by Lisa Hilton
Fear had come to Toledo by then. Fire and fear and treachery blazed through our city which had once been celebrated for its knowledge and harmony. The Castilian queen and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, called out their troops to drive away the infidel, and the city turned upon itself like a rabid dog. Families who had lived for generations as Christians were persecuted as morisco, heretics who secretly worshipped the Moorish God. Neighbours whispered against each other in the market and each day the bell of my father’s shop rang less often, until weeks would go by when nothing but the sweet mountain breezes stealing in through the shutters disturbed the golden dust on the heaped volumes. My father began to parcel up his treasures and send them away, to merchants in Venice and Paris where the danger was not so great, and at night I would hear the scratch of his pen as he went over his accounts, squinting behind his seeing glass in the light of a single tallow candle, sighing over how long he might hold out against ruin.
My father began to insist that we attended Mass each week in the still-unfinished cathedral, and afterwards he would walk about with my hand tucked into his arm, bowing politely to everyone he recognised, making sure we were seen. Although the bags of rice in the larder slumped and grew thin, and we no longer ate meat except on holidays, I was not afraid. I was glad that my father had more time for me, now that he was no longer at his correspondence at all hours, tracing out the works his clients sought. My papa had always been so gentle with me, so careful and patient. He had fed and bathed and dressed me from a babe, with all the tenderness I knew my mother would have shown; but he had often been weary and distracted, and those nights when his friends came to drink wine and talk with him in the parlour I had known better than to disturb him. Talk, I knew, was his only pleasure now my mother was gone. So, now that my father’s friends had left Toledo, and those that remained would greet one another with no more than a swift flicker of eyes as they passed in the streets, my father had time for me.
He began, with increasing urgency, to talk to me of the old learning. He would stroke my hair in the warm light of the stove and whisper to me, as I fell towards sleep, of Zoroaster of Chaldea whose learning was carried to Egypt, where the ibis-headed god Thoth invented writing. How King Solomon had learned to summon angels, and how all the arts derived from the seven principles of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geography and astronomy. These were my childhood stories, the names of the magi the heroes of my fairytales, kings who travelled on camels over golden deserts, summoning magical creatures from the movements of the stars. Like all odd children, I did not think it odd.
The only time I ever saw my father angry was when I questioned his passion. I was a good Christian girl, I knew my catechism and I asked my father whether it was right to speak of such things, whether this learning was not sinful. He banged his fist on the table with such force that his wine glass jumped to the floor and shattered, and I was so shocked to see the rage on his gentle face that I began to weep. He gathered me to him and stroked my hair.
‘I’m sorry, little one. Don’t cry. Listen. “Wisdom and knowledge shall be granted unto thee, and I will give thee riches and wealth and honour such as none of the kings have had that have been before thee, neither shall any after have the like.”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s from the Bible, Mura. The Chronicles. And none of these holy murderers with their false trials and their hateful piety know anything of knowledge. It is no heresy to seek to know, to understand the world God created for us. Their torture and their persecution and the fears they spread, that is true evil, because it is the evil of ignorance, and ignorance defends itself with cruelty. Remember that.’
My papa had told me many times how, hundreds of years ago, before the Spanish king El Sabio came to Toledo, the city belonged to the caliphs. And how before that, before the walls and the churches were built, men came here from the north, men who crossed the mountains and mixed their pale hair and eyes with those of the people they found here. How they scratched their runes into the rocks and how a century ago their magic had been collected and sent over the world on pages of vellum.
‘That is why our city is so special, little Mura. Many learned men came here and they brought books with them, marvellous books that told of medicines and the movements of the stars. They came from all over the world to study and talk here in Toledo, and some people say that there is another city, under the earth, a magic city with tunnels instead of roads and palaces in caves, and a river as cold and clear as frozen diamonds. If you can go down into that city, they say, and fill a flask of water in the river, then it will make peach trees bloom in winter time and cover the earth with blossom.’
I could never hear enough about the magical city, though my father told me I must not speak of it to anyone but him. He said that some people were afraid of such things, and that was why the city had to be kept secret, because people would try to destroy what they feared. I knew that there was nothing holy in the fires that burned in Toledo in those years, nothing of love or peace. Only ignorance and the love of power, and fear is the greatest weapon of the powerful. I knew that books are feared because their strength is silent, their challenge unspoken. My papa taught me then how knowledge that knows when to stay silent can never be destroyed.
The winter came. I was excited, for my father had told me I was grown big enough to wear my red dress for the Feast of Kings, Epifania. I had spent the afternoon carefully painting a gold crown Papa had helped me to cut out from packing paper. He put me to bed early, with a cup of warm milk and cinnamon, stroking my hair and telling me to stay quiet as a leaf. The early winter dark had not yet fallen, but Papa had already shut up the house and was moving uneasily in the dim rooms on the ground floor. Now and then I heard a curse and a crash as a heap of books toppled, and I wanted to laugh at his silliness. Why did he not light a candle? It was cosy in my little bed, which Papa had moved next to the stove to keep me warm, and I was dozing off under the blankets when I heard a tap at the street door and my father’s steps going to answer it. The hinge creaked as it closed, and I heard some muttered conversation; it wasn’t hard to pick out the husky boom of Adara’s curious voice, even though she was trying to whisper.
I liked Adara. I liked her bold swaying walk and the sour-spicy smell of her large bosom when she hugged me. Like many in our city, her skin was as black as a ripe fig and she wore huge hoops of twisted gold in her ears, which she would take out and let me play with as I waited for my father, dangling my feet in the blue-tiled fountain in her courtyard when it was hot or sitting snugly by the fire in winter on a settle covered all over with flowers worked in silk. Adara lived in a fine house with several other ladies, and I thought that she must be very rich, even though she had no husband.
Her name in our tongue meant ‘virgin’. I asked my father once why she wore no habit, if she was a nun, and he smiled and said she belonged to a convent of a sort, but that he did no business there. That wasn’t true, I said, because he took powders and salves to Adara that he made up in the back of our shop, and I had seen her handing him pesos to put in his purse.
Tonight, though, Adara had not come for almond water or the bitter black paste my father forbad me touch. There was an urgency in her voice that roused me to listen more attentively.
‘It’s too late,’ I heard my father say.
‘If you come with me now?’
‘No, they have it. They have the grimoire. I was betrayed. But you will do as we agreed?’
‘Very well.’
‘I have packed them for her. It’s a poor enough dowry, God knows.’
‘I will care for her.’
My father came up the stairs, treading slowly. He carried a candle and my dress lay over his arm.
‘It’s time to put this on, pretty one.’ He smiled, his teeth showing white in the grey of his beard. It makes me lose my breath now when I think what that smile must have cost him.
‘Papa, what’s happening? Are we going
somewhere special? With Adara? The crown isn’t dry.’
‘Come here, my little love. Something special, yes. Like a pageant. And you will be the most important player.’
Then he told me what I had to do, and opened the shutters wide.
*
It seemed a long time that I waited, hunched on the windowsill. It was icy, and I tried not to shiver, feeling the blood drawing towards my heart and my hands grow numb where they clutched the window frames. They came across the square, as Papa said they would, a line of torches, yellow light glancing on hooded faces and the fat crucifixes chained on their breasts. That was the first moment that I was afraid. The men stopped before our door.
‘Samuel Benito. Samuel Benito! In the name of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, you are under arrest.’
Aside from the river of flame beneath my window, the square was entirely dark. No one would stir, no one would come out to defend my father. Peeping over the sill, balancing the wax flowers my father had wound in my hair with one cold-clumsy hand, I watched him step into the circle of light. He wore his best cloak, but his head was bare. The men fanned out, encircling him, and I saw that those in the front ranks were not monks, as their hoods made them seem, but soldiers, the hilts of their short swords visible beneath the black robes like quartz in a pebble.
‘Does this belong to you?’ One of them was holding a fat square parcel, which I knew contained a book.
‘It did. I sold it some time ago. I am a bookseller, sir.’ My father’s voice was low and courteous.
There was a muttering amongst the group. I caught the words ‘heretic’ and ‘morisco’, but my father’s stillness had unsettled them, somehow. They had expected a fight. He spoke again.
‘I trust I am to come with you, sir?’
I heard Adara move into the room behind me. I could smell the oil on the two rush torches she carried. She knelt before the stove.
‘Are you ready?’
‘Yes.’ I spoke from a dream, ensorcelled by the scene outside.
‘They will burn the house. We must be swift. No tears, do you understand me?’
I nodded, my eyes fixed on my father as she dipped the torches to the flame in its iron cage.
‘Now.’
As the light flared I scrambled up on the windowsill, flapping at the red fabric around my legs. My hair was crowned with a circlet of briar roses, retrieved by my father from a sack of carnival costumes. They were dusty, but from a distance they would seem fresh. My hands were as red as my dress, the palms dipped in my father’s precious cochineal. I was to hold them before me, Papa said, and be sure to open my eyes very wide. For a moment, none of the men below me saw that I stood there, then one of the figures screamed, pointing up. The torches with which Adara illuminated me cast their light onto pale faces as they fell to their knees, crossing themselves.
Slowly, I raised my hands, the dye dripping from them like blood.
‘Demonio!’
‘Maligno!’
‘Diablo!’
I was uncertain what to do now. I cast my eyes around the group. Only my father was standing, his face seeking mine. He smiled once more, and the torchlight caught the flash of white in his beard. He raised his hands to his mouth and bunched them in a kiss, tossing it to me like a fine gentleman.
‘Come now, Mura, come!’
I reached for Adara’s hand, and as I clambered off the windowsill, I took one last look for my father, but he had vanished. All I could see now in the square was a huddle of cloaks and the swift flash of a swinging blade. Then we were running, banging down the stairs and through the back door of the shop. I could hear them already, beating at the bolts behind us, and I smelled a sharp, crisp scent, which I knew must be the first of the greedy flames lapping at parchment.
In the alley behind the house, Adara lifted me onto her hip and began to run, my hands clinging to her neck, and her flanks working strongly beneath me as she bounded downhill, her strides lengthening fluidly, her heartbeat mounting in her neck against my cheek. I was too surprised to weep. We ran through the empty streets behind the Zocodover, down towards the city gates, past the brick façade of the Santa Maria synagogue, we ran and ran until we came to the door of Adara’s house. She staggered, gasping for air, and let me down, but before she pushed me into the courtyard I saw that the sky behind us was no longer indigo but orange and gold and red, the fireworks from my lost home burning briefly brighter than the stars.
CHAPTER TWO
I LEARNED TWO THINGS IN ADARA’S HOUSE. I LEARNED that people were afraid of me. And I learned that my papa had told the truth, that my mother would come to me in my dreams. That first night, I lay curled on the floor like a melon rind, hollowed out with shock. When I finally began to sob, Adara was kind. She gave me a sweet, hot drink made of wine and spices and something else that made me sleep for a long time, and when I awoke my skin smelled of orange water where she had washed me and dressed me in a clean woollen robe. My hands were still pink from the dye. I ate flat bread with mountain honey and dried apples, feeling strangely calm, as though I had woken from a bad dream.
‘When will Papa come, Adara?’
She too had bathed, though the heavy perfume she wore, rich with rose oil and musk, did not quite hide the scent of her own skin, the salty, almost bitter tang which I had smelled when she carried me away from our house. Adara’s face twisted, she looked very sad and confused.
‘Not for a long time, little Mura. Those men last night, they were bad men. That’s why we had to trick them, so you could escape. Your papa told me you had to be a good girl here with me and when the bad men have gone, he will come to fetch you. Maybe before the summer comes . . .’
I wanted to ask why the men had burned our house, and what had happened to Papa’s books, but I half-knew the answer and was afraid to hear it. Adara clapped her hands and a maid came in with a little bundle.
‘For you,’ Adara said encouragingly.
Inside was a doll; not a stuffed rag, a real one, with a soft body and real golden hair, a pretty wax face and a green velvet dress and cloak. I had never seen such a lovely thing, and I skipped off happily to show her the fountain and the orange trees, just as Adara had known I would.
The red tint on my hands faded day by day, and my papa did not come. Adara made a little bed for me next to the stove in her own room and gave me a pretty inlaid chest of scented cedar wood in which to put my own things, my dolly and my red dress, washed and mended. As time went on I added more treasures: some violet-coloured pebbles from the courtyard, a little scent bottle of red glass with a silver stopper, an inch of brocade I found under a chest. Before I went to sleep I would spread out my marvels and imagine how I would show them to Papa. For a while, I stayed mostly in this room or in the courtyard, chattering to my doll or watching Adara as she rubbed creams into her skin or painted black lines around her eyes, or peeping from the window at the ladies who shared the house.
The ladies got up very late, sometimes after dinnertime, and if the winter sun was shining they would sit in the courtyard, their faces creased and puffy, wrapped warmly in their cloaks, combing out their hair. Adara said I wasn’t to go outside when they were there, but I loved to watch them, drinking endless little glasses of tea and slowly waking themselves so their skin brightened and their voices began to rise and chatter like starlings along a wall. A few hours before the sun went down, everyone grew busy. The maids came and went with jugs of hot water or mended dresses over their arms, and the old porter – the only man in the house – jumped up every few minutes to answer the street bell. It was exciting, with packages arriving and the ladies calling to one another and the smell of roast meat and chocolate from the kitchen.
A maid would bring me a plate of supper and I always ate it quietly, sitting on my bed while Adara dressed herself, peering dissatisfied into her silver looking glass, tweaking her chemise lower over her bosom, rubbing another layer of rouge over her full lips. When she was ready, I w
atched her cross the courtyard and climb the staircase, her loose silk robe trailing behind her. The rooms above were finer than mine, I knew that, with arched windows and benches full of cushions; and though the shutters were closed to the winter air I could hear music and laughter and smell sweet, smoky incense as it drifted through the cracks into the chilly night. As Adara left she would tell me to get into bed, but I would creep out from under the covers, clutching my doll, and watch the visitors arrive. Sometimes they came alone, purposeful, their faces muffled; sometimes they were in groups of three or four, already staggering a little with drink and making loud jokes, banging one another on the shoulder and tripping over their swords. They were men, gentlemen, and I knew they were rich because every morning when I woke I would see a little purse of coins stuffed under Adara’s pillow as she slept on through the morning light.
In a while, though, I grew restless waiting every day until Adara awakened, and one morning I too climbed the stairs to the rooms above the courtyard, which each evening seemed so gay and happy. The room I entered was not the grand, golden chamber I had imagined. With the sun stealing in through the shutters I saw a long table covered in wine cups and plates of congealing meat. There was a full chamber pot underneath and the horrid smell of wine and urine was worsened by a pool of vomit next to the fireplace. On the stained floor was a discarded glove, the pale leather soiled and yellowed. I put it on, pretending I was a beautiful grown-up lady, and trying to conjure the chattering glow of the night into that dismal room, when I heard a clatter behind me. One of the maids had come in with a broom and a bucket.
Usually, I hardly saw the maids. They were esclava, their skin purple-black like Adara’s, dressed in plain grey wool dresses with white headscarves. When they brought my food or tidied Adara’s room they barely looked at me, but this girl was standing still as an icicle, gaping, her hands frantically crossing and re-crossing her breast. The spilled hot water steamed as it spread across the dirty floor. I went to help her pick up the broom, but she backed away from me and I heard her footsteps pounding down the staircase. I could not understand what had startled her. I began to creep back down the stairs, fearing Adara would scold me if she knew I had broken her rule.