His mother’s body lay on a bed, blood soaking the linens from the back of her head and the cleft between her legs.
In his father’s study, the head had been smashed from the bust of Tully and the head of Felipe’s younger brother, child of his parents’ age and not yet twelve years old, thrust into its place on the marble neck.
At all these horrors, Felipe stared only long enough to comprehend the fact of death. The fullness of grief must wait, for one living voice screamed on.
At last they found its source, in the walled garden, beneath the mosaic-decorated fountain. Three Castilian soldiers were raping Felipe’s only sister, while a fourth looked on laughing even as he bandaged the joint of his right thumb where some defender had managed a crippling blow.
“Serafina!” Felipe started forward, but before he could so much as throw his bare arms round her present attacker, the man, finishing, struck his hard fist to her chin with a force that snapped her neck, opening a hole at her throat.
“Bravissimo, Manuel!” laughed one of his comrades.
They left, in their coarse laughter, taking no notice of Felipe and his guide. Sinking to his knees beside his sister’s body, the young priest wept.
“In all my life…” He gathered her poor body into his arms, willingly smearing himself with her blood. “Never before, except in nightmare, have I looked on the face of carnal warfare. Never have I seen it in all its bitterness!”
“Not that different from ‘spiritual warfare,’ is it?” Then, as though somehow to soften her words, Rosemary repeated, “Grandfather.”
And, so speaking, woke him with her own dissolution beyond the touch of waking memory. He recollected nothing of his dream save that a small dog had licked his foot.
Chapter 2
The News of Alhama
“You’re wanted in the Jewry, Master,” Gubbio announced, striding into the courtyard with market basket still on his arm.
Don Felipe looked up from the idle tale of Don Florindo, survivor of Roncesvalles, and the fair Zorinda that he was penning in the shade of the colonnade. “The Jewry? I hope that they do not expect us to ape their Castilian ways and go sniffing out conspiracies among our Jews of Aragon? Bad enough that we have been commanded to bottle them up in their own quarter as if infected with the plague. Do they suppose that a bishop’s Ordinary has no other work in hand?” (Not that he had. Nothing, at least, that could not wait until tomorrow. Else he would not have been penning his romance of Florindo and Zorinda.)
“Rest easy, master. By my calculation, it concerns only you, not your office, still less his Eminence your noble bishop or Fra Guillaume, either one.” Shutting his eyes, the Italian screwed up his face as if in the throes of concentration. “One who shall be nameless approached me in the market—”
“You mean the beautiful Sarah,” Don Felipe remarked with a chuckle.
Gubbio cleared his throat. “I mean one who shall be nameless. Approached me as I stood examining these oranges—newly come from Granada, you see—to impart the information that a certain Gamaliel Ben Joseph—”
“Gamito!” The priest jumped up with a suddenness he would have scorned to display anywhere else save alone with his servant.
“Ah, so Gamaliel Ben Joseph is Gamito, is he?” Gubbio nodded, obviously unsurprised. “Who arrived in the same ship with the oranges, I would guess, and is staying at present in the house of…let me see…Nathaniel the Silversmith, if your Reverence would like a word with him.”
* * * *
Castile had boasted fierce legal restrictions on her Jews since before the memory of all save the oldest persons now alive; but in proud Aragon, the law confining them to their own district was little more than a year old and largely honored without being observed. If some Aragonese Old Christians interpreted it as commanding them to stay aloof at all times from their Israelite neighbors, others did not: Don Felipe found Juan and Estevan del Quivir, two promising sprigs of one of Daroca’s Oldest Christian trees, looking Nathaniel Ben Solomon’s wares over in search of a gift for their mother. He acknowledged them with a priestly blessing before following the silversmith’s gesture to the upper floor of the house.
It was a comfortable, but not a pretentious dwelling. The stairs led directly into a single room large enough for three beds and, on the opposite wall where it could receive the best light from the windows, a study table reasonably cluttered with bound volumes and a few scrolls.
Gamaliel Ben Joseph stood beside the table, apparently having risen and turned to face the stairs at the sound of the newcomer’s footfalls.
For a moment, the two men stood gazing at each other. Felipe felt torn between joy at beholding a friend feared dead, and pain at seeing that friend clothed in homespun so coarse that its weave was clearly visible across the length of half a room, with a yellow patch blazing on the chest and new Jewlocks framing a black beard of some half a year’s growth. It did not occur to him until afterward that Gamaliel’s hesitation might have been that of any Jew faced with the presence of any Christian priest—even a secular wearing little of the sacerdotal—especially one known to be associated in any way with the Inquisition, whether the ancient one of Aragon or the new one of Castile.
Felipe broke the pause, throwing wide his arms and softly crying, “Gamito!”
In the middle of the room, they met and embraced. Their friendship was, after all, as old as themselves, and each of them already a year or two past the quarter-century mark.
“Old friend, old friend,” Gamito began, when he could speak. “Will you still touch me, when you have heard…”
“My family?” Felipe’s grip tightened on his friend’s arms. “Gamito, what can you tell me of them?”
“Little that is certain.” Falling back half a pace, Gamaliel shook his head. “To have been there is not to know everything, but…we fear the worst. We know that they were all in the city—your good father and mother, both your brothers, the wife and child of your older brother, and your beloved sister, the gentle Serafina—when the Castilians came. Since the day Isabel’s army breached our walls…since that day, old friend, we have seen none of your family, not one. Nor have I found anyone who has. We heard that your father’s house was among those burned to the ground, but I could never return there and see for myself.”
“But…” It was natural to fear the worst for those caught in a city struck by war, yet to have the fears confirmed—to know that the home of one’s memories was no longer anything but blackened ashes, to find oneself alone and familyless in a single blow—and did not the Catholic monarchs pride themselves on the righteousness of their war? “But we were Catholic Christians!”
“Some Christians attempted to side with the invaders—although not, by all that I could learn, until after the wall was breached and the Castilians actually in our streets. Some may have saved themselves in that manner. Abou Aben Hassim spoke of glimpsing one of the Nuñez Calatravo brothers drinking with the conquerors during the days when our own men of Karnattah besieged the city, trying to relieve us, and the Castilians allowed water to their horses and soldiers alone, and none to us their prisoners. But among those Christians made prisoner were a few who dared complain of having offered to join the conquerors and been refused. Many other Christians fought with us for Alhama.
