The Religion (60 page)

Ludovico blinked, slowly. "Afraid for my duty."

"Your duty to spread terror? To torture and burn? You chose that over valleys and flowers? Over the beauty we shared? Over love?"

"Yes, Carla. I chose all that over love. Isn't that what duty requires? Isn't that what honor demands?"

Whatever emotion he felt, he kept it from view. Carla fought to stop her own from boiling over. "I damn your honor," she said. "As you damned mine."

"Now I would make a different choice."

"The only choice to be made tonight is mine and I tell you once again: Get out."

"Hear what I have to say."

It was all she could do not to scream in his face.

"I carried your child."

He said, "I know."

"You know?"

She felt robbed of the revelation. Her privacy was more violated by this than by his outrageous visitation. "How did you know?" she said. Before he could answer she said, "When did you find out?"

"Since I returned with the relief I've learned many things."

"From your spies and familiars." Her voice reeked with contempt. He was unmoved.

"There is little in this town I am unaware of. Little in this world. Your search for an unknown boy was hardly a secret. A boy twelve years old. Born on All Hallows' Eve in 1552. Who else's could he have been but mine?"

"He was the fruit of our love. He was all I had to value. Even though you were gone, I carried him without shame."

"From you, I would have expected nothing less."

"I watched him stolen from my arms before I could put his tender mouth to my breast. I watched my father, whom I adored, turn into a fiend. I watched my mother broken by sorrow, by disgrace, by the ruin of every dream that she held dear."

Ludovico said, "I'm sorry."

The lamp was behind him. The pale silver light from the window cast half of his face into darkness. He said, "I am told our son died a hero's death, at Saint Elmo."

Carla took a sudden, heaving breath and held on to it, afraid that if she let it go she would sob, and that he would then, in some obscure sense, have won.

"If I could quench your suffering, I'd do anything to do so," said Ludovico. "But these things of which you speak happened long ago and we are neither of us now who we were then."

She said, "Do not you-of all men-try to comfort me."

Suddenly all the heat drained from her anger. She let the breath out. She felt only a desperate need to be alone.

She said, "My son died a fool's death and I failed to stop him."

"To blame yourself for that is madness."

"He was here, at my table, and I did not recognize him." She recalled the evening with bitterness. It was less than two months ago, here in this house, yet seemed to have taken place in a different universe. And to a different woman. A trivial and foolish woman, blinded by prejudice and conceit. "I was searching for something of you and I didn't find it."

"A man's features are only half formed at such an age. And perhaps he favored you."

"I searched for my own heartbeat and I didn't hear it."

"It's difficult to see oneself in another. Perhaps in one's own flesh most of all."

"He was vulgar. He was rude." She felt a sour relief in her self-contempt. "I thought him beneath me. Beneath us. Now I bathe such boys as they die in their own filth. And I count such service God's gentlest gift to me."

Ludovico raised his hand from his side and held it out to her-not in solace but as if he wanted her to take it and let him lead her. "War has worked its bitter alchemy on each of us. Perhaps we both now see our path in life more clearly."

"Perhaps. But my path is my own."

Ludovico said, "With God's Grace, we could make another son."

Carla stared at him as if he were mad, and perhaps he was.

"If the Cross prevails, and we survive this siege, my work by then will be complete," said Ludovico. "No man has done more for Mother Church than I, or with greater purity of intention. You call me a monster. Yes."

She saw again how deeply this had cut him.

"I will not deny it, nor will I offer apology. The world is monstrous-do we not stand in Hell at this moment?-and horror must be inflicted as well as endured in order to forestall greater evils. Even so, my heart is weary of the labor and would set the burden down." He indicated the habit he wore. "As you see, I am now a Knight of Justice of the Order of Saint John. The precedent exists in their customs that would allow me to renounce my monastic vows and become a Knight of Devotion. That is, one who is no longer a full member of the Order, but entitled to spiritual consolation and certain privileges of rank."

He paused as if he intended her to draw some conclusion from this. Instinct said it would be better if she did not.

Ludovico said, "By these means, and with the blessing of certain individuals whose benevolence I may count on, I could then wed you without loss of honor."

The statement hung in a silence that his eyes expected her to fill, and Carla felt a chill of absolute fear. A chill such as she'd not felt since her father told her she would never see her babe again.

She said, "You talk to me of madness and then ask me to marry you?"

"Madness." He considered the notion and nodded. "After the battle for Saint Michel, I saw you, by chance. In the Sacred Infirmary. I glimpsed you. The work of a single moment. And I have thought of nothing else since. Nothing but you."

His voice remained steady, the same deep, even resonance. Yet Carla felt herself step backward. Her shoulder blades touched the wall.

He said, "Do you know with what self-command I had until then avoided you? Every moment since I stepped on this shore I yearned to see your face. I denied myself. I saw only to my duty. Because I had some faint inkling of the power that you might wield to re-enchant my soul. But that was not to be, and, once again, enchanted I am."

Carla realized why he would have banished her to the convent. Not for the protection of her soul, but of his own. She made no answer.

Ludovico nodded again. "The work of a single moment, and it has damned me. Just as another such glimpse, at another such moment, damned me before, on a high hill above a gold-and-turquoise sea. It was never my intention to devote my life to the Sacred Congregation. To the Inquisition. I was already a learned doctor twice over. A jurist. A theologian. I threw myself into the work of purging heresy to purge myself-of the malady of love. For I could find no other cure. How could love survive, I reasoned, in a man who would be the object of so much hatred? So much anguish. So much fear. I burned apostates and Anabaptists and unbelievers of every feather, in order to burn your memory from my brain."

Carla stifled a sob. "You blame me for your crimes?"

The look Ludovico gave her said as much, yet his answer belied it.

"Philosophical nicety bars my way to such a charge," he said. "As to crimes, both dogma and jurisprudence contradict you."

"Did you feel nothing for your victims?"

"I saved their souls," said Ludovico.

She stared at him and wondered if he believed it. Perhaps he read the question in her face, for he gave her an answer.

"And they left me something more haunting than love unfulfilled. The memory of human lives snuffed out like candle flames."

Carla wanted to turn away, but his eyes wouldn't let her go.

He said, "When one has seen so much light extinguished, the world becomes dark indeed. Yet it never turned dark enough to stop me from seeing your face."

Carla understood the stab of pity that she'd felt on first seeing him at
the door. It returned like a hot iron stuck through her heart. "God forgive you," she said.

"He does," said Ludovico. "For I've served Him well. My question is, can you forgive me?"

"For snuffing out all that light?"

"For breaking your heart."

Her heart almost broke again. "Oh, Ludovico," she said, "I forgave you the instant I knew I was carrying your child. How could I carry a child and have room for anything but love? Especially for him who'd helped create him."

He stared at her. For a moment the coal-black eyes shone wet. In their depths was the look of a man who found himself stranded in a bottomless pit. A pit whose fiendish design was his own work. And whose confines he was desperate to escape.

"I have never known another woman," he said.

"Nor I another man," she replied.

"Can we two not rekindle that amorous fire?"

Carla shook her head. "I cannot."

"Because of my work?"

"Because what passed between us is past."

Later, she would not understand why she said what came next. She wanted to be rid of him. She wanted to spare him futile heartache. She wanted to tell him the truth.

She said, "And because I love another."

The wetness cleared from Ludovico's eyes so swiftly that she wondered if she'd seen it at all. Looking at her now was a man for whom that bottomless pit was home. With that tone of disbelief that betrays an expectation to the contrary he said, "The German?"

Carla had left her instincts too far behind. She had wandered out too far onto the web. She didn't know how to get back. She went forward.

"Mattias Tannhauser," she said.

"Tannhauser is dead."

"Perhaps."

"Only the swimmers escaped Saint Elmo. The Turk put the rest to the sword."

"Even if Mattias is dead, my feelings live on." She needn't have said more, but couldn't stop. "He and I were to be married. It was my desire. And with all my heart, I desire it still."

And it was done. The work of a single moment. Ludovico's eyes turned hard as pebbles and he stared down into her, and she knew at once that something irrevocable had changed, and that she'd regret it more desperately than anything she could imagine. Under his gaze she felt herself dwindle into something fragile, like the last burning candle in a world already given over to impenetrable dark. She expected his hands to tear the gown from her body. She could feel that urge boil within him, a desire perpetually crushed now matched to a huge and voiceless fury and the hurt to match it. His self-command exerted itself. Nothing else could have restrained the demon that was panting and raging just beneath the surface of his calm.

"We will speak again," he said.

He turned and walked away to the door.

Carla's relief was tainted by the uncertainty and dread he'd leave behind him. He opened the door and stopped on the threshold and turned. She could hardly see his features in the gloom.

He said, "The men who told you I'd gone forever-who regarded you as lower than a whore? I knew them well. They were my masters. They said you'd made a charge of infamous conduct. Against me."

"They lied."

"Yes."

"But you believed them."

"I was a young priest. They were exalted dignitaries of the Church. You were a girl. With a jealous father, who had powerful friends."

He paused. Carla didn't speak. Of the tragedy that bound them, she had no more to say.

"I didn't know until tonight," he said, "that they'd given me my first lesson in the use of power. Their other lesson they made clear enough at the time. For the needs of the flesh, there are brothels and boys. The crime is to fall in love. And for that, the punishment is terrible."

The gloom of the corridor swallowed him. The door closed without a sound. And Carla was left alone with the guttering lamp, and with her memories of all she had lost, and with her fears of what she yet had left to lose.

She lay on her bed without sleeping and found no consolation in prayer. She rose and put on her dress and pinned up her hair. She wrestled the
big brown case from out of its corner and, taking the lantern, she stole as softly as she could down the stairs and tiptoed through the kitchen and out into the night.

She found the spot she needed on the rocks by Galley Creek. Because the entrance to the creek was blocked by the massive iron chain, the waterfront here was one of the few unfortified stretches of the whole perimeter. There were no guards. There was a sense of peace. She unpacked her viola da gamba and tightened the bow and tuned the strings. Her fingertips felt soft, their calluses faded. It was the first time she'd taken the instrument from its case since she'd played for Mattias, at the Villa Saliba, in another world and in a different age.

Across the water lay L'Isola, its windmills gay silhouettes against the stars. Beyond L'Isola-somewhere-lay the Turkish camp. If Mattias was still alive-if the whisper of hope in her heart was something more than a desperate illusion-perhaps he would hear her music and her anguish. And perhaps he would return. Carla took a deep breath. She shook the fatigue from her shoulders and she summoned her bruised spirit to find its voice and she began to play.

Monday, August 6, 1565

The Marsa-The Pink Pavilion-Marsamxett Harbor

Tannhauser crossed the Marsa and the spoliated slopes of Monte Sciberras wearing a snow-white turban and a scarlet caftan that made him look far more lordly than he felt. At his side was belted a dagger with a ruby pommel and a garnet sheath. His mount was a splendid chestnut mare from the personal string of Abbas bin Murad. He was on his way to find a rogue boy. As before, Orlandu had proved elusive and this was by no means Tannhauser's first foray. Today he would try his luck among the corsairs.