Ludovico took it all with equanimity. “My comfort is the triumph of order over anarchy. And heresy—which is the enemy of good order—is rooted in the vainglory of learned men. He who hears the Eternal Word has no need of learning, for learning in itself is no virtue at all and is often the road that leads to infinite darkness.”
“I’ll agree that learning confers no guarantee of virtue, for the evidence stands before me.” Tannhauser could feel Bors’s eyes drilling into his skull, but the mood was upon him. “As to darkness, broader roads lead thereto than that of knowledge.”
“What good is knowledge without fear of God?”
“If God needs human agents to make us fear Him, then you must tell me what paltry manner of god He must be.”
“I am no agent of God,” said Ludovico, “but rather of the One True Church.” He pointed to the knights on the jetty. “These noble Knights of the Baptist, whose valor I imagine you honor, are come to defend the Cross against the Red Beast of Islam. The war that Mother Church struggles to survive is more desperate by far. The enemies ranged against Her from every quarter are more terrible and more ubiquitous, and the very worst are spawned from within Her own bosom. The duration of the Church’s war will be measured not in weeks, or even in years, but in millennia. And at stake is not an army, or an island, or a mere people, but the destiny of all mankind for all eternity. My purpose, then, is not to spread fear but to defend the Rock upon which Peter founded Christ’s congregation.”
“I do indeed honor these knights,” said Tannhauser, “but they come to cross swords with the bravest fighting men in the world, not to torture the powerless and execute the meek.”
“And the Paradise of the saints will be their reward. But you, too, wear a sword. If you believe in your inmost heart—in that place where even you hear the Voice of God—that you would rid His world of evil in ridding it of me, then I urge you, now, to draw your sword with gladness and strike me dead.”
The more the man talked, the more Tannhauser liked him, and the more he was convinced that he would rid the world of a very great menace indeed by striking him dead. He smiled. “I’ll match words with you no longer,” he said, “for I concede I cannot best you.”
“The challenge was issued in earnest,” said Ludovico. “And your comrade, at least, believes you might take it up.”
Tannhauser looked at Bors, who was indeed poised as if to spring on him. At Tannhauser’s expression, and somewhat sheepishly, he relaxed.
“It is not my purpose to rid the world of evil,” said Tannhauser, “but rather to accumulate wealth—and even a little learning—and to die of all the vices my allotted span will allow me to indulge. I turned my face from God a long time ago.”
“Believe me, man, He lives within you as surely as He lives within me,” said Ludovico. “And, just as surely, He will judge me for each of my deeds as He will judge you for yours.”
“Then perhaps—on Judgment Day—we’ll stand in the dock together, side by side.”
Ludovico nodded. “Of that, too, we may have no doubt at all.”
Ludovico glanced at Gonzaga, who was not only visibly shocked by what had passed but was also straining not to drop the satchels in his fists. Ludovico turned back to Tannhauser.
“Let us pray that by then the Grace of God will have freed us both from sin.”
“I thought you priests reserved that power to yourselves.”
“Opinions differ, scholastically speaking,” Ludovico replied. “The priest may absolve you from the punishment due to sin—which is Damnation—but if, as some of the higher authorities hold, the malice of sin is defined as obduracy of heart, then that can only be broken down by Sorrow.”
“You’ve dispensed a deal of sorrow too,” said Tannhauser.
“Who among us has not?” He waited and Tannhauser nodded. Ludovico said, “And if Sorrow opens the gate to the Grace of God, then what right man would shun it?”
Tannhauser didn’t answer. Ludovico smiled, with a hint of melancholy.
“But I’m keeping you from your business. Despite your shameless blasphemies, perhaps you’d accept a humble priest’s absolution before we part? It would ease my conscience, even if it won’t ease yours.”
Tannhauser glanced at Anacleto and caught the ghost of a smile on the cupid lips. He hesitated. But churlishness was not his habit and he lowered his head. Ludovico raised his hand and made the sign of the cross.
“Ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritu Sancti, Amen.”
Tannhauser looked up. He realized that Ludovico had the coldest eyes he’d ever seen.
“Assalaamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh,” said Tannhauser.
“Until we meet again,” said Ludovico.
“I’ll bring my own firewood.”
Tannhauser watched the Dominican stride away with Gonzaga panting in tow. Anacleto’s lupine figure brought up the rear. At ten paces distant he made a point of looking over his shoulder. Tannhauser held his eyes and Anacleto turned away and the trio were lost in the tumult of the port.
“Would you have us all on the rack?” seethed Bors. “I’ve never seen such folly.”
“The eagle doesn’t hunt worms,” Tannhauser replied. “Ludovico’s prey is the Religion.”
“I saw his face when he absolved you,” insisted Bors. “As if he were sending you to the gallows. Or the stake. Mark my words, that blessing will prove a malediction.”
Tannhauser slapped him between the shoulders. “Blessing or curse, I’ve no more faith in one than in the other, so let’s to work.”
The captain of the galley was the Cavaliere Giovanni Castrucco, whom Tannhauser knew, and so the civilities were brisk and he and Bors were invited on board to have the bill of lading stamped and endorsed by the purser, and to arrange the loading of the cargo, which would occupy the rest of the day. The payment would be credited to their bank account in Venice and the Order never reneged on its debts. The Couronne would leave on the midnight tide: the Turkish vanguard might turn up any hour and Castrucco was eager not to run a blockade. When the business was done, Tannhauser and Bors headed back down the gangway and found Oliver Starkey on the quay. Tannhauser stretched out his hand and Starkey took it.
“Brother Starkey. This is a pleasure I didn’t expect.”
“Tannhauser.” Starkey turned to shake Bors’s hand too. “And Bors of Carlisle.”
He pronounced his countryman’s name with ironic amusement. It was true that Bors’s sobriquet was somewhat extravagant, smacking as it did of noble birth; but then so too was “Tannhauser.” They’d chosen their noms de guerre over a bottle of brandy in Milan, while looking to hire their lances out to Alva. The unmapped mud hole from which Bors hailed was at least located near Carlisle; “Tannhauser” was stolen from some ballad of chivalric fancy, an old troubadour’s tale concerning a knight who was plagued by women and exiled from the City of God as a result. But a name had a power all its own, illegitimate or not, and theirs had done them proud, then and since.
“What brings you to Messina at this late date?” Tannhauser asked.
“You do,” said Starkey.
“If you want more men, I daresay I could round a few up—though most will be drunk and all of them scum of the earth—” He stopped at the patent want of interest in Starkey’s face. “But I forget my manners. Come and dine with us at our table—”
“Forgive me, Tannhauser, but I have not the heart to dissemble.” Starkey’s unease was manifest. “I do not come to trade, but to ask a boon.”
“You’re amongst friends. Ask and be damned.”
“I came at the Grand Master’s urgent command to entreat you to make common cause with the Religion, in the war against the Grande Turke.”
Tannhauser blinked. He stole a glance at Bors.
Bors smoothed his mustaches and licked his lips.
“In short,” said Starkey, “the Grand Master wants you to join us.”
“In Malta?”
/> “In Malta.”
Tannhauser stared at Starkey with such incredulity and apprehension that Bors dropped his hands to his knees and roared with laughter. So raucously, indeed, and with such jubilation, that the sailors reefing the lateens and the stevedores sweating at the wagons stopped in the midst of their chores and turned to gape.
Tuesday, May 15, 1565
The Oracle—Messina Gate—The Hills of Neptune
Tannhauser returned from the Couronne in a sour humor. Starkey had mounted every type of persuasion—moral, political, financial, spiritual, and tribal—in an attempt to recruit his allegiance. He’d promised him glory, riches, honor, and the gratitude of Rome. He had begged, cajoled, and browbeaten. He’d invoked the Summae of Thomas Aquinas, the authority of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and stirring examples of heroes ancient and modern. He’d done all but accuse Tannhauser of lacking courage. Yet Tannhauser had answered all these bribes and propositions with an absolute refusal to take up arms for the Religion. The Maltese Iliad, as Starkey styled it, would have to go ahead without him. He hadn’t killed a man in years and while his conscience was generally untroubled by such deeds it wasn’t a practice he missed. As a reward for the morning’s travails, he promised himself a bath back at the warehouse. Bors rode alongside him in a vexed silence of his own. As they approached the Oracle, Bors nodded toward a horse tied up in the shade outside the doors and said, “Trouble.”
Tannhauser saw that the horse was a splendid bay mare, expensively saddled and caparisoned. With a handful of exceptions, the tavern’s customers had no more chance of owning such a beast than they had of gaining election to the College of Cardinals. As they passed the Oracle’s doors on their way to the stables, Tannhauser ducked his head to glance inside and found a peculiar commotion within. The uproar spilled from a mass of scurvy drunkards, crowded shoulder to shoulder in the manner of spectators to a brawl. He dismounted at once, handed Buraq’s reins to Bors, and stepped to the threshold to peer over the heads of the unwashed.
In the middle of the saloon a long, bony whip of a girl in a forest-green riding dress whirled like a dervish, arms outstretched like wings, amid a horseshoe of rowdy patrons, seated and afoot, who shouted lewd suggestions in Sicilian slang and threw pieces of cheese rind, candle wax, and bread at her head. The girl was plainly demented, though bombarded as she was with obscenities and debris, she could hardly be blamed for that. To make matters worse, and in ripe provocation of her tormentors’ primitive fantasies, she chanted his own name in a piping voice as she revolved around.
“Tannhauser! Tannhauser! Tannhauser!”
Tannhauser sighed. He rearranged his sword so as to hang in a more imposing fashion and strode into the tavern with every appearance of knowing exactly what to do.
The louts were making such rare sport that few noticed his entrance, which galled him even more. As a squat, ox-necked individual leaned back from his bench, his arm cocked to hurl some piece of trash at the girl, Tannhauser grabbed him by the nape and bounced his face on the tabletop with such an excess of force that the other end of the trestle leapt in the air and spilled a shower of beer across the seated.
“Back to your ale, you pigs,” he roared.
To his gratification, the din collapsed into silence. The girl stopped in mid-spin and looked at him without a trace of giddiness. As far as he could tell in the murky light she had one brown eye and one gray, a sure sign of an unbalanced temperament. Since the eyes were perfectly matched in the spirit with which each shone, and this in spite of the cruelty to which she’d been subjected, he was intrigued. If her face was somewhat lopsided and she was far too thin and her hair looked as if she’d cut it herself, without the aid of a mirror, he couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to make love to her. The dress didn’t give much away, but an educated guess suggested magnificent breasts. To his surprise, he discovered a pleasant and rapid stiffening within his leather breeches.
“Tannhauser,” said the girl, in a voice that, to his ear, rang with music. Her eyes were fixed on his chest rather than his face, but she was entitled to be nervy.
“At your service, signorina,” he replied with a flourish and a bow.
Her eyes flickered past him and he turned as Ox Neck regained sufficient of his wits to rise unsteadily from his bench and clench raised fists. Before his dazed gaze could locate his foe, Bors fell upon him from behind with grim delight. The girl seemed unperturbed by the brutal events that ensued, as if violent spectacles, in tawdry settings, were not beyond her experience.
“Do you speak French?” she asked, in that language.
Tannhauser coughed and spread his shoulders. “But of course,” he replied in the same. With what he considered admirable fluency, he asked the girl her name.
“Amparo,” she replied.
Lovely, thought Tannhauser. He indicated the sanctuary of his alcove, with no little pride in its exotic furnishings and decor, and said, “Made-moiselle Amparo, come, please. Let us sit.”
Amparo shook her head, her eyes still on his chest, and replied with a torrent of words that Tannhauser realized he could not understand. Or rather, he recognized one word in five while the rest hurtled by and left him befuddled. He’d grown up speaking German among his family and as a boy of twelve, in the janissary school, draconian discipline had forced him to master languages and scripts of absolute foreignness. He’d subsequently learned Italian with relative ease. During his sojourn with Petrus Grubenius, whose every sentence would wander through rhetorical byways before reaching its point, he’d acquired a love of that extravagance which the Roman tongue invites from certain temperaments. Messina had also made him a passable Spaniard. But French was a cursed tongue, encrusted with irrationalities of pronunciation, and what vocabulary he had, he’d learned from soldiers.
He raised his hand to stop her.
“Please,” he said. The furtive eyes of the rabble were upon him and the sound of their grumbling and farting made conversation hard. He indicated the doors. “Let’s talk outside.”
Amparo nodded and he held out a protective arm. She ignored it and skipped past him to the waterfront, where he joined her with the horses in the shade. He found her staring at Buraq, whom Bors had tethered up alongside her mare. Clearly, she had an eye for fine horseflesh.
“This is Buraq,” said Tannhauser. He retreated into Italian and hoped that if he spoke slowly he’d be understood. “He is named for the winged horse of the Prophet Mohammed.”
She turned and met his eyes directly for the first time. If she wasn’t exactly pretty, she cast a powerful allure. Her face, misshapen he now saw by a violent depression of the bone beneath her left eye, glowed with an ecstasy that disturbed him. She had about her an elemental innocence at odds with the manner in which she’d handled the tavern. She said nothing.
Tannhauser tried again in his stunted French. “Please, tell me how I can help you.”
He listened as Amparo spoke to him as if to a simpleminded child, and though this enabled him to gain some idea of what she said, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was exactly how she viewed him. She talked a good deal of nonsense about a naked man—it was possible he misunderstood this detail—on some kind of horse, at which she gesticulated toward Buraq, and about a dog with a fire in his mouth and other fragments of what sounded like mystic fancy. But beyond these riddles he managed to glean that she wanted him to call upon her mistress, one Madame La Penautier—a contessa, no less—at the Villa Saliba in the hills beyond the city.
“You want me to visit the Contessa La Penautier, at the Villa Saliba,” he said, to confirm at least that much. The girl bobbed her head. As far as he could tell, she hadn’t explained the purpose of such a conference. “Excuse me,” he said, “but, why?”
Amparo looked perplexed. “It is her wish. Isn’t that enough?”
Tannhauser blinked. His experience of French countesses, or for that matter their maids, if such Amparo was, was nonexistent. Perhaps they always summoned
a gentleman in this manner, and perhaps all their maids were as strange as this elfin girl, but probably not. Nevertheless, it was a novelty and he was flattered. A contessa, no less. And after all, where was the harm? Tannhauser took a moment to compose his reply.
“You may tell the contessa, that it will be my pleasure to visit the Villa Saliba tomorrow, at her convenience.” He smiled, pleased with his increasing mastery of the loathsome tongue.
“No,” said the girl. “Today. Now.”
Tannhauser cast a glance from the slender shade into the shimmering furnace of a Sicilian summer afternoon. The prospect of his perfumed bath retreated. “Now?” he said.
“I will take you to her at once,” said Amparo.
There was a sudden dangerous aspect to the girl’s expression, as if she might start whirling and shouting at any refusal. Due to what he now viewed as the dark years of his celibacy—for such was the rule among the janissaries—Tannhauser had only come to know the gentle sex at an advanced age. It was a fact known only to himself that he’d been twenty-six before he’d abandoned virginity. As a result, he invested women with a power and wisdom he suspected they didn’t deserve. Yet he balked at the thought of appearing less than gallant before a contessa, or even her maid.
“Very well,” he said. “The air, for my health, will be good.”
He gave her what he hoped was a charming smile, but received none such in return. Amparo turned and skipped to her mare and sprang into the saddle with admirable litheness. She revealed a flash of muscular calf and, beneath the bodice of her dress, enough movement to confirm his hopes about the size of her breasts. She looked down on him with exaggerated patience. Tannhauser hesitated, unused to being marshaled in this way. Bors appeared, wiping blood from his knuckles, in the doorway. He looked at the girl in green, then cast a questioning glance at Tannhauser.
“I’m invited to call on a lady,” Tannhauser announced. “A contessa, no less.”
Bors snorted with salacious laughter.
“Enough,” said Tannhauser. He strode to Buraq.