He stalked to a rude log table, unstoppered a flagon of wine with his teeth, and looked back over his shoulder casually. "What news of the honest world, doña?"
She was glad for a moment to leave the bitterly personal for the general, although she had to lift an eyebrow that he cared. "Are you really interested? Much has happened." She began to drift around the nearly bare cave as she talked, as if she were interested in this bit of rock or that bit, but it was motion for its own sake, merely to soothe her nerves. "Finally the queen has decided to finance Columbo's insane voyage to the Indies—you remember him, the peculiar Italian from Genoa who went about begging for money for his expedition? Her Majesty almost had to pawn her own jewels, but the Aragonese treasury advanced the sum and three ships are departing Palos in August, westward—to their destruction, probably. The most unsettling event was the edict of expulsion against the Jews which Inquisitor Torquemada posted in March, signed, of course, by Their Majesties. So many of the Hebrews had acted as lenders of money, it caused quite a furor and panic among the bankers and those who had accounts with them, but nevertheless the Holy Office is being most diligent about sweeping the country clean of them. I have seen them on the roads in great, long, crowded masses from all over Spain, plodding toward ships to take them to Africa." Dolores had wandered the circuit of the cave, and now she stood before him again. She could not help the pity that softened her voice; she could not help wondering what he might think of the deed, this product of the tolerant Tendilla and di Lido. "They took along what they could, the young and the old, women and children, rich and poor, weeping for their Spanish homes, their ancestors, their lives. It touched the heart with sorrow."
He said nothing and so she shrugged. "For the rest the tidings from Portugal are good; the news from Sicily is bad. And the brave Marquis of Cadiz whom we all thought so indestructible died of lung fever not a month ago."
He had listened to her while he slowly poured the wine into clay mugs, with his back turned to her, brooding, she thought. But now he faced her with his mask of unconcern stubbornly in place and offered her a mug. "You were right," he shrugged. "I have no interest that Columbo will founder in the unknown wastes of ocean, that the Israelites are banished, that Ponce de Leon is dead. Good Valdepeñas wine, doña, a toast to the humble life. 'Tis much happier to be simple and not choke the mind with worries."
Never in her life had she felt so bewildered. She looked into the stubborn face, the eyes that met hers with such an effort that a vein pulsed at his temple, and she did not know what to think, nor how to reach this formerly vital man who was balking away from the mainstream of his life.
"You are despicable!" she flung at him, turning away the cup. "Not were I dying of thirst would I drink with so great an oaf." She turned about sharply to run from this dislikable stranger who was tearing her heart into shreds, but after a few steps stopped, damning pride. She swung around, her skirts whispering on the packed earth floor. "Francho, for the dear Virgin's merciful sake, what are you doing here?"
"Leave me, Dolores. You could not understand."
"You had more than a man could wish for—honor, wealth, the wreath of a hero. Why did you leave it for this disgrace?" She moved closer to him and pressed, "Do you know, they think you disappeared because you fear Felipe de Guzman's vengeance? You understand if you come back he will never rest until one or the other of you is dead sometime, somewhere, so deeply have you humiliated him. They think you fled..."
He almost choked on his mouthful of wine and spat it out. "Because I fear Perens?" he finished for her in an incredulous growl. "They say that!"
She refused to shrink before the gathering storm on his face. "Some say that, yes. What else can they think? And your friends are so mystified they might almost agree."
Francho hurled his mug to smash against the far wall. "Shaitan take them all, the stupid... I should have killed that dog with his own sword and had done with it." The dark curls clung damply to his forehead. "Show a bit of mercy and one is labeled not a man."
"Well, what was it made you run? Doña Leonora, then? Did her choice of Felipe hurt you so much?"
With a short bark of laughter he snapped, "Her choice of him, lady? The last time I saw her she had decided a wealthy Venegas was better than a Mendoza bastard. She came out to offer to break her betrothal. If that whoreson Perens is alive it is because I gave him to her." He slammed an angry fist into his hand. "Ah, Jesu, what is the difference. I don't want it—any of it."
But she watched him smolder at the suspicion of cowardice clouding his name at Court and jumped as he slapped his hat to the table with violent irritation. Her heart began to lift a little to see she had yanked up an edge of the barrier he had erected between himself and the world. She remained silent, mentally willing open that little breach for what might leak out. But it did not leak, it gushed.... He rounded on her.
"Three ugly deaths were the price of my honor and wealth!" he burst out. "Two innocent children paid for my title, an admirable general I murdered, I stabbed him in the back for my estates. I betrayed the trust of a ruler—a man—whom I found gentle and sensitive, whom I liked, maybe even loved. I broke the jaw of my damsel's almost-discarded suitor only for rage with her meanness of character. And you—I took it upon myself first to punish you with cruelty and then to make you my mistress and leave you. My birthright was so dearly bought it was ashes in my mouth when I had it. To Doña Leonora I was merely the new Marquis of Olivenza, to Tendilla a boost into the Governor's Palace and a votive offering to the memory of my mother whom he had loved. To the queen I provided expiation for her conscience. To you? To you I should have been a protector and instead I was a rogue. And to myself I became a torment and a fraud."
He sat on the table and pulled one leg up with his arms hooked around it so that his chin almost rested on his knee. The brooding eyes stared at her, but most of the fury left his voice. "So—am I truly Francisco de Granada-Venegas, upholder of the ancient house, lord of manors and overseer of tenants' lives?" Sarcasm took over from the spent anguish. "Or am I a figment of necessity, Tendilla's necessity and the queen's necessity and the war, with a new name as fragile as any of the old—Francho or Mendoza or Jamal ibn Ghulam? I went away to find myself. To go back to Francho the cutpurse who was sure and untroubled and search out the way I could have gone for myself without the advent of Tendilla. I must know in my own heart what I am."
Dolores stared back at him. Was this the man she thought she had adored? Hadn't she too bought life from death, which, if not murder, had anyhow laid poor Blanca in a grave not marked her own? She had not asked God to take Blanca, but she did not consider herself evil to have accepted the circumstance. And by using the sad dissolution of one life to build the vital substance of her own, was this not at least a small resurrection for the spirit of Blanca Ganavet? And here was this great hulk, a bold warrior with sword strapped to hip who would waste the terrible heedless deaths caused by war by wallowing in their tragedy and obliterating their meaning.
Her words came out clipped and scornful. "I will tell you what you are; you are a coward!" She sneered at the small, automatic jerk of his hand toward his knife. "You did not leave Granada, you ran. You always run when life becomes unpleasant, as you fled the monastery when polishing candlesticks bored you, as you welcomed the Count's arrival in your life when his offered pleasures outdid those of Ciudad Real, as you refused to recognize the feelings you had for me because it would complicate your life." She flung at him, "What's the matter, Don Francisco, you want to go back to being Francho the cutpurse, the simple, ragged boy, because it is too difficult to be obligated to a man like Don Iñigo who put the world in your hands, to owe a queen of easier conscience your utmost service for her generosity, to be responsible to your estates and tenants and to the reputation you established of a brave Christian knight? Must you always have another existence to try on like a new doublet while you discard the rub of the old?"
It was hot in the dim rock confin
es of the cave, oddly. Or maybe she was just hot. With an angry gesture she pulled off the Turkish-type coif and whipped it about as a fan, for sweat was trickling between her breasts under the heavy velvet of her bodice. Since he said nothing, just stared in silence at her from under beetling brows, she simply hurtled on, her anger outweighing the fact that she really didn't care anymore. He was not anyone she had thought he was. "You found much to admire among the Moors, do you remember? It was your hope that Don Iñigo would indeed be appointed governor for he alone among the candidates could be trusted not to despoil the city or vent a conqueror's fury upon the innocent. I was merely casually talking to Pietro di Lido—he looks at me so shrewdly, I do not think he believes I spent all those months as a hostage in Reduan's house—and he mourned to me that you would have been a great service to Tendilla now, helping him administer with a good knowledge of the Arabic mind. Anyone can see Tendilla needs adherents to offset the jealous men who think his policies too lenient. And the Archbishop Talavera in his saintly way has slowly garnered thousands of converts to the Cross, but not fast enough for the Holy Office, who would prefer the stake and the rack to make conversions. You loved Granada once, for all it was a heathen city. Now you sit here in the mountains when the time cries out for men of liberal view to prevent the tragedy of Malaga, of mass oppression and banishment for the Moors as happened to the Jews."
"Where did you absorb such politic philosophy, doña?" he jibed with half-closed eyes. "I thought you were interested only in jewels and gossip and fancy gowns."
"Where?" she flared. "Do you not recognize it? Much of it is your own, as you told it to me in the Alhambra. So many hours I listened to you, and I learned—" She choked to a stop and swallowed. Hot tears suddenly stung at her eyes. If he had meant to hurt her by demeaning her intelligence he had.
In a slick movement as lithe as the spring of a leopard he bounded the few paces toward her and grabbed her wrist, as if the charm of the sudden white smile on his face would sweep away her mood and stop the words that were jabbing their truth into his brain. He looked down at her. "Is that all you remember of Granada, the high-idealed talks we had? Have a drop of wine with me, Karima, and let's remember all the rest. Ay, Dios mío, how much more there was...." He drew her to him. She felt his arm encircling her waist with a familiar, possessive warmth, and at first her astonishment with his utter insensitivity turned her to jelly. She saw a glint of excitement flare in the depths of his eyes. "I miss you, querida. I often long for you, I wake and yearn to put my arms about you... like this..." The other arm went about her and she could feel his breath on her face, knew his lips were lowering slowly to hers.
She jerked away from him, drew back her arm, and slapped him across the face with all her might, the tears in her eyes no brighter than the fire of her rage. "You vile monster, get your hands off me. I remember nothing from Granada, nothing, for it was nothing but carnal sin. Once I loved you so much that I finagled and lied to have you. But now I'm free of you, the Holy Spirit be thanked, and you can rot in this hole the rest of eternity if you think that will relieve you of life. For my part I will have a man, a man with the courage to carve his own image from the fortune he is given. I make the dainty Zuniga a present of you. You are a sniveling coward and... and..." She panted for breath. "And a cad!"
In spite of his half-hearted move to stop her she slipped under his arm and fled stumbling down the uneven trail, scrubbing away the tears from her eyes so she would not break her neck, passing the cookfires orange in the twilight without even seeing them, until she reached the safety of her brother's cave. That she had ever come at all, she seethed to herself, made her a greater fool than that rascal above shrugging over her rebuff, counting it as little as he had counted her love. She prayed for the night to pass swiftly as she smoothed out her face to enter the cave. She went in finally and with a small smile accepted the seat Caratid offered at her table.
Francho flung himself down on his pallet, cradling the earthenware flagon, and in lugubrious silence began to drink himself into insensibility. Why, in the name of all the weeping angels in heaven, had he done that, insulted her attempt to befriend him with a vile sexual assault? Miserable, feeling the sting of her scorn and her fingers against his face, he quickly finished off the wine in the flask. Then he found a full leather bottle of aguardiente. He stared at the round flanks of a white unicorn adorning a plundered tapestry hung on one of his rough walls and drank, steadily, in wretchedness. And when the bottle was empty he hurled it into a corner and tried to rise to find some more or call Tula to bring some, but he lurched back onto the straw. Curiously an obscure memory pricked at his spinning brain: "Salute, you bobiecas!" an erstwhile cutpurse had greeted the liveried guards at Mondejar. "Salute, for yesterday you would not spit at me."
Yes, yes, they shall all salute, his mind wobbled, for I am the Marquis of Olivenza and that is what I was born. I am not a fraud. No—not fraud. Coward, she said.
Voices seemed to dart out at him from the dark recesses of his lair. Carlos's voice, dubious, "Can you forget the years of training that made you a gentleman?" Di Lido's voice, "A Marquis merely acts like a Marquis." His own voice as it roared in his head, "Tell the truth, scum, do you not really disdain these crude and ignorant bandits you have been emulating?" "Why don't you stand before a mirror," some voice or other said to him, "your reflection will not reveal the weaknesses that you feel, only those which you show." "Weakness?" babbled back another whisper from an opposite cobwebbed corner, "is it weakness to suffer from the knowledge of one's own stupidity, cupidity, duplicity? And to be tormented by a great sadness?"
A little glow seemed to creep from the furthest corner of his cavern. No, it was not weakness, and this was what Dolores was trying to make him see. It was reprehensible only if such human regret turned into the only meaning for life. Now it was his own voice that hollered out to keep that warming light from fading. "No, no, I am not craven, that's not it, Dolores, my tavern witch, my angry beauty, querida mía, querida.... I was stupid. I hated myself. I was ashamed...."
Spin, spin away, head, he yelled mutely at the drunken physical paralysis that kept him pinned to his bed. I am not your prisoner anymore, he railed. And tumbled into a whirling spiral that sucked him down into darkness.
***
The barking of the camp dogs woke him up as he lay curled atop the pallet in a defensive ball. A bleary-eyed glance showed him sun already slanting along the ledge outside his cave. But the problem that precipitated him stumbling out of the cave and further up along the ledge, bare-chested and just in his hosen, was physical, and he just reached the great boulder and rounded it in time. Having accomplished his urgent task he shook his head to clear it, then trotted across a little plateau to where a thin fall of water from the melting snow at the top of the peak came over a cliff and descended like a tattered ribbon to form a little stream. He yanked off his hosen and with a whoop to keep up his courage, for the water was icy, waded under the sparkling fall and stood there letting everything wash away, dust, dirt, bad head from the spirits, yesterday...
Vigorously revived he loped back to his cave and found a loaf of bread and a pan of rabbit stew had been left outside in a niche too high for the dogs. Goodhearted old Tula. He'd have to search all of Castile for a talented baker like her to put in his kitchens. He took the food inside the cave but stopped for a moment, his head coming up, for there was a hint of jasmine perfume still remaining in the air. He smiled, his mind cleansed by the cold water and cool, dry air of the mountain morning, and sat down to fill his growling stomach.
His kitchens? What? Somehow, while he had soddenly slept off the wine and brandy, God had opened his inner eye to the truth of Dolores's words. He could not always take the best and avoid the worst. He must choose and forever decide, or forever be an interloper, an impermanent shadow on life's stage. So be it. He had been recognized Francisco de Granada-Venegas and so he would stride in the world.
It would hardly be a miserable e
xistence, he thought, sardonic with himself. Honor and wealth. And a noble wife? Now something else clicked into place in his head. What was Leonora from the first moment but a charming part of the goal he had once set, a matching piece to the rest of the pattern? His sons would have rightfully carried the ancient Zuniga quarter on their arms and he would have had a dimpled blond lady to wife. One who might love him for this or for that, but who knew little of him and whose love was conditional, liable to vanish under stress. Did he want that? Had he ever wanted that, when the tilted gray eyes and responsive lips of a gallant, make-believe baroness had answered the every need of his heart?
Belatedly he pulled Leonora's letter from where it lay forgotten under his leather tunic and held it up to catch the light from the entrance. His eyes moved over it quickly. "...of what use is a woman's pride when a beloved remains absent? Return to me, Don Francisco, for I suffer the results of my selfish vanity and now know the values to cherish. Do you remember the words I spoke when you first left for Granada: I will have no other than you for husband? And so the promise remains in my heart although I am forced by your disappearance to continue my betrothal to Don Felipe. I beg you to return soon, before it is too late...."
He crumpled up the letter and laughed softly, a clear, free laugh. "It is too late. You will have to make do with your heir to a dukedom, my lady Zuniga. If your man stays away from me and thereby continues to live—"
Loose pebbles on the ledge crunched and Carlos appeared, ducking his head to enter the cave. He dropped down beside Francho with a somber face reddened by contact with the cold water of the stream. "I haven't heard you laugh like that since you arrived here. It sounds good, amigo, it sounds more like the rascal I knew as a boy."
Francho grinned. "Carlos, I'm returning to my own world."
The lifelong outlaw shrugged. "I expected it, sooner or later. You don't belong here in this barless prison. You didn't belong at Papa el Mono's either, you who could read and write and recite in Latin and sing the chants along with the monks at the church. 'Tis not the worst thing in the world to be called 'my lord' and bow to the queen. If knavery were not so ingrained in me I would almost envy you." And then, with a sly and casual air he added, "See, sir nobleman, if you ride fast enough you may catch up with Dolores and have company on your journey back."
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