The Last Jew (29 page)

But when Gripo whispered that Manuel must meet him at once on the wharf, and then finished his wine and said a loud good night, Fierro swallowed his own drink a few minutes later and, refusing the offer of another glass, said good night to everyone there.

As he made his way to the waterfront, he wondered why Gripo had been afraid to be seen leaving the tavern in his company.

The chandler was waiting halfway down the length of the dark wharf, behind a storage shed. He wasted no time in niceties.

'You are marked, Manuel. You would have done well to have discharged the ungrateful bastard long since, and sent him away with his sword and bow.'

'It was Costa?'

'Who else? He is a jealous man, resentful of prosperity, however well earned,' Gripo said bitterly.

Charges were made anonymously at autos de fé, but Fierro didn't ask how Gripo knew his accuser. He was aware José Gripo had half a dozen close relatives who were well-placed priests.

'On what grounds am I marked?'

'He told the inquisitors you apprenticed to a Muslim wizard. He said he has seen you place a blood curse on each piece of armor sold to good Christians. As I have told you before, it has been noted you do not attend Mass.'

'I have attended recently.'

'Recently was too late. You are denounced as a servant of Satan and an enemy of Holy Mother Church, Gripo said, and Fierro recognized the depth of the sadness in his voice.

'Thank you, José,' he said.

He waited there in the darkness until Gripo had left the wharf, then he made his own way back to his armory.

He told this to Yonah the next day, in the bright and lazy afternoon while together they polished the instruments he had fashioned for his brother. He spoke quietly in a flat voice devoid of emotion, as if they were discussing the progress of a piece of work. He did not identify Gripo by name, reporting only that he had learned he was denounced by Angel Costa.

'If he has warned the inquisitors of me, I am certain you are also denounced and will be taken,' Fierro said.

'Therefore, each of us must leave this place, and quickly.'

Yonah could feel his own pallor. 'Yes, señor.'

'Do you have a refuge?'

'No.'

'What of your kinsmen? The two men who visited you here.'

'They were not kinsmen. They were bad men. They have gone away.'

Fierro nodded. 'Then I ask a favor of you, Ramón Callicó. I shall go to my brother, Nuño Fierro, physician of Saragossa. Will you come with me and be my guard until we reach his home?'

Yonah struggled to think. Finally, he spoke. 'You have shown me kindness. I will go with you, to serve you.'

Fierro nodded in appreciation. 'So we must prepare at once to leave Gibraltar,' he said.

In the middle of the night, while others slept, Yonah went to the maestro's house as he had been directed, and they assembled the things they would need for the trip. Food and implements for the trail, and for each of them stout boots and spurs and a mail vest. A sword for Yonah. A sword for Fierro that took Yonah's breath away; it wasn't jeweled or scrolled like a sword made for a nobleman, but it was so finely wrought that it was beautiful, with a wonderful balance.

Fierro wrapped in soft cloths each of the surgical instruments he had made so meticulously for his brother, and placed them in a small chest.

He and Yonah went to the stable and from it led a strong mule to one of the supply sheds at the far end of the compound. It was locked, as each of the supply sheds were, and Fierro opened the door with a key. Inside, half the shed was a jumble of steel pieces, old and rusted armor and other metal dross. The other half of the space was stacked with firewood, fuel for the forge. The maestro set Yonah to moving billets of wood and worked with him, and when a good portion of the pile had been displaced, a small leather chest was uncovered.

It was no larger than the chest that held the surgical instruments, but when Yonah went to pick it up he grunted in surprise, because it had great weight, and he understood why the mule was necessary.

They packed the chest on the mule's back and locked the shed.

'Last thing we want is a braying that will waken the world,' Fierro said, and as Yonah led the animal back to the house the maestro patted the mule and gentled it in a low voice. When the chest was placed on Fierro's floor, the maestro told Yonah to return the mule to the stable and himself to his hut, which he did. Yonah fell onto his pallet at once, but though he was tired and tried to sleep he lay in the dark, troubled by thoughts.

Despite their precautions, next morning Costa knew something was amiss. Up to hunt at daybreak, he saw new dung in the stable yard and yet, within the barn, he noted that every creature was in its proper stall.

'Who has been using a horse or a pack animal in the night?' he asked casually, placing the question to everyone without receiving an answer.

Paco shrugged. 'No doubt a night rider lost his way and, seeing this is a dead end by the straits, rode back the way he had come,' he said, yawning.

Costa nodded reluctantly. It seemed to Yonah that each time he looked up he saw Angel's eyes.

He fretted to be off, but Fierro wouldn't leave until he took care of a final piece of business. The maestro left a package with an old friend who was monarchs' magistrate in the village, to be opened in a fortnight. It contained money to be divided among the men in his employ according to their length of service, and a letter granting them collective ownership of the shop and foundry, along with his wishes that they sustain themselves in the production of armor or other products of their considerable skills.

'It is time,' Fierro said to him that evening, and Yonah felt great relief. They waited until most of the night was gone, so they would have daylight by the time they were on unfamiliar ground. In the stable Fierro led from her stall his accustomed mount, a black mare said to be the best horse there.

'Take the Arab gray for yourself,' he said, and Yonah did so gladly. They saddled both horses and placed them back in their stalls, and then they led the mule to Fierro's house for the last time.

They dressed for the trail and armed themselves, and packed the mule with the things they had accumulated. When they returned to the stable they collected the horses and led the three animals through the compound of the foundry buildings in the gray birth of a new morning.

They didn't speak.

Yonah was sorry he hadn't been able to say good-bye to Paco.

He knew what it was to leave a home and thus could imagine what Fierro must be feeling. When he heard the soft grunt he mistook it for a small emission of regret, but turning to the older man Yonah saw that a feathered shaft had blossomed from the maestro's throat just above the mail vest. Bright blood ran from Manuel Fierro's throat and dripped from the vest onto his horse.

Angel Costa stood perhaps forty paces away and had made such a shot in the dim light as would have earned him a gold piece from the maestro if it had been done in practice.

Yonah knew Angel had taken out Fierro first because he feared the maestro's sword. He had no such fear of Yonah's skill, and he had already dropped the bow and drawn his sword as he ran.

Yonah's first panicked thought, which drove all else from his mind, was to leap on the horse and ride away. Yet perhaps there was something that might be done for Fierro.

He had no time left for musing, only time to draw his sword and step forward. Costa was on him and the blades clanged and clashed.

Yonah had little hope. Time after time he had been bested by Costa. The expression on Angel's face, bemused and contemptuous, was the expression he knew. Costa was determining which series of strokes would finish it quickly, choosing from a dozen maneuvers that had worked against the neophyte in the past.

With a strength born of desperation, Yonah immobilized Costa's sword, hilt to hilt, fist to fist, as they strained against one another. It was as though, then, he heard Mingo's voice in his head, bidding him precisely what he must do.

His left hand snaked down to the small scabbard at his waist, drew the dagger.

Rammed it home. Ripped it upward.

They stared at each other in the same stupefaction, both aware that it was not supposed to end like this. As Costa sagged.

Fierro was dead when Yonah returned to him. He tried to remove the arrow but it was deep and the arrowhead resisted, and he snapped the shaft close to the poor bloodied throat.

He couldn't leave Fierro to be found, knowing the corpse would be convicted and as a final indignity burned alongside the living victims of the next auto de fé.

He lifted the maestro and carried him well off the trail and then used his sword to scratch a shallow grave in the sandy soil, scrabbling the loosened dirt out of the grave with his hands.

The earth was full of rocks and stones, and using the sword as a shovel had ruined the blade, making it useless as a weapon. He exchanged it for Fierro's wonderfully wrought sword. He left the silver spurs on the maestro's boots but took his purse and removed from about his neck the cord holding the keys to the chests.

He spent time and energy covering Fierro's body with heavy rocks to protect him from animals, and then covered the rocks with a foot of earth, spreading the surface of the grave with stones and twigs and small boulders, until from the trail the ground appeared undisturbed.

A few flies were already on Costa and before long there would be a swarm, but after checking to make certain he was dead, Yonah allowed Angel to remain slumped in the dust.

He rode away from that place finally, on the gray Arab at a brisk trot in the lambent light of early morning, leading both Fierro's black horse and the pack burro. He didn't let up on the animals after they crossed the narrow isthmus that linked Gibraltar with the mainland, riding past the looted home of the Pilgrim Saint without seeing it. By the time the sun was high in the sky he was once again in the lonely security of high mountains, and for a time he wept like a child for Fierro as he rode, feeling grief and something more. He had sent two men to their deaths, and now had taken a human life with his own hands, and what he had lost therefrom weighed heavier on him than any of the burdens carried by the burro.

When he was confident that he wasn't being pursued he eased up on the animals, walking them as he followed little-used mountain trails eastward for five days. Then he turned northeast, still keeping the protection of the hills until he neared Murcia.

He opened the leather chest only once. From its weight it could have been only one thing, so the sight of gold coins was merely confirmation that the chest contained the maestro's earned capital from two decades of fashioning armor highly desired by the rich and powerful. It was a resource that wasn't real to Yonah, and he didn't touch the coins before relocking the chest and returning it to its large cloth sack. Fierro had made it his responsibility.

His hair and his beard quickly became wild and tangled once more, and his spurs and the mail vest were marred by skim rust from the dewy grasses on which he slept. He stopped twice to buy supplies in remote villages that appeared safe, but otherwise he avoided all human contact. In truth, most situations were safe, for he looked the perfect picture of a killer rogue knight, whose fine sword and warrior's horses and fearsome appearance did not encourage either attack or social intercourse.

After Murcia he turned due north, traveling through Valencia and into Aragon.

He had left Gibraltar at the end of summer. Now the days had become cool and nights were cold. From a shepherd he bought a blanket of sheepskins and slept wrapped in them. It was too cold to wash, and the poorly cured skins added to his stink.

He was numb with travel weariness by the morning he reached Saragossa.

'You know the physician of this place? A man named Fierro?' he asked a man loading cut wood into a donkey cart in the Plaza Mayor.

'Yes, of course,' the man said, watching him nervously. Yonah was directed to retrace his steps outside the town, to a small but secluded farm whose entrance trail he had passed unknowingly. There was a barn attached to the hacienda but no visible animals except a horse cropping the ragged brown grass of winter.

A woman answered his knock on the door, which emitted the odor of freshly baked bread. She opened the door only a bit; all he could see of her was half a sweet peasant face, the round of one shoulder, the swell of one breast. 'You wish the doctor?'

'Yes.'

Nuño Fierro proved to be a balding man with a big stomach and quiet, introspective eyes. Although the day was overcast he squinted his eyes as though he were looking into the sun. He was older than the maestro. His nose was straight, and in many other ways he didn't resemble his brother, who had been more vital, more robust. But at a second glance, when he left the house, Yonah saw the way he held his head, the walk, the expression that flickered into his face.

He stood silent and weighed down as Yonah told him his brother was dead.