moiled upward, leaning into the slope as it grew steeper. He began a pace or two at her heels, gradually closing the gap until they plodded shoulder to shoulder. “I know these hills,” he observed at length.
“Recognize them, huh?”
“We roamed them as boys, Gamito, Hamet, and I…” He looked again at the smoke. Red-gold billows roiled through it, shaping themselves into something like a face. “Is it akin to that column of smoke which led the children of Israel by day?”
“Probably not.”
“That is not the face of God?” He pointed.
She glanced up. “No.”
Seizing her elbow, he came to a halt. She stopped also, more as though by complaisance than constraint, and stood eying him with an expression of quizzical tolerance.
“Is it, then,” he demanded, “the face of the Devil?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘Devil.’”
“If we are in the mountains of my own boyhood, and you know—as it appears—little if anything more in this matter than I, then, in the name of Heaven, for what purpose have you been sent to guide me?”
“The Lady God knows.”
Recoiling, he made the Sign of the Cross at her.
She neither vanished nor flinched. “Maybe,” she went on, “because I’ll understand it better myself if I see it with you. You can go first, if that’ll get us there any faster.”
“I will not have you at my back.”
“Funny. I don’t mind having you at mine.”
The smoke scowled down at them like some gigantic gargoyle in livid reds and blacks. “That is the face of the Evil One!” Don Felipe exclaimed, staring at it.
“Evil, yes.”
“But if you are unbaptized, and the disciple of heretics, it follows that you must be damned.”
She clapped one of her palms to his forehead, the other to his cheek. “Feel damned to you?”
Both her hands were cool and dry, with only a very slight workworn roughness. “No,” he was forced to admit in confused relief, actually drawing human comfort from her touch.
“All right.” Transferring one hand to his wrist, she pulled him the rest of the way to the top.
He gasped. At their feet lay Alhama, home of his boyhood, her walls breached, her looms smashed, her houses aflame. Her people—Moor and Jew and Christian alike—fled through the streets like panicked ants, soldiers at their heels like greater ants, cutting them apart joint by joint. The column of smoke rose from her wealth, bolt upon bolt of fine woolens and silks, rare cottons and proud brocades, all drenched with not quite enough blood to stop their smoldering away to ash.
“God! Ah, God!” cried Felipe, for the moment past caring that at his side the strange woman repeated her blasphemous “Lady God!”
She was first to recover, if by only a little. “Sorry,” she said grimly. “Those are King Fernando’s and Queen Isabel’s troops, taking revenge for Zahara. Which must have been as bad or worse.”
“Zahara?”
“Last Christmas. And that was revenge for Villaluenga in October. Maybe you’ve forgotten. Or else the news hasn’t reached you yet. In my time, anybody interested, anywhere in the world, could learn about things like this while they were still happening. Maybe you were luckier. You only had local tragedies to cope with while they were fresh. If they happened at any distance, they were cold by the time you heard about them.”
“Such things as these do not grow cold.”
“If you say so. But we’re still witnessing part of the glorious Christian Reconquest of Granada.”
“What…” He swallowed hard and blinked. “What of my family?”
Now they stood in a street of the city, blood soaking the soles of their shoes. A small dog, once perhaps some lady’s pet, came and lapped at Felipe’s right heel, its tongue a tiny pink banneret flittering in and out of the ball of hair, looking like newly washed and carded wool, that was its body.
“Shoo,” the woman remarked, gently, scooping rather than kicking the dog away with one foot. “Well, grandfather, you know this town better than I do.”
He gazed around. Everything looked strange. This street seemed free from present fighting, except at its farther end, where conflict still raged between a Castilian knight and two women, one clumsily wielding a halberd and the other armed with meat-hook and frying-pan. All three ignored Felipe and his companion. Somewhere, a baby’s wail rose, then abruptly ceased. Corpses lay everywhere, draped every window, clogged every doorway. A few seemed whole, though mangled and bloody. Many more were in pieces. The dog had already abandoned Felipe in favor of a severed, beringed hand clutching a scimitar. Over all, the smoke threw an ashy black odor that, mingling with the stenches of blood, fear, and sinful flesh, formed a fog to torture nose, throat, and lungs.
“I knew it once… Once, I knew it well. Alhama de Karnattah…my poor Alhama.” Turning at last, Felipe led the way to the free end of the street.
Here he hesitated, casting about for some familiar landmark in the shambles deserted by living souls, until he glimpsed what he thought might once have been Ben-Siddim’s butcher shop, which had provided his family’s table with so much veal and lamb.
Thus, sometimes finding places he seemed to recognize, but more often wandering lost, he led his guide back and forth among the ruins of his native town for an interminable period. Now and then they passed near some last hand-to-hand combat, but without drawing the attention of those involved. Once, indeed, Don Felipe strove to halt a rape in progress, and once to rescue a half-grown boy from the pikes of two assailants. Each time he found himself and his self-styled descendant suddenly translated into another street, to begin the weary search anew.
“How, then,” he asked after the second failed attempt, “was the dog able to lick my feet?”
She answered, “Dogs go by their own guidelines.”
Privately, he could not help but rejoice whenever he saw the corpse of a Castilian invader or recognizable fragment thereof amid the carnage, although he saw that he must lock such rejoicings forever within his own breast, as disloyal alike to king, queen, and Holy Mother Church.
Eventually he stumbled on an arm that looked grotesquely familiar. Overcoming fear, he turned his head to follow the direction of the stump. His gaze met a doorway clotted with the frozen bodies of his father and elder brother.
“Here.” He could say no more. The door hung in splinters. From inside the house poured screams and a few curls of smoke.
The policewoman gave his shoulder a grip of solace, muttered, “I’m sorry,” and began climbing through a gap in the front wall. Numb, Felipe followed.
His brother’s wife lay on the floor, staring sightlessly up, her arms still locked about the top half of her child. Its lower half lay in the far corner. Felipe had never
