The Last Jew (25 page)

'I shall do my best to remember, señor,' he said politely.

'Did you meet with your kinsman?' Fierro asked when Yonah returned.

'Yes, maestro. A distant relative on my mother's side.'

'Family is important. It is good he came at this moment, for in a few days you will be gone from here.' He said he had decided to send Paco Parmiento, Luis Planas, Angel Costa, and Ramón Callicó to deliver Count Vasca's armor. 'Paco and Luis can use their skills to make any adjustment in the armor that may be needed after it is delivered. Angel will serve as commander of your little caravan.'

Fierro said he wanted Ramón Callicó to make the presentation of the armor to the count, 'because you speak a purer Spanish than the others, and because you can read and write. I wish written confirmation of the receipt of the armor by the count of Tembleque. Is it understood?'

Yonah took an extra moment to answer, because he was saying a prayer of thanks.

'Yes, señor, it is understood,' he said.

Despite Yonah's relief at being far from Gibraltar when Anselmo Lavera would return, he was made apprehensive by the thought of returning to the Toledo district. Yet he told himself he had left Toledo as a boy and was returning as a large man, his features altered by growth, maturity and a broken nose, his beard full and his hair long, and his identity changed and established.

Fierro brought the four members of the party together and spoke plainly when he gave them his instructions. 'It is dangerous to travel to strange places, and I order you to work in concert and not in opposition to one another. Angel is the leader on the journey, in charge of defense and responsible to me for the safety of each of you. Luis and Paco are responsible for the condition of the armor and the sword. Ramón Callicó will turn over the armor to Count Vasca, make certain he is content with it before you depart from him, and receive and bring back a written receipt of delivery.'

One by one, he asked each of them if all of his instructions were understood, and each answered in the affirmative.

Fierro oversaw their careful preparations for the trip. For food they would take only a few sacks of dried peas and hard biscuit. 'Angel must hunt along the way to give you fresh meat,' the maestro said.

Each of the four men in the party was assigned a horse. Count Vasca's armor would be transported by four pack mules. So that Fierro would not be shamed by the appearance of his workers they were given new clothing, along with stern instructions that it should not be worn until they were approaching Tembleque. All four were issued swords, and Costa and Yonah were given vests of mail. Costa strapped large, rusty spurs to his boots and packed a longbow and several bundles of arrows.

Paco smiled. 'Angel wears the permanent scowl that marks him as a leader of men,' he whispered to Yonah, who was grateful that Paco would be on the trail with him as well as the other two.

When all was ready the four travelers led their beasts up the gangway of the first coastal ship to put into Gibraltar, which to Yonah's surprise turned out to be La Lleona. The ship's maestro greeted each passenger with a warm word.

'Hola! It is you, the captain said to Yonah. Although he had never spoken to Yonah once while he was a member of the crew, the captain bowed to him now and smiled. 'You are welcome back to the Lleona, señor.' Paco, Angel, and Luis watched with surprise as other members of the crew greeted him.

The animals were tethered to the rails on the afterdeck, and as the apprentice it was Yonah's chore to carry up hay from the hold each day and feed them.

Two days out of Gibraltar the sea turned choppy, and Luis became queasy and then vomited often. Angel and Paco were unperturbed by the ship's motion and to Yonah's surprise and pleasure, so was he. When the mate called out an order to furl sail, on impulse he ran to the rope ladder at the mainmast and climbed, and soon he was helping the sailors haul in the sail and make it fast. When he reached deck again the crewman named Josep, whose injury had given Yonah opportunity to join the deck crew, grinned at him and slapped his back. Thinking about it, after the fact, Yonah realized that if he had fallen into the sea the mail vest would have helped carry him deep, and for the rest of the trip he remembered he was a passenger.

For the four passengers from Gibraltar, the days under sail were filled with tedium. Early on the morning of the third day, Angel unpacked his longbow and a bundle of arrows and prepared to shoot birds.

The others settled down to watch. 'Angel is as good with the bow as a damned Inglés,' Paco said to Yonah. 'He came from a little village in Andalusia known for its fine bowmen, and he went to his first fighting as an archer in militia.'

But Gaspar Gatuelles, the mate, hurried over to Costa. 'What are you doing, señor?'

'I shall kill a few seabirds,' Angel said easily, notching an arrow.

The mate was aghast. 'No, señor. No, you shall kill no seabirds on the Lleona, for to do so would bring certain disaster upon the ship and upon us.'

Costa scowled at Gatuelles, but Paco hurried over and placated him. 'Soon we shall be on land, Angel, and you will have plenty of hunting. Your skill will be needed to keep us in meat.' To the general relief, Costa unstrung the bow and put it away.

The passengers sat together and watched the sea and the sky. 'Tell us of war, Angel,' Luis said. Costa was still glowering and sulky, but Luis urged until he agreed. At first the other three men listened avidly to his memories of soldiering, for none had been to war. But soon they tired of tales of bloodshed and butchery, of villages put to the torch, of cattle slaughtered and women forced. They had had enough long before Angel finished talking.

The four passengers were aboard nine days. The sameness of their days wore on them and sometimes tempers shortened and frayed. By unspoken agreement each man began to keep to himself for long hours at a time. Yonah kept turning a problem over and over in his mind. If he should return to Gibraltar, he was certain Anselmo Lavera would kill him. Yet Costa's confrontation with Gaspar Gatuelles had caused him to begin to see his problem in a new way. Angel's authority had been overcome by the greater shipboard authority of the mate. One force had been held in check by a greater force.

Yonah told himself that he needed to find some greater force than Anselmo Lavera, a strength that could eradicate the threat of the relic thief. At first this seemed preposterous, but as he sat and watched the sea hour after hour, slowly a plan began to take shape in his mind.

Whenever the ship made port and was tied to a dock, the four men brought their animals down the gangway and exercised them, and when finally La Lleona nosed into the harbor at Valencia, the horses and pack mules were in good health.

Yonah had heard terrible stories of the Valencia harbor during the days of the expulsion. How the harbor had been crowded with ships, some of them in great disrepair and outfitted with sail solely to reap the bonanza of fares from the dislocated. How men, women, and children had been crammed into each hold. How, when sickness broke out, stricken passengers had been marooned on uninhabited islands and left to die. How, as soon as they were out of sight of land, some crews had killed passengers and dumped their bodies into the sea.

Yet on the day Angel led the procession from La Lleona, the sun was shining and the Valencia harbor was peaceful and quiet.

Yonah knew that his aunt and uncle and small brother would have come to a small seaside town nearby, seeking passage. Perhaps they had set sail and were now on foreign soil. He knew in his heart he would never see them again, yet each time he rode past a boy of the proper age, he stared, searching for Eleazar's familiar features. His brother would have thirteen years by now. If he was alive and still a Jew, he would be counted among the men of the minyan.

But Yonah saw only strange faces.

They rode westward, leaving Valencia behind. None of the horses could compare with the Arab stallion Yonah had ridden in the tourneys. His mount was a large dun mare with flat ears and a thin tail drooping between huge equine buttocks. The mare didn't make him a dashing figure but she was tireless and an easy ride, for which Yonah was grateful.

Angel rode first, followed by Paco leading two of the mules and Luis leading the other two. Yonah rode at rear guard, which suited him perfectly. Each of them developed his own trail style. Angel burst into tuneless sound from time to time, as apt to sing a sacred hymn as a bawdy tune. Paco joined in any hymns with a booming bass voice. Luis dozed in the saddle, while Yonah passed the time thinking of many things. Sometimes he dwelt on what must be done to carry out his plan against Anselmo Lavera. Somewhere near Toledo there were men who dealt in stolen relics, competing with Lavera for that illicit trade. He clung to the thought that if he could convince them to eliminate Lavera, he would be safe.

Often he passed the hours trying to remember Hebrew passages he had forgotten, the rich language that had fled his mind, the words and the melodies that had abandoned him after a few short years.

He was able to recapture some small remnant, and he repeated those fragments in imperfect silence, again and again. He could recall one short tractate of Genesis xxii in pristine perfection, since it was the passage he had chanted when he was first permitted to read from the Torah as a newly made man. 'And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built the altar there, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.' The passage had frightened him then and it frightened him now. How could Abraham have ordered his son to cut wood for a burnt offering and then prepare to kill Isaac and burn his body? Why had Abraham not questioned God, even argued with him? Abba would not have sacrificed a son; Abba had sacrificed himself in order that his son could live.

But Yonah was chilled by another thought. If God was a righteous God, why was he sacrificing the Jews of Iberia?

He knew what his father and Rabbi Ortega would say to such a question. They would say that man could not question God's motives because man could not see God's larger design. But when the design included human beings used as burnt offerings, Yonah questioned God. It was not for such a God that he forced himself to play the dangerous game of being Ramón Callicó, day after day. It was for Abba and the others, for the good things he had learned in Torah, visions of a merciful and comforting God, a God that forced people to wander into exile but delivered them finally into land that had been promised.

If he closed his eyes he was able to imagine himself part of the caravan in the wilderness, one of a host of Jews, a multitude of Jews. Seeing them pause in the desert each evening to erect the tents of the host, hearing them praying together before the sanctuary of the ark and the sacred testimony ...

Yonah's reveries were interrupted when lengthening shadows told Angel it was time to halt. They tethered the eight animals under some trees and the four men took time to piss and fart and walk off their saddle stiffness. Then they searched for wood and built a fire, and as their evening gruel began to bubble, Angel dropped to his knees and ordered them to do likewise so they might recite the Paternoster and the Ave Maria.

Yonah was the last to comply. Before the fierce glare of the master-at-arms he knelt in the dust and added his mumbling to the tired, murmured words of Paco and Luis and the loud, brusque prayers of Angel Costa.

In the morning Costa was out at first light with his bow. By the time they had packed the mules he was back with four doves and two partridge that they plucked as they rode slowly, leaving a trail of feathers before they stopped to gut the birds and roast them over a fire on green sticks.

Costa hunted every morning all along the route, sometimes bringing a hare or two with a variety of birdlife, so they never lacked food. They traveled constantly and when they stopped were careful to avoid rancor, as Fierro had ordered them to do.

They were eleven days in the saddle before, one evening as they made camp, they glimpsed from afar the walls of Tembleque, fading into the night. Next morning while it was still dark, Yonah left the fireside and bathed in a tiny stream before dressing in the new garments Fierro had given them, thinking grimly that no maiden ever protected her genitals from sight with more care than he. When the others awoke, they chaffed him for his eagerness to don finery.

He remembered riding to this castle with his father. Now when they rode to the gate, Angel answered the sentry's loud challenge with equally loud and confident tones.

'We are artisans of the Gibraltar armory of Manuel Fierro, arrived with the new sword and armor of Count Fernán Vasca.'

When they were given entry, Yonah saw that the steward was not the same man who had been there years before, but the message he gave had a familiar ring.

'Count Vasca is off hunting in the forests of the north.'

'When will he be seen here again?' Angel asked.

'The count returns when he returns,' the man said sourly. When he saw what was in Angel's eyes, he glanced quickly to the reassurance of his own armed soldiers on the wall. 'I do not believe he will tarry many days,' he said grudgingly.

Costa withdrew to confer with the men from Gibraltar. 'They now know that our mules carry precious goods. If we leave here with the sword and armor we may be fallen on and killed by these or other whoresons in number, and the armor and sword stolen.' The others agreed, and Yonah went to the steward.