DQ Chap 2
Chapter 2
I left the scholar where he was and, crouching over, ran through the darkness toward the area where the shot had come from, hoping the sounds of the scholar’s horse as it galloped away would cover the little noise I made. Unfortunately—or perhaps through God’s grace it was more of a blessing—I found no one. Or, looking back on this now, no one found me. I inched back to the stranger only to find a dark shape slinking near him, though making no attempt at quiet. The noises were…slurping noises.
“Tabo!” He raised his head, licked the unconscious scholar’s face once more, and then trotted over to me. I reached down to pet him absent-mindedly, but stopped short as he stiffened.
“What is it?” I asked. He gave a low growl and lowered himself. Crouching, he slunk off toward the bushes to our left. I pulled my knife from my boot, glanced back at the unmoving scholar, and followed Tabo into the darkness.
I hadn’t gone more than three or four paces when my foot kicked something … flexible, solid, and suddenly and unmistakably human. In that split-second when my boot connected with the body I heard the slide of fabric and not the thud of fur or the immobility of a downed branch. Whoever it was had to be dead—there was no sound of breathing, no indefinable air that said another human was there in front of me—but not deceased so long ago that he was starting to smell or even to stiffen.
May I awaken tomorrow with the fate of someone luckier than I, I cursed in Arabic. I bent down to see if I could make out anything in the darkness, and as I did so, my head bumped Tabo’s, who was pushing his nose against the body’s chest. He nudged the silver trim of what was apparently the messenger’s cloak draped across his chest. I knelt beside him and ran my hands down his sides, then underneath him; my hands came out bloody and empty. His messenger pouch was gone, along with a fair amount of his innards.
The poor fellow deserved more than a burial by the side of the road, and Bejar would need to know. I grabbed him under his arms, ignoring the trail of blood that he left, and dragged him over to Donkey. It took effort to get him draped over the back of the horse, and I kept hoping the scholar would come to, but I was not so lucky. At one point, I even hoped his body would stiffen so that I could at least get a grasp on it, instead of trying to mold something akin to a twisting and flexible 75-kilo bag of olives. I lugged the scholar a bit more gently to the horse, propped him face down over the saddle, and started the long trek back to town on foot.
The lights were off, but I banged on the door anyway. After a while, I heard Nico’s voice, grumpy and thick with sleep.
“Hold on…(mumble mumble)…can’t…(mumble mumble)…just wait.”
“It is I, Nico—Alonso. I need a doctor.”
The door sprung open, and Nico lowered the ax he held in his hand. “Well, you should have said so. Where are you hurt?” He glanced around me at Donkey. “Mierda, Alonso! You killed two of them this time?”
“One’s alive, I hope. The other I had nothing to do with….And what do you mean, this time?”
“Well, let’s get the live one then. The other’ll keep. We’ll put the live one in the surgery there, and the other one around back. Who’s the dead one?”
“Bejar’s messenger. I don’t know who the live one is.”
His eyebrows went up and he glared at me. “Collecting bodies just to pass the time now?”
“Gives you something to do when you’re not trimming beards,” I replied. “Or sleeping. May I use your writing desk? I need to write a message to Bejar and find a messenger.”
“Use Martinez. His wife’s driving him crazy and they need to be apart for a while. She gave him 14 stitches earlier today because he wanted to donate their daughter’s dowry to the church, or if she didn’t approve of that, he wants to raise male rabbits.”
“Only males? That’s a trick,” I asked as we hefted the scholar off Donkey.
“Yeah. Somebody told him that rabbit balls were good for virility. Apparently, the natives over in the new world use them. He figures if he can get enough rabbits to start, they can eat the females and cut up the males. If they breed fast enough, he can pay back the dowry and make enough money to buy his way into Lerma’s court.”
“I can see why Nandina’s a bit skeptical.” I grabbed the scholar under his arms and Nico grabbed his legs. “Where’d she hit him this time?”
“Skeptical? She’s threatening to send him to the Santuario de San José.” He lowered his voice. “They tell me they have a sacred relic of St. Joseph there—a personal piece of his, uh, equipment. It’s in an underground vault where they keep all their relics, and if a man has, you know, problems, they use it to reinvigorate his desire.” He looked around and then raised his voice again. “But you know they only take those who are truly possessed by Satan there.”
“Or the ones the Holy Office of the Inquisition wishes to hide after they have been driven insane.” Then I lowered my voice, “Maybe you should just invest in Martinez’ rabbits. Isn’t Gloriosa enough for you anymore?” Gloriosa was one of the maids at the tavern. She and Nico had a regular assignation, but she would leave the tavern only for marriage, whereas Nico was already married. Granted, no one had seen his wife for almost four years and rumor had it she had taken refuge in a Malaga convent.
“Shush! I do not hear you when you speak blasphemously where others might hear. And Gloriosa is fine. Better than fine, in fact. She is the flower of the earth in whose garden I plow. She is a woman among girls, a rose among daisies, a star among…”
I looked at him, rolled my eyes, and sighed loudly. “Do you really spout such utter nonsense to her? Chivalry is dead, my friend. And women are no better—and no worse—than men. This is your house, there is no one else here, and it’s the middle of the night. Who would hear us?”
He didn’t answer but glared at me. “The Inquisitors, my friend, are everywhere. And they’ve been nosing around the area.” Something was obviously afoot here too. Love, or fear? Another puzzle.
Nico hoisted the fellow up onto his the table he used for surgeries and did a brief examination of him. “Nothing wrong that I can tell. Maybe he’s a candidate for the Santuario. We’ll give him till morning and see if he recovers. Odd that he doesn’t have any papers on him.” He looked at me. “Or did he?”
I held up my hands in innocence. “There was no time for that. I’d no sooner found him than I was tripping over the messenger.” I gave him a brief description of the encounter along the road, the shots, and finding the body of the messenger. “And no, the messenger’s pouch wasn’t there either. I don’t snoop into everything, you know!” Only the things I don’t understand, I added to myself.
Ten minutes later, I had composed my message to the duke, Martinez had been summoned, and I was on my way back home. “Thank you, my friend. You are fantástico! I am grateful for your help.”
“If you were grateful, you’d listen to me. Let your housekeeper go. She’s a liability.”
”I can’t.” Even in these fearful times of persecution, I could not let Tia Serafina go. It was unthinkable.
As I rounded the bend out of Nico’s sight, I reached down and pulled the scholar’s bag from beneath the saddle blanket. I hadn’t said anything about there being no time on the long walk back to town. As Donkey marched home, I felt more than saw the contents of his bag: several books, a quill pen, folded papers, a bottle of ink. Nothing dangerous, unless one ascribed to the belief that the pen is mightier than the sword, which sounded like rationalization to me by someone like myself who couldn’t handle a sword. Examining them would have to wait for daylight, but I felt more certain than ever that here was one of Lippershey’s students, more determined than most, but still a scholar.
Dawn was rising through the knobby branches of the olive trees as I wound my way down the path that led to my door. A wisp of smoke and then a cloud bellowed from the chimney, and I knew Marina was about her work. Someday soon, she’d make someone a very good wife, but she was not yet twenty and I was in no hurry to dispense with her services. Marina is my niece, and her mother, my sister, is—to put it bluntly—afflicted with a desire for illness. Every sighting of a bird, change in temperature, or varying of wind direction portends some new affliction. We speak rarely since I have no patience with such distresses and thus deprive her of the appreciative audience she hopes to find in me.
In any event, I led Donkey to the stables, brushed him off, and fed him. By the time I got to the small kitchen near the back of the house, Marina had prepared a small tray of juice, an omelet of soft eggs and onions, and bread for me, and a smaller one of porridge for Tía Serafina.
“Is she feeling better?” I asked, when I had finished most of my meal. The wine and tapas from La Covachuela had been a long time before, I realized.
“Better, yes, though her color is not yet normal. But she took some mutton broth and said that wants to see you sometime today.”
I raised my eyebrows in question.
“The paseo, Uncle Alonso. It’s three weeks away. And you promised.” She stood with a pot in her hand. I wondered briefly if she were debating whether to use it on me if I gave some reason why I could not attend the march of the desperate. I had no desire for another wife, yet all the women in my world seemed to feel I was somehow not as much of a man without a woman by my side.
I groaned. “I said I’ll do it, and I will. But don’t get your hopes up! I’m not ready for a wife. You, niece, suit me just fine.”
“Ah, but what happens if you don’t suit me, hmm? What if I want someone younger, someone not related to me by blood but rather by marriage? What will you do then?”
The thought startled me. “You aren’t happy here? You want to go?”
Marina laughed. “I love it here, Uncle Alonso. But someday I will get married, and then what will you do? Tia Serafina can’t do everything she once did, you know.”
“Well, give me advance notice and I’ll find someone. But don’t count on a wife for me. Neither love nor lightning will strike the same man twice.”
“Oh, but uncle, you have to stop fretting about Dulc—“
“Don’t say it, niece.” I stood up more quickly than I intended, and the chair behind me clattered to the floor. “It’s been almost ten years, and every one of the days that made up every one of those years has lasted a lifetime without them. I don’t want to talk about them.” I grabbed the scholar’s bag that had been lying next to me and left the room in a hurry, afraid to see Marina’s pitying look.
Though I do not avoid people, as a rule, the cork trees give me the peace and stability that I need. After a few moments, I settled myself beneath one and pulled out the duke’s letter.
My dear and esteemed Alonso Cristoforo Santiago y Quejano, blessed of the Virgin Mary, soldier of the Army of God and in the service of God’s chosen messenger Felipe II, in service to…
My eyes crossed, and I stared up at the cork’s branches to change my focus. Tabo nestled by my side, worn out by the night’s events. I tried the letter once again, disregarding the religious blather.
My dear Alonso,
Some two weeks ago, Sofia entrusted the care of her children—all save the youngest, David—to her family. She told them she simply needed to be alone for a day, to consider an offer of marriage from Lerma on behalf of his son. Her family were relieved to see her seriously considering the proposal, and it didn’t dawn on them for two days that Sofia had not returned as promised. By the time they notified me, there was no trace of her or her son.
At first, I felt Lerma had had some hand in her disappearance but such does not appear to be the case. This morning, a note in her writing came to me by messenger. Sofia asks that I not try to follow her, but I cannot in good conscience allow that. I must at least know that she and her son, my heir, are safe. Beyond that, I will take what steps I must.
Sofia also asks that I relay the following to you:
Alonso, I appreciate more than you know the time you have spent with David at Santa Teresa. He especially enjoyed the barefoot adventures you had, even more than the explorations with Chrysotum in Salamanca. With the absence of his father, such times are important to him. We look forward to seeing you again, and I will relay your help to Franco when I see him.
I looked up at the sky again. I had never met her son David, save when he was a babe-in-arms, and certainly never for any barefoot adventures. Obviously there was a message here.
I am aware you have met Sofia but rarely since her marriage to Franco, so I have also enclosed a portrait of Sofia, done some ten months ago.
I have sent out feelers to all the churches here, though worded so as not to involve the Inquisitors, since they have their toes in all waters. The response, then, may take some time. I know how much you love a puzzle and I am therefore asking this of you: to find Sofia and alert me as to her safety. I am also sending someone to help you. He may not be what you expect, but we work with the tools God gives us.
For Franco’s sake, should he still be alive, I ask this of you.
Pero was right; she had evolved into a beautiful woman. The portrait was in three-quarter view, but her eyes were focused directly at the viewer. Cascades of dark curls fell against a sea-green gown and framed a delicate face. Franco, if he still lived, would be proud to grace her arm. I laid back on the trunk of the tree and closed my eyes to think.
Tabo nudged me some hours later. At the sound of Marina’s voice, I jumped to my feet and grabbed the scholar’s bag. I stuffed the letters in the waistband of my trousers and slung the bag over my shoulder. Tabo barked twice, and Marina responded by waving her arm at us.
“Tia Serafina’s ready to see you, if you have time….And what have you been doing, rolling in the dirt?” She swiped the broom at my back.
“Checking out the cork trees,” I replied.
“On your back? See if you can charm her into eating more of the mutton soup I took up to her. She needs to rebuild her strength.”
Mumbling something about old men acting their age, she returned to her sweeping and I prepared to face my doom.
Tia Serafina lay propped up in her bedroom, a small room she’d had for almost fifty years, though she looked not past forty herself, despite the bruises on her face. I bent to kiss her cheek.
“How are you, my liebling?” She patted the bed near her knees.
“Fine, Tia Serafina, just fine. I’m to tell you to eat your soup.”
“And since when do you do everything you’re told?” She smiled up at me, and I could see the pain she was trying to hide.
“Only when it makes you better.” Two weeks earlier, Tia Serafina had been at the square doing her marketing, going about her business. As she left, someone had dragged her into the alley, beaten her savagely, and scrawled the word “Damned” across her forehead in her own blood, leaving her for dead. Fear begets fearful deeds. I had known her my whole life, and even if it meant my own interrogation at the hands of the Inquisitors, no one was going to hurt her again.
She grasped my hands. “Of all your mother’s children, you are the one most like me, I think. We share a love of logic and languages, the two of us. And because I know your heart, I know why you promised to go to the paseo.”
I groaned. “I’ll survive the ordeal, and if it makes you happy…” In those first few days after the attack, when we knew not whether she would live or die, she had sometimes, wanderingly, spoken of my single state. In a rash moment, I had promised to participate in the ancient custom, and it was the one thing she had remembered upon her true awakening.
“Quietete! I have decided it will not make me happy to see you unhappy. You need a wife, Alonso. I will find you a wife. But to force you to participate in the paseo is not fair of me.”
Suddenly feeling alarmed, instead of the relief I had anticipated, I wondered now at her methods of finding me a wife. Perhaps a paseo—that traditional parade of eligible young men and girls around the village square—would not be so torturous. The men march in one direction, stiffly and singly, while the girls, always in twos and threes, stroll in the opposite direction, giggling and whispering. If a young man catches a girl’s eye, she tosses her handkerchief to him. Three times around the square they march, in opposite directions, thus giving each girl six choices to distribute her scarves.
“No,” I protested. “I promised you a paseo and I will do it. But do not get your hopes up. No young girl will pass me her scarf.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. Girls today have no sense, no way of determining a man’s soul. You need a worthy wife, someone older.”
“If anyone can find me such a paragon, I’m sure you can,” I said. I need an intelligent wife with a caring heart who will love a half-Jewish, half-Moorish tiny, manipulating nursemaid-cum-aunt, I thought, in a Catholic country where such things are anathema. I had had such a treasure once and I had destroyed it; I did not think it likely again, nor would I settle for less.
“Alonso, come in! Pero is here, and our patient is recovering nicely,” Nico beamed. “Come, follow me.” He mumbled something that might have been “Save me, O Lord,” but before I could ask I caught a blur of motion, and I was suddenly grabbed by a man with a thousand arms, all of them hugging me, shaking my hand, grasping my shoulders, and trying to bestow me with kisses.
“Miguel, Senor Quejano, I am Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, son of Rodrigo de Cervantes, a surgeon, and his devoted wife, my mother, Leonor de Cortinas. I am in your debt, senor, most assuredly in your debt, for saving my life by that nefarious plotter who….”
The voice trailed on as I looked around me, but I was suddenly in the room, alone, with someone who mistook words for breath. I heard the curtain swish behind me and a snicker from Nico.
“…your friends, who are most worthy individuals, and the surgeon, he has given me a bandage—see? Here at the base of my head—it was a serious…”
Friends, ha! Friends would not have left me alone with this madman. A thousand arms it had felt like, but only one hand moved. I tried to look closely, but the man was a blur of motion.
“…but I must have lost my papers, my very important papers, without which my life is useless, so we must find the horse, you see…”
The horse! I had forgotten to track down the horse after it had shot off into the darkness. Chances are, the Rom would have found it and appropriated it for one of their own. And welcome to it, I thought.
“…the clothes that I had, they are not so valuable. One change only, and not a good one. Unlike earlier, but in these times where money is hard to come by, and the debt collectors follow honest men…”
I reached inside my coat and drew out his bag. At the sight of it, he was suddenly speechless though his words continued to ring between my ears much as an echo in the mountains. He reached for the bag reverently, looked up at me, and then delved into the contents. Without another word, he searched the bag and pulled out one of the books I hadn’t had a chance to examine. His knees gave way beneath him, and he put out a hand to steady himself. Slowly, he sat on the small raised mat, and then lost himself in the contents.
I backed away before he could start to babble again, without having said a single word.
“Did you stuff his shirt down his throat? I have been trying to get him to be quiet for nigh on three hours. You are a genius—that is, if he isn’t dead. Did you kill him like you did the other one? God knows, I’ve wanted to. I can’t find it in me to go look at his maimed body.” Nico rested against the wall. “Silence! Oh thank you, Lord, for the recovery of mine ears.”
Beside him, Pero laughed. “I’ve only been here a short while, and I empathize.”
“If we find him his horse, will he go away again?” I whispered.
“He says he’s been sent to help you,” Nico said.
“Help me? I’ll find myself in the Santuario if I have to listen to that for long.”
“Perhaps it will subside. It may be some side effect of the blow to the head. Truly, he does seem better than he did before you arrived.”
“That’s the book in his bag. Ever since he saw it, he’s been quiet.” I peeked through the curtain and saw him writing something in his book, absently stroking his face with an ink-stained thumb. The right side of his moustache was noticeably darker than the left.
“I thought you didn’t take the bag?” Nico asked.
I shrugged. “It must have caught on my saddle when I loaded him.” I pretended not to see the look of disbelief he gave me.
“He won’t name who sent him, but I suspect it’s Bejar,” Pero added. “He mumbled something about saving fair young maidens with pure hearts and how it was his duty to rescue those in distress from the ravages of evil.”
“Chivalric nonsense!” I sputtered. “It may be our duty to rescue them, but not for such romantic notions.”
“Take it up with him, then. There’s no reason to keep him here. He says he’s here to help you, that’s all I know,” Nico said.
“He must be the person Bejar sent to…,” Pero started to say.
“Hush! He’s not coming with me, no matter who sent him. He’d drive me crazy within minutes.”
“The man’s quiet enough now.” Nico peeked through the curtain again, and the scholar—or whatever he was—was still scribbling madly on his papers. But the wisp of the curtain, or perhaps our silence, alerted him and he looked up.
“Ah, my friend and surgeon,” Miguel said as he stood up, shuffling his papers into his bag. “I thank you for you help. As an ardent Catholic and survivor of the Moorish prison, by the grace of God, you are…”
“You’re welcome, my friend.” Nico let the curtain drop begin Miguel as he joined the three of us.
“You were in the Moorish prisons?” I asked.
“For more than five years,” he said. “I must tell you about it sometime. You see, there we were off the coast of …”
“So you bear no good will toward those…heathens?” I asked.
“The spawn of the devil, they are, my good sir. There is not one among them who…”
This time it was Pero who interrupted. “Perhaps you might come stay with me then, Miguel. I have space in my small home, humble though it may be. And as a good Catholic man, you would be close to the Holy Spirit, able to worship as you please.”
I sent Pero a thankful glance. “Yes, Miguel, that would be an admirable solution. My own home is not nearly so hospitable.”
“If you don’t mind, Father Pero. To be in the House of God…” his voice trailed off wistfully of its own accord.
“You owe me,” Pero mouthed.
But Miguel, of course, wasn’t through. “But I can’t accept. You see, I have been entrusted with a mission to help Senor Quejano here, and duty forces me to accompany him wherever he goes.”
“Surely that doesn’t mean in my own home and in my village. I promise you, I am in no danger here.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, so that was no danger that attacked the two of us last night?”
“That was…” I faltered. “A coincidence, yes, a chance occurrence. In any event, I truly have not room at my home for another person.”
“Liar!” Pero mouthed at me from behind Miguel.
Nico stepped in. “There are advantages to staying with Father Pero. I have a friend, Gloriosa, who has friends, if you understand me. And Juan, at the local cantina, will stand you a round of wine if you regale him with some of your stories of Moorish prison. You will find him a compatible sort, as he too was a prisoner of the Moors.”
Miguel looked beseechingly at me. What, he wanted my permission?
“By all means,” I said. “I will keep you informed of my whereabouts.”
“Then I accept, with pleasure,” he nodded to Pero and Nico.
“Thank you, my friends,” I said, “more than you know.”
