The Religion (88 page)

The lock rattled in the door and a bolt was thrown back. He retched again. He spat bile.

He heard Ludovico's voice. "Take it away."

Tasso, the Sicilian
bravo
, shuffled in. He walked half bent, his arm wrapped around his side. Bors had fed a fist into his liver and had felt the ribs crackle like burned pork. Tasso balked before the stool, halted by revulsion. All that was left to Bors was his bestiality. He lunged to the limit of the chain around his neck and roared, and though the chain held Bors well short, Tasso reeled back in terror and Bors laughed at him, and at himself and at his fate, and at the puckered and pickled head of Sabato Svi, which sat before him on the stool.

There was a comfort in madness too. An annulment. A soaring as on wings of eagles.

They'd left him in the dungeon with a box of candles and a spiled keg on the sleeping bench, and for a night and a day he'd stared at that keg, for though he was no fox, as was Mattias, he knew there had to be some object behind these particulars. He'd finally turned the spigot and discovered the brandy inside. And object and particulars be damned in the light of such joy. He'd drunk himself blind while hours and days without reckoning slipped him by, and he'd dozed through reveries long, of glory and comradeship and blood, and had drunk again, and had plunged, as a man decided on drunkenness will, into an oblivion reckless and without imaginable end, until that end had come, and like a mother's teat the spigot at the last had given no more, and the keg sat empty as his belly and his soul. And yet not empty, for as he'd raised the keg above his mouth, and tilted it to liberate the dregs, something had shifted inside. Something solid and substantial, that bumped against the wood like a seed in a gourd, which in his blurred mind he recalled was the sound of folly. He'd set the keg
down, with a sickness in his gut, and let it be. But curiosity is a torment as keen as any and it bested him. He'd smashed the keg apart upon the flagstones, and from inside rolled the head of Sabato Svi. Severed at the neck and pickled like an onion in the brandy. And with that all his notions of what was vile had been dwarfed, and his own cruelty humbled, and the thread that connected his mind to his soul had snapped, and with that he had howled to a God he no longer had faith in.

Tasso found a lice-raddled blanket on the floor and netted the severed head inside it and disappeared, with Bors still laughing all the while. Then Ludovico walked in, and Bors's laughter stopped. The monk halted and looked at the floor at Bors's feet, as if noticing something striking for the first time. Bors followed his gaze. A trapdoor was set into the flagstones. In the wood was set a hoop and an inch-thick bolt.

"Do you speak French?" asked Ludovico.

Bors didn't answer.

"This is an oubliette," said Ludovico. "It's a place where one is forgotten."

Ludovico stooped and threw the bolt and lifted the door by its hoop. A foul miasma gusted forth and Bors grimaced and looked down. Beyond the trapdoor's maw was a space as cramped as a coffin. Inside lay Nicodemus. His face was the color of a jellyfish. Wormlike grubs crawled over his half-closed eyes and his motionless lips.

Bors's throat convulsed with rage and sorrow. No more rounds of backgammon. No more custard tarts, the most delicious he'd ever eaten. Bors closed his eyes. His mind reeled with sudden vertigo. He leaned back against the wall. The urge to vomit assailed him afresh. He swallowed. He imagined Mattias.
Hold on to the rage and sorrow both
, Bors heard him counsel,
for while we breathe, we may yet prevail
.

Ludovico let the trapdoor fall and sat down on the stool without a qualm and rested his hands on his thighs, and it was strange, for Bors didn't fear him, nor anything else Ludovico might do, for somehow, in pickling the head of a man he had not liked but whose side he had taken-in pickling the head of Sabato Svi, the Jew-Ludovico had done all that he might, and so much more.

"Bors of Carlisle," said Ludovico, as cordial as you please. "So tell me, where is Carlisle?"

And Bors thought:
Forgive me, Mattias, my friend, for this is a game I cannot win
.

A crone brought her food and wine while Anacleto lingered at the door, but neither had responded to her questions. When Ludovico finally came to visit her, Carla found that a primitive gratitude for company overwhelmed all other sentiments. She turned away from him to conceal it. She despised her weakness. She despised him for knowing that such would be her reaction. She turned back to face him. His eye sockets receded into his skull as if into endless night and they returned no light from the window high in the wall. Yet their shadows did not conceal the torment therein. In some ways he looked like the man she had once fallen in love with. In others he was quite unknown to her.

"Where is Amparo?" she said.

"Nearby," Ludovico replied. "The comforts you've enjoyed, though mean, are better than most in this city. Amparo enjoys the same. You seem in good health; I'm assured that so is she."

"You've seen her?"

"No."

"I wish to see her."

"Soon," he said.

"At once," said Carla.

"May I sit down?"

He advanced into the room. It was furnished with a bed and two chairs and was otherwise bare. Its original function she hadn't been able to deduce. He limped, though it was no attempt to win her sympathy. Her request would not be met, she knew. She remembered Mattias's advice not to cross swords with the Inquisitor. She nodded and Ludovico sat down.

"I regret these circumstances," said Ludovico. "But you must understand that I'm committed to a certain course and will not be swayed. Some aspects of my design concern you, others do not."

"And Tannhauser?"

"His quarters are less opulent, but he's not been ill-treated. Your companions can survive this ordeal unscathed. In part that depends upon them, in part upon you."

"So you've come with threats against the lives of those I love."

"I've come to illuminate the nature of things as they are. How they will be is contingent on the role we each play."

"Is the role required of me still that of your lover? Your wife?"

"I've prayed upon this matter, as I'm sure you have too."

She let silence stand as her reply.

He said, "I believe it's God's Will that we be joined. I believe it always was."

"You presume to speak for God, as do many who are wedded to evil. I'd rather you spoke for your own will and desire."

"I desire your happiness. I know you regard me with loathing, at this moment, and view my proposal with revulsion. But in time you will appreciate that your happiness is indivisible from mine."

"So you presume to speak for me too."

"Scorn ill becomes you and will profit no one."

Anger crushed her chest like a heavy stone. "Scorn?"

Ludovico blinked.

"Can you imagine how much I despise you?"

"I have tried," he said. "And failed. But there is another face to that coin. You cannot imagine what torment your presence has inflicted upon me."

"You accuse me of tormenting you?"

"I merely state a fact. I didn't ask you to return to Malta. I tried to prevent it."

A too-familiar guilt twisted inside her. She'd brought disaster in her train.

"I've sought to rid myself of this malaise," said Ludovico. "I've mortified the flesh. I've contemplated acts so atrocious they would place me forever beyond redemption in your eyes. In that result, at least, there would be a resolution, and some kind of peace."

Fear uncoiled in her belly. On this matter of atrocious acts she didn't doubt his word.

He said, "If I've refrained from committing them, it was out of horror at inflicting further grief, on you."

A shudder ran through her. She clenched her shoulders to suppress another.

He stood and pulled the second chair closer to his own. "Come, sit down, please."

She walked to the second chair and sat down. He returned to his seat. He sat for a moment with his elbows on his thighs and his fingers laced
into a fist and his head held down. His knuckles turned white. She took a deep breath. He looked up at her. The deep-seated eyes were like tunnels bored into something abominable beyond.

"I've asked myself," he said, "how do I win back the affection of a woman I've injured so gravely, and in such a multiplicity of ways. A woman whose pride I have trampled. Whose liberty I have stolen. Whose most beloved friends I have consigned to darkness and chains."

Carla felt tears rise in her throat. She swallowed.

"To these questions I've found no answers," he said. "For I am chained in a darkness thicker than any. If I've cut the knot of many riddles, and unraveled many more, this one is beyond my genius, for its most tangled threads are those of my own emotions. Their strength exceeds all ligatures and compulsions. War and its rapture have drawn them even tighter. Anger, pity, and lust have throttled me each in turn. Love has suffocated me, so that I've woken in the night and believed that my last hour was come. Aye, and as oft as not wished that it were so. But it was not so. Even on the field of battle, even when your German fired an assassin's bullet in my back, death eluded me. And so things are not as I might wish them, but as they are. Thus I come to throw myself upon your compassion."

Carla looked away from his eyes to find her own thoughts. She had prayed, yes. Mattias had told her to be true to herself, no matter what the cost. She'd wrestled with that conundrum night and day, for what did it mean? That under no circumstance was she to submit to Ludovico's demands? That all were to be consumed on the pyre of her honor-and in a world that reeked already of sacrifice and death? She'd decided that it did not mean that, but that that was only one choice amongst many, and that Mattias, as always, had meant only what he said: that she should be true to her highest conception of herself, not to some conception held by others. She looked back at Ludovico.

"Can you not let us live our lives and find your consolation in God?"

"Did you find such consolation?"

"Yes," she said. "I did."

"And yet you came back to Malta."

"Despite your accusations, I didn't come back to cause you harm."

"Even so."

"You haven't answered me."

He said, "You haven't slept with Tannhauser. Yet."

How did he know this?

Ludovico nodded. "There's little I don't know. There's less that I won't do. I will not leave you to the German, even though I be damned for it. My sin is already mortal. I cannot root it out. God sees the truth in my heart, and my lack of contrition. And so, if I must, I'll be damned for my deeds rather than my thoughts."

If she'd ever doubted his resoluteness, she did so no longer.

He said, "Hear me, Carla. Abhorrence, though it stalks me, need not find its prey. What we once had can never die. Resurrection is the heart of our Faith, and so is Love, and the one is at the heart of the other. I love you. More than I love God. Together we'll find peace. Amparo will remain your companion. We will be reunited with our child. And, in time, you will rediscover the tenderness you felt for me before."

"Our child?" she said.

"Orlandu is in the entourage of Abbas bin Murad, Aga of the Yellow Banners. When the relief arrives from Sicily, and the Turk is thrown into confusion, my knights and I will pluck Orlandu from their grasp."

"So you seek to steal Tannhauser's part in more ways than one."

He flinched. "I'll not let my son be shipped to Constantinople and turned into an infidel. I would rather he perished before he thus lost his soul."

This last she didn't want to dwell on. She said, "The relief is on its way?"

"When Toledo's army arrives, you and I will go to Mdina. From there I will join the relief and effect Orlandu's rescue."

"And Mattias?"

"I will free him to rejoin the Turks and among them he will prosper and thrive. He will forget you, as you will forget him. And unless you give me reason to do so, I will bear him no more injury or malice. His life then-like Amparo's-is in your hands."

He stood up.

"You have my answer," he said. "Now give me yours, for I won't come to ask you again."