The Religion (10 page)

"If you want more men, I daresay I could round a few up-though most will be drunk and all of them scum of the earth-" He stopped at the patent want of interest in Starkey's face. "But I forget my manners. Come and dine with us at our table-"

"Forgive me, Tannhauser, but I have not the heart to dissemble." Starkey's unease was manifest. "I do not come to trade, but to ask a boon."

"You're amongst friends. Ask and be damned."

"I came at the Grand Master's urgent command to entreat you to make common cause with the Religion, in the war against the Grande Turke."

Tannhauser blinked. He stole a glance at Bors.

Bors smoothed his mustaches and licked his lips.

"In short," said Starkey, "the Grand Master wants you to join us."

"In Malta?"

"In Malta."

Tannhauser stared at Starkey with such incredulity and apprehension that Bors dropped his hands to his knees and roared with laughter. So raucously, indeed, and with such jubilation, that the sailors reefing the lateens and the stevedores sweating at the wagons stopped in the midst of their chores and turned to gape.

Tuesday, May 15, 1565

The Oracle-Messina Gate-The Hills of Neptune

Tannhauser returned from the
Couronne
in a sour humor. Starkey had mounted every type of persuasion-moral, political, financial, spiritual, and tribal-in an attempt to recruit his allegiance. He'd promised him glory, riches, honor, and the gratitude of Rome. He had begged, cajoled, and browbeaten. He'd invoked the
Summae
of Thomas Aquinas, the authority of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and stirring examples of heroes ancient and modern. He'd done all but accuse Tannhauser of lacking courage. Yet Tannhauser had answered all these bribes and propositions with an absolute refusal to take up arms for the Religion. The Maltese Iliad, as Starkey styled it, would have to go ahead without him. He hadn't killed a man in years and while his conscience was generally untroubled by such deeds it wasn't a practice he missed. As a reward for the morning's travails, he promised himself a bath back at the warehouse. Bors rode alongside him in a vexed silence of his own. As they approached the Oracle, Bors nodded toward a horse tied up in the shade outside the doors and said, "Trouble."

Tannhauser saw that the horse was a splendid bay mare, expensively saddled and caparisoned. With a handful of exceptions, the tavern's customers had no more chance of owning such a beast than they had of gaining election to the College of Cardinals. As they passed the Oracle's doors on their way to the stables, Tannhauser ducked his head to glance inside and found a peculiar commotion within. The uproar spilled from a mass of scurvy drunkards, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the manner of spectators to a brawl. He dismounted at once, handed Buraq's reins to Bors, and stepped to the threshold to peer over the heads of the unwashed.

In the middle of the saloon a long, bony whip of a girl in a forest-green riding dress whirled like a dervish, arms outstretched like wings, amid a horseshoe of rowdy patrons, seated and afoot, who shouted lewd suggestions in Sicilian slang and threw pieces of cheese rind, candle wax, and bread at her head. The girl was plainly demented, though bombarded as she was with obscenities and debris, she could hardly be blamed for that. To make matters worse, and in ripe provocation of her tormentors' primitive
fantasies, she chanted his own name in a piping voice as she revolved around.

"Tannhauser! Tannhauser! Tannhauser!"

Tannhauser sighed. He rearranged his sword so as to hang in a more imposing fashion and strode into the tavern with every appearance of knowing exactly what to do.

The louts were making such rare sport that few noticed his entrance, which galled him even more. As a squat, ox-necked individual leaned back from his bench, his arm cocked to hurl some piece of trash at the girl, Tannhauser grabbed him by the nape and bounced his face on the tabletop with such an excess of force that the other end of the trestle leapt in the air and spilled a shower of beer across the seated.

"Back to your ale, you pigs," he roared.

To his gratification, the din collapsed into silence. The girl stopped in mid-spin and looked at him without a trace of giddiness. As far as he could tell in the murky light she had one brown eye and one gray, a sure sign of an unbalanced temperament. Since the eyes were perfectly matched in the spirit with which each shone, and this in spite of the cruelty to which she'd been subjected, he was intrigued. If her face was somewhat lopsided and she was far too thin and her hair looked as if she'd cut it herself, without the aid of a mirror, he couldn't help wondering what it would be like to make love to her. The dress didn't give much away, but an educated guess suggested magnificent breasts. To his surprise, he discovered a pleasant and rapid stiffening within his leather breeches.

"Tannhauser," said the girl, in a voice that, to his ear, rang with music. Her eyes were fixed on his chest rather than his face, but she was entitled to be nervy.

"At your service, signorina," he replied with a flourish and a bow.

Her eyes flickered past him and he turned as Ox Neck regained sufficient of his wits to rise unsteadily from his bench and clench raised fists. Before his dazed gaze could locate his foe, Bors fell upon him from behind with grim delight. The girl seemed unperturbed by the brutal events that ensued, as if violent spectacles, in tawdry settings, were not beyond her experience.

"Do you speak French?" she asked, in that language.

Tannhauser coughed and spread his shoulders. "But of course," he
replied in the same. With what he considered admirable fluency, he asked the girl her name.

"Amparo," she replied.

Lovely, thought Tannhauser. He indicated the sanctuary of his alcove, with no little pride in its exotic furnishings and decor, and said, "Made-moiselle Amparo, come, please. Let us sit."

Amparo shook her head, her eyes still on his chest, and replied with a torrent of words that Tannhauser realized he could not understand. Or rather, he recognized one word in five while the rest hurtled by and left him befuddled. He'd grown up speaking German among his family and as a boy of twelve, in the janissary school, draconian discipline had forced him to master languages and scripts of absolute foreignness. He'd subsequently learned Italian with relative ease. During his sojourn with Petrus Grubenius, whose every sentence would wander through rhetorical byways before reaching its point, he'd acquired a love of that extravagance which the Roman tongue invites from certain temperaments. Messina had also made him a passable Spaniard. But French was a cursed tongue, encrusted with irrationalities of pronunciation, and what vocabulary he had, he'd learned from soldiers.

He raised his hand to stop her.

"Please," he said. The furtive eyes of the rabble were upon him and the sound of their grumbling and farting made conversation hard. He indicated the doors. "Let's talk outside."

Amparo nodded and he held out a protective arm. She ignored it and skipped past him to the waterfront, where he joined her with the horses in the shade. He found her staring at Buraq, whom Bors had tethered up alongside her mare. Clearly, she had an eye for fine horseflesh.

"This is Buraq," said Tannhauser. He retreated into Italian and hoped that if he spoke slowly he'd be understood. "He is named for the winged horse of the Prophet Mohammed."

She turned and met his eyes directly for the first time. If she wasn't exactly pretty, she cast a powerful allure. Her face, misshapen he now saw by a violent depression of the bone beneath her left eye, glowed with an ecstasy that disturbed him. She had about her an elemental innocence at odds with the manner in which she'd handled the tavern. She said nothing.

Tannhauser tried again in his stunted French. "Please, tell me how I can help you."

He listened as Amparo spoke to him as if to a simpleminded child, and though this enabled him to gain some idea of what she said, he couldn't shake the feeling that this was exactly how she viewed him. She talked a good deal of nonsense about a naked man-it was possible he misunderstood this detail-on some kind of horse, at which she gesticulated toward Buraq, and about a dog with a fire in his mouth and other fragments of what sounded like mystic fancy. But beyond these riddles he managed to glean that she wanted him to call upon her mistress, one Madame La Penautier-a contessa, no less-at the Villa Saliba in the hills beyond the city.

"You want me to visit the Contessa La Penautier, at the Villa Saliba," he said, to confirm at least that much. The girl bobbed her head. As far as he could tell, she hadn't explained the purpose of such a conference. "Excuse me," he said, "but, why?"

Amparo looked perplexed. "It is her wish. Isn't that enough?"

Tannhauser blinked. His experience of French countesses, or for that matter their maids, if such Amparo was, was nonexistent. Perhaps they always summoned a gentleman in this manner, and perhaps all their maids were as strange as this elfin girl, but probably not. Nevertheless, it was a novelty and he was flattered. A contessa, no less. And after all, where was the harm? Tannhauser took a moment to compose his reply.

"You may tell the contessa, that it will be my pleasure to visit the Villa Saliba tomorrow, at her convenience." He smiled, pleased with his increasing mastery of the loathsome tongue.

"No," said the girl. "Today. Now."

Tannhauser cast a glance from the slender shade into the shimmering furnace of a Sicilian summer afternoon. The prospect of his perfumed bath retreated. "Now?" he said.

"I will take you to her at once," said Amparo.

There was a sudden dangerous aspect to the girl's expression, as if she might start whirling and shouting at any refusal. Due to what he now viewed as the dark years of his celibacy-for such was the rule among the janissaries-Tannhauser had only come to know the gentle sex at an advanced age. It was a fact known only to himself that he'd been twenty-six before he'd abandoned virginity. As a result, he invested women with a power and wisdom he suspected they didn't deserve. Yet he balked at the thought of appearing less than gallant before a contessa, or even her maid.

"Very well," he said. "The air, for my health, will be good."

He gave her what he hoped was a charming smile, but received none such in return. Amparo turned and skipped to her mare and sprang into the saddle with admirable litheness. She revealed a flash of muscular calf and, beneath the bodice of her dress, enough movement to confirm his hopes about the size of her breasts. She looked down on him with exaggerated patience. Tannhauser hesitated, unused to being marshaled in this way. Bors appeared, wiping blood from his knuckles, in the doorway. He looked at the girl in green, then cast a questioning glance at Tannhauser.

"I'm invited to call on a lady," Tannhauser announced. "A contessa, no less."

Bors snorted with salacious laughter.

"Enough," said Tannhauser. He strode to Buraq.

"He is your father?" asked Amparo, matter-of-factly.

Bors, whose French was in fact superior to Tannhauser's, stopped laughing.

Tannhauser took his turn. "No. But, for certain, he is old and fat enough to be so."

Amparo said, "Then why are you asking his permission?"

Tannhauser too stopped laughing, appalled that she had made this interpretation.

"You'd better go to your contessa," said Bors, "before this creature bests us both."

Tannhauser mounted. Before he could lead the way, as was his intention, the girl clattered away across the cobbles at a brisk trot.

They rode through streets rendered empty by the vicious heat and which hummed with the feces and flies that infested the gutters. At the city's northern gate they passed cartwheels fixed to poles, upon which were lashed the disemboweled corpses of blasphemers, sodomites, and thieves, their hides so sunburned, their flesh so desiccated, that even crows and maggots now shunned them. On the spikes to either side of the gate was a collection of beak-flayed heads. Leaving such eyesores behind they ascended the Hills of Neptune, where the air was surpassing sweet and falcons in great variety patrolled the Monti Peloritani.

Via discreet inquiries of the girl, he gained an impression of Lady Penautier as a tough and resourceful young widow who ran an estate in Aquitaine. Of the deceased husband, Amparo had no knowledge, for his death had predated her arrival, but the contessa had never shown signs of missing his companionship. While no accurate figure could be elicited, it seemed that the Lady was not yet thirty years old, and was possessed of considerable beauty.

For the moment he was content to note that Amparo had long fingers with almond-shaped nails and a neck as graceful as a swan's. Beneath the green silk, now stained black by sweat beneath her arms, her breasts were even larger than he'd appreciated, a fact emphasized by her build, which he now preferred to see as slender rather than thin. If she barely looked at him at all, it was no doubt due to shyness. Tannhauser learned, with relief, that Amparo was a Spaniard and had spent much of her later girlhood in Barcelona. Castilian gave him the chance to correct the impression that he was an idiot. He spoke of the port and the fine old cathedral to be found in that great city, though he'd never been there himself and had acquired this knowledge secondhand. Amparo met his enthusiasm with silence and he returned to asking questions, which she was, at least, always polite enough to answer.