The Religion (44 page)

As they passed among the reserves they inquired about Orlandu. No one knew him. He was fresh meat and no one cared. The age-old mathematics was at work: the longer you survived, the longer you were likely to survive. Under conditions of this severity, where eight-hour assault followed hard on twelve-hour bombardment, veterans were forged in two days and saw more bloodshed than most other troops during ten years' service. Those who'd been here since the start of the siege-eighteen days ago, now-and among whom many of the
tercios
were numbered, were made of a different clay altogether. They squatted in the dust, their halberds and partisans on the ground beside them, dead men every one, saying little and possessed of an unnatural, hollow-eyed tranquillity. Their
clothes were tattered and their boots cut to pieces by the rubble. Their hair and beards were clotted with filth, their faces with scabs and sores. Most sported wounds, crudely dressed, and missing fingers, and arms in slings, and burns and painful limps, which they bore with the fatalistic fortitude of injured dogs.

The knights stood grouped by langue at the head of each company: French, Auvergnoise, and Provençals. The Italians and Aragonese, they learned, were presently in the thick. The hiss of steel on whetstones mingled with the sound of
Pater nosters
. Discipline was tight. Morale seemed higher than should have been possible. Whatever weariness the soldiers felt, and it was etched on their spectral faces, the air crackled with some invisible communal force. They would have invoked the Holy Ghost to explain the phenomenon, but Tannhauser had felt it before, on the far side of the wall where Allah was claimed as its arbiter and source. Was this the difference over which these warriors were hacking one another apart? Over the name-the word-for the same essential concept of Divine Oneness? Or was there no Divine, and was this binding force the creation of men alone, men who found themselves thrown together for reasons which none could explain, men bound by merest accident: by birth, by geography, by Fate?

Tannhauser had stood on that far side and known the same tingling in the blood that he felt right now. To fight and die in any shared cause, whether for good or evil, or for any God, ancient or new, would evoke the selfsame compulsion in them all. Bors had hit the nail. The same Love. The spell was overmastering. Despite himself he found his heart yearning for the fray. His mentor Petrus Grubenius would have despaired.

You came here for the boy alone
, he reminded himself. Amparo awaited him, and her eyes, which when they looked into his saw only him. A look such as he'd never seen, except in memories so long lost they stood more in the way of a dream. Only here, amid the stench of powder smoke and bear grease and blood did he realize that he loved her. Yet did he love this stench of war even more? Was he too far fallen from whatever grace he'd been born with? And was the boy no more than a phantom of his own creation, summoned to lure him back to the gutters of blood where he belonged? And what of the contessa, whose hand he had won? Carla's heart, too, called out to his across the abyss. Two fine women and one fine war competed for his attention.

"I must be as mad as the rest," he muttered to himself.

"Mattias," growled Bors.

Tannhauser came to and looked at him.

"What's wrong, man? You're staring at the moon as if you expect to find some answer there. You won't."

"Do you think this will cost us our souls?"

"Pah. If so, we got a good price. I know you well-you consider things too deeply. Out here you should let me do the thinking. My brain's not confounded by idle musings and womanly conceits."

"Womanly?" Tannhauser took a step toward him.

"That's better. Look now, Le Mas is here. He calls us."

Tannhauser turned as Colonel Pierre Vercoyran Le Mas lumbered toward them. He limped and had a ladder of fresh stitches running across his jaw and down his neck behind his gorget. He smiled and held out both arms to clasp Tannhauser. His breastplate was thickly encased in an apron of stiffening gore.

"Didn't expect to see you here," said Le Mas. "There's surely no profit in it and I never reckoned you a suitor for martyrdom."

Bors said, "We were told the air here was conducive to good health."

Le Mas inhaled through his nose. "Truly, it is sweet. But in earnest, now."

"We've come to take a boy back to the Borgo," said Tannhauser. "On the Grand Master's orders. Orlandu Boccanera. A runaway. He may style himself Orlandu di Borgo."

"A boy of such importance must deserve a high style. I know him not, but I'll pass the word. I'll say this, if he was a boy when he arrived, he's a boy no longer. But come and look for yourselves. My Provençals and a crowd of your Spaniards are going into the line."

Le Mas hoisted a halberd, its several vicious edges freshly honed. Bors unslung his enormous German two-hander.

"Give Mattias a half-pike," said Bors, "or one of those lovely Turkwhittlers."

"There'll be arms aplenty up front," said Le Mas.

When men are gathered for a ruction it takes more than mere will to stand aside. Tannhauser submitted to events and they accompanied Le Mas to where he roused his section from their rest. Some seized the chance to empty their bowels and bladders, and they shook themselves down and shouldered their pole arms and checked one another's gear.
Tannhauser stood in line at the water butt and emptied two quart-full dippers down his throat. Then he fell in beside the colonel at the head of the column. Le Mas, despite the general din, conversed as if strolling down a country lane.

"Who's at the helm of your tavern, the Oracle? The Jew?"

"The Oracle is in worse repair than this fort. Ashes are all that's left."

"How so?"

"The Inquisition."

"Then my conscience is even heavier. I'm glad to have the chance to beg your pardon."

"For what?"

"When I blew in from Messina, I told Fra Jean-La Valette-what a bold species you were, how you'd recruited the ex-
tercios
as a favor to me, and so forth, and he took an uncommon interest. And, it must be said, that for all his piety he's a dexterous and unscrupulous mind. Next I knew you were in his chamber, when you conjured Mustafa's Greek out of thin air. So I'm to blame for you being here, if there's blame to be placed."

"It took a greater parcel of rogues than you and La Valette."

"Did the parcel include women?"

Tannhauser looked at him and Le Mas laughed. "He asked me, you see, Fra Jean, 'Is he a ladies' man?' he said. And I said, well-" He looked at him. "Well, I ask you Mattias, what would you have wanted me to say?"

He laughed again, and so did Tannhauser and if there was anything to forgive it was forgiven, and they marched on until the fractured limit of the curtain wall loomed to their right. There the din in Tannhauser's ears became a Devil's Requiem, and the entreaties to God in a dozen different tongues, the oaths and maledictions, the clang and whicker of thousands of brandished blades, the crackle of wildfire and the blast of guns mingled and whirled skyward like the clamor of fiends intoxicate. Flames brighter than day and hot enough to work brass flared up and down the line. Along the southern salient of the star-fort's western horn, a mined section of curtain wall fifty paces wide had collapsed into a craggy embankment. Across the jagged crest of this yawning breach, an immense crowd of men fought like maddened animals for possession of a heap of stones. And despite his most earnest efforts to walk a peaceful mile and ignore the call of the Beast, Tannhauser found himself, once more, on the floor of its pit.

Monday, June 11, 1565

The Gauntlet-The Bailey-The Causeway

Like a speck of migrant life in a forest primeval, Orlandu wriggled and crawled through the thicket of half-pikes and halberd shafts that filled the cramped gap between the front and second ranks of the defenders. As he picked his course along the boulder-cobbled gauntlet, which was coated, as was he, in a reeking compost of piss, vomit, entrails, shit, and spilled blood, his mind was occupied wholly by the task of finding the next squalid patch of ground upon which to advance. He had no surplus faculty with which to observe the progress of the fight, much less to care about its outcome. His head felt like the clapper of an alarum bell. His own vomit clung to his leather breastplate and chin and had already been trodden into the fetid paste underfoot. His anus strained painfully to open itself, even though he'd shat himself void of all but a watery mucus before he'd joined the fray. His body was a mass of bruises from the tattoo of boot heels, spear butts, and elbows that punished his passage. When he scrambled over the fallen or the dead, he minded them only as obstacles and not as men. If he felt terror, it was as the fish feels the sea, as an immersion so absolute that he was unaware of it. This was his third foray down the tunnel of wood and steel, and the work was getting no easier.

A finger jabbed him repeatedly in the ribs but so insensible was he by now to any such insults that the hand had to grab him by the neck and heave him up to his feet from his elbows. He found a wide, bearded face yelling down at him from beneath a dented morion, the eyes demonic in the light of the flames, and he gaped at it in stunned incomprehension. The
tercio
jabbed his finger downward and Orlandu, open-mouthed and panting in the hot and ammoniac air, turned and looked. The tub he was dragging behind him by its rope handle was empty. The
tercio
spat into it to register his disgust and yelled again. Orlandu rose to his feet and changed direction, too bedazed to feel either offense at the invective or gratitude for the respite. The
tercio
kicked him up the arse and he lurched back through the ranks and down the embankment to the rear.

All the warnings against snipers were forgotten. Like a creature only lately taught to walk on his hind legs he tottered across the bailey's shot-strewn wasteland. The empty tub bounced willy-nilly behind him. At the
door of what had been the stables, in the seaward lee of the eastern wall, he stopped and let go of the tub and slumped into a wall. His helmet, stuffed with sacking to make it fit, slid from his head and he let it lie where it fell and grabbed at the soaking sackcloth which still clung about his skull. He wrung out half a pint of sweat and scrubbed his face. His eyes stung and something infantile surged within him and his chest shuddered and he realized he was about to cry, not in sadness or fear or even relief, but as a child sobs, out of a boundless bewilderment and helplessness. Before he could give vent, some counter instinct rose equally unbidden, and hammered the child back down, and Orlandu gritted his teeth and caught his breath.

For Christ and the Baptist. For the Religion and his countrymen. For Malta. His spirit recovered. He wrapped the damp sacking around his head and replaced his helmet. He dragged the empty tub into the stables, which now served as the field commissary. The cook, Stromboli, looked up from among his bottles, barrels, and baskets and waved the knife with which he chopped the loaves.

"Where have you been?" he snapped in Italian. "The soldiers thirst."

Orlandu spat on the floor, set the empty tub down and gave it a kick. In Maltese he said, "I've been crawling in the shit, you old turd, what have you been doing?"

Stromboli, Orlandu now learned, had spent enough time in the markets dealing with the locals to understand. He lunged over and fetched Orlandu a stiff clout around the side of the head.

"Bread and wine from God. That is what I do. And without me the battle would be over."

He stabbed his knife at three other tubs which waited in a row, each filled near to the brim with hunks of bread dipped in olive oil and soaking in a marinade of red wine, salt, and revitalizing herbs. Earlier, a chaplain had blessed these supplies and sprinkled them with holy water. While it was true that these refreshments kept the fighting men on their feet, Stromboli gave no credit to Orlandu for delivering them to their mouths.

"Quickly now. And do not spill. And keep to the walls, or the food will be spoiled with your brains."

Orlandu held his tongue. He picked up the nearest tub by both handles, caught his balance, the tub bouncing into his bruise-blackened thighs, and staggered out of the door. There he set it down and shoveled
up a dripping handful of the damp red mush, as the soldiers did when he dragged it along the battle line, and crammed it into his mouth. He gulped it down, hardly chewing at all on the soft succulent crusts, and found it more delicious than anything he'd ever tasted. It was the first time he'd had the wit to eat himself and at once he felt new strength suffuse his belly and limbs. Stromboli was a bastard, but his tubs were filled with an elixir. Bread and wine from God. He reached down for another handful and the blunt edge of Stromboli's knife cracked down across his wrist.

"The food is for the soldiers, not the pigs!"

Orlandu hefted the tub and lurched off into the darkness that shrouded the bailey. The ropes cut into his fingers and his forearms burned, as then did his arms and shoulders and chest, his back, his belly, his hams and calves. The cheap leather cuirass he'd stolen from the barrel-chested Tomaso had chafed his hips and elbows to the bone. His breath scorched his throat. He thought of John the Baptist in the desert, surviving on only locusts and wild honey. He thought of Christ at the pillar. He thought of the knights in the forefront of the broil, already hours and hours in the breach and with God only knew how many hours more to go. He was weak, but he would become strong. He'd already carried this tub farther than the others. His body screamed. The ropes slipped in his blistered fingers. He would have to set it down. No. Another ten paces. At eight the rope slid from his left hand, taking his skin with it, and the tub canted over and a great wave slopped from the lip and onto the ground.