“Jai! All four legs with fennel and bacon!” Alejo scolded. The wagon road at the top of this mount was so close now, he could have walked up there faster on his own. “We have to get off this open hillside before the Red Spurs get to the valley. Jai! Up! You want to be soup?”
Padrona snorted and whinnied. She lunged upward in little mountain-goat hops, gravel skittering under hoof.
The punishing sun. Oven-blast wind. The heat from the horse’s overworked body. Alejo was on the verge of being cooked alive himself, but his master and teacher, Don Manuel, had sent word for him in Valencia to ride to the hiding place of the book with “hellspeed,” and so hell is what he’d beaten out of the selfless and indefatigable Padrona. Making matters worse for her, Alejo was being hotly pursued by the Marqués of Málaga’s Red Spur knights. After two years of avoiding these old enemies, Alejo had somehow attracted their attention, and the relentless Red Spurs had sniffed out his trail three days ago in Valencia, where he was seeking word from Don Manuel. They’d been hounding him ever since.
Aiming his red beard into the wind, he looked back down the way he’d come. The dusty green and gold chaparral below wavered with heat devils. That, or his vision was blurring. With a last kick from Alejo and a pathetic surge, Padrona heaved herself between great cracked boulders, and horse and man almost collapsed together upon the summit road.
As he listened for hooves from the valley below, Alejo slid from her back and stroked Padrona’s black-and-white neck. “You climbed a mountain,” he whispered, urging her off the summit road into the cool shade of the cork oak woods. “Don César must be taking his men all the way around to the switchback road because their steeds aren’t as strong as my woman, huh? We have a few hours and you live to see another day without me cooking you. God, you are magnificent! Let’s get you to the well.”
In the cool green light of the oak grove, the mare perked up, seemed to remember the way and began muscling past Alejo to get to the stables, the sweet oats that used to be waiting for her. Alejo reined her close, cocking an ear toward the farmyard. He couldn’t hear anything that made him suspicious, but he drew his espada and whispered reassuring words to the horse as they continued at a careful walk.
The squat, gnarled cork oaks thinned, giving way to the southern arm of the old orchard, where the smell of rotting citrus was oddly reassuring. It reminded Alejo of the storage shed and of packing oranges with the gitano kids to send to the missions and monasteries on the hems of the desert. The children of pickers, those kids had been. They loved dancing with him at their fiestas, and so did their mothers, uncles, grandfathers, and aunts. Basilio had always called them Gypsies, but gitanos weren’t from Egypt, even if they sometimes claimed they were, and “Gypsy” was becoming an epithet that meant con artist and robber. Alejo hated that. gitanos were pouring into Spain, that’s for sure, and many loved the caravan life. But many loved working and playing hard. Like him, these gitanos could outdrink, outdance, and outlast everyone around them. He had many happy memories of those long days of training with sword followed by simple farm work and a night of dancing to violins that wrung him out into hard, nourishing sleep.
By contrast, Alejo had slept five hours a day ago. Too paranoid to sleep, he feared the haggard and twistedly pious Don César was coming to slit his throat in the night.
Alejo hadn’t set foot on this farm since the night these buildings were set ablaze two years ago. The barn was nothing but a ragged foundation now, and Don Manuel’s beautiful maset—his farmhouse mansion—just a rectangle of battered stone. That was where Don Manuel, Basilio, and Alejo had met the Red Spurs, executing the don’s desperately brilliant feint in his lovely dining room, of all places, and giving Basilio time to hide the Book of the Seven Hands. Now, Alejo stood stunned on the edge of the barnyard, as if he could feel the heat of the buildings burning before him, and then his storied weeping began. Loud, strangling sobs. Tears the size of doubloons poured down his face until his mustache and ginger beard were wet, and even the front of his dusty black doublet had wet spots upon it.
Padrona shook loose of Alejo’s grip, and, with an impatient huff as if embarrassed for him, the mare shouldered past him to the stables.
Alejo imagined the don admonishing him for growing so attached to things and places. But he couldn’t help it. After twenty-five years, this was more his home than the one in which he’d been raised. At the age of sixteen, Alejo had come here from the bullrings of central Castile to learn the don’s fighting art—la destreza, the skill—and here Alejo had met his blood-brother, Basilio. It was in the drawing room of the maset, when Alejo was nineteen, that Don Manuel cracked opened the universe for him, revealing that la destreza had been kept alive by certain knights within the Order of Calatrava, itself an old and holy brotherhood of knights in Spain. But this order within an order was something else. It had been the secret weapon of the Holy Roman Empire and the Vatican, fighting in Constantinople, in the icy north of Europe, and as far away as the Silk Road—even carrying out clandestine missions in reconquering Spain, taking it back from the Arab caliphate. Despite the years, the flame of la destreza was still flickering, Don Manuel said, with only a few alive to keep it burning now.
Jaded, the child of a nobleman, Basilio didn’t care about the don’s history. More likely, he didn’t believe it. But Alejo was a nobody, the youngest child of an extremely poor family. One day, his father’s turnip farm would be given to his oldest brother, so he swallowed the don’s history in great draughts and loved it. It was beyond any dream that he dared to dream that he should be the heir of anything, let alone something as old as El Cid or grander than the Carolingian kings. Lying awake in his finely furnished bedroom in the maset, the young turnip farm boy was haunted by the horn cries of those ancient, knightly brothers of his, calling for Alejo from fog-shrouded and forgotten valleys of time to join them now and scoop up their bowing banners before they dipped into mist and out of history forever.
So Alejo became the student and companion of Don Manuel, the noted Comendador of the Knights of Calatrava, to distinguish himself in the Italian Wars, yes, but more notably, to recover the lost art of that other order. He went on quests, sometimes with Basilio, to track down and recover manuals on ancient martial arts, in hopes of finding one that referred to la destreza. Alejo’s favorite scars were gathered during these quests. The broken ribs he’d suffered stealing the German spear manual from a crime lord in Granada. The vicious powder burns from the French attack on Don Manuel’s library in Milan. The worst, though, was not a physical wound but a blow upon Alejo’s mind and soul. Having stolen the Book of the Seven Hands and sailed out of Málaga with the deadly Red Spur knights in pursuit (for the first of many times), Alejo was captured and held in captivity as a hostage of the Barbary pirates, and it had almost undone him. After six years in captivity, Alejo returned to the farm and gave the book to his master. Seeing the stunned look on Don Manuel’s face was the happiest moment of Alejo’s life.
Now, stepping over the charred beams of the old barn, spiked through with tall blue-green grass and crackly dry hedges of matorral, Alejo needed to recover the Book of the Seven Hands from where Basilio had hidden it during that last fight, and leave this place behind for good.
Just then a noise hooked Alejo’s attention.
Unaccountably, Padrona was drinking.
Alejo raised his espada. He couldn’t see the troughs from where he was standing, so he high-stepped through the grass and barn wreckage and sneaked to the stable, where he pressed his back flat against its hot south wall. With a quick bob of his head, he took a fast look around the corner, then flattened himself against the wall again to assess what he’d seen.
Padrona was swishing her long white tail in delight and drinking happily, sloppily. There was so much water in the trough, in fact, that she was splashing it all over the white hair of her forehooves.
A full trough? That wasn’t going to be rainwater, not in the chaparral. Virgen de Promachos, som
ehow the Red Spurs had beaten him here, Alejo thought.
But he hadn’t seen horses. He hadn’t seen bags, squires, or any signs of knights. It didn’t make sense. Alejo bit his scarred and twisted lip angrily. The message from Don Manuel had said the time had finally come and the three of them should meet at his old homestead north of Valencia as soon as humanly possible. Whoever arrived first should recover the book and ride like hell to Vacanana as soon as two of the trio were together.
Oh.
As the pinpoint tip of an espada pressed into his neck, Alejo thought, I always figure these things out just a second too late.
The sharp tip pushed him back till his boot heels were pressed against the slat-board stable wall.
Alejo cranked his dark eyes sideways to look up the length of the sword and saw the perrito guild-sigil stamp in the forte at the hilt—just like his own sword, it bore the mark of Don Manuel’s favorite Toledo smith. Black Andalusian leather gloves grasped the hilt. A sleeve of a black silk.
“You’re dead,” Basilio whispered to him.
“Oh, hello. Yes, I see your sword there.”
Basilio kept the espada pressed hard against his throat, his ramrod-straight arm in perfect Don Manuel–taught posture. He was standing to Alejo’s left, having snuck up behind him along the south wall of the stable. “You have something of mine,” Basilio said.
Alejo looked up along the sword blade. “Syphilis?”
Basilio sighed and lowered his espada slightly. “Lie down on your stomach.”
“Why?”
Basilio offered Alejo a fast, treacherous little stab. Without a thought, Alejo’s reflexes had spun him and rolled him away, so that he was now on one knee, glancing up at Basilio’s espada jabbing into the stable wall where he’d just been cornered. Alejo watched as Basilio yanked the espada free with a sneer. Good God, his old friend was annoyed that he hadn’t stabbed him in the face again? Why?
Alejo grimaced, his scarred lip twisting. “Aren’t we here to retrieve the don’s book?”
“Eventually.” Basilio took a step to his left, forcing Alejo back against the stable wall, and then struck his perfect dueling pose again.
Still kneeling, Alejo got a good look at his compadre for the first time in two years. Basilio’s black silk shirt was dusty from riding, and a ferocious purple bruise darkened his left eye. His hair was black and slick, his brows were heavy, and a full, sculpted mouth on a narrow face made him look more artist than soldier. It was a mouth that announced his every mood, and right now Basilio’s mouth was angry, nasty, eager to prove something.
“You broke your promise to me.”
Alejo gasped in outrage. “What did you say to me?”
Basilio sidestepped with supple grace. He drew his dueling circle further around Alejo, sidestepping, sidestepping, feet never crossing—forcing Alejo to turn with him and place his back against the wall again.
“You broke your word, telling people you saved me, Alejo. Don’t lie. I heard the songs.”
“Songs?” Alejo lunged at Basilio again, the only way to free himself from the wall and get his full dueling circle back. He lunged again, and once more. “What are you talking about? Songs?”
Basilio chambered his opponent’s thrusts easily, giving the ground that Alejo demanded. “I heard them myself. The details were too exact. I know they came from you.”
To keep himself from getting backed against the wall again, Alejo sidestepped into the open farm field.
“Those songs burned through the Gypsy camps down the coast till the song came to me in Sevilla,” Basilio continued. “I got to hear all about how El Saltador saved the life of the Great Basilio.”
Saltador was how Alejo was known in Barcelona, and that made Alejo remember. “Oh. Well. There was that celebration…”
The one that blew way out of control. Ten months ago. When that much wine was flowing, Alejo was always careful not to talk about Basilio. But there was that gitana, the woman with the mole. With the voice that ripped through him with such dark anguish. Alejo was making up songs with her and her violinist brother in the main painted wagon.
Suddenly Alejo was on his back. He wasn’t even certain how he’d tripped, but he knew the fight was almost over as he scrambled backward. Basilio was thrusting, scanning the distance between them, noting how heavily Alejo was resting on his left hand, which foot Alejo had pinned under his heavy black wool breeches. Calculating every inch and angle between them, Basilio counted out his measures as if they were calm heartbeats and not deathblows, slicing and thrusting at Alejo as calmly as a butcher going about his business.
Alejo scrambled back away from Basilio, ready to leap to his feet, but the sword whirled down, striking Alejo’s near the forte. A second later, Alejo’s espada had flown from his hand. Alejo froze. It was a heart-dropping sensation to be disarmed, one that he’d only ever experienced in nightmares.
The Great Basilio’s sword point was now touching Alejo’s cheek. Alejo’s sweat was pouring down his face, into his red beard.
“Admit you wronged me,” Basilio said, his shapely mouth a grimace of hate and revenge.
With the don’s school destroyed, and his two closest friends scattered, the only places that had made Alejo feel alive were the gitano festivals and ulaques that traveled in boisterous caravans up and down the Mediterranean coast. Yes. He remembered the song now. He had been bragging to the woman with the mole and her brother. He’d staggered back from them tipsily and yanked off his doublet to prove what he’d told them. “I saved the Great Basilio,” Alejo had cried in despair and longing for his blood-brother. And there it was. The star-shaped shatter of the gonne-ball wound in the middle of his back. Almost two years old and it was still red-hot at the center of the star.
“Yes, hermano. I admit it,” he said to Basilio.
“Good. Now roll over.” Basilio’s mouth was a moue of sadistic delight. “Onto your stomach.”
Unsure what this was about, Alejo did as he was told and Basilio pounced on him, sitting on his buttocks. He was a narrow, ruthless little man who didn’t have the weight to keep a bigger fellow like Alejo down. But held prone and weaponless, Alejo dared not test the better swordsman.
A second later, Basilio’s sword was slicing Alejo’s doublet up the back.
“What are you doing?”
Basilio’s careful fingers searched across Alejo’s back and found the starburst of welts. Basilio held Alejo down, spread the skin around the wound, and then jabbed the point of his sword straight into the scar.
Alejo cried out in terror and his brain exploded as the sword dug into muscle, pain eclipsing his ability to make sense of what was happening. The sharp sword point turned and carved inside him and blood trickled into Alejo’s armpit. The sword point worked back and forth, down into Alejo’s flesh, and he gasped in pain and horror. The blade found the little iron ball and made sickening little scrapes against it inside his body.
Alejo screamed, out of his mind in pain. “Blasted, leprous, whoreson, murdering, treacherous…”
It felt like a bone leaving Alejo when Basilio finally levered the iron ball from his body. Alejo passed out for a dark, telescoping moment, and when he came to, he was listening to himself whine and wheeze, the full midday sun hitting him like a whip. Sweat was still pouring down his face, making his thick ginger beard damp and hot. Alejo could distantly feel Basilio dressing his wound.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Alejo groaned.
Basilio finished packing the wound and tying it off. He handed Alejo a skin of cool water. “That ball wasn’t yours.”
“It was in my back for two years!”
“Only because you stole it. You had no right to keep it and brag to your drunken—”
In a gush of emotion that brought several heaves of weeping with it, Alejo shouted, “Basilio, why are you angry with me, for the love of Christ? I took that shot for you!”
Like the shadow of a cloud passing across a field, Basilio’s fa
ce softened with real love before it went stony again. “You unmanned me.”
“You were running with the book and your lapels were up!” Alejo said helplessly. “You couldn’t see the arcabuz when Don César gave the order to fire at you.”
With savage contempt in his voice, Basilio said, “So you were ‘protecting’ me.”
“Yes!”
“Then am I your little damsel? Is that it? You must dive in front of a bullet meant for me?”
Alejo’s heart felt like it was blowing away.
“I’m saying—you never would have done that for Don Manuel,” Basilio snapped.
Alejo gaped at Basilio a moment longer, tears clouding his vision. He shut his mouth. The Knight with a Thousand Enemies? The don would have chastised Alejo like a dog, maybe beaten him and cast him from his service for good, if Alejo ever took a bullet for him.
But for the Great Basilio, there was much more at stake than rank and honor. There was—they all still struggled with the words—his truth. His dignity and a dignity in maintaining his truth.
I won’t lie, Alejo had said twenty-five years earlier on this very spot, glaring at his classmate over their crossed swords.
Don Manuel had just given them forged steel discs, charms that both would wear about their necks on chains till the end of their days. His beard was black without any frost in it yet, a desert wolf’s cowl riffling in the hot wind off the chaparral. Wrapped tight about the crown of his head like a corsair’s was the scarf he always wore beneath his crested morrión helmet. His cape whipping, he pointed a wooden training baton at Alejo. Let’s have it. Say your fears now or I cannot teach you. Will not teach you, Alejo.
You’re protecting this lie? he said, his face an open expression of astonishment as he looked at Don Manuel.
Basilio is Basilio! And that is not a lie. Do not use that word again! Well, yes, perhaps it is a lie, I see your point. But if it’s a lie, it’s a lie to nurture and to protect my first and most accomplished student, Don Manuel said, clearly struggling to keep a lid on his anger with Alejo, to give him a chance to understand. As a teacher of this art, I owe protection to Basilio. And to you, Alejo. I would die for either one of you, now that you are in my service.
The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga) Page 2
