The Devils of Cardona (19 page)

“Did your sisters identify their attackers?”

“Of course!” She looked at him in surprise. “That's why Vallcarca's men arrested them.”

“And I understand that one of them said he was the Redeemer?”

“That is correct.”

“So the sisters saw his face during the attack?”

“Not during it. All three men were wearing masks, as I told Commissioner Herrero.”

“If they were wearing masks, then how did they know that the two men they saw were the ones who attacked them?”

Mother Superior Margarita's ancient, creased face looked suddenly confused. “Because they saw them before—on the road. And they also saw them later on.”

“At the prison?”

“No. The baron's men brought the two prisoners here on the evening they were caught. Our sisters saw them through the grille. They recognized them both as the men they had seen on the road just before the attacks. They were the same men who were arrested by the militia while riding away afterward. There was no one else on the road apart from them. Who else could it have been?”

Mendoza did not know, and it seemed discourteous to say that he would have required more conclusive proof to reach a verdict. Instead he expressed his hope that the guilty would be punished and that the sisters would recover from their ordeal.

Mother Superior Margarita nodded. “Nothing happens without a reason, Licenciado Mendoza. But goodness will triumph with God's help.”

Mendoza also felt that the nuns had been attacked for a reason, but he
was starting to wonder whether it was the reason it seemed to be. A new suspicion was beginning to take shape in his mind. It was certainly fortuitous, given the Inquisition's priorities in Cardona, that Herrero should have been conducting an investigation in Vallcarca on the same day that three Moriscos from Belamar had come to the
señorio
to carry out a crime like this. And why would three rapists come all the way to Vallcarca, with its gibbets and militia, when there were nuns in Cardona who were more easily accessible? As he walked back to his horse, it occurred to him that goodness would need considerable assistance from the law as well as the Almighty if it was to prevail in Vallcarca.

hey arrived back in Belamar in the early evening, and Mendoza was pleased to find his cousin waiting for them in the village hall with Necker, the two militiamen, and Constable Franquelo. Gabriel was impressed by Ventura's new horse, and Franquelo shifted uncomfortably when Ventura said that he had acquired it on the open market after his mare had broken her leg. Ventura told them about the bandit attack on the road whose survivors he had escorted safely to Cardona, and Mendoza immediately gave new orders. From now on they were to patrol the town by day and also by night, in case Vicente Péris attempted to enter Belamar. From midnight to dawn, there would be two-man patrols lasting two hours, and he and Gabriel would take the first.

Gabriel was excited by this new task, but Franquelo made no attempt to disguise the fact that he regarded it
as a burden. Mendoza sent them to the tavern and remained behind with Ventura. It was not until then that his cousin told him about his encounter with the smugglers.

“I suppose a horse is a fair reward for saving lives,” Mendoza said. “Otherwise I might have had to confiscate it as contraband. So Vallcarca is smuggling horses. And our little village constable is helping him.”

“Are you going to question Franquelo?”

Mendoza shook his head. “Not yet. Right now I have other priorities than smuggled horses. Like Vicente Péris.”

“Who's Vicente Péris?”

Mendoza told him about the attack on the nuns and his visit to Vallcarca. “The baron thinks that Péris is the Redeemer. But why would the Redeemer go to Vallcarca with two wretched Moriscos to rape two nuns when he has the band that you saw at his disposal?”

“There's something else I didn't mention,” Ventura said. “Didn't the priest have his skull smashed in with a pointed weapon?”

“That's what Segura said.”

“Well, the bandit who called himself the Redeemer was carrying some kind of silver mace with spikes on it. That's what he killed the tailor with.”

“He's probably not the only bandit with a weapon like that.”

“True, but there was something odd about the attack. After the bandit killed him, he called him a
gos
.”

“What does that mean?”

“It's a Catalan word for ‘dog.' And he spoke Spanish with a Catalan accent. I know because I spent some time in Barcelona when I came back from Flanders. The women, I tell you—”

“Hombre, stick to the point.”

“So why is a Catalan waging holy war on Christians in the name of the Turkish sultan?”

Mendoza shrugged. “Don't they have Moriscos in Catalonia?”

“No doubt, but what would a Catalan Morisco be doing in these mountains? And if these people were the same people who wrote Arabic on the church wall in Belamar, then why didn't they speak it to one another?”

“Not all Moriscos speak Arabic. Granada was always different in that respect.”

“Maybe. But his whole speech about the Redeemer—it didn't sound real. It was like something you hear at the theater.”

“Rebels don't have to be great orators, cousin.”

“True,” Ventura agreed. “But this Catalan sounded like a bandit, not a rebel. And the men I saw today—they were just a rabble looking for plunder.”

Mendoza pondered this for a moment as a new and completely unexpected possibility now entered his mind. “Well, if the Catalan is the Redeemer, then the Redeemer can't be Vicente Péris—unless there are two of them. But the priest wasn't robbed. And why would a bandit call himself the Redeemer if he wasn't?”

Ventura looked blank. “Maybe he thought it would frighten people. Some bandits like to give themselves a reputation.”

Mendoza was silent as he considered these possibilities. “Do you think you can track those bandits?” he asked.

“Claro.”

“Good. Because I need you to go back up into the mountains and get a closer look at those men. See what you can find out about them. Once you get a sighting of their camp, come back immediately. Only reconnaissance, is that clear?”

Ventura's face was a mask of injured innocence. “Have I ever disobeyed orders before? But I'll need to go on foot at least some of the way. A horse will be too conspicuous.”

“Necker can accompany you as far as you need to go on horseback. You'll have to make your own way back. And right now, cousin, I have to tell you that I am so hungry I actually want to go to the tavern.”

•   •   •

T
HE
DEL
R
ÍO
FARM
was only half an hour from Belamar, at the end of a steep dirt track leading off the Jaca road that most travelers who knew no better assumed did not lead anywhere. It was this inaccessibility that had made it attractive to Vallcarca, and the farm could also be reached from the lower plains through more complicated routes that avoided the main roads altogether so that horses could be brought up through lower Aragon and up through Monzón or Barbastro or farther west from Ayerbe unnoticed by the king's constables or anyone else, even by daylight.

It was a system that had worked well throughout the ten years Gonzalo del Río had been involved in the trade, and his section of the route was the easiest because the mountains were so lightly patrolled and because there were so many routes through the mountains that it would take a small army to watch over every one of them. In all those years, he had not failed to deliver a single animal and had never even been stopped crossing the frontier, by either Spanish or French customs officers. It was only now, thanks to the
alguacil
-bandit who had accosted them near the frontier three days earlier, that he had lost an animal and the delivery fee that came with it, and his reputation had been called into question for the first time.

Franquelo had also been penalized, and the
alguacil
had insisted that he and Rapino recoup his losses. Now there would be no more horses until Licenciado Mendoza's investigation was over, and that meant that he would have to rely only on the farm. Del Río could not help but interpret this reversal of fortune as a sign that Allah was displeased with him, and so he had made a special effort for the last two days to perform the salat five times daily. He had renounced taverns and brandy houses and pledged to keep himself pure. He did not include his comings and goings across the border in these pledges, because the laws that he broke were Christian laws and the income that he derived from breaking them helped him to pay his taxes and feed his wife and children, as well as his mother and father and his
grandparents, who lived on the farm with him. He could not see how Allah could object to that.

Del Río was only intermittently pious, and he did not find praying easy. He often struggled to remember the words and had to make up his own, but opportunities to pray in groups were becoming rarer since the judge and his constables had installed themselves in the town, and now that the
alguacil
-bandit knew where he lived, he was reluctant to pray with his family or even wear a clean white shirt in his own home, even though it was Friday. He had still managed to pray three times that day, however, and he washed his hands and face once again and knelt down before the open window and looked out toward Mecca and the Kaaba Stone.

From around the farm, he heard the familiar domestic sounds that he had heard all his life. He heard his eldest daughter cranking the well, his wife singing to the baby, the cattle lowing in the barn, and the chickens pecking at the corn his son was throwing to them. He had just touched his forehead to the ground when he heard the dog's agitated yelp, followed by a sudden silence. From the direction of the well, he heard his daughter scream, and then she, too, fell silent. The smuggler scrambled to his feet, reached for his sword and ran out into the courtyard toward the open doorway.

Outside, a hellish scene confronted him. Men were swarming into the yard. Some were wearing masks and white smocks with red crosses painted onto them. Others had their faces uncovered, and he recognized
montañeses
from his journeys back and forth across the mountains. All of them were armed with halberds, lances and swords, bills and spiked wooden maces. At first he thought that they had come to rob him, but then one of the masked men shouted, “Come out, Moriscos! Paradise awaits you!”

As if obeying a signal, del Río's six-year-old son came sprinting across the yard in an attempt to reach the house. The boy had run barely a few yards when one of the intruders tripped him up with his halberd and then calmly rammed its sharp point into his writhing body as though spearing a fish. All around him, del Río's family was screaming and crying as the
intruders rushed toward the house, some of them shouting the name of St. James the Moorslayer. It was only then that the smuggler tried with the help of his father and his uncle to slam the door in their faces, but their collective weight pushed him back. He had not even time to raise his sword before one of the masked men thrust the lance into his abdomen and leaned forward, pushing it in deeper. Del Río gasped and dropped his own weapon, staring back at the pitiless hate-filled eyes through the slits as the masked man's companions hacked, poked and slashed at his defenseless family and pursued the women and children into the surrounding rooms. He wanted to ask God what he had done to deserve this, and he pleaded with the deity to allow them all to meet in paradise, before his killer withdrew the lance and let him fall lifeless to the floor.

•   •   •

O
F
ALL
THE
CRIMINALS
Inquisitor Mercader encountered in the course of his holy work, there were few that he loathed more than sodomites. Even Jews and Moriscos were capable of genuine repentance, but sodomites were freaks of nature who had allowed their bodies to be used for purposes that the Heavenly Father had not intended, and their sins left a stain that could never be removed. Administering punishment to such prisoners brought its own special spiritual satisfactions. With most prisoners the Inquisitor was careful to see that his interrogators carefully calibrated the level of pain in order to extract their confessions. In the case of sodomites, the torment was not just a means to an end—it was a permanent message inscribed on the body in a language of torn muscles and broken bones that would always remind offenders of the words of Leviticus: “Thou shall not lie with a man as with a woman; that is an abomination.”

On this particular morning, Mercader presided over a private punishment at the Aljafería of an elderly hidalgo who had committed the nefarious sin with his servant. The old gentleman had to be carried into the courtyard on a board, where he lay barely conscious of the sentence that was read out,
while the servant had to be supported by guards as he was led out in his sanbenito and a candle, to be tied to the whipping post to receive his thirty lashes with a whip whose cords were dipped in pitch.

The inquisitor stood in his scarlet robes on the balcony overlooking the courtyard and observed these proceedings with his usual pitiless detachment. The Inquisition had been pursuing the hidalgo for many years, and right up until his arrest he had continued to believe that his social position would protect him. Now he knew better, and if he never walked again, then that was how God willed it, and the fine imposed upon him would greatly assist the Inquisition in its holy work. But the hidalgo's was ultimately a minor case that would have no bearing on his own career and merely completed an investigation that his predecessors had set in motion long before his arrival.

Cardona was a different matter. And now, against his expectations, the case had acquired renewed momentum as a result of the fortuitous investigation in Todos Santas. The prosecutor Ramírez had just issued a new indictment for the arrest of the three Moriscos from Belamar. Already he had dispatched urgent letters to the
justiciar
of Aragon, the Council of Aragon and Inquisitor-General Quiroga to report that three Moriscos from Belamar de la Sierra, two of whom had precedents with the Inquisition, had violated two nuns in the Baron of Vallcarca's estates and that he had reason to believe that one of them might be the Morisco Redeemer. In his letters he had reiterated the need for a full inquisitorial investigation into Belamar itself.