The Religion (28 page)

Ghisleri shook his head. He was not yet convinced.

Ludovico said, "Toledo hesitates because the loss both of Malta and of Spain's Mediterranean fleet would be a disaster too great to bear. And where the Turks are concerned, disaster has far too many precedents. Toledo will bide his time and see which way the wind blows. But if I can persuade him to send a small relief-say a thousand men?-then Toledo can claim he did his best, and La Valette's knights will cheer me to the echo, inquisitor or no."

Ghisleri weighed the possibilities. "But can our congregation muster the required inducements? Bribing the rich is expensive, which is why I'm not pontiff already. Toledo is no pauper, nor is Spanish cupidity mere legend."

"The advancements, wealth, and sacred relics within the gift of the Holy Father far exceed those of our congregation. The Vatican could provide more than enough to bribe not only Toledo but key elements within the Religion too." Ludovico leaned forward. "Let Medici pay the piper. While we call the tune."

Again Ghisleri tugged on his long white beard. "Your stratagem would appeal to Medici as much as to his successor. And you'd carry the full authority of the papal will."

"Tomorrow," said Ludovico, "I'll feign my arrival in Rome and report to Medici as if to him alone. The Pope will provide the instruments and promises I need."

"Then you'll return to Malta?"

"To Sicily and Garcia de Toledo, and thence to Malta."

"And if Malta has already fallen to the Turk?"

Ludovico didn't answer. He stood up. "Once I show my face at the Vatican, I'll be watched for the remainder of my stay. We two shall not meet again before I leave."

Ghisleri frowned. "You said two steps were needed before the Religion would take you to their bosom. What is the second?"

"I will join the knights on the ramparts and blood myself in battle with the infidel."

A different set of emotions colored Ghisleri's eyes. He reached out a hand and placed it on Ludovico's arm. "I beg you, go no further than Sicily."

Ludovico looked at him without reply.

"You're closer to me than any son could be," Ghisleri said. "And every bit as dear."

Ludovico, unaccustomed to affection, found himself moved. He did not reply.

"You're still a young man," said Ghisleri. "One day you could wear the Fisherman's Ring yourself. Indeed, that is my hope and my prayer."

Ludovico knew this. He'd envisioned every step that it would take, like a path of boulders strewn across a torrent. Yet he craved to achieve the impossible. He craved La Valette's downfall. He craved the judgment of battle. These petty cravings, he believed, were the expression of a power both fundamental and profound: the Will of God.

"Do you forbid me to go?" he asked.

Ghisleri sighed. He shook his head. "And if you die?"

Ludovico said, "I'm committed to God's keeping. Do I have your blessing?"

"As member of our holy congregation? Or as a Knight of Saint John?"

"As whatever I need to be to serve the Will of God."

Tuesday, June 5, 1565

The Waterfront-The Borgo-The Night

Night. Wind. Stars. Sea. Stones.

The days were hot and had no pity, but the nights were cool, as this
one was cool, and Amparo's green linen dress wasn't enough to keep her warm. She wrapped thin arms about her knees and shivered in the breeze. The shallow undulations of the sea were ribboned with silver and a gibbous moon lay low amid Heaven's dust. Direction meant nothing to Amparo, any more than did Time. From where she sat, tucked among the stacks of lumber on Kalkara Bay, these gentle friends-wind, sea, stars, moon, night-were all she could know and they brought her comfort. In her lap lay her shew stone in its cylinder of leather. She'd tried to read the secrets in its glass by the light of the moon but the Angels hadn't spoken. All she had seen were whorls of color. Pretty patterns but no more. Had the Angels fled from the hatred that flourished all about her? Or because Amparo was in love and no longer needed their guidance?

Tannhauser was out among the heathen, somewhere beyond the monstrous walls that closed them all inside and made her feel trapped. With neither him nor Buraq to fill the hours, the day had passed slowly. The quartermaster had scolded her for wasting water on her flowers and she'd had little else to do but watch them die. By sunset, Tannhauser had not returned. Exhausted by the waiting and the worry, she'd wandered to the waterfront to take the silence. Silence had been all but driven out of this place. Cannon shook the earth from sunrise to dusk. From the infirmary random screams pierced her spine. Men shouted or muttered prayers. Whips and whistles and curses drove the work gangs, poor wretches in chains, who in this city of endless high walls were forced to build yet more. In the auberge, Carla brooded, for she could not find her boy. Perhaps, though she had not said so, Carla was also downcast because Tannhauser had taken Amparo as his lover.

As far as the unknown boy was concerned, Amparo had few feelings at all. It was a quest that required events long dead be linked to those of a future that didn't exist, and this riddle perplexed her. A few hours either side of the present moment were as far as her imagination ever extended. Tomorrow was far away and yesterday was gone. Ambition was a mystery and her memories few. She hoped the boy would be found, for it would make Carla happy. Until Carla had appeared from the willows, like an Angel from her glass, Amparo's life had been one of enduring all things. Since then her life had been sown with wonder and beauty. Amparo loved Carla. But the search for the boy was an enterprise in which she felt she had no part.

As to Tannhauser, she loved him, with a wild and terrible passion that shook her to her blood, to her core, to her inmost heart and soul. She'd loved him since he'd told her the tale of the nightingale and the rose. The bloodred rose who'd killed the one who adored her. Tannhauser had brought her the yellow leather slippers she was wearing now from the Turkish bazaar. He'd brought her the ivory comb, chased with silver and floral arabesques, which she wore in her tangled hair. He made her howl in the night when she lay beneath him. He made her weep as he slept while she lay on his chest and feared he would die. Amparo knew herself to be unlike all other women. How or why she could not explain, but always had it been so. She thought she'd known sex. It had always been around her: in the rutting of the bulls that her father had raised; in the squalid hovels she'd shared in the course of her wanderings; in the cramped and violent streets of Barcelona; in the figure of the sweetmeats vendor who'd kicked her face in; in the farmhands who'd laughed while they held her down and who'd pissed on her when they were done. In the world she'd shared with Carla, of music and horses and peace, such things had been unseen, never spoken of, so utterly excluded that Amparo at first had found it strange. Then years had passed, and she'd forgotten them, and for her, as for Carla, sex had become a mystery left neglected and unknown. And then she'd seen Tannhauser naked. Her heart had almost stopped to witness the calligraphies and wheels and crescent moons and the red forked dagger with a dragonhead hilt, with which his arms and thighs and calves were bravely tattooed. Truly he was the man she'd seen in her vision stone. She'd shown him her own nakedness, with a wild and shameless joy, and she'd given herself to him, and he'd taken her.

Tannhauser and Carla would be married, perhaps. This fact left her unmoved and she did not dwell on it, for it was a matter for a future far away. It did not seem to her that they were in love. It did not seem to her that Carla wanted him, for she hadn't said so. Amparo had seen her flinch from his kiss in the garden of the auberge. And if Carla never spoke of such things, then what could she know of them? Her dejection must be for the boy alone, Amparo reasoned, and with a lighter heart she gave the matter no more thought.

"Hola."

She turned to the voice without alarm, even though its owner had appeared without a sound. It was the youth, rather, who seemed startled to
have come across her. His face was lean and smooth and unbearded, his features not yet fully grown; yet he was as tall, if not as broad, as many of the Maltese men. His hair was stiff with dirt and he wore a leather jerkin crudely studded with brass-head nails. His breeches were ragged and tied up with a rope and his feet were callused and bare. A butcher knife was shoved through his rope belt. A man-boy. She recognized him, from the dock when they'd first arrived. He'd been caked in crusted blood and the old puppeteer had danced him a crazy jig. She looked at him without speaking. He shuffled and regained his wits.

"You speak the French?" he said, in that tongue, and then in Spanish, "Spanish?"

She nodded and perhaps he took this to mean both for he went on to speak in a patois composed of both. "Are you hurt?" he asked, seeing the way she hugged herself.

She shook her head. He looked back and forth along the waterfront.

"This is not a good place for you," he said. "It's not safe, for a girl."

Amparo pointed up to the sky and he looked up. For a moment she thought he'd find this nonsensical, but when he looked back at her he nodded, as if her meaning couldn't be clearer.

"The stars, yes." He swelled his chest and pointed about the firmament with his finger. "The Virgin. The Great Bear. The Little Bear." He glanced at her to see if this impressed her. "But here is not safe. The soldiers. The
tercios
." He paused as if he'd suggested something indelicate. He studied her, fists on his hips as if this were his domain. He said, "You're cold."

Without waiting for an answer he turned and ran out of sight, his feet slapping on the capstones until silence fell. She wondered if Tannhauser had returned. She was about to leave for the auberge to find out when the footsteps returned and the boy reappeared with a threadbare length of fabric whose original function was obscure but which now, it seemed, served him as a blanket for he draped it over her shoulders and pulled it around her. It smelled of brine. She took up the slack and wrapped it tight.

"You're kind," she said.

He shrugged. "I saw you. With the German."

"The German?"

"The big man." He spread his chest and put a hand on the hilt of his knife and mimed a manly swagger. "The great Captain Tannhauser. He spies on the Turks for La Valette. He moves among them like a wind. He cuts their throats while they sleep."

This account of Tannhauser's activities disturbed her. She didn't believe it.

"And the other, the English, like a bull," continued the boy. "And the belle dame. You came with them on the
Couronne
, when the warships of the infidels were first seen. Yes?"

Amparo remembered the way he'd looked at Tannhauser and how the boy's eyes had met her own and how in them she'd seen the ghost of the life she'd left so far behind. She saw it again now, in his unvarnished honesty, in his poignant and desperate pride. She nodded.

"I saw you too, with the old puppeteer."

"The
karagöz
," corrected the boy. He looked sad.

Amparo had returned to the dock later that day and the old man, unprompted, had laid on a performance in his theater of dancing shadows, squawking in a fantastic mixture of tongues. It seemed to portray a rich man asking a poor man to die on his behalf, with the promise of great rewards in the blessed hereafter, but if the meaning had been less than clear the choreographed paper figures of his puppets had brought her delight. When she'd indicated that she carried no coin and couldn't pay him, the
karagöz
had fallen to his knees and kissed her feet. She hadn't seen him again since the soldiers had dragged him down the street on the day of the battle.

"Where is he now?" she asked.

"In Hell," said the boy.

"No," she said. The thought wounded her. "Hell wasn't made for such a soul."

He thought about this, and perhaps he agreed. "But for sure the
karagöz
is dead." He mimed a noose snapping about his neck and dropped his head, and she flinched. The boy grinned, as if this were what made him a man and her a mere girl. Then his eyes snapped toward something in the dark and he put a finger to his lips and pointed to the ground.

"Look," he whispered.

A long, slender lizard scuttled across the dock in the pale light and stopped a yard away to observe them with protuberant eyes. The boy dived and his hand flashed out and Amparo cried "No!" and he grabbed it by the tail. The lizard squirmed and its tail snapped off in his hand. The shorn creature scampered away into the dark. The boy squatted on his haunches beside her and showed her the scaly object.

"Gremxula," he said. "Very clever. They break so they can live. They survive."

He threw the tail away and looked at her, their faces now level.

"So," he said, "they have cast you out."

Amparo blinked at this absurdity. He gave her a rueful smile, his teeth white and uneven in his sunburned face.

"Me too. In, out. In, out. That is the game. But I am not sad. When the Turks have killed very many, the chevaliers will let me fight with them in the line and if I don't die, I'll become a big man too. That's the way forward in this life, to kill many. Tannhauser, La Valette, all of them. For killers the world is open-it is free-and I want to see it. This island is all I know. It is small. It is mean. Each day the same as the next."