by Jana Petken
They wouldn’t get far on foot, he thought, leading them through a maze of animals and transports. His mother, now hobbling uncomfortably behind him, moaned with pain as though she had suffered an injury. He looked back at the Roman theatre and felt his heart punching the wall of his chest. Again he considered that it would not take the Inquisition long to regroup and then send every man-at-arms and those under orders from its Holy Office to hunt down the prisoners and bring them back; those unfortunate enough to be caught would be sentenced to death.
“Mama, I know you have never sat on a horse’s back,” David said hurriedly, “but you will today. You will ride as fast and as far as you can, and you will hold on for dear life and not fall off.”
“I would sit on the back of a black wolf if I thought it would get me away from this hell,” Isa sobbed.
Halting abruptly, Juan looked for a brief second down the hill towards the centre of town. There was a wall of flames stretching in a straight line all the way from the south-east to the north-east section of the hill. From where he stood, he could see the fire partially obscuring the church’s spire and almost all of the municipal palace’s dark grey roof tiles. “Hijo, the centre of town and road to the plain might be blocked by flames. We won’t get through them,” he shouted to David, who was striding towards tethered horses.
“You must, Papa. You must!” David shouted over his shoulder.
Two young boys of about twelve were holding horses’ reins. David looked at his father and mother’s worn-out faces. His father had never looked so scared or vulnerable. His mother wouldn’t be able to walk farther than a few paces. Drawing his knife, he strode towards the two boys and planted a furious scowl on his face.
“If you don’t want to be bled like goats, you will hand me the reins and move out of the way,” he said to the youngsters.
Seeing the sword, David’s great height, and the fury on his face, neither boy hesitated in handing the reins to him.
“Stand aside!” David shouted at them for good measure.
“You must come with us, son,” Isa begged. “You cannot stay here!”
“Mama, there’s no time to argue,” David said, lifting her onto the horse’s back. Putting her feet into the stirrups, he saw her burnt feet. “The inquisitors can bugger each other,” he cursed.
“David, come with us!” Isa insisted again.
Looking at Juan, David said, “I’m staying to help my brothers-in-arms. I must do this, Papa, for my redemption. Listen to me. Bad people did this to you. They are a hundred leagues away from any Christian God or humble charity, and they will burn you if you don’t set off down that hill right now!”
“David will find us,” Juan said, looking nervously about him. “Isa, we must leave before we’re trapped by the fires.”
David said, “Just outside Valencia, with the sea to your left, you will find the Convento de los Ángeles. No more than a thousand paces from there, you will see an abandoned farm. You will recognise it because its house no longer has a roof. Diego and Sinfa are there waiting for me.”
“When will you come?” Isa asked, crying. “I cannot lose you.”
David took off his cloak, handed it to his mother, and then reached up to caress her cheeks gently with his fingertips. Staring into her face, he engraved it in his memory. “Soon. I’ll join you soon,” he said. “Go now. Ride through the flames if you have to – and don’t stop until you can no longer see the town behind you … God has sent us a miracle this day. Papa, don’t get caught,” he said, slapping the horses’ flanks and sending them bolting off.
Taking one last look at his parents clinging to the horses’ backs, he wondered if he would ever see them again.
Chapter Fifty-seven
Alejandro’s assault on the municipal palace had been met with very little resistance. Arriving at its doors with two closed carriages and four of his regular men, he had counted on Luis’s assurances that only two guards would be posted in the main hall and another two in the basement, where the treasury’s vaults were situated.
“I will make sure that most of my men are held back behind the castle’s walls and that all the townspeople, including the Jews and visitors, are well entertained in the Roman theatre,” Luis had said confidently. “I will also advise the dignitaries to have their personal guard beside them at all times. The inquisitor’s men-at-arms will not be a problem. They will be in the theatre, flanking the scaffold and the penitents’ benches. I’m taking a great risk, Alejandro,” Luis had added. I will be on that scaffold. I should be safe enough hidden behind the others, but there is still an element of danger …”
Alejandro and his men dispatched the surprised militiamen with swift thrusts of blades to their chests and abdomens. Then Alejandro opened the treasury vault with the keys Luis had given him in the secret chamber. “The duke has not disappointed us,” he said to Jóse, his second in command. “The town square and surrounding streets are deserted.”
“True, he kept his word, but even so, we don’t have any time to waste,” Jóse said, staring at the chests.
Alejandro’s most trusted men were with him, men he had known for years and who had lived with him in the caves these past few months. Like him, they had left their hiding place only to rob and whore when their urges to poke a woman overshadowed the need to hide from the authorities. Outside the building, another five men, not well known to Alejandro, stood watch, armed with crossbows and pikes. They guarded the two closed carriages, which would be used to carry the loot, and they’d been ordered to kill anyone entering or leaving the square or to alert Alejandro if there was a problem too great for them to deal with.
Observing the size of the chests filled with ducats and maravedis, Alejandro conceded that getting them to the carriages outside would take longer than Luis’s calculations. “Christ’s blood!” he cursed to his men. “We won’t have time to take the three of them. They’re too big and fat. It’ll take all of you to carry one.”
“What about our share of the money?” José asked. “If we can’t take the third one, our purses will be lighter.”
Staring pensively at the chests, Alejandro said, “If there’s less money to go around, it seems to me that we might have to get rid of some of the men I employed.”
“And it seems to me that if we’re going to kill some of them, we might as well kill all of them,” José suggested. “They’re common thieves. They won’t be missed.”
Alejandro looked again at the chest he would have to leave behind. He should get rid of the newcomers, he thought. This important robbery would be talked about for months and years to come. The fewer people who knew about it, the better.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Sacrifices will have to be made.”
The seventeen unfortunate men in question were those Alejandro had acquired only a week earlier in the bustling streets that sat next to the River Turia, in the heart of Valencia’s capital city. Employing the right men, however, had taken longer than he’d anticipated. He was supplying the weapons, but bugger the devil if he’d been able to find men who knew how to shoot arrows!
Eventually, he’d scraped together an army of impoverished beggars with swords for hire. There were also old soldiers living on charitable handouts and carrying nothing on their persons but parchments inked with recommendations and thanks for their service to the king. They’d jumped at the chance to earn decent money, but Alejandro had not divulged any details about how the robbery was to take place, only that they were to meet him half a league from Sagrat on the night before the auto-de-fé. It was a daring, risky, and dangerous endeavour, Alejandro admitted, but the prize was an unimaginable treasure that would see him live like a lord for the rest of his life.
Luis’s plan had been sound. Alejandro’s best bowman would accompany nine hardened ex-soldiers to the top of the small hillock banking the Roman theatre. Only one of Alejandro’s regular men knew that his job was to assassinate the inquisitor. The others had been ordered to shoot their arrows in quick succession at the s
caffold and into the arena, but without aiming to hit anyone. Their objective was to foment fear, instil panic, and to trap the townspeople and dignitaries inside the amphitheatre so that Alejandro had the time he needed to rob the treasury. When the bowmen saw smoke rising from the fires set by three others in the group, they were to halt their assault, ride as fast as they could from the town, and regroup at the meeting place, halfway between Sagrat and the sea.
Cowering under a hail of arrows, it would take a while for authorities and people to react. And Alejandro’s other men, setting fires in the streets running parallel to the town square, would delay the town’s militiamen from reaching the lower part of the hill and, more importantly, the municipal palace. Sniffing the air, he allowed himself to smile. He could already smell smoke drifting down the stairs to the vault. Everything seemed to be going according to plan.
Stepping into the town square, Alejandro encountered a thick grey fog covering the entire area. The men who had been with him inside the vaults had already put the chests inside the carriages. The five men who had been placed on guard outside the building stood in a group beside one of the carriages. Alejandro signalled to his regulars, who drew their swords, and within minutes, the unsuspecting men were dead in the surprise attack.
Panting, Alejandro cleaned his sword and looked at the bodies. “We have to leave, but before we do, bring the dead militiamen out here and put bloodied swords in their hands. Lay them with these thieves. Let the people think they died fighting for their duke and their town.”
Alejandro looked at the dead men again, stabbed hastily but with precision. Ideally, there would be honour amongst thieves, he thought. But this was not an idyllic kingdom ruled by fair-minded authorities, and he was not an idealistic man. Life was challenging, and only the strongest and most hard-hearted lived decently in these feudal lands. He had long since chosen an affluent life over an impoverished one, with honour that mattered to no one.
“That’s five less we have to share the loot with,” he said to his men after they had staged the bodies. “We ride to the caves. Sagrat is as hot as hell. Let the devil take it.”
“You’re not going to the meeting point?” Jóse asked. “Those nine men will be waiting for their coin.”
Alejandro laughed. They could wait forever. He wasn’t going to meet them or pay them, and he was not going to return to Valencia. He was going to reinvent himself in Barcelona. “We can’t kill all of them, my friend. Best we just let them wander the plain looking for us. They’ll never find the caves, and they are in no position to ask questions about me.”
When the carriage had reached the plain and was heading north, Alejandro stuck his head out of the window and took a last lingering look at the burning town. Flames were rising. Houses were crashing to the ground. A bright orange ribbon of fire streaked across the entire length of the bottom half of the hill like an uncrossable gorge to all those situated above its line.
Resting his head against the carriage wall, he wondered whether the bowmen had done their jobs properly. Had his man managed to kill the inquisitor as ordered? If De Amo was dead, the king would send an army to rain hell down on Valencia … He shrugged and pleasured his eyes with the sight of coins inside the chest at his feet. So what if he did send his army? There were not enough knights or soldiers in all of Spain clever enough to catch the man who’d emptied a treasury.
Relaxing his body with a long-drawn-out sigh, he rested his eyes on José, sitting opposite him. “After we’ve moved the two chests into the caves, I want you to hide the carriages. Militias will be swarming the countryside.”
“And the horses?”
“Put them in the woods on the other side of the dry river. No one will journey to that spot. It’s wild.”
“I hope we don’t have to stay in those cursed caves much longer. My arse forgets what a soft mattress feels like. And I’m sick and tired of holding up fish carts,” José said.
Alejandro was thinking the same thing. It had been a long six months. He was tired of living like a rat underground, waiting for Luis’s orders, which at times had seemed altogether too personal and senseless. The trivial whims of dukes and their subordinates never ceased to amuse and astound him.
“Patience. After I conclude my business with the duke two days hence, our mission will be accomplished and our months of hardship at an end.” Alejandro smiled. “We can put up with another week or two in that squalor for such a prize as this, don’t you think?”
Chapter Fifty-eight
The smoke from the fires covered the hill, and from a distance, the castle looked as though it were sitting above a grey-blanketed sky.
Sagrat’s visitors ran through the streets and alleyways like a charging army, dodging flames, falling timbers, and masonry. Few remained behind to help put out the fires, and many of them blatantly ignored cries for help from desperate townspeople valiantly trying to save their houses. Not knowing the best route to take, some of the travellers were blocked by steep rocks and deep crevices. Others ran all the way to the most northern part of the hill, where there were no fires, and started their descent from there.
More than a thousand men, women, and children had arrived in Sagrat filled with morbid curiosity and virtuous desires to see heretics being punished in the name of God. But it now appeared that their sole aim was to leave the town as fast as they could – and by any means possible.
The townspeople, casting aside their fear of marauders and invisible bowmen, fought to control the flames from reaching La Placa Del Rey. The church of San Agustin, the monastery, and municipal palace were the town’s most beloved buildings. The square itself was Sagrat’s heart and soul. If destroyed, it would never be resurrected to its former glory. It would be a treasure lost forever to a sordid event in history, and no one wanted to be associated with such a shameful legacy.
David, alongside men from the neighbourhood, stood knee deep in an open sewer which ran vertically down an incline at the edge of Calle Sandunga. The old and young rushed to the sewer with empty buckets in their hands. They were not hopeful of dousing the fires, for Valencia was still in the grip of a drought. The rainfalls two weeks previously had been welcomed, but there had not been a large enough deluge to seep through the hard-caked soil and fill underground reservoirs or town wells. Even if the wells had been full, there would still not be enough water to kill flames which were taller than the buildings.
David was handed one empty bucket, pan, and chamber pot after another. As he filled them up to the brim with pee and shit and passed them back to the people, he turned his anger towards the duke. Where were the militiamen, the Inquisition men-at-arms, and the dignitaries’ guards? Why had the duke not sent them to help his town? It was bad enough knowing that he had not put in an appearance or lent his support to the people trying to save Sagrat … but to leave his citizens to fend for themselves without the militia’s leadership was unpardonable.
Luis stood at the sleeping chamber’s door, hiding his disappointment with a sympathetic frown on his face. He wanted to say to the inquisitor, “I paid a lot of money to have you killed, yet there you lie, alive and well.” Instead, he clasped his hands and joined the bishop of Valencia in a prayer of thanks.
De Amo had a slight injury. Wearing two layers of thick armour underneath his robes had stopped one longbow dart from ripping through his body and killing him. It was a shallow cut, and not much more than the length of the dart tip had pierced his fat belly.
After the physician and bishop left, Luis was made to wait at the door until De Amo summoned him to the bedside. All he could hope for now was his father by law’s support at the next election for viceroy. “It’s a great relief to see you recovering,” he said. “Josefa was worried about you. This news will make her very happy.”
“It was God’s good grace that saved me. He knows I have work to do. As for my Josefa,” the inquisitor said sadly, “we cannot deny the truth forever, Luis. Every day, her condition worsens. Soon, she will stop spe
aking, and then she will sleep and stop breathing. I have witnessed this sickness before. She no longer knows who I am. I presume she no longer recognises you either. She has a disease of the mind and will die soon. You know this, and so do I, so we must not pretend that we are ignorant.”
Surprised by this admission, Luis nodded in agreement, wondering how De Amo’s revelation might be of use. Diseased of the mind, De Amo had said. She was a witch, possessed by the devil, and her father knew he wouldn’t be able to hide her heresies for much longer. He was afraid.
Looking furtively towards the door, Luis whispered, “I fear she might be possessed by demons. I don’t know how we can hide this ... If the townspeople find out what she is they might blame her for the curse that has inflicted this town ... I will find the very best physicians in Valencia and bring them here. But, I fear she may have to be hidden away.”
“The promise of physicians does not placate me one whit. There is no cure for what ails her. And as for hiding her from public sight, yes, I agree”
Pausing, Luis’s face crumpled as though he were about to cry with grief. “She deserves to have the best care possible. Perhaps we could send her to a convent? I would look after her here, but my town is burning. Sagrat has bankrupted me … I don’t have the means to rebuild. It’s a disaster.”
A spark of sympathy sat in De Amo’s eyes, but then it was gone. Lifting his arm and waving his hand dismissively in Luis’s face, he said, “This is not the time to talk of your needs. See to your town. God has sent his wrath upon Sagrat for all the evil that has taken place. Bury your dead and mourn them. I will recover and so will your cursed town. This tragedy happened, not because of my daughter’s illness, but because you are an incompetent leader. The burden must fall on your shoulders.”
“I am not responsible for criminals that roam this kingdom,” Luis retorted. “Maybe we should look to the king and ask him why he spends all of his time in Castile instead of in the land of his birth.” Remembering who he was talking to, Luis tried to gain control of his breathing and his temper. “Forgive me. I am distraught.”