The Religion: A Novel Read online

  “Enough,” said Tannhauser. He strode to Buraq.

  “He is your father?” asked Amparo, matter-of-factly.

  Bors, whose French was in fact superior to Tannhauser’s, stopped laughing.

  Tannhauser took his turn. “No. But, for certain, he is old and fat enough to be so.”

  Amparo said, “Then why are you asking his permission?”

  Tannhauser too stopped laughing, appalled that she had made this interpretation.

  “You’d better go to your contessa,” said Bors, “before this creature bests us both.”

  Tannhauser mounted. Before he could lead the way, as was his intention, the girl clattered away across the cobbles at a brisk trot.

  They rode through streets rendered empty by the vicious heat and which hummed with the feces and flies that infested the gutters. At the city’s northern gate they passed cartwheels fixed to poles, upon which were lashed the disemboweled corpses of blasphemers, sodomites, and thieves, their hides so sunburned, their flesh so desiccated, that even crows and maggots now shunned them. On the spikes to either side of the gate was a collection of beak-flayed heads. Leaving such eyesores behind they ascended the Hills of Neptune, where the air was surpassing sweet and falcons in great variety patrolled the Monti Peloritani.

  Via discreet inquiries of the girl, he gained an impression of Lady Penautier as a tough and resourceful young widow who ran an estate in Aquitaine. Of the deceased husband, Amparo had no knowledge, for his death had predated her arrival, but the contessa had never shown signs of missing his companionship. While no accurate figure could be elicited, it seemed that the Lady was not yet thirty years old, and was possessed of considerable beauty.

  For the moment he was content to note that Amparo had long fingers with almond-shaped nails and a neck as graceful as a swan’s. Beneath the green silk, now stained black by sweat beneath her arms, her breasts were even larger than he’d appreciated, a fact emphasized by her build, which he now preferred to see as slender rather than thin. If she barely looked at him at all, it was no doubt due to shyness. Tannhauser learned, with relief, that Amparo was a Spaniard and had spent much of her later girlhood in Barcelona. Castilian gave him the chance to correct the impression that he was an idiot. He spoke of the port and the fine old cathedral to be found in that great city, though he’d never been there himself and had acquired this knowledge secondhand. Amparo met his enthusiasm with silence and he returned to asking questions, which she was, at least, always polite enough to answer.

  She and madame had traveled from a village near Bordeaux, but beyond that her grasp of geography was weak. To Amparo, Marseilles, Naples, and Sicily were no more than stepping-stones scattered on the waters of a vast unknown. For two women traveling alone such a journey was reckless in the extreme, not least because they had scorned an armed escort. Yet Amparo declared herself content to follow her mistress “to the edge of the world.” Such loyalty was uncharacteristic of hired labor—or of relationships between females in general, in Tannhauser’s experience. By the time they reached the bougainvilleas that announced the end of their ride, Tannhauser was more intrigued than ever.

  The Villa Saliba was a pile of marble in the modern—ostentatious—fashion. Tannhauser felt that a residence such as this would suit him well. The villa itself, however, was not their destination. They left their horses to be watered at the stables. Then Amparo led him to a fabulous garden devoted to white-and-red roses. It was shaded by palm trees and myrtles and its location and design were superbly conceived. Tannhauser noted with satisfaction that there were none of the ubiquitous magnolias that would have smothered the delicate scents. Beyond the garden stood a much smaller yet still-splendid house of cool white stone.

  Amparo stopped in the rose beds and crouched down by a particular white bloom, as if to reassure herself of its health. Tannhauser watched her for a moment as she murmured to it in a language that was neither French nor Castilian. She was indeed a singular creature. As if she had read his mind she turned from the bloom and looked up.

  “In Araby,” he said, “they say that, once upon a time, all roses were white.”

  With a passionate curiosity, Amparo straightened up. She took in the red blooms thickly clustered, and then looked at him again.

  “One evening, beneath a waning moon,” Tannhauser continued, “a nightingale alighted by such a rose—a tall white rose—and when he saw her he fell at once in love. Now, until that time, no nightingale had ever been heard to sing—”

  “The nightingales couldn’t sing?” asked Amparo, eager to confirm this detail.

  Tannhauser nodded. “They passed their lives in silence, from one end to the other, but so brave was this nightingale’s love for this exquisite white rose that a song of wondrous beauty burst from his throat, and he threw his wings about her in a passionate embrace and—”

  He stopped, for the girl seemed entranced, and there was a look of such poignant rapture in her face that he feared to tell her the climax of the tale.

  “Please,” she pressed him, “go on.”

  “The nightingale clasped the rose to his breast, but with such wild passion that the thorns pierced his heart, and he died with his wings wrapped around her.”

  The girl’s hands flew to her mouth and she took a step back, as if her own heart had been pierced. Tannhauser pointed to the red flowers.

  “The nightingale’s blood stained the rose’s white petals. And that is why, ever since, certain roses bloom red.”

  Amparo considered this for some time. With grave sincerity she asked, “This is true?”

  “It is a tale,” said Tannhauser. “The Arabs have other tales of roses, for they hold them in special regard. But the truth of a tale is in the gift of the one who hears it.”

  Amparo looked at the bloodred blooms around her.

  “I believe it is true,” she said, “though it is very sad.”

  “Surely the nightingale was happy,” said Tannhauser, not wishing to dampen her spirits. “He won the power to sing for his brothers and sisters, and now they sing for us.”

  “And the nightingale knew love,” said Amparo.

  Tannhauser nodded, this vital observation having escaped him heretofore.

  “It’s a better bargain than most of us make in death,” he said.

  For the first time since they’d met, her eyes rose to meet his own directly. They were larger than he’d realized and she turned them on him as if stripping herself naked.

  “I will never know love,” she said.

  Tannhauser almost blinked but held fast.

  “Many people believe that,” he said. Indeed it was a conviction he shared himself, but did not say so. “Some fear the madness and chaos love brings in its wake. Some fear themselves unworthy of its glories. Most are proved wrong in the end.”

  “No, I cannot love, like the bird who could not sing.”

  “The bird found his song.”

  “And I would be a bird if I could, but I am not.”

  Tannhauser could not deny a strange affinity for the girl. He didn’t know why.

  “You’re the man on the golden horse,” she said.

  Now that they’d left the quagmire of French behind, he understood this phrase, which she’d used earlier on at the tavern with such great excitement. A golden horse. Buraq.

  He shrugged. “Yes.”

  Amparo turned and walked toward the guesthouse. Tannhauser followed, feeling somewhat like a large, ugly dog in train to a wayward child. In passing he noted the feline sway of her hips and the splendid drape of the linen adorning her hams. The building’s lengthening shadow fell across a wooden bench, equipped with floral-patterned cushions, which overlooked the garden and the sea. With a gesture, Amparo invited him to sit.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  Amparo walked through a pair of glass-paned doors and left them open as she disappeared inside. Tannhauser could see only a few feet within. The ceiling appeared to be decorated with the vulgar interp
retations of classical myth so popular with the Franks. The rear of the salon was shrouded in gloom and between gloom and doors—as if some elvish aura had been left by Amparo’s passage—a shower of golden motes tumbled through the air.

  Tannhauser settled on the bench, whose comfort delighted him. In the distance the sea was a mirror of white and gold held up to the sun, and across the straits of Scylla and Charybdis the hills of Calabria quavered in the afternoon heat. The air was the most fragrant he’d tasted in months and the roses and the hills and the water took him back to a private courtyard in Trebizond, in the palace where Suleiman Shah had been born, and where Tannhauser had sworn an oath to protect the emperor’s firstborn son.

  The only flaw was an awareness of his own smell, formerly undetectable, of tavern, docks, sweat, and the erotic antics he’d indulged in the night before. It was probably of no consequence, as the Christians were a filthy lot with a morbid fear of water, yet the missed bath was missed indeed. His fondness for immersing himself in water was a habit learned in Turkey, where the Prophet demanded that the faithful be pure for at least the Friday noon prayer, and most especially after the defilement of sex. Here it was considered an eccentricity. He inhaled deeply. There was no doubt about it, he stank. Perhaps that was why Amparo had left him in the garden.

  His concerns were truncated by a gust of divine sound. A sound so divine, and of a beauty so pure, that it took him a moment to realize that it was music. And so lovely was this music that he couldn’t bring himself to turn and seek its source, for it seized control of his nerves and so penetrated his heart that he was robbed of the power to do aught but fall for its spell. Two instruments, both stringed. One plucked, one bowed. One light and nimble, the notes falling soft as summer rain, the other dark and surging as the tides of a storm-wracked night, the two dancing, one with the other, in a fierce and elemental embrace.

  He closed his eyes in the shade, with the scent of the roses in his throat, and let the music roll through his soul, a saraband which caressed the face of death as lovers caress the face of their beloved. The darker instrument overwhelmed his senses with waves of ecstatic melancholy, in one moment brutal with exaltation, as delicate as candlelight in the next. Nothing he had known, not merely heard but known, had prepared him for such transcendence. What possessed him to allow his soul to yield to its force? What sorcery could conjure such specters and send them roaring through his heart and on and away into an eternity nameless and unknown? And when each note ended where did it go? And how could each be and then not be? Or did each one echo until the end of all things and from one far rim of Creation to the other? On and on the music rose and fell, and segued and flowed, with an exuberant hope and a demoniac despair, as if invoked from skin and wood and the gut strings of beasts by gods no priest or prophet had ever worshipped. And each time he knew that the music must die, depleted by its own extravagant longing, it resurrected itself again, and yet again, falling and climbing from one peak to the next, howling for more of itself, for more of his soul, that soul now borne along by the torrent unleashed from the locked places inside him of all that he’d done and all that he’d known and all that he’d seen of horror and glory and sorrow.

  Then with the same shocking stealth with which the sound had arrived, silence stole its place, and the universe seemed empty, and in that emptiness he sat.

  Time reestablished its dominion and once more the scent of the roses and the cool of the breeze and the weight of his limbs crept back into his awareness. And he found that he was sitting with his face in his hands and when he took his hands away he found them wet with tears. He looked at the wetness with amazement for he hadn’t wept in decades and had thought it no longer in him. Not since he’d learned that all flesh is dust, and that only God is great, and that, in this world, tears are for the comfort of the defeated. He wiped his face on the burgundy sleeve of his doublet. And just in time.

  “Chevalier Tannhauser, thank you for coming.” The voice was almost as lovely as the music. “I am Carla La Penautier.”

  He stood up and composed himself and turned and found a woman watching from some yards distant on the path. She was petite of build, somewhat narrow in the hips but long in the thigh, and perhaps shapely in the calf with finely turned ankles, though these latter attributes were based in speculation, for her legs were concealed by a dress that was something to behold. It was the color of pomegranate juice and of such sensuous cut and fabrication that it was all he could do to keep his mouth from falling open. The dress clung to her body like oil, like lust, and shimmered with slashes of light with every movement she made. He felt his fingers twitch and stilled them. He seized control of his senses and dragged his attention to her face.

  Her features were strong and clear, her irises green and rimmed, as if with ink, by thin black circlets. Despite her name, she didn’t look French but had the bones and hauteur of a Sicilian. Her hair was the color of honey and shot through with yellow, as if one of the Norman conquerors had left his seed in her blood. The hair was forced into a knot but would spring into golden waves if given its freedom. His eyes returned, despite his better judgment, to her bust. The dress was fastened at the front by an ingenious arrangement of hooks and eyes, and thereby buttressed her breasts—which were of modest dimension and a quite stunning whiteness—into two exquisite hemispheres. The hemispheres were separated by a cleft into which he would happily have fallen forever. The outlines of her nipples were just visible and, if he were not mistaken, appeared to grow more prominent under his gaze. But perhaps he flattered himself. In any event, she was a beauty, true enough.

  He returned his eyes to her face, upon which two high spots of color had appeared. If Amparo embodied a hardiness that had failed to extinguish her innocence, Carla possessed an air of sadness contained by courage. That and more. Much more, for he knew, on instinct, that the demoniac instrumentalist was she. He liked her at once and bowed.

  “My pleasure, madame,” he said. “But I must confess at once that I’m no chevalier.”

  He smiled and Carla returned the favor, as if involuntarily and with a warmth he sensed she rarely felt or revealed.

  “If you wish, you may call me Captain, as I’ve held that rank or its equivalent in a variety of armies. I should add, however, that I am now a man of peace.”

  “I hope you’ll forgive me for not greeting you more promptly, Captain.” Her Italian was refined, with an accent he couldn’t place. “Amparo insisted that we play music, as is our habit. Without habit, she becomes distraught.”

  “Then I’m in her debt,” he said, “for I’ve never heard the like. Indeed, delight has never transported me nearly so far.”

  She inclined her head at the compliment and he seized the opportunity to revisit the dress, which was quite the most fabulous he’d seen and which clung to her body much the way he might have done himself, given half the chance. To meet two desirable women in a single day was a welcome novelty. It was a shame they were such close associates, but that conundrum could wait on another day. He met her eyes again. Could she read his thoughts? He laughed. How could she not?

  “Do I amuse you?” she said, smiling again.

  “I amuse myself,” he replied. “And I’m filled with the joy of this unforeseen encounter.”

  He inclined his head in what he hoped was a gracious gesture, and she accepted with the same, and made a better job of it. He brushed the back of his fingers against his jaw, and was reminded that he was unshaven and that his mien was in general uncouth. Unsure of how to proceed, he took refuge in simplicity.

  “Please, my lady,” he said. “Tell me how I may serve you.”

  Tuesday, May 15, 1565

  The Abbey of Santa Maria della Valle

  Even a man’s inmost thoughts are known to God. As too are that man’s fantasies and fears, his shame, his dreams both waking and asleep, and most of all those unborn desires whose existence he dares not acknowledge, even to himself. From such occult desire springs spiritual error
. And spiritual error is the source of all human evil. Hence, desire has to be scrutinized—and policed—with unceasing vigilance. Ludovico Ludovici stood nude and sweating in the abbot’s gold-and-marble lavatorium. There he cleansed his flesh of the penetrating stench of the galley. As he did so he scrutinized himself. The quality of his mind and the elemental forces of his body made him more vulnerable than most to the abuse of power. And his power was immense. He was not only the plenipotentiary of His Holiness, Pope Pius IV, but the secret agent of Michele Ghisleri, Inquisitor General of All Christendom.

  In Ludovico’s hand was a piece of coarse sacking with which he wiped his face and the vault of his skull. He dipped the sack in a barrel of fountain water, sweetened with flowers of orange and leaves of wild betony. He could have used Red Sea sponges and soft white linens and any number of rare aromatics and balms, for these rooms had been placed at his disposal and the abbot lived in splendor, but luxury was a snare for the weak and unwary. He’d slept on stone for thirty years. He fasted, dawn till dusk, from September to Easter. He wore a goat-hair shirt on Fridays. He ate meat only twice a week, to preserve his intellect. And for all that he loved conversation, he practiced silence unless his work demanded otherwise. Mortification of the flesh was the armor of the soul.

  He wiped his neck and his shoulders. The water cooled him. He was obliged to determine the fate of two human beings. He always gave such matters the gravest analysis, and these two cases in particular weighed on his soul. Ludovico rinsed the sackcloth and wiped his arms.

  Ludovico had grown up in Naples, the richest and most vicious city in the world. Born into a family of courtier diplomats and intellectuals, he was the second son of his father and his father’s first wife. He’d entered the University of Padua at the age of thirteen and joined the Dominican Order a year later. He was sent to study at Milan, where his mind won him a chair in theology and ecclesiastic law. Encouraged by his father “to seize all opportunity with shrewdness and daring,” he went to Rome in his early twenties and won his doctorate in the same subjects. There he caught the eye, in turn, of both Pope Paul IV, Giovanni Carafa, and the Inquisitor General, Michele Ghisleri. It was to restore the moral purity of Italy that Carafa, in ’42, had established the Holy Office of the Roman Inquisition and had thereby unleashed the purges that had kept the prisons full ever since. A young man of Ludovico’s brilliance and piety was rare, and Carafa had recruited him with a brief to strike at men in high places, “for upon their punishment, the salvation of the lower orders will depend.”