The Errant Flock (21 page)

Chapter Forty

After the chaotic trial and execution earlier that evening, the prison seemed almost peaceful. David and Paco set to work checking prisoners at random and delivering water to those in need. In this part of the prison, only one familiar
was on duty. Sitting with his arms crossed and feet atop an upturned bucket, Raul scowled disapprovingly at David and Paco, who were making far too much noise in the middle of the night.

“For God’s sake, can’t you two leave the prisoners’ well-being until morning?” he finally asked Paco.

“We’ve got a couple more to do, Raul, and then we’ll take our leave. Please accept our sincerest apologies for disturbing your rest,” Paco said with a touch of sarcasm, which the man missed or chose to ignore.

At the other end of the passageway, some distance from the guard post, David entered Sinfa’s cell. The acrid smell of excrement coming from a pile of straw heaped against the wall hit his nostrils, making his stomach twist and his eyes water. Carrying a water bucket in one hand and an oil-lit torch in the other, he kicked the door shut behind him with his heel and then raised the torch to get a better look at the prisoner.

She tried to sit up, but her thin, weak arms lacked the strength to lift her body off the floor. Her face, white as chalk, and the ripped bodice hanging off her shoulders, blackened with dirt, tore at David’s heart, but it also strengthened his resolve. Hardening his thoughts, he placed the bucket on the floor and the torch in the wall bracket.

“Sinfa, stand up,” he told her, gripping her arm and lifting her onto her feet.

Sinfa, staggering like a drunk, pushed her knotted hair from her face and then shielded her eyes from the brightness. Struggling to stay on her feet, she looked disorientated. She tried to speak but apparently couldn’t. Finally, she pointed to the water bucket.

David shifted his body weight, clenched his fist into a tight ball, drew his arm back, and then swung a punch. After hitting Sinfa hard on the face, he watched her frail body reel backwards until she hit the wall and slid to the ground unconscious. “Forgive me.” She might hate him later, he thought briefly. But that had to be done.

“Paco, we’ve got a dead one,” David said, joining Paco, who was still speaking to Raul. “It’s the Jew girl. She’s stinking and covered in pus boils. We’ll need to scrub the cell later. I think she was diseased.”

“I suppose we’d better take her away,” Paco said to Raul with a worried frown. “Even the dead can spread sickness. You know, I remember a time when …”

“I don’t want to hear another one of your stories, Paco. By the time you’ve finished telling it, we’ll have a plague on our hands. Just get rid of her,” Raul said irately.

“Do you want to help us carry the body out?” Paco asked.

“No, why should I? The Jews don’t concern me.”

Shrugging casually, Paco nodded.

Back in the cell, David picked Sinfa up and threw her limp body over his shoulder. Time was short, David thought, heading towards the prison doors. If she were to wake up before he and Paco got her outside, she’d moan or struggle and he and Paco would be arrested and locked up within minutes.

“Let me look at her,” Raul shouted from farther along the passageway.

Paco held the outer doors open. David, who was just about to walk outside, halted. “I wouldn’t get too close if I were you, Raul!” he shouted over his shoulder. “She’s marked with open sores all over her face and body. She might infect you with her pus.”

Holding his breath, David watched Raul take a step forward and then stare for a brief minute at Sinfa’s bare thighs and legs dangling lifelessly as she was strapped to David’s back. If the man decided to put his curiosity ahead of his well-being, their plan would be shot to hell and he and Paco would be finished. “Well, do you want a look at her or not?” David asked casually.

“Take her – and good riddance!” Raul shouted back.

Outside, David laid Sinfa in a coffin on the dead man’s cart. This transport, used by the prison guards to move dead bodies to the graveyard, was no more than a wooden box sitting on a couple of planks of wood atop four wooden wheels and connected to two narrow wooden arms used as handles. It was heavy to pull, even for two men, and it made a loud noise when the badly constructed wheels grated against the wooden base. But they needed the coffin and the cart. Their plan would fail without them.

After clearing the streets surrounding the prison, they stopped. “Do you think it’s safe now?” Paco asked David.

Walking to the corner, David looked left and then right. There were no houses in this area, only the long zigzag road down the hill. “There’s not a soul in sight,” David told him. “I doubt we’ll see anyone on the streets until morning.”

After hiding the cart and coffin on a grassy bank near their street, David carried Sinfa in his arms and followed Paco through the deserted streets.

Sinfa stirred and moaned softly. Halting in mid-step, David laid her on the ground. Her eyes shot open. Filled with terror and confusion, they bore into David’s face.

David dropped to his knees and clamped his hand over her mouth. “You’re safe but you must keep quiet,” he warned her harshly. “Not a sound, Sinfa.”

Sinfa tried to move her head but couldn’t. Her terrified eyes darted left to right and then rolled upwards, as though she were trying to take stock of her surroundings.

“You’re safe. You’re free,” David told her again.

She stared again at David, and the hope in her eyes seemed to replace the terror. Finally, she nodded in understanding.

David withdrew his hand. “I’m going to carry you. We’re almost there.”

“Where … are you … taking me?” she asked in a barely audible whisper.

“I’m taking you to my parents’ house. My mother will care for you. I give you my word.”

Sinfa nodded. “Did you hit me?” she mumbled, and then she closed her eyes again.

Chapter Forty-One

The inquisitor rubbed his eyes, turned his head, and stared at the sleeping boy lying next to him. As always, after the sexual act, regret and a measure of guilt struck him, but never enough to replace the satisfaction and surge of vigour that followed lovemaking. He stroked the boy’s body and revelled in its youthful contours. He would take the lad again tonight. Today would be momentous, but it would also be tiring, with long hours in contemplation and devotion to duty. Sighing loudly with a reluctance to lose the boy’s warmth, he lay for a moment longer.

An inquisitor’s life was not an easy one, he thought, and the boy brought him a well-earned respite. Did he not deserve to have comfort in the midst of his gruelling duties? Slapping the boy’s bare buttocks, he smiled.

“Get up and see to your business. Bring me food and wine. See to my bath. Prepare my robes for High Mass – and be quick about it. I have God’s work to attend to.”

Once alone, he picked up his Bible, which had been resting on a table, opened it and read Genesis 3–5 from the Old Testament. “Like God, you will be able to tell the difference between good and evil,” he repeated several times. That passage had always held a special meaning for him. The devil had spoken those words to Eve in the Garden of Eden, yet they could have come from God’s mouth and could quite easily have been directed towards His inquisitors. He, Gaspar de Amo, had only one mission in life: to know the difference between guilt and innocence, sin and purity, and to seek confessions from lost souls.

He looked at his naked body in the smoky uneven glass mirror, which distorted his form somewhat. His narrow shoulders, flabby arms, chest hanging like two small sacks of wheat, and a large belly which folded over and covered his genitals reminded him of his mortality. He wasn’t the healthiest of men, he acknowledged. Cursed with the
bloody flux, he had good and bad days. On particularly sickly days, he struggled to leave his daybed, so frequent were the eruptions from his arse and tight knots in his stomach.

Life was too short, with barely enough time to achieve one’s full potential, he thought as he tried to reach a boil on his buttock so that he could squeeze it. Sagrat would be the pinnacle of his success and his lasting legacy, for he doubted he would live to see many more years. Here in this town, a statue would be built to honour him. Centuries from now, he would be remembered as the just inquisitor whose fair judgements transcended secular bias and racism.

During his years of service to the Holy Office, he had brought order and peace to countless towns and cities. No longer were there violent acts against Jews and Moors from townspeople who would take justice into their own hands without understanding what righteousness was. Before this Inquisition, townspeople rounded up suspected heretics and brought them before the local lord, but no one knew how they were to be judged or how witnesses were to be heard and examined. The Inquisition had brought order to the proceedings and fair trials for the accused.

The Inquisition was Christianity’s most instructive and protective body, gently shepherding its errant flock back into the fold and towards an idyllic world, where only sinners experienced God’s wrath and the pure lived blissful lives. The Inquisition was not cruel. On the contrary, it provided a means for heretics to escape death at the hands of inexperienced townspeople and to return to the community.

He opened a wooden trunk sitting at the bottom of the bed and lifted out a leather whip. Kneeling in prayer, he asked God for guidance and clarity of mind. “Let my pain bring me closer to you. Accept my suffering as a testimony of love towards my fellow men and my devotion to you,” he whispered.

His mind’s eye caught glimpses of the two men burning at the stake two nights previously. He had watched the fires being lit from his sleeping chamber in the municipal palace and had not moved from the window overlooking the square until the bodies had turned to ash.

Shaking his head violently from side to side, he tried to cast out the images. An anguished sob ripped from his throat, his legs buckled, and he fell to his knees. Holding the whip tightly in his hand, he used his free hand to stroke the three arm’s length knotted leather prongs one by one. “May I bleed as Christ did for his fellow men,” he muttered. “Let this sacrificial deed atone for my sins and lead me to sanctit
y
.
”

As the first strike of the whip slashed his back, he shuddered with a mixture of pain and ecstasy. Lifting his arm, he coiled the whip onto his back and shoulders and with each lash flogged himself more viciously than the time before.

His body, jerking violently every time the whip dug into his flesh, stung like the kiss of a thousand stinging nettles, yet his mind urged him to continue. During flagellation, he had once crossed the thin veil between two worlds. God had spoken to him, first telling him to punish the heretics who would destroy Spain, and then saying that He and his angels would smite the sinners with rocks from heaven.

“Speak to me, Lord!” he cried out. He
needed
to experience the Lord’s presence again. “I do this for you! This is your will!” he exclaimed, vividly remembering God’s words in that wondrous vision.

Again he pictured the men at the stake, their rigid bodies tall within the high wall of smoke that surrounded them, their heads exploding with intense heat. “Oh, Lord, it was done in your name!”

Lashing himself harder still, he tasted the blood that was spraying from his back onto his shoulders throat and mouth. His teeth were chattering, yet sweat poured down his forehead and onto his eyelids and cheeks. Conjuring up images of tortured faces, his mind settled on a young woman in Zaragoza whose body had been roped in the torture chamber. Tears sprang from his eyes and coursed down his cheeks as he recalled her agonising screams for mercy.

Thick ropes had been coiled around her body. Between the ropes and her skin was a wooden pole which the torturer turned like a key. With each twist of the wood, the ropes had tightened until they had squeezed her belly so tightly that her skin bled and ribs broke. “I love my people!” he cried. “I am their saviour!”

The whip slipped from his hand. His body keeled over, and he curled himself into a tight ball on the floor. Shivering, he reached out his arm towards the bed and gripped the blanket hanging over the edge. Groaning with pain, he dragged it towards him and pulled it over him. His panting breath was like smoke rising in the cold air, and for a fleeting second, he wondered why he’d not ordered the fire to be lit. “I do what I do to save God’s flock,” he mumbled. “I am their shepherd. God, grant me Your Grace …”

Chapter Forty-Two

The church of San Agustin was bathed in light on this last Sunday before Christmas. In the front-row pew, Luis sat with his town council. On the other side of the isle were the Dominican monks and visiting clergy from Valencia.

There were not many pews, and every one of them was filled. Children sitting on parents’ laps shifted impatiently, waiting for permission to go outside to play in the town square and eat their caraway seed biscuits, a Sunday treat. In the centre aisle, invalids lay or sat on the floor. Halfway down the church, a throng of people, unable to find a seat, stood in dishevelled lines, ten deep in places.

After finishing his sermon with a blessing, Bishop Sanchez left the pulpit and gave way to the inquisitor.

Gaspar de Amo rose from his throne-like chair and allowed his chamberlain to adjust his cloak before making his way up the spiral staircase to the highest pulpit – the eagle’s eye, so called by Father Bernardo.

Looking down at the multitude, he took a moment to search out the enthralled sea of faces waiting, probably wondering and undoubtedly fearful of the edict which he was about to read. From where he stood, he could see over the tops of the people’s heads at the back of the church and into the crowded La Placa Del Rey outside. His heart soared. Hundreds of townspeople, unable to find a spot inside, had gathered to listen to him and to learn from him. His mission had begun, he thought, for by the end of this day, many would have already come forward to confess their sins.

There was a hushed stillness, yet the inquisitor, inebriated by power, raised his hand as though he were the pope himself, silencing the masses.

“Children, by the grace of God, the Holy Office, and Their Majesties King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, I extend a solemn invitation to you the faithful to hear the edict of grace,”
his voice rang out. “This is your one opportunity to confess all that which blackens your soul.

“Heresy, that most terrible crime, is not only a sin against God. It is also a grave offence against Rome and Spain. A priest cannot give you absolution,” he continued, giving his first warning. “Your confessors can, however, refer to me any penitents who have denounced themselves for sins against the faith. I urge you all to think well on this! By self-accusing yourselves, you will avoid the most severe penalty for heresy, which is death!” De Amo paused and allowed the soft rumbling of shocked voices to settle. The people would not be filled with fear were they not shocked at his words, he always reminded himself at this point in the edict. And fear was exactly what he wanted from them.

“Let me remind you that self-denunciation is not enough. You must also denounce your relatives, friends, and acquaintances who have taken part in your reprehensible practices. Those who witness a heretic act and do not denounce the sinner are just as guilty, and the punishment will be just as severe, as though you too have sinned!” Watching confusion and disapproval spread throughout the congregation, he wondered why it was not obvious to the people that their duty to the church far outweighed any loyalty they might feel towards friends or family members.

“Amongst these heretic crimes are any and all ceremonies or meetings where Jewish prayers have been recited or a circumcision has been performed,” he continued. “All Judaizers must be reported, for I repeat, if you do not accuse those heretics, you will be excommunicated and charged by the Inquisition.

“Even those already in the grave should be denounced if it is clear to you that they
were
Judaizers. They shall not rest in peace … Their bodies will be exhumed and burnt, and all remaining possessions will be confiscated!” Again De Amo paused for effect. The church was as silent as a tomb. Only a sea of terrified eyes spoke of the fear he was inflicting.

“You must look for signs. People who refuse to recite the ‘Gloria Patri’ at the end of a psalm are to be denounced as heretics, as are those who slaughter animals in an unchristian way, abstain from eating Christian foods such as pork, and do not work on Saturdays.

“All who attend funerals must also be vigilant. Judaizers must be denounced if they attend to a dead person whose body is washed in warm water and its armpits and beards shaved when it is wrapped in a new winding sheet, with its head propped up by a pillow filled with virgin earth! If you see that a pearl or coin has been placed in the dead person’s mouth, or that the house has been sprinkled with water, then in all probability, you will be in the presence of Judaizers!

“Hear me well, my children. You have been warned! By the grace of God, you are given a period of one month’s grace to come forward and …”

A piercing scream coming from the town square filtered into the church and echoed up into the wooden rafters. Seconds later, the sound of men’s raised voices, cries of terror, and a chaotic congregation in the square, running towards one of its side streets, managed to halt the inquisitor’s edict.

Wagging an index finger at Luis and throwing him a contemptuous look, De Amo shouted, “What is this, Your Grace? What new calamity has befallen your inflicted sin-ridden town!”

Luis rose from his seat, ignored the inquisitor, and was halfway down the aisle before De Amo had stopped shouting. Barging past people blocking his path, he headed towards the church’s doors, screaming with rage at those in his way.

“Murder! There’s been another murder!” a man’s voice boomed at the church’s doors.

Women’s screams vibrated through the church. People blessed themselves and cried out to God. Some knelt in prayer, but the majority clambered towards the doors, climbing over pews, which toppled onto the floor. Effigies vibrated, and some fell off the altar. The invalids lying in the centre aisle screeched with horror as the able-bodied ran over their bodies. And in a frantic effort to get outside, they knocked down Inquisition men-at-arms, trying to block their paths.

The inquisitor’s mouth opened and then snapped shut after deciding that he wouldn’t be heard. Making his way down the spiral stairs, he stumbled and fell to his knees just as he cleared the last narrow step. Kneeling, he attempted to untangle legs from the folds of his robes and inadvertently cursed. “A plague on them all!”

His chamberlain tried to pick him up off the floor. “Get your hands off me, you fool!” De Amo shouted. “Make a path for me! Move this spawn of the devil out of my way!” When he’d steadied himself, he strode onto the dais. “Sit down, all of you!” he screamed.

Having no effect on the people, he left the pulpit and angrily pushed aside worshippers blocking his path to the doors. His rage, increasing further at the sight of his flock following the duke, who had already left the church, caused him to stop in his tracks. If he lost control of the people today, he would never have their obedience, he thought. They would not confess to him if they were not afraid of him.

“Halt!” he screamed again. “You cannot disobey your inquisitor! Remain in your seats. I have not finished! You will be reported to the Holy Office. This is heresy!”

Finally, the people took notice of him. A few returned to their seats and got on their knees to pray, as though their very lives depended on the words they would speak. But most, stunned by the growing chaos outside, seemed determined to find out what was happening and, more importantly, who had been murdered.

“Go back to your seats! I demand your obedience! You will go to hell. I give you my word that you will all see the devil and burn for eternity!” Although de Amo tried again, only a few listened to him.

Sitting down in an empty pew, he covered his face with his hands. This was a catastrophe, he thought. Never had he been so humiliated. Sagrat was a cursed town. The evil one and his legions lurked in every corner of every street. Peráto had caused the flock to scatter, and the opportunity to rein in the heretics had been lost. They would not come back inside the church, not today. “Damn you to hell, Peráto,” he cursed under his breath. “You’ll pay dearly for this!”