The Religion (92 page)

"Mercy and a priest for a fellow soldier," he begged.

Tannhauser stabbed him up beneath the basket of his ribs and through the liver. The man gave him a woeful look. Tannhauser unseamed him to the belt buckle and let him fall at the old hag's feet. He sheathed his sword and grabbed the hag by her knot of white hair.

"Take me to Amparo."

Her toothless mouth clamped shut. Her face incarnated that peculiar malice unique to the withered female in the winter of her days. Her eyes were tiny and quavered from side to side with blind fear. Tannhauser dragged her screaming and threw her facedown in the merging burgundy pools of Ponti's and Remigio's blood. She shrieked and slithered in the gore like a newly happened member of the Damned. She tried to regain her feet and failed and swashed back into the welter and rolled about in the waste like a panicked dog.

Tannhauser turned away and handed the pistol to Gullu Cakie.

"Bors is somewhere below. There's a turnkey on guard."

Gullu took the gun and nodded. As he circled the lobby he picked up Tasso's sword. Tannhauser grabbed the hag from the cooling swill and shoved her toward the stairs. She clambered up them like a frantic black spider, shuddering with sobs of horror and retching gobs of bile down her reeking dress, and Tannhauser heard from his conscience not a whisper of pity. At the top of the stair a lamp burned on a stand and Tannhauser took it and prodded the hag in the back. She stumbled away and stopped at a heavy door. She fumbled at her throat and produced a key on the end of a string. She turned it in the lock and pushed the door open, then fell
to her knees at his feet and threw her arms about his ankles and babbled. And he knew by then that Ludovico had lied and that he was already too late by far.

He looked down at the crone. Her face was a mask of crimson wrinkles.

He said, "Who?"

"Anacleto," she wailed.

He kicked the old crone into the room and she left a slimy trail as she crawled into a corner and chewed on her knuckles with her gums.

Tannhauser walked inside.

A lemony first light streamed through a high window and fell across the bed where Amparo lay. He set down the lamp and walked over. She was nude and cold and the fabric with which she'd been strangled was still drawn tight about her neck. He peeled the garrote away. It was silk, and the dark red of a pomegranate, and had left no mark on her throat. He realized it was Carla's dress. The dress she'd packed on his word. He threw it to the floor. He saw the bruises on Amparo's arms, days old, and he knew she'd been raped-over and again-for at least that long. These observations struck him mute and numb. He sat on the mattress and lifted her head in his hands. Her hair was still soft and smooth. Her skin was as white as a pearl. Her lips were drained of color. Her eyes were open, one brown, one gray, and each was filmed with death. He couldn't bring himself to close them. He stroked her left cheek and traced the flawed bone that had somehow revealed her strange and incomparable beauty. He touched her mouth. Of all the many thousands who had died on this scourged shore, she had been the purest in heart. She'd died alone and violate and without a defender to count on, and his numbness broke and an awesome grief overwhelmed him, and this time there was no Abbas to stay his tears. He'd failed to protect her, and worse. He'd failed in the courage to love her as she'd deserved. To love her as she'd loved him, despite that he'd not earned it. To love her as in fact he had, which was beyond his power to voice, then and now. He hadn't dared to meet such love on the square. He'd hidden from it like a cur. And he realized how mean a vision of courage he had owned, and how true and indomitable the courage of Amparo had been. He tried to recall the last thing he'd heard her say to him, and he could not, and his heart was cleaved apart inside him. Through that wound the Grace of God flowed into him. He was filled with a sorrow too enormous to contain and he groaned and
squeezed her to his chest and buried his face in her hair and grunted with pain. And he begged Jesus Christ for His Mercy and he implored Amparo's spirit to forgive him.

Thus and so did Gullu Cakie find him. Tannhauser felt the old rogue's hand on his shoulder and looked up. In the deep clefts scored in Gullu's cheeks, in the sun-creased eyes, he saw a smoky mirror of himself, for Gullu too had lost many he had loved, and though in loss all felt alone, all here had a deal of fellowship. Tannhauser lowered Amparo to the bed. Her eyes were still open. Even in death they seemed luminous with some essence that refused extinction. He closed them. He stood up.

"See," said Gullu Cakie.

He pointed to Amparo's hand. It clutched the ivory-and-silver comb that he'd bought in the bazaar. Tannhauser worked it loose. The teeth were crusted with blood.

"Jesus triumphed over Death, and so will she, for that is His promise," said Cakie. "She'll be forever with you if you so want it. But life goes on. And you have work to do."

Tannhauser's heart sank. He was sickened and weary. He'd had enough. Sorrow was no fit baggage for the killing fields. He wanted to nurture his tears. He wanted to run. To the boat at Zonra. To the Turkish ships. To a bottle and a wedge of opium. But Carla was still out there. And Orlandu. And Ludovico and his foul and rotten limbs. Tannhauser stuck the ivory comb in his own hair. He laid Amparo out straight and folded her arms across her chest. He saw once again the bruises yellow and blue on her slender arms and the bite marks profaning her breasts. The sorrow retreated to some hidden haven within, and with good reason, for something terrible rose in his chest to take its place. And this was as well, for he'd terrible things to do. He took the crumpled sheet from the bed and unfurled it and it fell across her body like a caress. And it was done and Amparo was gone.

With the onset of day, the bells of San Lorenzo broke into peals of victory.

Tannhauser crossed the room and hauled the trembling crone from her corner.

He turned to Gullu Cakie. "I'm going to find the boy, Orlandu. Will you ride with us?"

He followed Gullu Cakie down to the dungeons and he dragged the squalling crone along by her hair. Bors had been confined in a hole in the floor, and on his release had set about the turnkey with such outrageous violence that Gullu had skipped from the cell and locked the door. As they approached down the dank corridor they heard Bors bellowing, and they heard the blood-muffled whimpers of his victim. Gullu opened the door and Bors turned to face them with clawed hands. On the floor behind him sprawled the turnkey, his limbs twisted about at unnatural angles and the sockets of his eyes gouged clean. The trapdoor of an oubliette lay open.

"Bors," said Tannhauser. "Are you steady?"

Bors's eyes cleared. For a moment Tannhauser got a glimpse of something gentle, something young that predated all the violent roads he'd traveled. Then Bors, without even knowing it, banished it for good. "Steady as a rock," he said.

"Throw him in the hole and let's go."

Bors wiped his mouth and picked up the wretched turnkey like a sack. He pitched him headfirst underground and stomped him from sight. He reached for the trapdoor to close it.

"This hag was Amparo's keeper," Tannhauser said. "Amparo is dead."

Bors blinked and his viciousness was tempered by grief, for he'd considered Amparo his friend, and he too had failed to protect her. Tannhauser shoved the crone across the dungeon floor and she gibbered with fear as Bors seized her by the neck. Tannhauser pointed to the oubliette and the broken and caterwauling turnkey crammed within.

"Let the hag keep him company."

The Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin: Saturday, September 8, 1565

The Grande Terre Plein-Naxxar Ridge-Saint Paul's Bay

With their reprieve from certain doom the townsfolk had succumbed to a festive frenzy. So crowded were the churches that the
Te Deum
was sung
in the streets while chaplains celebrated Mass in the piazza and the market square. Icons of the Virgin were brandished and bells of salvation pealed. People embraced in the rubble and wept. The Hand of Saint John the Baptist was taken from the conventual sacristy and paraded for adoration. Their prayers had been answered and their stoical heroism rewarded. The Will of God had been determined. The Knights of the Holy Religion stood vindicated before eternity and the world.

Yet through this joy three riders rode whose hearts were closed to rapture.

Their mounts stepped over the shot that littered the cobbles as they threaded the abandoned barricades and wended to the Provençal Gate. Tannhauser looked up. On the bastion above he saw the launch from the gallows of the last, the unlucky, the one hundred and eleventh Moslem sacrifice of the siege. As if the stones themselves protested at this enormity a section of the breached wall moaned and crumbled with a sigh of dust into the ditch. But if anyone heard, none cared. No more would the call of the muezzin echo from the hills.

The gates stood open and they passed through and out and over the Grande Terre Plein. Thousands of forsaken corpses lay bloated and liquefying in the sun, and if the Turks had been vanquished, the blowflies in their multitudes had not, and they reveled about the black and stinking wasteland in whirling vortices of blue. Vultures hopped about the putrefaction and ravens and seagulls and crows cawed and squawked as they wheeled and swooped in their own grim ovation to victory.

Tannhauser, Bors, and Gullu Cakie rode fanned out and abreast, crossing this scourged estate like three apocalyptic horsemen who were missing only Famine from their rank. None spoke for there was nothing to say, nor words to do the job even if there had been. To the outer limit of sight in every direction was a land laid desolate by war. The collapsed galleries of the mines, some smoking still, split the flatland's surface like the evidence of some vast geological rupture. The hacked entrenchments that gutted the slopes lay vacant, as if their aim had only ever been to violate the hills. The gullies running from the heights were contaminate with gun waste and cannon swabs and mounds of human feces. To their right the broken façade of Fort Saint Michel was striped with an impasto of blood and soot and lard. Its ditch heaved and stank with a charred human humus infested with worms. As they crossed the Ruins of Bormula, across which so many charges had been launched only to be broken,
weapons and bones and fragments of rotting gear, and the fleshless skulls of horses and men, and stacks of yellowed carrion half consumed, were heaped and scattered in profusion. The horses shied as affronted vultures flapped and waddled about them, and Buraq in particular trembled with an equine horror, as if the beast's great soul could not incorporate such ugliness into its ken.

They climbed the slopes of Corradino and took in the Marsa.

The once-fertile plain was pocked with dead campfires by the thousand and mottled with poisoned wells and humming latrines. A sirocco had begun its laggardly rise from Africa, and on its desert breath smoke in numberless tendrils spiraled aloft from dumps of provender torched and abandoned by the Turk. It drifted in filthy scuds through tattered tents, flapping empty and forlorn, and wove notes that were bitter and harsh through the sweet and yellow stench of decomposition. Out by one far rim hundreds of clay-brick bread kilns stood in geometric clusters, like villages built by dwarfs who feared the sunlight. And where once the wretched hospital had sprawled across the landscape like disease, pyramids of corpses drew colonies of hunchbacked birds, and the sordid awnings thrown together from poles and canvas shifted like boneless scarecrows in the wind. And in all that bleak and godforsaken detritus, nothing human stirred except those three.

Beyond the scarred back of Monte Sciberras to the north, the white-on-scarlet banner of the Knights flew above the shell of Fort Saint Elmo. In Marsamxett Harbor, the tail of the Turkish fleet pulled out into the offing and struck north for Saint Paul's Bay. They left behind them scores of galleys in flames, for they'd neither mariners to crew them nor passengers to bear away. The harbor smoldered black as if the sea were brewed from brimstone, and as this ghost fleet burned and sank beneath the blue, huge white plumes of steam erupted skyward and shreds of fiery sail feathered the beach, and though no living man had seen such sights before, they three said naught, nor felt any wonder, for Hell held no more marvels for such as they.

They rode on and left this terra damnata behind them and Gullu Cakie led them north toward the rim of Naxxar Ridge. There they heard the sounds of battle joined: the final battle, one more needless even than the rest, and which would choke the waters of Saint Paul's Bay with its slain.