The Religion (73 page)

An hour or so's hard grind passed by in the scorch of the August sun, the air alive with screaming and the drone of the
Pater noster
. Tannhauser's armor was caked in indigo mud and the weight was tiresome. The fight was a stiff one, but he and Bors had cleared their share of the talus with reasonable dispatch, and as far as he could see-which wasn't twenty feet in any direction-the Turks were falling back and the tide had turned. Then a few yards to their right and down the incline, commotion arose.

"The Grand Master is down!"

The word spread like a pox along the widely extended line and the news got worse as it did so. Within a hundred yards, by Tannhauser's reckoning, La Valette would be being buggered by Mustafa's horse. Besides the resurgent stench of incipient panic, disaster loomed because soldiers and knights rushed in crowds to protect their prince. In the general state of chaos, few in fact knew where he was, and the result was akin to a riot. If the Turks had the wit to take advantage, the tide would turn again, and likely for good. Bors was making a meal of finishing a janissary half his size. Tannhauser stabbed the Turk through the back of the neck with his blood-quenched dagger and shoved him down, then jerked his head at Bors to indicate he follow him.

They encountered a hedge of fighting as savage as any that Tannhauser had yet seen, as a mob of Gauls turned berserk to shield their warlord. The janissaries, sensing that victory itself was only inches beyond their swords, committed themselves with no lesser courage and furor. Tannhauser and Bors circumvented the melee and jostled their way to the ring of knights around La Valette.

Peering over their heads without much trouble, Tannhauser discovered the kind of squabble that only the French know how to muster, most especially in the middle of a battlefield. The exchanges were too florid and swift for Tannhauser to follow in detail, but he gathered that the
myrmidons wanted La Valette to withdraw to safety, while the old man, who seemed fairly sprightly, despite being held upright by Oliver Starkey, was having none of it. The skirt of his habit was sodden, and torn apart at the thigh, but if he looked a little pale it was more likely with rage than with blood loss, for tempers were running high enough to boil. Starkey was far too English to advance his master's cause in the face of such emotion. Gallic obstinacy looked set to triumph where Turkish valor had failed.

Tannhauser hadn't inched this far up the bloody talus to be shoved back down. With a loud clang he smacked the nearest helm with the flat of his sword. The victim dropped to his knees and Bors threw in a snigger to rub the point home. In the outraged pause that ensued, Tannhauser spoke in Italian.

"The soldiers believe their Grand Master is dead. Clear him a way to the top where they can see him and take fresh heart."

Bors added, "If you Gauls have the mettle to get up there."

Before the Provençals could hack them both apart, La Valette shoved his way forward and limped up the slope. Oliver Starkey was the first to reach his side, he too hobbled by wounds. Pride and bellicosity triumphed over pique and the French knights roared like men deranged and drove in a gore-boltered wedge for the infidel banners. So furious were the Gauls in the violence they unleashed that Tannhauser revised his opinion of them on the spot. Bors made to follow. Tannhauser held him back.

"Enough's enough," he said. "I need to move my bowels and have some food."

They trudged back through the reeking sewage of the fray, too hot and fatigued to spare the wounded a glance, and they crossed the open ground and collected their long guns. When they turned to look back, La Valette's attack had taken him and his men to the ruined bastion's summit, where the Turkish banners were thrown down amid a rabid orgy of killing.

The second rout of the day was thus avoided and the whole uneven embankment of blood-slaked debris was back by Christian hands. The eight-pointed Cross of Saint John was wafted aloft; and taunts and obscene gestures were exchanged; and God Almighty was praised for their deliverance from evil.

Throughout the afternoon the decimated slave battalions, and the mass of the town's population, toiled to fling Turkish corpses into the ditch and to erect rough breastworks along the devastated walls. Fireworks crews set up shop in sulfurous redoubts. The cannon were entrenched and resighted. The ramparts were braced and remanned. And Gullu Cakie's confederates trawled the crippled and the slain, to slit the throats of the dying and strip the Moslem bodies of their plunder.

The long day waned and the dragon-mouthed siege guns rattled again on their chains. As cannonballs and gun stones bounced back from the walls, they raised reeking spouts of filth from the putrefying pudding of dead that clogged the ditch, and the foul vapors thereby expelled kindled a yellow-green ignis fatuus, which glowed like evil in the twilight and necklaced the Borgo's throat, as if the spirits of the Moslem dead had awakened in protest and were calling on their coreligionists to rise and avenge them.

And that spectral call to arms was heeded, despite the horror and the squanderment of the day, for, shortly after sundown, the Grande Turke attacked again across the whole enceinte. The darkness blazed as bright as day, and Satan's chorus sang, and the Gods of East and West alike concealed their faces in shame as Their benighted devotees flocked back to the slaughter.

Sunday, August 19, 1565

The Post of Castile-A Fire in the Ruins

The chaos of the midnight broil transgressed all human codes and circumscriptions, as if every fool on earth had been there assembled and given leave to rave in the dark unfettered. Men hacked one another asunder in the sweltering darkness. Corrosive drifts of smoke nourished the confusion. Arquebuses crackled and cannon crashed. Flares and spouts of flame and spinning wildfire hoops lit up the tumult.

By these intermitted flashes of incandescence, Carla stuffed handfuls of coils back through the slit in the Spaniard's belly. It wouldn't prolong
his life but it spared him indecency, and at such a grievous extremity even small dignities were precious. She'd gained some practice in this maneuver, and with the entrails reseated inside him she tucked the lap of his shirt into the wound to keep them in place. If he stood up, or moved overmuch, they'd spill out again, but of this the risk was slight. He lay without movement or demur, his face yellowed and shining in the waver of the flames, his eyes no longer animate with fear but fixed on his eternal destination. A smudge of chrism gleamed on his forehead. On his lips clung some fragments of Communion bread. He was in the arms of Christ. She smiled at him and he nodded with curious contentment. She shouldered her poke and stood up and left him to die.

She found Mattias watching her, his helmet under one arm, his weight slung over one hip like a piece of statuary. His cuirass was daubed with muck and a rifle hung from his shoulder. His features were in shadow and she wondered what they might have shown her of his thoughts. He came closer, into the light. Powder had blacked his face like a sweep's and was gathered like ink in the creases around his eyes. He tossed back his filthmatted hair and sweat flew, and he craned his neck to one side to reveal a congealing gash an inch or two in length.

"I'm sore afflicted with wounds," he said. "I need your ministrations."

She gave the gash a glance. "A scratch," she said.

"A scratch?"

He feigned chagrin, with such conviction that she felt obliged to examine the gash again. He'd been close to death but the wound was superficial. His teeth appeared in a grin, and the creases around his eyes grew blacker.

"How else can I win the pleasure of your society?"

She laughed, taken by surprise, and was amazed at the sudden joy the laughter brought her. She smiled often enough, at the mutilated and doomed, but laughter was a habit unpracticed. The last time, she realized, had been on the night of his return from exile, when he'd made his adventures among the heathen sound like farce. She hadn't seen him since. In one big fist he brandished a goatskin and a scorched wicker basket.

"Water and wine from God," he said. "And some bread, pickled eggs, olives, and a sheep's cheese, perfectly aged." He jerked his chin at the field. "The dying can wait, and the dead won't mind. Come, you must take something, I insist."

He swapped his booty to the hand that cradled his helm and with his free hand took her arm and led her to a breastwork improvised from the ruins. He set down his load in the lee. He gathered chunks of burning timber from the wrack nearby and threw them together for a fire.

"Not much of a hearth," he said, "but better than none."

She watched him lay out his wares.

"I brought enough for three," he said. "Where's Amparo?"

"She's keeping Buraq company," she said. "The sight of wounds upsets her, and out here I'd fret for her safety."

"But not for your own," he said.

"The infirmary is filled twice over, as is the piazza and every house still standing and even the tunnels and cellars underground. The wounded aren't to be taken to the infirmary anymore. Fra Lazaro has decreed that we now come to them."

Mattias cast his gaze about the diabolic nightscape. Oily jets of flame gouted from the mouths of trumps along the outermost breastworks and the glare of the ocher inferno they created beyond-in which numbers unknown of Turkish souls were consumed-threw the jagged rim into sharp relief. The defenders of the Roman Faith strung out thereon lunged into the nether realm at their feet with pikes and glaives, like shadow-puppet demons on a mutinous bank of the Styx. Incendiary hoops skirred sparking into the void and the glowing barrels of muskets bucked and slammed. A hot wind keened from the deserts across the sea and sent ragged leaves of flame flying up at the stars, like pages torn from a burning book of prayer condemned and unread. And from shallow pits in the rubble men squalled like abandoned children in a dozen foreign tongues, foreign to one another and foreign to God, for He seemed unwilling to hear their cries for mercy.

"One would have thought such suffering beyond the design of men," said Mattias. He looked at her. "Yet that is our Genius."

Carla didn't reply.

He brushed the dust from a block of stone, and invited her to sit, which she did. Stifling a groan, as if every joint voiced its own bitter complaint, he sat down too. She said grace and to her surprise he joined in. They crossed themselves.

"You'll convert me yet," he said, and offered her the wineskin. His hand was scabbed and bruised. Two fingers, one swollen as a spindle,
were bound together with a length of twine. "Your pardon," he said. "I neglected to bring beakers."

She took the skin and drank. The wine was warm and sweet, and not watered as much as she was used to. Perhaps not watered at all. She handed the skin back.

"Take more," he said. "Your throat must be dry as clay, and you'll need your strength tonight."

She took another mouthful and wiped her lips. Mattias poured half a pint down his throat and swallowed once. He plugged the skin and set it aside and she watched him pare the rind from a wedge of cheese with a garnet-dudgeoned dagger. He did it with great precision, then cut a delicate slice and proffered it by the dagger's tip, conspicuous not to touch it with his filth-rimmed fingers.

"Taste it," he said. "It's like a poem melting on your tongue."

The cheese was pungent and as good as promised. Her stomach stirred with a hunger she'd been unaware of. They ate.

"When I left for Saint Elmo," he said, "your complaint was that the world had little use for you. I return to find you all but a subject for balladry. And justly so."

Coming from him, the compliment touched her and she colored. She asked, "What have you accomplished since your return, aside from mischief?"

"Little of merit, I admit," he said. "My keenest ambition I haven't advanced at all."

Carla said, "You've brought Amparo happiness."

Mattias coughed on a crumb of cheese. He recovered. "Well, as is commonly known, lovemaking is vital to good health and in my current state all cures are heartily welcomed."

Carla shifted. Her jealousy of Amparo, which she'd labored so hard to contain, flooded her stomach. At the same time, she felt her blood rise to her head. Her eyes roved over his hands, beautiful in their strength for all that they were damaged, and to his face, whose contours and crags she could have studied forever despite its being mantled of grime. She recalled her dream in the cot and was discomfited. She looked away.