“Straight through the chest,” chortled Bors. He kissed the water-dappled steel of the musket barrel. “What a baptism for my beauty. Her very first shot. I’ll call her Salome, in honor of John the Baptist. Salome was a filthy Moslem, was she not?”
“There were no Moslems in those days,” Tannhauser informed him. “There were only a dozen Christians or thereabouts.”
Bors took this as a jest. “But bitches aplenty, of that much we can be sure.”
Tannhauser aimed his rifle and watched as the corsair rowers found their stroke and shunted their flatboat forward. The Algerians were stranded broadside. In order to swing stern-on they’d have to backwater and pull, starboard versus port, but without the helmsman to guide them confusion was king. Another man leapt to the tiller and Tannhauser, waiting for such a ploy, fired on the rise of the oar stroke and draped him among his compatriots coughing blood. The collision was now inevitable. He slipped the rifle across the bench beneath his thighs and hoped to keep the lock dry. He grabbed either gunwale, both feet braced, and hung on for grim life. Bors stuffed the wick of his gun, still burning, down his boot top and followed suit. Arrows flew toward them and slammed quivering into the hull. They closed the last hundred feet with alarming speed, their momentum irresistible. The bank of Moslem oars dipped the water before them. The longboat took leave of the sea. There was a roar from Aiguabella and Tannhauser heard the jangle of looms in the rowlocks as the oarsmen hauled in their shafts.
The teeth of the corsairs shone in their snarling faces, Algerians by the look, and a dozen belated musket blasts flashed wild. Then wood splintered and groaned and Tannhauser clung for his life as the prow rose before him and his bowels dropped inside him and all he could see was a flash of the star-speckled sky. There were screams and curses and the rush of the sea below as it swamped the corsairs. His guts welled up again as the prow plunged steeply back down. Then he was drenched as water cascaded the bows. They were level again, rocking and pitching but afloat, and he heard the looms run out again to steady them. He turned.
In their wake floated the overturned hull of the corsairs’ flatboat. Around it splashed a shoal of desperate men with gasping mouths and arms aflail. From the remnants of the first Christian transport came a chorus of huzzahs. Aiguabella had the helmsman bring them around, and the crew rose from their benches like grim harpooneers, and as the Algerian flotsam blubbered their last orisons, the Maltese finished them off with the blades of their oars.
They pulled into Saint Elmo’s dock and Tannhauser’s relief at feeling solid ground beneath him could not be described. Beyond the looming and ragged silhouette of the crumbling fort the sky flared a fiery yellow shot through with smoke. Great chunks of masonry had been blasted from the ramparts and lay half submerged at the foot of the sheer rock bluff upon which the eastern wall was built. Their welcome was warm but brisk and they climbed the steps in the stone behind Aiguabella and his brethren. On dry land the knights were as nimble as goats in their armor. Tannhauser hefted his baled helmet and cuirass, which he hadn’t worn in the boat for fear of the water.
“If we’re going into the broil I want more steel than this against my hide.”
Bors said, “Then let’s go find ourselves some dead men.”
As they reached the gate Tannhauser asked the guard where he could find the field hospital, and was directed toward the chapel at the fort’s northern end. They cleared the postern gate and there they stopped and gaped, for any such spectacle as that which lay before them was seen by few. Of those, far fewer still would live to recount it.
The inner ward of the fort was a crater-pocked wasteland across which no man dared to stray. Its cracked and pulverized flagstones were littered with iron and granite balls, some big enough to sit on, and blotched with sinister stains so numerous that in parts they merged together to paint whole sections of the yard a gelatinous black. Here and there stood the outlines of smaller buildings, demolished either by cannon fire or design. Their materials had been used to throw up the rude breastworks that zigzagged all about the open ground, for there was scarcely a square foot of the interior that wasn’t exposed by now to Turkish musketry.
The northwestern wall to their right gaped with holes and a second bulwark had been built behind it from cannibalized stones, earth, splintered timbers, and bedding. This defense work was presently unmanned and had the air of a folly erected by a madman and abandoned in a fit of pique.
On the southern side, facing the captured ravelin and the main Turkish positions on Monte Sciberras, the curtain wall could no longer rightly be described as any kind of wall at all, but was rather a vast heap of rubble—more befitting cave dwellers than a modern army—scraped into a crude defensive embankment. Even as they watched, chains of slaves toiled in the moonlight to the whistle and the whip, naked and ghostlike in their caked raiment of dust and sweat and blood, heaving chunks of masonry from one pair of bleeding hands to another until the stones regained the rampart from whence they’d fallen. The rim of the V-shaped ravelin on the Turkish-held ground beyond now loomed higher than the Christian defenses. From behind its protecting veil came the intermittent bark of hostile musket fire.
But the ravelin was a distraction. The brunt of Mustafa’s night attack was directed against a huge breach in the western apex of the fort’s southern salient. It was there that the light of the flames, the brilliance of the fireworks, and the desperation of combat were most intense.
The garrison at this point comprised perhaps five hundred Maltese militia, whose courage and tenacity had stunned everyone, and the Turks most of all, plus two hundred and fifty of the legendary Spanish tercios, and eighty or so knights of the Order. Half of the whole was engaged in repelling the wave assaults. Lookouts were posted at various points around the perimeter to give notice of a secondary attack. A few Christian cannon bellowed from their ravaged and precarious emplacements. The bulk of the reserves were drawn up in the lee of the west wall and protected from the ravelin’s marksmen by the improvised inner bulwarks and breastworks. Freed Christian slaves—criminals, homosexuals, heretics—were employed to collect shot from the yard to feed the guns. Freed Jews were employed as stretcher bearers, and these crept back and forth from the front in an intermittent stream, carrying stricken men on wattles toward a stout building prominent among those clustered under the northern—seaward—wall.
Tannhauser’s eyes roved the fiery and tempestuous melee. Where in all this havoc was Orlandu? He had no skill in arms and no great strength. Where danger was so ubiquitous, he could easily have met the same fate as the slain strewn in abundance about the bailey.
“You know Orlandu,” he said. “To what use would you put him?”
Bors frowned. “Powder monkey? Water boy?”
Tannhauser had spotted four batteries within the fort. There was a fifth, he understood, on a cavalier raised outside the fort and connected to the northern seaward wall by a bridge. Orlandu had been here only a day. “Powder monkey I don’t believe. It takes too much schooling and drill in the hazards of fire.”
Bors was all too eager to agree. “Water boy would put him in the thick of the fray.”
The chapel’s interior flickered with candles and was perfumed with incense and thyrus smoke. The benches had been removed for use in the breastworks and the wounded lay supine on the flags or sat slumped in anguish against the walls. A chaplain wearing the rich red vestments of Pascha Rosatum said Mass at an altar stone scattered with rose leaves, and that someone had troubled to convey the leaves to this locus of ugliness and horror seemed at once both marvelous and crazed. Cries of pain rang out from those under treatment by the surgeons, of which latter there were only two. They stood across a table in the quag of congealed blood that befouled the chancel floor. They were as incarnadined as butchers and their faces were gray with that peculiar fatigue that comes from the infliction of torment in the quest to heal. A man writhed on the altar table between them and beneath his screams the rhythmic burr of a bone sa
w could be heard. Despite their inhuman tribulations, and the fact that they’d slept hardly two hours in twelve for the last fifteen days, the surgeons radiated a steadfast composure—perhaps even a careworn serenity—that was more affecting and majestic than anything Tannhauser had seen. The knights were the Hospitallers, after all, and these grave heroes were the guardians of the holy flame.
Inspired by such placid nobility, or perhaps by the discovery that screaming usually hurts, the rest of the patients lay quiet and waited their turn. Arrayed inside the vestibule and wrapped in clean white shrouds were the bodies of five dead knights awaiting transport to the vault of San Lorenzo. As Tannhauser had hoped, their armor and swords were stacked beside them. The knights treated their own dead with particular delicacy and, contrary though it was to reason, would never think of passing their harness on to the common soldiers whose longevity it would have extended—and whose corpses were consigned to the sea with lesser ceremony. Tannhauser pointed to the equipment.
“Choose quickly and well. Greaves, cuisses, shoes. Gauntlets if they’ll fit.”
“Where are you going?” asked Bors.
“To give wool today so that we might take sheep tomorrow.” He unlimbered his knapsack. “Remember my motto: A man with opium is never without a friend.”
While Bors rifled through the gear of the bulkiest shrouds, Tannhauser approached the altar. He watched the surgeons complete the amputation of a leg below the knee. They sealed the stump with a most ingenious arrangement of skin flaps, and with only the most subtle use of the cauterizing iron, and this gave him the chance to gain their attention.
“Is this the new technique recommended by Paré?” he asked.
The surgeon who had the air of being in command looked at him with surprise. “You’re most well informed, good sir.”
“I was at Saint Quentin, where Monsieur Paré was surgeon general and took his stand against excessive use of the fire iron.” He recalled that Paré was a Huguenot, and thus a heretic, and hoped that he hadn’t made the wrong impression. “I assume you approve.”
“The results speak for themselves.”
Tannhauser held out his hand. “Mattias Von Tannhauser, of the German langue.”
“Jurien de Lyon, of Provence.”
Jurien hesitated to shake, for his hand was bloody, but Tannhauser clenched it undeterred. He told the noble surgeon that he was La Valette’s commissioner for the inspection of defenses, and showed him the Grand Master’s seal on the parchment he’d acquired from Starkey. He then engaged Jurien in a discussion of the state of the wounded, and commended his policy of only sending to the boats those with some hope of survival and return to duty. He swiftly impressed Brother Jurien with his knowledge of Natural Magick and vulnerary potions, secrets learned from Petrus Grubenius, and he proceeded to take from his knapsack a number of hemp bags whose contents he described.
“In this we have comfrey, pyrola, and aristolochia, leavened with featherfew and agrimony. Boil the poultice in a ratio of one ounce to two measures of wine, and having mixed a pinch of salt with them, bind the herbs to the wound. The wine which remains may be taken as a decoction—a spoonful morning and evening is enough.”
Jurien de Lyon, familiar with this regime, nodded and expressed his thanks.
Tannhauser produced a stoppered glass flask full of garnet-red oil. “Oil of Hispanus—linseed and camomile extracts rectified with bayberries, betony, cinnamon, and Saint-John’s-wort. A few drops taken in black wine, thrice daily, helps heal wounds by contracting the nerves that inflame them. Keep the stopper tight, or the virtue will fly out and vanish.”
There was so loud a clatter from the vestibule that it cut through the groans of woe, and unease provoked him to be more generous with his last donation than might otherwise have been necessary. He rose from the knapsack with two oilcloth slabs of opium.
“This will need no introduction. Opium from the poppy fields of Iran.”
Jurien almost took a step backward. “Fra Mattias, you are heavensent.”
“Like all such marvels, the poppy is God’s bounty, albeit that it flourishes best in a land of Shiite devils. Accept these small contributions, then, from your German brother.”
Jurien, despite a canny glance into the knapsack, was moved by this benevolence and assured him that no favor he could ask would go unsatisfied. As he judged the fellow honorable to a fault, Tannhauser buckled up the knapsack and entrusted it to Jurien’s safekeeping.
On his way through the vestibule he did the unthinkable and stole a dead knight’s sword. He chose on instinct and therefore chose well. Even inside the scabbard the sword felt like an extension of his arm. His own rapier, by Julian del Rey, could not be bettered in a street fight but was too delicate for the work that lay ahead. For battle one needed a tool with the resilience of a plowshare. He left the del Rey by the corpse and slipped outside.
He found Bors in an alley by the chapel, standing among a heap of steel and trying to lever his bargelike feet into a pair of bear-pawed sabatons. Tannhauser marked them as big enough to fit over his own boots and examined the rest of the collection. There were no complete leg fitments of a length to suit him, so he levered out some rivets to dismantle what was there, rolled his boots down to the knees, and crammed a pair of schynbalds down the front. He found poleyns that with some stomping were reshaped to accommodate his knees. He unrolled his boots back up the groin and stuffed their tops with thigh plates. The ensemble chafed here and there but was preferable to a scimitar across the shins. He dismantled his own bale and donned the fluted cuirass, which had been forged in Nuremberg by Kunz Grunwalt. Bors helped him buckle on the pauldrons and vambraces. Bors surrendered the sabatons but disputed the single pair of full-finger gauntlets to fit either one of them. On account of the Damascus musket, Tannhauser won and stuck them in his belt. Bors found a pair of armored mittens and made do. Their helms were morions, high-crested and open-faced with cheek and jaw guards tied beneath the chin with red silk ribbons. With each man fifty pounds heavier, they cradled their long guns and started around the western perimeter toward the flames.
As they passed among the reserves they inquired about Orlandu. No one knew him. He was fresh meat and no one cared. The age-old mathematics was at work: the longer you survived, the longer you were likely to survive. Under conditions of this severity, where eight-hour assault followed hard on twelve-hour bombardment, veterans were forged in two days and saw more bloodshed than most other troops during ten years’ service. Those who’d been here since the start of the siege—eighteen days ago, now—and among whom many of the tercios were numbered, were made of a different clay altogether. They squatted in the dust, their halberds and partisans on the ground beside them, dead men every one, saying little and possessed of an unnatural, hollow-eyed tranquillity. Their clothes were tattered and their boots cut to pieces by the rubble. Their hair and beards were clotted with filth, their faces with scabs and sores. Most sported wounds, crudely dressed, and missing fingers, and arms in slings, and burns and painful limps, which they bore with the fatalistic fortitude of injured dogs.
The knights stood grouped by langue at the head of each company: French, Auvergnoise, and Provençals. The Italians and Aragonese, they learned, were presently in the thick. The hiss of steel on whetstones mingled with the sound of Pater nosters. Discipline was tight. Morale seemed higher than should have been possible. Whatever weariness the soldiers felt, and it was etched on their spectral faces, the air crackled with some invisible communal force. They would have invoked the Holy Ghost to explain the phenomenon, but Tannhauser had felt it before, on the far side of the wall where Allah was claimed as its arbiter and source. Was this the difference over which these warriors were hacking one another apart? Over the name—the word—for the same essential concept of Divine Oneness? Or was there no Divine, and was this binding force the creation of men alone, men who found themselves thrown together for reasons which none could explain, men bound by merest accident: by birt
h, by geography, by Fate?
Tannhauser had stood on that far side and known the same tingling in the blood that he felt right now. To fight and die in any shared cause, whether for good or evil, or for any God, ancient or new, would evoke the selfsame compulsion in them all. Bors had hit the nail. The same Love. The spell was overmastering. Despite himself he found his heart yearning for the fray. His mentor Petrus Grubenius would have despaired.
You came here for the boy alone, he reminded himself. Amparo awaited him, and her eyes, which when they looked into his saw only him. A look such as he’d never seen, except in memories so long lost they stood more in the way of a dream. Only here, amid the stench of powder smoke and bear grease and blood did he realize that he loved her. Yet did he love this stench of war even more? Was he too far fallen from whatever grace he’d been born with? And was the boy no more than a phantom of his own creation, summoned to lure him back to the gutters of blood where he belonged? And what of the contessa, whose hand he had won? Carla’s heart, too, called out to his across the abyss. Two fine women and one fine war competed for his attention.
“I must be as mad as the rest,” he muttered to himself.
“Mattias,” growled Bors.
Tannhauser came to and looked at him.
“What’s wrong, man? You’re staring at the moon as if you expect to find some answer there. You won’t.”
“Do you think this will cost us our souls?”
“Pah. If so, we got a good price. I know you well—you consider things too deeply. Out here you should let me do the thinking. My brain’s not confounded by idle musings and womanly conceits.”