Iacobus (11 page)

“Well, I’m sorry, boy, but it will be a bit longer before you warm yourself before the fire, have dinner and lie on your cot,” I told him, using the same order in which he had presented his needs. “First of all we’re going to the Jewish quarter, and I’m afraid that it’s going to be a very long night.”

He looked at me wide-eyed. “To the Jewish quarter?”

I couldn’t see any differences between the clean, narrow and aromatic streets (cinnamon, oregano, cloves) of the Parisian ghetto and the Castilian aljamas that I had known in my youth, or even the calls of Aragon and Mallorca that I had visited during my childhood. We walked under the light of the bluish moon, completely lost between rows of huts jammed together, most of them uninhabited, hoping that sooner or later someone would come to a door or window so as we could ask where Sara the witch lived. The Jews had been thrown out of all the kingdoms of France in 1306 but there were always groups who returned to adapt to the new conditions.

Just after passing the crumbling synagogue on our right, as we were approaching what looked to be the real heart of the Jewish quarters, we came across an old man who was coming out of a crumbling house and who gave us a terrified look.

“Blessed be the Lord forever, amen,” I said to him in Hebrew. This verse of psalm 89 is like a ritual greeting amongst Jews, a way of recognition which the old man instantly welcomed with pleasure.

“Blessed be forever, amen,” he replied with a warm smile. “What are you looking for here at this time of night?”

“We are looking for the house of Sara, the witch. Maybe you can help us.”

“Well, look no further. That’s her door over there, the one covered by a small awning. Sara must have forgotten to take it down tonight.”

“May peace be with you,” I said as we left him behind.

“Was that language you were speaking with the Jew Hebrew?” asked Jonas as soon as we were out of the old man’s earshot.

“It was.”

“And why do you know the Hebrew language?”

“Ah, Jonas, Jonas …! There are so many things that you want to know before your time! Look, this is definitely the silversmiths’ street. Can you see the paintings on the walls?” We knocked on the door.

I had to knock a few times before anyone opened it. A woman of indeterminate age — it was hard to tell in the dark —, covered in a black tunic with a leather apron over the top, peered through a crack.

“What do you want?” she asked rudely.

“We wish to talk to Sara, the witch.”

“What for?

“We need her help.”

“Who sent you?”

“A merchant who was very satisfied with a previous job she did for him.”

The woman looked at us with curiosity for a few seconds that felt eternal, and finally opened the door and let us in.

“Come in, but don’t even think about touching anything.”

At first, her strange and abundant white hair, which fell around her shoulders, confused me for a moment while I was trying to guess her age but I soon saw that she was not an old woman, and she couldn’t have been more than thirty years old.

I noticed that she was walking barefoot on the cold ground, and when she turned to let us in, I could see by the candlelight that her skin was as white as milk and was covered in constellations of freckles and moles of all sizes, shapes and colors. She had hundreds all over her body, even on her feet. She was a woman with the strangest beauty that I had ever come across in my life.

Unexpectedly, I was touched by the room we entered; I was obviously looking for a place where she practiced magic but the mysterious Sara had outrageously decorated it with the most absurd objects one could imagine. As much as I looked around, other than the cauldron that bubbled with a frothy concoction, I could not see any genuine signs of real witchcraft. On one of the walls was an alter on which burned a fire of various candles, and amongst them, dozens of cups, vases, jars, pots, bowls and chalices of a thousand different colors and substances containing liquids, solids, granules, dead and even alive beings from various sources: mercury, roots, sulfur, worms, seeds, flowers, strange juices, stones, sand, bird beaks and feet, herbs …. Another wall had a large, magical circle with a blue hexagon in the middle, whose points shined with six golden stars. That meant, of course, that one of the seven days of the week could not be included: Inside the circle, following the radius of the hexagram, she had drawn the symbols of the Moon (Monday), of Mars (Tuesday), of Mercury (Wednesday), of Jupiter (Thursday) and Venus (Friday) and of Saturn, (Saturday) but there weren’t enough stars to add the Sun (Sunday). For that she would have needed a heptagram, and it wouldn’t have been the same.

In short, there was a Jewish candelabra beside an alchemist atanor, a snake skin beside a wolf fish floating in a jar, and a cauldron for magical transmutations under a cross in the shape of a U, shiny curtains and, on an olive branch, a black, live rook and a white skull completed the scenery.

Jonas remained amazed, looking at those objects that were incomprehensible to him, and a certain child-like terror made him stick to my side more than usual. The witch sat in a chair, behind a small altar covered with a cloth embroidered with golden dots, and with a wave of her hand she invited us to sit on the two stools behind us.

“I’m listening. What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I won’t beat about the bush,” I began, raising my hand ostentatiously to the hilt of my long, double-edged sword. “I need information right now which only you have and I’m willing to do anything to get it.

“Brave fool!” she exclaimed, sitting back with a look of humor on her face; her eyes and lips smiled with irony. “I don’t care whether you are bourgeois, a knight, nobility or the King of France himself; you are a fool, sire. You are trying to frighten me with a childish gesture. But look, I am willing to allow this bravado in my house if you pay the price I tell you for whatever it is you have come looking for.”

I must admit that I was taken aback. Of course, at no time was I actually thinking of using my weapon but I thought that the gesture would scare her enough to put her in a vulnerable position during our conversation. I was wrong; I had believed her to be less astute than she was. She took advantage of my confusion.

“Spit it out. Or do you want to spend the whole night here?”

“We won’t argue anymore, good witch, I accept my defeat,” I said and gave her a friendly smile with all the kindness I could, rapidly changing my tactics. Her Semitic features (black, small eyes, aquiline nose, large forehead) were in harmony with those other amazing features (white hair, milky skin and countless moles, freckles and warts). The truth is that this Hebrew woman possessed a disturbing beauty. I caught myself enjoying these sinful thoughts that went against my vow of chastity which forbade me from interacting with women and I had to make a great effort to push them out of my mind. She then took a long contemptuous look at me and threw me off balance again. I reacted in haste. “Well, you see, I know it was you who prepared the poisoned candle that ended the life of William of Nogaret.”

She didn’t say a word. She continued staring at me contemptuously, unmoved.

“Did you hear me or are you deaf?”

“I heard you, so what? Do you want me to cry or scream out in horror?”

Just then the raven began to shout: ‘She will scream out in horror, she will scream out in horror!’ and Jonas jumped so high that his stool almost rolled across the floor.

“That is the work of the Devil, sire!” he exclaimed, rearranging his attire.

“Your young son isn’t that brave, is he …? Look how he is scared of a bird!”

Now it was my turn to jump. That damn woman couldn’t be a real witch, could she? She was beginning to worry me.

“Jonas is not my son, ma’am, he is my squire, and if you don’t mind, I would like to get back to the matter at hand which I believe is much more important than your comments and your friend’s comments.”

“I already told you that I’m listening.”

“Very well, we’ll do it your way. Did you prepare the poison that killed William of Nogaret?”

“And why should I answer that question?”

“How much money do you want to tell the truth? Gold escudos or papal florins?” I asked, slyly.

“Gold escudos. Two.”

“Fine. Did you prepare the poison that killed William of Nogaret?”

“No, I did not prepare it. And now put the two escudos on the table.”

I undid the bag of coins from my belt so that she could see it properly and put four escudos on the cloth with the golden dots.

“If it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

She thought for a moment, looking at the money with greed but halted by some invisible force.

“Pick up two of those four escudos, sire. I won’t answer that question.”

“O.K., I’ll ask it in a different way a little later.”

She smiled, raising her eyebrows with skepticism but said nothing.

“Do you work for Matilda of Artois?”

“I work for a lot of people but if you want to know whether I have a special commitment to her, the answer is no. I don’t know why but everyone who comes here ends up thinking that I am at their service,” and she laughed, “but that’s not true. I don’t have masters or owners, so I repeat my answer: No, I do not work for Matilda of Artois. I have done some favors for the lady and she paid me well but nothing more.”

With every answer, I put two escudos on the table.

“Did these favors you speak of include poisoning William of Nogaret?”

“No, Matilda of Artois knows much more about poisons than I, and she wouldn’t have needed me for that; she could have done it perfectly well on her own. In fact … Do you not know the latest happenings in France, sire?” she inquired, surprised. “No, I can see that you don’t. Of course, you are not French. Where are you from?” I shook my head. “Ah, you don’t want to tell me! Well, you don’t need to, by your accent I would say that you were born on the other side of the Pyrenees, in one of the kingdoms of Spain but I don’t think that you have lived there for a long time. Your mother tongue must be, let me see, Latin … yes, Latin. Are you a monk in disguise? Please tell me, I want to know if I got it right.”

And she pushed two of the six escudos she had in front of her towards me. I found her game to be amusing and I picked them up.

“You got everything right,” I said.

“So, a monk,” she smiled. “But not a monk from a convent or a church clergy. What type of monk could you be? One willing to draw his sword,” she murmured, “one who asks about intriguing palatial secrets, one who travels with a squire … You must definitely belong to a Military Order. Are you a Templar? Perhaps a Hospitaller?”

She pushed two more escudos towards me.

“I belong to the Order of Montesa, ma’am.”

“Montesa? I’m not sure, I don’t remembering hearing of them.”

“It’s an Order created recently by James II of Aragon in the Kingdom of Valencia.”

“Aha! Well then, you didn’t earn these two escudos,” and she pulled them back towards her. “You don’t know how to lie, sire.”

“Now it’s my turn,” I said, slightly suspicious. “Did Beatrice of Hirson, Matilda of Artois’ lady in waiting, come to your house to ask you for something that would make her lover, William of Nogaret, return to her side?”

“Yes. She came,” she confirmed with a nod of her head. “She wanted a spell that would return the peace to the royal keeper of the seal and at the same time act as a filter for love.”

“And did you give her both things?”

“Yes.”

“In the candle?”

“Yes, in the candle.”

“Did you also ask her for ashes from the tongue of one of the Aunay brothers to attract the power of the Devil?”

“Correct. Matilda of Artois has these ashes and I asked Beatrice of Hirson to bring me a very small amount, hardly anything, just enough to mix with the wax and utter the necessary spells.”

The gold escudos began to form a pile between Sara’s hands.

“But there was something else in the candle ….”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“What else was there?”

“White crystal and Pharaoh’s Serpent.”

“Combustible mercury and vitriol oil!”

“Wow, it seems that you are also an alchemist expert!”

“Why, ma’am, why did you add the mercury and the acid to the mixture?”

“You are going to lose a lot of money if you keep repeating the same question twice. I told you before that it wasn’t I who prepared the poison.”

I looked straight into her eyes and realized that there were only two ways of dealing with this woman: One, offer her such a large sum of money in return for the name of the poisoner that she could not refuse, and two, accept my suspicions about the Templars and wait for her to fall into my trap. I decided to go with both of them.

“O.K., ma’am, I can see that you trust the assassin and that they paid you such a high price for your silence that my gold escudos are no more than small change to you. But if that is true, if you have that much money, I’m sure that you wouldn’t be living here, nor would you be working as a witch, so I will discard the second option and we are just left with the first: The assassin is someone you cherish.”

“I repeat, sir, that you are a fool,” she said, placing her hands on the edge of the table and leaning forward to invade my personal space. The truth is she was very beautiful; without meaning to, I stared at the locks of white hair that were beginning to fall softly around her face, as the raven repeated, “Fool, fool!”

“Did I say something wrong?”

“Well, what you haven’t said is your name.”

“You’re right. Forgive me. My name is Galceran, Galceran of Born, and I’m a doctor. And my squire’s name is Garcia but I prefer to call him Jonas.”

“Beautiful symbolism …,” she observed; why was I beginning to think that the Jewish witch had guessed the link that tied me to Jonas? “But listen, this chat has been going on for too long and I want you to leave as soon as possible: The assassin, as you have classified him, was not just one man, but two, two dignified and honorable knights who have my absolute trust and esteem. A long time ago, they saved my family from being burnt alive on the fire,” her voice suddenly turned opaque and cruel. “My father was the most important lender in the Jewish quarter and he had countless enemies amongst the gentiles, who were dying to see him burn on the fire of the Inquisition. Someone falsely accused him of stabbing and burning a sacred host. What nonsense! We had to quickly abandon our home and escape with nothing to save our lives. The two knights I mentioned helped us to flee, they gave us refuge and hid us until the danger had passed. As you will understand, I owed them so much that I offered to help when they asked for my services. It is true that, against my wish, they paid me a considerable sum of money, much greater than I’m sure you could pay but should I abandon my art for that? Every person has a profession in this life, and I am a witch and I like being one. I wouldn’t stop, even if I had three times as much money as my friends paid me.”