The Religion (72 page)

This observation was hardly what he wanted to hear. Tannhauser almost said,
I was ashamed. And I could not dare the chance that I'd shame him too
. But he'd had enough of such weighty matters. He said, "There is little in the way of sense in much of what I do. Why else would I have returned to this sorry hellhole?"

"You don't love me anymore," she said.

This charge so took him by surprise that he blurted, "Nonsense."

She cocked her head to one side and stared at him, with her air of a wild bird examining an earthbound creature far larger, more cumbersome,
and more stupid than she. Clearly his reply was inadequate. Yet be that as it may, he'd been tricked into an admission of love. She waited for him to blunder even deeper within her trap and like a fool he did so.

He said, "I've never adored a woman more entirely in all my days."

The truth with which this statement rang was enough to satisfy her for the moment. She said, "Then why won't you take me to your bed?"

Her eyes bored through him. They seemed illuminated from within. How and in what fashion he couldn't say, but it was so. Illuminated. It had been so from the start, when he saw her spinning about in the gloom of his tavern. But looking into her eyes made further thought strenuous; combined with the other contents she brought to the tub, thought was impossible. He battled to keep his hands anchored to her waist; rather, he slid them a little farther around the small of her back, a harmless enough maneuver, to be sure. His fingertips encountered the apex of the cleft between her hams. His head swam.

"Are you listening?" she said.

"Of course," he said, his mind quite blank.

"Then why?"

"Why?"

Her mouth was the color of crushed violets, a small mouth, the lips less than full, but of a wonderful symmetry, swelling at the center with a pertness that matched her nose.

"Yes, why?"

Words arrived from he knew not where. They were of paltry value and, he belatedly realized, probably best unsaid. "Sundry ailments and wounds," he mumbled. "Fierce agues, a touch of plague, fatiguing night duties. All manner of afflictions and woes . . ."

"I can cure all manner of woes."

She kissed him and he surrendered his virtue without further ado. He discovered afresh her nimble, flickering tongue. Her black hair had grown longer and fell about her neck in uncultivated curls. He slid a hand beneath her arse and guided the tip of his organ between the folds of her matrix. The first half-inch was cold, and moist only with brine, and he encountered stiff resistance which, while not without appeal, made him fear for a moment that he might do her an injury if he pressed on with excess zeal. Amparo grabbed the edge of the tub behind him and anchored her heels around his thighs and launched herself down. She cried
out with a passion that stoked his own as he gained another crucial inch of entry and paused. She hovered suspended, her limbs as taut as bowstrings, catching her breath. She opened her eyes and looked at him. He took her weight in his hands and straightened his legs, the barrel rim chafing the skin on his back as he stood upright and invaded her to her core. She cried out again, but from somewhere much deeper within, and her eyes rolled back under fluttering lids. He kissed her throat, the salt tart on his tongue, and realized he had more to give, and that it would not be unwelcome, and he grabbed her by the nape of the neck and held her tight as he shunted the last inch home. Her bones banged into his hips and he kissed her full on the mouth and he heard her yowling echo through his skull as he pierced her, long and slow, with lubricious strokes. In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire. He was deaf to the rage of the siege guns and the frenzied tintamarre of the alarum horns. He was oblivious, for once, to the foaming spate of rancor from the circle of barbarity beyond. He was aware only of Amparo clinging to his bulk, her nails clenched deep into his loins, her body at once frail and indestructible, her teeth bared in a rapture that looked like pain, his drenched hair plastered to her skin as he sucked her teats.

The ground beneath the hogshead trembled and lurched, as if some subterranean beast of mythical proportion had rammed it from below. This hardly seemed fantastic in the circumstance, nor did the stupendous percussive blast whose force drew the air from their lungs. She let go of him and lay back and gripped the iron-shod rim, half floating, splayed and convulsing, and whimpering "Yes," over and over and again, as if her only fear was that he'd stop. He suppressed his own explosive wave, gentleman that he was, and she felt this and it incited her to spasms more frantic yet. He stood stalwart and immobile while she helped herself to her fill, or at least until she arched her back and shuddered and began to slide back down into the water. It was a spectacle to behold, and fortunate he considered himself to witness it. He withdrew and she squirmed. He turned her about to face the parched garden and he entered her from behind and below. Her ardor was far from exhausted. With a sigh he felt the welcome gust of his second wind and, the proprieties duly observed, no obligation to hold back further. In the distance the bells of San Lorenzo
began to jangle, with a fury whose significance presently eluded him. Shortly thereafter, or so it seemed, he looked up above Amparo's brine-slicked hair to find the less than agreeable spectacle of Bors as he lumbered from the rear of the auberge.

To his credit, Bors's first instinct was to perform a swift and discreet about-turn, then some higher sense of duty made him turn about again.

"The bastion of Castile is down!" he called. His head bobbed cannily as he sought a peek at the fabled breasts in the hogshead. "The Turks are inside the town!"

"What would you have me do about it?" roared Tannhauser.

Bors waved a vague hand, head bobbing with increased desperation. "I supposed you'd want to know."

"Thank you, but as you can see, I'm in flagrante."

Bors retreated, thwarted by the hogshead's brim. Tannhauser held his own frustration to be rather more properly justified, but was damned if he'd let the situation best him. He withdrew and she protested loudly, and he scooped her up in his arms and hoisted her from the tub. She stood dripping and unmindful of both her nudity and the havoc sweeping the town. Tannhauser clambered out. He picked up her threadbare green dress and handed it to her and she clutched it about her with small enthusiasm. Tannhauser, with fewer concessions to decorum, loaded one arm with his dagger, breeches, and boots, and with the other escorted Amparo back inside.

"It's as well," he said, "if we conclude within easy reach of some decent weapons."

By the time Tannhauser reached the front some half hour, or maybe twice that interlude, later-and in neither fit state nor mood for anything more demanding than a nap in Amparo's arms-the siege appeared to have reached its expected denouement. The streets en route were choked with staggering fugitives and fallen wounded. That sense of mass panic that commanders fear above all other calamities crackled in the air like the prelude to some meteorological cataclysm. The victim of the huge mine, which the Mamelukes had burrowed out of solid rock and crammed with tons of powder, had been the impregnable bastion of Castile toward the eastern end of the enceinte.

The bastion was now a shapeless talus spanning the outer ditch, at the top of which flew a number of bright silk banners sporting the
surah
of Conquest, and where an array of janissary marksmen knelt or lay prone. The exploding mine had brought down with it a wide swath of the curtain wall to either side. Worse still the second, interior, wall was also massively breached and Turkish shock troops, having mopped up a desperate resistance, now spilled toward it, around and over the shoulders of the devastated bastion like lava around an outcropping of rock. Many good Christian knights had no doubt been buried in the eruption, and amid the still-smoking rubble a thin line of beleaguered brethren held the Turkish vanguard to a standstill, their armor dripping red in the morning light.

On this side of the breached wall was an apron of open ground where La Valette's engineers had cleared a section of dwellings two blocks deep to give an open field of fire. A pair of sixteen-pounders had been hauled up and even as the mules were unlimbered, their sweating crews were charging the barrels with grape. From the barricades and breastworks sealing the cross streets, arquebusiers swapped fire with the musketeers on the brow of the talus, to little effect. The air pulsated with Arabic and invocations of the Prophet and His beard. The whole arena was fogged with drifts of gun smoke. The bells of San Lorenzo tolled as if they might do some earthly good. At a forward command post La Valette, armorless and bareheaded, observed the unfolding struggle with Oliver Starkey and a band of Provençals at his side. Several squads of pikemen trotted uncertainly across the open ground toward the melee.

"Mattias!"

He found Bors priming the pan of his Damascus matchlock behind the wall of a roofless hovel. "Ready for glory, my friend, now that your appetites are slaked?"

"I missed breakfast," Tannhauser replied. "Did you think to bring me some?"

"I did not, though your portion wasn't wasted. Where's the girl?"

"I told her to find Carla and stick close by her, in case we need to improvise an exit."

"We'll see," said Bors. "Seems Mustafa has Saint Michel on its knees, again. Piyale's lot are yonder. They've got ladders and ropes up all the way to the bastion of France, but that's just to soak up our reserves. The sharp end is here."

As Bors plowed a ball into the Turks massed on the slope, Tannhauser settled beside him to bench his rifle on the wall and choose a mark. He saw a young chaplain of the Order stumble from the smoke, his arms cartwheeling and his habit filthy and torn, as if he'd recently burrowed out from the rubble of Castile. His face was bloodied and contorted with the absolute conviction that only extreme fear, and states of religious ecstasy, may confer. In his case perhaps both ingredients were at work for he stopped a hundred feet away, framed by the gaudy Moslem pageant just behind him, and raised his hands aloft to deliver a crazed jeremiad, fragments of which reached Tannhauser's ears through the din.

"Lost! We are all of us lost! God has turned His face against us! The harvest is over, the summer has ended, and we are not saved! Retreat and make your peace with Christ!"

Such claptrap coming from a priest was worth a fresh battalion of Sipahis to Piyale. The morale of the Spanish soldiery and the peasant militia had been fragile ever since their
maestro de campo
, Don Melchior De Robles, had been shot in the head on the twelfth. Sure enough the advancing pikemen stopped and wavered in confusion. They stole looks at one another, deaf to the provost sergeant's roars, and found little comfort in what they saw. They found even less in the bloody duel for the breach or in the ululating horde trampling over the corpses of their comrades just beyond. They shifted about like leaves in a wind and teetered on the verge of rout.

Tannhauser scowled and threw down on the raving chaplain and shot him square through the cross spanning his chest. The chaplain's fingers almost touched his toes as he left the ground and he vanished back into the fog from whence he'd emerged.

"Well," said Bors, "someone had to do it."

Tannhauser crammed his powder flask into the bore. The pikemen didn't continue their advance, but at least they were thinking twice about running away. Some of them jerked and fell under gunfire from the slope. The chaplain's execution provided no more than a hiatus. Someone had to seize the hour and at this most desperate pass only one man had the stature for the job. Tannhauser glanced over to the knot of armored men around La Valette, and found the Grand Master looking in his direction.

"Come on, you old dog," shouted Tannhauser. "It's time to show us what you're made of."

He didn't know if La Valette heard him, but if not the Grand Master had come to the same conclusion. La Valette grabbed a morion and a half-pike from a startled soldier nearby and, to the consternation of his myrmidons, the old man mounted the breastworks alone and strode across the bullet-scourged ground toward the broil.

"God's bread," said Bors. "He's taking them on single-handed."

The effect could not have been more dramatic if John the Baptist himself had appeared on the field. The pikemen at once formed up in order. The Provençals fought with one another to follow in his wake. As the old man broke into a shambling run, the Christian battle cries rose above the din, and the disheartened felt their blood boil, and knights and militiamen appeared from the ruins where before there'd seemed to be none, and hundreds charged pell-mell for the smoldering slopes where the foemen in their thousands grimly waited.

Bors grounded his musket and drew his sword. He looked at Tannhauser, who was winding the key of his wheel lock with every intention of sticking to the wall.

"Come now," said Bors. "The girl can't have drained all that much sap from your balls."

Tannhauser canted his rifle against the wall and donned his gauntlets. He said, "Because you'll never let me hear the last of it if you live."

They joined the rush to perdition and, as if it sprang from some poisonous wellhead whose source would never run dry, the evil bliss of combat surged once more through Tannhauser's veins. He wore a salet and half-armor, cadged from the growing stockpile, and as he ran the sweat poured down his flanks like a swarm of lice. His sword was a Running Wolf blade from Passau. He hurdled fellows groaning in their own spilled bowels. He waded into the line with cut and thrust, treading on the dying and the dead. He avoided the flailing elbows and blocked the hissing blades. He carved out a space at the foot of the talus and a figure loomed in green and he doled out a backhand below the knees, felt the woody double clunk through his wrist as the shins gave way, then stabbed the man through the gut as he slithered down the scree. Uphill assaults were damnable, but it was how the janissaries earned their daily bread. Just ignore the sweat and breathe. His arm moved, in part, of its own accord, pulling out strokes that his mind was too slow to foresee, like a player contesting tennis balls on the courts of the Pallacorda, and this was
a satisfaction most profound. There was joy in a throat gaping wide. There was something of beauty in the union of action and intent, as your sword clove a skull below the turban and vented brains and eyes in a single blow. It shouldn't have been so, but it was, and this was the world and this was the day and this was the way to write your name in the book of Life.