The Religion (65 page)

Tannhauser wondered if he'd be able to reclaim Buraq-after, he supposed, seeing the women safe-and reckoned it would take light footwork, a good deal of opium, and probably some killing.

As the opening bombardment ceased, the clearing smoke and dust revealed a huge breach in the Borgo enceinte, where a forty-foot section of the curtain wall had collapsed onto the corpses in the ditch. The banners of the Sultan surged across the Grande Terre Plein and Piyale's Tartar levies, in brilliant yellow uniforms and headdress, unleashed a whickering
rain of arrows from their bows. They flung themselves at the Religion's arquebusiers. Scores were cut down on the gore-steeped clay of the approaches. Those who could hauled themselves up and stumbled on into the inferno, for such it became as wildfire and bubbling pig fat vomited into the breach from the enfilading crownworks. As Azebs freighted ladders in an attempt to escalade the post of Castile, a scarlet wedge of Sipahi foot soldiers drove forward in the Tartars' yellow wake.

On the hilltops more battalions, and yet more-as if Piyale could conjure them up from thin air-shunted over the rim to join the fray. The high white
borks
of the janissaries swayed like a field of giant lilies. Dervishes stomped in impatience and brandished glittering blades and cried out, "Woe to the Unbelievers, on account of that Day of theirs which they have been promised." And Iayalars delirious with hemp tore at their clothes and screamed out to Allah to grant them their right share of blood.

Above the foremost of the Catholic bastions, the seventy-ninth slave of the siege to grace the gallows on the Provençal Gate dangled over the catastrophe like a wingless and blue-tongued Harpy sent by the forces of darkness to observe the day.

As the Borgo fought for existence, three hundred yards to Piyale's left, and separated by the inlet of Galley Creek, Mustafa Pasha fell on Saint Michel. A red mass of Sipahis flung their scaling irons high amid a flaming pandemonium of fire hoops and pipkins. The stench of burning hair and fat reached Tannhauser's nose through the already dense miasma of the decomposing dead, from which multitudes of blowflies rose in snarling and iridescent pillars blue and green. It seemed impossible that even
gazi
could endure such demonic treatment, yet they did; and as minutes and then hours crawled by, they climbed the bodies of the roasted and the slain, and scaled the fire-blacked walls and wormed through the embrasures, and combat at close quarters erupted high above the Ruins of Bormula.

As if to sound L'Isola's death knell, Mustafa himself appeared on that broken plain at the head of his guards. Musket balls kicked dust spots from the sun-baked ground about him. He disdained them. Ostrich feathers surmounted his immense white turban and his pearl-gray courser was dressed in cloth of gold and red horsetail standards towered to his either side, as they'd towered over Temujin and Timur the Lame in
the hecatombs of yore. Alongside the Pasha's guard, a dozen
orta
of
solaks
, the janissary elite, accompanied by their Bektasi dervish fathers, drew themselves up, in bronze helms and ocher robes, and Mustafa rode among them, goading their pride, exhorting them with verses from the Prophet, courting their souls with the prospect of a palm-shaded paradise and whetting their greed with that of bonuses and pillage. He and La Valette were well matched, Tannhauser thought. Both seventy years old and each still crazed with blood. The
solaks
formed up for the charge and his throat tightened, for he felt their hearts beat. If Sipahi could mount the ramparts of Saint Michel-and they had-the Lions of Islam would take them down entire.

Then a great roar-of vengeful triumph intermingled with despair-rose from the breach in the Borgo wall and Tannhauser urged his horse back along the ridge for a better view. Piyale's shock troops had cleared the fiery breach and crowded pell-mell into the vacant ground beyond. There they met the unblemished stone of the concealed interior wall-the new second wall that Tannhauser himself had suggested and which La Valette had killed slaves by the hundreds to construct. Instead of finding themselves in the town, Piyale's invaders were trapped in a couloir of slaughter, penned up in front by the wall and crushed together from behind by the scarlet wedge of
gazi
seeking glory.

The killing floor was superbly conceived. At either end of the corridor casemates and oilettes accommodated cannon charged with grape, and these plowed the frantic press with tempests of gore. From above, arquebusiers and archers fired at will, and Maltese women in pairs poured cauldrons of boiling lard and dropped blocks of masonry, and the incendiary crews plied their baneful wares, all of them conspiring in the infinite ruin of the caterwauling mortals below.

The entrapped wheeled this way and that, like a herd of panicked cattle set about by predators, and as they finally understood that their only chance of salvation lay in rout, a convulsive migration exploded toward the breach, and sally gates creaked open in the new-wrought works, and grim squads of knights ventured forth to hack their prey to pieces with axes and swords. And as the quarry rose waist-high in bloody stacks, and the refugees on the Grande Terre Plein were shot in the back as they ran, the knights raised their weapons skyward and praised God.

The Borgo would stand. At least for today.

Tannhauser rode back to view the progress of the fight for Saint Michel. Howling columns of
solaks
were mounting the ladders and had already pitched their Star and Crescent banner alongside the Cross. The knights and the Maltese were contesting every inch, but with immediate support unlikely from the Borgo, and Mustafa's reserves effectively unlimited, the forecast for Saint Michel seemed bleak indeed. If Saint Michel fell, the Borgo would follow within a week. Mustafa would fill L'Isola with his siege train, blast the city's undefended flank from a distance of a few hundred feet, and traverse Galley Creek with his longboats while the enceinte was being stormed from the Grande Terre Plein.

Tannhauser didn't know the byways of the island well enough to make his way into the Borgo under darkness, at least not from here, nor did he know the disposition of the Turkish lines to the east. He needed one of the Religion's Maltese scouts to get him through. They knew every nook and cranny of the rugged terrain and ferried messages to and from Mdina at the Grand Master's will. As far as he knew not one of them had been caught. Mdina was four miles away. If he wanted to return to the Borgo, Mdina was where he'd have to start.

Tannhauser wheeled his horse and rode across the heights with as much haste as he dared. He climbed the flank of Corradino and swung past Abbas's tent and found Orlandu shoveling horse manure into a barrow. Orlandu abandoned his shovel as Tannhauser dismounted.

"We'll not be seeing each other for a while," Tannhauser said.

The boy was at once crestfallen but squared his narrow shoulders.

"You'll stay with the entourage of General Abbas. He's wise and fair, and will see you come to no harm. Tell him nothing of our fellowship. Tell him, if you must, what I've told him myself: that you did me a kindness when I was enslaved at Fort Saint Elmo. I was dying of thirst and you gave me a drink from a goatskin water bag. That's all. In ransoming you from the Algerian, I've repaid that boon, as Allah commands. Do you understand?"

Orlandu nodded. "A goatskin water bag."

"Remember, you're now a man, and a Maltese at that, and I know no tougher of the species-and as Saint Paul wrote, you must put boyish manners behind you. Work hard, pray with the heathen, learn their
tongue. You survived the captivity of Salih Ali; in this berth you'll live like a duke."

He took a step nearer and stooped over, hands on thighs.

"Now listen to me close, Orlandu. If Malta falls, and I've not returned, and Abbas takes ship for Old Stambouli-as sooner or later he will-you must go with him."

Orlandu blinked. "Across the sea?"

"Look on it as an education, for it will certainly be that. Give me your word, now. On the Tears of the Virgin."

"I give you my word, on the Tears of the Virgin."

"Good. As long as you're with Abbas, I'll be able to find you again, be that it takes months or even years."

This was rather harder to take, but Orlandu swallowed his fear and did not demur.

"Do you have faith in me?" pressed Tannhauser.

"That's the only thing I do not need to fake," said the boy.

At this Tannhauser almost wavered himself, but he swallowed too, and contented himself with a solemn nod of approval. He slipped the heavy gold ring from his finger and pressed it into Orlandu's palm.

"Keep this as a memento of our friendship. While you carry it, you shall not come to harm." This was a piece of nonsense, no doubt, but Orlandu looked at the ring as if it were the Grail, and Tannhauser knew it would give him heart in the trials that lay before him. "Let no one see it or you'll have to defend it with your life. Hide it up your arse."

Orlandu said, "My arse?"

"I've known men carry knives up there, and no end of contraband besides. If Abbas ever seeks to abandon you, or sell you, show him the ring, and him alone. Tell him it is my pledge-he will recognize it-and that you beg him to honor it until I return."

Orlandu nodded. "Where are you going?"

"As far as you-and Abbas-are concerned, I've gone to Tripoli."

Orlando looked to the sound of guns across the bay. He looked back at Tannhauser, who saw him hover on the verge of begging to go with him. To his credit, Orlandu kept his peace, and from this Tannhauser took confidence.

"Now embrace me," he said. "And let us bid each other Luck until we meet again."

He lifted his hands from his thighs as the boy, for in truth a boy he still was, plunged his head into Tannhauser's chest and held tight. Tann-hauser squeezed his shoulders, which for a moment felt pitifully frail in his big freckled hands. Should he take him along after all? Reason's answer was unequivocal: Orlandu was safer by far with Abbas bin Murad. Orlandu was reluctant to let go, and truth to tell he wasn't alone, but Tannhauser pushed him back and turned to his horse. He mounted. He gave the forlorn boy a salute. And then he rode away.

On the fringe of the commanders' encampment he passed a squad of musketeers without being challenged. He dropped down the western slope of Corradino onto the wide, flat apron of the Marsa and trotted south through the bazaar, where he bought half a sack of coffee to store in his wallets. He popped a handful of beans in his mouth and chewed and the bitter tang braced him. He crossed the eerie quiet of the soldiers' encampment. Almost every fighting man had been mustered for the assault and of the lowly levies who'd been left behind to renovate the latrines, none extended more than a sullen glance.

Beyond the camp proper, originally at a sanitary distance but now spreading back to meet it like leakage from a huge and pungent bog, was the Turkish field hospital. It was a primitive aggregation of tatty canvas awnings, under which lay a multitude of flux-stricken wretches. The poisoned wells had fulfilled their atrocious expectations. The burning sun and noxious miasmas from the numberless puddles of filth had done the rest. Alongside the plagued lay uncounted wounded, who swiftly succumbed to the pest. The listless, demoralized orderlies, who shuffled about the squalor with the bleak resignation of farmers in a blighted field, were outnumbered by hundreds to one. The delirious murmurs of the afflicted, their groans and prayers, their cries for water, for mercy, for deliverance, set up a chorale of desperation that harrowed Tannhauser to the gut. He covered his mouth and nostrils with the hem of his caftan and whispered a blessing on Abbas for denying him such a fate. He skirted the sea of horror with all due speed.

The outer perimeter of the sprawling camp was picketed by a dozen or so mounted lookouts patrolling in pairs. He headed toward the nearest and nodded imperiously without slowing down, counting once again, and
with the desired result, on the ostentatious splendor of his trappings to forestall delay. Once in open country and beyond their sight, he swung sharply west, set his mount to a brisk pace, and put the din of the continuing battle behind him.

De Lugny's outriders captured him on the open ground, at the foot of the rocky ascent to the city of Mdina. They formed a circle of menace about him on their slaver-toothed chargers-Lusitanos and Andalucians crossed with Swedish warmbloods for size. The knights' visors were down, their blood was up, and without their standing orders to take all prisoners in for torture they'd have been glad to hack his head off on the spot. They swapped ribald comments on his caftan, which, it seemed, they found womanly. Despite this none of them laughed, an indignity Tannhauser would have welcomed to lighten the mood. After all, the severed head of a Turk would bring them at worst a mild rebuke, and cooped up in Mdina- far from the unhinged slaughter they craved-the pickings were slim.

He was relieved then when the Chevalier De Lugny arrived with the Religion's entire complement of two hundred cavalry. Over their armor they wore red surcoats with a large white cross. The garment had looked much better on Amparo. De Lugny at once recognized him as "the spy" who had guided the raid on Gallows Point.

"I asked for your services a month ago, Captain," he said. "I was told you were dead."

"False rumors abound in such times," Tannhauser replied.

"May we know how you have spent this interlude?"

"Recovering from my wounds."