Читать книгу Inquisitor Dreams - Phyllis Ann Karr - Страница 7

Chapter 1

The Dream of the Fall of Alhama

He stood among mountains, feeling a wind whip through his vestments. He was vested to say Mass, but could find no chalice. Watching the chasuble’s red brocade crease over his elbow, he searched for the holy vessel, moving rock after rock. Curls of ash blew past him in the wind.

“Great-great-grandfather,” said a woman’s voice.

He looked up. The tall woman who wore trousers and a homely face stood before him.

“Is it you?” he said.

“Me. Rosemary.”

“But, I tell you yet again, you meant to address me as ‘granduncle.’ I am vowed to celibacy,” he reminded her.

“That didn’t slow down priests like your patron Alexander the Sixth.”

“Who?”

She looked thoughtful. “Right. We’re in February, 1482. Borja isn’t pope yet. Well, let’s go.” She turned and set off upslope as if expecting Don Felipe to follow her lead.

He took half a step and caught himself, calling after her: “Wait!”

Already so far distant that she looked little taller than a dog, she paused and looked back.

“Who are you, Doña Rosemary,” he demanded, as he should have demanded on earlier occasions, “that I should render you obedience? Some descendant of mine in a collateral line, perhaps, but that is rather reason that you should obey my authority than I yours, even were I not both priest and—”

“Shut up, grandfather. I’m an unchristened policewoman.”

“Unchristened?” In his shock, he found himself within arm’s reach of her. Scooping a palmful of water from the stream that ran at their feet, he leaned toward her. “Ego te baptizo in nomine—”

She caught his wrist and turned it, shedding its water over the mountain herbs. “Never try that again.”

“That any offshoot of my family should remain unbaptized—”

“Like quite a few of your ancestors. Well, understand ‘policewoman’?”

“No.”

She sighed. “An officer of the secular arm of the law.”

“Pardon me, Doña. I have heard of women who go to war and women who avenge their kin with the sword. But, no matter how virile the lady, I have never heard of a female alcalde.”

“Times change. Maybe in your time a mere member of the civil branch doesn’t have any authority over a churchman, but neither does an inquisitor have any authority over an unbaptized soul.”

“An inquisitor?” he said somewhat coldly. “You mistake me for Fra Guillaume.”

“No, I don’t. I’m just a few years ahead of you. All right, we’ll call ourselves equals. Now come on and let’s see what we’ve got to watch this time.”

Glancing over her shoulder, he saw a column of black smoke rising from beyond the ridge. “In curiosity, I will come.” He emphasized “curiosity.”

They moiled upward, leaning into the slope as it grew steeper. He began a pace or two at her heels, gradually closing the gap until they plodded shoulder to shoulder. “I know these hills,” he observed at length.

“Recognize them, huh?”

“We roamed them as boys, Gamito, Hamet, and I…” He looked again at the smoke. Red-gold billows roiled through it, shaping themselves into something like a face. “Is it akin to that column of smoke which led the children of Israel by day?”

“Probably not.”

“That is not the face of God?” He pointed.

She glanced up. “No.”

Seizing her elbow, he came to a halt. She stopped also, more as though by complaisance than constraint, and stood eying him with an expression of quizzical tolerance.

“Is it, then,” he demanded, “the face of the Devil?”

“Depends what you mean by ‘Devil.’”

“If we are in the mountains of my own boyhood, and you know—as it appears—little if anything more in this matter than I, then, in the name of Heaven, for what purpose have you been sent to guide me?”

“The Lady God knows.”

Recoiling, he made the Sign of the Cross at her.

She neither vanished nor flinched. “Maybe,” she went on, “because I’ll understand it better myself if I see it with you. You can go first, if that’ll get us there any faster.”

“I will not have you at my back.”

“Funny. I don’t mind having you at mine.”

The smoke scowled down at them like some gigantic gargoyle in livid reds and blacks. “That is the face of the Evil One!” Don Felipe exclaimed, staring at it.

“Evil, yes.”

“But if you are unbaptized, and the disciple of heretics, it follows that you must be damned.”

She clapped one of her palms to his forehead, the other to his cheek. “Feel damned to you?”

Both her hands were cool and dry, with only a very slight workworn roughness. “No,” he was forced to admit in confused relief, actually drawing human comfort from her touch.

“All right.” Transferring one hand to his wrist, she pulled him the rest of the way to the top.

He gasped. At their feet lay Alhama, home of his boyhood, her walls breached, her looms smashed, her houses aflame. Her people—Moor and Jew and Christian alike—fled through the streets like panicked ants, soldiers at their heels like greater ants, cutting them apart joint by joint. The column of smoke rose from her wealth, bolt upon bolt of fine woolens and silks, rare cottons and proud brocades, all drenched with not quite enough blood to stop their smoldering away to ash.

“God! Ah, God!” cried Felipe, for the moment past caring that at his side the strange woman repeated her blasphemous “Lady God!”

She was first to recover, if by only a little. “Sorry,” she said grimly. “Those are King Fernando’s and Queen Isabel’s troops, taking revenge for Zahara. Which must have been as bad or worse.”

“Zahara?”

“Last Christmas. And that was revenge for Villaluenga in October. Maybe you’ve forgotten. Or else the news hasn’t reached you yet. In my time, anybody interested, anywhere in the world, could learn about things like this while they were still happening. Maybe you were luckier. You only had local tragedies to cope with while they were fresh. If they happened at any distance, they were cold by the time you heard about them.”

“Such things as these do not grow cold.”

“If you say so. But we’re still witnessing part of the glorious Christian Reconquest of Granada.”

“What…” He swallowed hard and blinked. “What of my family?”

Now they stood in a street of the city, blood soaking the soles of their shoes. A small dog, once perhaps some lady’s pet, came and lapped at Felipe’s right heel, its tongue a tiny pink banneret flittering in and out of the ball of hair, looking like newly washed and carded wool, that was its body.

“Shoo,” the woman remarked, gently, scooping rather than kicking the dog away with one foot. “Well, grandfather, you know this town better than I do.”

He gazed around. Everything looked strange. This street seemed free from present fighting, except at its farther end, where conflict still raged between a Castilian knight and two women, one clumsily wielding a halberd and the other armed with meat-hook and frying-pan. All three ignored Felipe and his companion. Somewhere, a baby’s wail rose, then abruptly ceased. Corpses lay everywhere, draped every window, clogged every doorway. A few seemed whole, though mangled and bloody. Many more were in pieces. The dog had already abandoned Felipe in favor of a severed, beringed hand clutching a scimitar. Over all, the smoke threw an ashy black odor that, mingling with the stenches of blood, fear, and sinful flesh, formed a fog to torture nose, throat, and lungs.

“I knew it once… Once, I knew it well. Alhama de Karnattah…my poor Alhama.” Turning at last, Felipe led the way to the free end of the street.

Here he hesitated, casting about for some familiar landmark in the shambles deserted by living souls, until he glimpsed what he thought might once have been Ben-Siddim’s butcher shop, which had provided his family’s table with so much veal and lamb.

Thus, sometimes finding places he seemed to recognize, but more often wandering lost, he led his guide back and forth among the ruins of his native town for an interminable period. Now and then they passed near some last hand-to-hand combat, but without drawing the attention of those involved. Once, indeed, Don Felipe strove to halt a rape in progress, and once to rescue a half-grown boy from the pikes of two assailants. Each time he found himself and his self-styled descendant suddenly translated into another street, to begin the weary search anew.

“How, then,” he asked after the second failed attempt, “was the dog able to lick my feet?”

She answered, “Dogs go by their own guidelines.”

Privately, he could not help but rejoice whenever he saw the corpse of a Castilian invader or recognizable fragment thereof amid the carnage, although he saw that he must lock such rejoicings forever within his own breast, as disloyal alike to king, queen, and Holy Mother Church.

Eventually he stumbled on an arm that looked grotesquely familiar. Overcoming fear, he turned his head to follow the direction of the stump. His gaze met a doorway clotted with the frozen bodies of his father and elder brother.

“Here.” He could say no more. The door hung in splinters. From inside the house poured screams and a few curls of smoke.

The policewoman gave his shoulder a grip of solace, muttered, “I’m sorry,” and began climbing through a gap in the front wall. Numb, Felipe followed.

His brother’s wife lay on the floor, staring sightlessly up, her arms still locked about the top half of her child. Its lower half lay in the far corner. Felipe had never seen this child in life; he remembered only, from his mother’s letters, that it was the single one of her grandchildren to have survived the natural perils of infancy.

His mother’s body lay on a bed, blood soaking the linens from the back of her head and the cleft between her legs.

In his father’s study, the head had been smashed from the bust of Tully and the head of Felipe’s younger brother, child of his parents’ age and not yet twelve years old, thrust into its place on the marble neck.

At all these horrors, Felipe stared only long enough to comprehend the fact of death. The fullness of grief must wait, for one living voice screamed on.

At last they found its source, in the walled garden, beneath the mosaic-decorated fountain. Three Castilian soldiers were raping Felipe’s only sister, while a fourth looked on laughing even as he bandaged the joint of his right thumb where some defender had managed a crippling blow.

“Serafina!” Felipe started forward, but before he could so much as throw his bare arms round her present attacker, the man, finishing, struck his hard fist to her chin with a force that snapped her neck, opening a hole at her throat.

“Bravissimo, Manuel!” laughed one of his comrades.

They left, in their coarse laughter, taking no notice of Felipe and his guide. Sinking to his knees beside his sister’s body, the young priest wept.

“In all my life…” He gathered her poor body into his arms, willingly smearing himself with her blood. “Never before, except in nightmare, have I looked on the face of carnal warfare. Never have I seen it in all its bitterness!”

“Not that different from ‘spiritual warfare,’ is it?” Then, as though somehow to soften her words, Rosemary repeated, “Grandfather.”

And, so speaking, woke him with her own dissolution beyond the touch of waking memory. He recollected nothing of his dream save that a small dog had licked his foot.