The Devils of Cardona (23 page)

“But how can I confess to something that I didn't do?” the Morisco pleaded.

Mercader neither showed nor felt any sympathy. Many people had asked him the same question, and the young Morisco would have to find out as they had done that the truth was always available somewhere inside him, even if he thought otherwise. That afternoon the two prisoners were examined by the Inquisition doctor and declared fit for torture. And the next morning the interrogation of Navarro began in the presence of Pachuca and another jailer, the doctor, the notary and Mercader himself.

After stripping Navarro naked and covering his shameful parts with a loincloth, the torturers fastened him to the sloping ladder and tilted it back on its wooden axis till his head was lower than his heels. Pachuca forced his mouth open with metal pincers and stuffed cork plugs into his nostrils with his thick, hairy fingers before spreading the linen
toca
over his mouth.

The other jailer slowly began to pour the first jug of water. Within seconds Navarro was choking and gasping for air and his eyes were bulging in his red face as he wriggled and writhed in a futile attempt to escape his bonds. There was a brief pause after the first jug, and Mercader asked him if he was ready to confess his crimes. When he refused, the procedure was repeated, and once again Navarro insisted that he had nothing to confess. After eight jugs the answer was still the same, and Mercader ordered him to be hung from the ceiling, beginning with the second weights. Using a long rope suspended from a pulley in the ceiling, the torturers tied Navarro's arms behind his back and attached a metal weight to each foot.

The Morisco howled as the two men yanked the rope over the pulley and hoisted his arms up behind him till he was dangling some six feet off the floor before attaching it to a hoop on the wall and looping it over a hook about two feet above it. They left him there for more than half an hour, sobbing and pleading with God to spare him, before Mercader gave Pachuca a nod and the torturers slipped the rope off the hook and let him fall. The Morisco shrieked uncontrollably as his body jerked to a halt at the end
of the rope, perhaps a yard from the floor, with the weights swinging from his feet. It was a sound that Mercader knew well, an irresistible primal cry that sooner or later emanated from everyone who ever came here, rising up from some deep well of pain that no one, not even the strongest, could repress or control, because the spirit might be willing but in Pachuca's hands the flesh was always weak.

“Merciful God, you've broken my back!” the Morisco howled.

“God is merciful to those who tell the truth,” Mercader reminded him. “The sooner you speak it, the better it will be for you.”

“Damn you, Mercader!” Navarro cried. “I'm innocent, and you know it!”

Mercader did not tolerate profanities, even in the torture chamber, and he ordered Pachuca to increase the weights. Once again the procedure was repeated until the Morisco was finally lowered sobbing to the floor. Pachuca sat him upright for the medical examination, and the doctor said that his right arm had nearly been pulled out of its socket and recommended a night's rest before continuing with the interrogation.

Mercader reluctantly agreed. After a short break for lunch, it was the apprentice's turn. This time they began with the
potro
, binding him to the rack and tightening the ropes around his arms and legs with sticks till he was already crying out even before they began to crank the wheel and stretch him lengthways. Within a few minutes, Royo was begging them to stop and proclaiming his innocence, shouting out “God's Holy Sacraments!” over and over again like some kind of incantation as the sticks were tightened and the ropes bit deeper. His guardian urged him to admit to his crimes and bring the torment to an end, but the Morisco tearfully insisted that he could not confess to something he had not done.

This was not the right answer, and Mercader ordered the torturers to continue. Soon the apprentice was no longer able to curse or even speak, and he lay stretched out on the rack and twitching under the ropes, screaming at the top of his voice as the tears poured down his face. Within an hour
he shouted that he was ready to confess. Mercader nodded at Pachuca to loosen the ropes and untie him. As he watched them sit the sobbing young apprentice upright, it was clear to him that the boy had arrived at that special state of genuine penitence in which he was willing to admit to anything.

“I don't want to die,” Royo sobbed.

“Death is nothing to be afraid of, boy, as long as your soul is pure,” Mercader said in the same calm, soothing voice. “Those who confess will live forever.”

“But I don't know what I've done!” the boy sobbed.

“But you know what others have done,” Mercader reminded him. “And if you didn't rape those women, then you know who did. Tell me the identity of this Redeemer. Tell me the names of the other men from Belamar who have influenced you to commit these crimes. Tell me their names and the pain will stop. And your sentence will certainly be reduced.”

“I don't know anything, Lord Inquisitor!”

Mercader sighed impatiently. The boy had clearly not fully understood what was expected of him, and the inquisitor nodded at Pachuca to take him to the pulley.

entura could only barely make out the trees around him as he sprinted through the darkness, crouching down and holding up his hands to protect his face from low-lying branches. He ran till his lungs were burning, and every time he tripped or snagged his foot on a root or hummock, he picked himself up to continue his headlong flight away from the shouts and the barking dogs. He continued to run even though he had lost all sense of direction, until the rain began to come down in a torrent, filling the forest with a liquid roar that muffled all other sounds. Within minutes he was drenched but exultant, because he knew that the shower would not help the dogs or the men with torches.

By the time the rain let up, the lights had disappeared, and even the dogs sounded as though they were moving away from him. It was only then that he finally allowed himself to stop and catch his breath. He had lost the
crossbow during his escape and left his powder and ammunition in his knapsack, but he still had his pistols and his sword and daggers. He had no doubt that they would resume the search and try to prevent him from getting back down to Belamar, and he knew that his survival depended on putting as much distance between himself and the camp as possible, even if he had no idea where he was going.

He continued half running and half walking until the trees began to thin out, and eventually he emerged cautiously onto an open slope that fell away sharply toward the darker outline of a canyon a short distance away. The rain had saved him, but the cloudy sky also meant that there were no stars to guide him. He was walking carefully around the edge of the forest, looking for a way down, when he heard the sound of men and horses. He ducked back into the trees and crouched, releasing the safety catch on his loaded pistol as he saw the two riders coming through the path toward him. They rode slowly past his hiding place to the edge of the forest and then back again, and he continued scrambling and sliding across the muddy ground, keeping the forest to the left of him and the canyon to his right.

Again and again he was forced to retrace his steps as the slope suddenly gave way to even slipperier rocks or a precipitous drop. Even going slowly, there was a good chance of breaking a leg or even his neck, and he decided to look for shelter. He soon found a dip in the ground beneath an overhanging rock, and after poking around with his sword to see that there were no snakes, he lay down inside it as the rain began to fall again.

As he lay shivering in his wet clothes, curled up beneath a rock like a hunted animal, hiding from men who wanted to kill him, he remembered an old tapestry he'd seen in a French church during his first campaign in Flanders. It depicted a group of aristocratic hunters surprised by the skeletal figure of death riding a pale white horse. He could still see the dumbfounded expressions on their faces, as if those rich gentlemen had believed that they were somehow protected from the plague by their wealth and status.

Ventura had no such illusions. There were men who died in their beds in their old age, surrounded by their loving wives, their children and grandchildren, with time to make their last confession and receive the last sacrament. But that would not be his fate. In many ways he considered it astonishing to have lasted so long. Time and again he had felt himself close to death and abandoned himself to it, and death had not taken him. There'd been moments in the slave pens of Algiers when he had not only expected to die but had actually wanted it. Death had not been ready to receive him then, but he had no doubt that it would come for him one day, in a time and place of its choosing, in some wild place like this, leaving his body unmourned and even unburied, to be eaten by animals—in a tavern brawl or a Madrid backstreet at some assassin's hand among strangers or on a battlefield in one of the king's wars in Flanders, France or Africa. And whatever form death took, he did not expect to die in his bed with his children or grandchildren around him.

For some men the fear of death was inseparable from the fear of hell, but the afterlife was not his concern. Years ago, at the monastery in Salamanca, he had learned that Thomas Aquinas believed that the soul was independent of the body and could therefore survive without it after death, but he could not understand how this could be true. Where did the soul go? What form did it take if it had no body? These questions passed through his mind as he lay there on the stony ground listening to the wolves calling back and forth to one another in the distance and watching the clouds slowly part to reveal a pale half-moon and a sky thick with stars. He picked out the constellations that he recognized and conjured others from his imagination in the shapes of dragons, ships, animals and scimitars.

Perhaps that was where the soul went after death. Perhaps all the souls of all the people who had ever existed were floating up there in a stream of dust among those fields of stars. But it was also possible that Aquinas was wrong, that the only world that really mattered was the one he saw with his own eyes and felt in his own flesh. Whatever the truth, he considered
himself fortunate to have survived in it for so long when he should have died many times over and to have seen and done things that men who lived to twice his age would never experience, and he fell into a surprisingly restful sleep.

He woke just after dawn, to find himself facing a lynx only a few yards off, staring at him with its yellow eyes. The animal had clearly been investigating whether he was dead and ready to be eaten, and as soon as he reached for his sword, it leaped away from him and was gone. The sky was just beginning to lighten, so that he was able to see his way more easily, but his clothes were wet and torn, there were bruises on his arms and legs, and his knee was stiff and throbbed painfully. It was nevertheless essential to make progress before the bandits began looking for him, and he left his hiding place and continued to work his way downhill, till the sun was high enough to dry out his clothes and he was able to estimate his approximate direction as southeast. Even by daylight he could not avoid retracing his steps or seek out a more gradual and circuitous route to avoid a gorge or rock face.

•   •   •

A
LL
THESE
DIVERSIONS
made it impossible to follow a direct route down from the mountains, so that by midday he did not feel as if he had made any progress at all. In the early afternoon, he saw a large column of horsemen heading downward from what he believed was the direction of the bandit camp. At first he thought they might be looking for him, but the column was moving too quickly and the speed of their progress suggested they had found an easier route down than the one he had taken.

It took him nearly an hour to reach their line of descent. When he did, he found himself on a well-worn path that led into more open country. Soon the first signs of human habitation became visible on the distant slopes and valleys around, and he was able to make out the occasional fortified tower, what looked like a monastery and the distant specks of grazing sheep and
cattle. He had been walking on the path for nearly an hour when he saw an earthen hut up ahead, with a thin stream of smoke rising out of it and a tethered donkey sheltering from the sun beneath a tree alongside a handful of cows and goats grazing in a nearby field. Its single glassless window emanated a smell of cooked meat that reminded him that he had not eaten in nearly a day, and he knocked on the wooden door.

“Who is it?” a male voice called warily.

“A stranger who means no harm. And who needs your help.”

A moment later the door opened and a haggard, dirty little man peered out at him warily. The
montañés
was wearing homemade shoes made from animal hide, and his ragged, patched tunic was as filthy as his face and smelled as if he had been wearing it all his life. Behind him Ventura glimpsed an equally ragged woman and various children, who were staring at him out of the gloom like creatures from some forgotten subterranean world.

“My horse broke its leg,” Ventura said. “Can you give me something to eat, brother?”

“You have money?” the man asked.

“I have nothing to give you but the grace of God, my friend, and the gratitude of one Christian to another.”

The man's eyes flickered across Ventura's leather jerkin and the two pistols, and he stepped back to let him in.

“God bless you,” Ventura said. The doorway was so low that he could not stand fully upright, and he had to bend his head as he stepped across the dirt floor. The only furniture in the hut consisted of a stool and a mattress. Crumpled blankets lay on piles of straw where a little boy appeared to be sleeping. The fireplace had no real chimney except for a hole in the roof, and there was so much smoke that it was an effort for Ventura to stop himself from coughing. Nevertheless, he was hungry enough to eat whatever was in the blackened copper pot, and he was about to sit down on the floor when the
montañés
pointed toward the stool and shooed his three dirty and sickly-looking children outside as though he were scattering flies.

He murmured something to one of them and shut the door behind him. Ventura unbuckled his sword frog and laid his weapons on the ground. He perched on the little stool and looked at the little wooden cross on the wall above the fireplace, where the woman was spooning stew into a bowl. It was a good thing that this couple believed in salvation, he thought, because their lives on earth had clearly not gone well. The woman had no more flesh on her than her husband did, and poverty had stripped her face of whatever womanly features it might once have had. She served him a plate of chickpeas flavored with flecks of meat, which he spooned down greedily despite the fetid smell, the smoke, and the occasional agitated groan emanating from the child on the bed.

“Is he sick?” Ventura asked.

The woman nodded and went over to the mattress to dab at the boy's forehead with a damp cloth. So far she had not said a word, and Ventura sensed that they were not used to talking to strangers and probably not even to each other. He was still staring at the sick child when he felt the sharp blade pressing against his throat.

“One move and I'll gut you like a fish,” the man said. “Leanor, take his pistols.”

The woman gaped at him uncomprehendingly. “Andrés, what are you doing?”

“This is the
alguacil
the boys in the forest are after. Whoever hands him over gets a reward. Move, woman!”

“You're making a mistake, Andrés,” Ventura warned. “Now, let me go and I'll forget this happened.”

“
You're
the one who made a mistake!” Andrés pressed the knife a little deeper, till Ventura felt a trickle of blood down his throat. Leanor approached him from the bed and nervously unclipped his two pistols. As she did so, Ventura kicked out with one foot, catching her in the belly, and propelled himself backward with the other. Leonor fell onto the child, who let out a cry as Andrés tumbled toward the door behind Ventura and
dropped the knife. He had no time to pick it up before Ventura was straddling him, holding the parrying dagger against his throat.

“Now, that is no way to treat a guest, is it?” he said.

“God's mercy! Don't kill me!” Andrés pleaded.

Ventura had forgotten about the woman behind him, but she now struck him a fearful blow across the head with one of the pistols and sent him reeling to the floor. Leanor stood watching with her hands over her mouth as Andrés retrieved his knife and stabbed Ventura in the shoulder. Ventura grunted and jammed the poniard down into one of his bare feet, pinning him to the floor. Andrés let out a howl and lay clutching his bleeding foot as the door burst open and the three children ran toward their father shouting and crying. Ventura extracted the blade and wiped it on the shepherd's patchwork tunic as Leanor crouched by the fire and pointed the pistol at his chest with both hands.

“You need to take the safety catch off first,” he said with a sigh. “And I wouldn't bother, because that one's not loaded. Now, give it to me. It's only because of your children that I'm not going to kill your husband—if that's what this creature is. But you'd better find something to stop this bleeding before I lose patience with the pair of you.”