The Devils of Cardona (6 page)

“And a veteran of Granada and Lepanto,” Gabriel said proudly. “But he never talks of it!”

“Some things are better forgotten than remembered,” Mendoza replied.

He had arranged for a carriage to take the three of them to the stables to load the horses and mules, and Magda looked tearful as she came out into the hallway to say good-bye and saw their weapons, knapsacks and saddlebags, and the wooden bureau that contained Gabriel's writing materials.

“You're sure you have enough ink and paper?” Mendoza asked him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Must he go with you, Don Bernardo?” Magdalena pleaded. “Suppose something happens to him?”

“Now, Magda, we're going to the Pyrenees—not Barbary.”

The housekeeper embraced Gabriel and clung on to him, much to his embarrassment and Ventura's amusement. The carriage stood outside, and they rode over to the stables with their bags, with Ventura riding alongside. Necker was already waiting for them with Daniel and Martín, the two Valladolid militiamen whom Mendoza had managed to wrest from the city council to serve as special constables. Neither of them looked much older than twenty, and Necker towered over them, with his craggy, blocklike face and deep-set green eyes staring out from beneath his three-cornered
alguacil
's hat and his slightly protruding jaw that always reminded Mendoza of the king's father.

Both of them had served as harquebusiers in the king's armies during the conquest of the Azores the previous year, and Necker assured Mendoza
in his impeccable but heavily accented Castilian that they were men of ability and experience. In addition to pistols, swords and daggers, both men had brought two short matchlock carbines or escopetas, which hung in holsters from their horses' saddles.

Mendoza would have preferred flintlock carbines in the mountains, but Necker said that they were the only weapons the militia commander had been willing to part with. If Necker was pleased with the two militiamen, he looked less impressed by Ventura and cast an openly disdainful gaze at his plumed hat, his silver-handled sword and crab-hilt parrying dagger, the ornate pistols clipped to his belt and his knee-length deerskin boots. Ventura merely smiled back and looked dubiously at the enormous double-bladed two-hander that was tied to the saddle of Necker's horse.

“You don't see many of those relics nowadays,” he said. “Is it for chopping wood?”

“It was my father's sword,” Necker said, bristling.

“As long as you know how to use it.”

“I do, sir.” Necker tapped the hilt of the shorter Landsknecht sword that hung from his left side and the pistol that hung from the other. “And I also know how to use these.”

Mendoza now explained the purpose of the investigation for the first time. Daniel and Martín did not look pleased to hear that they would be away from their homes for some weeks and possibly months in the Morisco lands of Aragon, but the devout Necker's face darkened when Mendoza told them that a priest had been murdered.

“So Moors did this?” he growled.

“That's what we are going to Aragon to find out.” He noticed that Martín was looking at him with a perplexed expression. “You have a question, Constable?”

“Yes, sir. Where is Aragon, sir?”

“It's in the Pyrenees. Next to France.”

Martín looked none the wiser. “Where is France?” he asked.

“You just keep heading north,” Ventura explained, pointing in that direction. “Until you bump into some mountains. Then you cross them.”

After loading their mules and horses, they rode slowly back to the Palace of the Chancery to pick up the expenses for the journey. Outside the main entrance, horses and carriages were lined up on the street, accompanied by their drivers and servants, and they followed two handcuffed prisoners who were being led to trial by their guards into the main patio, which was thronged with lawyers, judges and
oidores
in black robes and clients, plaintiffs and defendants waiting for civil and criminal cases, some of whom were already shouting and arguing with one another as notaries and scriveners hurried back and forth clutching sheaves of papers.

It was the usual bedlam, and Mendoza thought that he would not be sorry to be away from it for a while as he and Necker pushed through the crowd to the accountant's office. They returned to the waiting horses, carrying four bulging bags of coins, and Mendoza turned his back on the king's courts and led the expedition out of the city, toward the Crown of Aragon and the distant mountains where His Majesty's laws were being flouted.

rom the gallery overlooking the Patio of Santa Isabel, Inquisitor Mercader looked down at the ornate hedges and orange trees, the bubbling water fountain and the white marble walkways with their lobed Moorish arches. As always they charmed and soothed him, and the fact that they had been built by Moors did not detract from his enjoyment. On the contrary it seemed to him a fitting outcome that the Aljafería Palace that the infidel invaders had constructed centuries ago in Zaragoza and inscribed with prayers to Allah and his false prophet had now become the headquarters of the Inquisition of Aragon. If anything this transformation only enhanced the pleasure that he took in the serrated stucco workings, the geometrical designs and gold-paneled ceilings.

Such buildings were no longer possible in Spain, not since the last conversions of the Aragonese Moors in the
second decade of the century. Some of their mosques and public buildings had already been torn down or reconditioned centuries before, and those that remained had undergone the same fate. But it was no bad thing to retain some reminders of what had once been and never could be again, and the massive walls and towers and the defensive ditch provided a formidable barrier against an Aragonese population that, unlike that of Castile, had never wanted the Holy Office in the first place and still resented its presence after nearly a century.

Beyond these walls lay a kingdom infected with heresy and sedition, where Moriscos brazenly followed the law of Muhammad with the complicity of their Christian masters. And nowhere was the infection more advanced than in Cardona, in the mountains of the far north where the infidel Moor known as the Redeemer had called upon the Moriscos to rise up and make war on all the Christians. Mercader pictured him now like a wild creature—hairy, bearded and wearing a turban, with the stink of the forest and the stain of his poisonous faith on his dark skin—looking down from some mountain cave with mad, staring eyes, the image of his damned trickster Prophet. He imagined the Redeemer in the church at Belamar de la Sierra, standing over the body of the dead priest with his scimitar dripping blood, while the Moriscos laughed and looked on approvingly like the murderous savages they were.

These images filled Mercader with disgust. At the same time, he felt a sense of satisfaction and keen anticipation as he imagined the Morisco killer who had dared to threaten him by name, gazing down from his mountainous lair and dreaming of entering Zaragoza with the sultan's army. Whoever this monster was, he no doubt believed, like his fellow heretics, that he was beyond the reach of the law and the Inquisition. But he was wrong. Because all this was about to change, for now the time prophesied by Luke was coming, in which there would be “nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.”

These thoughts were interrupted by the sound of footsteps, and a moment later Secretary Bleda appeared at the top of the stairs, accompanied by the tonsured commissioner of the Huesca Inquisition, Domingo Herrero, and his green-clad
familiar
Diego Pachuca.

Mercader looked at them in surprise. “Good afternoon, señores,” he said. “I did not expect you to return so soon. Have you made arrests?”

“We have not, Excellency,” Herrero replied nervously.

“And why is that?” Mercader's voice was calm, but his eyes were as hard as polished glass.

“We were not able to enter Belamar, Your Excellency. We were prevented from doing so.”

“Prevented by whom?”

“By Sánchez!” replied Pachuca indignantly. “He said the Holy Office was not permitted to enter Cardona without the approval of the Cortes.”

“Not permitted?” Mercader repeated scornfully. “So the Inquisition must ask the Aragonese parliament for permission even when a priest is murdered and a church defiled?”

“We did, Excellency,” Herrero said. “We told Sánchez we had come to read out the Edict of Grace. He insisted that we had no legal authority.”

“How fortunate that we have bailiffs to explain the king's laws to us. I assume he didn't stop you by himself?”

“No, Your Excellency,” Pachuca replied. “He had forty men with him. And well armed, too. He said the countess had given orders that no one was to enter Belamar without her permission.”

“So this Redeemer has threatened the Inquisition directly. He has killed a priest and promised to kill more Christians. Yet this Christian countess will not allow the Inquisition to enter her estates to find him.” Mercader grimaced and shook his head at the absurdity of the situation he had described. “This will not stand,” he said darkly. “This woman will not defy me.”

“Baron Vallcarca has been more cooperative, Excellency,” said Herrero. “He has asked us to carry out an investigation at a Morisco village in his
señorio
.”

“What village?”

“Todos Santos, Excellency. The baron has received reports of sorcery and witchcraft there.”

“And why have I not heard of this place before?”

“We have only just received information about it,” Herrero replied. “We believe that these reports are sufficient to warrant a full investigation.”

“Baron Vallcarca is a good and faithful Christian. Very well, you may proceed. But we will return to Belamar. These delaying tactics merely confirm the countess's complicity in the depraved practices of her vassals. You will await my orders, and the next time you return to Belamar, you will not be stopped.”

Herrero bowed, and Bleda showed the two of them out. Afterward Mercader remained staring for a long time at the gardens and the wisps of cloud that drifted above the patio. The countess's latest act of defiance was frustrating. Now letters and petitions would have to be written and representations made to individuals and institutions, a process that might take weeks or months. But the Inquisition was tenacious, and its authority would prevail. Witchcraft and sorcery were of no real interest or importance to Mercader, nor was Todos Santos. What he wanted were the Moriscos of Belamar. It was only a matter of time before he got them.

And when that happened, the Moriscos and their Redeemer and the mistress who protected them would all discover that no one was immune to God's justice.

•   •   •

E
VERY
YEAR
, in the first or second week of April, the Quintana brothers brought their sheep back up from their winter pasture on the plain of the
Ebro to their home village above the Gállego River for the summer. Their father generally advised them to leave before the other shepherds, in order to keep their herds separate and avoid the confrontations that invariably ensued when they brought their herds up through the valleys and across the old drover routes through the Morisco lands that the shepherds had used for centuries. Every spring and autumn, there were quarrels and fights between the Old Christian mountain men and the Moriscos, and some of them were fatal.

These fights generally took place when the
montañeses
drove their cows, goats or sheep right through plowed or cultivated Morisco fields, to the fury of the farmers and peasants who worked on them. Such damage was not always easy to avoid, because the larger herds often strayed from their allotted paths, and the drover routes that shepherds had used for centuries to move their flocks back and forth between the plains and the mountains sometimes led through lands that had been placed under cultivation, where the rights of passage were still disputed by the drovers on the one hand and the lords and their Morisco vassals on the other.

There were also incidents in which the mountain men deliberately led their animals through the Morisco fields and orchards in order to show them that they alone would decide who had the right to cross them. Most of these shepherds were Old Christians whose blood was unstained by any taint of Jew or Moor, and many of them had no compunction about driving their cattle directly through Morisco lands, especially when they were traveling in large groups. The Quintana brothers avoided these confrontations, because their father always advised them to avoid trouble, and they were good Christian boys who obeyed their father, even though they saw him for only four months of the year. This spring they were late getting away, because it had been a harsh and bitter winter even down on the plains, and many lambs had died and others had been born so weak that the brothers had kept them back for extra feeding. On the morning of April 27, the feast day of Our Lady of Moreneta, the Black Virgin of Montserrat,
they abandoned the stone hut where they had spent the winter and set off with two mules and fifty sheep on the
cañada
that led around Huesca and through Vallcarca and Cardona.

Their parents had a small statue of La Moreneta at home, and usually the brothers arrived in time to pay homage to her with a candle and prayers, and their mother cooked a special lamb stew in her honor. This year only the feast would still be waiting for them once they had crossed the Morisco lands. Like most drovers, the Quintanas were armed. The eldest brother, Pepe, carried a sword and also a light matchlock hunting rifle, though their father had specifically ordered them not to hunt until they had passed through the
señorio
even if an opportunity presented itself, because that was another potential source of dispute. Juanxo Quintana was also armed with a short sword, and even though Simón Quintana, the youngest, was barely fifteen years old, he carried a hunting dagger in addition to the slingshot he used to keep the herd from straying. None of the brothers had ever used these weapons against a human being, but they were glad to have them when they entered the Belamar Valley on May 5, because the news of the murder of the priest had already reached the lower plains, and there were stories circulating among the shepherds of a Moorish bandit in the mountains above Belamar who cut the throats of Christians and drank their blood.

As usual they aimed to get their flock well above the town by the end of the day and spend the night in the next valley beyond it before pushing on toward their home village the next morning. They took the usual route along the right-hand side of the valley, using stones to keep the herd bunched and moving at the same unhurried speed and preventing wayward animals from straying onto the plowed or cultivated fields, orchards and vineyards. The valley looked much the same as it had the previous year as they passed laborers chipping away in the fields and terraces and weeding with forks and hoes, in some cases helped by their wives and children.
As they drew closer toward the ravine below the town, they saw men and women going about their business above them, and only the barking dogs showed any interest in their presence.

By the time they began to climb up through the woods, the three brothers had already begun to relax as the line of sheep spread out along the well-beaten path. By the early evening, they had crossed over the ridge and reached the higher valley, where they usually camped. The brothers were in a cheerful mood, knowing that they were less than a day away from their family and neighbors, whom they had not seen for nearly eight months. They ate the same supper of bread, oil and vinegar that they had eaten every day since leaving the plains, and Pepe undertook to light a fire while his brothers went to gather more firewood from the edge of the forest.

Simón was just returning from the woods with a pile of branches when the men on horseback came bursting out of the woods on the other side of the field, riding hard toward the campsite and scattering the sheep before them. From where he was standing, their faces were nothing more than misshapen white blobs, and it wasn't until they came closer that he realized they were wearing masks. He saw Pepe run for the rifle, but he did not even have time to load it before one of the riders came alongside him and shot him in the back with a long pistol.

The firewood dropped from Simón's hands as his brother toppled over, and Juanxo came running toward him, pursued by two of the horsemen. One of the riders leaned out to his side, with one hand holding the reins, and brought the curved falchion sword down into Juanxo's neck. Pepe was still trying to crawl away as the rider who had shot him walked slowly toward him and planted a foot on either side of his body. Simón watched as he drew a long pommeled dagger, squatted down and drove it into his brother's back, pushing on the round hilt with both hands. It was only then that Simón turned and ran back toward the forest. He had nearly reached the trees when he saw the flashes of white ahead of him, and the crossbow
bolt struck him in the chest just above the heart. The grass seemed to turn to liquid beneath his feet as he sank down into it and the sheep ran past him, with no one left to guide them.