The Devils of Cardona (7 page)

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T
HE
JOURNEY
NORTHEAST
from Valladolid to Zaragoza took twelve days, even though Mendoza followed the most direct route through Aranda de Duero, Soria and Tarazona across the Castilian plain known as the
meseta
. Gabriel had never ridden for so long and so far. After two days he could barely walk upright, and it was an effort even to get back on his mule. By the fourth day, he had begun to get used to being in the saddle, but the roads were poor and sometimes almost nonexistent. In some places they had to lead their animals knee- and even waist-deep through water, because the road had been washed away and a bridge had collapsed. On some days they traveled for hours along dusty roads through an interminable, almost treeless plain, where only the occasional farm, castle or shepherd's stone hut provided anything to relieve the emptiness. And then they would come across a beautiful town like Aranda, with its fine churches and squares, its shops and markets and its ancient stone bridge spanning the green banks and rows of poplars that lined the Duero.

On some nights they camped out on the great plain in the open air, and he preferred this to the grubby inns run by fat men who looked as if they had gone to sleep in their unwashed aprons and by wide-hipped women with sullen faces and unwashed and unbrushed hair, where they slept two to a bed on dirt-encrusted sheets red with blood from mosquito bites or sometimes on the floor, in low rooms that reeked of wine, brandy and bacon. Even though they ate the meat that they brought themselves, the inns were insalubrious and evil-smelling, with walls black from smoke and plates and cups that were as greasy as the tables.

He preferred to camp outside, despite the cold, and eat the raisins, fruits and fresh bread that they bought from markets or peasant roadside
vendors. One evening Ventura used his crossbow to shoot a rabbit, which they cooked at the campfire. On another afternoon Mendoza bought a lamb from a peasant and Ventura slaughtered it on the spot before slinging it over his saddle. Most days they rode from early morning until late in the afternoon, because Don Bernardo was determined to reach Aragon as quickly as possible.

Despite the physical discomfort and the primitive conditions, Gabriel felt happy. In Valladolid he had risen early and gone to bed early. Apart from Don Bernardo and Magdalena, his companions were classmates, tutors, teachers and priests, and the boundaries of his world had consisted of the Pisuerga and Esgueva Rivers and the poorer suburbs that Magda always told him to keep away from.

Now there were no classmates to call him “Moor,” “bum boy” and “slave,” and he thought of the envy that his tormentors would feel if they could see him riding in the company of policemen and soldiers on a mission in the service of His Majesty the king to the land of James the Conqueror and Ferdinand the Catholic. Every day he saw a world that most of them had never seen, and the more he saw of his native land, the more impossible it seemed to him that there could be a greater country than Spain, or that the Turk or any ruler in Christendom could ever hope to conquer it.

He took an almost proprietary pride in its walled cities and strong castles, in the monasteries and convents perched on mountainsides and cliff edges. Despite Mendoza's urgency, Gabriel's guardian invariably found time to stop at churches and cathedrals or a fine palace or public building and admire the paintings, the wood and stone carvings and gilded altar panels or retablos, or point out some example of fine workmanship in the construction of a pillar or an arch or pictorial skill in the features of Jesus and Mary or the face of an apostle from a Gothic bas-relief, or examine a few rocks that he said might have belonged to the ruins of Numancia, where the Celts of Iberia had once committed suicide rather than surrender to Scipio's legions.

He cast a more critical eye at the sight of fields that should have been under cultivation and had instead been left barren for no good reason, at streams and creeks that should have been dammed up or directed into canals, at bridges that had not been maintained. Such things were bad for Spain, he said, because a hungry population was an unhappy population, and unhappiness bred lawlessness, crime and rebellion.

Gabriel knew that these observations were part of his education, but he was always more interested in the people they encountered than he was in his guardian's meditations on architecture, agriculture or road maintenance. Along the roads they encountered a wide variety of people from all trades and classes, from muleteers and merchants carrying carts piled with merchandise to priests, monks, nuns and soldiers; from sellers of real or faked indulgences to French and Italian craftsmen; from laborers and stonemasons heading for Valladolid and Madrid in search of work to nobles in gleaming black coaches with leather interiors and silk curtains to protect their passengers from the dust. Some traveled alone on foot or horseback; others had formed groups for protection as they moved along roads where the only visible signs of law and order were the constables from the Holy Brotherhood who intermittently patrolled the highways of Castile.

Many members of the Santa Hermandad looked like bandits and highwaymen themselves. They were grim, hard-faced men who wore leather chest armor and bristled with weapons. On Mendoza's party's fifth day out, they saw a small crowd standing by the roadside just outside a village. As they drew closer, they saw three members of the Hermandad holding a young man to the ground while another stood waiting with an ax. The young man was almost naked, and he was writhing desperately in an attempt to escape. Necker paused to ask what was happening, and it was not until they had ridden past that he told Gabriel that the Holy Brothers were about to cut off the young man's right hand because he had been caught thieving in a market.

They also encountered peasants sitting outside mud houses, in rough
yarn shirts and hide jackets, some of whom were barefoot or wearing tattered rope-soled sandals, and shepherds with their flocks whose dirty, unwashed faces and primitive appearance shocked him. Everywhere there were paupers and vagabonds moving from one place to another, who Mendoza said would have been arrested had he encountered them in Valladolid. Some were army veterans, missing arms and legs, who clustered around them brandishing their stumps or pointing at their mutilated faces, crying out “Lepanto! Lepanto!” and the names of other wars and battles.

Mendoza said that these experiences were sometimes invented, and Lepanto was a particular favorite of beggars because of the religious obligation it entailed. To have fought at Lepanto was to have fought in a war blessed by the pope and all the great princes of Christendom, and it was incumbent on all good Christians to treat its veterans with charity, reverence and gratitude. Ventura sometimes caught them out by inventing the names of ships and asking if they had fought on them, and Mendoza threatened to arrest those who said they had.

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T
HE
PLEASURE
OF
THE
JOURNEY
was greatly enhanced by Gabriel's traveling companions. They spoke of cities he had only read or heard about, such as Antwerp, Paris, Rome, Tunis and Naples, with the easy familiarity with which the people of Valladolid spoke about their neighborhoods or surrounding villages. Even Daniel and Martín had been to Lisbon and the Azores, despite the fact that they were only a few years older than Gabriel. In the evenings they passed stories back and forth across the campfire or the tavern table, of wars and battles in the Alpujarras and the marshes of Flanders, of wounds and narrow escapes, of bandits and criminals arrested or killed.

They were men of action who seemed afraid of nothing. They drank wine and brandy and cursed—particularly Ventura, who uttered a constant stream of profanities despite Necker's obvious disapproval. Mendoza took
little part in these exchanges. Most evenings he rarely talked at all but sat reading his book or drawing faces or architectural features from memory in the leather-bound sketchbook that he had brought with him.

Of the two special constables, Gabriel liked Daniel more. Martín was taciturn and morose and gave the impression that he regarded a scribe who had never borne arms as a burden to be carried rather than an asset to the group. Daniel was more cheerful. One afternoon when they were out gathering firewood together, he explained that Martín had a wife and child in Valladolid and didn't want to spend a long time away from them.

“Me, I'm happy to be away,” Daniel said. “Just as long as I get back by next summer.”

“Why next summer?”

“I'm getting married,
chico
. Settling down. I'm going to work on my wife's parents' farm. I've had enough of bad food and officers screaming in my face. And I'd rather ride a good woman by night than a bad horse by day, if you know what I mean?”

Gabriel did not, but he sensed that he should. All this manly talk made him conscious of his own inexperience and bookishness and filled him with a determination to show his companions that he was more than a scribe. He saddled and unsaddled mules and horses. He gathered firewood and learned how to strike two flints and make a fire himself. He also tried out his companions' weapons. Almost every evening he persuaded one of them to give him basic instructions in fencing positions and technique. Necker's zweihänder was too heavy and unwieldy. Gabriel preferred Daniel's short cinquedea with its thick base almost as wide as a hand tapering off to a sharp point, his guardian's side sword with its bluish tempered steel or Ventura's basilard parrying dagger and swept-hilt Italian rapier with its S-shaped guard, its silver pommel and leather grip and the Latin words
Usque mors
—“Until death”—which Ventura had had engraved in the blade just above the guard.

With these weapons Gabriel learned how to position his feet, to thrust,
lunge and parry and to gauge distance and anticipate his opponent's movements. He also learned about the different schools of fencing. Ventura talked about Euclid's theories of geometry, about the relative importance of obtuse and right angles in the meeting of the blades, about the exact distance of each step and the positioning of the feet for a thrust and lunge, about maintaining distance through circular movement within the same sphere and the importance of maintaining the same parallel distance between the rapier and parrying dagger.

Ventura used Italian as well as Spanish expressions to describe particular movements and strikes. He talked of the
mediotajo
—the cut from the elbow—the
stramazzone
—the flip of the point—and the
stoccata—
the thrust delivered under the opponent's sword with a turning of the wrist. Necker had learned his sword fighting in the Holy Roman emperor's mercenary Landsknecht and was not impressed by Ventura's intellectual approach. He often made disparaging remarks about the lighter blade that Ventura used and his enthusiasm for the new Italian methods, and Ventura teased him that his own sword was good for sacking Rome but not much else. One evening as they were setting up camp in an open field where Mendoza said that Numancia might once have stood, Ventura playfully insisted that the Passau wolf on Necker's two-hander was a fake and annoyed him so much that the German challenged him to a mock duel.

Mendoza agreed, on condition that there was no blood or physical contact. For more than half an hour, the two men fought in the open air, and Ventura eventually won the argument, as he effortlessly parried and evaded the big German's slashing attacks before finally dropping onto one knee to deliver what would have been a killing blow. As Gabriel watched them fight and listened to the clash of their swords, he thought of the legions at Numancia, of Roman gladiators, and imagined himself and his companions as a band of knights embarking on a great quest.

As much as he admired their skill, Gabriel could not imagine himself actually thrusting a sword into another man's body, and he could not
entirely shake off his nervousness whenever a sword was pointed at him. His favorite weapons were Ventura's pair of matching flintlock pistols. Sometimes he held them simply in order to admire their lacquered finish, the mother-of-pearl inlay of hunters chasing deer and the delicate floral designs in the metal barrels. The first time he held them, he thought they were the most beautiful objects he had ever seen.

“Has anyone ever tried to steal them?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” Ventura replied. “But I still have them.”

That evening Ventura taught him how to load and cock a pistol, and Gabriel fired two shots at a piece of wood that he set up as a target. On both occasions he missed. That same evening Daniel demonstrated how to load, aim and fire his escopeta. The militiaman hit the target from just under eighty yards, but when Gabriel tried from a much shorter distance, the kickback knocked him backward and the weapon nearly slipped from his hands, to general hilarity. That night he lay awake for a long time as the others slept, looking up at the stars and imagining himself performing heroic deeds and wondering whether he had the courage required. It was comforting to think that he was accompanied by men who did and who would not be deterred or intimidated by the prospect of bandits or the dubious-looking characters they sometimes met on the roads who cast furtive predatory glances at their horses and possessions. It was especially reassuring to think that he'd be accompanied by such men when they arrived in the Morisco lands. He had never met a Morisco, as far as he knew, but he had heard terrible stories about them. Magda said that the Moriscos of Granada were more like devils than humans. She told him that they drowned priests in barrels of wine, that they ate the hearts of Christians and cut the throats of young babies. Lying there beneath his thin blanket, Gabriel tried to imagine what kind of men would do such things, and he felt a chill that was only partly due to the cool breeze that blew across the barren
meseta
. For a few moments, he imagined that he heard faint screams that might have been his own.