The Horse Healer (45 page)

Diego watched Tomás take out a long horn from his saddle. He brought it to his lips and blew three times, very hard, so that it resounded across the esplanade. An arrow struck his thigh just as he blew the last one. After an initial jolt of pain, without thinking twice, he broke the wood in half and threw it away with a curse. In fury, he grabbed his bow and fired arrows all around. Diego counted five enemies who fell by his hands.

“To the right! Protect yourself with your shields! Now!” Otón shouted.

Almost without time to react, a hellish rain of arrows fell upon them from a neighboring hill. They were Turkish archers. Luckily they weren't mounted and soon they'd been left behind.

Diego looked behind him and saw with a tremor that they were being tailed by no less than fifty soldiers. He was taken back in time to his flight from the inn, not so far from where he was now. He stroked Sabba. She was sweating as she never had before, just like the rest of the horses, which were all showing immense effort.

“The doors are opening!” Pinardo yelled to them.

“Look now,” Bruno said to Diego.

When he looked in that direction, they saw coming from inside the walls a hundred armed horsemen who formed a long passageway to cover their entrance. Others flanked the first group, and then they began a rapid cavalcade to catch up with them. They had their lances pointed at the enemy and approached screaming and shouting.

Diego felt great emotion when they met. The men wore Calatravan insignia, powerful weapons, brave faces. As soon as Diego and the others were in their midst, they closed ranks behind them to cover their entrance into the fortress.

When Diego was inside, relieved by the protection of those solid walls, he sighed, unable to believe what he'd just lived through.

Bruno de Oñate approached him and clapped him hard on the back.

“Welcome to the castle of Salvatierra!”

II.

A
sharp whistling interrupted his sleep.

Diego jumped from the bed and ran to the courtyard of the fortress as the rest of the knights were doing.

The noise came from outside the walls but was coming closer. He looked up, instinctively, and somebody shouted: “Catapult! Take cover!”

Diego ran, without knowing to where.

A second creaking sound came, and then a third, almost at the same time. An enormous stone came over the double walls and fell over a shack where the water vessels were kept. In an instant, everything was thrown into the air. Another one struck the walls of the tower, and a third, judging from the tremors it produced and the thunderous sound with which it struck, must have landed on the walls of one of the terraces.

They were followed by many more that seemed to do minimal damage to the walls or other structures, thanks to the fortress's solid construction. But the upper levels, were the masonry work was more shoddy, did not resist as well, and crumbled in places.

“It's been a few days with not much action,” one of the knights commented. When he saw Diego doing nothing, he asked, “Can you tell me what you're doing standing there and not helping? Come with me to the battlements and shoot at anything that's moving down there below.” He passed him a crossbow and a quiver full of arrows.

They mounted a wooden stairway up to a long passageway that covered the perimeter of the outer wall. Diego looked out and saw a group of Saracens, some manning the four catapults and a few more with other siege machines. They were in the company of at least a hundred soldiers on horseback and twice as many infantry.

He dodged an arrow, saw who had shot it, and without hesitation he began to fire off his.

“Get used to this, you'll see it's pretty common. …” That voice could only belong to Bruno de Oñate.

“Is this how you wake up in Salvatierra?”

“What better way than with a little bit of action?” He laughed. “Now leave this for the others and follow me. We have lots to do and little time.”

Bruno went down to the courtyard, followed by Diego.

“Take cover!” someone shouted from the battlements.

They both looked at the sky and saw a projectile pass over their heads. They followed its trail until they saw it land on a carriage, destroying it. To Diego's surprise, Bruno showed little worry about all that was happening, while he himself continued to look into the sky nervously, fearing he would be crushed by one of those tremendous boulders.

“We'll train you. …” Bruna affirmed before he opened a trapdoor on the ground level on a side wing of the main building.

He crawled down into that narrow hole, watching his head, and told Diego to follow. They descended down a steep stairway until they arrived at a passageway beneath the fortress. Bruno took a torch from the wall.

“Train me for what?” Diego asked, imagining he meant fighting and strategy.

“To combat those fanatics, but not with arms, as a spy,” Bruno answered.

“Did I hear you right?”

“That's correct. That will be your task from now on.”

At the end of a long hallway there was a door. Bruno knocked three times.

“Password?” was heard from the other side.

“Sancho has not returned,” Bruno answered.

They heard the shifting of a lock and the door opened.

“Enter, sir.” The man looked at Diego. “And you are?”

“Diego de Malagón,” he said, offering his hand.

“My name is Teobaldo de Córdoba; come on in.”

The man was extraordinarily robust in appearance and stern in his expression. He accompanied them to a circular room lit by two skylights in the ceiling. In the center was a large round table with a symbol painted on it in black, two kestrels flying low over a Calatravan cross. Seated around the table were Otón de Frías, Tomás Ramírez, and Pinardo Márquez, as well as six other men, making twelve total. They greeted one another informally and then all sat.

Bruno looked everyone in the face, making himself the center of attention. As if all were one man, they raised their hands to their breasts and shouted their motto at the same time: “Faith and blood; God and valor!”

Bruno began to speak.

“Before entering into a matter as grave as the one I shall bring before you today, I want to present to you someone I would like to add to our group.” All looked at Diego. “Though some of you already know him, his name is Diego de Malagón.”

He greeted them without knowing well what he was doing there. Bruno went on talking.

“As we know from our own experience, the boy has a long period of apprenticeship before him, and I trust in your aid to get him through it as fast as possible. We have important missions to take care of in the coming months and we will need all the assistance possible. Diego speaks Arabic with ease and has as many reasons to hate our enemy as we do.” He looked at Otón and pointed to him. “From now on, you will be in charge of his training.”

“We will begin today,” he answered.

“Good, then let's move on to something else. As you know, some of us have gone to Provence in search of a better way to conceal our communications, and luckily, we have found it. It's a set of machines; one makes messages with letters and symbols, and the others are necessary to decode them. I will show you.”

He looked in his tunic and pulled out a bag of red cloth. Inside there was a small metal cylinder made of twelve discs that spun independently. Each disc had a series of letters and symbols that added up to seventy in total, Bruno said. The knights passed it around from hand to hand until it had made it back to Bruno.

“It's simple to use; I will give you an example.” He stood up to look for an inkpot and a white parchment. “First you must memorize a sequence of equivalencies that relates each symbol with a word. Then I will pass it to you. Keeping them in mind, to write a message you move the twelve wheels selecting the necessary symbols until you have a complete row.” He squeezed a lever that stopped the wheels from moving. “Once it is set, as it is now, you put ink on the surface and roll it on the parchment.” He passed it only once. “As you see, the result is a rectangle formed of twelve lines by five, seventy figures in total, completely illegible for anyone who doesn't have a second device.”

Bruno passed the parchment to his right for all to see.

“If you receive a message like this, you have to order the discs on your machine according to the sequence in the first line. Afterward, when you print the message on your parchment, it will show you a box of symbols that you will be able to understand.”

A murmur of approval moved through the room.

Bruno didn't want to give more details about that instrument and asked Diego to leave the room; later they would speak in private about one further issue that they needed to discuss.

Diego took leave of them and climbed the stairs, anxious to be back outside. He had never liked enclosed spaces, and that room was terribly damp and dark.

The siege of the fortress had stopped and he could walk across the broad courtyard and meditate with a certain calm about all that he had just lived through.

He had always considered himself a simple son of the soil, a commoner who had made his way through hard work, overcoming all sorts of obstacles to reach an uncommon degree of knowledge and skill for a person of his position. He had the profession of albéitar, the most noble of all of them, and saw himself serving others by caring for their animals. Maybe for that reason, it seemed unbelievable that they would now propose that he become a spy.

The incredible events that had happened during his last hours in Cuéllar had upset him, and he still wasn't able to react logically. He felt insecure and weak willed and had begun to distrust people since he had been betrayed, first by Mencía, then by Marcos.

Far from Diego's thoughts, the meeting in the underground room followed its course.

“Let us speak about a project that could become the most important one entrusted to us up to now.” Bruno paused and felt the tension in the air. He filled his lungs with air and continued. “The mission comes from the king himself and is part of a complex plan that we will all take part in.” He took a sip of water. “For the moment, I can only tell you that a grand battle is being planned, the most decisive one that has occurred to this date. We have been asked to prepare for it by stepping up our spying in Seville, where we unfortunately only have two men at present.”

“The others have been arrested,” Otón reminded them. “We haven't made any progress there since the Almohads have had their new man in charge of spying. We know nothing of him except that he has improved their information services and the efficiency of their people. We also believe he has managed to infiltrate our empire with a number of agents. If only I could get a hold of them …” Otón closed his hand around the imaginary neck of a Saracen.

“I know we are talking about a very difficult task, but we have shown we can work in worse conditions. Remember that it is a direct order of the king, and we have no choice but to carry it out.”

All, in unison, pledged their complete obedience to the mission.

“From now on, we will work in groups on different tasks until we have managed to better our position in his territories. We have to be better trained and ready to go anywhere we are asked. I will bring you up to date on the rest of the plans as soon as the dates are confirmed.”

Otón left the room first, as soon as the meeting was over, to look for Diego.

“Do you want to meet some nice girls?”

“There are women in Salvatierra?”

“You can tell me when you meet them. … Now follow me, we're going up into the tower.”

Diego had thought it over several times and couldn't bear not to ask it any longer.

“Otón, I would like to be in charge of the stables. Do you think Bruno would let me?”

“For that job, we already have a farrier and he's very good at what he does. Regardless, I will mention it. I don't think he'll be opposed to it, given your profession as albéitar.”

They rose to the final floor of the tower on a circular stairway that Diego thought would never end. Once they'd arrived, Otón placed a large key inside a lock, and before he opened, he told Diego to enter slowly and not to speak.

He pushed the door little by little and suddenly they were inside an enormous cage with hundreds of doves. When they saw them, some flew noisily to the other side of the room. An infinity of black, vivacious eyes looked at them in fear.

“Here you have our friends. … You thought it would be something else, right?” he cackled, placing both hands on his fat belly.

“Why do you have so many?” Diego had never cared much for birds and even less for their strong odor.

“They're the best messengers. They are trained to fly to certain points where our men are hidden and then to return home, to this castle. Their instinct for orientation is incredible, they are never wrong.”

“And to transport the message, do you tie it to their legs, the way I saw Tomás do?” A dove posted on his shoulder and looked at him with curiosity. Diego didn't hesitate to scare it off.

“That's what we did until recently, but those damned Turkish archers are so good they manage to knock them out of the air and neutralize our sensitive messages.” He took a dove and lifted a wing, digging about underneath. Not satisfied, he looked for another and then a third, until he'd found one to his liking. He showed it to him.

The bird's skin was tattooed, hidden under the feathers, with disordered, apparently meaningless letters.

“Take every fifth one and then put them together.”

Diego did it and suddenly a name, Jaén, appeared.

“This one arrived today, first thing in the morning, just before our meeting. It brought this message for one of our men, telling him his next destination. So it's no use to us anymore.” He twisted its neck until it snapped. “For now this system is more secure than parchment, but it's costlier.” He lifted one finger, then another. “For now, each mission costs us a pigeon.”

The sharp sound of a cornet reverberated in the dovecote. All at once, the birds began to fly madly around its interior, beating against the metallic mesh. Diego and Otón ran out and took a small flight of stairs until they arrived at a watch post. Otón peeked out from an embrasure to see what was happening.

“One of our men is arriving.”

He stepped back so that Diego could see the approach of a man on horseback, galloping furiously, chased by a group of Saracens. He calculated that he was less than half a league away from the entrance to the fortress.

“Why doesn't anyone go out to help him?” Diego turned to Otón, not understanding their passivity.

“Did you not notice the catapults? We're surrounded. To open the gates now and bring out the cavalry would be to put the fortress right into their hands. Unfortunately we can't do anything today. We have to trust in fate and in the protection of God, of course.”

Diego turned to look through the embrasure. The man was in the worst possible situation, with two of his pursuers about to catch him. He didn't have much farther to reach the fortress, but a length of rope landed on his horse's neck and stopped him. He defended himself as best he could, wounding one of his attackers, but he didn't see the other coming at his back with a sharp sword.

Diego turned away at the moment when the Saracen, after running him through and slicing off his head, stuck it on the tip of his lance to brandish it with pride before the onlookers in the castle.

That night, the pressure from the Muslims would not let up, though they did change their munitions used. From their catapults, they launched nets full of sticks and stones covered in flaming pitch. When they reached the straw or wood roofs, the consequences were fatal. Their nonstop shooting and the ruinous effects turned that night into a living hell.