Read Online The Religion by Tim Willocks - Free Book Online

and now an estimable merchant in opium, arms, and munitions. To the Moslems he was Ibrahim Kirmizi-Ibrahim the Red-veteran of the bloodbaths of Eastern Anatolia and Iran. He knew the Ottoman way, its manners and languages and rituals. He moved amongst them as the native he once had been and, in some regions of his heart, would always remain. He had associates in Bursa, Smyrna, Tripoli, and Beirut; he'd shipped silks and opium out of Mazandaran; and no man in Christendom knew the Stambouli shore-and Eminonu and Uskudar and the Buyuk Carsi, and their baths and hostelries and bazaars-as well as he. In Messina he was thick with those of the pilots, overseers, and sailing masters who might supply valuable intelligence-of goods and vessels in transit, of competitors on the rise or fall, of confiscated cargoes up for auction, of raiders and intrigues abroad, of changes of political fortune overseas. He also canvassed the slaves in their dockside jails, and the Moslems most of all, for they were mute to everyone else. These men brought tidings from the Barbary Coast that no one else could provide. When news traveled so slowly, a few days' foreknowledge could be precious, and that of a few weeks without price.
    It was thus that his dealings with the Knights of Malta had begun, when he'd seen with his own eyes from the Unkapani quay of the Stambouli shore the raw timber keels of Suleiman's new fleet, and had realized that such intelligence might make him and Sabato Svi wealthy men.
    They'd embarked from Old Stambouli that very night, Sabato for Venice to broker a supply of powder and arms, and Tannhauser for Messina to lease the warehouse, and thence on to Malta to treat with the Religion. The priceless advance news of Suleiman's fleet he gave them for free, to establish his bona fides and to secure a lucrative contract to supply them with arms. "War is a river of gold," he'd promised Sabato, "and we will stand with buckets on its bank." And so it was, for the Religion's appetite for gunpowder, cannon, and ball had proved insatiable, and with rich lands all over Catholic Europe their pockets were deep.
    "My information," Tannhauser said, to Sabato Svi, "is that we're richand getting richer whether the French put pepper in their soup or sprinkle it over their privities for the pox."
    Sabato laughed, with the infuriating cackle he inflicted on those he had bested. Dana bumped her haunch into Tannhauser's shoulder, but the pleasures of her skirt had been soured. With a gesture he sent her away and she acquiesced with another rancorous glare at Sabato Svi. Tannhauser watched her hips swing out of sight then turned and planted a forefinger on the tabletop.
    "You ask me to spend two months at sea when the bloodiest contest of arms in the memory of the living is about to take place on our doorstep."
    "So now we come to the nub. Rather than advance our station, you'd sit prattling with the wine swillers and sifting gossip from the docks." Sabato tossed his head at the scurvy entourage crowding the trestles. "You've spent so much time with these swinish guzzlers you're taking on their virtues."
    "Peace!" said Tannhauser, without effect.
    "The arms trade has been good but the cannon won't roar forever. We own little property. We own no land. We own no ships." Sabato waved a contemptuous hand at the rafters. "This is not rich. This is merely the chance to become so-a chance to dream."
    "I have no great faith in dreaming," said Tannhauser. His last dream had been to forge a blade that his father might be proud of, and his father had never seen it. That dream had left him with an emptiness he'd never been able to replenish. He said, "We will talk no more of pepper, at least for today."
    Sabato caught his change of mood and placed a hand on Tannhauser's thickened forearm and squeezed. "Melancholy doesn't suit you. And it's bad for the liver-like the air in this filthy hole. Let's take a ride to Palermo and see what profitable mischief we might