The Horse Healer

by Gonzalo Giner

  As soon as Diego saw him step into the stables, he saw he’d been informed of what had happened. The monk looked crazed, and his eyes reflected his bottomless rage. At Diego’s side, he began to scream and upbraid him as if he’d gone half mad.

  “Do you want to explain to me who gave you the right to attend to my clients?” He walked around Diego with his fists clenched. “If you knew who that horse belonged to …”

  “To the royal ensign of Navarre.”

  Friar Servando pushed his shoulder violently, offended by his response.

  “Don’t you have just a bit of shame?” he snorted, exasperated. “Perhaps you think yourself more capable than me?”

  “I’m an albéitar,” Diego answered proudly.

  The man, beside himself, grabbed Diego’s tunic and began to pull so furiously that he ended up tearing it.

  “You know I hate that name …”

  Diego decided not to speak, since in that moment anything he said would be taken badly. That reaction enraged the monk even further. Tired of Diego’s silence, the friar decided that punishment would be the best thing to put the young man in his place.

  “You’ll go back to the latrines, but from today on, you’ll sleep in them as well. You will eat there, amid the stench, and you won’t come out until I say so. I hope that for once this will make you reconsider your actions.”

  Diego felt tempted to choke him right there or give him a serious kick to the stomach. He also considered abandoning the monastery and forgetting that absurd person once and for all; but instead, he decided to take another approach.

  “Fine,” he responded, without raising his voice. “Should I consider this penitence or punishment?”

  “Well … Well,” Friar Servando repeated, indignant. “A penitence … Your sin is known as disloyalty and vainglory.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You understand very well. I know you still consider the albéitar’s a science greater than the one I possess, and you are stubborn besides. You don’t like me calling you a horse healer or veterinarius, I can tell, and you are judgmental of every job I perform. I have felt it when you watch me.”

  Friar Servando swallowed, angered by Diego’s tranquil mood.

  “If it is a penitence, then, will I be absolved of my sin afterward?”

  “Ummmm …” It took the friar an eternity to answer and a strong dose of humility. “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And once my sin is forgiven, will I be able to go to the scriptorium afterward?”

  Friar Servando clenched his fists and looked at Diego with exasperation, but he did not say no.

  The third night he spent in his new destination, Diego received an unexpected visit that relieved him. It was Marcos.

  He arrived with a piece of stewed meat, a pound of black bread, and the best repast for his soul, a bit of affection.

  “How are you?”

  Marcos lit up the floor with a torch to make his way through such filth.

  “Not as well as you.” Diego stared at the contents of the clay pot that Marcos was carrying in his hands.

  Marcos left the torch in a crack in the wall and looked for a seat close to Diego. He couldn’t hold back an expression of disgust when he perceived the scent.

  “I’m coming to give you good news.”

  “You don’t know how welcome it will be.” Diego smiled.

  “I’ve made friends with the friar responsible for the library. His name is Friar Tomás. He’s a cheerful man, with a dreamy gaze and forgetful face, but he likes to eat as much as I like scheming. Since I spend the whole day in the kitchen, it hasn’t been hard for me to satisfy his weakness, and I’ve been pleading your case with him.”

  Diego opened his eyes wide. All he wanted was to hear the words that were about to come out of his mouth.

  “I spoke to him about you without leaving out any detail. He knows your wishes to learn and that you can read Arabic without difficulty. He also knows what’s been happening with Friar Servando. Believe me, he’s interested in your case and wants to know what you’re looking for.”

  “And …?”

  “I have bad news and good news.”

  “Start with the bad.”

  “Friar Servando is lying when he says you can enter the scriptorium or the library with relative freedom. I found out that those who haven’t taken vows are not granted admission.”

  Diego sighed, defeated. That could mean the end of his plans.

  “But wait! I haven’t told you the good news.”

  “Can there be anything positive after what you’ve just told me?”

  “If we can’t go in, they can still come out. …”

  “What?”

  “Friar Tomás has another weakness aside from eating.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Herb brandies.” He smiled roguishly. “Two bottles and the promise of a regular supply took care of it, and thanks to that …” He took out a package wrapped in cotton cloth. “While you’re down here in this filth, you can read the Roman Vegetius. Isn’t that one of the writers you were looking for?”

  Diego pulled back the wrappings anxiously and found a book with the title Digestorum artis mulomedicinae, signed by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus, written in the fourth century.

  “He also told me that if you’re interested,” Marcos continued, “he would pass you the book by the author from Cádiz, Lucius Junio Columella, and then two more treatises in Latin, I think he said from Pliny and one from Paladius. Anyway, I don’t know any of them.”

  Diego couldn’t contain his emotion and felt a few tears stream down his cheeks. At last he had one of those books in his hands; it didn’t matter anymore that he’d had to put up with so many calamities, far more than could be considered reasonable. Now, thanks to this treatise, he could broaden his knowledge in an area little studied among the Arabs, the methodology for diagnosing illnesses.

  Vegetius had been a soldier in the Roman army, an expert in war strategy, a defender of the use of cavalry as a weapon when the rest of his colleagues trusted only in the infantry. Perhaps for this reason, he studied and compiled the most extensive collection of knowledge about those animals, even than that of the Greeks. The book’s pages contained marvelous descriptions of the most varied illnesses, recommendations for raising the animals, breeding them, and other aspects such as the ideal physical form and an organized system to select the best stallions.

  By candlelight, Diego passed night after night reading, learning each one of the paragraphs by heart. At last he felt happy. That compensated for everything.

  In the mornings, he washed the large pieces of perforated marble where the monks emptied their waste, or went down in the dark to clear out the frequent clogs in its drains, but it scarcely mattered. Nor was he bothered by the need to carry spadesful of human waste to the carriages where it would be later used as fertilizer.

  He even grew used to the horrible odor, with the lone desire to wait for nightfall and feed himself on that delicious and nutritive science of the books, as he called it. He became drunk with the wisdom written in ink, without understanding why it should be hidden from the eyes of the world. He didn’t understand what harm could be done to men’s souls by knowledge or what reason there was to have to hide between those stones and temples, authentic walls of faith, the sweet effect of knowledge. He would never understand it.

  And thus the days and weeks passed until the last night of his punishment.

  He didn’t go to sleep until very late, absorbed in his reading of a treatise by Hippocrates. From his deep and solid thought he extracted three rules and the wise man defended them as the basic principles of the medical profession.

  Diego memorized them and repeated them out loud several times.

  “Primum non nocere: First do no harm.” He savored the meaning of it
. “It’s better to do nothing than make the situation worse.”

  He breathed in and remembered the second, the one he agreed with the most.

  “One should always go after the cause of the complaint, and fight against the principle that produces it. And last, abstain from acting against incurable illnesses, accepting their inevitability.”

  V.

  Sancho VII had fallen so far in love, he was losing his mind.

  He had arrived in Marrakesh for a short diplomatic mission, but Princess Najla compelled the king to stay almost two years.

  “Bringing him to us has been an excellent decision. …”

  Caliph al-Nasir ordered his pipes refilled with those herbs that raised his spirits.

  “You remember how hard it was for me to convince you? No?” Don Pedro de Mora filled his lungs with a deep mouthful of smoke.

  “It’s true, but the decision to use my own sister as bait was not easy for me to take. You are right, though; now I have no doubts about it working.”

  A slave came over on her knees, without looking at them, with a tray full of sweets made of almond, honey, and coconut. They tried them. Al-Nasir lifted her veil, stroked her cheeks, touching a fatty finger across the corner of her lips.

  “I don’t know you. What’s your name?”

  “Abeer, sir.” She looked into his eyes, taken aback by their intense blue color.

  “What does her name mean?” Don Pedro asked, entranced by her beautiful body.

  “Fragrance. … An insinuation of passion. Doesn’t she strike you as beautiful?”

  “She’s majestic.”

  Al-Nasir stroked the girl’s chin.

  “Come back later.”

  “Thank you for choosing me, sir.”

  The caliph slapped her with extreme violence.

  “Did no one warn you yet that you shouldn’t speak to me if I haven’t asked you to first?”

  The woman lowered her head submissively and left them alone, without turning her back at any moment, as they had explained to her.

  The caliph and Mora went out to the terrace to take in some fresh air and saw King Sancho walking with Najla through the palace gardens.

  “When I visited him in Navarre, he had just separated,” Pedro de Mora remembered. “You were necessary to him for his policy of territorial expansion. … And Najla, in her youth, dreamed of being loved by some noble and valiant knight. All I had was to put the two pieces together, and—”

  “The accord with his kingdom is good for us, very much so,” the caliph interrupted him. “With Navarre on our side, we will break the dangerous unity of the Christian empires that Castile has been seeking so ardently.”

  “Can you imagine how King Alfonso VIII would see a marriage between Najla and Sancho? Al-Andalus united with Navarre …” Don Pedro rubbed his hands together as he thought of it.

  “What I don’t understand is how he still hasn’t asked me for her hand. They’ve been like this more than a year.” The caliph pointed at them. The two lovers looked at each other with absolute commitment, holding hands, Sancho stroking Najla’s hair shyly. “What the devil could he be waiting for?”

  “Think, my lord, that since Sancho has moved into the vizier’s palace, he is too far from your sister, whom you also never let leave here, no matter what the excuse. If you facilitate their intimacy, perhaps they will taste love’s essences together and they will thus accelerate your wishes.” Don Pedro confirmed that al-Nasir had captured the sense of his words.

  “I will think about it. Every day I pray to Allah that he bless their love and make it grow, but also that it be soon. I need to seal this accord once and for all.”

  That same night, a bundle of nerves, Najla entered the harem looking for Blanca and Estela, anxious to tell them the news.

  “They are going to move him. …”

  The princess didn’t even wait to reach the blue chamber where they were normally found. She spoke to them in Arabic, since the sisters had begun to speak it. For some time now they alternated between one language and the other.

  “Who? What are you talking to us about?”

  “Sancho. I just found out my brother is going to allow him to lodge in this palace.”

  Blanca winked at Estela. Some months back, the princess had promised to take them to Navarre if she finally managed to get married. They understood that the lovers’ being closer to each other could speed up their relationship, and if they announced their wedding at last, the sisters’ way out of that hell could be closer.

  “He’s such a marvelous man. …” Najla let her hair down in front of a large mirror. Immediately her hair flooded down over her shoulders and breasts. “Do I look pretty?”

  Blanca got behind her.

  “You are beautiful and young. You have a gorgeous body and you radiate grace. Any man would get lost in your eyes, as soon as he caressed your silken skin. I assure you that you will drive him mad.” She tugged Najla’s hair upward, leaving her lithe neck free, and breathed in her scent. “To captivate him, perfume yourself with sandalwood and honey, put on a tight-fitting dress, and ask your slave to draw something beautiful on your breasts.”

  “I’ve never been with a man. …” The princess grew red, looking at them with an almost childish face. “And there’s a lot that I don’t know. I don’t know how to please him. I imagine you both know very well what I’m talking about.”

  Estela’s face clouded over with a grimace of restrained rage and humiliation. It was still hard for her to swallow that truth. They were nothing more than two concubines, kept alive and well fed for the sole purpose of pleasing the caliph and various of his closest collaborators.

  “Don’t try to be what you aren’t,” Blanca went on recommending. “Be natural and let yourself go. When you disrobe, don’t be fast, look at him with ardor, and then …”

  The door opened suddenly and a black guard came in, an Imesebelen.

  “They are looking for you, ma’am. Come out from here. You should get back to your bedroom as quickly as possible.”

  Blanca and Estela were paralyzed, almost shrunken. The vision of his black face took them back in time. The horrendous images of their abduction, the brutal death of their sister, Belinda, the uncertain fate of their father and brother—all those terrible experiences were relived every time one of those men came near them.

  “Which of you is named Blanca?”

  “Me.” She looked back at him with an almost physical fear.

  “Right now, they’re looking for you as well. Move quickly.”

  “Thank you for letting us know,” Najla interrupted. “Tijmud is my most faithful protector. Don’t be afraid of him; he is different from the rest of the Imesebelen who guard me.” When she finished this phrase, she took leave of them, and in an instant she disappeared, turning off down the hallway.

  The two sisters arrived at their room and lay down as fast as possible, hearing footsteps. Shortly afterward, two men entered. They were servants of the caliph. One of them asked after Blanca from among those present, and when he found her, he came over and touched her shoulder. That was the signal the concubines all knew too well for when they were expected to spend the night with someone. She rose and followed the men.

  Unusually, they took the east wing of the palace and walked through other hallways. Blanca couldn’t imagine to where.

  They reached a beautiful gilded door and opened it for her to pass through. At the moment, she didn’t see anyone inside. The soft breeze that greeted her face as soon as she entered came from a window through which the reflections of the moon filtered as well. She walked toward it and looked outside. The night in Marrakesh captivated her. She listened to laughter in the distance, maybe in some plaza or side street, and sighed. She dreamed of being free again, she missed her former life, she wished to escape from that terrible prison.

>   Soon she heard some footfalls behind her and turned.

  Once more it was the individual she hated. To look at his long scar made her relive the most hateful moments in her life. His face reflected a deep and subtle intelligence, but also wickedness.

  “You are precious, as always. …”

  Resigned, she received his first kiss on her lips.

  VI.

  Horse manure, sweat, and science.

  Those three ingredients characterized Diego’s life for the following six months, as well as a permanent atmosphere of reproach from Friar Servando. That man had pledged not to forgive a single error on the part of Diego, though he also wouldn’t teach the boy any of the little that he knew. Maybe it was for that reason that Diego sought a refuge in books.

  A year after arriving at Fitero, the winter had penetrated the walls and Diego continued soaking up knowledge. He needed hours and days to order his learning, assimilate what he was reading, and think about how he could apply it to the future.

  On one occasion, without Friar Servando’s noticing, he dissected the hoof of a deceased horse before it was buried in quicklime. Thus he could understand how it worked, what forces and pressures were borne by the bones and tendons, how movement was generated. He rooted around inside it, trying to find answers to where the maladies inside it had their origin, the tumors and swellings, impactions and decays.

  He also decided to order the illnesses differently in his mind from how he had read and done up till that moment. He would do so according to their anatomical location. This way, it would be easier to distinguish one sickness from another.

  One day Marcos found Diego thoughtful, seated on a pile of straw, close to his mare, whom he still visited every night.

  “Talk to me about your sisters. …”

  On that occasion, Marcos had brought him a book written by a Palatine nun, Hildegard of Bingen.

  “I already told you what happened. … God! It’s horrible; it was already six years ago. … Can you tell me why you’re asking me now?”