullu indicated that he intended to crawl across the intervening ground, a feat he would no doubt accomplish with the speed of a cobra. Gullu further indicated that he would get the gates to open, a potentially dangerous moment even for him, and that it was then that Tannhauser should follow. This would give Tannhauser a free run to the interior, and would also give the dispatches from Sicily the greatest chance of safe delivery, a goal which Gullu valued higher than Tannhauser's life. However, the wily old dog was not entirely indifferent to his fate, for he thrust a bony finger toward the sky.

Tannhauser followed it, and for a moment was baffled. The finger pointed at Scorpius. What did he mean? Then Gullu opened his hand and moved it slowly toward the waxing three-quarter moon, now low to the southeast, and Tannhauser belatedly noted that at some considerable distance a blue-gray cloud was doing just the same. It was a small, solitary cloud, and Tannhauser would not have bet a ducat on it masking the moon, and thereby darkening the land below. Instead he was going to bet his life. Gullu mimed a sprint and stuck a finger into Tannhauser's chest. Then Gullu gave him a nod and squirmed out from the rocks toward the walls.

Tannhauser looked up at the cloud. Now that he was alone it appeared smaller than before, and its course more erratic, and the likelihood of it giving him any cover more remote. He watched Gullu work his way across the open ground. In the event he moved more like a crab than a snake, but no less swiftly than predicted, skittering this way and that on his palms and tiptoes, stopping at random to flatten himself to the ground, then breaking back into movement as abruptly as he'd stopped. Even if he'd been spotted he would've looked more like a nocturnal creature than a man.

Tannhauser watched the cloud again. It looked hardly to have moved at all and the more he stared at it the more clearly static it became. There was no wind down here, and up there the case seemed the same. When he looked back from the relative brightness of the heavens to the ground, Gullu Cakie had disappeared.

His solitude was complete. He was armed only with the wheel lock
and his dagger, and neither was any great comfort. His powder flask and ball pouch, he belatedly recalled, were in the wallets on Gullu's back. He gave up watching anything but the cloud and he watched for twenty minutes before he was convinced that it still moved at all. Indeed, it seemed suddenly to bear down on the moon with considerable speed, but such are the tricks that the heavens play. He levered himself into a crouch, grabbed his rifle, and watched the cloud skim Sagittarius. It would cover the ice-white moon but it would pass quickly. He considered crawling to the gate, but his elbows and knees were raw and his chest was a bed of coals. Thirty seconds' exposure was better than ten minutes on his belly with his arse in the air. The cloud's foremost edge cut into the whiteness, and then covered it, and darkness fell across no-man's-land. Tannhauser lurched to his feet and ran.

In the service of Suleiman Shah he must have run fifteen thousand miles-a janissary spent his life running-and the technique hadn't left him, breathing deep and steady in the putrefying air, elbows in, rifle held firm across his chest. His stride was long and fast, weight tilted forward at the waist, the fatigue of the journey banished by the prospect of its end. Straight ahead the water of the bay loomed black as ink; to his right impenetrable shadows and the Turkish lines. The musket blasts started when he was seventy feet out, shocking in sound and brightness. He didn't slow but he threw a few zigzags. One of the blasts caught the glitter of a double-curved sword and he saw a fleet silhouette as it sped along the shore to cut him off at the bulge of Castile. Tannhauser pulled more speed from his hams. The distance closed. But a thin strip of silver light widened across the clay and unrolled toward him as the cloud drew its curtain from the moon.

The
gazi
was revealed, his robes hissing round him and his lips peeled back in effort or perhaps in rage. He'd intercept Tannhauser just short of Castile, and if the musket fire didn't take him down, the blade of the yataghan would. Tannhauser's rifle pointed across his body to the left. He could reverse the gun for a left-handed shot, which was cumbersome, or he could stop and turn and fire, which would squander his hard-won impetus and give the edge to the Turkish marksmen in the trench. Another muzzle bloomed and he felt the wind of the ball. Then the
gazi
was before him, his arms stretched like a discus thrower, the blade cocked back to strike him on the run.

On the verge of their collision, Tannhauser spun clockwise in a backward sprint. The rifle came around with him. The
gazi
's yataghan flashed toward his skull and Tannhauser fired a six-inch flame and a half-inch ball point-blank into his chest.

At least he'd thought he'd done so. But at the same instant the
gazi
's turbaned head flew apart in shower of gleaming gobbets, and before the airborne corpse hit the ground Tannhauser spun back around, the whole maneuver complete in a single pace, a single turn, and he sprinted, head down, to cover the last hundred feet to the Kalkara Gate.

He rounded the wall of the mantlet with bullets drilling dust spouts from the bricks. Entrance to the sally port beyond was through a wicket in the large main gates. It wasn't much wider than his shoulders. A torch flickered within. The first thing Tannhauser saw on barging inside was Bors, who stood measuring powder down the still-smoking bore of his black-and-silver musket. Bors looked up and sniffed.

"What was the pirouette in aid of?" he said. "I was leading that devil from the moment he left his trench."

Tannhauser caught his breath. "Then why didn't you shoot him sooner?"

"Why," said Bors, "then you might have slowed down, and that would not have done at all. You were already flagging under the weight of all that gold." He indicated the bangle on Tannhauser's right arm. "Glittered like a tabernacle the instant you rose up. No wonder they almost had you."

Tannhauser declined to respond. A pair of guards sealed the wicket with an iron-shod door, which they reinforced with a complexity of buttresses and bolts, a process he watched with an eye to getting back out again, and as soon as circumstance allowed. Bors stooped and handed Tannhauser his saddle wallets.

"Gullu Cakie told me to give you these, with his thanks."

"Gullu doesn't speak Italian."

"He speaks Spanish as well as King Philip and Italian better than you. In his trade he needed to. You should be honored to have such a guide."

The wallets felt distinctly light to Tannhauser's hand. He opened them. Only a single wax-paper package remained inside: the one containing the miserly quarter of opium. More woundingly, in a way, his package of coffee had vanished too.

"The old bugger has robbed me."

Bors clapped him on the back and a grin distorted his hugely scarred face. "By the Rod, it's good to have you back," he said, "for mirth has been in very short supply."

"In his trade?" said Tannhauser. "What trade?"

"In his day, Gullu Cakie was the most notorious thief and smuggler of these islands. Dodged the gallows a score of times and never once was caught. It looks like you've put him back in business."

The sally port corridor turned at an obtuse angle. Above the angle a murder hole gaped in the ceiling. Intruders could be waylaid at this junction while incendiaries and gunfire were showered from above. At the inner end was a portcullis and beyond that, to provide another killing floor in the event that the port was breached, was a small, roofless blockhouse furnished with oilettes. As Tannhauser headed through the blockhouse, Bors took his arm.

"Come and see this," said Bors.

Tannhauser followed him up the wall stair. They reached the top and turned and Tannhauser stopped dead, and blinked, as the prospect from this vantage was revealed.