The Horse Healer

by Gonzalo Giner

  He stood behind Diego and pointed his finger at him.

  “You just heard him. During his testimony, he has tried to convince us of his noble undertaking, but who believes him? When he explained to us how he infected himself to prove the existence of this mysterious mushroom, he nearly made us weep with laughter.” Sarcastically, he took a pocket cloth out and pretended to dry his tears. “But let us not forget one thing. What is certain is we have a heartless assassin before us. …” He grabbed Diego’s tunic and twisted it, spitting these last words in his face. “A man known only for strange behaviors ever since he set foot in this lands, yes, very strange behaviors indeed.”

  The public was anxious to hear him. He punished them with a long silence.

  “Are you asking yourselves what I am referring to?”

  “Using witchcraft to cure animals!” a man from the public shouted. The rest turned to see who it was.

  “If anyone interrupts again, I will have you all put out,” the lord of the town interrupted. “Go on, prosecutor.”

  “That man was not wrong.” The person he referred to smiled, proud. “For the accused has been seen to engage in bizarre practices that he surely learned at the feet of his master, the Jew Efraím. He picks up dead animals and takes out their livers and even burns them, inhaling their fetid vapors. He has also practiced divination, using snakes and strange potions, as his own servant has told us. And besides, we have all heard how he performed strange acts with bread before making a potion which he then drank. …” He took another pause. “Is this the normal conduct of an albéitar?”

  The masses followed his words with bated breath.

  “I doubt whether we are judging an ordinary murderer or if he is not, in reality, a magician of the black arts, sowing terror in our villages, making our women miscarry and decimating our flocks—”

  “You are twisting around everything!” Diego suddenly shouted. “Your words bespeak bad faith, and there is no proof that I committed this evil. You should listen to me and destroy the rye in the storehouses. That is the lone cause.” He looked around the room, searching for Marcos.

  The lord of the town, who was presiding judge of the tribunal, admonished him, and ordered him to be beaten.

  One of the bailiffs fulfilled his command so zealously that he split Diego’s lip. When he saw the blood, he begged the pardon of the court for not removing his iron glove.

  “You say that I lie …” the prosecutor continued. “I see …”

  Another member of the tribunal passed him a paper and he read its contents aloud.

  “They have just informed me that the lone witness the accused presents, Marcos de Burgos, not only has failed to show up to this tribunal but has also been seen fleeing Cuéllar.”

  When he heard that, Diego felt despair for the first time. He couldn’t believe Marcos would betray him; it couldn’t be true. He was defeated, desolate. If that was the case, then no one would defend him, and he was surely doomed.

  The prosecutor continued talking.

  “Therefore, there is nothing left but to ask for a sentence from the court.”

  The crowd began to shout.

  “Hang him! He killed my wife,” a toothless man yelled, flames dancing in his eyes.

  “Let him pay with his life!” an old woman shrieked from the corner.

  “Death to the defendant!” the rest of the people screamed.

  “You see…”—the prosecutor turned now to Diego—“it seems no one believes your mushroom story. …”

  “Silence! Let the prosecutor speak.”

  “Thank you, my lord. I shall. And I shall because all this would be funny did the souls of more than a hundred of our neighbors, all friends of ours, not weigh upon this room. I confess that I feel them calling for justice in my heart, for vengeance, they are begging us to make amends for their terrible deaths, indeed, they are shouting at us from their tombs. I hear them, we all hear them. …” He circled Diego. “The evidence, the witnesses, what we have heard up to now, all of it incriminates this man, Diego de Malagón, as the culprit of these terrible deaths.” He pointed a finger at him and raised his voice for the finale, full of gravity. “He poisoned them! He … along with that despicable Jew, Efraím the magician.”

  The spectators began to murmur Efraím’s name. His luck was going the same way as Diego’s after he had been dragged before another tribunal.

  The prosecutor continued.

  “Not a single testimony we have heard has defended his arguments, not one has favored him. Are there any doubts left then?”

  The lord of the town stopped him short. He wanted the trial to be brought to an end and a punishment to be decided on. It was best that way. The people needed their leaders to protect them from evildoers, and he needed someone to put all the blame on. He wasn’t sure that Diego de Malagón was that person, but he would do it to give the people what they wanted.

  “If you believe that the role of the accused has been proven in this case, and I have to confess that the tribunal shares this opinion, what punishment do you demand for him?”

  “I ask the tribunal for the penalty of death!”

  When they heard it, the public broke out in cheers and applause.

  Diego felt knocked down and utterly defeated. He knew everything was lost. He looked at the five judges, seated behind a table, while they all consulted with one another. He saw them ready to impose an exemplary punishment on him. He felt a dreadful nervousness, an atrocious fear.

  The notary was called over by the lord of the town. He heard the final sentence from his lips, and then approached Diego, ordering him to rise.

  “Diego de Malagón!”

  “Yes, sir …”

  “This court, after hearing the testimony of the witnesses and studying each piece of evidence, accuses you of responsibility for the death of more than a hundred citizens of this community as well as an infinitude of animals. And for that, it sentences you to death by hanging.”

  The room exploded in applause once more. Diego turned to those seated, not knowing where their hatred could have come from.

  “Moreover,” the notary continued, “you must know that it is our will that the punishment be enacted tomorrow morning, before midday.” He looked into his eyes before finishing: “May God forgive you.”

  Diego collapsed into his seat, nauseated and depressed. Two bailiffs had to drag him off, because he was incapable of standing, and thus he was taken off to the dungeons. In his cell, they pushed him so rudely that he fell onto the floor. There he could hear the laughter and insults of the two men.

  “Sweet dreams, murderer. Tomorrow you’ll go to bed in hell.”

  Bruno de Oñate ran to his aid, imagining the very worst. Diego’s breathing was frantic; he was sweating, and he looked like a corpse. He needed time to be able to speak.

  “I … I …” He sighed, destroyed. “They’re going to … hang me … it’ll be tomorrow …”

  “I’m truly sorry.”

  “It’s fine, what can I do? This is the end.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Leave me. … I need to think.”

  “No, speak to me, believe me, tell me everything you’re thinking. … I will help you.”

  Diego felt all the muscles in his body cramp. He stretched out to relax and breathed slowly until he felt a bit calmer.

  “Bruno,” Diego said bitterly, “I’m only twenty-seven and my whole life is ahead of me. It has taken so much effort to get here, so much work, so many dreams. I left so much of myself behind on the way, and I had to abandon people I loved with all my heart, and I did it to be able to keep my promises. That’s why I still don’t want to die. … I still have work to do.”

  Bruno was thinking of nothing but how to help him. The situation was so critical that any possibility that occurred to him would
have to be considered. And one thing did.

  Diego went on opening his heart to him.

  “But, all in all, what hurts the most is knowing that if I die, everything I’ve done has been for nothing, that I’ll have hardly given back anything for all that’s been put in my hands, all my understanding.”

  Bruno answered him immediately with a deep voice, full of consideration.

  “Death is a liberation. Be hopeful; maybe it’s nothing but a path to a greater destiny.”

  “Is that how you’re trying to console me?”

  “Yes, I think that’s how I have to do it. Don’t think more, Diego; trust in my words, and from now on, let things happen. Years ago, a man I considered my greatest master told me something that has been useful to me many times. He said that nothing is what it seems, that behind everything that happens there is always a meaning, though sometimes it’s hidden. Maybe the same is happening with your death,” he concluded.

  Diego’s expression could not have been more incredulous.

  “I never imagined you’d be so harsh …”

  Bruno put his hand on his shoulder.

  “Don’t think I don’t have feelings. Just listen to what I have to say. Maybe that harshness will become something peaceful.”

  Diego heard him and prayed to God with all his might that the man was right, and that all wasn’t what it seemed.

  XII.

  The gallows was built over four thick pillars of wood, with a trapdoor in the center that opened when the bailiff gave the order for the sentence to be carried out. The hangman pushed a lever, and the accused hung in the air till he choked to death.

  Bruno was released from the cell some time before Diego and promised to be in the square to accompany him on his final journey.

  People crowded the place where the sentence was to be carried out. In this case, the person convicted was known by everyone, and everyone had heard he was guilty of the worst nightmare Cuéllar had ever lived through.

  When Diego appeared, escorted by two soldiers, the people greeted him with insults. They spat at him and cursed his name as he passed. He saw hate in their stares, lust for vengeance, and they seemed happy to witness his martyrdom.

  Diego bore it all with resignation. Some of the ones now cursing him had sung his praises when he’d cared for their animals. Maybe they didn’t really feel what they were saying; maybe it was just that insane atmosphere contaminating them.

  He was struggling for breath. The unbearable pressure of their gazes weighed heavily on him. He was innocent and his face reflected worry and fatalism.

  When he looked at the scaffold, he saw another man already hanging, swinging from a cord that would soon be wrapped around his Diego’s neck. It was his friend Efraím, he saw sorrowfully when he came closer. While he climbed the steps to the platform, he looked into those swollen, lifeless eyes, which seemed to stare back at him. Efraím’s neck was twisted, and his face showed the marks of his long agony. Diego had heard that some hanged men took longer than normal to die and that seemed to be the case with the Jew. At that moment, Diego prayed for his soul and out of respect, he continued to look at him until they took him down, without the least consideration. His body fell, striking the wood, but no one seemed to care. A man, hunchbacked and filthy, approached the body and pulled it by the wrists to drag it to the edge of the platform where an open wagon was waiting to cart it off. He failed in his first attempt, and the crowd laughed when the corpse plunged to the ground. As if it was a dog, the man stomped on the body, angry, and threw it over his shoulder to dump it into the wagon. Diego swallowed, feeling the hole that had been carved inside him. At that moment, he remembered the prophecies Efraím had made to him. “A rope, wood, life and death. Resist.” Now he understood what it meant. Resist. But how would he resist his own death?

  When he stepped onto the platform, the people clapped enthusiastically. Some avoided his gaze, perhaps ashamed, while Diego tried to understand their thoughts, not knowing where their bottomless rancor could come from. He was shocked by that enormous thirst for collective revenge.

  At one end of the square, he could see Bruno de Oñate wave at him. That was the only thing that calmed him even slightly.

  Beside him he found Sancha, completely destroyed by sorrow, with her daughter Rosa. He caught her eyes. Diego smiled at her tenderly and she said good-bye silently amid tears, thankful for all he had done for her and her daughters. In her eyes he saw friendship, love, the longing for one last kiss.

  The hangman examined the knot and passed the noose over Diego’s neck, tightening it until it scratched his skin.

  “Please forgive me.” Clear blue eyes could be seen through his hood.

  “I do. …”

  The bailiff asked him if he wanted his head covered. Diego said yes, so no one would see him. From then on, each word he heard seemed worse than the lashing of a whip. There were few, just enough to spell out the death sentence.

  “Are you ready, then, to receive your punishment?”

  Diego nodded his head and tightened his muscles, all of his body, waiting to hear the last words.

  “Any final requests?”

  “The blessing of a priest.”

  The bailiff made a sign for a man of God to step up to the platform.

  Diego lowered his head when the priest put his hands over the cloth and made the sign of the cross on his head, reciting a prayer in a soft voice. When he finished, the accused thanked him for his words.

  “Soon you will be free, like all of God’s sons,” the priest said in parting.

  “God bless you, Father. …”

  “Everything is ready to carry out the sentence.”

  The bailiff made a signal to the hangman and he grabbed the lever that pulled the trapdoor.

  Then some women broke into shouts, begging for clemency. Others drowned out their shouts, asking for vengeance and death. They seemed soulless beings, hungry for agony, for blood.

  Diego couldn’t see them under the cloth, but he could smell the scent of a wish for punishment in the air, and with it, his own panic. He waited to hear the bailiff’s fateful words, and when that happened, he felt himself fall into the void until the rope around his neck stopped him with incredible, fatal brusqueness.

  The people shouted, impressed when they saw him kicking, those last attempts to hold on to life. Others applauded joyously. They were comforted, for once more justice had managed to uproot evil and that thought eased their conscience.

  “Rot in hell,” a woman shouted.

  The echo sounded out across the plaza; maybe Diego heard it too.

  And then there was silence.

  The hangman shoved his body to be sure it wasn’t moving. He untied the rope and Diego fell to the ground. They all saw him, Bruno de Oñate too.

  He shoved through the crowd to escape that horrendous square as soon as possible, with a tense expression.

  Before he got on his horse to leave through the city’s gates, he said aloud: “Diego de Malagón, you just did your part, now it’s our turn to do ours.”

  Part V

  Lands of Danger

  In 1208, the Navarrese Rodrigo Ximénez de Rada is named archbishop of Toledo. Thenceforward he becomes the main counselor to King Alfonso VIII of Castile and the chronicler of the incredible events that take place in the borderlands.

  Ximénez de Rada establishes, as objectives for his mandate, convincing the pope to consider the reconquest of Al-Andalus a Holy Crusade, and attempting to restore the primacy of the bishopric of Toledo.

  Once the treaties with al-Nasir are broken, the campaigns of siege and conquest against the Saracens begin, such as the one led by Alfonso VIII to retake Jaén and Baeza, and the Calatravans’ battle for Andújar in 1209.

  Encouraged by his counselors, the Almohad caliph decides to move to Seville to organize a definitive
strike against the Christian kingdoms of the north. In his citadel, not far from the Aljama or Great Mosque, in the shadow of its towering minaret, an exact replica of the one in Marrakesh, a transcendental battle begins.

  I.

  There are secrets that stay buried with their possessor and never come to light. In fact, they die with that person.

  But that wasn’t Diego’s case.

  “Officially, I’m dead,” he roundly affirmed.

  “That’s right, Diego. That is what we’re saying.” Bruno de Oñate patted his back to knock off the bits of straw and filth that still clung to him. He was pleased by his plan’s success.

  “In theory, you no longer exist.”

  Diego had just appeared in the company of his hangman, who was none other than one of the Calatravan knights who had come with Bruno de Oñate.

  Not long before, they had left the cemetery in Cuéllar after spending the night hidden inside a storeroom on the cemetery grounds. A generous quantity of money had been enough to distract the warden there for a few hours, so that no one would witness how a sack of dirt had been placed in the tomb instead of one that should have harbored the body of Diego de Malagón.

  The unfamiliarity of the place and the tension he had lived through over the past few weeks kept Diego from sleeping all through the night, and he had time to think through his life, not without some bitterness. He thought of how he had lost all the people he had loved and how that must have been his fate: his family, Galib, Marcos … Through that endless night, over and over, he saw himself on the gallows, hanging by the neck, apparently dead, and he sweated from the anxiety.

  First thing in the morning, his false hangman, Tomás Ramírez appeared to pick him up and to leave the place. Luckily no one saw them, not even when they galloped to the spot they had agreed on, an abandoned grazing field half a league from the town of Carbonero, on the edge of the Eresma River.