The Devils of Cardona (37 page)

“You know, I don't normally like to put prisoners to the torment unless
I have to,” Mendoza said. “But unless you talk to me here, you and I are going to have a very painful conversation when we get to Jaca.”

Sánchez gave a faint smirk. “We'll see,” he said.

Even though the bailiff could barely walk, Mendoza ordered Martín, Gabriel and Necker to take turns guarding the locked stable door. The rest of the day was spent clearing away the bodies. By nightfall there were fifty bandits and
montañeses
piled up outside the town and forty Moriscos stretched out in the church. Mendoza insisted that sentries remain on alert throughout the night and assigned a special detail to keep a brazier lit near the stack of bandit corpses to keep the animals and vultures away from them. It was not until the early hours that he finally retired to his room and quietly thanked God for allowing him to live before he closed his eyes and slept.

•   •   •

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
the Moriscos began to dig graves in the cemetery while others carried the corpses outside the main entrance down into the ravine in carts to be burned. Throughout the day the buzzards and vultures continued to circle hopefully over the village as the smell of burning flesh wafted up from the ravine. There was not enough space for individual graves, and Mendoza told them to dig deeper holes so that the graves could be shared. The men performed these tasks with quiet determination as the women and children continued to distribute food and water. Some of the water was taken to the church, where Segura's sons prepared the bodies. Mendoza deliberately stayed away from it and ordered his own men to do the same so that they would not have to observe what the brothers might be doing.

Sánchez spent the day, as he had spent the night, locked in the back room in chains with Segura's sheep and goats. He spoke only once, when he asked Necker for permission to use the privy. In the evening Mendoza and
Gabriel brought him bread, cheese and water from the tavern. They found Necker slumped on the stone bench in front of the fire with his head resting on his chest, and the embarrassed constable apologized profusely as he unlocked the stable door. Sánchez was still sitting in the gloom among the goats and sheep and the horses on the other side of the wooden corral. He did not even look up when Gabriel laid the tray at his feet while Necker unlocked his chains. He ate his meal in silence, and then Gabriel took the tray back. Mendoza sent the exhausted constable to bed and sat down in the alcove.

“When will we question him?” Gabriel asked.

“Tomorrow perhaps,” he replied distractedly. He was still wondering why Sánchez had called Susana a whore when he noticed the frown that told him that another question from Gabriel was imminent.

“What is it, boy?” he asked wearily.

“Sir, why did you take me from the orphanage? Was it your decision or your mother's?”

“It was mine. But do we have to talk about this now?”

“Sir, am I a Morisco?”

Mendoza was silent, and he knew from the expression on Gabriel's face that his silence had already answered the boy's question.

“Sir, you know I have always looked up to you and respected you,” Gabriel said. “But I have just fought in a battle. I have shed blood. I might have died, and I could still die. Surely this is as good a time as any other to tell me whatever it is that you have not told me.”

Mendoza looked at his page. In that moment Gabriel seemed older and wiser than his seventeen years, and Mendoza knew that he was right. This was not a subject he had ever wanted to talk about, but after everything his page had been through, it seemed suddenly impossible to avoid.

“No, you are not Morisco,” he said finally. “But your parents were.”

For the first time, Mendoza told his page about his service in Granada with the army of the king's half brother, Don Juan of Austria, about the
siege of Galera in the Alpujarras and the house-to-house fighting that took place when the Christian troops breached its defenses, about the Morisca woman he killed outside her house and the toddler he found among the heap of corpses inside it. He described how he had pulled the child away from his dead mother and carried him crying out of the burning house, but he could not bring himself to say that the child he rescued was covered in blood that might have been his mother's, because there were some details that he could not speak aloud, not only for his page's sake but for his own. Nevertheless Gabriel looked increasingly distraught as Mendoza continued.

“So you killed my mother?” he asked incredulously.

Mendoza shook his head. “No, boy, I did not. Your mother was killed by a cannon shot. When I entered that house, everybody but you was dead. The woman I killed was too old to be your mother. But if I hadn't killed her, she would certainly have killed me. The Moriscos of Galera were the bravest fighters I ever met—the women as much as the men. We treated them the same. I ordered her to surrender, but she wouldn't. I don't know who she was, but I do know that if I hadn't pulled you out, you would have died, too. Or you would have been sold into slavery, like all the other survivors.”

“And why didn't you sell me?”

“Because . . .” Mendoza hesitated as his page continued to look at him with the same pained expression. It was a question he had often asked himself and never really been able to answer. “Because I don't like slavery, and I felt responsible for you. Perhaps I wanted to perform some act of kindness in the midst of so much evil. I don't know why, boy. I just acted that way, and once I started, I couldn't stop.”

“And you never thought to tell me this?” Gabriel asked in an indignant, critical tone that Mendoza had never heard before.

“What good would it have done? So that you could know that your parents were killed in a war? So you could be a Morisco? You've seen here what that means. Be angry if you want to, but it was war. Sometimes in
wartime you do things you would never do in other situations. Maybe you can begin to realize that after today.”

Gabriel continued to stare at Mendoza as though he had just turned into another person in front of his eyes.

“Did Magda know about this?” he asked.

“No. Only my mother and my cousin. And I told them not to tell you. Well, now you've asked me and I have told you,” Mendoza said. “Go get some sleep, boy. In the morning things might look a little different.”

After Gabriel had gone, Mendoza continued to gaze into the fire, wondering if he'd done the right thing. Just before midnight Martín and Ventura came in together, and the militiaman took over Mendoza's shift while he and his cousin went upstairs. The faint light from Gabriel's doorway told him that his page was still awake, and he was tempted to see if he was all right, but he was too tired for any more conversation or reflection. No sooner had he extinguished the candle and lain down on top of the bed in his tunic and hose than he felt himself drifting off to sleep.

•   •   •

H
E
WOKE
UP
to hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs. It was only the faintest of creaks, but the obvious caution immediately aroused his attention, because his own men never took that kind of care. He sat up in the dark room and carefully unsheathed his sword as the door slowly opened. He waited until he saw the forearm and the glint of metal and then leaped from the bed and slammed the door shut. The intruder dropped the dagger with a grunt of pain. Before he could pick it up, Mendoza threw the door open and thrust his own sword into the crouching back, and the man crumpled to the floor.

Mendoza just had time to make out three other figures looming like phantoms in the gloom when Gabriel's door opened and his page appeared in the doorway.

“Get back inside!” Mendoza rushed forward and shoved him violently
into the room. In the same moment, one of the three men grabbed his shoulder. He twisted around to his left as the knife stabbed point-first into the doorframe just behind him and grabbed the attacker's wrist as he withdrew it, but now the man gripped his throat with his other hand. His assailant was short and heavy, with powerful, thick wrists and muscular arms that smelled of sweat and animal dung, and his blackened face made him look more like a monster or an animal than a human being. Mendoza fell back into Gabriel's room, holding the knife hand up as the heavy body pinned him to the floor and winded him.

The other hand was squeezing Mendoza's windpipe as though he were trying to tear it out of his throat, and he felt himself choking. Behind him he heard curses, grunts and the sound of violent struggle, but he could no longer breathe, and still the knife was bearing down inexorably toward his face. Just when he thought he might black out, his attacker reared up and collapsed on top of him. He looked up to see Gabriel pushing a sword with both hands into the man's back as a pistol shot exploded like a thunderclap in the little hallway.

Necker pulled Mendoza to his feet, and he saw Ventura standing just behind him with a pistol in his hand. There were four corpses on the landing and the stairs, and Ventura now led the way past them and down to the ground floor. Goats and sheep were milling around in confusion before the still-smoldering fire, and the red glow illuminated Martín's body lying in the half-open doorway that led out onto the street. Mendoza turned him over and examined the wounds in his chest and throat as a group of militiamen and armed Moriscos appeared holding torches.

“He must have opened the door for them,” Ventura said.

Necker made the sign of the cross. It was only then that Mendoza realized that the animals had escaped from the stable. He grabbed one of the torches and rushed over to the open door. Sánchez was sitting on the floor in the same position in which he had last seen him, seemingly oblivious to the horses that were kicking and stamping in the corral alongside him,
and it was not until Mendoza bent over him that he saw the dark wound in Sánchez's throat. Outside, the militiamen and Moriscos were dragging the bodies into the street. All of them were barefoot, bare-chested and dressed in the same dark hose, their faces, arms and upper bodies smeared with charcoal. Mendoza passed his torch across them and gazed down upon the heavy, hairy-looking body who had nearly strangled him.

“I've seen that man before, in Zaragoza and Vallcarca. He's an Inquisition
familiar
.”

“His name is Pachuca.” Segura's eldest son, Agustín, appeared in the street just behind them. “A real brute.”

“The Inquisition did this?” asked Ventura in amazement.

Mendoza shook his head. “Someone else sent him. He killed the bailiff, and he would have killed me if Gabriel hadn't stopped him. We need to find out how they got in.” He looked back at Gabriel, who was standing in a daze near the fire in his blood-spattered nightshirt as the goats and sheep milled around him. Mendoza ordered him to get his boots. The village was wide awake now, and groups of Moriscos were walking around with weapons and torches in expectation of another attack as Mendoza and his men went into the streets to inspect the main entrance and the medieval wall. The sentries were still in place, their braziers still lit, and none of them had heard or seen anything unusual apart from the single shot in the dispensary.

Mendoza doubted that Pachuca and his men could have slipped past them without being seen, but there was no obvious point where they might have entered the village. Most of the houses were built so close together that they made a natural wall, and there was only a narrow, rocky ledge beneath them, which did not allow any room to mount a ladder that could have reached the high windows.

“Did anyone come into the town during the day?” he asked Ventura as they stood next to the cemetery looking over the wall.

“Only the Moriscos who buried the bodies and collected firewood.”

“Doesn't it seem strange to you that I arrested Sánchez only yesterday, yet Pachuca knew exactly where he was? And he also knew where I was. Who went to chop wood? Was it only Moriscos?”

“No, there were some Old Christians, too. Romero took his children to help him. They brought back a cartload of wood. He said he needed it for his oven.”

At the mention of the baker, Mendoza walked away from the church to the edge of the old wall and glanced back up at the row of houses on the main square overlooking the valley. All of them had the same high windows and the same narrow edge beneath them, but he noticed that one of the windows had a metal crossbar in front of it.

“That house with the bar. Isn't that the bakery?”

Agustín Segura said that it was.

“Come with me, señores” Mendoza said. “I think I know how this was done.”

They followed him to the bakery, where he banged loudly on the door until Romero's wife appeared in a nightgown and shawl, holding a candle in her hand, and peered out at them with an expression of abject terror.

“Where's your husband, señora?”

“He's in bed,” she quavered. “He's not well. What do you want?”

Mendoza pushed past her and went up the little staircase leading from the shop into the house, with his men following behind him. He had just reached the first floor when Romero appeared in the doorway of his bedroom in his nightshirt.

“What are you doing in my house?” he demanded in a voice that sounded more fearful than defiant. Mendoza walked over to the window, gripped the bar with both hands and shook it before leaning out to look down.

“Where's the rope?”

“What rope?” Romero replied in a tremulous and slightly hysterical voice.

“The one that you brought back from the woods today to let Pachuca in.”

“I don't know anything about that!” the baker insisted.

“Really? Then what's this?” Mendoza took the torch from Ventura and held up Romero's left hand in front of him. “Charcoal. And these look like charcoal footprints on the floor.”