The Devils of Cardona

by Matthew Carr

  “That is most helpful.”

  “No need to thank me, Licenciado. If you find this Redeemer, you’ll be doing all of us a favor.”

  Mendoza told the others to be ready in two hours and returned to his room to look at the map the count had given him. Soon afterward he heard footsteps coming rapidly down the stone corridor, and one of Sástago’s servants appeared to say that the viceroy needed to see him urgently. Downstairs in the patio, Inquisitor Mercader was engaged in agitated conversation with Sástago and two other men. One of them was the Inquisition familiar who had been flogging the unfortunate adulteress the previous day. Mendoza had never had much respect for the Inquisition’s secular helpers, but this one was a particularly unpleasant example of a bad breed. Close up he exuded cruelty and malice, from his broad shoulders and low, thick neck to his apelike hands to the sunken, narrow eyes that peered pitilessly from beneath the fringe that fell down over his forehead. His companion was a young, earnest-looking man whose mud-splattered boots and dusty cloak testified to his recent arrival from the countryside.

  “Bad news, Mendoza,” the viceroy said. “This is Constable Vargas, the chief constable of Jaca. It seems that three brothers have been found murdered near Belamar. All of them are Old Christians.”

  “One of them was nailed to a cross!” Mercader exclaimed. “With the heads of his brothers arranged next to him!”

  “You saw this?” Mendoza asked.

  “No, Your Mercy,” replied the alguacil. “But some montañeses found him hanging on a cross by a shrine, about two leagues above the town, and they took him down. The constable at Belamar saw him and sent a messenger to Don Pelagio.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “The bodies were found four days ago, in the afternoon.”

  Mercader’s narrow eyes glittered, and his cadaverous features bore an expression of bitter fury as he turned toward Mendoza. “Now do you understand the kind of people we are dealing with, Alcalde?” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  hey headed northward through a treeless landscape broken by eroded, lightly cultivated fields and white hills before climbing gradually up toward Huesca and the Pyrenean foothills. After spending an uncomfortable first night in a damp and bug-infested inn near Huesca, they resumed their upward progress through the Monrepos Pass the following morning. On reaching the pass, they found themselves looking over a series of immense, wide valleys with forest-covered slopes that stretched out toward the snow-tipped peaks of the Pyrenees.

  Mendoza was impressed by the scale of the mountains, by the towering slabs of rust-colored rock and the dense forests of oak, birch and pine, by the castles and fortified towers and the alpine meadows speckled with edelweiss and sweet basil, but he was also wary. He had ordered his men to load their pistols, but the only traffic they encountered on the roads consisted of peasants bringing their produce down to the markets in Huesca or Zaragoza or shepherds driving cattle, sheep and goats up toward the higher valleys. From time to time, they saw the raftsmen precariously balanced on giant rafts made from tree trunks that they were taking to Zaragoza on the fast-moving rivers, skillfully navigating their way through the surging waters with wooden rudders at the front and back.

  The roads were poor, and progress was slow as they guided their animals across streams and rivers, with Necker riding ahead of the group and scanning both sides of the road while Ventura kept up the rear guard. On the second afternoon, they reached the plain of Jaca, the former capital of Aragon, and followed the flat road into the city through the former Jewish quarter, past the old Roman walls, converted synagogues, Romanesque churches, elegant three- and four-story houses with painted wooden eaves, and a large square tower that had once been the town jail.

  Constable Vargas took them directly to the stone courthouse, where dozens of vagabonds, beggars and poor women were lining up to receive bowls of soup and hunks of bread. Mendoza saw a short, plump man in a cape and a soft green bonnet checking begging permits with another official who wore the red badge of an alguacil on his chest. It was not until they turned around that he realized that the man in the bonnet was his old friend Pelagio Calvo.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Bernardo de Mendoza!” Pelagio grinned. “Should I call you ‘Licenciado’ or ‘Your Honor’? How long has it been, my friend?”

  “Too long,” Mendoza replied as the corregidor enveloped him in a warm embrace. He looked at his old friend’s thick walrus mustache and stubbled jowls and protruding belly. Calvo had not aged well. His hair and beard were tinged with gray, and he was barrel-shaped where he had once been firm and stocky. His clothes were of good quality but not especially rich or extravagant, and he looked like so many other provincial magistrates. Organizing soup kitchens and food distributions for the poor was as much a part of the duties of a corregidor as arresting vagrants, and Calvo exuded a mixture of quiet authority and obvious boredom as he looked over the proceedings.

  “A real hornet’s nest you’ve walked into, Bernardo,” he said. “This is Constable Franquelo from Belamar. He brought in the three dead shepherds this morning.”

  “The Quintana brothers are here?”

  “Yes, they’re at the hospital. Their father is coming to collect them today.”

  “I’d like to see their bodies first.”

  “Vargas can take care of this. But it’s not a pretty sight. Are these all the men you’ve brought with you? You’ll need more than that if you’re going to Cardona.”

  “I was told that discretion was required,” Mendoza replied.

  “If you want my opinion, Bernardo, His Majesty has shown a little too much discretion in these parts already. We only buried the priest last month, and now this! I don’t have the manpower to deal with this level of mayhem! In theory I can call up seventy, even a hundred volunteers for the militia. But you can’t do it just like that. I have to send my people all round the towns and villages to get them, and that takes time. And they can’t stay out permanently. This is the Pyrenees, Mendoza, not the meseta. I don’t think they always understand what that means in Madrid—or even in Zaragoza.”

  The hospital was a large, three-story building only a few minutes from the courthouse. It was staffed mostly by nuns, and in the mortuary the three bodies were lying side by side on wooden tables. Mendoza had seen many corpses in his life, but the three naked, headless shepherds were a shocking and disturbing sight. One had been shot in the chest. Another had been struck in the chest by a crossbow bolt. The third had a deep diagonal cut just above his right shoulder. The boy with the crossbow bolt bore the marks of wounds on his hands and feet and also on his chest. All the bodies had been washed, including the three heads lying neatly in a basket, and as Mendoza looked more closely at the boy’s chest, he saw that the wounds were in fact letters that had been carved into it with a knife.

  “IHS,” he murmured. “The Holy Name of Jesus.”

  “That’s what it says?” Franquelo made the sign of the cross. “The dirty heathen scum.”

  Mendoza thought of the first weeks of the Morisco rebellion in Granada, when the Moriscos had slaughtered the Christians of the Alpujarras. It was all strikingly similar, from the grotesque blasphemy and sadism to the mockery of religious symbols and rituals. And yet it seemed incredible that the Moriscos of Aragon should have dared to embark on such a provocation after the terrible punishment that had been inflicted on Granada. Gabriel was standing nearby, looking pale and distraught, and he suddenly hurried from the room with one hand over his mouth.

  They found him outside in the street, leaning over a pool of vomit.

  “Are you all right?” Mendoza asked.

  Gabriel nodded, obviously embarrassed at being the center of attention. Just then they heard the clatter of hooves, and a mule-drawn cart pulled up outside the entrance to the hospital. In the driver’s seat, a bearded old man in a frayed gray tunic and cloth cap held the reins. He w
as flanked by two younger men, both of whom were carrying swords and daggers. Two more men were seated in the back, one of whom was holding an escopeta across his lap.

  “I’ve come for my boys, Franquelo,” the old man said.

  “They’re inside, Paco. This is Alcalde Mendoza. The king has sent him from Valladolid to bring these villains to justice.”

  “There’s only one kind of justice these devils understand.”

  “I promise you, Señor Quintana, that I will do everything I can to find who killed your sons,” Mendoza assured him.

  “Then you better go to Belamar de la Sierra, because that’s where those devils came from, and everybody knows it.” Quintana turned away into the hospital without waiting for a reply.

  • • •

  “DO YOU HAVE ANY SUSPECTS?” Mendoza asked Franquelo as they walked back to the courthouse.

  “No, sir, but the killers went to a lot of trouble to crucify them. The campsite where they were killed is nearly an hour away on horseback.”

  “Have you searched this place?”

  “Not yet. We haven’t had time.”

  Like many rural alguaciles Mendoza had known, Franquelo did not seem overburdened with energy or intelligence. “And what about the priest? Do you have any suspects for that?”

  Calvo laughed. “Yes—the whole town! Panalles was stuck like a pig, but no one heard him scream. Whoever did it also had time to desecrate the church, but the whole town just slept through it! No one is talking! Not to me. Not to the Inquisition. And not to Franquelo. I tell you, Bernardo, what we need to do is make a couple of arrests, bring them down here and stretch them till they talk. Then maybe the fear will open up some lines of inquiry. Especially after this.”

  Mendoza said nothing. Even though he himself had subjected suspects to the torment, he did not approve of torture either as a first resort or as a substitute for a full investigation, and he was disappointed to hear his old friend advocating such primitive methods.

  “One thing is certain,” Calvo said. “This was some kind of message. Bandits would just have robbed them. They wouldn’t have carved them up like this and carried them up to the road for every pilgrim to see.”

  “The Redeemer?” Mendoza suggested.

  “Oh, so you’ve heard about our Morisco avenger? Who knows? There are all kinds of wild stories going around the villages about this man. That he hides in a magic cave whose entrance opens and closes on command and rides a green horse and is armed with a scimitar. Some say he’s seven feet tall and has four fingers on his right hand. There are even those who will tell you that he isn’t a man at all but the ghost of Tariq ibn Ziyad, come to reconquer Spain for the Moors. Of course, when you actually ask around, you find that nobody’s actually seen him—they’ve just heard of someone who has. These are simple people, Bernardo, people of the mountains. Some of them still believe that the high peaks are filled with dragons and monsters.”

  “And you? What do you believe?”

  Calvo shrugged. “Well, these bodies are real. And they weren’t killed for their money. Those shepherds weren’t rich.”

  Mendoza had intended to continue to Belamar that same day, but Calvo now pressed him to stay for supper and offered to find them rooms in a local inn that was used by pilgrims. The prospect of a bed and good food swayed Mendoza, and that night they ate at the corregidor’s well-appointed house. Unlike the viceroy, Calvo did not stand on ceremony, and Necker, Gabriel and the militiamen were also allowed to eat with him and his wife. Calvo had not been married when Mendoza last saw him, and his Dutch wife, Cornelia, was definitely something of a catch for a man who was not the most imposing physical specimen. She looked at least ten years younger than Calvo, with lustrous blond hair and creamy white skin and a voluptuous figure that her loose-fitting robes accentuated, to the obvious admiration of her husband’s guests.

  Mendoza found her less appealing. He disliked the way that she flirted with Ventura and the two militiamen as if her husband were not there. He noticed how Calvo gave her endearing looks that she did not reciprocate as he told anecdotes that were obviously designed to impress her with his manliness and boldness, about their student days in Salamanca and tavern brawls and scrapes with tutors, about his attempts to serenade the ladies accompanied by Mendoza on guitar.

  These reminiscences inevitably turned to Lepanto. Calvo delivered a colorful and exciting account of the battle that reminded Mendoza of the stories he had once told in Salamanca taverns. He described the sultan’s ships spread out in a crescent shape across the Gulf of Patras with their sails billowing in a great curtain, the tambours and cymbals beating out the rowers’ strokes from the Turkish decks, the turbaned soldiers dancing and brandishing their weapons in anticipation of the battle as they waited on the walkways.

  Calvo told his wife and guests how the Christians broke the fetters that held their galley slaves so that they could use their chains as weapons and promised freedom to those who survived, how the Turkish arrows bounced off their boarding nets, how Don John danced a gay galliard in full view of the enemy before boarding the Turkish flagship, how the huge Venetian gunships blasted the Turkish galleys at the center of the sultan’s fleet, wreaking terrible damage. Gabriel was spellbound, but Mendoza found these recollections oppressive. War stories told at suppertime might be entertaining, but Calvo’s narrative did not include the thrashing of the bosun’s bullwhip on the backs of the slaves as they crashed into the corsair ships, the exploding grenades and incendiaries and the screams of men jumping from burning ships with their clothes on fire into the churning red waters among the entrails of their own comrades where they were stabbed with pikes, shot dead by harquebusiers or drowned, weighed down by their armor.

  When Calvo described how he had saved Mendoza’s life, Mendoza remembered the awful pain as he fell to the deck and his certainty that he was about to die as the janissary raised his scimitar above his head. Once again he saw the infidel tumble over and his friend’s face, splashed with blood and framed by a combed morion helmet as he reached down and pulled Mendoza upright.

  “‘Onward rush / The Greeks amid the ruins of the fleet / As through a shoal of fish caught in the net, / Spreading destruction,’” Mendoza quoted absently.

  “‘Advance, ye sons of Greece, from thraldom save / Your country, save your wives, your children save!’” cried Calvo.

  Cornelia Calvo and the other guests looked at them blankly.

  “Aeschylus!” Calvo yelled. “Just because I didn’t finish university, that doesn’t mean I can’t still quote the classics, eh, Bernardo? And if I hadn’t picked you off the deck that day, you wouldn’t be quoting them now!”

  “To friendship,” Ventura said, raising his glass. “To the man who saved Licenciado Mendoza from the infidel!”

  Calvo beamed proudly as they raised their glasses. His wife managed a tight-lipped smile. She asked Mendoza if he had ever been to Aragon before. Mendoza replied that he had not.

  “And have you ever dealt with Moriscos before?”

  “I have, señora. In Granada.”

  “Then you will know what to expect,” she said. “The Moriscos of Aragon are just the same. Christians on the surface but Moors underneath.”

  “In Granada some of the Moriscos were more devout Christians than the Old Christians themselves,” Mendoza said.

  “Not in these mountains,” Señora Calvo insisted. “Oh, they’re good at pretending to be Christians, but as soon as your back’s turned, they’re praying to Muhammad. They’d kill us all in our beds if they got the chance. The only surprising thing about this Redeemer is that he took so long to appear.”

  “Does the Countess of Cardona think the same way as you do?” Mendoza asked.

  “The countess is a good woman, but she isn’t a woman of the world,” Señora Calvo replied with undisguised condescension. “She treats her Moriscos as if they were c
hildren, and that only encourages them to believe they can do as they like.”

  “She needs a man!” said Calvo with a lewd expression that made his wife visibly stiffen. “The Moriscos run rings around her! What they need is discipline—like Granada.”

  Mendoza felt himself becoming irritated. “You were in Flanders, not Granada,” he said. “The Moriscos had real grievances that were ignored. Too many Old Christians exploited and oppressed them, and when they went to the courts, there was no redress. Even the priests fleeced them, but the Church did nothing. Instead of addressing these concerns, the king issued the Royal Pragmatic. In one year the Moriscos were supposed to abandon their language, their dances, their public bathhouses and their clothes. It was unreasonable to impose these demands. Wiser government could have avoided the rebellion.”

  “Are you saying His Majesty is not wise?” Señora Calvo asked with a faint smile.

  “I’m saying, madam, that His Majesty does not always receive accurate information. And when it comes to Moriscos, I am often skeptical about the information one does receive—and also about the sources of such information.”

  Señora Calvo’s smile abruptly faded.

  “But the Moriscos were punished,” Calvo said. “And you helped administer the punishment.”

  “Of course!” Mendoza replied hotly. “Because they rebelled. And rebellion must always be punished.”

  “Well, let’s hope you can nip this in the bud, Bernardo,” said Calvo. “Before it gets any worse. Because we need to find these criminals before someone else dies.”

  This seemed so self-evident that it barely needed saying, and Mendoza merely nodded. Calvo sensed that he had displeased his old friend, and he seemed eager to make up for it as he accompanied them to the inn.