The Religion (4 page)

As they trotted down the street, past burning hovels and villagers with gazes cast down, Mattias saw the remains of the last two devils. Their decapitated
bodies soaked in enormous puddles of blood and the whited eyes of their heads stared into the mud. Their chastened comrades stood in sullen ranks under the guns of their Turkish betters. These men, Mattias would learn, were the irregulars who flocked to the Sultan's banner in search of plunder, landless failures and criminals, Walachians and Bulgars, the floating scum without discipline or skill who crave the wages of war. The execution was to demonstrate that this was now the fiefdom of the Sultan and that all that lay upon it belonged to him. Every grain of wheat, every cup of wine, every sheep, every mule, every village. Every man, woman, and child. Every drop of rain that fell. All this belonged to his August Majesty, as, now, did belong young Ibrahim.

Thus, in the year of 1540, Mattias the blacksmith's son became a
devshirme
: a Christian boy gathered in the Gathering and drafted for the Slaves of the Gate. Across many strange lands he would travel, and many strange Things he would see, before the fabled minarets of Old Stambouli rose gleaming in the sun by the Golden Horn. Because he was a killer before he was a man, he would train in the Enderun of Topkapi Saray. He would join the violent brotherhood of the janissaries. He would learn strange tongues and customs and the many arts of war. He would learn that God is but One and that Mohammed is His Prophet and would yearn to fight and die in Allah's name. For the unknown fate toward which he rode was to dedicate his life to God's Shadow on This Earth. To the Padishah of the White Sea and the Black. To the Refuge of All the People in the World. To the Sultan of Sultans and King of Kings. To the Lawgiver, the Magnificent. To the Emperor of the Ottomans, Suleiman Shah.

PART I

A World of Dreams

Sunday, May 13, 1565

Castel Sant'Angelo-The Borgo-Malta

The situation, as Starkey saw it, was thus.

The largest armada since antiquity, bearing the finest army in the modern world, had been dispatched by Suleiman Shah to conquer Malta. Turkish success would expose southern Europe to a wave of Islamic terror. Sicily would be ripe for the picking. A Moslem reconquest of Granada would not be unthinkable. Rome itself would tremble. Yet these strategic rewards be as they might, Suleiman's most passionate ambition was to exterminate the Knights of Saint John-that singular band of healers and warrior monks known to some as the Sea Knights and to others as the Hospitallers, and who in an age of Inquisition yet dared call themselves "The Religion."

The Grande Turke's army was commanded by Mustafa Pasha, who had broken the knights once before-and in a citadel immeasurably stronger than this one-at the celebrated siege of Rhodes, in 1522. Since then, Suleiman-who, despite his many achievements, placed his sacred duty to conquer the world for Islam at the forefront of his Policy-had overthrown Belgrade, Buda, Baghdad, and Tabriz. He'd crushed Hungary, Syria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Transylvania, and the Balkans. Twenty-five Venetian islands and every port in North Africa had fallen to his corsairs. His warships had smashed the Holy League at Preveza. Only winter had turned him back from the gates of Vienna. No one doubted the outcome of Suleiman's latest jihad on Malta.

Except, perhaps, a handful of the knights themselves.

Fra Oliver Starkey, Lieutenant Turcopolier of the English langue, was standing at the window of the Grand Master's office. From this prospect,
high in the south wall of Castel Sant'Angelo, he could see the complex geography of the battlefield to come. Encircled by surrounding heights, three triangular spits of land formed the boundaries of Grand Harbor, the Sea Knights' home. Sant'Angelo stood at the apex of the first peninsula and dominated the main town of the Borgo. Here were crammed the Auberges of the Knights, the Sacred Infirmary, the conventual church of San Lorenzo, the homes of the townsfolk, the main docks and warehouses, and all the bristling paraphernalia of a tiny metropolis. The Borgo was barricaded from the mainland by a huge, curving enceinte-a curtain wall studded with defensive bastions and teeming with knights and militia at their drill.

Starkey looked across Galley Creek toward the second spit of land, L'Isola, where the sails of a dozen windmills turned with a strange and incongruous tranquillity. Squares of militia wheeled in formation, the sunlight winking from their helms, and, beyond them, naked Moslem slaves chained in pairs strained to the overseer's whistle as they hauled blocks of sandstone up the counter wall of Saint Michel, the fortress that sealed L'Isola from the mainland. Once the siege commenced, the only communication between L'Isola and the Borgo would be the fragile bridge of boats across Galley Creek. To the north, half a mile across Grand Harbor at the seaward tip of the third peninsula, stood Fort Saint Elmo. This was the most isolated outpost of all, and once under siege could only be accessed by water.

The entire vista seethed with preparations. Fortification and drill; excavation and entrenchment; harvesting and salting and storage; burnishing and honing and prayer. Master serjeants roared at the pikemen and the hammers of the armorers rang. In the churches bells pealed and novenas were held and women prayed to Our Lady by day and by night. Eight out of ten of the defenders were unblooded peasants with homemade leather armor and spears. Yet in the choice between slavery or death, the proud and valiant Maltese had shown no hesitation. A mood of grim defiance hung over the town.

A movement caught Starkey's eye and he looked up. A pair of black-winged falcons plunged earthward through the turquoise sky, as if they would fall forever. Then they broke and soared in unison and sailed without visible motion for the western horizon, and in the indefinable moment that they melted into the haze, Starkey imagined them the last birds
in the world. A voice from across the spacious room behind him broke the spell of his reverie.

"He who has not known War has not known God."

Starkey had heard this unholy motto before. It never failed to disturb his conscience. Today it filled him with dread, for he feared he might soon discover that it was true. Starkey turned from the window to rejoin the conference.

Jean Parisot de La Valette, the Order's Grand Master, stood at his table of maps with the great Colonel Pierre Le Mas. Tall and austere, in a long black habit emblazoned with the Cross of Saint John, La Valette was seventy-one. Fifty years of killing on the high seas had forged his sinew and so, perhaps, he knew whereof he spoke. At twenty-eight he'd survived the blood-soaked tragedy of Rhodes, when the tattered remnant of the Order had been exiled to the waves in the last of their ships. At forty-seven he'd survived a year as a slave in the galley of Abd-ur Rahman. When others would have taken high office within the Order-and on the safety of land-La Valette had chosen decades of ceaseless piracy, his nostrils stuffed with tobacco against the stench. His brow was high and his hair and beard were now silver. His eyes had been bleached by the sun to the color of stone. His face seemed cast from bronze. To him news of the invasion was like some rejuvenating elixir in an Attic myth. He'd embraced the prospect of doom with the ardor of a lover. He was tireless. He was exuberant. He was inspired. Inspired as one whose hatred may at last be unleashed without pity or restraint. What La Valette hated was Islam and all its evil works. What he loved was God and the Religion. And in these the last of his days, God had sent the Religion the blessing of War. War at its apotheosis. War as manifestation of Divine Will. War unfettered and pure, to be fought to its smoking conclusion through every conceivable extreme of cruelty and horror.

He who has not known War has not known God?
Christ had never blessed the pursuit of arms in any fashion. But, then, there were times when Starkey was certain that La Valette was mad. Mad with the premonition of outrageous violence. Mad with the knowledge that the power of God flowed through him. Mad because who else but a madman could hold the destiny of a people in the palm of his hand and foresee the slaughter of thousands with such equanimity. Starkey crossed the room to join the two old comrades talking over the map table.

"How much longer must we wait?" said Colonel Le Mas.

"Ten days? A week? Perhaps less," replied La Valette.

"I thought we had another month."

"We were wrong."

La Valette's office reflected his austere temperament. The tapestries, portraits, and fine furnishings of his predecessors were gone. In their place, stone, wood, paper, ink, candles. A simple wooden crucifix was nailed to the wall. Colonel Pierre Le Mas had arrived that morning from Messina with the unexpected reinforcement of four hundred Spanish soldiers and thirty-two knights of the Order. He was a burly, battle-scarred salt in his late fifties. He nodded to Starkey and indicated the chart on the table.

"Only a philosopher could decipher these hieroglyphics."

The map-somewhat to Starkey's chagrin, for he'd overseen the delicate cartography himself-was densely annotated with cryptic notes and symbols of La Valette's devising. The Order of Saint John was divided into eight langues-or tongues-each according to the nationality of its members: those of France, Provence, Auvergne, Italy, Castile, Aragon, Germany, and England. La Valette traced the defensive enceinte that sealed the Borgo in a great stone curve from west to east, pointing out the bastion he'd assigned each langue.

"France," he said, and marked the far right, hard against Galley Creek. Like Le Mas, La Valette was of that most belligerent of breeds, a Gascon. "Our noble Langue of Provence is next, here on the foremost bastion."

Le Mas said, "How many are we of Provence?"

"Seventy-six knights and serjeants at arms." La Valette's finger moved westward along the chart. "On our left is the Langue of Auvergne. Then the Italians-a hundred and sixty-nine lances-then Aragon. Castile. Germany. In total five hundred and twenty-two brethren have answered the call to arms."

Le Mas furrowed his brow. The number was pitifully small.

La Valette added, "With the men you brought we have eight hundred Spanish
tercios
and twoscore gentleman adventurers. The Maltese militia number a little over five thousand."

"I hear Suleiman sends sixty thousand
gazi
to drive us into the sea."

"Including seamen, labor battalions, and supports, many more than that," replied La Valette. "The Dogs of the Prophet have pushed us back for five hundred years-from Jerusalem to Krak des Chevaliers, from
Krak to Acre, from Acre to Cyprus and Rhodes-and every mile of our retreat is marked with blood and ashes and bones. At Rhodes we chose life over death, and while to all the world it is an episode bathed in glory, to me it is a stain. This time, there will be no 'surrender with honor.' We will retreat no more. Malta is the last ditch."

Le Mas rubbed his hands. "Let me claim the post of honor." By this La Mas meant the locus of greatest danger. The post of death. He was not the first to request it, and must have known this, for he added, "You owe it to me."

To what this referred, Starkey did not know, but something passed between the two men.

"We'll talk of that later," said La Valette, "when Mustafa's intentions are better known." He pointed to the edge of the fortifications. "Here, at the Kalkara Gate, is the post of England."

Le Mas laughed. "An entire post for one man?"

The Ancient and Noble Tongue of England, once among the Order's greatest, had been destroyed by the bloated philanderer and heresiarch Henry VIII. Starkey was the only remaining Englishman in the Order of Saint John.

La Valette said, "Fra Oliver
is
the English langue. He is also my right hand. Without him, we'd be lost."

Starkey, embarrassed, changed the subject. "The men you brought with you, how do you rate their quality?"

"Well trained, well equipped, and all devoted to Christ," said Le Mas. "I squeezed two hundred volunteers out of Governor Toledo by threatening to burn his galleys. The rest were recruited on our behalf by the German."

La Valette raised one brow.

"Mattias Tannhauser," said Le Mas.

Starkey added, "He who first forewarned us of Suleiman's plans."

La Valette glanced up into space, as if to conjure a face. He nodded.

"Tannhauser brought the intelligence?" said Le Mas.

"It wasn't an act of charity," said Starkey. "Tannhauser has sold us a colossal quantity of arms and munitions with which to prosecute the war."