by Matthew Carr
“He’s already escaped,” Segura reminded him.
Mendoza did not like the idea of Segura and Péris talking in private, but forcing the wood-carver to come to Spain at gunpoint was not practical. He grudgingly agreed, and Segura went back inside to explain the situation to Péris. The mayor emerged a few minutes later saying that Péris had agreed to talk and that he would return when they had found somewhere to stay. It was getting dark as they threaded their way on foot back through the teeming crowds and crossed the bridge again. Mendoza had expected to spend the night in a field, and he was pleasantly surprised when Segura knocked on the door of a private house. The Christian householder, Monsieur Marcel, cheerfully greeted the mayor like a long-lost brother and offered the dust-covered and disheveled travelers an attic room.
One of his sons took their horses to a stable while they carried their weapons and saddlebags upstairs, and a servant girl brought them a bowl of warm water to wash in. Afterward they went downstairs, where Monsieur Marcel’s wife served them a supper of warmed-up mutton stew and a jug of red wine, which only Mendoza and Daniel drank. The two of them retired to the narrow single bed that they were obliged to share, while Segura left to speak to Péris. Within minutes the militiaman’s snoring merged with the cacophony of horns, drums, shouting and laughter from the ongoing bacchanal outside, and it was not long before Mendoza was asleep himself.
• • •
HE WOKE to find Daniel’s feet next to his face and felt immediately agitated. The room was dark, apart from a small square of wan gray light coming through the little skylight, and there was no sign of Segura.
“Wake up,” he said urgently.
Before Daniel could get out of bed, Mendoza was already getting dressed, and the two of them went downstairs. The house was silent, and Mendoza had a sudden overwhelming suspicion that Segura had betrayed him, until he saw the mane of white hair protruding from under a blanket on the drawing-room sofa.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Segura sat up and looked around the darkened room. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?” he asked. “He said he’d talk to you. He’s not going anywhere.”
“I want to speak to him now.”
Segura shrugged and got dressed. Monsieur Marcel had heard them and came down to offer them breakfast, but Mendoza politely declined the invitation. Outside, the crowds had gone and the streets were littered with bodies that might have been dead, drunk or sleeping. The stallholders were already busy packing away awnings and tables while beggars and municipal carts picked their way through the streets, sweeping up the mess of broken glass and clay pots or combing through the rubbish in search of something edible or salable.
Mendoza hurried grimly past them, like a blackbird of ill omen, his cloak flapping and his head hunched forward, tapping the ground with his stick and walking with such speed that Daniel and Segura struggled to keep up with him. As soon as they turned in to the street and saw the small crowd gathered around the entrance to the old man’s house, he knew that his urgency had been justified. He pushed his way through them and into the darkened room, where he saw the old man lying barefoot in his nightshirt in a pool of blood with a candle by his outstretched left hand. On the stairwell an old woman was half sitting, half lying, with her nightdress pulled up above her knees and a dark stain across her chest and stomach from the wound in her throat. In the back room, Péris lay on his stomach in a shirt and leggings, facedown on the bed, with one arm dangling over the bloodstained mattress.
Mendoza looked at the bloodied hair on the base of his skull and the stab wounds in his back as he stepped carefully into the room, taking pains to avoid the blood, and stared down at the body of the man who would no longer tell anyone anything.
“Let me take a look at him,” Segura said.
“A little late for that, isn’t it?” Mendoza replied angrily. “Or maybe you knew that already?”
“You don’t think I did this?” asked Segura.
Mendoza did not reply. On the floorboard next to Péris’s outstretched finger, he noticed an unusual shape, and kneeling down he saw the distinct outline of an S that appeared to have been written in his own blood.
“Have you seen this?” he asked. “It looks like he was trying to tell us something. S for ‘Segura’ maybe?”
“No, Licenciado,” Segura replied. “It’s not me. It’s Sánchez.”
“The bailiff?” Mendoza looked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about, man?”
Before Segura had a chance to answer, there was a sudden commotion from the next room, and a Frenchman in a wide-brimmed felt hat appeared in the doorway and began shouting at them and gesturing toward the front door. Everything about him exuded officialdom, from his gleaming leather belt and boots to the blue badge in the shape of a shield stitched onto his chest. Mendoza did not need to be told that they were being ordered out of the house, and as they went outside, Segura informed him that the man was the chief constable of Pau.
They found Daniel standing against a wall guarded by four armed constables wearing identical red tunics, helmets and breastplates and carrying pikes and halberds. The chief constable told them to line up alongside him and stood frowning as an old woman pointed angrily toward Mendoza and began to speak to the chief constable in urgent, agitated French.
“This is bad,” Segura muttered. “She’s telling him that we were here yesterday evening. She says that you’re Spanish and that she saw you point a pistol at the old man.”
The crowd was getting larger now and becoming turbulent and aggressive as the words espagnols and assassins catholiques were passed back and forth. The chief constable waved his arm at the three of them and barked out another order.
“He’s arresting us on suspicion of murder,” Segura said. “He wants your sword and pistol.”
“This is ridiculous,” Mendoza protested. “Tell him who I am. Tell him the people who did this are getting away even as he speaks!”
Segura’s remonstrations had no effect. For the first time in his life, Mendoza was obliged to hand over his sword and pistol to an arresting officer, though the chief constable allowed him to keep his stick.
• • •
THE THREE OF THEM were marched through the streets to a large, two-story stone building with barred windows bearing the Béarn coat of arms of two bulls and a shield. A bored-looking clerk took their names, and Mendoza asked Segura to explain to the chief constable who he was. Once again the man showed no interest, and the three of them were ushered into a large cell packed with semiconscious revelers and assorted lowlifes, some of whom were still bloodied from fights.
Mendoza pushed Segura forward to a space near the barred window above them and stood leaning on his stick, trying to ignore the stench of sweat, wine and vomit, while Daniel squatted on the floor nearby. “I want to know what Péris told you,” he muttered. “In every detail.”
“Is this really the right time, Your Honor?”
“It’s as good a time as any other.”
“I have your word that nothing I say will have repercussions for the families of these men, just as you promised last night?”
“I thought I’d already made that clear to Péris.”
Segura nodded. “You remember I told you that Péris was not capable of rebellion?” he said. “Well, it turns out I was wrong.”
Mendoza listened carefully and ignored the background of French and the occasional intrusive questioning from the other prisoners as Segura told him Péris had now admitted to him that he and his companions had sought to launch a Morisco rebellion in Cardona and that they had been encouraged in these efforts by the countess’s bailiff, Jean Sánchez. Sánchez had revealed that he was a Lutheran while Péris was working on the church at Cardona. He had told the wood-carver that Lutherans, Turks and Moriscos should unite to overthrow the Catholic tyrant and boasted of his connections with the P
rotestant nobility in Béarn.
Péris, Segura said, was not a learned or intelligent man, and the bailiff would not have found it difficult to convince him and his friends that King Henry of Navarre and the Turkish sultan were planning to invade Aragon during the royal wedding the following year. While the Béarnese attacked Spain across the Pyrenees, Sánchez promised, the sultan would land a large fleet on the Aragonese coast. At the same time, the Moriscos of Aragon would rise in rebellion under the leadership of the Redeemer.
“Did Péris say anything about who this Redeemer was?” Mendoza asked.
Segura shook his head. “He never met him. Sánchez told Péris that the Redeemer was descended from the Umayyad caliph, like Aben Humeya. He said that he had returned from Barbary to fight jihad in al-Andalus and free all the Moriscos. He said the Redeemer was as great a general as Khalid ibn al-Walid.”
“Who?”
“A companion of the Prophet Muhammad and a great warrior. He commanded the Muslim forces at Medina.”
“Why am I not surprised that you would know that?” Mendoza said.
Segura shrugged. “Moriscos remember their history,” he said. “Just as Christians do.”
“Go on.”
Sánchez had promised Péris and his companions that the Redeemer would shortly give a demonstration of his power in Belamar itself. Three weeks later, on the date he had given, Father Panalles was murdered. Péris and his friends were so impressed that they agreed to join the rebellion. At Sánchez’s instigation the three of them went to Vallcarca, where they expected the bailiff to take them to meet the Redeemer so that they could swear an oath of fealty to him. Instead they were arrested by Vallcarca’s men at the prearranged meeting place. Péris had escaped arrest only because he had gone into the forest to answer the call of nature just before the baron’s militiamen arrived and had seen his companions being arrested.
“So he wasn’t chased on horseback?”
“No.” Segura looked at him in surprise. “He arrived on a horse, but he escaped on foot. He walked back to Belamar, thinking that the arrest was just bad luck. It wasn’t until his wife told him about the nuns and Herrero that he realized Sánchez had betrayed him. That’s when he decided to come to France.”
“How do I know whether a word of this is true?” Mendoza asked. “The two of you could have made the whole thing up. You could have killed him yourself.”
“For what purpose? You heard what Péris said last night. He regarded me as a traitor and a collaborator. He still did even when I left him.”
“Presumably he knew that you also broke the king’s laws and continued to follow the sect of Muhammad?”
“I never advocated rebellion! Doesn’t Jesus say that we can worship God and Caesar?”
“So now you quote the Bible, yet you bury your dead like Moors.”
“I’m only trying to point out—”
“Never mind. Thank you.”
The jangling of keys brought the conversation to an end, and one of the jailers appeared in the doorway and called out the names of some of the prisoners. To Mendoza’s relief the men filed out of the room and some space began to open up around him. He’d been inside many jails, but he had never spent so much time in a cell, let alone in such close proximity to men he himself would normally have arrested, and the stench made him feel faintly nauseous as he pondered what Segura had told him.
If Péris’s declarations were true, then Sánchez had murdered the priest on Vallcarca’s orders and the baron and the Inquisition had colluded to frame the three Moriscos. Mendoza knew that Mercader was determined to carry out his purge in Belamar, and it was certainly possible, as the countess had suggested, that Vallcarca and her father-in-law were using the Inquisition to frighten her into marrying Rodrigo Vallcarca. But was the implacable inquisitor whom Mendoza met in Zaragoza really willing to collude in a criminal act in order to bring about such an outcome?
And why would the loyal bailiff who refused to allow Mercader’s officials to enter the village be simultaneously acting against his mistress’s wishes behind her back? Whatever the answers, it was clear to him that from now on these questions should be directed at Christians, not Moriscos.
And it was also obvious that whoever had killed Péris had no reason to allow Mendoza to return to Spain to ask them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ver the next two hours, the cell continued to empty out to the point where the three of them were finally able to sit on a bench. They remained there for some time until the jailers returned, accompanied by the chief constable and his officers and another official whom Mendoza had not seen before. Segura introduced Monsieur LaFranc, the chief magistrate of the city of Pau, and Mendoza told Segura to ask if he could fetch the royal seal from his saddlebags. LaFranc’s demeanor did not change as he ordered them to accompany him. Once again they were escorted back into the street and across the bridge toward the château and up the steps leading beyond the old medieval wall to the royal palace, where two well-turned-out halberdiers in armored breastplates and striped breeches stood by the main entrance.
Monsieur LaFranc led them down the spacious corridor, where Mendoza heard what sounded like someone being kicked or beaten, accompanied by laughter, cheers and applause.
“Are they going to torture us, sir?” asked Daniel anxiously.
Mendoza was beginning to wonder the same thing when LaFranc halted before one of the dozens of doorways and ushered them into an enormous rectangular room with paneled walls and wooden galleries, where a handful of male and female spectators were watching four men in pantaloons, shirts and stockings hitting a ball across a fringed rope with leather gloves. Mendoza had heard of the Game of the Palm, but he had never seen it played before. He immediately recognized King Henry of Navarre from the previous afternoon. He was a stocky, robust-looking man in his early thirties with a ruddy, healthy complexion, a full, well-groomed beard and a shock of brown hair combed back high across his forehead that shook when he jumped about.
His Majesty was clearly enjoying himself and let out enthusiastic exclamations of triumph or dismay when he won or lost a point, or shouted “Bravo!” when his opponents did well and called on the spectators to applaud them. He had noticed their entrance, and as soon as the game ended, he came toward Segura with a broad smile, wiping the sweat from his forehead with one hand and shaking Segura’s hand with the other.
Mendoza was struck by the stains on Henry’s tunic and the pungent smell of garlic on his breath and clothes as the king of Navarre turned to him with a curious but not unfriendly expression.
“So you are the Spanish judge,” he said in Latin. “Some of my officials were concerned you might be a spy or an assassin. They thought the Guises might have sent you to kill me or that you might be agents of the Catholic League.”
“Absolutely not, Your Majesty,” Mendoza replied in the language that he had not spoken since university. “I’ve come to solve a murder.”
“And now you have left us with three. Strange, it seems that whenever Spaniards come to our country, they leave corpses behind them.”
“That was not my intention, sire. And I have a letter from the king with the royal seal to prove it, if I can be allowed to get it.”
“No need for that, Maître Mendoza. My officers have already inspected your credentials—otherwise you wouldn’t be here. And Dr. Segura’s father is an old friend of my mother’s, God bless her soul. Come, let us eat something. Prison makes men hungry, and so does tennis.”
Henry draped a towel over his shoulders, and they followed him out into the corridor, accompanied by Monsieur LaFranc and some of the male courtiers, to another room, where a long table was laden with wine and an array of cut meats, pies and cheeses.
“So, Maître Mendoza,” Henry said, gnawing on a chicken leg with one hand and holding a cup of wine with the other. “Perhaps you can tell us why His Most Cat
holic Majesty has sent a judge all the way from Valladolid to our humble little kingdom?”
In his student Latin, Mendoza did his best to explain the investigation in Belamar, and Segura added other details in French. The king listened attentively while continuing to pick at random from the assortment of dishes with his hands, much like some of the revelers Mendoza had seen the previous day.
“So your wood-carver came to us for sanctuary, only to be murdered,” Henry said. “It’s curious. Three hundred years ago, the Cathars crossed these mountains into Spain to escape the Inquisition. Now Moriscos are coming across the same mountains to seek our help for the same reason.”
“And does Your Majesty help them?”
Henry laughed, and his courtiers laughed with him. “It’s a good thing that you took up the law rather than diplomacy, Maître Mendoza. As a matter of fact, we Huguenots have had quite enough wars lately without giving His Most Catholic Majesty further reason to attack us. My ministers tell me that Monsieur Péris asked us for weapons and gunpowder to help the Moriscos, but we refused—politely, of course, because master wood-carvers are always in high demand. In Spain, His Most Catholic Majesty drives his Morisco subjects to rebellion when they could be an asset to him. Take Dr. Segura here—he could have worked in any hospital in Paris. We ourselves have asked him to work for us here in Pau, but he prefers to work in the land of his birth. Such men are worth holding on to, Maître Mendoza, and yet your king persecutes these people, and perhaps one day he will drive them away, just as his predecessors once expelled the Jews.”
“I very much doubt that His Majesty would do such a foolish thing.”
“Wouldn’t he? He expelled them from Granada after the Morisco rebellion.”
“To ensure the security of his realms and punish rebels—as any king would do in the same circumstances.”
“Not always, maître. Sometimes even rebels have good cause.” Henry picked a clove of garlic from a plate and chomped on it with gusto. “Here we also accept the principle that each prince must decide the faith—even in Pamplona.”