Hammer of Witches

by Shana Mlawski

  Gonzalo and his gang shared a few snickers. I forced myself down on all-fours in the mud.

  “Just then the goat pops his head out Cohen’s window, braying, ‘MAAA! MAAA!’” I shot to my feet. “The neighbor takes Cohen by the collar, screaming, ‘I knew it! You treacherous swine! I knew you had her all along!’

  “And can you believe it? What does Foolish Cohen do? He says, ‘Now who are you going to believe? Me or a goat?’”

  I stretched another fake smile across my face as Gonzalo’s gang hollered, and I tried to ignore the pain I felt when I saw my own friends hiding their own laughter. But I couldn’t blame them for laughing, not really. Everyone always laughed at my stories and howled when I made a fool of myself. That was my role, after all — the Jewish jester.

  Gonzalo crossed his bulky arms and shook his head at me. “All right, Infante. This I want to hear. What does any of this have to do with Elena Hernández?”

  I smiled wider, feeling my lips rip at the corners. “You said it yourself, Gonzalo. Me and Foolish Cohen? We’ve got the same blood. I knew Elena Hernández would never go for someone like that. I only tried to kiss her as a joke.”

  A joke. Gonzalo’s jaw relaxed as the idea took hold of him. “And you should have seen it!” I went on. “I move in real close — romantic, like this. And bam! She cracks me right across the face! She screams, ‘Ew, get off me, Baltasar! Like I’d want to kiss some big-nose like you!’ Luis was there. Tell him, Luis.”

  Luis avoided my gaze but got the idea. “That’s what happened, Gonzalo. It was . . . it was pretty funny.”

  Gonzalo’s crew muttered to one another, not sure what to believe. I put a muddy arm around their leader. “Come on, Gonzalo! You know I’d never really go after your girl. I swear on the name of my foolish Jewish God.”

  Gonzalo considered me, the muddy Marrano standing next to him, as the facts of my case clicked together in his head. Finally a wry grin formed between his jowls, and he choked me in the crook of his elbow.

  “I should have known.” I flinched as Gonzalo gave me a playful punch in the stomach. “You dumb bastard! Did you actually think she’d kiss you back? I mean, if the stories didn’t scare her off, your ugly mug would!”

  “Exactly,” I said. I put my hand out in a symbol of truce and waited. “Friends?”

  Gonzalo took my hand, and I knew I was forgiven. Behind him, Luis gathered up the coins Gonzalo had thrown at me — the coins Gonzalo had stolen from him earlier. And Gonzalo said to me, “You’re mad, you know that, Marrano?”

  I just nodded and smiled like a fool.

  When I entered my house, I marched straight into my room and slammed the door behind me. The scent of my aunt’s eggplant and onion stew followed me inside. As nice as it smelled, I couldn’t deal with her kitchen lectures now. Thinking of the fuss she’d make when she saw my bruised face, I buried it into my pillow and hoped sleep would take me soon.

  No such luck. The sound of a door opening and closing told me my uncle had entered the kitchen. “Was that Baltasar?” I heard him say with some urgency.

  “Hmph,” was Aunt Serena’s answer. “Sounded more like the Behemoth with all that stomping.”

  “But he’s home,” Diego said, relieved. Then, “Stomping? What happened? Is something wrong?”

  “Why don’t you go ask him?”

  Bracing myself for my uncle’s inevitable entrance, I tossed myself onto my side and crossed my arms at the open window. Even someone as old and scatterbrained as Diego could understand that signal.

  Or maybe not. Before long I heard the door to my room open. Soon a muffled creak told me that my uncle had settled on the stool next to my bed, the one he used to sit on to tell me stories.

  “Bali, I told you not to leave the house.” I winced as he pressed a finger against my bruised face. “Another fight with Gonzalo, I see. What did he say about your parents this time?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I know it’s hard, Bali, but you mustn’t be ashamed of them! Your parents were heroes! They died for what they believed in.”

  Frowning out the window, I toyed idly with the cross hanging from my neck. My parents. Not long after I was born they’d converted and changed their name from Mizrahi to Infante, hoping to protect me from Palos’s anti-Jewish mobs. Then King Fernando and Queen Isabel introduced a new inquisition meant to free their kingdoms of false Christian converts. My aunt and uncle thankfully escaped trial and execution, but my parents were not so lucky. The Inquisition tried them and put them to death after they refused to publicly renounce their Jewish beliefs.

  According to Diego that refusal made them heroes. Heroes. The word always put me in a silent fury. If my parents were heroes, they would have forsworn their faith, gone to church on Sundays like they were supposed to! Heroes didn’t leave their children orphans. Heroes didn’t die.

  Diego and I were quiet for some time, and eventually I thought he might leave without saying anything more. But then he raised a bent finger and said the words I’d been dreading most: “You know, Bali, I know exactly what you need. A golem.”

  I moaned, knowing it was no use. Once my uncle started a story, it was unstoppable, like a volcano or a flood.

  “‘What is a golem?’ you might ask. One of my favorite stories. It’s a wonder I didn’t tell you about him sooner. The golem is a giant beast made out of clay. But the best part of the golem — to an old bookmaker, anyway — is that he comes to life through the power of the written word. Must have been an invention of bookmakers. They’re creative fellows, you know. Philosopher kings, if they wanted the power —”

  “But moving on,” I grumbled.

  “Now, to give a golem life, you write the word truth, which is ameth, like this.” With a finger, my uncle traced out some invisible runes on my quilt. “You write it on a tablet and put it into the creature’s mouth. And to stop the golem, simple enough. You erase the first letter.” My uncle covered the first invisible symbol with a veiny hand. “Now it says meth, which means death, and voilà — the golem stops.”

  “Please, Uncle. No more stories.”

  “But I haven’t even gotten to the point of it yet. You see, Bali, the golem is a protector. Brute strength, pure loyalty. In fact, he is the Jewish people’s greatest protector —”

  My uncle couldn’t have known that was the exact wrong thing to say, but he must have realized when I jumped up so our noses nearly touched. “I said enough, Uncle! You don’t know when to stop! I’ve had enough of you, enough of your Jews, and enough of your boring old stories! They aren’t real! They are a complete waste of time!”

  “Bali.”

  No. I didn’t want to hear it. I pushed my uncle away and stormed out of my room, past my aunt, and out the door.

  “Baltasar, come back!” my uncle yelled after me, and I heard his footsteps as he tried to follow me outside. But I was too fast for him. I ran up the hill that led into the lonely streets of Palos.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon storming through town, trying to force Gonzalo’s insults and my own shameful story out of my head. Coward. Traitor. Christ-killer. Foolish Cohen. No matter how much I walked I couldn’t escape those words.

  Eventually I returned to my friends’ hangout by Amir al-Katib’s house. Except for a few dragonflies, it was empty. A ceramic bottle lay on a barrel, dripping a small puddle of wine. Not enough, though. Not if I wanted to forget.

  The sun was starting to set now; the candle in the iron lamp on the wall beside me had already been lit. Fog was filtering up from the cobblestones, covering them with an eerie golden mist. I paced back and forth through it, feeling my insides burn.

  Damn Diego, damn Gonzalo, damn my parents, damn the Jews! And damn myself most of all. I sat on the nearest barrel and and banged a fist lightly against my knee. A crumpled piece of paper stuck with mud to the sole of my shoe. It was a copy of the Alhambra Decree, signed by the king and queen in March of this year. “Knowing they are trying to subvert our Catholic fa
ith,” one of its paragraphs began, “it is resolved that all Jews and Jewesses leave our kingdoms under penalty of death.”

  I crushed the page into a ball and chucked it at the nearest wall. Then I bent my head into my hands.

  Two shadows, long from dusk, spread over the golden puddles in front of me. “Good evening,” said a man’s voice, lean, dark, and oddly amused. I removed my hands from my head. Two figures waited in the entrance to the alley, blanketed by the shade of Amir al-Katib’s house. A cowl hid the face of the first man. A helmet hid the face of the other. The second man was decked in armor, and he carried a shining spear. Agents of the Inquisition, maybe. I didn’t want to wait to find out.

  Slowly I rose from my barrel. “We are looking for someone,” the cloaked man said. “A Baltasar Infante of Palos.”

  My fingers twitched at the sound of my own name. “I don’t know any Infante. I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

  I held back the tremors ready to race across my body so I could push my way past the two men. But the soldier swung his spear in front of me, and I danced back to avoid its shining edge.

  “I’m sorry,” I repeated somewhat breathlessly. “But I really don’t know who you’re talking about! Listen, this is all some big misunderstanding!”

  “That is correct,” the cloaked man replied. “We know you are Baltasar Infante. And you will be coming with us. Now.”

  My horrified reflection stared back at me, warped in the soldier’s tarnished helmet. The cloaked man made a quick motion at the soldier, and I tried to make a run for it. The cloaked man caught me from behind by both arms. With all my strength I stomped on his foot and tried to wrest myself out of his grip. The man cursed but held on. The soldier swung the flat of his spear across the side of my skull. With stars in my eyes, I doubled over. The soldier rammed the dull end of his spear into my back, and I fell into endless darkness.

  My body was pitched forward. I tasted some animal’s mane. Rain pattered against my back, reins rattled, and hooves clopped in my ears. Although it took my bashed brain some time to fit the pieces together, soon enough I understood.

  The men had put me on a horse.

  The top half of my body was slumped forward in a twisted position that squished my face up against the horse’s head. When I tried to move my arms, I found they’d been tied behind my back with a thick and splintery rope. “No need to struggle,” the cloaked man said behind me. He snapped our horse’s reins above my shoulders. “You’re not going anywhere, so you may as well enjoy the ride.”

  I was in no state to argue, so I lifted my aching head off the horse’s and squinted through the downpour. Already the landscape around us had changed. The sunny skylines of Palos and nearby Huelva had given way to barren, storm-swept marshes covered in unending night. Rain whipped down on us, strict and blinding, but I could distinguish the outlines of pines twisting toward the sky on either side of us. Every so often our horses would slosh through shallow black water, and tall, creeping reeds would brush against their haunches. In daytime, maybe, this land would be beautiful. But now, in darkness and rain, it was a world of nightmare.

  At last the cloaked man pulled our horse to a whinnying stop, and the soldier slowed his own horse beside us. In the distance we could see a jagged, moss-covered building that appeared to have grown out of the black hill in front of us.

  “Strange place to have an interrogation,” the cloaked man behind me said. “What is it? Some kind of old monastery?” When the soldier didn’t answer, the cloaked man snorted. “And here I’d thought the Inquisition was flush with coin. Didn’t they just build a fancy new courthouse up in Cuenca?”

  The soldier answered gruffly in his helmet. “The Inquisition and Malleus Maleficarum are no long affiliated. And if you want to keep working for us, you’ll keep your questions to yourself.”

  Rain plinked against the soldier’s helmet as he dismounted his horse. He trudged up to us through the mud, pulled me off my horse by my tunic, and hurled me to the ground. I had only a moment to shiver in the dirt before he lugged me to my feet. Then he shoved me into the wooden mouth of the monastery door and down a spiral staircase.

  Down and down we went. We descended into gloom and finally blindness. From out of nowhere, it seemed, the cloaked man lit a torch, a burning parody of the fire back home in Aunt Serena’s kitchen. The thought of it put a half-smile on my face, but the smile trembled under its own weight and shattered.

  I was going to die here.

  A dim orange light throbbed below us now, leading us to our destination. The narrow throat we had been traveling through gave way to the expansive bowels of the monastery’s underworld. To my relief the torches on this basement’s damp walls revealed no shackles, no metal spikes, no open-mouthed skeletons. Only huge stone blocks cowering in neat rows over the floor, each roughly the size of my bed back home. Nothing more in this cellar but a single chair and its shadow, which shifted spectrally under the torchlight.

  There was a priest, too — or at least, a balding man in the garments of priest. Above his long robe and short cape was a plain, pudgy face that might have been pleasant if it didn’t try to smile. But it did, and the sight of the man’s lizard teeth churned acid through my gut.

  The soldier removed the rope from my worn wrists, shoved me into the room’s only seat, and tied my arms firmly to the chair. “There is no need for roughness,” the man dressed as a priest said. His accent sounded German — quiet, high-pitched, and lyrical. “Allow me to apologize, Baltasar. Normally we wouldn’t have arrested you this way or brought you to such a distasteful place as this one. But due to the lack of insight of the current Inquistional administration, we are nowadays forced to do our work, shall we say, underground.”

  The frigid air of the basement clutched at my lungs, and my head was still ringing with pain. Through the agony and the wheezes I was somehow able to mutter, “Who are you? Why did you bring me here?”

  The priest rifled through a pile of papers sitting on the massive stone block behind him. “There is no need to worry, Baltasar. This is not a trial. You are not under arrest, officially. I will simply be asking you some questions, that is all. Now where is that — ah, yes.”

  The priest reached a ringed hand into his robes and removed a roll of parchment sealed shut with red wax. An image of a hammer was imprinted on that seal — printed on the diagonal, as if ready to strike. As the priest opened the scroll I noticed the golden signet ring he wore bore the same symbol. He plucked a quill from the block of granite behind him and dipped it into the inkwell next to his papers.

  “But first we must handle some paperwork,” the priest said. “So if you don’t mind, please state your full name for the record.”

  He had to be joking. “But you already know my na —”

  The priest cut me short by taking my swollen jaw in one hand and crushing it in his fingers. The pressure of his grasp sent pain stabbing through the insides of my teeth.

  The priest knelt in front of me and shook my head lovingly. “Oh, Baltasar, Baltasar! There is no time for arguments! Do you realize that at this very moment your country is in grave danger, and that you, my dear boy, are the only one with the information to save it? And I’m sure you’re in a hurry, too, to leave this place. So please. State your full name.”

  He let go of my face, and I cracked the pain out of my jaw. “Baltasar Infante. Are you happy now?”

  The priest must have been; his quill frolicked across his paper as he scribbled down my response. “Very good, Baltasar! I thank you. And what are the full names of your parents?”

  It was the wrong question to ask me — definitely the wrong one. “Parents!” I hissed. “You know who my parents were! My parents were Abram and Marina Infante, converted Jews from Palos. And the Inquisition killed them! You killed them!”

  Fourteen years ago a man like this had captured them, stolen them away from me. I glared up at the priest with a sharp desire to murder him, too, to crack open his stupid fac
e and watch the blood spill from his blubber.

  Unfazed, the priest scratched some more words into his parchment. “As I said before, Baltasar, we are not part of the Inquisition. But I thank you for answering my question. And would you please tell me the names of your guardians? Your closest relatives?”

  As quickly as my hatred took me it set me loose. Uncle Diego. Aunt Serena. Had they been captured too? Were they trapped in their own dank cellars, being tortured by their own awful priests? I had to escape, somehow, find them, save them! We could flee to Portugal, maybe. Genoa! Or to Constantinople, where my father and uncle had lived in their youths.

  The priest prodded my chair with a velvet shoe. “Baltasar. I am becoming impatient. I thought we agreed it was in your best interest to answer my questions as quickly as possible.”

  But I couldn’t answer them — I wouldn’t! — and the man’s mouth wrinkled sternly at my silence. “Very well. I wish it hadn’t had to come to this, Baltasar. But time is running out, and if you will not help us . . .”

  The priest raised his roll of parchment up near his face so the cloaked man and the soldier could see it more clearly. “I do not wish to use torture, Baltasar, but all I need to do is sign this warrant before two witnesses to use it. Do you know that upstairs we have a device made of ropes and pulleys that allows us to hang you by your arms and rip your bones from their sockets?” The priest picked up two wooden blocks from the stone behind him and shook them before my eyes. “And did you know that we can place your feet within this contraption and smash nails through each of your toes?”

  My own toes cringed inside my shoes, but I thought of my aunt and uncle and said nothing.

  “And if that method fails, we will move on to the heretic’s fork.” The priest replaced the pieces of wood on the stone behind him and picked up a long metal object with a twopronged fork at either end of it. It clanged as its tip bounced off the edge of the stone, and it burned red and gold under the torchlight. With one end of the metal tool he poked me lightly above my collarbone, pricking my skin with dots of cold. “We will bend your head back and stick the bottom prong through your flesh, here.” The priest then flicked up the heretic’s fork so it chilled the underside of my chin. “The other end we will thrust through here, taking care to avoid splitting the tongue.”