“Yes, Lord, and it is just for that reason that we Turks do not steal. We give our alms, pray the prayers he prescribed, and are all prepared to die for him.”
“And the wine you are not allowed to drink? There is said to be both taverns and drunkards in Constantinople.”
“Some drink it, Lord. God comes to punish them. We are ashamed of them. But are the Christians not forbidden from whoring? Or lying? And they do these things openly and without shame.”
“You can go now, Ibrahim.”
“Are you angry with me, Lord?”
“No, Ibrahim, but we have more to do than talk the time away, both you and I.”
He went to his desk. But it was tedious and slow writing to the property administrators of Barletta, Messina, and Capua with the usual nagging notes to hurry and send help to scrape up the last of the money and personnel. The Turk’s word would not leave him alone.
If Christ was God’s Son, why didn’t He give them victory?
For three-hundred fifty years, He had only given defeat to his faithful: At Hattin’s Horn, at Margat and Acre, at Nicopolis and Varna. Jerusalem, Ceasarea, Nicea, Constantinople, Smyrna, Ephesus and Corinth, all had fallen. All the holy, apostolic cities were now under the half moon, except for Rome—and it too would fall one day, if one wasn’t ready to put an end to the peace.
At one time this question plagued him, almost insufferably. He would lie on the galley’s quarterdeck in the warm humid nights, the stars blurred behind the haze and stench of the rowers, who snored and groaned in their chains and excrement while the Latin sail lifted its pointed top to the heavens. Black thorny shorelines shadowed the horizon, almost always enemy territory, islands that had already fallen or that could fall any day. He wondered: What is God doing? What are His holy mother and all His saints doing? Now he had stopped questioning. Life had taught him this hard lesson. If God cared about such things, then he always kept the best galleys, the most powerful artillery, and the hardest disciplined soldiers. In the end, that which decided the matter was money, weapons, cleverness and self-will. It was a game where the clearest brains and the hardest hand took home the victory. To bring God into the game only made it more complicated.
The Walls and Hands
In the tavern Five Florentines, brother Antonio Bosio flagged his old friend Gianantonio Bonaldi with a shout, fell upon him with greetings, kissed him on both cheeks, showered him with questions, and offered him the house’s best wine, which by chance came from Crete where Bonaldi also called home, Venetian as he was.
Brother Antonio Bosio was a renaissance man, a real mover. He could get by with most of the languages spoken in these parts, was known by most of the merchants, knights, servants and spies who roamed about here, and was best friends with anyone who could give the Religion any help—the saints would not forget—a proven connoisseur of all the Mediterranean’s wines, boats, and pirates, and trusted with many dangerous and delicate tasks by his Grand Master. Among the serving brothers of Saint John of Jerusalem’s Order, he had held a unique position for many years that gave him a great deal of exemptions. In principle this was enough to arouse suspicion, but as far as anyone could tell, his childlike enchantment with serving his order and his Grand Master never waned.
He had met this Gianantonio Bonaldi one blistery evening on a dock in Chios. They had both been in the same straits, no ship heading home and at risk of being locked up by the Genovese Castellan, who at that moment was almost as irritated with the order of St. John as he had always been with the Venetians. Brother Antonio had convinced a Greek fisherman to take them with promises of a gratuity greater than a poor fisherman’s income for half a year. They split for the sea in the midst of a storm and darkness, and that also helped. When they were seized by a Venetian force outside of Negroponte, they cleared themselves using Bonaldi’s good name, and when they fell into the hands of the old pirate Santolino (who, aside from Turks, captured any and all Venetian vessels), Antonio Bosio took him in arms, thumped him on the back, and reminded him of all the fun they had had together that winter. Then Santolino took them to Rhodes, escaping the Turkish fleet, which set out to take him dead or alive. They continued to Lango, escaping all the Turks, and once more finding themselves in the galley benches (which, of course, was always a risk when sailing these waters). From Lango, Antonio helped his newly won friend continue to Crete despite the fact that the order’s relationship with Venice had hit a new low point. The Venetians declared that members of St. John’s, disguised as pirates, captured one of their ships while Rhodes indignantly replied that they completely fabricated this story in order to hide that they were playing under the covers with the unbelievers and put their good before their religion, always playing by the old maxim, Veneziani, poi Christiani. Venetians first, then Christians.
Now they sat there and drank their good wine. Gianontonio Bonaldi had come from Crete with a boatload of wheat, wine, oil, and gunpowder, all marketable wares in Rhodes, particularly after winter when the shipping had slowed down. Stores were lacking and prices climbed. It was his first time in Rhodes and Brother Antonio invited him to see the city in all its glory.
“You must see the Grand Master’s garden. When I was a boy, there were real ostriches there. The Grand Turk had given them to the blessed Grand Master d’Aubusson. They would eat scrap iron, you know, and laid eggs as big as your head in the sand. They never brooded over them. They only stirred them. They hatched by themselves. And there was a rare dog that also came from the Sultan. It was as big as a greyhound and gray as a rat without a hair on its body except for the nose, and so fastidious that it never ate meat that hadn’t been slaughtered the same day. Man, it could jump too! As high as you are tall.”
“Is it still there?” Bonaldi asked a little skeptically.
“No, it died of offence when Carretto became Grand Master. It could not suffer the Piedmonts.”
Brother Antonio paid generously. He kept his vow of apostolic poverty, at least in such a way that he insisted on paying if he had any money.
“Then we will go to the walls,” he decided. “You have to see Carretto’s new tower.”
They went through the city district that had been the Jewish ghetto and brother Antonio narrated.
“This is where Misac Pascha broke through in 1480. They successfully shot the Italian wall to pieces, came through the breach, and made it here. But d’Aubusson had allowed them to destroy the houses from here to the wall and stack up the stones as an emergency wall. There were as many Turks in the breach and on the walls as there are bees in a beehive. You couldn’t see any space between them. The Grand Master stood in the midst of the worst crowding. He swept and hacked as if he were harvesting grain until he took a pike in the side. It went straight into the lung and he came close to dying. Afterwards, he was sick for a long time. But we saved ourselves, thanks to Signor San Giovanni Battista and God’s Holy Mother. They revealed themselves, you know, here up in the heavens.”
He looked straight up.
“You really saw them?”
“Not our people. They stood right under them, and they had other things to do just then. But from the bottom of the moat and the crest on the other side they saw them clearly. The prisoners and deserters told us afterwards. That is why they gave up and fled.”
Bonaldi nodded thoughtfully; he did not belong to the gullible.
They went up the long ladder to the wall’s crown, thirty-two rungs high. There the Venetian stood, surprised and overwhelmed.
“But this is a city square!” he said.
He was right. On both sides of the wall expanded strada di rondo connecting the walkways to the crest, broader than the city’s broadest street. Fifty men could easily walk there, shoulder to shoulder. They were still working higher up, and the path was cluttered with stone blocks, tools, slaves, and stoneworkers, whose chisels clinked against the stones like a final extended bird trill of steel clangs and hammer hits. Through the windows you could see the