The Religion (23 page)

"The garden of the-" Omar's Maltese failed him. But like many denizens of Grand Harbor, like Orlandu too, his head contained fragments of a dozen tongues. The Borgo was a tower of Babel. Omar's hands undulated upward to illustrate the growth of plants, then he mimed throwing a drink down his throat and pulled a face as if the taste were bitter. "
Le jardin du physique
," he said, in French.

Orlandu nodded, for his French was fair.

Omar lapsed back into Maltese. "The house of the Italians. Yes!"

At the rear of one of the Italian auberges was a walled physic garden, where Father Lazaro, Master of the Sacred Infirmary, cultivated shrubs and herbs with medicinal powers. As well as being the greatest warriors in the world, the Hospitallers were also the greatest physicians. But what did the old man mean? Omar pointed down the alley, but there was no sign of the greyhound.

"
Dans le jardin
! The white jinni! Yes!"

Omar threw back his head and howled at the sky.

Orlandu had nothing to lose, and madmen often know things that right men do not. He headed through the panic-stricken town toward the physic garden. The North African sun was as pitiless as despair and he was grateful for the shade of the narrow streets. In those that were neither cobbled nor flagged, where the common folk lived, dust raised by the tumult flew up in clouds and clung to his hair and coated his tongue and powdered his rags. Every yard teemed with refugees seeking shelter for their families and their goats. Orlandu considered their fright with scorn, but they were peasants, naturally timid and unused to war, and it was to be expected. The knights would protect them, the knights and the other fighting men-the
soldados particulares
, the Spanish
tercios
, the Maltese militia, the dog killers like himself. He set an example by walking tall and without fear. He pressed on toward the auberge.

Each langue of the Religion had its own auberges. The younger knights and all the serjeants at arms slept in austere dormitories. The commanders and senior knights had their own homes bought with the
spoglia
, the prize money yielded by their pirate caravans. The Italians, the largest and richest langue, had several buildings, including their own hospital, on the foreshore of Galley Creek. The wall of the garden of Father Lazaro's auberge was six feet high. At the rear was a wrought-iron gate.

Orlandu peered through the gate. Sure enough, the white greyhound stood in the lee of the far wall, nibbling the slender leaves of a dark green shrub as if to salve its wounds. Orlandu's compulsion to his duty lay in his belly like a heavy rock. He could not shirk it. In entering the garden he knew he risked a flogging, or even a spell in the dungeons of Saint Anthony, yet if he asked permission he would surely be denied. It was as if the dog had sought this sanctuary for that very reason. He raised the latch and opened the gate and the hound turned and looked at him, ears cocked forward, its graceful figure perfectly still.

Orlandu closed the gate behind him.

He walked along the path between the plants. As he got closer he saw the hound's eyes for the first time. They were large and moist and black as oil of Peter. They were filled with inexpressible sadness. They pierced him to the core. At the last moment the hound fell onto its side and splayed its legs in the air toward him, as if hoping his belly would be tickled and that this invitation to play would spare his life. With a shock Orlandu saw that the dog, as he'd assumed it to be, was in fact a bitch.

Orlandu squatted on his haunches and the bitch sprang up and pressed her tapered skull and long white neck into his chest, her pink tongue extended as she panted in the heat. Orlandu put an arm around her shoulders. She was all bone and lungs and muscle, and her fur was as sleek as velvet, and he felt her beating heart throb against his hand. The knife in his fist trembled. It would be no great sin to steal back out the gate and leave her here in the shade.

"God will forgive you."

Orlandu went down on one knee and turned and in so doing he clasped the greyhound closer still. At a door in the rear of the auberge stood a monk. His hair had receded to a gray fringe around his scalp. His voice was kind and his eyes were as sad as the hound's. Orlandu recognized
Father Lazaro, for Lazaro had nursed him through a childhood fever of the chest many years ago. Few of the knights deigned to learn Maltese at all, for it was the language of "the little people," but because the peasants and townsfolk were his most frequent charges, Father Lazaro was fluent. He was not a knight of the Order but a chaplain. He walked toward Orlandu.

"You would also earn my gratitude," he said. "To my shame, this chore proved more painful than my courage allowed."

"She's yours, Father?" blurted Orlandu.

"I inherited her, because she showed no great love for the kill. Last night I sent her away so that someone else-someone like you-would bear the burden of her fate. For that I must beg your forgiveness."

Orlandu bowed his head. His heart now beat as rapidly as the hound's. He became aware of his filth-caked feet, his tattered shirt and breeches, the shredded and stinking sheepskin bound to his arm, and all the evidence that he, unlike this gentle and holy monk, was a seasoned murderer.

He said, "Father, if you please-" His throat was dry and he swallowed. "Please would you hear my confession, afterward?"

Lazaro stopped beside him and put a hand on his head. The touch caused a healing comfort to seep through his body. "You must not do this against the voice of your conscience," said Lazaro, "for that would be to disobey God, and it's better you disobey our Grand Master."

"What's her name, Father?"

Lazaro removed his hand and in so doing he seemed, to Orlandu, to seal the greyhound's doom. Lazaro said, "It's best you don't know."

"Why?"

"Because, man or animal, it's easier to destroy a victim that has no name."

"Please, Father, but whether I know her name or not, it will not be easy. I'd like to be able to remember her in my prayers."

"I call her Persephone."

Orlandu didn't understand, but he spoke the name. "Persephone."

Lazaro watched the hound lick Orlandu's throat.

He said, "It seems that she will forgive you too."

Orlandu gritted his teeth and put the point of his knife to Persephone's chest.

In emulation of the knights, he whispered, "For Christ and the Baptist."

He drove the knife home until his fist hit the prominent breastbone. Persephone let out a scream that was almost human and squirmed with alarming power beneath his arm, and Orlandu squeezed tighter and half withdrew the blade and canted the angle and drove it home again. He felt something clench and then burst around its point and in an instant all her strength melted into nothingness and the long white neck fell across his lap.

Orlandu pulled the blade free and beads of crimson spilled down the snow-white fur. He wanted to drop the knife, but couldn't litter the garden with such trash. Without wiping it, he slid it through the back of his rope belt. He began to take the carcass in both arms, to carry it away to the gut cart and thence to be burned, but Lazaro put a hand on his shoulder.

"I'll do the rest. Leave her here."

Orlandu laid the carcass on the earth beneath the shrub. He made the sign of the cross.

"Father, do dogs have souls?"

Lazaro smiled. "It's no sin to hope that they do. And since you and I must take good care of our own souls, we will go to Father Guillaume to confess together."

Although Lazaro was not a Knight of Justice, and had never, therefore, reckoned at all in the ranks of his military heroes, Orlandu was overwhelmed by this honor. He bowed, once again ashamed of his lowborn appearance.

"But first," said Lazaro, "you must let me dress those wounds before they putrefy."

Lazaro walked back toward the auberge. Orlandu hesitated to follow, unable to believe he was meant to go inside. Lazaro turned and beckoned him and Orlandu followed. The room beyond the threshold was cool and dark and smelled of pungent scents intermingled together. Lazaro scrubbed Orlandu's bites with brine and painted them with unguents and Orlandu bit his cheeks and made not a sound.

When he'd finished, Lazaro said, "You have seen the ships?"

"The ships?"

"The fleet of the Grande Turke."

Orlandu remembered the cannon shots at dawn, the consternation in
the streets, but so bedeviled had he been by catching the hound that he'd forgotten the cause of the alarm. He shook his head. "No, Father, but I would like to."

Lazaro led Orlandu up a stair to the auberge roof. From here Orlandu could see across the sandstone houses and Kalkara Bay to the gibbets on Gallows Point and the open sea beyond. The bright blue waters of the offing were obscured by a strange, multicolored carpet, which quavered like an apparition in the heat. It was enormous, its farthermost edge fringing the horizon and its eastern margin obscured by Monte San Salvatore.

As Orlandu squinted, he realized that the immense carpet was composed of warships. The sun sparkled from gilded prows and silver plaques, and the colors were of bright silk awnings and extravagant banners and billowed sail, and in a silence ominous and huge, massive banks of oars rose and fell like the beating of wings. The ships were moving south. And there were hundreds of them. Hundreds? Orlandu rubbed his eyes and looked again. The Navy of the Religion boasted seven galleys, and Orlandu had believed it the mightiest in the world.

He sensed Lazaro watching him and on an impulse encouraged by the old monk's patience, he said, "Father, is this a world of dreams?"

Lazaro considered him, and his rheumy eyes assumed a melancholy sheen.

He said, "When we enter the Kingdom of Heaven, perhaps it will seem so."

Monday, May 21, 1565

The Auberge of England

Majistral Street was empty.

The whole of the tiny city seemed to hold its breath.

Every fighting man was on the great enceinte. The womenfolk sheltered indoors from the deadening heat and whispered prayers to their icons and saints. The foreboding crept like mist into the Auberge of England and heightened Carla's frustration. Idleness galled her yet there was no pressing work to keep her occupied. Oliver Starkey's assumptions had been proved correct: she was a useless mouth. She joined Amparo in
the parched and scrubby garden. Mattias arrived at noon. He wore a fluted cuirass, a pistol, and a sword and carried in his left hand a wheel-lock rifle. Wedged beneath the same arm was a morion helmet.

"The Turk stands at the gate," he said. "The Maltese Iliad begins. I thought you might wish me luck before I join them."

Since Carla's return, the Borgo had boiled with excitation. Despair competed with jubilation. Emotions were tossed on the tides of rumor that flowed at every street corner. The Turks were heading south, then heading north. The Turks, having seen their defenses, would flee back to the Golden Horn. The Turks had already landed at Marsamxett Harbor. The Turks would conquer the island within a week. Spies were reputedly abroad. And saboteurs. And assassins sent to murder the Grand Master in his bed. Guards were mounted on the sandstone plugs that sealed the underground granaries and cisterns of water. The giant two-hundred-yard chain that barred the mouth of Galley Creek was cranked up from the sea floor by its capstan. Turkish galleys prowled the open sea. The Borgo, L'Isola, and Fort Saint Elmo were now cut off from the rest of the Christian world.

Amid such turmoil, Carla's own concerns were small indeed, yet this was the land of her birth-and in which she'd given birth-and she was elated to return. Of all the townsfolk it was the boys, whose numbers seemed unlimited, who exhibited the greatest exhilaration. They never walked while they could run. They fell silent only when a knight passed by. They mimed combat in the streets, stoked by dreams of heroic sacrifice in which their own deaths featured as the most heroic of all. Half of them were barefoot and many carried small weapons-knives, carpenter's axes, hammers, staves-that seemed quite futile to the task. Their faces were bronzed and bright with lean, hard life. Yet while all of them moved her, none of them provoked any instinct to suggest he might be her son.

The knights were solemn and undaunted for they were God's martyrs. Armored monks strode past Carla on the street as though she had no more significance than a butterfly, each occupied by thoughts of duty and his place among the saints. The Maltese menfolk had a grimmer view. Compared to the knights they were poorly armed and armored. Being ten times more numerous they had no doubt that they would die in much
greater numbers. Those with wives and children reassured them, then headed for their posts. These men fought for much more than God. Their women bore the greatest weight of all. They eased the fears of their men and kept their own to themselves. They stored food and exchanged remedies for wounds. They readied their hearts for the death and mutilation of their loved ones. Love was the fragile and hidden counterweight to overwhelming fear.

Carla found herself stranded. Her request to work in the infirmary had been denied; so had her application to work in the commissary. The latter service in particular she felt well equipped to improve, but the fact that in Aquitaine she managed a farm, a vineyard, a winepress, and twoscore tenants counted for nothing. She feared she'd be given no role beyond that which the knights had imagined: that of a vain and feeble woman to be fed and protected. Oliver Starkey had donated his own small house in Majistral Street for her use. The house was austere and masculine, with an overabundance of books. Her chamber contained a single hard bed and a writing desk. Amparo was provided with a cot in the adjoining room. The house communicated with the Auberge of England next door. Since the latter had been vacant for years, Mattias and Bors had seized possession.