The Lords of Time

by Eva García Sáenz

  I had another visit to make that day. I headed toward Fausti Mesanza’s villa and found her closing the gate to her garden.

  “Am I in time for book club?” I asked.

  “Yes. I was just leaving. Come with me, and I’ll introduce you to the others. The village bar used to be a doctor’s office, but we did some remodeling and started running it as a collective. We took turns every month. It was open on Saturday evenings and on Sundays after Mass. But we’re getting too old now, and some young people have taken over the lease. We still go there for a glass of vermouth and to play a few games of cards. When it’s cold, they light the stove, so it’s nice and cozy.”

  We climbed the steep streets of Ugarte, a beautifully preserved village complete with a medieval drinking fountain next to the church. Although it had fewer than a hundred inhabitants today, it had remained populated for a thousand years. The bar was located next to the fronton court and the outdoor bowling alley.

  Peering through the window, I could see a bar with a wooden counter, a well-worn pool table, and several teenagers playing foosball. The evening had grown chilly, and the warmth of the blazing fire was welcome. It enveloped us as soon as we stepped inside.

  An elderly lady in a wheelchair observed us from the corner of the room near the stove. She scrutinized me, a sardonic smile on her face. I’d seen a similar expression on others who had lived a long time and were past caring what others thought. Her sunken eyes took in every detail as we went over to say hello.

  “This is my mother-in-law, Benita,” said Fausti. “Best not to tell her anything since nothing escapes her. She’s sharp as a tack.”

  I pulled over a chair and sat next to Benita. She sounded like the perfect accomplice.

  “That’s Cecilia, the pharmacist,” Fausti informed me, filling me in as more neighbors entered the bar.

  “Apothecary,” Benita corrected her. “She and Aurora, the woman who just walked in, hate each other. Aurora ran the dry-goods store, but she’s retired now and bored stiff.”

  A young man, around twenty-five, came in carrying a bunch of cans.

  “That’s Gonzalo, he runs the bar.”

  The man smiled at us. His T-shirt had a picture of an animal with the body of a goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a serpent, along with the words I’m a chimera. He came over to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Fausti asked for “the usual,” and I ordered a bottle of water.

  “Txomin is a cabinetmaker. He grew tired of living in the city and set up his workshop here in the village. It’s worth a visit; he has some beautiful things,” Fausti said.

  “I’ll stop by,” I said.

  Within ten minutes, I knew the names of the twenty locals in the circle. Their copies of The Lords of Time were all open to the same page.

  “We have a new member,” Fausti announced. “He isn’t from Ugarte, but we welcome him nonetheless. His name is Unai, and he’s—”

  “I’m an inspector with the Vitoria Criminal Investigation Unit, but I’m here as a reader.” I smiled. My announcement came as a surprise to everyone, including Fausti.

  Everyone stared at me, intrigued. I studied their expressions, making mental notes.

  After they’d recovered, a young woman with curly hair began to read aloud in a leisurely way. I’d been told that her name was Irati, and she ran the glassworks and the Ugarte agritourism business.

  I watched the fire crackle, letting myself become hypnotized by the flames as I listened once again to the story I already knew so well.

  27

  THE SACRISTY

  DIAGO VELA

  Winter, the Year of Our Lord 1192

  I met Gunnarr on Rúa de las Tenderías. When he saw my expression, he led me away from the festivities into Pero Vicia’s garden.

  “I can tell something’s going on, Diago. What do you need?”

  “Your strong arms and two maces.”

  “Then we’ll go to the forge.”

  We set off in silence, skirting the crowd, the flour, and the ashes. I looked over my shoulder every once in a while. I could sense that we were being shadowed, but I couldn’t make out who was following us. All I saw were colored streamers, dunce caps, and faces painted black and red.

  When we arrived at the church, the doors were wide open, but nobody came out to greet us. It was strange that the priest hadn’t returned. As we entered the sacristy, Gunnarr held his nose.

  “You are right, I fear,” he murmured.

  Neither of us was in the mood for conversation. We didn’t speak as we hit the sacristy wall with our maces. Soon the mortar between the stones began to crumble, and eventually the hole was big enough for one of us to climb through.

  “Do you want me to go in?” Gunnarr asked, burying his nose in the crook of his arm.

  “No, just bring me a candle from the candelabra,” I replied.

  At that moment, Nagorno and Onneca appeared in the doorway.

  “Is it true, Diago?” Onneca cried. “Is what Vidal told me true?” Her green-painted face was streaked with tears—it frightened me to see her like this.

  “What did the priest tell you?”

  “That you forced him!” she screamed, pummeling my chest with her fists. “You ordered him to stop giving them food and drink.”

  “You believe me capable of that?” I replied, aghast.

  I snatched the candle Gunnarr had brought and stepped through the hole in the wall.

  I have no wish to remember the complete squalor I saw. There were rats with the two dead bodies, as well as Onneca’s unopened letters.

  I emerged gasping for breath, the stench of death clinging to my skin.

  “No one is to go in there—what’s inside is not of this world,” I ordered, my voice cracking.

  Neither Gunnarr nor Nagorno was a stranger to death, but I silently begged my brother: Don’t let her see them.

  “I want to go in. I want to see them!” cried Onneca.

  Nagorno stood in her way, but she thrust him aside.

  She took the candle from me—as though she couldn’t see me, as if I weren’t there—and entered her sisters’ tomb.

  We could hear her sobs. We could hear her speak to them, though they could no longer reply. Her heartrending cries still haunt my nights.

  The three of us despaired as we contemplated the scene on the other side of the broken wall.

  “Get her out, Nagorno,” I begged in a whisper. I wished I could block my ears. I couldn’t bear to hear her suffering a moment longer. “Please, Brother. Get her out of there.”

  Nagorno stood motionless, staring through the hole as his wife clung to one of the bodies.

  “If you won’t do it for him, then do it for me,” Gunnarr added in a hushed tone. “Go inside and fetch her.”

  “For you, then, Gunnarr. For what we owe each other,” he said at last.

  He entered as serenely as Death. He whispered something into her ear, removed the flaxen wig, and stroked her black tresses.

  I never knew what my brother said to her, what soothing words he used to tear her from that torment.

  She emerged a different woman. More terrible, all fury.

  She rushed at me with the burning candle in her hand, full of rage.

  “Because we’re family, Diago…!” she roared. “Because your brother has asked it of me, I shall await your trial rather than have you killed this very night. But I shall never forgive you.”

  I forgot about Nagorno, Gunnarr, even the two dead sisters. She and I were alone with our shared hatred.

  “And I shall never forgive you, Onneca! For believing me capable of murdering your sisters, for choosing to think that of me…after what we were to each other, after I opened myself to you. You knew me. You knew my mornings and my evenings, my happiest days and my most sorrowful. Yet you choose
to think me a murderer of children. Do you believe yourself capable of falling in love with a monster?”

  We held each other’s gaze as the melted candle wax dripped onto the stone floor of the sacristy. All my instincts were on alert, watchful; I felt as though I were on a hunt, waiting for a wounded boar to attack with sharpened tusks.

  “Yes, I think I am capable of falling in love with a monster,” she replied at last.

  I looked at Nagorno and then at her.

  “Not my words, but yours,” she said.

  I turned away from the stench of rotting flesh.

  But Gunnarr barred my way, silently imploring me to remain calm.

  “Onneca, word of this must not be spread tonight. The streets are awash with drunken revelers, and if the townsfolk were to learn of this atrocity, they would lynch your brother-in-law, or the priest, or whomever they deem to be at fault.” Gunnarr’s soothing tone was born from time spent calming mutinous sailors aboard a ship.

  “My cousin is right,” Nagorno interjected in a monotone, as unruffled as ever. “Gunnarr, inform the lieutenant, but tell him to keep his counsel until the morrow. Send guards to detain the priest so that he may bear witness. Seek him discreetly in the barns, or in Sant Michel Church. Close the town gates. The burning of the Judas has enraged the fruit vendors. If we do not take care, we will all end up on the sharp end of a sword before the night is done. Brother, go home and stay hidden. Do you need protection?”

  “You know my answer,” I said without looking at them.

  “As you wish. But sleep with one eye open.”

  “I always do.”

  I set off for home.

  * * *

  —

  At midnight I woke from a light sleep to find myself standing in the bathtub with dagger drawn. I had locked the door to my dwelling, and few people knew the key’s hiding spot.

  Once home, I’d soaked my spirits in the hot water for several hours, staring into the hearth, surrounded by darkness. I’d fallen asleep, only to wake naked and wet with my dagger in hand.

  “Diago, it’s me. Put away your blade. I came alone,” said Alix.

  I set my weapon on the ledge above the fireplace and sank back into the water.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, drawing nearer. She was still wearing her costume, the dress bedecked with eguzkilores.

  I felt a little safer with her by my side. Her calm presence soothed me, as it had since our first meeting.

  “Have you heard anything?” I asked her.

  “No, but when I checked on Grandmother Lucía, she was tossing in her bed; usually she could sleep through a war. What happened? What did she see? What did you tell her?”

  “The priest starved Count de Maestu’s two young daughters to death. He has testified that he did so in accordance with my instructions.” I spoke frankly because I had no wish to keep any secrets from her. Not that night, when I felt so raw. “Of course I did no such thing, which means someone forced him to do it and then to lie and say it was me. I can think of only two reasons he might have been tempted do such a thing: the promise of riches or blackmail. Does he have a family?”

  Alix sat heavily on the edge of the bathtub, as though her legs were about to give out.

  “Does Vidal have a family?” I repeated.

  “An elderly widowed mother in Toledo,” she replied, blank. “I can’t believe they are dead. Bona and Favila…I grew up with them. We learned to walk together. I danced with them, prayed with them.”

  But my thoughts were elsewhere. Did the villain behind this have influence as far away as Toledo?

  “You cannot speak of this,” I said at last.

  “I know I cannot.”

  “Why did you come, Alix?”

  “I came to be here. Just to be here. I realized something terrible had happened when I saw Grandmother. Is there room for me in your tub?”

  I nodded in silence.

  Why speak.

  Words had harmed me enough that day. I was weary of it all.

  I wanted only to close my eyes, for sleep to wash away the words of the day. Alix stepped out of her robe and slipped into the tub, the light of the flames sliding over her naked body. She spread her loose hair across my chest and pulled my arms around her, so she was enfolded by me. We stayed like that, staring into the fire, allowing the night to lull us to sleep in each other’s embrace.

  “What shade of blue am I now?”

  “A distant blue, somewhere beyond sorrow. Your eyes are lost in the flames, as if you were gazing at the ocean.”

  “It’s true.”

  “The blue of abandonment.”

  “Yes. I smell of death, the odor of their decaying flesh has clung to my hair and my skin. I wanted to wash it away for my own sake, but also because I didn’t want you to smell it on me,” I confessed, after staring at the flames in silence for a few minutes.

  “We mustn’t be together. I will not bury a fourth husband, and you’ve seemed intent upon dying since your return.”

  “I agree; we mustn’t. It is too dangerous for you. They’d find a pretext to accuse you if I were to die. Let’s just sleep tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be simple neighbors again. Alix…”

  “What?”

  “I shall never forget how well you have cared for me since I returned to Victoria.”

  28

  VALDEGOVÍA

  UNAI

  October 2019

  I was jogging through the Old Quarter the night Peña called. My runs calmed me and cleared my head. Since Alba and Deba were no longer with me, I took to the streets every chance I got.

  I took a breather between Calle Zapatería and Calle Correría, sitting on the lip of an open drain in the Carnicerías district to take Peña’s call.

  The city had transformed its medieval open-air sewage system into well-kept enclosed gardens: el Túnel, los Hospitales, los Rosales, los Tejos, los Acebos…

  “Kraken, have you checked Twitter?” Peña asked.

  “I haven’t had time today,” I replied. The wind was picking up; it lifted my hair, exposing my scar. I quickly covered it.

  “Well, it’s going viral as we speak.” He sounded concerned. “I’m calling to ask if we should step in.”

  “Tell me what ‘it’ is first.”

  “I’ll read you the tweet: ‘The Lords of Time is based on an unpublished twelfth-century chronicle. Its market value, according to an expert, could reach three million euros.’ ”

  “Damn it,” I blurted.

  “Did you know about this?”

  “I just found out yesterday,” I replied, heading back home. My run was over. “And other than my source, no one should know. Have you spoken to Estíbaliz?”

  “She’s not picking up. It’s eleven o’clock. She could have gone to bed, I guess,” he said.

  “We’ll have to start without her, then. Did you call Milán?”

  “She’s already trying to trace the owner of the Twitter account. We think it was created recently just to drop this bombshell. The number of retweets is increasing every minute. Local and even national media are bound to publish the story tomorrow. What concerns me is that if no one knew about this other than you and your source, then somebody could be following you or could have hacked your cell phone.”

  “I mentioned it to Alba. I was with Lutxo in Café de la Virgen Blanca, but I took her call downstairs in the restroom. I’m pretty sure he didn’t follow me, and there’s no way he could have heard anything from upstairs.”

  “Maybe there was someone in the bathroom with you?” Peña ventured.

  “No, I checked. Unless…”

  “What?”

  “I suppose someone could have been eavesdropping from inside the wine cellar. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Lu
txo knew the waitress. Would he have bribed her to listen behind the door? Would she have agreed? Was this leak even advantageous to Lutxo? I wasn’t sure. But it made no sense for Iago and Héctor to share that information.

  “In any case, the judge knows nothing about this line of inquiry, so we’re powerless to take down the tweet,” I told Peña.

  “You’re right, we certainly can’t do anything tonight. We’ll brief everyone at the office in the morning. Besides, you’ve been in a bad mood for days, Kraken. You need to get out. Why don’t you come with me to Calle Pinto? There’s a new bar that has live music, and there’s a Celtic band tonight, fiddles and flutes. It might help us forget death and literary intrigue for a few hours. What do you say?”

  I forced myself to accept, if only for my mental health. I knew I needed to disconnect and that ultimately a night out would help with the investigation. For weeks I’d been avoiding meeting my cuadrilla for coffee, once again putting my life on hold to solve a case.

  * * *

  —

  It was almost three in the morning by the time I said goodbye to Peña and left the bar. He had stayed behind to have drinks with his musician friends.

  Peña’s pals had ended their Celtic set with “Fisherman’s Blues” by the Waterboys. For the first time, I’d managed to relax and forget about how depressing my situation was. But as I stepped outside onto a practically deserted Calle Pintorería, I realized I had missed several calls. At around two thirty, Estíbaliz had left a disturbing voice mail: “Come to the tower right away, I think…” It trailed off.

  I dialed her number a few times, but she didn’t pick up. I was worried. Estí always answered my calls.

  I ran back into the bar.

  Peña put down his drink when he saw the look of alarm on my face.

  “I need you to come to Valdegovía,” I whispered. “Estíbaliz called me from Nograro Tower. She sounded frightened, and now she’s not picking up. I have no idea what she’s doing there this time of night, but I have a bad feeling. Let’s go see what’s happening.”