“Yes. Don Felipe, from my heart, I thank you.… Is there anything else you would say to me?… Would you hear my Confession again?”
“Do you find Fray Giuliano a good pastor?”
It was her turn to nod. “Even as we tell him our sins, he respects us as if we were holy saints.”
Not that the Calé women would have any great sins against purity or chastity to confess: in such matters, they put to shame all too many Old Christians—even the monks, nuns, and popes themselves (rest their souls) Don Felipe remembered from the days of his youth, before the reforms of Torquemada and Cisneros.
“In that case, Doña Pilar,” he said, “I have nothing more to speak of with you.”
He took pride in having hidden his regret that he could find no further legitimate reason to keep her; and yet, as she rose…did he glimpse some slight hint that she, also, regretted how soon their conference must end? Knowingly and consciously, he had offered her the opportunity to warn her aunt of all that he had said. If it were not for that, would Pilar herself have found excuses to prolong their talk?
“Perhaps, Don Felipe,” she said, almost as though reading his thoughts, “we may find another hour…to speak of the Faith? Father Giuliano teaches us well, but he has much to do…and you were the first who opened my eyes. Before you, I had known only Don Fadrique, and sometimes passing monks and friars, but they always kept us at a great distance.”
“Doña Pilar,” he said solemnly, “it would give me great pleasure to speak with you on matters of our holy Faith.”
She kissed his hand and departed. He lay back, wondering whether he stood gazing down into a slippery abyss or up into a dazzling firmament, and marveling that he felt no alarm, but only a deep anticipation which seemed both pleasant and as natural as the ripening wheat or the hatching of a clean, brown egg.
* * * *
Several months went by. During that time, they exchanged letters: one letter apiece, written by their own hands—Fray Giuliano taught reading and writing to any of his flock who wished to learn, and Doña Pilar Labaa had so wished. Don Felipe would not willingly have told anyone how carefully—as if casually—he laid her letter up in his Divine Office, marking the day of its arrival.
Late that fall, he visited Agapida again. Three times within a single year…it astonished himself. This time he braved the roads with Gubbio as his single attendant, and, while he did not in any sense disguise himself, neither did he make any show of his priesthood, riding in completely secular garb, neither too rich nor yet too sober—for he would not attract robbers, and yet his soul throbbed with spring despite the nearness of winter.
He went directly to the Calé settlement, letting no one else, not even Fray Giuliano, learn at once of his arrival. At need, he could put it forward that his experience with Don Fadrique had taught him the need for keeping watch on his vicar, and that secrecy was always useful in such work.
He found that the Calé loved their new pastor just as well even knowing that he need never be aware of their report. This gratified but failed to surprise Don Felipe. His true concern lay elsewhere.
Doña Pilar and he had enjoyed two long conversations during his last visit, both centering on spiritual matters and both in the presence, if not under the scrutiny, of other people—one in her uncle’s courtyard and one beside the stream, in view of the cookfire of some cousins who still lived in their old tent. This time, with the chill wind of November for their excuse, they soon managed to slip away together into a small cavern she had made her own, not far from her uncle’s house. Here were a threadbare but still colorful carpet; some old cushions; two ancient blankets hung up like tapestries; a little hearth with kettle, cups, and firewood waiting near; and, on a flat stone covered with a red cloth embroidered in designs of yellow, orange, and green, a small oil lamp and a tiny printed volume of the Handbook of Erasmus, a precious gift from Fray Giuliano.
Someone must have seen her bring him here; but no one had protested. She was, after all, a mature widow held in honor among her people; and he, the graying inquisitor who had delivered them from a parish priest notable for corruption even in this generally corrupt age of the world.
She mulled a hot herbal draught for them against the chill. They sat awhile, drinking it from little red cups and talking of the size and strangeness of the earth, and whether or not the kingdom of Prester John might be reached by penetrating deeply enough into the lands found by Pereira, Vespucci, and others.
At length, when the pounding of his heart was such that he thought she must hear it as well, he brought out the gold ring with its carnelian the breadth of his little fingernail, bearing the carven likeness of Juno’s head—the ring his mother had given him when, still a boy, he had been sent away to Rome. Now, handing it to Pilar, he said, “Doña, will you be my wife?”
She replied slowly, “You are a priest.” But she seemed to take his question as though she had half expected, even awaited, it; and this enheartened him.
“True,” he assented. “I am a priest. But neither a monk nor a friar. I have looked into this point with some care, Doña. In the time of the Apostles, even bishops were allowed one marriage. Secular priests, like myself, were not forbidden wives until more recent centuries. The ban is no divine law, but merely a changeable rule of the Church.”
“Is that not enough?” She slipped her hand into his. Her fingers were trembling. He held them tightly, trying to still them. She went on: “If we were to marry, could they not burn you?”
“Burn me?” Smiling, he shook his head. “Hardly! When priests marry in private, there is no suspicion of heresy and no work for the Inquisition. Even if one were found who flaunted his marriage with a great public show, the Holy Office would sentence him but lightly.”
“Nevertheless, for you to take even so much risk…” She swallowed and averted her face a little. “Don Felipe, I will be to you as…Béatrix de Córdoba was to Don Fadrique—”
“My lady! Do not insult us both!” He kissed her hand. “I will never make you an outcast among your people.”
“I am barren.” She spoke in a low, halting voice, her head bowed. “With care—”
“No! For your safety, there must be witnesses. Your own people must know that you are my true and honored wife.”
She lifted her face to him, such a smile beaming from her eyes as saints might wear upon first beholding Heaven. He would never know, nor greatly care to know, whether she had offered concubinage merely to test him.
After giving each other a single kiss upon the lips, they left her cave at once, to seek out her uncle.
The following afternoon, Don Felipe sent Gubbio to tell Fray Giuliano that they had come and were allowing the Calé to host them this time, but would visit the village tomorrow. While the Italian was absent, Felipe and Pilar wed each other according to a mix of her people’s customs and his, in the presence of her uncle and as many other Calé as could squeeze into the courtyard of Don Sagesse. Let Gubbio think what he wished—that his master was finally following the example of good Pope Alexander, or that he was carefully sparing his servant full knowledge—Felipe de Granada and Pilar Labaa were husband and wife in the sight of God, themselves, Holy Church (however grudgingly), and the Calé community.
Gubbio might have been just as happy to be left out of the secret, for, whatever he thought upon his return—noticing dark glances, involuntary brief smiles, and the way in which Don Felipe’s bed was made in the rearmost cavern and Doña Pilar’s in the one adjoining, while the servant was banished for once from in front of his master’s door to sleep beneath Florello Montagnard’s roof—he kept his own Italian counsel and manifested none of his usual shrewd curiosity.
As for the Calé, unwieldly though their number was for containing a secret, they seemed to regard their trust with the enthusiasm of children and the skill born of generations of keeping silent where prudence or custom demanded. A people who were able to live their lives never speaking the names of any of their beloved
dead, nor alluding to certain courses of nature—Fray Giuliano had told Don Felipe that he observed Calé parishioners to blush and look down on hearing that Gospel passage in which Christ speaks of what is taken in through the mouth and passes out of the body into the drain—such a people could well hold their tongues between their teeth at need.
Once, during the marriage night, he murmured to her, “Other women have thought themselves barren, and yet borne children safely. Sarah, Elizabeth, Saint Anne…”
He felt the resigned shaking of her head, her long, loosed hair rubbing like fibers of damask over his shoulder. “My marriage gave me many nephews and nieces, no sons or daughters.”
Nevertheless, to hold one another was enough. How simple, after all, and how glorious was this sacrament of married love…the oldest sacrament of all, the one sacrament enjoyed by Eve and Adam while yet in Eden.
Not until morning did he think of Morayma, and then it was only briefly, and with drowsy gratitude to her for having preserved him all these years from the coarse sacrilege of performing this act outside the marriage bed.
His one regret was that he and Pilar could come together so seldom. But, though she would have gone back with him willingly to his house in Ainsa, where none but gadje eyes would watch them, he would not expose her to even the appearance of being to him as Béatrix de Córdoba had been to Fadrique Osorio. They must continue to live most of their lives apart, she among people who knew her to be an honorable wife, he among people who thought him still completely celibate.
Chapter 24
The Dream of the Most Deadly Game
Through the dark wood he wandered, when one came and seized him by the shoulder. Familiarity had rendered her face, though mannish, no longer unpleasant in itself—dreadful only in whatever scenes it might portend. She did not smile.
“Rosemary,” he greeted her heavily. “What Hell do you show me this night?”
She replied, “Haven’t you figured it out yet? Hell begins on earth. What’s the point in worrying about other planes of existence before you clean up the one you’re on?”
“How?” he demanded. “Are we not caught here in some limbo, powerless to change any course of events? When you free me, will I not return to my own life, far in time or place or both from whatever horrors you have shown me, and remembering little or nothing of them? How, then, am I to help purify my own plane, save by furthering the fear of another among my fellows?”
She looked him full in the face, and now she gave him a grim smile. “I don’t know. One of our founding sages said that if we didn’t hang together, we’d all hang separately. Damn good trick, isn’t it, ‘hanging together’?”
Somehow he followed her meaning, despite the strangeness of her words, but before he could make reply, they heard the baying of hounds, and a second woman ran staggering between the trees, to fall in exhaustion a few paces from where they stood.
He thought at first that she was his ancestress, but no—when she lifted her head to stare wildly about, he saw that her skin was dusky and her eyes held none of Raymonde’s calm. He saw also, now, that his first impression of a white robe had been in error, for this woman wore rags in many colors, bloodied like Joseph’s coat, and a gold ring in one ear, though her other lobe was torn away. And the burden she bore in her arms was no martyr’s palm, but a little child over whom she hunched like any desperate mother.
“The earth must be cleansed,” a new voice said behind Felipe. Turning, he saw a tall man at his back, a man of pale skin, blond hair, and gray eyes, who wore a gamma cross banded around the sleeve of his stark tunic. Tears ran freely down his cheeks, but he spoke righteously. “We must be men. No taint of the subhuman races must be left alive to pollute our own superhumanity. We must be brave supermen and exterminate them all.”
“Do it yourself!” snapped Rosemary. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re family.”
Don Felipe looked again, and found Rosemary at his other shoulder; it was a youth, bearing a long gun of the future, to whom the gray-eyed man had been speaking.
“I cannot, sir,” the youth replied with a sob. “I know they are subhuman, but they are so…lovable!”
The gray-eyed commander laid one hand on the youth’s shoulder and said in deep sympathy, “I know, lad, I know, but we must be brave men and purify the world for our descendants. Now do your duty like a man, and I will not report you for insubordination.”
Wiping his eyes with his banded sleeve, the youth raised his gun, took aim, and fired upon the kneeling woman, who fell with a cry, shielding her child even in death.
But now the gamma-cross men had vanished, and a nobleman’s hunting party had just burst into the clearing to fire the shots.
Beneath the woman’s body, the child continued to wail. Laughing, the hunters shot again and again, piercing the corpse until at last the wails ceased.
Don Felipe covered his eyes and turned away from the scene. “At least those men of the future felt pity. At least they did not laugh!”
“They might have felt pity,” said Rosemary, “for all the good it did.”
The hunters had bound the woman’s wrists and ankles to a long pole and were carrying her away like the carcass of a deer. One of them stuffed the infant’s corpse into his bag and followed. Their laughter faded into the chorus of a hunting song.
“I do not wish to follow them,” said Don Felipe.
“Neither do I,” his guide agreed. “Too bad we don’t have to.” Turning, she led him through a door in the wall that he now found had been at their backs.
They stood in a cloistered walkway, the longest he had ever beheld. Looking between its columns he saw, in the open courtyard, the two trees of Eden—of Life and of Knowledge—their branches heavy both with blossoms and with fruits in all stages of development, some appearing luscious beyond endurance, others prickly and rotten on the bough. Around these trees cavorted apes and monkeys of all sizes, plucking and swallowing the fruits with abandon, afterward changing, some into men and women, others into strange twisted creatures like gargoyles or demons.
“In here,” Rosemary grunted, pulling him by one sleeve through a doorway at their other hand.
Into a catacomb like those of Rome, or so he thought at first. Its end he could not see, for the dark winding; its only illumination came from the strange, steady light in Rosemary’s hand; yet their steps echoed as though on scrubbed tile. He began by counting his steps, but at a certain point found himself counting “ten thousand” over and over, with no recollection of having reached that figure from “one.”
“In here,” his guide repeated, throwing open another door.
Light, laughter, and delicious aromas flooded the passage. Drawn to them like nail to lodestone, Felipe entered a banquet hall bright with roaring fireplace and candles enough for a cathedral. They stood in many-branched silver candlesticks on the long table, among its platters of steaming meats. A cloth white as milk draped the board, and laughing men in curious attire ate from golden plates and drank from crystal goblets through which the red wine shone like rubies.
Still more candles clung in sconces to the walls, casting shadows up from dozens or hundreds of trophies, so that the dark ghosts of antlers, tusks, and muzzles danced spiderlike over the ceiling. Among them was a curiously regular shadow, like the outline of a perfect semi-circle. Searching downward with his eyes, Don Felipe saw that it came from the single golden earring of the woman whom he had watched hunted down…
There was her head on the wall, mounted like any other trophy, and the head of her babe beneath hers, so that they resembled some glassy-eyed portrait of the Madonna and Christ Child. Ah, Ihesu! Sweet Ihesu, Mary, Joseph! Was she not Pilar’s own brother’s wife, Calixta Aranse?
“Oh, God!” Felipe cried, staring again at the platters. “What do they eat?”
“Somebody wrote a story,” Rosemary remarked, “about a human being as ‘the most deadly game’ to hunt. Funny, huh? Of course, these men never thought of Gypsies as h
uman.”
One of the feasters threw a goblet at the fireplace. It soared across the long room, to strike with a smash that woke the sleeper. Remembering nothing else of his dream, he lay awake a long while, listening for another crash.
Chapter 25
The Long Arm of the Child
Fernando Lepecheur, Pilar’s oldest nephew, brought her letter: “My Lord Don Felipe, come at once or you will come too late.”
With great effort, the priest held his voice calm. “What is this?”
“Don Gaspar.” White with exhaustion, the boy was swaying on his feet. At Don Felipe’s gesture, Gubbio set a chair for Fernando, who tottered into it and went on, “He threatens to drive us away. All. Forever. They say…my grandparents and the old people…it is like those times beyond the mountains, come down on us again.”
The inquisitor of Ainsa had received his vicar’s letter late the evening before, and it had troubled him all night. Fray Giuliano wrote that old Don Alfons was dead at last, after lingering longer than anyone expected. Barely in time for his father’s funeral, Don Gaspar had returned from his latest journey to Barcelona, this time bringing a middle-aged man in place of his usual lady of questionable virtue. As zealously, even piously, as if his own virtue were not in question, Don Gaspar spoke of finally carrying out certain laws of the kingdom aimed against the Calé, honored but not executed in Agapida since their passage.
Already determined to lay aside all other business and set out for Agapida, Don Felipe had arisen while the morning was still dark. Young Fernando’s arrival at earliest dawn trebled the urgency.
Fray Giuliano’s messenger, none other than his own servant Pablo Savarres, was still asleep on the bed Don Felipe had caused to be readied for him beside the warm hearth. Without waking Pablo, the inquisitor turned the Calé youth over to his good cook Diego Sos to feed and find bedding for. In less time than it might take to mumble a rosary, Don Felipe, his servant Gubbio, and his personal guards Armiento and De Sotra were galloping on fast horses toward Agapida, having left instructions for the fiscal and scrivener to gather two or three trustworthy familiars and follow with all possible haste.
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