Hart, Mallory Dorn Read online

  One corner of Carlos's mouth twitched. "Listen, Francho, think twice tonight if no opportunity looks worth the risk. You'll possibly have another chance at them before they ride out. We do not want to lose you. Seriously, amigo."

  Francho's smile held affection. He knew it was to Carlos's benefit to caution against excess, for if any one of them were caught and lashed or had a few bones snapped by the guard captain they might implicate the whole family. Yet the boy felt his friend was concerned more for his safety at this moment, and it touched him.

  "Sí, seriously, Carlos. I give you my word to use good sense. I don't relish being taken, either."

  Carlos turned his attention to Pepi. "Did you hear how many ride with the Count?"

  "Y-yes, many, so the constable said. He told the smith to get his fire good and hot for they are riding all the way from S-Seville. At least thirty horsemen and more beside that on mule and foot, a lady's litter and ten well-loaded wagons."

  "You're correct, amigo." Carlos transferred his gaze and inclined his head at Francho. "This looks too rich to pass up. It occurs to me that the illustrious Count of Tendilla must have fine horseflesh under his men, and there will be no moon tonight. If the main party camping outside the walls is close to the Playenda gully, we can run the horses off and into our cave between the guards' snores. The bigger the party the more likely someone will wake up to piss and discover us, but not even Ferdinand the Royal gets God's safe conduct through this life, eh, hombres?" His solemn wink at Francho acknowledged what his face hadn't shown; he was just as avid as his companions to raid this treasure trove which had suddenly hove into view.

  Carlos and some friends had discovered years ago a large, hidden cave under the banks of a meandering river a few scraggly bushed leagues across the plain from Ciudad Real. It had made a perfect stash for purloined animals awaiting the middlemen who would take them to distant towns for sale. The Playenda gully, an almost dry offshoot of the same river with banks overgrown with brush and tall reeds, would conveniently act as a screened highway direct to the cave.

  Pepi, who, in imitation of his brother, was also chewing on a straw, watched Carlos unfold his lanky bones and stand up to brush clinging straw bits from the skirt of his knee-length tunic and black wool hosen. "Where d-do you go now, C-Carlos?" the boy asked hopefully, even though he knew that he wouldn't be invited.

  "To talk with Estaban and Diego Patiza and arrange for tonight. But Pepi, don't tell Dolores about this one or I will cut off your monkey nose."

  "Why?"

  "Because if there are any noblewomen riding in the train they will be festooned with gems enough to make your head reel. Dolores is excited by glitter. She'll get careless and with private guards that is dangerous."

  "She'll learn of it anyhow," Francho shrugged. "The party probably rides by close to our doors. Or she'll hear word of it."

  "That we can't help, but better later, after they've reached the Alcalde's house, than sooner."

  "She'll open your veins for you when she finds out," Francho chuckled, "and mine too."

  Carlos's thin lips slid into the suspicion of a smile. "None of us lives forever. I'll alert Papa and Alfredo." He clapped Francho on the shoulder and ruffled Pepi's hair at the same time. With a brief nod of the head and crackle of straw underfoot, he strode between them and was gone.

  "I wish I w-was old enough to steal horses," Pepi confided wistfully as he watched Francho bite at the corner of his thumbnail, brows drawn together in thought. "Then I would take the fastest one for myself, a great charger with red velvet reins, and r-r-ride quick as the wind like a fearsome knight—"

  "Sí, and they would ride you quick to the dungeons, estúpido, if they found a beggar like you mounted on a rich man's horse. I'm going up to sharpen my knife. How is yours? Dull as usual?"

  "I'll go get it," said Pepi, his button eyes brightening.

  Chapter 2

  Francho sat on his straw pallet under the low, second-story ceiling and ground his small knife carefully against a whetstone, which he held between his knees, drawing the blade up and down against the oiled stone with precise strokes. His dark brows were drawn together under the unruly black curls falling damply on his forehead with the heat, and he whistled softly through his teeth. Musing, he was unmindful of the stuffy air or of his aunt's faint but strident cries rising from the clatter of the kitchen a floor below.

  His thoughts flowed around a possible strategy for the evening's work, but they were soon blunted under the hypnotic rhythm of his task. A distant church bell ringing out noon drifted him into an uncharacteristic reverie, and he recalled, as if the years were just days, the solemn pealing of the bells at Santo Domingo del Campo gathering the pious brothers to their worship all through the day and night.

  Images rose in his mind's eye of the gloomy, thick-walled monastery where he had been abandoned as a baby and which he had left when he was nine: of patient, gray-haired Frey Ignacio, ah, was he still alive; of bumbling Jorge, the other foundling baby raised along with him; and of the old but beautiful Roman-arched church, where his child's dreams and budding love of music had soared along with the brothers' exalted voices.

  Some of the memories were not so pleasant: of endless polishing of silver candlesticks and reliquaries; of the many Latin prayers to be memorized word for word and repeated constantly (and almost forgotten now, he realized wryly); of the austere little cell in which he and Jorge slept, bitterly cold in winter, suffocating in summer, and filled with an ear-ringing silence that nagged at the nerves of a small boy who yearned to shout until the stone walls echoed.

  There were good memories, too. There was a field behind the refectory, where he and Jorge had played, running and shouting and tumbling as they pleased, with no care for the ragged jerkins that covered them. And evening vespers...

  He closed his eyes for a moment and saw the high-vaulted, shadowed church, its nave lit with hundreds of flickering winks of fire that shed warm yellow light on the great silver crucifix over the altar and the white-robed brothers with their tonsured heads. How he had loved the church, the singing, the rich tonalities of the chant. Even as a child it had seemed to seep beneath his skin and fill him up, and he remembered the beautiful painted-wood Madonna with shiny lips who looked down on him from a high niche, smiling and urging him to sing too....

  It occurred to Francho, as he considered his short past, that it was strange that a nine-year-old raised from infancy inside a cloister had felt so compelling a need for excitement that he had finally run away. And he wondered if his urge to live in the outside world had been born in him as a heritage from the unknown man who'd sired him.

  Francho had to smile to think of how strongly he had wanted to become a soldier, how innocently he thought the Christians' commanders were waiting just for him to save Spain from the Moors and become a greater hero than El Cid himself.

  The good brothers had undertaken to raise a wailing babe who had been abandoned at their gate wrapped in a fine wool blanket and dressed in a linen gown, obviously not the child of a common whore. The name "Francisco" was scrawled on a parchment scrap, and after due deliberation the abbot decided this name was God's will, even though Domingo, he felt, would have been more suitable.

  Francho was nurtured and instructed until he was nine, with the eventual goal of passing him through his novitiate and into the community of brothers. But the boy had discovered that by clambering up a chestnut tree growing against the monastery wall and lying along a broad limb he could drink in the sights and sounds of the vivid life on the road below, where not only locals and travelers passed by but also contingents of troops raised by Ferdinand and Isabella. With trumpets blaring they clattered south by the thousands in order to lend their arms to the long and bloody Christian siege occurring outside the Moorish city of Alhama.

  In front of Francho's astonished eyes unrolled long cavalcades of men of high rank and experience, the cream of Castilian and Catalan nobility proud in their shining cuirasses. The
y were followed by ranks of cantering knights and squires and the tramping, sweating foot soldiers attached to their personal houses, as well as levies of impressed regulars from the cities. In the rear rumbled lumbering, heavily loaded supply carts, the drivers urging their mules on with whips and purple curses.

  And in addition, to further this secular seduction, there was Rodrigo, a penniless mercenary who finally died on the eve of San Simon, suffering in the damp cell made available to him by the kind brothers who had honored his wish to breathe his last on holy ground. A small boy had been appointed to bring him drink and what food he could swallow, and the luckless man made friends with the child. It helped him pass the time as he wrestled with the dark angel of death.

  'Drigo told Francho there were two kinds of men on earth: the fighters and the prayers, the doers and the thinkers, the ones who accomplish and the ones who accept. Solemnly regarding the thin little form before his fevered eyes, he told Francho he was sure that he was meant to be a fighter, ward of God or no, just as he was sure that Francho's sire, whoever he might have been, was a soldier.

  "But how do you know that?" questioned the child, his heart thumping with excitement as he imagined having a father who was a glorious soldier in a plumed casque. "How do you know I should be a soldier?"

  "I can tell it, lad, by just looking into your eyes, so blue and steady. The common man here does not have eyes the color of the sky, lad, your people must have been of those fierce ones from the north. But yours are the eyes that should belong to a worldly man, not a monk—one with a strong right arm and a powerful fist. You are young yet, and still stringy, but believe what Rodrigo says, lad, for I have seen boys and I have seen men and I have looked more keenly through them than their confessors. It is my way."

  Rodrigo's leg was gangrenous. It was discolored and swollen and smelled bad. It should have been cut off, but while the man hurled black curses at the overturned wagon which had so badly crushed his limb, he preferred to die rather than let the chirurgeon amputate it.

  Francho liked 'Drigo, even though he was coarse and a little frightening, with his dark, matted beard and powerful voice. The boy stole away from his duties every chance he got, to sit by the injured man's pallet and hear his tales of bloody battles and bravery, such as the story of how Rodrigo had once hacked thirty men to pieces with murderous swings of his double-edged sword until he fell half dead with three crossbow bolts in him, whereupon he used his remaining strength to hack open the belly of a horse and crawl inside the corpse to hide until the battle was over.

  The older Francho could still hear the sonorous voice, surprisingly strong for a man whose end was near, growling at him, "Vive Dios, have you seen nothing but Latin books and psalms all your life? When I was your age I could handle a sword with no trouble and had tasted the honey of a pretty wench, and I fear me that by fourteen there was already blood on my hands. These priests, what do they know? God... and God, that is all. Good enough for some men, I'll warrant, but not for you, boy, you have too much blood in your gorge for that, I can tell. How old are you? Eight? Nine? Time enough to begin to learn how to grip life by the tail."

  Francho, sitting cross-legged, leaned forward eagerly, a hundred questions burning to be asked. "'Drigo, are the gentlemen that ride by with shiny breastplates and gold rings on every finger, are they... I mean, do they fight—"

  Interrupting the stammering child, 'Drigo bellowed, "God's blood, are they good soldiers? Well... yes and no. Most of them have good training, fighting men through and through, ready to lead their troops into battle and ask no quarter. I tell you I have seen some valiant acts that would make you glad to call some of these nobles liege lord. Aha! But some of them sit shivering in their fancy feathers and venture not a toe from the camp until someone takes pity on their fainting souls and sends them back to their ladies, where they play the hero to the sickening."

  He frowned, surveying his rapt audience. "Why do you ask this?"

  Francho hesitated for a moment under that stern look, then squared his thin shoulders and went on anyway. "Because if I were a soldier I would like to be a knight, with a gold saddlecloth on my horse and a big velvet hat with a plume. I would like to have a jeweled dagger, too. But I would be courageous like you, 'Drigo, and not run away from the enemy. Should I see a Moor, I would lop off his head with my sword and wipe the blood off on his tunic." The very thought brought a wolfish grin to the smooth-cheeked, olive-skinned face.

  "Oho!" the sick man exclaimed. "A soldier in fine trappings, is that the lay of it?"

  "I watch them every day from the big tree next to the wall. The caballeros water their horses at the trough, and I can hear them talking of places like Seville, and Valencia, and Toledo. Those must be great cities, 'Drigo, filled with knights and lords and bishops, even the King and Queen and the cardinals. 'Drigo, do you really think I could be a soldier?" Without pausing for an answer Francho leaned closer, glancing around as if someone could hear. "Listen..."

  Realizing there was a confidence coming, Rodrigo forced his pain-lined face into an expression of close attention.

  "Being a friar is all right for Jorge—that's the other boy who lives here. He says he loves God too much to leave His service and he doesn't care about anything else. I love God too, but I could love Him while I was a soldier, just as much, couldn't I? I wouldn't make a good religious anyhow because Frey Ignacio says I lack patience. So I have made up my mind. I am going to be a soldier, not a monk."

  "All very well, lad. But how are you going to go about such a business?"

  "Well, one night I shall swing myself over the wall and go to the town and offer myself as a soldier, ready to fight the heathen in the King's name. And in God's," he added quickly.

  Rodrigo scratched at his heavy beard, noting the determined chin and serious blue gaze. "The Devil's belly, my little lad, you would make a handsome knight to woo a woman, but can you ride a steed? Can you duel with a broadsword? Or heavy distaff? Can you use a pike? Or shoot an arquebus? Or draw a bow?"

  Francho was not abashed by his lack of worldly attainments. "No, I can't. But I can learn, and quickly too. Frey Ignacio says I have a very agile mind. And I can wrestle. Jorge and I sometimes battle behind the stables just for fun. He is bigger than me but sometimes I win because I butt him in the stomach with my head and trip him. He never learns to watch out for that."

  "Do you want me to tell you how to swing a broadsword, Francho?"

  The boy nodded, a smile lighting his face.

  "Then come back tomorrow with a broad stick about so long, and about so far down nail a smaller crosspiece. You shall be my pupil. But not a word of this to Frey Ignacio. He would broil your hide for you."

  "No, not a word," promised Francho, entranced. The door to Paradise seemed to be swinging open.

  "Ah, lad, I shall teach you things that will make you the scourge of the Moslem. I, Rodrigo, shall have a pupil. I shall pour into you all that has made me what I am, and you shall be even more," the dying warrior swore. He waited until the youngster left before falling back exhausted on the small bundle of clothes he used for a pillow, sweat gleaming on his forehead, his teeth clamped.

  Francho went to sleep that night with his ears still holding the sound of Rodrigo's bass voice: "... scourge of the Moors... to the glory of God and Christ... Francho, the courageous..."

  But alas, the lessons were never to be, for Francho could not sneak back to his friend for two days, and when he did Rodrigo was in high fever and half delirious. The silent monk who tended him padded out to join vespers services and Francho slipped in.

  Rodrigo was muttering about omens and signs and insisted that there had been a sign he was to die soon. A black crow had flown through the window of the cell (except that there was no window), had circled the room, and had lit briefly at the foot of the man's pallet, finally flapping out again with an evil cry.

  Rodrigo was flushed and hot, his black eyes burned, the great booming voice was reduced to a croak, which f
ought its way up through his chest with an effort. Drops of sweat stood out on his forehead, and now and then a deep groan escaped him. His leg, oozing under its soaked wrappings, was monstrously swollen, and the odor in the room was nauseating.

  Francho gagged and wanted to run away. Ashamed of his fear and revulsion, he pressed his lips together hard and forced himself to draw nearer to the man. In a pitying effort to divert the sufferer from his pain, Francho pulled down the wide neckline of his jerkin and directed Rodrigo's attention to a puckered scar on his left shoulder blade, a mark about an inch and a half long, white against the olive skin. It was shaped like a cross, Frey Ignacio said, but Jorge had drawn him a picture of it and Francho knew it was shaped like a dagger with a down-curved hilt.

  "What do you think, 'Drigo? Is this an omen too? Does it mean something?"

  Rodrigo stared at the mark uncomprehendingly and then at the boy. His vision wavered and blurred and cleared again, and the boy before him had become twice as big, a man, while the white mark glowed ivorylike in the light of the candle set on the floor. Again everything swayed and shivered and it seemed to him the ivory dagger floated in space, writhing and twisting, and writing invisible words in black blood. He heard a terrible cry rend the air, a cry of disaster, a scream of despair, or was it a groan? Abruptly his head cleared and he saw Francho kneeling on the floor beside him, regarding him over his shoulder with pity and horror, and the dagger was merely a puckered scar on the child's thin back.

  "Francisco," he whispered, and Francho turned and had to lean close to hear him, trying not to mind the putrid smell of the dying man's breath. "You will be a soldier, lad, destined to fight for Castile and for Leon. I have seen it written in letters of blood drawn by the dagger God has traced on your body. You are a secular servant of the Good Lord, boy, and not a priest. Listen to Rodrigo... he can read your omen...."