Hunger's Brides (141 page)

The stars were fading to the last constellations…. I was leaning toward the fire, my elbows resting on a book in my lap that I had hurried into the library to retrieve. Abuelo had been speaking of the chivalry of Spinola at the raising of the siege at Breda, and regretted never having served any such prince in the field.
Iliad…
. I had found it quickly, on his desk, to read for him the speech of Zeus's mortal son to Glaucus. It was to be years before I could read the
Iliad
again.

Alone and hurt my grandfather walked home from the front, through half-empty villages to his own on the bank of the Guadalquivir, but everyone was gone. His family, the friends he had known. He followed the river to where it ran into the sea, then kept walking, to land's end, to the pillars of Calpe and Abyla. And as he talked over his plans for explorations here, in America, his eyes glowed green as emeralds, as they had not in many years. And so it was that he began to speak of the end of the Mexica and the last sorcerer, Ocelotl.

“As I have followed his trail, Angelina, it has sometimes seemed to me that there went the last honest man….”

Kings and princes … service and counsels … honest men … Ocelotl, Vieyra … Vieyra defending the Jews … condemnation, to wander to the end of the world. The Wandering Jew—

Magda. Magda will testify Abuelo was a secret Jew.

No
—
Núñez does not need to do this
—why? to show me the full measure of my cowardice? Would you tear the palace down, Father, or rally its defences? He cannot think even me such a coward, to recall this of all nights to my mind and then expect me not to fight. If I know you, Father, your motives are not these. If these are your motives, I do not know you.

Could it be he has concealed a
code
within Arellano's messages, woven from all that Núñez knows of me? He does not ask me outright so as not to give me the opportunity to lie; rather I can only break his code if I have the very information he needs to know if I possess. He has trapped
himself
—four months of getting no answer from me, four months without the reassurance he seeks. It is not merely a question of what Núñez knows, thinks he knows or pretends to, but of what he
doesn't
know, thinks I
may
know,
fears
I do. There is more here, more than a threat, there is weakness, and not merely mine. Wandering, world's end, prince, sceptre …

In the legend, an old Jew taunts Christ at the foot of Golgotha. Why does the mighty King of the Jews drag a humble cross up so slowly?
I go on
, Christ answers,
and long shall ye wait for my return
. For his jeer the old Jew is condemned to wander without rest until the day of Judgement. And yet the story mentions no war—no golden sceptre.

Núñez has sent messages through Arellano
because it is dangerous to come himself
. For if there is danger, the messages Arellano carries must not appear to be in code but instead seem what they have seemed even to me—mortifications of my soul. What sort of code is this—with a clue that seems to be about my letter but is not. His is a code with a missing key—it must be, for if any message or even all of them together were to carry all the necessary elements, Núñez could never be sure it would not be decoded by someone else, someone other than … me—I alone hold the key. No, I am the lock. Núñez has inserted his code into my memory.

There is another children's story Núñez would recall. One that contains every element of Arellano's messages.
Wandering, war, world's end, prophecy, divination, service, a chosen race, a king's favour. Escape. Resistance. The time of sea and fire
.

The Conquest. One night holds the key.

The moon was rising, late, high above the mountains…. He had asked for my help, to look out for Amanda and Xochitl. Yes, we would watch over them together.

“You remember I once told you that Ocelotl had a twin. And that together, from here in these mountains, they launched an uprising against us—do you know it started right around here? Maybe from a campfire exactly here, on a night just such as this….”

Though the fire had burned down to red embers the night was no longer dark. The snowfields glowed faintly violet.

“Ocelotl's second summons to the capital had gone quite as disastrously as the other—first with Lord Moctezuma, now with the Lord Bishop Inquisitor Zumárraga. So it goes for one who would serve the Sovereigns of Two Worlds, eh Angelina? At least this time things had begun better. This new lord had offered him his friendship and protection. But then after a few months came the request that should have sent Ocelotl running. Before long he was arrested on the charge of divination. He found himself in prison again, this one too the nightmare of a race….”

Tracking the sorcerer Martín Ocelotl through a countryside Grandfather had travelled so far to call his own, this was the last great passion of his life. Ocelotl might have been the one man to have escaped both from Moctezuma's prisons and from those of the Inquisition—twice, and Abuelo's fascination with those escapes was perhaps more personal than I had ever realized. In the months before the Conquest, Ocelotl had gone to the archives of the Triple Alliance, in the city of Texcoco, for it was a time of strange events such as had been related in the old histories. Ocelotl was next summoned to Tenochtitlan to give advice to the Speaker, and was imprisoned there with the other seers and sages. Abuelo was never able to determine how Ocelotl escaped, but some said he had been released by none other than Cortés. The sorcerer returned for a time to Texcoco and worked with the Franciscans there who were recording the things of the past while there remained time. The archives
had been put to the torch shortly after the fall of the city on the lake, and FastingCoyote's temple to the Unknown God razed. The memory of an entire race survived now only in the minds of a few elders.

Ocelotl's reputation among the Franciscan brothers led to his invitation to meet Bishop Zumárraga, which led in turn to their friendship and to his second imprisonment. It was the patterns of likeness and contrast that had fascinated my grandfather, on that night and other nights. Texcoco of the Unknown God, Tenochtitlan of two thousand gods. The warnings from Texcoco to Tenochtitlan, of one emperor to another, father to father, then son to son. FastingCoyote to Moctezuma I, FastingPrince to Moctezuma II—then the three warnings and the three escapes of Ocelotl. Twins, doubles …

“The same and yet not the same,” Abuelo shrugged. “Almost the reverse,
verdad?
It reminds me of a company of knights I once watched riding along the banks of the Guadalquivir. So many ensigns and banners, differently patterned, and yet all part of a deeper emblem of—what would you say, Angel? Honour …?”

“Sí Abuelito
, and truth—and
valour.”

“Eso
. Honour, truth and valour. But in the histories here, though I have tried I can never quite name the deeper emblem. Do you know they stopped for the night in our village, those knights? Of course, even in my boyhood they no longer wore much armour. It was only a hunting party, and yet how proudly and how high the pages had borne the old standards and ensigns—but I have never told you of the great knight companies of the Mexica! Truly, have I? The Eagle Knights and—”

“The
Jaguars.”

“Ah, so I have. Companies as great as our Order of Santiago, reduced now to two men. And they had one last battle to fight, those two, under the old banners.”

The uprising began not long after Ocelotl had quit the capital, having escaped his fate a second time. “The jailers claimed he had help, but it was what their kind always said.” Ocelotl and his twin Mixcoatl—even knowing it to be hopeless, with so few men of fighting age left—invoked the ancient prophecies and launched a series of attacks leading toward the capital.

“The Indians Martín Jaguar and his brother Andrés CloudSerpent were arrested and convicted by the Holy Office of falsely claiming to be gods, or the doubles of false gods. The Inquisition could not even decide
on the charges! As in the ancient prophecies, CloudSerpent went to the burning ground but, that morning, Martín Jaguar's cell had been found empty—ha, for a third time. Ocelotl had vanished in the night.”

Why has Núñez used one children's tale to refer to another—why not refer to the second directly? What is the deeper pattern he would have me read? So long as his code is not broken, even if I myself were, I could give no other answer even under torture, and he would be in no more danger than before. But with each fresh message, each new hint, he brings me closer to guessing what he would have me reveal unwittingly, and the danger to him increases.

It is a code that points to one thing to point to a second to a third to what the messages never quite say … from Persia to the courts of Europe, to the Jews of Africa and Asia, to Golgotha and Mount Carmel, the hills of the Holy Land … but the land that he never directly mentions is this one, these hills, this continent, these old palaces, this New Eden.

Scrolls … the burning of the painted books, Sahagún, the Franciscans, an honest man
.

Not nostalgia, not cruelty—there is one last window in the palace of my memory Father Núñez needs to look through, into a room whose contents he very much needs to inventory. Though I do not yet know what it is, the basis of Núñez's code and the source of his fear are the manuscripts Carlos has left with me. And if he comes now, it is because after four months he is becoming desperate—and if he is desperate he cannot afford to come to me empty-handed. There
is
hope here, but I cannot delude myself. Even he does not have the power to offer me my freedom. He cannot raise the siege himself—at best he offers a trade, an exchange of prisoners. The manuscript and my silence for … and now I see. In the darkness after the last prayers one sees most clearly, as on a blinding page.

Somewhere on the south bank of the Guadalquivir is a village, and in it the parish has its church. Within that church, the sacred canons stipulate that a yellow
sambenito
be hoisted into the vault, such that the light that filters past it through the high windows and over the parishioners casts shame in hues of sulphur. And thereafter shall begin proceedings against all those related to the family Ramírez de Santillana by blood or association, who, if convicted of following the law of Moses shall be condemned, and if dead, burned in effigy…
.

He trades with this. But I do not yet see how—no one controls the
Inquisition—and if his offer is to suppress the evidence, how? if Magda began giving testimony in 1663? I did not even know Núñez until … 1666. Three years. Who gathered that testimony? Dorantes is my age. He would have been a boy. Gutiérrez was in Spain, also a boy. Santa Cruz, also in Spain.