The Last Jew (21 page)

'There is an armory a bit down the road,' Gripo said. 'Have you experience with weapons?'

'I can use the dagger.'

Gripo shook his head. 'I refer to the manufacture of weapons.'

'No experience in that. But I have had lengthy apprenticeship in the working of silver, and much briefer experience with both iron and steel.'

Vincente finished his wine with a sigh. 'Then you must go and see our Maestro Fierro, the armorer of Gibraltar,' he said.

*

That night Yonah paid a few sueldos to Bernaldo and was allowed to sleep by the tavern hearth. The fee also gave him a bowl of gruel to break his fast in the morning, and he was both rested and fed when he departed from the tavern and followed the road according to Bernaldo's directions. It was a walk of only a little while. The singular stone mountain of Gibraltar loomed above the long low buildings and grounds of Manuel Fierro's armor works, and beyond that, the sea.

The armorer proved to be a short, wide-shouldered man with craggy features and a shock of rough white hair. Whether by birth or accident, his nose turned slightly to the left. It marred the symmetry of his features, but somehow the irregularity made his face homely and sympathetic. Yonah told him a story that was nearly true: He was Ramón Callicó. He had been apprentice to Helkias Toledano, master silversmith of Toledo, until the expulsion of the Jews sent Toledano away and brought an end to his service. For some months he had worked metals in the repair shop of the Roma of Córdova.

'Roma?'

'Gypsies.'

'Gypsies!'

Fierro was more amused than scornful. 'I shall give you some tests.'

The maestro had been working on a pair of silver spurs as they spoke, and now he set them down and took up a small piece of steel.

'Provide the chasing, as though the steel scrap were this silver spur.'

'I would rather work on the spur,' Yonah said, but the maestro shook his head. Fierro waited without comment, and clearly without high expectation.

But he grew attentive as Yonah accomplished the chasing on the scrap without fuss, and then, the second test, completed a neat seam between two discarded sections of a steel elbow protector.

'Do you have other skills?'

'I am able to read. I write a legible hand.'

'Truly?' Fierro leaned forward and studied him with interest. 'These are not talents often found in an apprentice. How did you come by them?'

'My father taught me. He was a learned man.'

'I offer an apprenticeship. Two years.'

'I am willing.'

'It is customary in my craft that the apprentice pay for instruction. Are you able to do so?'

'Alas, no.'

'Then, at the end of two years you must work one year at a reduced income. After which, Ramón Callicó, we may discuss your entering my employment as a journeyman armorer.'

'I agree,' Yonah said.

The shop suited him. He enjoyed working with metals again, with a difference, for the making of armor and weapons employed techniques totally unfamiliar to him, allowing him to learn while also utilizing skills he had long since mastered.

He liked the place. There were always the sounds of hammers on metal, a ringing and clanging, sometimes rhythmic and sometimes not, often coming from several of the sheds at the same time, a kind of metallic music. And Fierro was a very fine teacher.

'Spain has much to be proud of in the development of iron,' he said, and gave a lesson. 'For thousands of years ore was placed in a deep charcoal fire that wasn't hot enough to melt the resulting iron, but sufficiently hot to soften it so it could be pounded or forged.'

Repeated heating and forging, heating and forging, forced out impurities and resulted in wrought iron, he said.

'Then our ironworkers learned to make the fire hotter by blowing air into it through a hollow tube, and later by using bellows. In the eighth century, Spanish ironworkers built a better hearth furnace, called the Catalan forge. Ore and charcoal are mixed in the furnace and air is blown into the bottom of the fire by means of waterpower. It enables us to produce better wrought iron, and much faster. Steel is made by removing impurities and most of the carbon from the iron. No matter how clever the armorer, his armor will be only as good as the steel from which it is made.'

Fierro had learned how to work steel by prenticing to a Moorish sword maker. 'The Moors make the best steel and the best swords.' He smiled at Yonah. 'I served an apprenticeship to a Moor and you served an apprenticeship to a Jew,' he said.

Yonah agreed it was amusing and busied himself cleaning the workplace to bring an end to the conversation.

On the fifteenth day of Yonah's apprenticeship Angel Costa sought him out as he sat on a bench in the cooking hut, eating his morning gruel. Costa was on his way to a hunt, carrying his longbow and a bundle of arrows. He stood before Yonah and glowered, watching him without speaking. That suited Yonah, and he finished his meal leisurely.

When he was through, he set the bowl down and rose to his feet. He started to leave, but Costa blocked his path.

'What?' Yonah said softly.

'Are you good with a sword, apprentice?'

'I have never used a sword.'

Costa's smile was no more pleasant than his glare. He nodded, then he went away.

The cook, who was referred to as the other Manuel because he shared the maestro's first name, looked up from scrubbing a pot with sand and followed Costa with his eyes as the master-at-arms crossed the compound. He spat. 'It is easy to dislike that one. He says he is God's representative in the Smoke House, where he keeps us on our knees in prayer morning and night.'

'Why do you allow it?'

The cook looked pained at Yonah's ignorance. 'We are afraid of him,' the other Manuel said.

The advantage of being the apprentice was that Yonah was the designated chore boy, sent to shops and warehouses all over the town of Gibraltar, which allowed him to learn something about his new haven. The community nestled at the foot of the great rock and spilled onto its lower slope. Fierro conducted business with many suppliers, and some of these merchants, proud of their environs, were happy to answer Yonah's questions.

A cooper's clerk told him the exotic town had a Moorish feel because the Moors had inhabited it for 750 years, until the Spanish recaptured it in 1462, 'on the feast day of St. Bernard.' At the chandlery the owner turned out to be José Gripo, whom Yonah had already met at the tavern. Gripo was busy, but while he measured and coiled rope he revealed that the name Gibraltar was a corruption of Jebel Tariq, Arabic for Tariq's Rock. And the chandler's ancient clerk, a slender old man with fine features, whose name was Tadeo Deza, added, 'Tariq having been the Moorish commander who built the first fort below the rock.'

Yonah learned little about Gibraltar from those with whom he worked in Fierro's armory. There were six peóns whose chief duty was to maintain the grounds and move the heavy metal from storerooms to workrooms and then back to storerooms again. These laborers lived with Angel Costa and the other Manuel, in a barnlike building, the Smoke House. The two top artisans, Luis Planas and Paco Parmiento, were mature men and the royalty of the workshop. Parmiento, a widower, was the master sword maker, while Planas, who had never married, was the master armorer. Yonah was assigned to live in the worker's hut with them and Vicente, the old man for whom he had bought a drink in the village bar. Vicente had trouble remembering the new apprentice's name.

'Who did you say you are, young stranger?' he asked, leaning on the broom with which he had been sweeping the dirt floor.

'I am Ramón Callicó, uncle.'

'I am Vicente Deza and I am not your uncle, for then your sire would be a whoreson.' He laughed, relishing his own feeble wit, and Yonah had to smile.

'Are you related, then, to Tadeo Deza of the chandler's shop?'

'Aye, I am cousin to Tadeo but he does not own to it, for at times I shame him by begging for drink, as you have seen.' The old man cackled again and regarded him curiously. 'So we shall live here cheek by jowl, along with Luis and Paco. You are lucky, for this is a sound and weatherproof hut, built carefully by Jews.'

'How did it come to be built by Jews, Vicente?' Yonah asked, keeping his voice casual.

'They lived here in number once. About twenty years ago, perhaps a bit more, good Catholics rose against those who called themselves New Christians. Not real Christians. Jews is what they were. Hundreds of them from Córdova and Seville thought that Gibraltar, having been recently captured from the Moors and sparse of population, could be a safe and cozy haven for them, and they bargained with the duke of Medina Sidonia, the lord of this place.

'They gave the duke money and agreed to pay for a cavalry force to be stationed here. Hundreds of settlers came and raised structures for homes and businesses. But the cost of maintaining the military and paying for expeditions against the Portuguese soon drained them. When the duke learned that their funds were gone, he came with soldiers and soon they were gone as well.

'They had built this hut and the Smoke House as a business that smoked fish to be sent to port cities by ship. If you sniff deep on damp days, you can still smell the smoke. Our maestro leased the abandoned property from the duke and raised the animal barn and all the work sheds as you now see them.' The old man screwed his face into a wink of his left eye. 'You must come to me whenever you wish to know of the past, señor. For Vicente Deza knows many things.'

Later that day Yonah brought supplies to the shed ruled by another of his hut mates, Paco Parmiento, the sword maker. Yonah had a feeling that Parmiento would be easy to get along with. He was bald and ran to fat. His clean-shaven face bore a whitened scar on his right cheek, and his eyes sometimes seemed distant, for he was constantly thinking of better ways to design and fashion swords, and apt to be absent-minded concerning the world around him. He muttered to Yonah that all were expected to keep their hut neat and clean. 'But we are fortunate, for old Vicente Deza attends to such chores.'

'Is Vicente Deza an armorer? Or a sword maker, like yourself?'

'That one? He has not worked metal at all. He lives among us only because of the maestro's charity. You must not believe anything old Vicente says,' the sword maker warned, 'for he is impaired of intellect and has the mind of a slow child. Often he sees things that are not there.'

Like most of the stony places Yonah had seen in Spain, Gibraltar had caves, the largest being a commodious cavern at the very top of the rock. Fierro bought most of his steel from Moors in Córdova, but he kept a supply of a special iron ore that was mined in a small section of this great cave, whose entrance was reached by a narrow trail up the rock face.

Three times the maestro took Yonah with him, leading a pair of burros up the steep trail. On all three occasions Yonah wished his animal were Moise, for the trail went up, and up, and up -- far higher than the crow's nest of any sailing ship -- and a mishap would mean a dizzying and fatal drop. But the burros were accustomed to the trail, not even panicking when the way was blocked by a group of cinnamon-colored apes.

Fierro smiled when he saw Yonah start at the sudden appearance of the animals. There were six of them, large and tailless. One of the females was nursing a small ape child.

'They live here in the upper regions,' Fierro said. He took from a sack a quantity of stale bread and overripe fruit and threw it off the trail, up the slope, and the beasts cleared the trail quickly to get at the food.

'I never thought to see such animals in Spain.'

'Legend says they came from Africa, through a natural tunnel running beneath the strait and ending in one of the Gibraltar caverns,' Fierro said. 'Although I lean toward the probability that they escaped from a boat that had touched in at our rock.'

From the top of the trail, myth seemed possibility, for the coast of Africa appeared deceptively close in the clear air.

'How far is Africa, Señor Fierro?'

'Half a day's sail, with good wind. We are standing on one of the fabled Pillars of Hercules,' the maestro said. He pointed out the other Pillar of Hercules, a mountain in Morocco on the far side of the strait. The water that separated the Pillars was blue as blue, glittering under the golden sun.

Five days after their first conversation, Angel Costa approached Yonah again.

'Have you spent much time on a horse, Callicó?'

'Very little time, actually. I owned a burro.'

'A burro suits you.'

'Why do you ask these things? Are you seeking men for a military expedition?'

'Not exactly,' Costa said, and went away.

After days of being ordered to run errands, shovel ore, and carry steel, at last Yonah was assigned a task that allowed him to work metal, even though the task was lowly. He was nervous about working for Luis Planas, whose bad temper and character he had already witnessed. To his relief, although Luis spoke to him in a surly manner, he was serious about work. He bade Yonah to dress several sections of armor. 'You must search out tiny imperfections in the surface of the steel, the mere hints of the faintest scratches, and polish them interminably until they are no more,' Luis told him.