A Divided Inheritance

by Deborah Swift

  Fabian stamped his feet, though it was not cold, and glanced again at the mountain path winding down to the town. ‘I thought we were only coming to Valencia to watch,’ he said accusingly.

  ‘We are. Or we’d be down there in the thick of it with that tercio under our command. Don Garbali’s put us here because this is the best vantage point, and Denia’s layout is similar to Seville.’

  ‘I didn’t know we were going to fight. I thought it was just a recce.’

  ‘We might not have to. But we can see how the thing unfolds from up here, then when it’s Seville’s turn, we’ll be down there with four tercios under our command.’

  ‘All Sevillians?’

  ‘Some, yes. But one of the units will be convicted men from the Catalan prison, trained up. There are other ports enforcing the expulsion order at the same time and the Crown couldn’t raise enough men. My men will be on the quayside – like those.’ Rodriguez pointed. ‘We’ll put the prison mercenaries behind, bringing up the rear, and in the warehouses where they must leave their children. You’ll have charge of those. I need someone reliable.’

  ‘In the warehouses? With the children?’ Fabian swallowed. Rodriguez watched his face. He knew this was not what Fabian wanted to hear, so he tried to explain.

  ‘That is where the most delays will happen. We’ll need to keep everyone moving. I need someone who has the necessary detachment, or it will turn into a fiasco. You will have the tercio of Catalans, who have a vested interest in obeying orders. They know if they do not, they will go for galley slaves or back into the vault in Catalonia.’

  It had started. A slow tide of people was moving down towards the shore. They were kept tightly together by armoured guards, their steel breastplates catching the sun and reflecting shafts of white light towards the waiting galleons. Odd sounds drifted up to them, the shout of ‘Moros, Moros!’ from the spectators, the sound of crying, the sound of people singing, a song with unfamiliar words in a strange, haunting tongue. From here they could watch the people herded on to the ships.

  ‘They seem quiet,’ observed Rodriguez, more to himself than to Fabian.

  When a consignment was on board, that ship inched away and set sail, and another was rowed into its place.

  ‘Where are this lot bound?’ Fabian asked.

  ‘Oran. Back to Araby, where they belong. They don’t want them there either, who would? They’re the dregs of society. Ours from Seville are going mostly to Rabat, but there’s resistance there too. They know most of them are just vagrants, with no skill or trade. Old slaves, some of them, or women past child-bearing age. No use to anyone.’

  The whole road below was now a moving river of flesh. At the quay, it fanned out and broke up into smaller pockets of people. A sudden retort of gunfire and a plume of smoke rose into the air. A small contingent had broken free and was running, scattering in different directions.

  ‘Trouble,’ Rodriguez said, and his men jumped to attention, ran for their weapons, tamped them with powder and shot. Fabian put on his helmet and buckled the strap. When they looked back there were more dark twists of bodies lying on the quay.

  This prompted a commotion at the quayside, with some Moriscos trying to turn back to run the way they had come. Rodriguez caught a glint of steel from within the crowd, but those behind were oblivious to the disturbance and kept marching forth, pushing the crowds down into the narrow funnel of guards before the quay. Those at the front must have managed to smuggle in arms. A sharp retort and clouds of smoke caused the pikeman to fall away, as others hit the ground wounded.

  More gunfire. A swathe of Moriscos writhed and fell, and those behind tripped over them, and still they were being pushed forward.

  ‘Why don’t they stop!’ Rodriguez said. ‘Are they deaf? Surely they heard the musket fire? They should halt them until order’s restored –’

  ‘Too late!’ shouted Fabian. ‘Look at that!’

  The line of pikes disintegrated, and people poured out through the ranks. Some scrambled to board the boats that would take them out to the waiting convoy, some ran towards the town, some scattered into the fields. Those who ran out to the sides produced muskets from somewhere and blasted at the soldiers from behind. The wall of soldiers wavered and then collapsed under the weight of the pressure from behind. Still the battalion behind pressed them forward.

  ‘My God. It’s chaos. Get ready.’

  They positioned themselves behind the brush and the bushes, the musketeers flat on their bellies before them, squinting down the barrels towards the path.

  They heard them before they saw them – the panting breath, the noise of their feet. Three men sprinted towards them, clothes flapping, eyes wild. One of them dragged a heavily pregnant woman by the hand. Rodriguez waited until they crested the brow of the hill before giving the command. ‘Now!’

  The man at the front crumpled over his exploded chest, blood spattering over the bushes and path. Behind him, the second man jerked with the impact of the shot to his head and was thrown backwards at the feet of the man coming up behind. Rodriguez caught a glimpse of the other’s shocked face and his sudden move to place himself in front of his wife, but the musketeer sought him out with the muzzle of his gun. The musketeer took aim precisely, and the shot took off the top of the Morisco’s head.

  The woman screamed and collapsed to her knees over her husband, her eyes wide with terror.

  ‘Cease your fire!’ Rodriguez gave the order. The musketeers reloaded, ignoring the woman keening now over her dead husband, and aimed the muskets down the track ahead. Rodriguez looked to Fabian. ‘She’s not worth a bullet. Fabian, despatch her.’

  Fabian unsheathed his sword and approached the woman. She clasped her hands, brought them up before him, wringing them in the gesture of asking for mercy that transcends all languages, her eyes blank with dread, entreating. Rodriguez saw Fabian hesitate, and mentally willed him on. The woman whimpered something and looked down to her belly. Fabian sucked in his breath in a rasp before he made a practised lunge to skewer her through the heart. Her mouth bubbled blood before she toppled over and he could put his boot on her to extricate the sword from between her ribs.

  Fabian turned away, white-faced, and cleaned his sword on a rag from his pocket. Rodriguez noticed his hand was shaking.

  ‘That’s two more who won’t be going home!’ laughed one of the other foot-soldiers.

  ‘One less Moorish brat for Spain to feed,’ agreed Fabian, panting. He had recovered himself well. Rodriguez exhaled with relief. He would be up to the task in Seville after all.

  The musketeers took down four more runaways, all young men, before no more ventured their way. The smoke from their muskets must have alerted any other rebels to their presence.

  They picked through the clothes of the Morisco men, where they were not too mutilated to do so. They found coinage sewn into the clothes, small valuables and tokens. All of the Moriscos were wearing many layers of clothing so that Rodriguez’s men had to peel them apart layer by layer with their knives, like skinning rabbits.

  With a look to Rodriguez for his approval, Fabian slit the woman’s blood-soaked djellaba and folded it open until she was down to her skin. In the last layer he bared her breasts to find a small bag sewn inside her clothing with clumsy hurried stitching. He ripped it open and a few items spilled out. A child’s plaything – a bone rattle, a hank of dark hair tied together with a leather thong. Two or three pearls rolled away, and he snapped his hand out to retrieve them. It was only when he opened his palm that he saw they were a child’s baby teeth. He grunted and flung them away from him into the scrub, then spat into the dust.

  ‘What was that?’ Don Rodriguez asked him.

  ‘Nothing. Just stones.’

  ‘Look, they’ve got the formation back together now. But we’ve seen what can happen. There’ll be no mistakes like that when we’re in charge.’

  Below them calm had been restored and the procession of people was still moving. They watched
for several minutes before Fabian said, ‘There must be thousands of them.’

  ‘There’ll be thousands more in Seville,’ Don Rodriguez said.

  Chapter 26

  Luisa liked living at the Fencing School, even though it was on the other side of Triana and further away from the pottery where she worked. At least here there were a few young men. Much better than their old yard full of toothless old women, and the pot-bellied grandfathers who congregated at the bodega at the end of the street with their thick black coffee and their endless chess.

  There had been no news of Alma and Merin. And poor Daria had gone to live with her aunt – too grief-stricken and distracted to carry on working. It wasn’t until they were gone that she realized how much their lives had been intertwined. Papa missed Merin, and Mama had nobody to go to the market with. The kitchens at Señor Alvarez’s school were empty without Daria constantly scrubbing vegetables. Luisa missed her, and the next auto da fé wasn’t for three more weeks. Now there was the Time of Grace, if you could ever call it such a thing.

  Mama and Papa chewed over it in low voices, squeezing each other’s hands, bending their heads close together so that Husain should not hear about how they wring confessions out of innocent men with water torture and the rack. They were snappish and on edge, for they knew it could have been them the familiares came for.

  Luisa was so angry at Mama and Papa for their stupid Muslim practices that she could barely speak to them. If they would only stop, everyone could breathe safely in their beds. She was tired of watching Husain leap to hide under the table at every little noise. A loving parent would surely keep their children safe first? It exasperated her. Why did they hold on to it all? Mama said it was tradition, but who for, when their children were standing right there in front of them in bare feet begging them to stop?

  But with Daria and Alma gone, the kitchen empty and bread mouldering in the crock, Señor Alvarez needed someone to step into Daria’s shoes.

  Mama was happy to help Señor Alvarez as long as the family could stay there. ‘Cooking is physic,’ she said, ‘and physic is cooking. And it is better to be busy.’ It was safer there, too, she said, in a yard full of men with swords and bucklers.

  And Señor Alvarez – well, Papa loved to talk with him. They sat long into the night, with their dry-dust arguments about long-dead philosophers. She was sure Papa should have been a Greek himself, he spent so much time talking about them.

  They were deep in one of their conversations again – a discussion about Heraclitus and the logos, and whether the world was rationally organized, can you believe it, when Uncle Najid arrived. A rapping on the courtyard door, and when nobody from the house went to answer it, Señor Alvarez rose from his cushion to go out himself. Husain leapt up too from where he had been playing catch-stones at their feet.

  ‘No, Husain. You stay here,’ Mama said. ‘We don’t know who it is.’

  ‘Aw, let me go with Señor Alvarez, it might be the fig-seller, or the man with the canaries.’

  ‘Or the Inquisition,’ Luisa muttered.

  Mama threw her a look of knives.

  ‘Then they have a very polite knock today,’ Señor Alvarez said, catching her eye, but he buckled on his sword just the same. The knock sounded again. And he was right, it was a gentle knock.

  ‘Come on, then, Husain. You can carry the lantern,’ Alvarez said, and Husain picked up the nearest light and hop-skipped in front of him to the door.

  They waited, straining to hear, but shortly Husain’s excited voice called out: ‘Papa, Mama, it’s Uncle Najid!’ Husain looked proud to have remembered him, holding him by the sleeve and pulling him into the room.

  Mama stood up and hurried to the door to greet him. ‘As salaam alaikum,’ she said, full of smiles, embracing him. He made the traditional reply, ‘Wa alaikum salaam.’

  ‘This is my brother Najid.’ Mama then introduced Señor Alvarez and bade them both sit, and went to make more tea.

  ‘My, how you’ve grown. Look at you now with your butter-and-milk face, so pretty.’ Uncle Najid smiled at Luisa, but his cheeks were thin and haggard and there were cuts and scratches all over his hands. Something had come in with him, some sour atmosphere: the odour of fear.

  Luisa looked down in embarrassment, conscious she was staring.

  ‘How old are you now, my little hen?’ Uncle Najid smiled in an effort at jollity.

  ‘Old enough to help her mother,’ Papa said pointedly, gesturing with his head to the back room where the smoke of the fire clouded through the open door. Of course she understood this meant that just the men were to talk without them. Even the boy Husain, who was not old enough to understand anything.

  She stood up and pulled aside the curtain to go and help Mama who was rolling vine leaves around morsels of rice and peppers. As she went out through the door she heard Papa say, ‘We are all brothers here, Señor Alvarez can hear what you have to tell, for there is something, is there not?’

  She closed her ears, determined not to listen, and concentrated on folding the leaves, slippery with olive oil, and piercing them with the twigs of rosemary to hold them together. Mama’s attention was not on the task, Luisa thought, she had been rolling the same parcel for too long, and she must be curious to know what her brother was doing here. It must be four, no, maybe five years since they had seen him. The last time he came he was fatter and sleeker, and full of hopes of setting up his loom and making his fortune from the rich merchants of Seville. But he was not expecting so much competition here, so Mama said. Seville was full of weavers and embroiderers. Here he was a speck of dust in a lentil pan, and in the end he had returned to Valencia where his skill was better known.

  Husain’s face peeked round the curtain. He was scowling. ‘They say I’ve to come and help,’ he wailed, his mouth turned downwards in a mutinous scowl. ‘Papa won’t let me stay.’

  Luisa pulled him to her and planted a kiss on his head. ‘Here,’ she said and gave him a vine leaf to fold. The men talked in whispers and in snatches of Arabic that she could not catch. Neither she nor Mama spoke, but placed the food on the beaten copper tray, and added the crock of olives and the last of the goat’s cheese, along with the hot honeyed tea.

  Mama looked at her disapprovingly and Luisa knew what she meant. She smoothed down her hair and lowered her eyes before going back through the curtain.

  Already she sensed something different in the room.

  ‘We have to tell them,’ Papa said.

  Uncle Najid said nothing, and an awkward silence ensued.

  ‘Why’s nobody talking?’ Husain whispered.

  Señor Alvarez broke the silence. ‘They have expelled anyone they suspect of being Muslim from Valencia. Even conversos.’

  Mama did not react but put the tray down softly, and said to Husain, ‘Go watch the men practising in the yard for a while.’

  ‘Really? You’ll really let me watch?’

  Señor Alvarez smiled at him and nodded, and he scampered away.

  ‘Tell us, Najid,’ Papa said.

  ‘Forty thousand men and women have gone to Oran.’ Najid opened his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘My city is lost. There is no one left, the streets are empty of traders. Looters fill the shops. We had three days’ notice, to board ship or to suffer the penalty. They left us no choice. Any converso or Muslim left after three days was to be put to death.’

  ‘We heard rumours,’ Mama said, ‘but we never thought . . .’ She moved towards him, her hand outstretched, but he shook his head. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears. Mama pulled her hand away again, for fear her affection would make him lose control of himself and weep.

  ‘You must stay here,’ Papa was decided.

  ‘Have you no one with you?’ Mama asked. ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘A few of us disguised ourselves as women with draperies and head shawls. We sat by the side of the street to ambush a Christian party of soldiers on horseback. We wanted the horses, to go into the mountains,
raise a rebel army. But it went wrong, they recognized one of us, and in the fray only two of us managed to break free. We escaped up the mountain pass, but my friend was badly wounded from a sabre cut, and I had to leave him.’

  ‘Oh Najid,’ Mama whispered.

  ‘It was my friend Ali, remember? Who you met. We’ve been friends since I was . . .’ He paused then, his hands twisting over and over. ‘When I got to the caves where we were to meet, there was no one there. They must have caught up with the rest. I was the only one. I waited a few days. I stayed in the darkness and prayed, but nobody came.’ He laughed, but it was bitter as green olives. ‘You are looking at the only rebel left alive from my whole city.’

  ‘Well, you are welcome here. They would never be able to do that in Seville. The whole city would collapse without our labour, and well they know it.’ Papa’s words were bracing, but Uncle Najid’s eyes looked hollow just the same.

  Chapter 27

  Elspet flapped the flies from her face with her kidskin gloves, which was the only purpose they were fit for in this heat, and searched the crowd for a glimpse of Zachary. She had been in Seville a week and still had obtained no audience with him. Mr Wilmot had written from Toledo requesting to see him and had also left a letter with the slave girl at his lodgings. After a week, still no reply had come, and she was fast losing patience.

  Mr Wilmot had persuaded her to go down to the harbour. The fleet of ships bearing gold and silver from the Indies had been sighted, and he wanted to see the entertainment. She had bought a cheap lace mantilla such as the ladies in Seville wore to protect their faces from the sun, and now she cracked open her parasol which used to be a glorious shade of blue but had turned faded and yellowish-green under the glare. Martha followed, red-faced and grumpy as usual, carrying a basket of provisions – a flagon of water, and some bread and goat’s cheese.