The Errant Flock

by Jana Petken

  The boys looked on expectantly. David, walking towards the door, said, “You two stay here.”

  Juan wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. He shook his head and sighed. “This must be important, son. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to walk all this way from town in the middle of the night to pay such a short visit. Are you in trouble?”

  “You could say that,” David answered grimly.

  As they left the house, Juan gestured to his other sons, putting his finger to his lips and then pointing to the closed door that separated the bedroom from the main room. “Keep your voices low. Don’t wake your mother.”

  Chapter Ten

  Outside the farmhouse, David’s nervous fingers fumbled with his hood. Hearing the girl cry, he put his hand on his father’s arm, and asked, “Will you listen to what I have to say before you go in there?”

  Juan stared at the hut’s door and then at David. “What’s that noise I’m hearing? Is that a child crying?”

  “It is.”

  Shrugging David’s hand away, Juan said, “You had better have a good explanation for this.”

  Inside the hut, the girl’s wailing drowned out David’s voice. He lifted the child, but this time, he couldn’t soothe her. “Father, what do I do?”

  “Give her to me and start talking.”

  David’s mouth opened and then closed.

  “David?” Juan said warningly.

  “Papa, her life was in danger. I had to hide her …”

  “Stop talking!” Juan put his hand up to silence David and then covered the child’s mouth to stifle her crying. “What is that?”

  David’s open mouth snapped shut with fright. His eyes bore into his father and then he whipped his head around to stare at the door. The sound of hooves thundering across the plain became louder and heavier, and upon reaching the plot, they struck the ground so hard that the hut’s wooden walls vibrated.

  David gasped for breath. “Dear God, the duke?” he choked. His terrified eyes widened. He looked again at his father, rocking the child and gazing with eyes as big as plates at the door. His father had a right to know why the men had come. He had to explain. “Papa …”

  Juan cut David off with a fierce whisper. “Hush up!”

  The horses halted, snorting and whinnying with excitement outside the hut. Men were yelling. David pinned his ear to the wall. He couldn’t hear their words, just animal-like cries. The first smell of smoke wafted through the hut’s walls. David instinctively reached for his sword, but his father swiped his hand away. Then the sound of hooves battering against the ground began again, seemingly scattering in all directions.

  Juan covered the girl’s mouth with his hand and pulled her closer to his chest. Both men crouched in a corner of the hut, as far from the door as possible. Even from inside the windowless wooden structure, David and Juan could see the bright orange torches and hear the crackling of flames through cracks in the timber slats. Terror sat in their eyes as the horsemen’s intentions became clearer.

  Juan uttered the word everyone in Sagrat feared: “Marauders … What do they want with us? We have nothing.” His panicked eyes looked for a weapon. A scythe stood upright against the wall. He grabbed it and stood up, still trying to silence the girl’s weeping with his free hand covering her mouth. “I have to get to your mother and the boys.”

  “It’s too late, Papa. They’ll run you through before you get ten paces from here!”

  “If I’m going to get myself killed, I’ll die trying to save my family! Get out of my way, lad!” Juan whispered sternly.

  David’s mind was racing. Was his father right? Were they marauders? Was he wrong in thinking they were the duke’s militia, his own brothers-in-arms, sent to silence him? But no one knew he was here …

  Marauders were not known for being merciful. They usually killed their male victims and took female prisoners to be sold or used. And marauders didn’t usually attack smallholdings. They preferred towns with richer pickings or robbing caravans on the coastal plains. It had been months since a band such as this had been anywhere near Sagrat.

  He couldn’t breathe … couldn’t believe … God, please not his family!

  “They might not be marauders,” he said. “Papa, trust me – they might be here because of me!” Grabbing Juan’s leg as he stood up, he begged again. “Don’t go out there. You will be of no use to Mama or the boys if you get killed as soon as you open this door. Don’t move! Papa, sit down!”

  Juan stared at David with eyes filled with confusion and terror. His legs buckled, and he fell to the floor, clutching the little girl in his arms. Throwing a scathing look at David, he hissed, “What have you done to us? Isa and my boys are out there!”

  David crawled on his knees to a split in the hut’s wall where the timber was brittle, causing it to crack. He put his eye against the long narrow opening and gasped with horror. It was impossible to count how many men were outside, and he couldn’t see what they were doing, but the bright orange glow lighting up the sky was undeniable. “No … They’re going to burn us out.” He grabbed a loose splinter of wood and pulled it, widening the hole. Squeezing one eye shut, he peered through the breach with his other eye. The house was already being torched. He saw flames rising into the air, whipping the walls, and dancing wildly in the strong wind.

  Isa Sanz’s terrified screams pierced the air, drowning out the crackling flames and, for a brief second, silencing the attackers’ screams.

  David gripped the pommel of his sword and drew it from its leather belt. His eyes were like slits. Fear was replaced with rage. “No more hiding. I’m going to defend my family!”

  His father grabbed his arm and shook his head, horrified. “No, son,” he said tearfully, “you were right. We can’t get to them … God help us!”

  Tears streamed down David’s face. “I have to try,” he shot back. “Stay here and mind the girl. Promise me!”

  “You can’t fight what’s out there.” Juan’s teary eyes pleaded again. “They’ll kill you. Don’t you understand? They’re going to kill all of us!”

  The smell of smoke as well as burning straw and timbers sifted into the air and through the hut’s walls. The marauders were still yelling like animals. David strained his ears. He couldn’t hear his mother’s voice anymore, and he had not once heard a sound coming from Diego or Juanjo. Were they dead?

  The little girl was choking on smoke that she had inhaled. Juan covered her face with his blanket and clutched her closer to his chest.

  David’s eyes stung, and he coughed uncontrollably. The crackling sound of flames and disintegrating wood was overwhelming. Both men looked upwards and gasped. The hut’s roof was on fire. Flames had licked their way through the outer covering and were now inside. David’s heart sunk. “The ceiling is going to cave in!” he shouted above the noise. “We have to get out before we burn to death in here.”

  His father nodded, set the child on the floor, and tried to stand. Coughing, he lifted the child back into his arms and then faced the door, panting as though he had just raced a horse.

  David cracked open the door. He looked at his sword, held against his chest with its point raised in the air. His mind’s eye still saw the blood on it from earlier, and he inadvertently shuddered. Juan stood behind David, holding his throat, trying to stifle his coughing fit. Tears poured down his face, reddened with the scorching heat. Gripping one of his father’s shoulders, David gave it an affectionate squeeze, and then shouted above the noise. “As soon as we’re outside, run with the girl! Run as far as you can. I’ll try to hold them back!”

  The attackers saw David and Juan as soon as the hut’s door opened. Surprise crossed their faces, and they halted their onslaught on the property to watch the men stumble blindly into the open. Regrouping, they encircled their kill, shrieking with amusement at the pitiful sight of the two staggering men still unable to focus their smoke-filled eyes. The horses’ hooves pounded on the ground, at times a hair’s breadth from where David
and Juan desperately tried to dodge the jabbing swords pointed at them from all directions.

  “What do we have here?” a marauder shouted at David, standing with his sword outstretched. “Go on then, dance for us! Make us laugh!”

  David wiped his eyelids and saw the men clearly for the first time. He glanced briefly at each of the assailants. They were not militia but five men he had never seen before. Two of them rode mules whilst two sat on horses without saddles and with thick rope for bridles. Only one of the men, whom David presumed was the leader, had a well-groomed horse, dressed with leather bridle and saddle.

  The men continued to toy with David and Juan. Laughing, they mocked David’s futile efforts to hold them back with his flashing sword.

  David searched his father’s face, still reddened from the scorching heat. Juan clung tightly to the child squirming under his blanket. Her face and body were hidden, but her legs were visible, dangling and swaying with Juan’s rapid twisting body movements.

  His father was looking for a way out of the circular enclosure, but he wouldn’t be able to break through it, David thought. The marauders had them penned in, and after they had tired of their game, they would cut him, his father, and the child down. “What are you waiting for, you whoresons?” he screamed at the horsemen. “Do it! Do it! Get it over with!”

  The marauder’s leader sawed at his horse’s mouth with the bridle and brought it to a complete standstill. The other men followed suit. The expressions on their faces grew serious, and the malicious laughter faded.

  David took a swift step backwards, and with his sword arm still outstretched, he tried to shield his father. Staring up at the leader, he baulked at the man’s arrogant smirk. Who were these men? He panted harder now, convinced that he was in the dying seconds of his life. The horseman continued to stare at David with nonchalant enjoyment. The fire that surrounded them still raged. Sparks flew in all directions, continuing to make the horses jumpy.

  His mother and brothers …Were they dead? David wondered again. He grunted loudly. Any minute now, he would die too, but why should he be killed like a cornered animal? “Who sent you? Get down here and fight me, you bastards!” he heard his shrill voice shout. “What are you waiting for? Fight me fairly!”

  “Not tonight, lad; maybe some other time,” the leader said, still smirking. “We’ll meet again!” Pivoting his horse, the marauder rode off with his men following behind him.

  David was incensed and his mind devoid of rational thought as he ran screaming obscenities after the horsemen. He sprinted as far as he could, until he was forced to stop because of the searing pain in his chest. Light-headed, he bent over double and panted in short breaths. Finally, after steadying his pulse, he ran back towards the house … It was falling to the ground. The roof was gone, walls were crumbling, and the door had completely disintegrated.

  At thirty-nine years old, Juan Sanz had suffered his fair share of loss. But as he stumbled over charred smoking timbers and rocks surrounding his house, he felt like an old man. In so much pain, he craved death rather than suffer his present anguish.

  For a while, the fire had burned strong and fast, but a gusty wind was beginning to extinguish its power. He shouted, and his booming voice overpowered the dying flames, still crackling and snapping pieces of wood. Tears ran down his face as he tried to get as close as possible to the remaining structure. He screamed his wife’s name. “Isabella … Isa! Diego, Juanjo!”

  Running from the front of the house to the back, not once did he lower his ear-piercing shouts for his family. But although he called for them, he had already concluded that no one could have survived the fire or the marauders’ blades. Finally, he sunk to his knees, and his cries matched the sound of the weeping child in his arms.

  From out of the darkness, Juan heard his wife’s screams for help. Stumbling to his feet, he shook with elation, convinced he’d heard his wife’s cries but unsure of where they had come from. “Isa, where are you?” he shouted in every direction. Running towards the open field behind the house, he heard her cries again. At a low stone wall, he saw Diego. Behind him was Isa, propped up against the stones. Her head was bowed and violently shaking from side to side.

  Juanjo’s limp body lay on the ground. His head rested on Isa’s lap, and she stroked his pale cheeks. “Look what they did to our son!” she moaned without looking up.

  Drowning in grief, Juan squatted down beside her and fixed his eyes on the gaping hole just beneath Juanjo’s left eye. The wound was surrounded by a crimson halo, startlingly bright against his lifeless white skin. His blood had streamed out of him. It had turned one side of his face and neck red, and it had spread all the way down to his chest. “My son,” he muttered. “Oh, my poor son!”

  Diego’s hand grasped a rock. “I’ll kill them, Papa!” he cried. “I’ll kill them all!”

  Juan set the little girl down on the ground and then lifted Juanjo’s body onto his lap. Rocking his dead son in his arms, he wept unashamedly, his grief so profound that he was unaware of Isa’s loud sobs and Diego’s questions about the small child sitting beside him.

  “Almighty God, why did you allow this to happen? Oh my lad, my sweet child!”

  Isa picked up the little girl and looked at the tiny smoke-blackened face for the first time. “You’re just a babe,” was all she muttered.

  The wind whipped Juanjo’s straight black hair onto his face, and it stuck to the blood. Juan pushed it away from his son’s eyes and felt his heart crushing with guilt. Three years previously, he and his family had converted to Christianity. He had not been happy about the decision, but it had seemed unavoidable and a justifiable means to an end at that time. The old duke’s ruling to evict Jews from farms and smallholdings on Sagrat’s land had forced many Jewish friends and neighbours to leave the area. Many had left Spain rather than convert or live in the town, faced with new and unfair laws regarding cohabitation and occupations. No Jew wanted to live in the open countryside nowadays. They were being persecuted just about everywhere. The only safe place left in Sagrat was the Jewry, surrounded by its high wall.

  How swollen with pride he’d been, conceited and thickheaded to believe that the Sanz family, who had lived in Valencia for almost two hundred years, would be left in peace just because they had become Christians. The great Juan Sanz had refused to abandon his measly patch of dirt and dilapidated house and had forced his family to become conversos. None of the other family members had wanted to give up their Jewish faith. Isa had fought with him, and his children had not understood why they had to lose their traditions and rituals just to have the privilege of living in an old hovel in a field. “Life was good when we were Jews,” Isa had remarked only recently. “We wanted for nothing. Now look at us – we want for everything. We are Christian beggars in a flock we don’t belong to.”

  He hadn’t listened to her objections, not in the past and not in the present. The family had been baptised and accepted into the Catholic Church. They’d relinquished their holy book, the Torah; Judaist ceremonies; and diet – and all because he wanted to be a farmer instead of a saddle maker. “I’m so sorry, my son. Forgive me,” he begged.

  Diego’s blackened face was full of rage. “Papa, I told Juanjo to run away from the house. I grabbed his arm and pulled him along, but he wanted to go back and save the mule and goat. Mama was terrified, and I couldn’t leave her, even when I saw Juanjo struggling to free the mule’s tethering. Then the animal panicked and reared up … Juanjo fell, and the mule stamped on his face and chest. Papa, I couldn’t get to him in time. He was a stupid boy!”

  Isa said, “Son, those men would have killed you too!”

  “Mama, if they had wanted to slaughter us, they would have!” Diego shouted. “Why didn’t they kill us?”

  Diego was wrong, Juan thought, continuing to rock Juanjo in his arms. The mule didn’t kill Juanjo. His youngest son was dead because of the bastards who seemed to enjoy terrorizing innocent people. As he listened now to Diego’s c
rying, he was also wondering why their lives had been spared and, more importantly, why David believed that the attack was his fault.

  Chapter Eleven

  Exhausted, David dropped to his knees and crushed his tearful mother to him. Over her shoulder, he saw Diego holding the child and Juanjo lying against his father’s chest with his head tilted downwards and his hair blowing wildly in the wind. “No!” he cried out, and then he grew strangely quiet. He stared at Juanjo’s wound, sickened by the gaping hole and sight of blood. His brother, sweet Juanjo, who was so fond of weapons and dreams of soldiering, lay dead, bloodied like a boar!

  The marauders could have come from anywhere, David thought. They had borne no markings of allegiance, but they’d been well armed, like an army. Why had they not used their blades on the family? They hadn’t even bothered to get off their animals’ backs to steal meagre possessions. Their sole intention, it appeared, had been to destroy his father’s trees and buildings. He looked across the plain in the direction of the town and wondered if the town would be next.

  Focusing his eyes on the surrounding area, David saw in the distance two more fires lighting up the sky. “We weren’t the only ones to get burned out,” he said miserably. He wiped his sore eyes, sniffed loudly, and squeezed his lips together tightly in anger. One thing was clear. He would take revenge on the attackers. His brother’s murder would not go unanswered.

  Although the flames were still high in a couple of places, Juan ordered the family to move closer to the house. The fire would keep them warm for a while, he suggested.

  David and Diego carried Juanjo between them. Juan helped Isa, who was holding the little girl … No one had asked who she was or why David had brought her to them. Isa still wept, and every few minutes, Juan blurted out, “The foolish, brave boy.”

  David shivered nervously as he watched his mother’s efforts to settle the girl, who was gasping in short breaths between loud cries for her mama and papa. He wanted his confession over and done with. But when the child was eventually soothed, it was Juan who spoke, not David.