The Religion (25 page)

Bastion of Castile-Bastion of Italy-Bastion of Provence

Orlandu gazed from the high stone battlements-for hours-as a vortex of red dust bloomed above the horizon to the south and the legions of the Sultan Suleiman emerged from its coils. The Moslem horde drew up in immaculate order until they covered the ocher hills beyond the Grande Terre Plein and so glorious and brave was the spectacle that some of the knights there watching wept without shame.

Orlandu, in recognition of wounds sustained in the slaughter of the dogs, had won a coveted place on the bastion of Castile, which jutted forth from the left of the enceinte at the base of Kalkara Bay. The outer bulwark was lined with arquebusiers and the acrid smoke of their matchcords stung his eyes. Most of them were Castilians from the
tercios
of Sicily and Naples. Their corselets and gear varied, for each man managed for himself. Their uniform, such as it was, was a small red-burgundy cross patched onto their jerkins. They were grouped in bands of six, and called themselves
las camaradas
. Behind them stood the Maltese infantry with their half-pikes. They were dressed in homemade leather armor and simple casques. Interspersed among the foremost ranks, the Spanish and Portuguese knights sounded the only note of grandeur, their shining armor covered by their crimson war coats, each breast emblazoned with the
plain white cross of Crusaders. Orlandu squatted on the lid of a water butt, at the rear of these lines, and from this vantage took stock of the enemy deployment. The contrast in brilliance between the opposing armies stunned his senses.

The Grande Terre Plein was an apron of flatland, a thousand feet across, which unrolled from the ditch outside the city walls to the heights of Santa Margharita. Upon these heights the horde was now assembled. The Turks were caparisoned in more splendor than Orlandu knew existed, a dazzling array of vivid greens and blues, of radiant yellows and fierce reds, of gleaming musketry and pole arms and damascened blades, of massed white turbans and high bonnets, of fluttering pennants and gigantic standards garnished with scorpions and elephants and herons and hawks, and with crescent moons and the Star of David, and with twin-bladed swords and exotic calligraphs wondrous to behold. Even the mounts of the cavalry, drawn up in two huge squares on either flank of the summit, were chamfroned in gold and armored with polished bronze. And all this pageant was iridescent with shimmering silks and sparkled like the surface of the sea as the sun winked from a fortune in gilded ornament and jewels, as if this mighty host had journeyed to this distant field not to fight a battle but to mount a festival of wild and exorbitant splendor.

Orlandu suddenly wondered why indeed they were all here, and what had brought them so far, and why God had blessed him by placing him here to see it, and his chest filled with an excitement so intense that he could hardly breathe. If the Sultan's extravagant multitude appeared inexorable, then the immense city walls toothed by the Religion appeared impregnable, and so absolute was this contradiction that Orlandu thought that these two foes must reach some cordial agreement and go their ways. For a moment he felt fear: that all this might indeed melt away, like an unforgettable dream that ended unfinished. He didn't want the horde to turn back. A cataclysm such as this now poised before him was given to few to witness from one end of Time to the other. The faces of the knights told him so. The stones beneath his bare feet told him so. Something rooted in his gut and bone told him so. And because everyone there present beneath that burning azure sky knew that this was so too, Orlandu realized that the cataclysm was already here, and that it stood unhindered by all jurisdictions and controls, and that nothing in Heaven or on Earth could stop it now.

He turned at a sudden disturbance. Two serjeants at arms manhandled a manacled figure along the alure. The prisoner had a strange, bobbing gait and as Orlandu gained a clearer view through the staves of the pikes, he saw that it was Omar, the old
karagöz
. His mouth was jammed with a knot from a ship's rope. As Omar was dragged along the wall walk to the bastion of Italy, Orlandu lost sight of him. Then he looked beyond and saw that canted over the ditch, on the wall's foremost prominence above the Provençal Gate, a gallows had been erected. From the gallows swung a noose, etched as black as ink against the turquoise sky.

When Omar reappeared it was beneath the gallows. They stripped him naked of his rags and his bones poked like deformities through the shriveled mantle of his skin. Orlandu watched as they pushed the
karagöz
to the wall's sheer edge and looped the noose around his neck. Omar was too old and crazy to be a spy. And he never strayed far from his barrel. Orlandu looked out at the heathen massed on the hills. Their every eye seemed fixed on the bowlegged ancient, who stooped and jiggled and drooled beneath the long arm. And Orlandu understood.

The Religion was hanging Omar because he was Moslem.

And it was true, thought Orlandu.

The old
karagöz
was a Moslem.

And his world of dreams was over.

Somehow Orlandu knew that so too was his own.

Tannhauser had been honored with a station on the bastion of Provence. La Valette himself was but a few yards distant on the alure and with him stood his young page, Andreas, and the great Colonel Le Mas, and a clutch of other stern grandees. Tannhauser had never encountered a society so concerned with rank and purity of blood. In the empire of the Ottomans a slave could become a general or a vizier, if such was his quality. Admiral Piyale, whose ships even now surrounded Malta, was a Serbian foundling from Belgrade. Yet if it had to be said that for the mass of Frankish nobles knighthood had become a charade, the elite of the Religion were as lusty a fraternity of killers as ever Tannhauser had seen. They were twelfth-century barbarians with modern arms. And without doubt they were spoiling for a fight.

As the army to which he'd devoted a third of his life spread across
the heights, turbulent waves of memory rolled through his heart. The soldiers of God's Shadow on This Earth had never looked more beautiful. No other word would do. They were also terrifying, in a way he'd never been privy to before. The flawless precision with which forty thousand troops arrayed themselves across the hills was alone enough to loosen a man's entrails. The quality of their weapons was outstanding, as was, too, the quality of the men. To have transplanted all this wholesale-to a scorched rock halfway around the world-was a marvel of raw power.

He saw the
Topchu
artillery crews drag colossal serpent-mouthed culverins into place. He saw the Sipahi and Iayalars, and the Yellow Banners of the Sari Bayrak and the crimson of the Kirmizi Bayrak, and between these latter cavalry corps he saw the silk pavilion of Mustafa Pasha as it suddenly arose, shining like an orb of gold on the rugged skyline. Above Mustafa's pavilion the
Sanjak i-sherif
was unfurled, the black war banner of the Prophet, inscribed with the
Shahada
:
THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MOHAMMED IS HIS MESSENGER
. Mustafa's blood ancestor had carried that same banner into battle for the Prophet himself. This fact too filled Tannhauser with awe, for the ghost of the Prophet hovered atop that hill; and Mustafa and his legions knew it, for they felt His sacred hand on every shoulder.

Tannhauser saw pennants identifying regiments he'd once known for their deeds and temper, and alongside whom he'd fought in the wastelands around Lake Van. But among the
ortas
of janissaries he didn't see the standard of his own-the Sacred Wheel of the Fourth of the Agha Boluks. The janissaries were as close to a notion of country as Tannhauser had ever known. His feelings for their hearthstone, his loyalty, his love, had been as profound as La Valette's for his Holy Religion. In abandoning their ranks so many years ago, he'd abandoned part of his soul; yet had he not done so, he'd have lost his soul entire, for such would have been the price of the dark deed required of him. Despite that their pipes and tambours still stirred his blood and his heart, he now faced his former brothers on the field of battle. He waited with a pounding in his chest and a tightness in his throat for a sound he'd never heard but had only voiced.

The mighty Lions of Islam were about to roar.

When each of the great squares of troops, mounted and afoot, had finally taken its position in the order of battle, the haunting ululations of
the marshaling horns and the rousing melodies of the Mehterhane band abruptly ceased, and the great wheeling movements stilled, and a vast and unearthly silence fell across the field. A silence and a stillness such as that which must have reigned over the first dawn of Creation. Amid that stunned tranquillity tens of thousands of souls, Christian and Moslem, considered one another across the gulf for which they would sacrifice their lives, and the merged beat of their hearts was all that sent a ripple through the silence or the stillness of either one. A strip of dirt and a pile of stones lay between them. This dirt and these stones they would contest as a proxy for eternity.

It was a moment in which Tannhauser understood, and he was not alone, that whatever any man might accomplish on this field, this battle was just another marker on a grave-strewn road. A road stretching back seven centuries before any man here was born and which would carve its bloody furrow for centuries uncounted yet to come.

Tannhauser might have wished himself elsewhere, but he was here, and could be nowhere else, for this was his fate. The straight and the winding road at last were one. And he realized-for the first time since a cold spring morning in the glow of a mountain forge-that the Moslems were the enemies of his blood. He was a Saxon. A man of the North. Now, as he confronted the implacable men of the East, he felt his origins flow through his deepest marrow.

Bors, whose presence on the post of honor had also been contrived, turned from the Grande Turke's display and inhaled, as if of a toothsome aroma, and looked at Tannhauser.

"Can you smell it?" whispered Bors.

Tannhauser watched his gray English eyes as they creased up in a smile.

"Glory," said Bors.

Tannhauser didn't reply. Glory was more potent than opium. He feared its grip.

Bors looked along the fortress walls, then at the vast and shining panoply on the heights. "Can it be possible?" he said, with awe. "That most of these men are to die?"

Tannhauser looked at them too. Again, he gave no answer, for there was no need.

With their jewel-encrusted display the Grande Turke had struck the
first blow against the morale of the defenders. The Religion now struck back. La Valette gestured to Andreas and the page bowed and strode to the bulwark, where he delivered the Grand Master's order to a brother knight. The knight raised and lowered a sword that winked in the sun.

Tannhauser turned.

Beneath the gallows above the Provençal Gate stood the naked and trembling figure of the old puppeteer, whom Tannhauser had found himself following, step for step, from Majistral Street. A serjeant at arms stepped up and with the butt of a spear he struck the puppeteer between the shoulders. What dignity the ancient had clung on to was robbed and his legs buckled under him like weeds, and he befouled himself, and with his dying cry muffled by the knot crammed hard betwixt his gums, the old man toppled into space. The drop seemed long. Then the rope cracked like a gunshot over the plain and both armies watched the
karagöz
as he jerked and danced like a puppet in his own theater, sixty feet above the floor of the ditch below.

La Valette had decreed that a Moslem be hanged for every single day the siege continued. Tannhauser thought this a brilliant ploy, not just because its ugliness was the perfect rebuff to the splendor of the Turk but because it declared to both armies that this conflict's end would only be marked by the extinction of one or the other. As regarded the defenders, the choice of the
karagöz
as inaugural victim was also inspired. The old puppeteer was known to every islander and, indeed, was held in a certain communal affection. For most, he was the only human face that Islam had. Now he squirmed beneath the gallows' arm with the contents of bowels and bladder dripping from his gnarled toes. With this single stroke La Valette had made the whole population accomplice to a cruel and iniquitous murder. He'd rendered every heart there stony. He'd bound them together as monsters in the eyes of their foe. If this fight was to be fought at a savage and amoral extreme, every man on the Christian walls now knew it.

At the end of the rope, the old man's spasms ceased, and he rotated lifeless and obscene above the Grande Terre Plein.

Colonel Le Mas raised his sword and threw his voice across the flatlands in a roar.

"For Christ and the Baptist!"

As Le Mas's voice faded, the Christians crowding the ramparts took
up the cry. It rolled outward to left and right and from one crowded bastion to the next in a crescendo of fury, and it spilled across Galley Creek and along the walls of Fort Saint Michel, and on its way the pledge was garnished by the taunts and obscenities of the soldiery. The battle cry found its echo across the waters of Grand Harbor on the ramparts of distant Fort Saint Elmo. Then it was gone.

The Turkish horns wailed again and the culverins on the heights bucked like dragons in chains and flame spouted from their mouths and guerre fnbsp; outrance was commenced.

A score of stone cannonballs arced visibly toward the Borgo. As the missiles punched great divots in the walls of Castile and set the masonry atremble beneath their feet, a regiment of Tüfekchi janissaries charged down the hills and across the plain. Tannhauser watched as they fanned into triple firing ranks-the perfection of their geometry astounding-and their long-barreled pieces rippled with light as the muzzles swung down to the aim. The muskets issued a volley and the marksmen vanished behind a bank of smoke. They seemed to many to be out of range, but Tannhauser knew better. He ducked behind a bulwark and the hum of the balls was lost in the loud, bright bangs of those that struck the armor of the knights. La Valette's young page was shot in the throat and Tannhauser watched him fall at his master's feet. La Valette flinched not at all and motioned for the bearers to remove him.