The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga)

by Anderson, Barth

  “That’s good to hear. Well, my name,” he said, pausing for effect, “is Basilio.”

  The old patriarch stared at him blankly. “Are you a swordfighter too?”

  “Never mind. Crowd around me, all of you,” Basilio whispered.

  The patriarch brought the members of the families in tighter, holding one another, pressing in close to the old midwife. Most were still crying and wailing.

  Once he was completely surrounded, Basilio felt Alejo’s pockets and found the charm, the forged steel disc that Don Manuel had given both of his students the day they became blood-brothers. He held it in his palm and looked at it. Like his, it was engraved with four letters: OMVI.

  Don Manuel had never told them what the letters meant, except that it was a symbol of his devotion to Alejo and Basilio as their teacher. Basilio did not share Alejo’s same starry-eyed view of what la destreza might be: a form that anyone with skill could learn. A fighting method for a new Europe. But he felt he owed it to Alejo and to Don Manuel to return the student’s charm to the teacher.

  As he pocketed the solid metal trinket, he realized he was producing his knife, which still smelled of apples.

  And he was slicing off a small lock of Alejo’s fiery red hair. Slipping it into his pouch.

  Rojo, mi hermano de sangre.

  “What are you doing there, grandmother?”

  It was the young knight who’d been guarding the front of the chapel.

  Basilio felt like he’d been shaken and slapped. “Hmm?”

  “Why are you defiling a body in this church of God?”

  “I’m an herb-woman,” Basilio said. “An ingredient for a strength potion, I seek. The lock of a proven hero, don’t you know?”

  “Is that so?”

  “I can make it for you now that I have the hair. Buy a draught of it, señor?”

  Through the purple curtain at the rear of the altar appeared the one and only Don César, striding forward with hand gonnes in each gloved fist, match cords lit. Basilio barely recognized him with an eye patch and no mustache, the skin of his face burned bright pink from the nose down.

  Basilio took in the man’s wounds and whispered, “Oh, well done, Rojo.”

  “What is that you’re saying?” the young knight shouted in anger.

  “Out of the way, Amadis,” César growled at the boy. Two more Red Spur knights, lieutenants by their shoulder braids, stepped through the purple drape, walking behind César, each with a lit hand gonne. “Out of the way, you filthy pigs, unless you want a whiff of powder too.”

  The families scattered and Basilio quickly ripped off his dress, shrugging off his huge fake breasts and feed-bag hips.

  The three armed Red Spurs came to stand on the other side of the body, gonnes trained on Basilio. “Your sword,” César said. “Take off your sword too, abuelita.”

  Basilio jerked his head back in seething disgust. “You’re ordering me to drop my sword with a gonne in your hand, César?”

  César’s voice was flat with regret. “My soul is cold, Basilio.”

  Basilio spat on the ground and raised his hands. “Come and get it if you want it.”

  As though following Basilio’s order, the boy-knight Amadis came blundering up behind him. “I’ve had enough of this fire-shitting braggart. You’re talking to a knight, you criminal!”

  “Amadis, no!” César shouted.

  From behind, Amadis placed his hand on Basilio’s sword hilt to disarm him.

  Basilio’s left hand came down on top of the knight’s and he spun to his right, dragging and twirling the young man forward.

  Two gonnes fired. One gonne ball hit young Amadis below the ear. The second struck Basilio in the back of the upper left arm, snapping the bone in half. Amadis fell to the ground, gurgling.

  The gonne explosions deafened everyone in the church, sending most of them fleeing or diving for cover.

  Basilio screamed and staggered forward, drawing his sword and wheeling.

  César’s eyes didn’t look cold so much as dead, as he let the fuse burn to the powder.

  The gonne ball hit Basilio in the gut, low on the right side. He crumpled to the chapel floor, trying to understand how a knight could kill someone like this. Nothing but a rabid dog.

  I am a dog, he thought. Lying on his stomach, the chapel’s pews were wavering as if occluded by chaparral heat devils. To César, Basilio is not even a man.

  “Go and fetch the archbishop. I won’t risk moving the prisoner, so he will conduct the inquisition of the Great Basilio here,” César said, removing his gloves, “in this very chapel. Fetch a table for the tribunal!”

  Lying on the chapel floor, Basilio was bleeding to death, he could tell, and it filled him with sadness that he would not get one last dance, one chance to redeem the death of his hermano de sangre. But hell. He couldn’t move his left arm. The blood from his stomach was a flood. He could feel it flowing out onto the tiled floor around him, against his cheek.

  Then Basilio saw that through the purple drape behind César, and through the haze of smoke that smelled like war in Bologna to him, four figures were floating by the marble steps that led down to the customary mausoleum.

  Four dark-robed women. Nuns.

  Two looked familiar. One of them stepped close until her blunt-toed shoes were inches from Basilio’s face and said, “That’s not a man, that’s Sor Barbara, who was with our pilgrimage.”

  The other looked Italian or French. This nun was familiar, but from so long ago he couldn’t place her. Her nose was thick at the bridge, crooked. Maybe broken.

  The nuns passed him and all Basilio could see was that bank of dark smoke from the gonnes, and the man he longed to kill. There was César sweeping off his cape; César unbuckling his battered breastplate; César sighing deeply as if he were done fighting for all time but, unlike Basilio, relishing his retirement.

  “It’s finished, finally,” the knight said, crossing himself in the smoke.

  The air of Bologna was dark, opaque with arcabuz smoke, a fetid and stupefying smell, almost worse than the stench of the dead that would rise from the streets tomorrow. The three burst into another empty kitchen, relieved to drop the wet kerchiefs from their faces.

  “Oh, why do we do this?” Alejo shouted, as the don and Basilio ransacked the cupboards. “What do we want?”

  “Brandy, you Galician sheep-rapist!” Don Manuel thundered, his boots stamping hard and unevenly on the kitchen floor as he searched.

  “I mean the fighting. The killing,” Alejo said. He took a deep drink of clean water from a porcelain jug. Gasped appreciatively. “Ah, Don Manuel, I like it all too much.”

  They were dodging back to Spanish turf against the stream of retreating French, scurrying from bombed-out kitchen to bombed-out kitchen and celebrating their successful sabotage mission as they scurried.

  Don Manuel was drunk, but unlike his friends, he was exhausted and looked his forty-eight years. “Oh, piss on that, Rojo. I’m not a priest and no one in heaven or earth knows what you did today, evil or blessed. Or the excellence. I take that back.” He winked at him. “I know.”

  Alejo gave his teacher a fierce, grateful grin.

  At that moment, Basilio shouted in delight. He had found two dust-covered bottles. “Forgive us, brandy, for we know not what we do.”

  Turning his morrión helmet on its side, Don Manuel sat upon it and waved to Basilio for one bottle. “I am going to tell you why I fight.”

  “Money?”Alejo joked.

  “Women?” Basilio joked. He hadn’t really been joking. Then, because he thought it would sound better, he said, “Loyalty and friendship, for me, is why I fight.”

  “Well, friends can provide cover,” Don Manuel said with a sage nod of his scarved head. “But loyalty. Well. You’re a fool if you fight for a king. A crowned head will make you lose your own head eventually. Don’t do that ever. Promise me.”

  “So promised,” Alejo said.

  “Luchamos por la der
echa luchar luchas más.” Don Manuel rapped his breastplate with his bare knuckles. Clunk, clunk. We fight for the right to fight more fights. Then he drew his espada larga and slammed the flat of the blade down on the kitchen floor three times. “All else is a lie we’ll tell our inquisitors. Amen!”

  “Amen!”

  The gagging arquebuz smoke over the city cleared, and Basilio found himself in a beautiful little Bolognese church. Don Manuel’s desperate order to move up the cannons into town had worked. They had leveled this part of Bologna, as feared, but the French had cleared out (as hoped). Basilio could no longer hear their music, their arquebuz fire, or their froofy, hysterical language screeching in the streets around him.

  In this Bolognese church was an old priest. An archbishop perhaps and two others in Inquisición robes. The four nuns he’d seen before were here too, and so was a gentleman knight with an eye patch and a badly burned face.

  No, that’s not right. Not Bologna. I’m in Vacanana, Basilio realized. Ai, qué lastima, that’s so disappointing.

  “Stop talking,” a German with a Swiss accent was saying in his ear. Paracelsus was with him? How did he get here? “You are in the glory of the laudanum but not for much longer. Wait until your soul comes back to the terrestrial plane before speaking. Say nothing more lest you incriminate someone, Basilio.”

  Basilio lifted his right hand and felt the stiff bandage over his stomach wound—a smart, tight military doctor’s dressing—and his left arm hung uselessly in a sling. Neither wound was bleeding, he could tell, but by his wan dizziness he figured he had lost a great deal of blood.

  “Was I speaking?”

  “About Don Manuel,” Paracelsus said, “in a most unbecoming way, under the circumstances.”

  Basilio realized he was wearing a simple muslin nightshirt with no undergarments, not even the wrap for his breasts, actually, and felt suddenly stripped bare, thrown down, beaten. “Oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think they saw me. I think they know.”

  “Yes, God help you, everyone knows,” Paracelsus said. He pretended to be fussing with the sling. “The whole town of Vacanana knows and by now the news is halfway to Chinaland, I imagine.”

  Knights and clergy were coming and going from the front of the little chapel, preparing for a ceremony it seemed. Don César was some fifteen feet away, standing by his two fellow Red Spur knights. He wasn’t wearing his breastplate, but he was armed with those vicious little rondel daggers he was known for and holding his hand gonne with one boot up on a pew, staring hate at Basilio.

  Basilio’s life as the “ascendant star of Spanish manhood” was over, and since it was the only way he knew how to be, he couldn’t imagine what was next except bitter retribution.

  At the very least.

  “You must listen to me. Concentrate,” Paracelsus whispered, his bug eyes staring into Basilio’s. “They have the Book of the Seven Hands and my translation of it both. La señora maneuvered me out of the house and must have stolen both while Alejo slept. I tried to convince the archbishop that the books were mine but they know that—”

  “Master Paracelsus, is the accused ready?”

  That voice. The Archbishop of Barcelona was here, Basilio thought.

  Paracelsus pressed himself close and, in a rushed whisper, said in his ear, “Don Manuel is dead, Basilio. Killed weeks ago by a priest named Zacarías, I heard the archbishop say. Alejo’s corpse is downstairs in the mausoleum below this chapel. That’s your situation.” Paracelsus placed something on the table behind Basilio. He could feel it at his rump. “You must decide what to do about the book.”

  Then Paracelsus straightened and turned back to the scrum of holy officers behind a little table. Red cloaks of inquisitors. Red Spur knights behind them. Basilio reached out in hopelessness and tried to grab Paracelsus as the alchemist stood, but his reflexes were too slow.

  Paracelsus pronounced in his stentorian voice, “Basilio is alive, no thanks to César and all thanks to me. You may proceed with your so-called inquisition.” Paracelsus went to sit behind César and his two lieutenants.

  Basilio was rattled down to his core. The world felt as though it were caving in on itself, dipping into mist. The man who had been like Basilio’s father. The man who had been his maestro and captain.

  His beloved Manuel.

  The hated archbishop was right in front of him, Basilio realized, at the center of the tribunal at that small table. The last time Basilio had seen him was in León, when Basilio was trying to leave a broken, confusing life behind, and the archbishop was but an inquisitor trying to undo the mystery surrounding the sudden appearance of this deadly swordsman called Basilio.

  With his feeble turkey neck and the white wisps across his liver-spotted pate, the archbishop lifted his eyes to meet Basilio’s. A drool cup was fashioned to his chin with a clever bit of metal wiring. He hardly looked the frightening phantom of Basilio’s nightmares any longer. But the tools of his trade were. On the table before the archbishop lay three inkwells, several quills, many stacks of old parchment, and Basilio’s espada. And two volumes—no doubt, the Book of the Seven Hands and Paracelsus’s translation of it—a good twenty feet away.

  The archbishop gestured for the two other red-cloaked inquisitors to sit. Once the small tribunal of three priests was in place, other knights and nuns took their places in pews throughout the chapel. A regular auto-da-fé, he thought. A public spectacle where the Great Basilio would be publicly humiliated. Should he flee? Could he even stand? His mind was blank and thick as he watched the archbishop slide a parchment to the inquisitor next to him, who in turn signed it.

  “We have reached a conclusion and determined a punishment in the matter of Duchess Constanza Peréz de Gŭzman,” the archbishop said. His voice sounded thin and twee in the hollow quiet of the chapel. “We have entered written testimony of Don Manuel Sifuentes into the record of this current inquisition, along with the testimony of Violeta, the house-slave belonging to Don Porfirio de Vacanana.”

  Light-headed. Angry. Horrified.

  “No testimony has been submitted in support of Duchess Constanza,” the archbishop said, as if this settled matters, and he closed his waxy-lidded eyes. “It has been a lifetime of work, but we have proved your lineage. We know your family is the most excellent Medina Sidonias, thanks to Father Inquisitor Zacarías.”

  The elderly priest next to the archbishop, wearing a gaunt, pale face, inclined his head and turned his piercing eyes on Basilio.

  Zacarías? he thought. The thugs who’d jumped Basilio and Alejo said the name Zacarías. The man who killed Don Manuel too? It confused him. His mind swam slowly toward what all this might mean.

  “We have your birth announcement right here, Constanza, and we have the sworn testimony from your parents, entered from the previous inquisition held twenty-six years ago. Now let us—”

  “Not Basilio’s,” Basilio managed. He had to command his mind to concentrate on every word in order to speak them, but his focus was beginning to sharpen. “Basilio never had one of those.”

  “A birth announcement? No, the lie of ‘Basilio’ would not need such a document,” Father Zacarías said. He was clean-shaven and his flesh was puffy in a way that reminded Basilio of rank sumptuousness. “But Duchess Constanza did have a birth announcement, and we have it here, sent to us by the duke’s own archivist. What you gained by acting as a rogue instead of what you are, a duchess of magnificent lineage, is simply…” He answered himself with a derisive shake of his head. “You bewilder this tribunal.”

  Basilio scratched the small of his back with his one good hand, feeling the dagger that Paracelsus had placed there. Tongue fat in his mouth, he said, “I am no duchess. I am just Basilio.”

  “We are not debating your identity. We know who you are,” the archbishop answered. “You are Duchess Constanza Peréz de Gŭzman, third daughter of Juan Alfonso, Duke of Medina Sidonia. You were schooled at León and you were scheduled to enter t
he cloister of Santa Anita as a student, perhaps even to become a nun. At the age of twelve, you began training in the use of espada corta, daga, and a buckler shield by the exemplary Order of Calatrava knight, Don Manuel Sifuentes, who was captain of your father’s forces. We assume that Constanza ran away and changed her name, since soon after, in 1497, the name Basilio Arias de Coronado y Morrillo appears in the service records of Don Manuel. There are no records of this name before that time.” The archbishop looked sharply at Basilio. “Why did you run away, Constanza? It’s time to tell your full story.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not me.”

  Father Zacarías leaned forward, resting his scarlet sleeves upon the tribunal’s table and folding his gnarled hands. “There’s no use in denying now. No use running anymore. We know you are Constanza.”

  Basilio’s mind was slowly sharpening, but his passions were piqued as ever. “My name is Basilio, Father Zacarías, and I’ve never run from anything in my life.”

  “Demonstrably untrue,” Zacarías said. “You’ve been running and lying about who you are your whole wretched life. You and the pervert Don Manuel lied about who you were for decades.”

  He was still touching the dagger behind him, ready to throw it and kill the old priest. But Basilio wouldn’t be able to hit Zacarías, even if his mind were clear and sharp. He was simply no good with a throwing knife. “You called my master a pervert?”

  “He corrupted you. You were innocent,” the third member of the tribunal said kindly. He was a young Gregorian with a pointed chin beard and a quiet, unassuming demeanor. He kept a nervous eye on the other two inquisitors as he said, “You should clear your name, Duchess.”

  “I am not,” Basilio said, “a bloody duchess.”

  “You ran away at the age of thirteen. A thirteen-year-old girl of such high birth would never do such a thing of her own accord,” Zacarías goaded. “Don Manuel abducted you, didn’t he? He forced you.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Say it. He raped you.”

  “When this is over, I’ll take a nice warm bath in your blood, Zacarías.”

  Father Zacarías unfolded a tattered piece of paper, a look of bemused contempt on his face. “This is a letter from Manuel Sifuentes to your father the duke, written in the autumn of 1497. I finally convinced your father to share it with me.”