The Devils of Cardona

by Matthew Carr

  “What makes you say so, my lord?”

  “Because that’s how he introduced himself to those poor women. And if you need extra men to catch him, I shall be only too pleased to provide them.”

  Mendoza thanked him and asked him for directions to Villamayor. For the first time, Vallcarca seemed genuinely willing to help and called on one of his militiamen to guide them out on the road to the village. They had not been riding long when they noticed a small group of men and horses gathered in an open field near the road. Some of them were wearing maroon tunics, but others were carrying sticks and drums that indicated they were beaters at a hunting party. Nearly all of them were standing in a circle watching what appeared to be a fight in progress. On closer inspection Mendoza saw that one man was lying on the ground, his yelps mingling with the curses and grunts of satisfaction coming from his assailant, who was kicking and beating him with the flat of his sword.

  “What’s going on here?” Mendoza shouted.

  The man stopped what he was doing and looked up in surprise, his face twisted into an expression of anger and cruelty. “I am Rodrigo Vallcarca, and who in God’s name are you?”

  “Why are you beating this man?”

  “This idiot is my servant and my vassal. He coughed when I was about to shoot a deer so that I missed my shot!”

  “Well, you’ve beaten him enough,” Mendoza said.

  “I will decide when he’s had enough!” Vallcarca gave the man another savage kick in the stomach, and then Mendoza rode his horse directly into the circle, pushing Vallcarca back so quickly that he fell over. There were gasps of amazement from the spectators as Vallcarca scrambled to his feet and held up his sword.

  “I’ll kill you for that!” he yelled. “Get down from your horse!”

  “You are raising your sword against an officer of the king,” Mendoza said. “And if I get down from my horse, it will be to place you under arrest. Now, leave this man alone. A servant should not be beaten for coughing.”

  He rode away without waiting for a reply. Behind them he heard the sound of another blow, and he glanced around to see Vallcarca kicking the prone servant.

  “Shall we go back and stop him, Don Bernardo?” Necker asked.

  Mendoza shook his head. He had interfered enough already, and there were some things in these mountains that could not be put right. But whatever benefits the union of the Vallcarca and Cardona families were intended to bring to the baron, he thought, this encounter with the baron’s son made it clear why the Countess of Cardona was not keen to offer him her hand.

  • • •

  ABOUT TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Vallcarca’s militiaman pointed out Villamayor up ahead and turned back. When they reached the seigneurial jail, they were told that the Inquisition escort had left with the two prisoners half an hour previously on the road to Zaragoza. Mendoza decided to try to catch them, and they took out at a canter along the dusty road until they saw the inquisitorial cortege in front of them. The party consisted of a carriage and a cart bearing the two gagged and chained prisoners, accompanied by an escort of eight armed familiares on horses and mules. One of them was the same brutish creature with the squashed nose and the thick hands whom Mendoza had first seen in Zaragoza, who wheeled his horse and scowled at them.

  “Stay back,” he ordered. “The Holy Office is escorting prisoners to Zaragoza.”

  “I know,” Mendoza said. “I want to talk to them.”

  “That is not permitted!”

  Necker rode past him in front of the cortege, forcing it to come to a halt.

  “Why are we stopping?” A tonsured head appeared in the carriage window as Mendoza rode alongside him.

  “Commissioner Herrero?” Mendoza asked.

  “Yes. And who are you?”

  “Alcalde Mendoza, the king’s special justice. I wish to speak to your prisoners.”

  “You’ll do no such thing! That is forbidden.”

  “I’d like you to make an exception in this case.”

  “Absolutely not. And you are obstructing the work of the Holy Office. You should go back, or I will report you to my superiors.”

  Mendoza looked at the prisoners, who were sitting passively, their legs chained together and their arms tied behind their backs. Their gags were not unusual, since prisoners of the Holy Office were not permitted to talk to anyone after their arrest, but there were bruises on both their faces, and one of them looked as though he might be unconscious. Perhaps it was the heat, or the aching in his thigh, or the seemingly endless procession of people who he suspected were not telling him everything they knew, but Mendoza was not inclined to take no for an answer.

  “I only want to ask them a few questions,” he said.

  “You will ask them nothing!”

  The familiares were gathering around the carriage and the prisoners now, with their hands poised on their swords and pistols. They were only the usual lay volunteers and assistants, but they looked as though they knew how to use their weapons, and Mendoza gestured to Necker to move away. As he watched the cortege hurtle down the road, he could not help feeling that his journey to Vallcarca had raised as many questions as it had answered. He had indeed confirmed that the three Moriscos had come from Belamar, but nothing that he’d heard so far had shed any light on what the Moriscos were doing in Vallcarca in the first place. If they wanted to rape nuns, there was no shortage of them in Cardona. Why would they go to the neighboring señorio to do it, at precisely the time when the Inquisition happened to be working in the vicinity?

  There was one other source of information in Vallcarca that might shed light on these questions, and he asked some labradores who’d been watching the scene for directions to the Convent of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Twenty minutes later they rode through a patchwork of well-tended orchards and vegetable patches and knocked on the main door of the convent. A shutter drew back, and a pallid female face in a nun’s habit appeared in the opening, her eyes widening with fear and amazement at the sight of them. Mendoza asked to see the mother superior, and she closed the shutter without a word. A few minutes later, they heard the faint sound of footsteps, and the shutter opened once again to reveal a severe-looking old lady whose crinkled face was also entirely enclosed in a black wimple.

  “I am Mother Superior Margarita,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “Good afternoon, Reverend Mother. I am Alcalde Mendoza from the Royal Chancery in Valladolid. I’m here in connection with the attacks on your sisters.”

  “That has already been investigated by the Inquisition.”

  Mendoza suppressed his impatience. Was there anyone in this kingdom who did not think that he or she had the right to question his authority? “I understand that, but there are some questions I wish to ask the victims that relate to my own investigation. I believe others may be involved of whom the Inquisition is not aware, and I need to speak to the two sisters in order to establish this.”

  “Absolutely out of the question. They are in no condition to talk to anyone. I will talk to you, but not here. Men are not allowed within these walls. Please wait.”

  Mendoza stepped back, and a moment later the heavy door creaked open and Sister Margarita hobbled out, accompanied by the mouselike nun who had greeted them previously. Like him, Sister Margarita was carrying a stick, and she walked slowly and with obvious difficulty to a wooden bench overlooking the rows of fruit trees, where her companion stood attentively a few feet away from her.

  “You may sit,” she said as she looked out somberly toward the men who were working in the fields and orchards. “This has been a terrible event for all of us, Licenciado. Most of our workers are Moriscos, and we have very good relations with them. Some of them have worked on our estates since they were children, and their fathers and grandfathers worked here before them. Now some of the sisters are saying we should hire only Old Christians.”


  “Even though the perpetrators are from Cardona, not Vallcarca?” Mendoza asked.

  “People are afraid, and fear breeds hatred. Some of the sisters are saying we should accept the baron’s offer to use his militia to protect us. But until now we never needed protection. And some of the baron’s methods are not in keeping with our Lord’s teachings. Now, how can I help you?”

  “Did your sisters identify their attackers?”

  “Of course!” She looked at him in surprise. “That’s why Vallcarca’s men arrested them.”

  “And I understand that one of them said he was the Redeemer?”

  “That is correct.”

  “So the sisters saw his face during the attack?”

  “Not during it. All three men were wearing masks, as I told Commissioner Herrero.”

  “If they were wearing masks, then how did they know that the two men they saw were the ones who attacked them?”

  Mother Superior Margarita’s ancient, creased face looked suddenly confused. “Because they saw them before—on the road. And they also saw them later on.”

  “At the prison?”

  “No. The baron’s men brought the two prisoners here on the evening they were caught. Our sisters saw them through the grille. They recognized them both as the men they had seen on the road just before the attacks. They were the same men who were arrested by the militia while riding away afterward. There was no one else on the road apart from them. Who else could it have been?”

  Mendoza did not know, and it seemed discourteous to say that he would have required more conclusive proof to reach a verdict. Instead he expressed his hope that the guilty would be punished and that the sisters would recover from their ordeal.

  Mother Superior Margarita nodded. “Nothing happens without a reason, Licenciado Mendoza. But goodness will triumph with God’s help.”

  Mendoza also felt that the nuns had been attacked for a reason, but he was starting to wonder whether it was the reason it seemed to be. A new suspicion was beginning to take shape in his mind. It was certainly fortuitous, given the Inquisition’s priorities in Cardona, that Herrero should have been conducting an investigation in Vallcarca on the same day that three Moriscos from Belamar had come to the señorio to carry out a crime like this. And why would three rapists come all the way to Vallcarca, with its gibbets and militia, when there were nuns in Cardona who were more easily accessible? As he walked back to his horse, it occurred to him that goodness would need considerable assistance from the law as well as the Almighty if it was to prevail in Vallcarca.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  hey arrived back in Belamar in the early evening, and Mendoza was pleased to find his cousin waiting for them in the village hall with Necker, the two militiamen, and Constable Franquelo. Gabriel was impressed by Ventura’s new horse, and Franquelo shifted uncomfortably when Ventura said that he had acquired it on the open market after his mare had broken her leg. Ventura told them about the bandit attack on the road whose survivors he had escorted safely to Cardona, and Mendoza immediately gave new orders. From now on they were to patrol the town by day and also by night, in case Vicente Péris attempted to enter Belamar. From midnight to dawn, there would be two-man patrols lasting two hours, and he and Gabriel would take the first.

  Gabriel was excited by this new task, but Franquelo made no attempt to disguise the fact that he regarded it as a burden. Mendoza sent them to the tavern and remained behind with Ventura. It was not until then that his cousin told him about his encounter with the smugglers.

  “I suppose a horse is a fair reward for saving lives,” Mendoza said. “Otherwise I might have had to confiscate it as contraband. So Vallcarca is smuggling horses. And our little village constable is helping him.”

  “Are you going to question Franquelo?”

  Mendoza shook his head. “Not yet. Right now I have other priorities than smuggled horses. Like Vicente Péris.”

  “Who’s Vicente Péris?”

  Mendoza told him about the attack on the nuns and his visit to Vallcarca. “The baron thinks that Péris is the Redeemer. But why would the Redeemer go to Vallcarca with two wretched Moriscos to rape two nuns when he has the band that you saw at his disposal?”

  “There’s something else I didn’t mention,” Ventura said. “Didn’t the priest have his skull smashed in with a pointed weapon?”

  “That’s what Segura said.”

  “Well, the bandit who called himself the Redeemer was carrying some kind of silver mace with spikes on it. That’s what he killed the tailor with.”

  “He’s probably not the only bandit with a weapon like that.”

  “True, but there was something odd about the attack. After the bandit killed him, he called him a gos.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s a Catalan word for ‘dog.’ And he spoke Spanish with a Catalan accent. I know because I spent some time in Barcelona when I came back from Flanders. The women, I tell you—”

  “Hombre, stick to the point.”

  “So why is a Catalan waging holy war on Christians in the name of the Turkish sultan?”

  Mendoza shrugged. “Don’t they have Moriscos in Catalonia?”

  “No doubt, but what would a Catalan Morisco be doing in these mountains? And if these people were the same people who wrote Arabic on the church wall in Belamar, then why didn’t they speak it to one another?”

  “Not all Moriscos speak Arabic. Granada was always different in that respect.”

  “Maybe. But his whole speech about the Redeemer—it didn’t sound real. It was like something you hear at the theater.”

  “Rebels don’t have to be great orators, cousin.”

  “True,” Ventura agreed. “But this Catalan sounded like a bandit, not a rebel. And the men I saw today—they were just a rabble looking for plunder.”

  Mendoza pondered this for a moment as a new and completely unexpected possibility now entered his mind. “Well, if the Catalan is the Redeemer, then the Redeemer can’t be Vicente Péris—unless there are two of them. But the priest wasn’t robbed. And why would a bandit call himself the Redeemer if he wasn’t?”

  Ventura looked blank. “Maybe he thought it would frighten people. Some bandits like to give themselves a reputation.”

  Mendoza was silent as he considered these possibilities. “Do you think you can track those bandits?” he asked.

  “Claro.”

  “Good. Because I need you to go back up into the mountains and get a closer look at those men. See what you can find out about them. Once you get a sighting of their camp, come back immediately. Only reconnaissance, is that clear?”

  Ventura’s face was a mask of injured innocence. “Have I ever disobeyed orders before? But I’ll need to go on foot at least some of the way. A horse will be too conspicuous.”

  “Necker can accompany you as far as you need to go on horseback. You’ll have to make your own way back. And right now, cousin, I have to tell you that I am so hungry I actually want to go to the tavern.”

  • • •

  THE DEL RÍO FARM was only half an hour from Belamar, at the end of a steep dirt track leading off the Jaca road that most travelers who knew no better assumed did not lead anywhere. It was this inaccessibility that had made it attractive to Vallcarca, and the farm could also be reached from the lower plains through more complicated routes that avoided the main roads altogether so that horses could be brought up through lower Aragon and up through Monzón or Barbastro or farther west from Ayerbe unnoticed by the king’s constables or anyone else, even by daylight.

  It was a system that had worked well throughout the ten years Gonzalo del Río had been involved in the trade, and his section of the route was the easiest because the mountains were so lightly patrolled and because there were so many routes through the mountains that it would take a small army to watch over every o
ne of them. In all those years, he had not failed to deliver a single animal and had never even been stopped crossing the frontier, by either Spanish or French customs officers. It was only now, thanks to the alguacil-bandit who had accosted them near the frontier three days earlier, that he had lost an animal and the delivery fee that came with it, and his reputation had been called into question for the first time.

  Franquelo had also been penalized, and the alguacil had insisted that he and Rapino recoup his losses. Now there would be no more horses until Licenciado Mendoza’s investigation was over, and that meant that he would have to rely only on the farm. Del Río could not help but interpret this reversal of fortune as a sign that Allah was displeased with him, and so he had made a special effort for the last two days to perform the salat five times daily. He had renounced taverns and brandy houses and pledged to keep himself pure. He did not include his comings and goings across the border in these pledges, because the laws that he broke were Christian laws and the income that he derived from breaking them helped him to pay his taxes and feed his wife and children, as well as his mother and father and his grandparents, who lived on the farm with him. He could not see how Allah could object to that.

  Del Río was only intermittently pious, and he did not find praying easy. He often struggled to remember the words and had to make up his own, but opportunities to pray in groups were becoming rarer since the judge and his constables had installed themselves in the town, and now that the alguacil-bandit knew where he lived, he was reluctant to pray with his family or even wear a clean white shirt in his own home, even though it was Friday. He had still managed to pray three times that day, however, and he washed his hands and face once again and knelt down before the open window and looked out toward Mecca and the Kaaba Stone.

  From around the farm, he heard the familiar domestic sounds that he had heard all his life. He heard his eldest daughter cranking the well, his wife singing to the baby, the cattle lowing in the barn, and the chickens pecking at the corn his son was throwing to them. He had just touched his forehead to the ground when he heard the dog’s agitated yelp, followed by a sudden silence. From the direction of the well, he heard his daughter scream, and then she, too, fell silent. The smuggler scrambled to his feet, reached for his sword and ran out into the courtyard toward the open doorway.