“If he did write The Lords of Time, that could explain why the author doesn’t give interviews or appear in the media,” said Estíbaliz.
“That’s true, but there are quite a few authors like that. It’s one thing to write, but not everyone feels equipped to deal with the press or speak in public. They’re two different skill sets, and people aren’t necessarily good at both.”
“What about the contract you signed? What was the name on it?”
“Diego Veilaz, Ltd. There was a bank account number, but it belongs to a popular NGO. He wasn’t interested in making money, and we didn’t expect it to be such a huge success.”
“So he’s not interested in money…” Estí repeated, her mind clearly working overtime.
Or he’s not interested in making money off the book, I thought. If Ramiro Alvar is so rich, would he be concerned with royalties?
Just then Peña called, and I moved away from the others.
“Kraken, we just got a report from a building site in the Medieval Quarter. Are you there now?”
“Yes. What’s it about?”
“We don’t know exactly, but there’s a bad odor coming from an apartment they’re refurbishing between La Cuchi and Santa María. No one can figure out what’s causing it. There’s absolutely nothing in the space other than the floor and the walls. Anyway, I’d like to take a look.”
A cat caught in the pipes, I bet. I’d have smiled if it weren’t something we had to deal with at least twice a year. Usually we called the fire department, but if they heard about it first, they sent it to us. The hot potato was passed back and forth, depending on which department received the first call from a neighbor with a sensitive nose.
“Are you coming or not?”
“Estíbaliz and I are going to Valdegovía. We’ll be back in an hour or two. We’re with Milán.” I looked at her, and she turned away. Ever since she had broken up with Peña, it was difficult for them to conceal how uncomfortable it was to work together. I didn’t like to force them, but the bashful Ramiro Alvar Nograro had piqued my curiosity. Meeting him would be interesting, whether or not he was the author. “Milán will catch up with you in the Santa María district.”
“Milán…As you wish. Tell her I’ll meet her in ten minutes,” he said with a sigh.
* * *
—
Estíbaliz took the wheel and headed out of Vitoria. I leaned back in the passenger seat and watched the beeches’ golden canopies speed by as we got into the hills and the highway turned into a dirt road.
I hadn’t been back to Villaverde, my grandfather’s village, in days. I was spending too many hours on these cases. I missed the fresh air when I was walking in my hills, trudging through muddy leaves as I wandered between the oaks and boxtrees.
We passed the small village of Ugarte, a delightful place that still looked as it did in the Middle Ages, fuchsia plants in every window. We took the narrow lane leading to Nograro Tower, which was no more than four hundred yards from the town.
The grounds consisted of a rectangular tower with battlements and machicolations at each corner. There were a few windows at each cardinal point, and a small wall around the perimeter that concealed a moat. A pointed arch with a small window led to the entrance.
“So you’ve been here before,” I said to Estíbaliz as she parked the car.
“Yes, but the exhibition took place after the guided tours had ended. I had no idea the old lord of the tower lived in the same building.”
“Old lord? The tower might be a hundred years old, but its owner is not, at least not according to Prudencio,” I said, as we clambered out of the car.
We crossed the drawbridge and entered through the gateway. It was like stepping back in time. An immense cobblestone compass rose spread on the ground in front of us, a pair of Roman scales stamped with the date 1777 hung above our heads, and several worn statues lay scattered on the ground. Pure Middle Ages. It was wonderful.
A very tall young woman with a cleft chin and a long side ponytail greeted us at a small ticket window. We assumed she was the guide the town council had appointed to lead tours of the tower.
“Good morning,” I began, “we came to—”
“Did you call? I didn’t have any visits scheduled for today,” she said in a soft voice.
“Criminal Investigation,” said Estí, flashing her badge. She was already impatient and wanted to dispense with the small talk. “Could we please see the lord of the tower?”
“Of course. I’ll tell him you’re here,” the woman said, and pressed a button on the intercom next to the polished wooden counter.
The tour guide’s office held an old-fashioned computer, a display case filled with catalogs, and little else. I imagined she spent endless hours there, bored, surrounded by wheat fields in a forgotten paradise.
“Ramiro Alvar, there are people here to see you,” she said vaguely.
“I’m not here,” came the reply.
“I think you should meet them,” she insisted.
“This is Inspector López de Ayala, from Criminal—”
“A López de Ayala. So they still exist….Come on up. I’ll see you.” The young man spoke with an authority I often wished I possessed.
“Go up to the third floor. He’s in the Tapestry Room office,” the woman informed us.
“So the count has several offices,” said Estí, half impressed, half resentful.
Rich people always had the same effect on her, and she wasn’t good at hiding it. Estíbaliz was brought up poor, in a decrepit shack fifty kilometers away.
Ignoring her comment, the guide opened a door that led to a wooden staircase. We climbed to the third floor and entered a room hung with tapestries depicting a hunt: a pack of hounds pursuing their prey.
The lord of the tower walked into the room, intent on making our jaws drop.
He strolled slowly and confidently in front of his ancestors’ pictures, hands clasped behind his back and a mocking smile at the corner of his lips. He looked like a mischievous boy showing off his playroom, or his tree house, or a tent he had set up on the back lawn.
Ramiro Alvar Nograro was wearing a cassock and a delicately embroidered scarlet chasuble. I couldn’t tell if he was a priest, a chaplain, a bishop—but whatever his title, he was the most attractive man of God we had ever laid eyes on. I say “we” because in another life I would have killed to have Estíbaliz look at me the way she was ogling him.
When we were young, Estí and I would run into each other in the old city’s bars. She was going through her punk phase, and it drove me crazy. She was so free; she didn’t give a damn about anything. I was constantly striving to accidentally bump into the diminutive redhead. One night, I told her best friend, Paula, the sad story when I was drunk on kalimotxo, and Paula comforted me. Later on, we went for a coffee in El Caruso, then another and another, until the Grim Reaper’s scythe put an end to our love story on the Avenue of Pines.
I shook off the past and took a good look at the curious man standing in front of me.
Ramiro Alvar had intelligent, darting blue eyes, and his stylishly slicked-back hair revealed a prominent forehead and eyebrows that seemed to stare down at us from an imaginary pulpit.
“Would these kind souls care to accompany me to lunch?” he asked. “I can offer you rooster-comb stew, my favorite dish.”
I was about to refuse politely when my cell phone interrupted the awkward moment. Alba’s face flashed on the screen.
“Unai, my mother has had an accident. I’m on my way to the hospital now.”
9
EL CAUCE DE LOS MOLINOS
DIAGO VELA
Winter, the Year of Our Lord 1192
I swear I didn’t want it to happen, but I now believe that what took place on that icy dawn was just the beginning of the many deaths and misfo
rtunes that later befell us.
I came across her walking barefoot on the blue-tinged snow, a pair of skates across her shoulder. Onneca was striding along as if the cold didn’t bite at her feet, as if there were no layers of frost on her heels.
Broad-shouldered, flat-chested, head erect, she was absorbed in whatever intention she harbored, barely conscious of the world around her. She took no notice of the howling wind, the white winter birds searching for mice on the icy ground, the branches of the oak trees weighted down with snow….
An armed band could have attacked the old mill, and she would have been none the wiser. Nor would she have been afraid. That is the way Onneca was.
She hadn’t seen me arrive at Cauce de los Molinos. It was my favorite spot, a secluded area east of the town wall. The tranquil blue sky reflected off the white land like a mirror, as if a calm sea were set out before me.
A dense wood of holm oak offered me the privacy I sought. I approached the ivy-covered ruins of the old mill. Once the mill had been important, but it lost its value when the road to the Arriaga Gate became popular. The millrace that used to flow under the enormous wooden wheel was no more than a trickle, the blades merely dripping icicles. The mill now looked like an old woman whose tears had frozen on her cheeks.
I was sitting on a tree stump, staring at the frozen river. Onneca appeared in the distance, skating, her eyes fixed on a point on the horizon that only she could make out.
All of a sudden, she became aware of my presence. At first she was startled, but she relaxed when she recognized me. She came over to me, ignoring the snow that crunched beneath her bare feet.
“Where are your shoes?”
“I left them on the bank of the pool,” she replied, as though it didn’t matter.
“I’m sorry about your father’s death,” I said, in part to test her reaction. How should I behave now toward my sister-in-law?
“I’ve come here every week over the past two years,” she said, her red-rimmed eyes fixed on me. I thought I saw sadness in them. Much sadness. “Thinking about what it was like before the gallicantus, when we used to meet behind my father’s back. Come, I want to show you something.”
There was so much I wanted to say that I decided to stay silent. Besides, nothing could be more eloquent than the gazes we exchanged.
I followed her until she stopped near the mill’s north wall. It had become a ruin; perhaps it was an indication that whatever we once had was never to return.
“What’s this?” I asked, confused.
She bent and brushed the snow off a small, engraved stone on the ground.
“Your tomb. The lavender has survived. I planted it to keep you company, so you wouldn’t feel alone. It was silly of me not to understand that it was a sign that you were alive. It was right in front of me.”
“You had a tombstone made for me?”
“What does it matter now that you’re alive?” she exclaimed. “How can I live now? How can I sleep with your brother tonight, when I know you are breathing only a few yards away?”
“I’ll move out.”
“You’re breathing!” she repeated, coming closer. “You’re breathing, I can scarcely believe it. So many sleepless nights I thought you were decaying beneath the waves. I was worried about your body, about how cold and damp your bones must’ve been.”
She was staring at me as if I were a ghost, with the same mixture of disbelief and respect for the incomprehensible. She raised her hand and brushed my cheek. I caught it. Her fingers were hot, much hotter than I expected.
“Am I not even allowed to touch you now, dear Diago?”
“You know what happens to wives who are unfaithful. Nagorno will be following you. We shouldn’t meet alone.”
“So I must make do with your countenance, the polite words of my brother-in-law?”
“That is the way it will have to be.”
Because of a single accursed day, that is the way it will have to be, I thought.
“At least tell me there was no one else, that I was the only woman in your thoughts for these past two years.”
I sat on my own tombstone, shading it from the bright sun.
“Yes. That’s the truth.”
“There were rumors…” she began.
“They were just that. There was nothing.”
“The silent, devoted Berenguela.”
“I brought her to Richard with her virginity intact, just as her father charged me. Do you think I’m so foolish as to give the kings of Navarre and of England a reason to chop off my manhood?”
“I was hoping for a more romantic explanation, one that had something to do with me.”
“Everything has to do with you. I don’t need to repeat it or dress it up, you already know it. You have never been a woman who seeks praise. You have no need for it. A polished mirror and the knowledge of what the chronicles will say of your dynasty is enough for you. Who told you of the mission King Sancho gave me?”
“As you always used to say, I’m the eyes and ears of Nova Victoria. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out why you galloped off to Aquitaine one night with no warning?”
“Who told you, Onneca?” I insisted. “Not even your father knew.”
“Who was close enough to the Tudela court to be privy to the preparations being made?”
I rose to my feet, thinking.
“Ah, now I understand. The good bishop García, your father’s protégé.”
“He took pity on me when he saw my desperation. He feared the worst. Don’t blame him. It was a confidence between cousins. He didn’t even tell Father. It remains a secret that only the three of us know.”
“That is how it must stay. The king put his trust in me, and my life would be at stake if my mission were to become public knowledge. I couldn’t even tell you about it, Onneca. Will you ever forgive me?”
“A message, Diago. A message would have sufficed. Nothing more. If you trust me to stay silent now, why not then, when I was betrothed to you?”
“So that’s it! You’re angry with me.”
She pursed her lips, and the color drained away.
“Angry?” she cried. “I’m furious! They were about to hand me over to the Lord of Ibida, that hunchbacked widower, and then to de Funes’s young son, a man known to all the sailors in San Sebastían. If it weren’t for your brother—”
“Don’t say any more about Nagorno,” I roared. I stepped closer and covered her mouth so as not to hear her say his name. “I cannot bear it.”
We collapsed on top of what would have been my tomb—and still would be—holding each other like the passionate lovers we had once been. When I felt the weight of her body on top of me, her lips searching until they found mine, I felt alive for the first time in two years.
“Onneca, let’s go inside the mill,” I whispered. “We’ll freeze to death out here.”
So we slipped into the milling room, as we had so often done in the past. It had partially collapsed, but there was still an area that was protected from the snow, and the old wooden boards gave the winter morning a little warmth.
Onneca was not in as great a hurry as I. She removed her white headdress, which identified her as a married woman, unbuckled her leather belt, and let the tight yellow woolen tunic fall to her feet. I don’t know how many nights I had cherished the memory of her naked body. She sat on a stone that had grown tired of grinding grain into flour a century before and motioned for me to come to her.
I removed my hose and was about to enter her when she stopped me.
“No, I want you to be naked as well.”
I obeyed. What else could I do?
Once we were both stripped bare, we embraced.
My two years of celibacy ended quickly. We groaned with pleasure as we always had, our bodies recognizing each other.
> “Do you believe me now?” I asked in a choked voice.
“You were telling the truth. You waited for me.” She laughed.
I lay in silence, deep in thought. Then I slipped her tunic over her head.
“I felt your absence,” I whispered. “But I thought that someday we would have our wedding ceremony, that once I was freed from my duties, once I completed my voyage, we could pursue our plans for Victoria. I can’t imagine governing two districts at war without you by my side.”
Onneca sat by the grain trough, her back to me.
“You have wheat in your hair, and your braid has come loose. Let me comb it for you,” I said. “And wear my boots until you find yours, or they’re going to have to cut off your frostbitten feet.”
Smiling contentedly, she put on my boots, then leaned back against me and allowed me to neaten her hair.
“The men of the Church aren’t going to like the fact that you don’t completely cover your hair,” I said.
“Bishop García is like a brother to me. If Bishop García speaks, everybody else in this town stays silent. And if Bishop García permits something, everybody keeps their accusatory fingers in their pockets. Yesterday at my father’s funeral everyone saw him give me, in my headdress and braid, his blessing. No one will reproach me or say a word against me for letting my hair show.”
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