of their women, so that Felipe and Gamito had twice seen their friend Hamet’s younger sister. Those two visions of Morayma, coupled with her brother’s accounts of her, had been enough. After his second glimpse, the boy Felipe had begged his father to approach her father with the proposal of an alliance between their houses.
In wealth, the two families were equal. In social standing, comparable: if Morayma’s family was Moorish in a Moorish kingdom, Felipe’s was descended on both sides from some of the noblest blood of Old Spain—on one side, as family tradition maintained, from El Cid himself. It might have been argued forever which family lowered itself to the other. But the barrier of religion, although in the old ways of the kingdom of Karnattah preventing neither friendship nor good business relations, held both fathers back when it came to arranging a union between their offspring while still little more than children.
Felipe was then fourteen, and his father lost little time before shipping him off to Italy, to complete his education in that completely Catholic country. Two years later, in Rome, he received a letter from his mother which included the news that Hamet’s father had wedded Morayma to a rich Moor of the city of Karnattah, where the whole family had moved. Morayma would have been fourteen at the time of her marriage.
As though sensing Felipe’s emotions, in the same packet with that news his mother had sent him her own golden betrothal ring, set with a carnelian bearing the carven likeness of Juno’s head, in hopes that when the time came he would set it upon the finger of his bride to be.
Not that he would ever find one to take the place of Morayma in his heart! No, nothing was left for young Felipe save to worship her as a knight his sovereign lady—the devotion that neither time nor distance could ever dim, for it depended upon the excellence of the lady rather than the fleshly hope of the knight.
Not that actual knighthood was a vocation which held great allure for young Felipe de Bivar y Aguilar, even despite his proud family name. While not sickly, he had no exceptional strength nor stamina. Neither did he feel any burning desire to dress in iron for the purpose of battering and being battered by a fellow mortal similarly armed and clad. Such sports were all very well for leather-coated boys at play with wooden staves; but Felipe had been thwacked twice or thrice with such a mock weapon wielded over-forcefully, and he saw little honor and less usefulness in putting his excellent brain at the mercy of a true sword or mace.
Therefore, he decided upon the Church. Was not a priest in some sense a knight of God? As well as a man in the way to considerable success even in the worldly sense.
He would take orders, but not enter an Order. Being the child of a cloth merchant, he appreciated fine clothing. Being the child of a wealthy family of Karnattah, he possessed a finely developed if somewhat delicate palate, and misliked the thought of coarse diet as much as he misliked that of sleeping with any other discomfort than the inevitable mouse or bedbug. True, religious houses that actually kept their ancient rules and austerities were fewer than those that did not. But in any wild and luxurious cloister, his virtuous devotion to the lost Morayma would doubtless be put to sorer tests than he desired enduring. As a secular he could keep his independence—even, wealth allowing, his own household—along with freedom to hold himself forever pure and innocent of fleshly love, in honor of his lady.
He would be a true knight-errant of Morayma and God: that is, a secular priest.
Chapter 4
The Dream of the Martyrs of Baal
It was on the eve of his ordination that Felipe dreamed his earliest dream of the two women.
He stood in a parched land: desert behind him, and before, and on his right hand. To his left, distant mountains. Remembering no other goal, he turned and began trudging toward them. His forward foot sank ankle deep in pale sand at every step. His thirst was great.
As the hind longs for running waters …
A hind shimmered between him and the mountains—a pure white hind framed by dry golden dust, azure sky, and the deceptive cloudlike blue of the mountains.
No, not a hind, a woman. A woman clad all in loose and flowing white, like one in mourning, or some sainted virgin. Indeed, the martyr’s palm lay green in an upright line between her left arm and breast, its end resting lightly, even carelessly, in her light brown hand; and while her hair fell long and black to her waist, the sun seemed to strike a pale golden aureole from its crown.
“Felipe,” she said, holding her right hand out to him. “Grandson.”
“Señora,” he answered, taking it, aware only vaguely that in order to do so he must have covered several paces in a single stride, this time without sinking to the ankle. “Who are you?”
“I am numbered among your distant great-grandmothers, and in life I wore the name Raymonde.” Her voice was gentle and musical, yet penetrating.
“Which would you prefer that I call you: Raymonde or grandmother?”
“Either or both, great-grandson, as you will.” Still holding his hand, she turned, and he found that they were already in the foothills.
The hills were almost as dry as the desert. One tiny stream trickled its way through a bed far too wide for it, where a few herbs struggled to stay green. Everywhere else, the dry brown grasses crackled underfoot like the shells of tiny beetles.
“This land has lain long under drought,” Felipe observed.
“Too long. Its people have grown too desperate.” Raymonde pointed upslope.
Felipe became aware of a crowd populating the mountainside, milling about like dusty sheep a little below two high points. For a moment, it seemed to him that all of them stood upon the body of a vast, reclining giantess: himself and Raymonde on one of her knees, the bulk of the crowd girdling her like a broad sash about the waist, with the two high points being her nipples, the ridge beyond and between them her chin. The belt of humanity wound up to cover one of her breasts. The other rose denuded except at the very top.
Then he saw that her nipples were a pair of stone altars, one with a mass of priests surrounding it, the other attended by a single man.
A chant rose from the priests encircling the left-hand altar. The sound swelled and intensified until Felipe felt it as a rumbling in the soles of his feet. The solitary attendant of the right-hand altar began to shout, but Felipe could not make out his words.
“Is it safe to draw nearer?” he asked of Raymonde.
“It is safe for us,” she replied.
The multitude of priests were brandishing blades of various sizes, slashing their own bared arms and chests, shaking their blood upon the bloody altar offering. They might have been pelicans opening their breasts to give life to their young. Their chant had grown into a wail. Yet the offering was a mangle of dead and skinless flesh that could almost as well have been human remains as butcher’s meat.
“Shout louder,” the solitary man at the right-hand altar called across to them. “Your Lord is a God, and He might be sleeping, or eating, or shitting!”
“Who is that blasphemer?” Felipe demanded of his guide.
She answered gently, “Do you not recognize the first of all holy inquisitors?”
Squinting, Felipe could only make out that the solitary man’s altar was heaped with as much anonymous fresh meat as was that of the multitude of
