The Religion (68 page)

It was nearly two months since he'd left the town, at which time hardly a shot had been fired against it. Now it was a formless wasteland dense with rubble-paved with rubble, stacked with rubble, and by yet more rubble surrounded. Holes and fractures scarred the masonry of San Lorenzo, the Sacred Infirmary, the Arsenal, and the Courts of Law. Whole streets had been leveled down to the cobbles. Iron balls and gun stones littered the ruins. Countless roofless houses gaped to the sky. Castel Sant'Angelo brooded like the seat of a vanquished kingdom and apart from a flicker of watch fires nothing in that wide desolation stirred, as if the place had been sacked and forsaken when history was young, and its denizens were savages yet dressed in the skins of beasts.

"The women," said Tannhauser. "Carla, Amparo, are they alive?"

"They're sound enough," said Bors. "At least in body."

"And otherwise?"

"There are few in this benighted burg who aren't heartsick to the core. Even I have moments of weariness, and I wouldn't miss all this for a palace on the Lido."

Tannhauser's eyes sought out the Auberge of England on Majistral Street. It was one of the few buildings that appeared to be undamaged.
Bors caught the look and as Tannhauser started down the stair he said, "The women don't live at the auberge anymore."

Tannhauser looked at him.

"Carla moved out with her belongings just short of a week since. Left as if she'd found that the place was haunted, but wouldn't say why. She says she has a cot in the infirmary, where she can sleep as she will and always be on hand for the sick."

"And Amparo?"

"Amparo lives in the stables on the straw, with Buraq. Don't worry, I've kept one eye on both of them. Both women, that is, and the horse too." He shrugged at Tannhauser's frown. "They're a willful pair. What else could I do?"

When they reached the foot of the stairs, La Valette's page, Andreas, who'd survived a bullet in the throat on the first day of the siege, informed them that Gullu Cakie had presented his dispatches to the Grand Master, who was now awaiting an immediate report from Tannhauser on the standing of the Turk. To the youth's shock, Tannhauser replied that he had no intelligence that would prolong the city's resistance beyond the morning, and that, with all appropriate homage and salutations, the Grand Master could wait until then to learn what he knew.

Tannhauser left Andreas stranded in the street and struck for the infirmary. He did so on instinct, on a whim he was too tired to question or resist. He wanted to see Carla. He wanted to see what was in her face when she saw him. Perhaps it was the boy. He wanted to tell her Orlandu was alive. Perhaps it was something more.

When they reached the piazza that fronted the Sacred Infirmary, they found it wholly covered with the bodies of wounded men, the harvest of that day's battle laid out in bloodstained rows. They languished under the stars, their sundry mutilations and truncated limbs swaddled in blankets made threadbare by launderings and use. Brother monks and chaplains and Jews and Maltese women gave what comfort they could to their charges and loved ones. After what Tannhauser had seen that afternoon in the Turkish camp, he had no reason to be unduly moved; these men, at the least, enjoyed more succor than the lances and hooves of fiends; and yet moved he was, and he didn't know why.

Then he heard a thread of music wind a sinuous path through the night. It was fainter than that he'd heard upon the hill and he looked at
Bors to be sure it wasn't his fancy. Bors tossed his head toward Galley Creek.

"They make the music by the water."

"Both of them?"

"Every night since Carla abandoned the auberge."

Bors held out his hand and Tannhauser gave him the rifle and the empty wallets, then he turned to go.

"Mattias."

Tannhauser stopped.

"Brother Ludovico is back."

Tannhauser's hand gripped the hilt of his dagger.

"My thought also," said Bors, "but killing him would be no easy matter. Brother Ludo is now a Knight of Justice. The Italian langue."

"Ludovico has joined the Religion?" said Tannhauser.

"Courted them with relics and done his share of slaughter."

"I didn't think La Valette was such a fool."

"Ludovico's respected by all and the Italians love him."

Tannhauser passed a hand over his face. "This is more a madhouse than I expected."

"The fortunes of war," shrugged Bors. He added, "He's caused no trouble to date, so far as I know, but his spies have their noses to the ground, so beware."

"Beware?" said Tannhauser.

The very notion was folly. As were all his strivings. He'd waded in folly more deeply than he'd waded in blood, and he'd wade on yet in both till one or the other drowned him. The evils of the day had almost broken him and for a moment he found himself teetering, between a fit of rage too vast to admit of any object and a fit of mirth from which he might not return. Then the music once more drifted down the evening, and the moment passed.

"You look like a man not long for this world," said Bors. "Come and take some brandy with me. We'll get drunk, and talk of better times."

"Bors," said Tannhauser, "embrace me, my friend."

Tannhauser clasped his arms about the immense shoulders as a drowning man might clasp the trunk of a tree. The tree was so bewildered it staggered but it did not fall. Then Tannhauser turned away and walked through the crumbling streets toward Galley Creek.

He found the women in a nest of rocks at the water's edge. At closer range the sound of Amparo's lute was delicate and clear, the notes of its many strings lifting the boldness of Carla's viola like the wings of so many hummingbirds. Both women seemed lost within the sphere of infinite beauty that they spun, their eyes closed to this world, their faces thrust up to the firmament at moments of ecstatic flight, their chins tucked into their shoulders as they dived the depths of their hearts for pearls of truth. And if the scales of the cosmic balance could ever be righted, if that calamitous measure of woe in one tray heaped could ever be countered and made to tip back from its nadir, then it was here and now, and by the power of this magic invisible that filled the air.

Tannhauser found a perch and sat down to listen. He wasn't alone. There must have been twoscore people gathered there and about, as one might find them drawn on a market day by a jongleur or a fool. Soldiers and peasants and women, knots of grubby boys, and tatterdemalion girls holding hands, these latter with the vacant faces and haunted eyes of children who had witnessed all that perdition allows. Some had brought candles or lamps, and these threw small arcs of light that were quickly lost in the uneven ground. All kept their distance. They sat or stood or squatted with no great fuss. Some had the glister of tears running down their cheeks. Some were merely curious. Others seemed dazed or befuddled, as if the gulf between the beauty of the music and the catastrophe around them were too vast to bridge.

The musicians themselves were oblivious to all but the Divine. The realm they were exploring lay far from this one; and perhaps its charting was the noblest gift they made, for this realm here was so dark, so caged by dolor and death, and so far stranded from all imaginable others, that to illuminate, even for a moment, a dominion where harmony reigned was to pluck the stars from the heavens above and place one in every hand.

Bors tiptoed up and sat down. He proffered a leather flask. Tannhauser took a drink and stifled a gasp. By its kick the brandy had been rectified in a helmet, but it spread a glow, and he drank again and handed it back. Bors tilted his head at the performers and puckered his lips in pride, as if he'd tutored them himself. While they listened, the tyranny of Time seemed overthrown forever; but forever too is another of Time's
satraps, and at last the musicians stopped and they sat in a circle of silence, a silence near as exquisite as the music now long vanished on the wind.

A girl in the crowd clapped with rapture and someone shushed her, as if they were in church. Then bit by bit the crowd broke up and drifted toward the ruins like specters called to their tombs by the onset of day, and the creek front became deserted and Tannhauser and Bors alone were left behind. The retiring crowd took their lamps and as the last yellow orbs disappeared into the streets, Tannhauser glimpsed a long face caught by the glow. A face striking for its aquiline beauty and beardless cheeks. He grabbed Bors's arm and pointed but it was gone, and he wondered if he'd seen it there at all.

Tannhauser said, "Anacleto?"

"He's about," agreed Bors. "He lurks out of sight. Like the spider never seen upon the web until the fly is trapped. He too has taken holy orders, as a Knight of Magistral Grace. Want me to roust him?"

"Until it's time to kill him and Ludovico both, there's no good sense in it."

Tannhauser turned to watch Carla and Amparo pack their instruments. How splendid it was to see them both together again. They were a little thin, yes. There were new lines carved on their features that would never be erased. But their fettle looked fine enough to him. Indeed, each in her way was so fair of form and face that his heart almost stopped as the moment of reunion loomed. He loved them both without let or doubt and in that conundrum, for once, he found neither contradiction nor anguish. That knot could be unraveled on some other occasion. As they clambered back up the rocks, toting their cases, Tannhauser rose from his seat and they saw him.

Both women stopped for a moment, as if confronted by an apparition, or perhaps a troll escaped from some Northern tale. It was true he didn't look his best. His breeches hung in shreds about his knees. His shirtless arms were streaked with sweat and dirt. And the brigandine was the kind of garment sported by a bravo of the lower sort. These defects were beyond mending for the moment. At least he'd had his beard oiled in the bazaar the day before and was wearing a respectable amount of gold. But while he entertained these vain and risible frets, the women dropped their cases and rushed toward him, arms outstretched, with a gratifying display of tearful joy.

He embraced them both at once, an arm to each, as on that long-ago day of the first clash when he'd solicited their blessing for the fight. He held their heads to his chest, as if they were his children, or as if he was theirs. If they hadn't wept so hard he might have done so himself, and thus was their sentiment welcome. His chest swelled with a marvelous sense of warmth, engendered in part by the pressure of their breasts against his ribs, and when Carla raised her face to meet his eyes, Tann-hauser grinned.

"You called," he said. "How could I not come running?"

This garnered a smile from each of them and he looked from one pair of shining eyes to the other-Amparo's irregular face yet again exerting its lethal charm, and Carla's soulful elegance knifing his soul-until affection threatened to undermine his poise and he glanced away over their heads.

"Bors," he said, "bring their accoutrements, if you will. We're going back to the auberge. And there, when we are snug, I will tell you all a tale you won't forget."

PART IV

By Dens of Lions Encompassed

The Assumption: Wednesday, August 15, 1565

Post of Italy-Fort Saint Michel

The waning moon stood, by Anacleto's reckoning, in Aquarius. Siege guns boomed at disparate intervals and the walls beneath Ludovico's feet would occasionally shudder as a ball struck home. In the trenches cut into the hills, and on the Marsa plain beyond, the Turks rested to restore their strength after recent reverses. Ludovico watched the shadows in the Ruins of Bormula and brooded on those shadows that lay across his own affairs.