The Religion by Tim Willocks

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, inone 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