All eternity.
The words echoed in my head, a terrible punishment I could not imagine. Why had they done it? How could they have done it? I kept seeing those fragile forms in the pinpricked darkness behind my eyelids, and as we rode under the Alhambra’s gateway, I did not point and laugh with the other women at the broken bodies strewn on the rocks below.
My parents, Juan, and Isabella swept ahead with the nobility. Maria, Catalina, and I remained behind with our women. Taking Catalina by the hand and hushing her anxious questions, for she knew something terrible had happened, I gazed at the citadel. With the afternoon light turning to vermilion on its tiled facade, it appeared blood-soaked, a place of death and destruction. And still I was overwhelmed by its exotic splendor.
The Alhambra was unlike any palace I’d ever seen. In Castile, royal residences doubled as fortresses, encircled by moats and enclosed by thick walls. The Moorish palace had the mountain gorge for protection, and so it sprawled like a lion on its plateau, sheltered by cypress and pine.
Doña Ana motioned to Maria; together with our ladies-in-waiting, we marched into the audience hall. With Catalina’s hand still clutching mine, I took in everything at once, my heart beating fast as I began to see just how magnificent the Moor’s world was.
An immense space of saffron and pearl opened before me. There were no scarred doors, no suffocating staircases or cramped passageways. Instead, carved archways welcomed me into rooms where honeycomb walls curved, and secret mosaic terraces could be glimpsed. Glazed porcelain vases held vigil under smoke-darkened hangings of every imaginable hue; quilted pillows and divans were strewn about as if their occupants had just retired. I looked down at my feet to a scarf coiled on the tiled floor. I feared to touch it, thinking it might have been dropped by one of the concubines on her doomed race to the tower.
I had dwelled in ignorance. No one had told me the heretic could create something so beautiful. I gazed up to an inverted cupola. About its perimeter, the painted faces of dead caliphs stared at me with laconic reproach. I swayed where I stood, overcome. I now understood why the concubines had chosen death. Like Boabdil, they could not bear to live without this Eden that had been their home.
The scent of musk crept past me. I heard water everywhere, a constant murmur as it flowed through rivulets carved in the marble floors, emptying into alabaster pools, set to dance in the patio fountains.
I paused. A sigh shifted through the pilasters, stirring the hair of my nape. Catalina whispered, “Hermana, what is it? What do you hear?”
I shook my head. I could not explain.
Who would have believed me if I said I could hear the Moor’s lament?
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THE RANDOM HOUSE PUBLISHING GROUP
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by C. W. Gortner
Reading group guide copyright © 2011 by Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from The Last Queen copyright © 2006, 2008 by Christopher Willis Gortner
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gortner, C. W.
The confessions of Catherine de Medici : a novel / C. W. Gortner.
p. cm.
This book contains an excerpt from The Last Queen by C.W. Gortner, originally published by Two Bridges Press, Berkeley, CA, in 2006 and in different form by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52194-1
1. Catherine de Médicis, Queen, consort of Henry II, King of France, 1519–1589—Fiction. 2. Queens—France—Fiction. 3. France—History—16th century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.O78C66 2010
813′.6—dc22 2010009363
www.ballantinebooks.com
Cover design: Victoria Allen. Cover photograph: Peer Lindgreen.
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