The Lords of Time

by Eva García Sáenz

  “A poor wretch he may be, but innocent he is not,” the other guard interjected. “Ask him which parts he likes to cut off cats, foals, and rabbits. His fondness for knives is well known.”

  “All the more reason to believe he did not poison Count de Maestu,” a member of the Isunza family piped up.

  “Let Count Vela outline the charge,” the mayor said, intervening. “He called for the trial, and he must pass sentence.”

  I remembered that I had yet to reclaim my title. The document signing had been held in abeyance, as had the restitution of my property, my inheritance, and all my other worldly goods, which at present my dear brother, Nagorno, was enjoying. Currently, it didn’t seem as though there would be any point in trying to regain my title. The stench from my wound worsened each day, and the upheaval around this trial was taking its toll.

  I strode forward, attempting to disguise my stumbling gait.

  Do not reveal your weakness, I told myself.

  I did not yet know who had cut me, or whether they had paid somebody else to do it, but I felt sure that whoever it was stood nearby, watching me closely. The attack had taken place after curfew had sounded and the gates had closed, so my assailants must have been townsfolk.

  “I shall call a witness who can confirm that, five nights ago, Ruy’s son purchased three pinches of Spanish fly. An unusually large quantity, as this same witness will affirm, since a single pinch lasts two days and nights, and those who avail themselves of such powders do so with caution, as excessive use renders it poisonous and causes an agonizing death. Yet, on Saint Agatha’s Eve, two nights after procuring the powders, the accused himself confessed to me that he had only one pinch left, despite not having shared his cache with a soul. By this reckoning, if he took one pinch himself, he would have two remaining. I ask, therefore: What became of the remaining powder? Alas, I believe it found its way into the deceased Count de Maestu’s stomach. As a learned physician in Pamplona once taught me, this proves the count was poisoned,” I declared, holding up the white rabbit’s blackened, blistered skin. “Imagine what the Spanish fly did to the good count’s insides, dear neighbors, and the agony of his final hours.”

  “What has the accused to say in his defense?” demanded the mayor.

  Ruiz gave a few grunts and waved his arms. Many of the townsfolk began to jeer. They hated him; for years, they’d listened to their daughters’ complaints and dealt with his violent incursions into their farmyards.

  “Since the accused is unable to defend himself, will anyone speak for him?” the mayor asked.

  “Let’s speak frankly,” Mendoza said, urging his horse forward. “We all agree that he could have been the culprit, but I suggest he pay blood money for his crime. Because of what was done to him in prison, I propose that the incarceration tax be waived.”

  “Is that how the matter is to be settled?” An excited voice rose from the ranks of artisans. “Those with money get away with wretched murder? They murdered our protector, and they’ve all but murdered Count Vela.”

  I tried to step forward again, intending to make an appeal for calm, but as I started to walk, the hanging tree toppled over onto me, or so I thought. The world grew suddenly dark as I collapsed to the ground in the center of the Plaza del Juicio.

  * * *

  —

  When I regained consciousness, the first thing I saw was a three-coned wimple. Alix de Salcedo was sitting by my bed, holding a cold compress to my brow.

  “What happened?”

  “You fainted during the trial. The wound in your back reopened and you started to bleed again. Here, eat these pig kidneys. Grandmother Lucía says they replenish the blood.”

  I raised myself slightly, and Alix passed me a knife to slice the kidneys. The sauce smelled of rosemary and red wine, and when I swallowed the food, it warmed my insides. By the time I wiped the bowl clean with a morsel of bread she had given me, I could feel strength flowing back into my body.

  Alix watched me in silence, but her lips were pressed together and she kept looking toward the window, as though she were in a hurry to leave my side.

  “You could have called me as a witness, yet you chose not to,” she said at last.

  “Tempers are running too high. I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “I would have come forward. They almost killed you, but you’re stronger than I thought. Half the people in Villa de Suso have been praying for your soul, and the other half are wagering that another Count Vela will die before his time.”

  “What about you?”

  I sensed Alix’s unease as she stared into the warm embers, avoiding my gaze.

  “Why, I did both. The mayor has followed your advice. Ruiz will be executed. But there is much ill-feeling in Nova Victoria. Are you sure he deserves such an ignoble punishment?”

  “What execution is preferable to hanging? It’s quick, and it will deter his supporters.”

  “Sire…”

  “Sire? Why, only the other day you called me Diago. And you’ve now seen me naked as the day I was born. Haven’t we earned the right to dispense with such formalities?”

  “Diago it is, then. Ruiz will not be hanged. He has been sentenced to poena cullei. You recommended it in a letter to the mayor, and he has carried out your wishes. You said it was the most fitting punishment.”

  “What letter, Alix?”

  “The council received a letter signed by Count Don Vela, or so I heard.”

  I was on the verge of saying that I had written no such letter, but I decided to keep my counsel.

  “Has the punishment been carried out yet?”

  “Those who wanted to attend left for the River Zadorra a good while ago.”

  “You did not wish to see it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. I simply thought that with the town half empty, the gates open, and you so weak, I…”

  She pulled a dagger from the folds of her gown.

  “You stayed behind to protect me….Was this Grandmother Lucía’s idea as well?”

  “She sends me to fatten you up with my pies and tarts. I didn’t tell her about your recent bout of fainting. I didn’t want her to fret.”

  I shook my head.

  “She will have heard about it from a hundred different sources by now.” I struggled to get out of bed. “With or without your help, I will attend the execution.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded weakly.

  “As you wish. I don’t want to witness any more cruelty,” she murmured. “I hope you sleep well tonight.”

  With that she disappeared through the door, as if she were fleeing the devil himself. I could tell she disapproved, yet she had stayed behind to protect me. I knew tongues would start to wag if her visits continued.

  Her ministrations must cease. I would speak to her after the execution, and to Grandmother Lucía. With each day, I was gaining more and more enemies. I was not a proper companion for a thrice-widowed young woman.

  * * *

  —

  Half an hour later I reached the River Zadorra. A thaw had set in over the past few days, but the waters would still be icy.

  I followed the muddy tracks and ruts left by the feet, hooves, and wheels that had passed earlier. By the looks of it, few people planned to miss this execution. Poena cullei was a rare punishment indeed. There were rumors that it had been used by powerful men who had accused their wives of adultery, but no one here had ever witnessed such a spectacle.

  When I reached the point where the river slowed, I spied Mendieta, the executioner, struggling to push a stray dog into a wine barrel.

  Half the town’s population watched expectantly from the near bank: smithies, cobblers, fishmongers—I even spotted two of the grocer’s wives nursing infants. There were more than fifty people cheering on Mendieta. But over by the somber, gray
poplars on the other side of the river, petty noblemen on horseback and local aristocrats looked on gravely, forming a stark contrast to the villagers’ laughter and heckling. They hadn’t wished to miss the execution, either.

  Mendieta opened a sack containing a yowling cat, then tossed the beast into the barrel. Then he extracted a rooster and a coiled snake from two other sacks. The snake looked drowsy. They had doubtless sent a young lad for it, and he had fetched it from beneath a rock up in the hills.

  “You came to stop it,” Nagorno said, edging toward me on his steed, Altai.

  I was too distressed by the spectacle to look at my brother. Ruiz’s desperate cries as the executioner threw the barrel into the water hushed more than one jeerer, and the excitement and applause soon gave way to an uneasy, then barbed silence.

  “You sent the letter,” I whispered.

  “I still bear the title Count Don Vela,” he replied in a low voice. “And if you had intervened, you would have undermined the mayor’s authority. Pérez de Oñate was chosen by the very residents of Villa de Suso you so cherish. If you oppose them, you will find yourself in no-man’s-land. You’ve already gained enough enemies among those on the far bank. They won’t forget this slight. It’s too late to stop the punishment now, and, besides, Onneca will despise you if you do.”

  “I know that.”

  My first consideration had been Onneca. She would never forgive me if I were to show leniency to her father’s murderer.

  “Nagorno, have you considered the possible consequences for the town?”

  “What do you think? I was always a better strategist than you.”

  I swallowed hard. I could hear Ruiz’s screams from the barrel. Tello the tanner cupped his hands over his little boy’s ears, then picked him up and set off wordlessly along the muddy path toward town. Others followed in a silent stream, heads lowered. But the noblemen stayed until the bitter end, until water seeped into the wooden barrel and it began to sink into the Zadorra.

  “This is a game of chess, then,” I retorted.

  “Yes, it’s been a game since you vacated your seat. I’m obliged to you for the two-year head start.”

  Very well, I thought. We’d played this game before, with more pawns, more lives. We both ended up losing, but he didn’t care. And therein lay my brother’s strength and my weakness.

  “One question, Nagorno. When will this round begin?”

  It was my way of asking whether I must immediately prepare for the battle he was staging, or if I might live a little first.

  “Don’t you see what is unfolding before your very eyes? You, who have always been the shrewdest of the Vela siblings? The game begins today, you fool.”

  As he spoke, the remaining residents of Villa de Suso abandoned the scene with a bitter taste in their mouths. Ruiz’s cries had been drowned in the riverbed, and the barks and mewling had ceased as well.

  The mayor and the executioner pronounced the man and the animals dead and then cast a length of thick rope—supplied by the rope maker, Sabat—into the water. After several failed attempts, they managed to snare the barrel, and between them hoisted it onto his cart, its deathly cargo inside. Nobody had the courage to open it. Even Mendieta, who had seen nearly everything in his many years as executioner, was forced to withdraw behind a poplar tree, where he noisily purged his stomach of its contents.

  Onneca was the only one left. The others had all headed back to town, but she sat steadfastly on her horse. She approached us, dismounted, and spoke to Nagorno.

  “Leave us, dear husband. I need to speak with your brother alone.”

  “I prefer to stay.”

  “Nevertheless, I wish to speak with him on my own. Wait for me in our bed, for I shall need your embraces to comfort me after what I have seen.”

  Nagorno held my gaze, but in the end obeyed.

  “You’ve risked a great deal to avenge my father,” said Onneca, once my brother was out of sight.

  What could I say to her, if one day she were to discover the truth?

  “What do you want, Onneca? You were unwise to stand up to Nagorno. You must save that for when it’s truly needed.”

  “Don’t concern yourself with my battles with my husband. I’ll fight them on my own terms. I need to speak with you because I’m worried about my sisters. I sent word again this week about the proceedings against our father’s murderer, but I’ve had no response. Your family has always administered the affairs for Santa María Cathedral. My father decided my sisters should be immured there, in a section of the granary. Can you think of any reason for their silence?”

  “Our family built a simple chapel there before the king decided to erect a church, but there is little to oversee, apart from the schedule of masses and collection of the wheat tithes, along with a few other religious matters. When I left, your sisters were two little girls, and your father doted on them, so his decision came as a shock to me. I’ll find out who is looking after them. Is there anything else you need from me, sister-in-law?”

  “No, thank you, Diago. You should rest. You look weak.”

  I stayed on the riverbank until all the others had left: Onneca on her golden horse; the cart bearing that travesty; the spitting, cursing noblemen on the far side of the river…

  And I saw how the town had been rent in two. From that day on, no one was safe within its walls.

  22

  ARKAUTE

  UNAI

  October 2019

  I drove the short distance from the cemetery to the Police Academy in Arkaute, on the outskirts of Vitoria. I had done my training there years ago, first as an ertzaina and then as a criminal profiler. I used to go running on the roads around the compound, where new recruits had cohabited for nine months before the word partner acquired a more professional meaning.

  I wanted to talk with my mentor, Doctor Marina Leiva. The psychiatrist had guided me from the outset along the dark labyrinths of the mind, helping me understand psychopaths, psychotics, and the most heinous serial offenders, my specialty.

  I flashed my badge at the academy’s entrance and was allowed through the barrier.

  I checked the time. Well acquainted with the doctor’s routines, I knew better than to look for her in the lecture halls where she taught profiling classes.

  I entered the wing that housed the indoor swimming pool and saw her swimming in the otherwise empty lanes. She was wearing a red bathing suit, and a rubber cap covered her blond hair.

  I stood in the chlorinated water, boots in my hand, and waited patiently for her to finish her laps and notice me.

  “Unai, I didn’t expect to see you here!” she said, clambering up the metal ladder.

  “I owed you a visit. I’m afraid it’s long overdue.”

  “Of course. You flew the nest a while ago, and you’re doing well, I hear.”

  “Not that well, Marina. I’ve solved a few cases. But I’ve run up against something—someone—who has me completely stumped. And I need your help.”

  I motioned for her to sit with me on the bleachers.

  “Why do you need me?” she asked, leisurely toweling herself dry. Marina was petite, calm, and easygoing. She just sat and listened, sometimes nodding, never making you feel uncomfortable or as if you were being analyzed. I’d forgotten what a soothing effect she had on me.

  “Let me explain. Remember when you told me about your first collaboration with the police? It involved the rapist called Bigmouth.”

  I had been a teenager at the time. The national newspapers didn’t pick up the story, and there was no social media back then to spread the news.

  He’d earned the name Bigmouth because he talked to his victims throughout the crime, even during the rape. He demanded they tell him their fantasies and sexual preferences. All the women described the rapist as talkative with an Eastern European accent. The
police got lucky, obtaining semen samples from a few of his victims.

  They ran a search targeting sexual offenders who held passports from the relevant countries, but it led nowhere.

  Around the same time, there was a second rapist active in the area, one who was extraordinarily cruel. His victims described him as Spanish and said he never spoke—a completely different profile from Bigmouth. But then an anomaly occurred: DNA from a victim of the second rapist matched the DNA on file for Bigmouth. The perpetrator was arrested. He was indeed Spanish and turned out to be one of Doctor Leiva’s patients. The police turned to her for help. She had been treating him for dissociative identity disorder, or DID.

  “Dramatic cases like that are few and far between,” she reminded me, folding her towel carefully before placing it on her lap. “In fact, most of my colleagues are skeptical of the disorder, because there are so many false cases. In the fifties, ‘multiple personality disorder,’ as it was called then, became well known thanks to a movie, The Three Faces of Eve. The movie and subsequent books were very popular, and a lot of felons feigned symptoms, hoping to persuade forensic psychiatrists to diagnose them with DID in order to avoid prison. Many offenders also claimed to suffer from amnesia or dissociative fugue disorder. Now, we have clinical tools to help us determine whether the disorder is genuine. We don’t have precise numbers about how many people in the general population are afflicted with DID, but it’s certainly a rare disorder. Most psychiatrists will never encounter or diagnose a case. I have only treated a few during my thirty-year career. Why do you want to talk to me about that case?”

  “I want to describe someone to you. We’ll call him Alvar.”

  “Okay.”

  “He’s a priest in his late thirties,” I explained. “He arguably fits the profile of a narcissist: extroverted, self-assured, charismatic. He insists on being addressed formally. He runs hot and is content to wear nothing but a simple cassock whether he’s indoors or out at night. He’s the scion of a wealthy aristocratic family, landed gentry whose members have held a privileged position in society for more than a thousand years. He also has a superiority complex. And he’s a rich snob.”