By Fire, By Water (17 page)

“Well, it’s done.”

“Yes, I know. Did you find the log?”

“I found a number of logs. But Felipe’s testimony … Nowhere. I’ve been summoned to the king’s camp, outside Cordoba.”

The priest frowned. “Go, then. I shall continue our search.”

While they conversed, the horseman stepped in. “Good morning, gentlemen,” he muttered, hanging his hat on a peg.

Miguel Gutiérrez, balancing a jug and three earthen cups, approached from the kitchen. He slammed the pitcher down, causing some of the frothy beverage to spill. More carefully, he placed the bowl of broth on the table. Santángel handed it back to him. “My son is outside.”

“As you like, my lord.”

Gutiérrez brought the soup to Gabriel.

“Put it on the ground,” the boy commanded him without looking up from his whittling.

The innkeeper wondered why he was so grumpy. “Is there anything else you’d like?”

“That will be all.”

When Gutiérrez returned to the kitchen, he crossed himself, muttering.

“Maybe the men need something else. What kind of host are you?” The innkeeper’s wife did not bother looking up from her bowl of white beans. Since her husband had begun fooling around with that young bawd from the village, she had lost respect for him. She made sure he felt her resentment at every occasion.

“They want to be left alone,” Miguel whispered. “These aren’t the kind of men who come back.”

Señora Gutiérrez glanced at her husband’s sad blanket, shaking her head at his ineptitude, pitying herself for ever having crawled into bed with him.

Miguel Gutiérrez opened the kitchen door a crack and peeked out.

The chancellor and Cáceres each handed a purse to the horseman, who untied the string of one and looked inside. He opened his jacket and attached the purses to a cord.

“If I can be of further service—” he began again.

“The best you can do, now,” Luis cut him off, “would be to leave Zaragoza as quickly as possible.”

“I will,” agreed the horseman, securing his jacket over his reward.

“Then our work here is settled,” observed Luis de Santángel. “There’s no need to linger. Let us pray this is all over.”

All three raised their glasses and drank deeply.

“Let us pray we have saved lives,” offered Cáceres.

Santángel closed his eyes to meditate upon such a prayer.

The horseman left. Santángel placed a silver coin on the table and went out with Father Cáceres. Miguel Gutiérrez was untying Father Cáceres’s horse when it reared and the innkeeper fell to the ground, losing his grip. The horse galloped into the surrounding fields. While the innkeeper sputtered excuses and apologies, Luis de Santángel climbed onto Gabriel’s horse, Ynés, and gave Cáceres’s horse chase. He failed to capture it.

“If he is in this valley, I shall find him, señor,” stammered the innkeeper. He untethered his mule.

“I doubt it,” said Santángel. “Take my horse,” he told Cáceres. “Leave her at my home, in the care of my maidservant. I’ll ride with Gabriel.”

Father Cáceres mounted Béatriz. Gabriel climbed onto Ynés, behind his father. The two horses and their riders rode off in opposite directions.

    
CHAPTER SIX

T
OMÁS DE
T
ORQUEMADA
, Inquisitor General of Castile and Aragon, sat at his desk in the monastery of Santa Cruz, examining plans for a new Dominican abbey. He wore a brown habit, the hood lowered on his back. A thin circle of hair surrounded the shaved dome of his head. His eye sockets and cheeks appeared hollow.

One of Torquemada’s penitents had recently died, leaving enough wealth to build a spiritual refuge in Avila, specifying in his will that the prior of Santa Cruz was to supervise its design. Additional funds would come from the Inquisition itself, money pried from the clutches of heretics. Although alchemy was associated with doctrinal divergence, and unquestionably evil, this sort of reverse alchemy, beating ill-gotten gold into the stones of an edifice dedicated to the service of the Lord, was a pursuit worthy of the monk’s most diligent efforts.

Indeed, Torquemada preferred architecture to all other arts. So much was unstable and transitory in this world. To serve as midwife in the birth of something both functional and durable was to help import a measure of the Eternal into mankind’s ephemeral life. Just as God was the greatest architect, so it behooved man to follow His example.

The inquisitor general loved the sharp, rough, solid feel of skillfully hewn stones, joined together with or without mortar. They yielded to the will of man only with difficulty, but once shaped, did not budge. They stayed where one placed them. They performed their humble tasks without grumbling or questioning, holding up a building, providing shelter through storms, giving townsfolk a place to gather and pray. Of course, they were not alive, but they were part of God’s creation, and thus worthy of man’s respect. Aye, of man’s wonderment.

The widow of the deceased penitent was one of Queen Ysabel’s preferred ladies-in-waiting. Eight years ago, she and her husband had recommended Torquemada as confessor to the queen. The monk and the headstrong, vigorous sovereign had discovered they shared a vision for Castile. The New Inquisition and this little monastery at Avila were among the first fruits of that friendship. The monastery was therefore doubly worthy of Torquemada’s earnest attentions.

Outside, a horse’s hooves thumped to the gate and stopped. The guard exchanged words with a visitor. Any disturbance so late at night was not only unusual, but also frowned upon, as the monks rose early for matinal prayers.

The visitor ran to the door of the prior’s office and rapped. “Fray Tomás, a frightful thing has happened!”

Torquemada crossed the small room and unlatched the door. He recognized the tall man with a scar on his forehead under a shock of persimmon-colored hair, who stood there panting. “You were Fray Gaspar Juglar’s aide, were you not?”

The man caught his breath. “Yes, I was. But now I’m a constable of the Inquisition.” He reminded Torquemada of his name: “Juan Rodríguez.”

“Yes, yes. Rodríguez. And before you began with Fray Juglar?” Torquemada had heard rumors about this man.

“Before I dedicated my life to the service of the Church,” replied Rodríguez, “I was not a good man, Father.”

Torquemada nodded compassionately. “Come in, Señor Rodríguez. What’s all this fuss?” He closed the door.

“It’s Maestre Arbués, Father. He’s dead.”

“Pedro de Arbués? Dead? What happened?”

“Murder. A deed too evil to contemplate.”

Was the constable lying? The inquisitor general had seen too much of the blackness in men’s hearts to take anyone at his word, especially someone who had just admitted to his dark past. He asked himself what a constable of the Inquisition could have to gain by dissembling about such a matter. “Murder? And the perpetrators, were they apprehended?”

“Not yet. But soon after Father Arbués died, the cathedral bells started ringing on their own. They haven’t stopped since.”

Torquemada did not believe in such pint-sized miracles, but he was convinced most people needed them as anchors for their faith. He noticed the constable eyeing the cauldron of lamb broth that hung from a wrought-iron stand in the fireplace. “Are you hungry, Rodríguez?”

“Yes, Father.”

He rolled up the plans for the monastery at Avila, reflecting that unlike the buildings in Madrid or Barcelona, those in Zaragoza were constructed not of stone but of adobe, crumbling, impermanent clay mixed with straw and held in place with beams of wood. Clay, the very substance from which God had fashioned man, his fickle, rebellious child.

He fetched a bowl and filled it with the steaming broth. “Our earthly lives are fleeting,” he comforted the constable. He placed the bowl on the table and pulled out a chair for him. “Father Arbués has gone to a better place. And to those followers of Satan who perpetrated this evil act, Jesus will make his wrath known. I can assure you of that.”

The Jesus of compassion and love mattered greatly to the faithful, who knew they could depend on His affection and support. At present, however, they desperately needed the help of the other Jesus, the messiah of righteous anger, the incarnate God who commanded obedience and instilled terror, the Jesus who promised eternal fire and wailing for sinners and for those who refused to recognize His divinity.

Torquemada would demonstrate his fealty to that Jesus. By murdering an officer of His Church, the perpetrators of this crime had pounded yet another nail into Christ’s wrists and ankles. The pain thus inflicted upon the Lord was not His alone to carry. Mankind’s duty, and especially the duty of Christ’s servants, was to undergo the torment with Him.

“Jesus will make his wrath known,” echoed the constable, “in the next world, yes. But in this one?”

“Those who committed this unspeakable act will be found, I assure you.”

Finding comfort in the words of this wise potentate of the Church, Juan Rodríguez sipped the steaming brew.

Torquemada took the chair across from him and lowered his head into his hands. In his mind’s eye he saw the powerful face and large, commanding body of Pedro de Arbués, clothed in the finery of his station, leading Mass. The man Torquemada had chosen to be Inquisitor of Zaragoza had never been a friend. Torquemada did not approve of his carnal appetites, but the canon of La Seo had been a tireless servant of the Lord, struggling as all righteous men must to better himself and extirpate sin and temptation from the world. What more could God’s Church require of its frail, hidebound servants? For no matter what his enemies imagined, Torquemada was not a man who lacked compassion. Not to feel pity for a sinner who sincerely repented, he felt, was not to be Christian.

As he watched Pedro de Arbués officiating in his mind, tears came to the inquisitor’s eyes—tears not only for the man whose murder was an affront to God, but for all mankind, who knew not from one moment to the next what destiny awaited them.

Torquemada rode hard for two days to the city where Pedro de Arbués had resided and died. He set up quarters in the rooms formerly occupied by the canon of La Seo.

The
cierzo
, a brusque southeasterly, blew over Zaragoza. The inquisitor general found the chambers drafty. Small echoing sounds, unfamiliar and occasionally disturbing, leaked from the nave at night. Doors and windows creaked, sometimes so loudly the Dominican could hardly keep his eyes closed.

He read all of Arbués’s logs and journals. He noticed that not all the confessions and depositions from his inquisitorial proceedings were among them. Had the canon misplaced one or more volumes? Was there some meaning to their absence?

Four nights after he arrived, a repetitive whine and clap awoke him. Unable to fall back to sleep, he rose. In his rough woolen habit, holding a small candle, he clomped down a narrow corridor to locate the door or window that was blowing open, then slapping closed.

As he peered into each room, he found only latched doors, until he came at last to the dark nave. The main entrance was wide open and a terrible wind was howling through. It blew so strong the inquisitor had to struggle to push the heavy door closed and latch it. When he turned around again, what he saw startled him. The candle fell from his hands.

Kneeling in front of the cross was the canon himself. Torquemada knelt to pick up the candle, which was still burning, and moved closer. “Make me as a branch of the willow, Lord,” he prayed, “bending before the gale of your volition, that I may better serve you. If this be a demon that ye have placed here to test me, give me the strength to wrestle with it and banish it from Your house.”

When he approached close enough to observe Arbués’s skin and vestments in the candlelight, he saw the bloodstains. The canon rose and turned to him. His plump face showed no horrific traces of martyrdom. What Torquemada saw in that face was an image of serenity, the kind of serenity Torquemada himself had been striving for over the years, through fasting and meditation. Drained of color, reflecting the candlelight, Arbués’s countenance glowed. As if touched by celestial radiance, Torquemada felt his fears slip away.