The Religion (52 page)

As he watched his brethren dying across the water, La Valette appeared
as serene as a portrait of Jerome. He knew that even the epic of Saint Elmo was but a prelude to the greater fight to come-for L'Isola and the Borgo. Yet this was one moment when Starkey found La Valette's composure unsettling. Almost inhuman.

Starkey said, "The Greek poets used the word
ekpyrosis
to describe their heroes. Achilles, Diomedes, Ajax. It means, 'to be consumed by fire.'"

"Our heroes are not consumed yet," said La Valette. "Listen."

Turkish horns wailed forth from Monte Sciberras, heavy as the breast of anguish in the crimson gloaming. The watchers held their breath. Then, from the embattled walls across the water came a ragged cheer. Starkey could hardly believe it.

"Was that a huzzah?" he said.

The cheer was raised again from the smoking ramparts. The voices of the doomed brethren pierced the heart of every man there standing on Sant'Angelo's lofty alure. Some burst into tears and felt no shame. As the Turks withdrew up the hill, La Valette turned to Starkey, and Starkey saw that he had been unkind, for the eyes of the old man too were filmed with tears.

La Valette said, "Even the Ancients knew not such men as these."

To advance his climactic stratagem, Tannhauser buried his last five pounds of opium, along with his Russian gold ring, under a stone in the floor of the forge. He extinguished all signs of the disturbance with ashes and straw. In the less secure hiding place of the splintered timber vaulting of the solar, he'd earlier concealed his wheel-lock rifle and its key, along with powder and ball. He took the last bottle of brandy from his knapsack and walked out into the bailey, favoring the wound in his hip. The Turkish lead was still in him, but as hundreds of horribly wounded carpeted the stones outside the chapel, he felt in no position to beard the surgeons. In any case, the untreated wound might yet prove useful to his escape.

In the middle of the open ground a bonfire blazed, wherein the knights burned everything that might be valued by the Turks. Food, lumber, furniture, tapestries, wildfire hoops, pike staves, arquebuses, even those sacred icons and paraphernalia that might be desecrated by the fiends. There was no surer sign that Saint Elmo was facing its end. The
chapel bell tolled and the flames were sucked up into the darkness. A strange sense of peace reigned over the night.

Orlandu sought him out by the bonfire's light. He was naked but for his breeches, and his scrawny body and dirty face and wide dark eyes made him look even younger than his years. Around his neck by a cord hung a cylinder sealed with oilcloth and wax. This latter Tannhauser was gratified to see. It contained a letter to Oliver Starkey, in his own hand, detailing certain observations on the state of Mustafa's forces and the number and size of his siege guns and, in anticipation of Orlandu's desire to return to Saint Elmo, a request that under no circumstance was the boy to be allowed to do so. He also asked that Starkey do what he could to ensure the comfort and safety of the women.

"I have a commission from Colonel Le Mas," announced Orlandu.

"A great honor," said Tannhauser. "Tell me more."

"I'm to deliver these dispatches to La Valette and tell him what has taken place here."

"I hope you'll include the saga of my own brave doings."

"Oh yes. You'll be mourned as much as any other hero. Probably more."

Tannhauser laughed. "Do not bury me yet, my friend. Tell La Valette that the fox plans to run with the hounds."

"What does this mean?"

"He will know." He held out his hand and Orlandu shook it. "Mind the Turkish marksmen on the shore. Swim underwater until-"

"I know how to swim."

"So you do. Bear north a quarter of a mile before you turn."

"I know the way too."

"Tell Bors and Lady Carla to endure until I see them again-and don't let them think I mean in the hereafter. Tell Amparo she is in my heart."

Orlandu blinked as his eyes filmed. He threw his arms around Tannhauser in a sudden, emotive embrace. Tannhauser suppressed a flinch as his wound was mauled. He returned the embrace with one arm.

"We'll meet again, too," he said. "Mark my words. Now, be off."

Orlandu turned and loped away across the yard and was lost to the blackness beyond the flames. Tannhauser was hugely relieved. He tracked down Le Mas. The Frenchman was monstrously afflicted by sword cuts and burns, but despite all that was still on his feet, dispensing
words of encouragement to the brethren and relaying the cannon at the breach in time for the morrow. Having already confessed his sins to Chaplain Zambrana, and taken Communion, he was able and willing to share in Tannhauser's brandy.

They sat in two splendid chairs that Tannhauser had rescued from the bonfire and he thanked Le Mas for the favor of dispatching Orlandu. He told him something of the boy's story, which Le Mas acknowledged a tale, though by no means the most unlikely that one might cull from their fellow adventurers.

"Many an account of folly's wildest escapades will die here untold," said Le Mas. "In the end, every man's life is but a tale told to him that's lived it, and to him alone. Hence are we all alone, except for God's Grace."

They drank and dwelled on what had passed. Less than four hundred defenders were still able to stand at the breach, and of those only a handful lacked serious wounds. That day alone, the bloodiest yet, two thousand Moslems had been slain, and by Le Mas's reckoning seven thousand or more lay rotting outside the walls. The Religion's total loss, when it came, would amount to fifteen hundred.

"Five for one isn't bad," he said, "considering how badly we're outgunned. We gave your heathen pause. If they had any sense they'd pack for home tomorrow."

Neither said, though both knew, that Mustafa could afford to lose seven thousand far more readily than the Religion their fifteen hundred.

"Sense is generally in short supply on this island," said Tannhauser. "I should tell you that if I can work the masquerade, I intend to join the foe in the guise of one of your Turkish prisoners of war."

Le Mas looked at him, then poured brandy down his throat, then looked at him again.

"Taking account of the fact that you are a German," he said, "you are the wiliest man I ever knew. If you were French, you'd be the equal of La Valette himself."

"Then I have your blessing."

"Godspeed," said Le Mas and handed him the bottle.

"Tell me," said Tannhauser. "How many Turkish slaves do we have left?"

Le Mas said, "I should say no more than a dozen. Why?"

Tannhauser took a swallow. "If they're liberated, they'll be mining
the walls of the Borgo within the month. Perhaps even fighting in the Turkish line."

"Very true," concurred Le Mas. "An observation that had escaped me. And it would be a pity, would it not, if one of those filthy swine were to betray your stratagem?" He looked at Tannhauser. "Perhaps more than a pity."

"A catastrophe," said Tannhauser.

"Marvelous," said Le Mas. He threw his head back and laughed. "Marvelous. God forgive me, but I do love men who have no scruples about war. After all, without them, how ever could we fight one?" He seized the bottle again, wincing at the pain the movement caused him. "Rest easy. I'll have them all put to death, after breakfast."

Tannhauser soothed his conscience with the thought that at least the condemned prisoners would have time to say their morning prayers. He soothed it further by digging out a pair of the Stones of Immortality. He showed Le Mas their marbling of gold and explained their properties, both healing and mystic, and they each washed one down with the brandy and then they sat and watched the mighty constellations wheel about the sky above. The Great Bear straddled the north. To the south, Scorpius was bright. A perfect half-moon had risen in Aquarius. Tannhauser-as was his habit whenever the bounds of augury could be stretched-read into this sequence a favorable omen. Speaking for himself, he would need it.

All about the bailey, the remnant of the garrison bedded down, each man pondering the knowledge that this would be his last night on Earth. The crackle of the bonfire died away and a balmy silence enfolded the two good friends, a silence in which they could believe themselves the last living men in the world. They linked their arms in the darkness and this was a boundless comfort to both, and Le Mas sang a Psalm of David into his beard and tears rolled down the scars on his face as he made his peace with God. After a while, the brandy and opium wrought their spell. Le Mas fell asleep. Now alone, or so it felt, and swaddled in darkness, Tannhauser gazed at the firmament and slipped into a blissful trance wrought by stars and eternity.

And in that trance he wondered just how it might be that in a Universe as beautiful as this one some room had been put aside for the likes of him.

Saturday, June 23, 1565

Saint Elmo's Fall

Tannhauser counted himself fortunate to have indulged the comfort of opium the night before. Its soothing effect lingered on and made the task of keeping his nerve seem almost plausible. This advantage was welcome, for the Turks today forwent their usual bombardment. The dragon-mouthed muzzles of the siege guns gaped from heights in silence. Saint Elmo's last battle would be settled toe-to-toe with cold steel.

Forty-odd professed knights of the Italian and three French langues, a hundred or so Spanish
tercios
, and two hundred stalwart Maltese squared up on the gore-blackened stones of the southern breach. Juan de Guaras and Captain Miranda, both too badly injured to stand, commandeered the chairs from which Tannhauser and Le Mas had been roused. They had themselves strapped into the seats. The chairs and their mutilated occupants were ferried to the top of the embankment and there they both sat, swords across their laps, and watched the Turkish army on the slopes above. There, janissaries, dervishes, Iayalars, Sipahis, and Azebs waited for the cries of their imams and the blast of the horns.

Since honor had long been banished from the field, some savage and primeval pride must have directed the final Turkish assault, for they ignored the unmanned walls, which they might have escaladed with ease, and the abandoned gatehouse, and the numerous lesser breaches through which they might now have swarmed unimpeded. Instead, the entire army, with a deafening assertion of Allah's greatness, foamed roaring down the mountainside like some river provoked to boil by the End of Days. Its only mark was the bloody gauntlet where so many of their comrades had died-and where the Christian devils even now sang hymns and jeered them on. The disparity in their numbers was almost comic. Yet the defenders would not go down without shoving the thorn a final inch through Mustafa Pasha's side. To Tannhauser's astonishment, as he watched the unhinged bloodfest from a squint in the fore of the keep, the Religion held their ground for more than an hour.

Sword and dagger, half-pike and mace. Bellows of rage and agony. Heartfelt prayers. Luigi Broglia, Lanfreducci, Guillaume de Quercy, Juan de Guaras, Aiguabella, Vigneron, all of them bathed in blood in the ferocity
that bloomed around the chairs. Tannhauser saw Le Mas's halberd carving bright arcs in the early light, and his heart went out to him. If not for the heady tranquillity bequeathed by the poppy in his gut, Tannhauser would have been hard-pressed not to join him. He ached to do so. But the die was cast once more. There would be no Glory for him today, just survival or an ignominious death. If the latter, he was at least dressed for the part.

He was naked but for his boots, already long tattered, which he'd cut down to six inches below the knee and rubbed down with ashes and charcoal. They now looked looted from a corpse. Nicodemus's golden bangle, with the inscription that now mocked him but which he was loath to abandon, he'd clasped around his ankle and bound up with rags. In the other boot he stowed the last of his Stones of Immortality. He'd caked his torso with the filth in which the fort abounded. Although he'd not the benefit of a mirror, he was confident of looking every inch a heathen slave. Le Mas, closer to the Divine than he'd ever been and with much expression of mirth, had assured him so when they bade each other farewell. Le Mas, engaging with the spirit of Tannhauser's deception, had had the Turkish prisoners penned in the stables and shot dead, rather than knifed as might have been expected. Now Tannhauser's bullet wound would further validate his pretense to be the only survivor.

Tannhauser needed just one more prop for his performance and as he studied the last-ditch stand, there it was. A half-armored figure reeled down the embankment and crashed among the rubble in a rise of dust. He rolled prone and dragged off his helm, as if he were drowning, then rose to his hands and knees and vomited blood. He crawled a few feet, back toward the battle, then slumped to his elbows. He raised his right hand to his forehead, then to his breast and his left shoulder, then collapsed on his face without moving with his sign of the cross incomplete.

Tannhauser turned to go, then heard the shrill calls of the marshaling horns and looked back. To the blood-elated cheers of the Christian remnant, the Turks were withdrawing. It was only to re-form for the last push, to be sure; but even so. Le Mas had held the breach one last time. No more than ninety men yet stood alive on the gauntlet. Most of the Spanish and Maltese were dead, the core of knights preserved by their superior armor. As they gathered in a phalanx around the chairs of Guaras and Miranda to await the end, Tannhauser ran down the stairs and into the bailey.