The Religion (57 page)
It was Carla.
As the last of his senses slid from his grasp and the young knights let him fall, he realized that he loved her still, and an abyss as deep as eternity opened inside him. He loved her despite the years of virtue and discipline. He loved her despite the jeopardy to his duty. He loved her with as dark a desperation as that which had bewitched him once before.
Wednesday, August 1, 1565
The Borgo-The Sacred Infirmary-The Auberge of England
Beneath the light of the Milky Way the streets of the Borgo lay silent and derelict and pale, like a ghost's faded memory of a civilization ruined long ago. Midnight was near when Carla left the Sacred Infirmary and crossed the piazza. The flagstones stank from the vinegar used to cleanse them of blood and waste, and the smell increased the dizziness of her exhaustion. For the last two weeks the night had been rent by random Turkish bombardments, and she picked her way through the streets with an eye for cover. Everything-including those sleeping outdoors-was powdered with sandstone dust. Gun stones would crash without warning through the roofs of overcrowded hovels. The Sacred Infirmary had been hit several times. Cannonballs bounced down the narrow cobbled alleys like playthings in an awful game. Even at rolling speed they were capable of shattering a limb and it had taken several gruesome incidents to teach the town's children not to try to catch them.
Without religion to comfort them, bind them, and, most of all, keep them occupied, the spirit of the people and the soldiery would have broken long ago. At La Valette's command a more or less constant flow of holy rites had been maintained. Funerals and mass burials were conducted with great ceremony. Requiem Masses, Benedictions, novenas,
vigils, and public processions were a daily occurrence. Rare icons and relics were displayed for public veneration and then removed. The feast days of saints scarcely recognized, even by the pious, were announced and commemorated. A handful of baptisms and three unlikely marriages had been conducted with special joy. In these ways, and in their fortitude and courage and in their kindness to one another, the people proved themselves worthy of God's protection.
But the other tie that bound them was a fervid hatred of Moslems, whom they considered inherently murderous, treacherous, and cruel. Much conversation concerned their inhuman character. The Order's two thousand galley slaves, most of them repairing walls under Turkish gunfire, bore the brunt of this spite. The random acts of violence that they suffered went unpunished. When a line of women at the food depot had been chopped into raw meat by a Turkish cannonball, dozens of slaves had been murdered with shocking cruelty. Nicodemus, when he ventured out-and he did so more and more rarely-was treated like a man with a pestilent disease, even in church. Carla walked past the slave gangs, past their skeletal frames and suppurating sores and haunted faces, with a burning sense of shame.
"You can do nothing," Fra Lazaro told her. "War makes villains of us all."
Seventy-two days had passed since the old puppeteer had been hanged. Everyone had lost something of their sanity and their soul. Terrified and insomniac and sheltering in cellars and tunnels by night, and cowering in the debris from musket fire and arrows by day, the population lurched ever closer to despair. Some even hoped for the next Turkish attack: it would at least break the grinding, fear-soaked monotony, and maybe it would bring their trials to an end. Carla was not amongst these latter. She had not forgotten-she could never forget-the aftermath of the assault on Saint Michel.
The wounded had started to arrive when the battle was done, when the bridge of boats had been opened-at last-to the injured. Until then the casualties, who'd swollen since early morning into a parched and wretched horde, had been detained by armed guards on the far side of the creek. Fra Lazaro had sent across three of the town's Jewish doctors to do what they could and with the din of the slaughter a mere three hundred
feet distant the Jews had toiled like angels in the scorching and bloodstained chaos. Carla hadn't been alone in her desire to volunteer, but Lazaro had some notion of what was to come and refused to risk the lives of his staff.
Even Lazaro was stunned by the scale of what followed. The exodus of the wounded across the slippery, lurching planks was too harrowing to describe. The knights were favored first, an injustice accepted by all as the way of the world. Then came a torrent of panic which the provost marshals tried and failed to control. People slipped through ropes into the creek, where they drowned. Others fell into the boats and expired in tangled, suffocating piles. Others yet were trampled to death. From the Borgo end of the boat bridge the townsfolk bore the fallen on blankets and wattles to the infirmary; those with strength to do so hobbled or crawled; members of either group expired in droves along the way. By the time the evacuation was complete the streets along the route displayed a wall-to-wall mantling of russet sludge.
The Sacred Infirmary was the best equipped and staffed in the known world-the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem had made it so-and with two hundred beds it was also one of the biggest. Large-scale slaughter was itself no innovation, but the human detritus was usually left on the battlefield to die. No institution had ever attempted to handle such numbers of casualties before. To try to save them at all was an act of Madness harnessed to Faith. But try they did, and they were overwhelmed.
The walls and floors of the operating room were awash with gall and gore. Crews of Maltese women sloshed back and forth, swabbing up the crimson slime with mops soaked in vinegar. Then the mops became inadequate, and they were driven to using shovels to clear the fat, blackening clots, which multiplied under the slabs like obscene forms of life. Sweating surgeons wielded mallets to induce unconsciousness in their charges. They exhausted sheep-gut twine by the spool and called for their instruments to be resharpened time and again. Rotten teeth snapped on wooden gags, for the precious narcotic sponges quickly ran out. Arrowheads and musket balls and shards of bloody masonry-plucked and quarried from the depths of groaning flesh-skittered about the tiles underfoot. The smells of cauterization hung in a pall. Among competing yells of agony and command, chaplains knelt in habits saturate with blood and dispensed extreme unction with unseemly speed. With nauseating
regularity, tubfuls of amputated limbs were ferried to the growing heap outside. Larger still were the stacks of the dead.
Necessity voided the rules that had restricted Carla's duties. Fra Lazaro set her to strip and wash the casualties before they braved the surgeon's slab. Armor still hot to the touch had to be unbuckled and levered free of its convulsing occupants. There was clotted clothing and padding to peel from gashes and blistered skin; boots to cut away from shattered feet and shins; deformed and embedded helmets to pry from skulls. Without exception, the men stretched out on the trestles were befouled with excrement and dirt. To clean them, brine by the barrel was hauled from the harbor. And the wounded screamed. They screamed as they were stripped and they screamed as they were washed and they screamed as they were portered to the slab. Carla felt like their torturer. She ground her teeth and choked on her own dry retching. She avoided their flailing hands and rolling eyes. As she scrubbed their wounds with salt, she begged their forgiveness.
There was no component or aspect of the human form, it seemed to her, that could not be punctured, slashed, crushed, burned, or severed, nor was there limit to the medleys thereof. Pain and Fear and Chaos, robbed of the theater of battle, now bestrode the stage of the infirmary with glee. They danced all about her and played on her every sense, assaulting her vision with pallid, twisted faces and violated flesh, harrowing her brain with piercing pleas and shrieks, fouling her mouth and nostrils with ruptured bowels and leaked urine and sweat and rancid breath. Even her hands tormented her, for they conveyed to her gut and spine every spasm of agony and the waste-polluted seawater burned her abraded fingers like a bane.
Darkness fell early in the infirmary and by the flicker of lamp and candle Death was more present and Terror more palpable than ever. Now the shadows thrown onto the walls screamed too. Carla tried. She dug deep into whatever she contained of courage and worth, but it wasn't enough. The moment came when she knew she'd have to flee. With the last of her self-command she made a promise, to herself, that she wouldn't actually run. She'd drop the bloody washcloth in the bucket and slip away. No one would see her. She'd step across the bodies to the doorway, then over those splayed supine in the vestibule, then she'd reach the archway and the piazza. And then she'd run. San Lorenzo beckoned, and the shrine of Philermo, and Our Lady's all-absolving gaze. Surely in Her embrace she
would find some ease, and if not ease, at least the company of One who knew all sorrows.
She dropped the washcloth in the bucket and made her way to the door. She crossed the dusk-shadowed vestibule, where torchlight flickered on the grimacing faces of the damned. She heard her name called. Or was it a voice within? She didn't stop. The stone arch loomed above her. The light here lingered longer. She was halted by what she saw beyond the portal.
Mutilated bodies carpeted the whole piazza. The cloisters extending to her left and right writhed with countless injured. Men, women, boys of every age. Maltese soldiers, Spaniards. Civilians of either gender. Each lying supine in the puddles that shone on the flagstones. Sisters and mothers and wives knelt among their beloved, wafting at the snarls of flies and the waning heat. Black-robed chaplains shuffled back and forth, and also the physician Jews, still not welcomed in the infirmary's sacred precincts despite the many lives they'd labored to save. The bleak red radiance of the eventide, and the murmur of prayers and lamentations, lent the whole tableau the semblance of an apocalypse foretold, as if Judgment Day was come and these war-scourged penitents had dragged themselves en masse to eternity's gate to confess their sins and petition God for mercy.
Carla stood stranded between the horrors crammed within and those without. Whatever contribution she might make to their survival seemed trivial. And to what end? Those who recovered enough of their strength to stand would only be thrown back into the fire, to inflict the same monstrous crimes on other men, for surely beyond the walls the Mohammedans languished in comparably promiscuous anguish. Her breath came too quickly and her chest tightened like a fist. Her heart pounded in her breast as if it would burst from its moorings and lay her on the ground with the rest. For a moment she desired this outcome with a passion. To lay down the burden of being the only sound body in a mob of broken and maimed. To stop rolling this stone up the mountain. To be released from duty and panic and failure and care.
Something tugged at her skirts and she looked down. A clawed hand grasped the blood-sodden linen. A youth not twenty years old lay at her feet, his shoulders trembling with the strain of raising his arm. His cheeks and eyes were hollows carved out of the dusk. Moist pinpoints of fading life gazed up at her face and a black hole moved between his lips without
a sound. Her throat clenched and she tried to swallow but could not. She glimpsed purple coils, and a blue knot of flies, which bulged from a lean, ridged stomach. She clenched her eyes against a surge of tears. She turned away. She turned away from this unknown youth, who would never embrace his sweetheart, who would never again breathe the air of a bright blue morning, who in dying here in the reeking dark would rob the world of all he might have given it. She blinked. Through the blur she saw her pathway across the piazza. Through the mist of her tears it didn't seem so far. Our Lady of Philermo would forgive her, She who'd seen Her Son scourged to His end on a barren hill. The clawed hand snatched at her again and she begged him silently to release her from her pledge. She took a step toward the piazza. It wasn't so far. And what price in horror could it cost her that she'd not already paid?
She felt the hand fall away and for an instant she felt free. Then, with a crushing shame, she knew that it was not the hand that had fallen, but she. The youth had not reached out for succor, but to save her, to pull her back from the oblivion into which her soul now plunged. She turned back, desperate, dragging a sleeve across her eyes to clear her sight, and as she went down to her knees by his side, she saw that she was too late and that he was gone. The pinpoints of light had vanished from his soft brown eyes; his mouth was fixed in a silent howl; his chest, when she laid her hand upon it, was clammy and still. Even the bulging purple coils had lost their luster. Friendless and nameless and forsaken he had died, denied so much as a stranger's parting glance. Was this how Tannhauser had died too? And Orlandu, the son she'd never known and never claimed? She wouldn't believe it. She couldn't or she could not endure. She closed the brown eyes and the gaping mouth and held his cooling face in her hands and she sobbed in the scarlet twilight and felt herself unworthy even of prayer.
Hands took her shoulders from behind and raised her to her feet and pulled her face into a black-robed shoulder. Arms enfolded her, and she clung to a cross-emblazoned breast, and wept, with the bewilderment and abandon of a child. She wept as she'd not wept in a lifetime. A thousand sorrows coursed through her: for the nameless youth at her feet and all those like him; for Tannhauser and Orlandu, whether they lived yet or not; for her father whose heart she had broken and whose honor she'd stained; for the love she had known and had lost; for the love she'd never lived at all and missed more keenly than any.
She caught her breath and looked up. It was Father Lazaro, wizened, and himself sore drained, the sorrow in his own eyes no less infinite than her own; yet from the greatness of his heart he mustered a smile of boundless kindness.