Tim Willocks by Willocks Tim

Author:Willocks, Tim [Willocks, Tim]
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-05-15T05:00:00+00:00

In the smoking shell of Saint Elmo across the water, Tannhauser searched the grounds and found Orlandu at work with a gang of Maltese soldiers. They were hauling rocks up the scarp to the western breach, where the heat was intense and the sky was dark with flies. The boy was naked to the waist and sweating and caked with dust. As Orlandu stooped down in the rubble, Tannhauser placed a crock of quince jam on the rock he intended to lift. Orlandu blinked, as if dispelling a mirage, then straightened and looked at his former master.

“That,” said Tannhauser, of the jam, “is the most coveted prize left to this entire company.” He brandished a hand. “Your companions here would fight for it as fiercely as they fought for this breach—if they knew it was here—for all of them will die without ever again tasting anything so sweet. What say you help me finish it?”

Orlandu wiped the back of a hand across his mouth. He glanced at the jam without replying. Tannhauser picked up the crock and tossed it in the air and Orlandu’s hands flashed out to catch it before it smashed. Tannhauser laughed and wrung a grin from the boy.

“Come,” said Tannhauser. “We’ve pouted like women long enough. And comfort yourself with the fact that no man ever sold his pride for a higher fee.”

While the Turks from four points of the compass had sniped and bombarded without cease, Orlandu had avoided Tannhauser day and night. It was clear that he nursed wounded feelings and that his Latin blood seethed over insults of his own concoction. Tannhauser had left it to hard labor to cool him down. He’d kept an eye out for his safety and employed certain others to do the same. Tannhauser took him now to the forge, which he’d seized as his own domain following the death of the armorer. Three days’ solitude at the anvil, refurbishing damaged harness and drinking nostalgia’s wine, had restored his inner contentment. The big news from the front—the Drawn Sword of Islam, Torghoud Rais, mortally wounded in the head by a cannon shot from Castel Sant’Angelo—had reached him as if from far away. The end was nigh for Saint Elmo’s ragtag garrison. By his calculation this weekend would see Mustafa conclude the siege. Time, then, to mollify the boy for his departure.

Tannhauser brewed the last of his coffee on the firepot and while gun stones battered the donjon above and shook showers of plaster from the vaulting, they ate the jam with a wooden spoon and both of them were hard-pressed not to weep with pleasure. Tannhauser didn’t push the boy as to his intentions, for the cult of death had swallowed him and his intentions were plain. Instead, Orlandu pressed him.

“I am the boy you were looking for, born on All Hallows’ Eve, yes?” asked Orlandu.

“You are he,” said Tannhauser.

“How do you know this?”

“It was writ down by the priest who baptized you and sworn to by a man of devout character.

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