The Religion (71 page)

"Did Bors put you up to this?" he asked.

"Bors?" she said. Innocent as a spring morning.

He shook his head to dismiss the notion. He groped without success for something to say. She put her hands on his shoulders and jiggled with impatience. He held her around the waist. Marvelous. In his experience women were deft enough at eluding congress when it suited them, but woe betide a man who attempted the same, no matter how enlightened his reasons.

"In Spain," she said, "men fight bulls with spears, did you know?"

The question took him unawares, but no more so than her self-invited
entry into his tub. Perhaps it was provoked by his flagrant state of arousal.

"Of course," he said. "I heard that Charles Quintus himself lanced bulls, in Valladolid."

Such pedantry impressed Amparo not a bit.

She said, "Do you know by what means they find a fighting bull?"

His hands wandered beneath the brine. "I do not. But I should love to know. Tell me."

"They gather the bulls from the
finca
in great herds-fifty bulls, a hundred, an enormous mass of enormous beasts-then the herdsmen drive them along, whipping them, shouting, goading, until they form one heart, one mind, one soul, one wild and headlong creature rushing forward, rushing on. If a gorge lay before them, they would run into the gorge and die as one. If the sea was before them, they would run into the sea, and drown as one."

Despite other powerful distractions, Tannhauser found himself captivated. She paused and watched him, until she was satisfied that this was so. She went on.

"But from that great herd-that single wild creature hurtling into nowhere across the sunset-crimson plain-one bull will at last break free from the rest. One bull who will not run with the others-into nowhere, or into the gorge, or into the sea. He does not fear the herdsmen or their whips. He reclaims his heart, his mind, his soul from the headlong rush of the many. He runs apart, he runs alone, in a direction of his own choosing."

Tannhauser felt breathless at the thought of such a sight, and of such a beast.

"Magnificent," he said. "And so this is the fighting bull."

Amparo shook her head. She leaned closer and fixed him with her twin-hued eyes, and he realized she was no mean teller of tales.

"This
might
be the fighting bull," she said. "For the herdsmen take him far away, far into the mountains, far away from his brothers, far away from anything the bull has ever known. There they leave him, lost and alone in a strange new land, and they go." She threw her hand toward some far-flung horizon.

Again she paused, looking at him. Then she leaned back again.

"One week later they go back to find the bull. If he has turned thin and dull and crazy, and runs away because he is afraid, or toward them
because he is lonely, then they kill him at once with their spears and eat his meat for supper." She smiled. "But, if he is strong and shining and proud, and eating much grass, and he stands without motion and stares at them, and snorts and kicks the dust with anger, as if they have entered a kingdom where they don't belong, and are not welcome, then they know." She nodded. "Then they know that
this
is the fighting bull."

Tannhauser didn't know whether to burst into tears or into laughter, in either case as expression of an inexpressible joy. He found that he loved this extraordinary beast, unknown yet present in his inmost heart, and looming large before him in his mind's eye, as if, even there-as a phantasm-it might bear down and gore him if he looked at it too long.

"It's a rum tale," he said. "The bull has the largeness of spirit not to live-or die-with the common mass. Yet by that act he marks himself out as the one who must be sacrificed by Fate."

Amparo reached out her hand and wiped one corner of his eye.

"This brine is pungent," he said, abashed. She smiled a catlike smile and he sniffed. "So tell me, how do they get this magnificent fellow to the
plaza de toros
?"

"The herdsmen have their ways. They say the only one who knows the bull better than the herdsman is the
rejoneador
at the moment that he slays him."

"By the Rod," he said, with sudden insight. "You've witnessed this very manner of finding the bull with your own eyes."

"My papa was a herdsman."

"Was?"

"He found one bull who chose to fight in the mountains, rather than the
plaza
."

Tannhauser took this in in silence. He wondered if it was a bull that had left the indentation in her face. He preferred to think it was so, rather than-as he'd assumed before-the fist of some brute. He didn't ask.

"So you're a nomad too," he said.

"A nomad?"

"One who wanders, always, and claims no home."

She touched her left breast and said, "Here is home." She touched Tannhauser's chest and said, "And here." While Tannhauser debated whether this was an erotic invitation, she said, "Where is your father?"

"Very far away, in the northern mountains," he replied.

"Do you love him?"

"He taught me how to forge steel," he said. "And how to make fires burn hot, and the meaning of the colors in iron, and the care of horses, and how to be honest, and no end of other fine things, the best of which I've forgotten and which he has not."

"Then he is alive."

"I've no reason to think otherwise. He was always strong as an ox. Or as one of your bulls. I haven't seen him in ten years," said Tannhauser. "And he hasn't seen me in almost three times that long."

"I don't understand."

Tannhauser stretched his shoulders and looked up into the turquoise sky. Abbas had provoked the memory too, and he'd resisted. Not so now.

After retiring from the janissary corps he'd taken the decade's wages that he'd hardly had the chance to spend and bought a horse and a fur-lined caftan, and traveled north-through the Sultan's Christian fiefdoms, to the East Hungarian marches and the Fagaras Mountains, and finally to the village of his birth.

Tannhauser, or as he was in those days, Ibrahim the Red, had gone at once to the smithy, and there had found a new firstborn son, who shoed his horse with skill and with the deference accorded to a lord. It was then that he realized how far above these remote mountain people his finery placed him. And Ottoman finery at that. He glimpsed the boy's mother in the yard, a pretty thing not yet too hard worn. The boy had a younger brother. Their father would be back at sundown and, yes, his name was Kristofer. It was clear from the boy's warmth that this father was greatly loved and respected.

Ibrahim returned the next morning and Kristofer was there: his father too.

Ibrahim had last seen his face when the world was young, when he was Mattias the blacksmith's son, and his mother's hair was bronze, and Britta sang of the raven while she played with Gerta in the yard. Kristofer had clapped young Mattias on the back, as he left on his circuit of the manors, and had told him to look out for the womenfolk. And Mattias had not done so, though he'd tried.

Ibrahim found Kristofer in the forge, bent over glowing charcoal with
his son, revealing some fascinating intricacy of his art. He wore a long leather apron. His hair had turned gray without thinning. For his fifty years he looked more than hale, his build as solid as ever, his forearms thickly thewed and his hands huge. His back was half turned and Ibrahim stood in the doorway-and he watched, with the forge taste of powdered goat horn and tallow in his mouth, and his ear readjusting to the dialect long unheard, and to the voice that stirred so many echoes.

"There!" said Kristofer, as if spotting a bird of rare plumage. "That is the blue, like the early-morning sky on New Year's Day. Remember it. Always. Quickly now."

The boy took a length of steel from the fire with his tongs and quenched it in a bucket and recited an
Ave Maria
. The steel looked like a mason's chisel. As steam rose from the bucket, Ibrahim sniffed distilled vinegar and liquor of quicklime. Yes: the quench for a stone chisel. The long unremembered instructions flashed through his mind.

"Not so hard that it will shatter from the blows of the hammer, nor so soft that it will bend at its holy task, for until the cutting of stone men lived in the wilderness-like Cain in the land of Nod-and without the right tools, the wilderness is where we will return."

Ibrahim almost stepped forward to grab an apron, but he caught the expression-the smile-on Kristofer's face as he looked down at his boy and glowed with a primal sentiment and pride. They were feelings unknown to Ibrahim, for he had no son. But that look, that smile, those he'd known, and the face of God could not have been more benevolent.

And in this moment Ibrahim-who'd faced Death a score of times and called him honest-conceived a fear far greater than any he had known. Kristofer had built his family anew. He had endured, and flourished, and from the ashes of desolation rekindled his fire of family and love and peace, and by its light he taught magic and beauty and the mysteries of creation to his son. He'd borne the slaughter and sorrow that devils had wrought upon him, and upon those he'd loved more than life. Devils like Ibrahim. Whose trade was murder-and the strangling of babes-and not the cutting of stone but its razing to the ground.

Why revisit such terrible grief upon this gentle man? Why reveal what his firstborn son had become in the meanwhile: a bloodstained servant of the Power that had massacred his children? Why cast a shadow too black to own a name across the radiance of his forge?

Kristofer sensed him at the door and turned and saw Ibrahim's Turkish garb but not his face, backlit as he was by morning sunshine from the yard. The smile of God vanished from his face. He bowed, coldly, with a civility that excluded any deference.

"Good day, sir," he said. "How may I serve you?"

Ibrahim remembered that instruction too: the greeting, the poise, the graciousness. His throat tightened and he cleared it.

He said, "Your boy, here, he shoed and fettled my horse, just yesterday."

Kristofer had spoken in the German that Ibrahim thought he had lost. The blacksmith hadn't expected a reply in the same. Not from this Turk.

Kristofer blinked. "You have a grievance?"

The boy stiffened. Ibrahim upraised his palm.

"Not at all. To the contrary, the beast has never taken better to a new set of shoes, and he and I had traveled many hard leagues." He stopped, for fear of revealing too much. "I felt I'd paid too little for such expert labor, and wanted to give the boy a bonus."

The boy colored with pleasure.

"This is not necessary," said Kristofer. "Your satisfaction is reward enough. Thank the gentleman, Mattie."

The revelation of the boy's name further thickened Ibrahim's throat and intensified his confusion. "Even so," said Ibrahim, "if I could do so without offense, it would please me."

Mattie looked at his father and received a nod, and while the boy walked across the forge, Kristofer regarded the shadowed figure in the door with an odd curiosity. Ibrahim fumbled for his purse, which contained the better part of all his silver and gold. He hadn't planned this circumstance. By the time Mattie reached him, the impulse could not be debated or resisted. He pulled his purse free and crammed it in the boy's hands, shielding it, he hoped, from Kristofer's view. Mattie felt its weight and opened his mouth to protest.

"Mind your manners, boy," said Ibrahim, under his breath. "And don't open this until I'm gone."

He glanced once more at Kristofer. Could the man see him or not? Go now, he thought, before it's too late. He raised his hand.

"Peace be upon you and all your household," he said.

He turned out of the door, where his horse stood waiting.

"Stay awhile," said Kristofer's voice behind him. "Share some breakfast with us."

Ibrahim paused on the threshold. An exquisite pain knifed his heart. An abyss gaped at his feet, as another had gaped on that very same threshold so many lifetimes ago. Should he reclaim some small portion of that which had been taken? Or was it already gone forever and would he, in the attempt, lose even more? A familiar voice in his head, in a familiar tongue-the tongue he now thought in, the tongue in which he'd issued commands at the sack of Nakhichevan-cut through the anguish.

It is over. It is done. They are not your people anymore. Leave them to their peace
.

Ibrahim spoke over his shoulder. "You are very gentle, sir, but urgent affairs await me on the Stambouli shore."

He mounted his horse and left without looking back. In doing so he realized that he couldn't return to Stambouli. That was done too. The Turks were not his people either. If there were one man in the world who had no people at all, it was he. He was alone. And he was free.

"Instead, of heading south I rode west," he told Amparo, "toward Vienna and the lands of the Franks, and to wars and follies and wonders of a different character. But that's another tale."

Amparo watched him with wet eyes and seemed even more besotted than before.

He turned away. "So you see," he said, "I saw my father, but I didn't let him see me."

Amparo said, "Where was the sense in that? He loved you. He would have given anything to see you."