The Religion (95 page)

"And the boy?"

"In fine fettle," said Bors. "I think I surprised him." He grinned. "I surprised them all, the bastards. Better make haste or Ludovico may make the town and blacken your name."

Tannhauser asked, "Am I going to see you again?"

Bors shook his head. "Not this side of Perdition." He pointed up at the shadeless tree. Three fat ravens perched on the same bare branch and watched with curious motions of their heads. "They've come to accompany my spirit to the other side. But do not mourn, for I've slaked my pride and made my peace with God. The road was long and its end a sight more glorious than I deserved."

Tannhauser put a hand to the nape of Bors's neck and squeezed. He'd imagined this moment many times. The death of his most beloved friend. Now it was here, his sadness was more than he could bear and he couldn't speak. He swallowed on a plug of emotion and smiled.

"When you get back to Venice," said Bors, "and you cash in our goods and count our gold, give my share to the family of Sabato Svi. He was a damnable Jew, to be sure, and if I'm bound for Hell, he and I will toast you through Eternity, but his kin will have more use for my spoils than you will."

Bors contained a spasm from below. He wiped his mouth and raised his hand and took Tannhauser's arm. Despite the extremity of his condition, his grip was still like a vise.

"Gullu will see my carcass back to the Borgo," he said. "Will you see me buried proper?"

Tannhauser nodded. He squeezed the great ox neck again, for his tongue was still tied.

"Now kiss me, my friend, and be gone," said Bors, "for I don't enjoy lengthy farewells."

Tannhauser cradled his massive head in both hands. He kissed him on the lips.

"Until the end," said Tannhauser.

"The very end," said Bors.

Tannhauser swallowed and stood up and walked to Buraq.

"Mattias," called Bors.

Tannhauser turned. He looked into the wild gray Northern eyes.

"Stand by Lady Carla and don't be a fool," said Bors. He grinned. "You'll make the liveliest pair of nobles since Solomon and Sheba." He took a mighty breath, as if to laugh at his own wit, as was his habit, and something gave way inside him, and he didn't let the breath out again. His head fell back against the tree trunk. Thus Bors of Carlisle did die.

Tannhauser mounted Buraq. He rode on through the wind-raised dust of the defile.

The two knights and the half-naked boy left the polluted plain and rode up the trail to Corradino at a pace so slow they might have crawled it on their hands and knees. At the summit they stopped. Around them here and there lay the quitted Turkish trenches, and in them bones and improvised hovels and forsaken gear and ruptured cannon, and racks of ribs both animal and human stretched with stiffened hide and mottled skin. Spread out below was the landscape Orlandu had thought he would never see again.

Grand Harbor sparkled sapphire blue. The twinned peninsulas of L'Isola and the Borgo were as familiar as his hand, and yet seemed changed forever. The great enceinte was shattered from Saint Michel to the Kalkara Gate and moated by incalculable numbers of dead. Whole sections of either town looked stomped into the ground by a titan's rage. The shot-tattered sails of L'Isola's windmills turned no more, despite the rising sirocco. Yet from this seeming necropolis the church bells pealed without cease, and somewhere within the wrack they celebrated life and hope and the future to come.

Orlandu's throat tightened. The Moslems had been driven from their shores, and to these shores they never should have come; yet he'd witnessed their massacre in Saint Paul's Bay with an anguish scarcely less rending than that which he had felt for the men of Saint Elmo. He wondered what Tannhauser would say, and Tannhauser would say that it didn't matter, for it was done, and what mattered was the things they'd do next. Orlandu turned to study Ludovico.

The Black Knight with his mortal wound was a mystery. Ludovico of Naples. He'd never heard of him, yet he thought he'd known all the most gallant brethren of the Order. Still with them was the haunted, one-eyed youth, whom Escobar de Corro had called Anacleto. Orlandu had assumed that these men were allies of Tannhauser. Then Bors had bearded them at the defile and had almost slain them all. Ludovico now hunched forward in his saddle. He breathed in short, shallow breaths. His agony was great. He saw Orlandu watching him and raised his head.

"Are you pleased to be home, boy?" he said.

His voice was gentle. The obsidian eyes still radiated something like love.

"Yes, sir," replied Orlandu. "I'll be in your debt forever."

Ludovico managed a smile. "You have the manners and the bearing of a man. From whom did a boy like you learn such?"

"The great captain, Mattias Tannhauser," said Orlandu.

Ludovico nodded, as if he'd thought as much. "You could've wished for no better mentor."

Orlandu's confusion multiplied. "Then you do know him?"

"He and I are bound together by God's Will. As to your debt, consider it discharged already, and more than generously repaid."

Ludovico's smile became a grimace as pain lanced through his bowels and he doubled over. He made no sound and the spasm passed and he raised his head again. "I wanted to reunite you with your mother, Lady Carla, in Mdina, but the mountain would have finished me off."

He doubled forward yet again.

Questions filled Orlandu's mind. Anacleto urged his horse up and took the reins from Ludovico's slack grasp and handed them to Orlandu.

"Take him to the infirmary," said Anacleto. "Find Father Lazaro."

Orlandu nodded and Anacleto wheeled and whipped his horse back down the hill. Orlandu glanced after him. Out of the spoliated plain of the Marsa below, a horseman galloped toward them tailing dust. The horse was the color of a new gold coin and its tail was as pale as wheat. The rider's hair flowed wild and glinted a fiery bronze in the westering sun.

Orlandu said, "Tannhauser."

Ludovico saw him too. He called out to his comrade as if he'd stop him. "Anacleto!"

The effort clenched him up again. Anacleto did not heed him. Orlandu sensed the dark wrath hurtling across the barrens, and he craved nothing more than to see Tannhauser hale. But whatever riddles were here to be resolved, this brave knight needed the surgeon and he wanted to help him. He started forward with Ludovico's reins.

"Hold," ordered Ludovico.

Orlandu said, "Father Lazaro-"

"No," said Ludovico. "I am beyond the surgeon's art. But not, perhaps, beyond honor."

Ludovico took the reins back. He turned his horse around to face the
plain, and tossed his chin to indicate that Orlandu do the same. They watched Tannhauser bear down on his golden horse. Anacleto rode out to meet him with drawn sword.

"God knows All," said Ludovico. "All things that are, and all things that have been, and all things that ever there will be. Even so, Divine Election cannot be approached, and each man graves the chart of Life with his own free hand."

Ludovico looked at Orlandu, and Orlandu looked back into the fathomless eyes, and the sorrow there enshrined was so immense it encompassed, or so it seemed, all the wasted heartache there heaped on the destitute island around them.

Ludovico took a breath and continued. "The scholars call this paradox 'the Hidden Mystery' and to such questions as these, Augustine answers,
Inscrutabilia sunt judicia Dei
."

"Sir?"

"The judgments of God are inscrutable."

Ludovico turned back to the plain and so did Orlandu.

They saw Tannhauser rein the golden horse to a halt. Anacleto charged toward him. They saw Tannhauser circle his arms around about his head and saw the blue wink of the sun on the barrel of his rifle. They saw smoke and flame plume from the muzzle and Anacleto keeled backward from his saddle. Then they heard the shot and its echo from the bone-strewn scarp. They saw Tannhauser hold the barrel upright in his fist and saw him cram a flask into its bore. They saw Anacleto roll onto his belly and clamber to his knees. They saw Tannhauser drive home a ball and lay the loaded rifle on his thighs and draw his sword. He walked the golden horse forward. They saw the gleam of the sword's rise and fall, and Anacleto fell forward, and something rolled from his shoulders and came to a halt in the dust.

With a strange sense of contentment that chilled Orlandu's spine, Ludovico said, "This is where my own chart ends. Yet even in writing his end, a man may become one thing and not another. Perhaps in writing his end most of all."

When Tannhauser saw Anacleto ride down the hill, he realized he was drained of hatred and rage. He'd imagined taking the youth apart piece by
piece, prolonging his suffering, humiliating him, leaving him certain to die but not yet dead. Now he wanted only to have it done. He unlimbered his wheel lock and shot him and the rifle ball cracked loud as it breached the chest plate. He recharged the gun and wound the lock tight with the key and primed and closed the pan. He drew his sword and as he passed the kneeling villain, he cut him down without deigning to look him in the face. He scabbarded the sword, then looked up to the shoulder of the scarp and saw their silhouettes against the azure. The man and the boy. The father and his son. Tannhauser canted the rifle against his hip. He rode up the slope to kill the one in front of the other.

When he got there, he saw that there would be no contest of arms.

It wasn't the sight of the bullet hole in the belly of the monk's armor, or of the glistening mat of blood that coated Ludovico's thighs and saddle and which clung in sticky swaths to the flank of his horse. It was the expression on the monk's pallid face and the glimmer from the sockets of his eyes, a glimmer such as thrown by certain stars, so that when you look at them direct they disappear.

"I've asked Orlandu to wait for us in the Borgo," said Ludovico. "But he was reluctant to leave without greeting you."

Tannhauser looked at Orlandu. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, he felt something close to happiness flicker through his chest. He said, "You look to have put some flesh on your bones in your exile among the heathen."

"After working in Galley Creek," said Orlandu, "working for Abbas was like a
festa
."

Tannhauser smiled and Orlandu beamed. The boy's expression faded as he looked at Ludovico. It occurred to Tannhauser that the boy had no inkling of his enmity for the monk, or at least had not, until Bors had shot the latter through the gut.

Tannhauser said, "Brother Ludovico is right. Wait at the Borgo."

He threw his rifle to Orlandu and the boy caught it with both hands and swayed on the bareback horse. Tannhauser dismounted and looped his canteen around his neck and handed Buraq's reins to the boy.

"Take Buraq to the Grand Master's stables. Blanket him and walk him and see he's watered when he's cool. No feed until I get there." He pointed to the bulging pouches slung behind the saddle. "And don't let my wallets out of your sight."

"After such a day as he's had, Buraq should have his feet picked," said Orlandu. "And his eyes and nostrils wiped, for the dust and smoke were something fierce."

"Excellent," said Tannhauser. He looked at Ludovico. "The boy is a fiend for learning and hard work. When first we met he'd hardly touched a horse in his life."

Ludovico mastered a spasm and nodded his admiration.

"The boy is all you said he was and more. Brave, proud, tall."

Orlandu glowed. But Tannhauser could see that his awareness that Death was the fourth member of their circle remained keen. Tannhauser said, "Now say goodbye to your savior. And thank him."

"He's already thanked me," said Ludovico.

Tannhauser said, "Then goodbye will do."

Ludovico stripped a bloody gauntlet and held up his hand. "Come closer," he said, to Orlandu. Orlandu did so and bent his head to receive the blessing. Ludovico placed his hand on the boy's skull. The contact seemed to fill the black monk with a transcendental joy.

"
Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis
"-Ludovico raised the hand and made the cross-"
in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sancti, Amen
."

Orlandu crossed himself. Ludovico held out his hand. Orlandu was surprised, for knights never offered such courtesies to such as him. He shook it.

"Honor your mother, always," said Ludovico. "There is no wiser commandment."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," said Orlandu.

He glanced at Tannhauser. Tannhauser nodded.

"Goodbye," said Orlandu.

"Godspeed," said Ludovico. He let go of Orlandu's hand.

Tannhauser and Ludovico watched the boy's descent down the trail. They watched him through the Ruins of Bormula, and across the Grande Terre Plein, and through the Provençal Gate. Then they stood in a silence of their own, for a while, and took in the harbor, and the derelict fortresses, and the half-razed town, and the shambles of ashes and blood for which so many folk, from so many corners of the Earth, had fought and died. The bells of victory pealed. And Tannhauser remembered that it was from a spot very close to this one that he'd heard Carla play her viola da gamba in the night. And he thought of the two women playing
their music together, and of the moments of rapture and beauty they'd wrought between them, and he thought of Amparo as she swam the moonlit bay, and the wind in his hair evoked her wayward spirit passing by. For Gullu was right, and she would always be with him, and he tried again to recall the last words she'd said to him, and, again, he could not.