The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga)

by Anderson, Barth

  Alejo was nineteen. It stung to hear that Basilio was first in Don Manuel’s eyes. I don’t even have the words for this.

  There are no Spanish words, the don said. None that I know.

  Basilio said to Alejo, The only word I care about is “dignity.” And that’s all I ask that you protect, if we’re going to be students together.

  Alejo shrugged. You can have your precious dignity but I will live to be your better.

  Well said and manly, Don Manuel pronounced. May I finally continue with the head-strike lesson?

  Basilio was less convinced. We are equals?

  Equals. Forever, Alejo sneered, still plainly seething.

  And Basilio would not have that.

  With only the slightest of movements, he delivered his espada point to Alejo’s mouth.

  Oh, Basilio, Don Manuel said in disappointment, leaning on his baton like a cane, watching the blood pour from Alejo’s mouth.

  In generations hence, swordfighters in Toledo and Madrid who knew the life and legend of the Great Basilio would repeat this maneuver in duels with careless opponents whose inattentiveness was perceived as insulting. This marking or branding became popularly known on the Continent as the Spanish Kiss, and Alejo was credited with receiving the very first.

  While Alejo bled, Basilio shouted, The word you’re looking for is “dignity.” Promise you’ll protect mine, right now, or come at me. Basilio raised his espada.

  What is not remembered in either Spain or the Continent is what happened after the first Spanish Kiss was delivered.

  Blood pouring from his cleanly sliced lips, Alejo was angry enough to murder Basilio. But instead he dodged Basilio’s thrust with the hideous speed that Don Manuel had seen Alejo display in the bullrings and seized his fellow student in a rib-crunching bear hug.

  Ha, ha, ha, ha! Alejo shouted, pulling Basilio’s head to his. Kiss me! And he wiped his wounded, bloody mouth over Basilio’s, kissing him until his whole face was just as bloody as Alejo’s. Kiss me, Basilio! Your dignity is everything to me! Ha, ha, ha!

  You dirty son of a bitch! Basilio shouted, craning to get away from Alejo’s dripping wound of a mouth. You dirty, filthy whore of a—God, my shirt!

  Don Manuel said, Well, that was far less manly.

  Alejo didn’t let go until he was sure his blood had been forced into Basilio’s mouth. Then he dropped Basilio in the dirt and looked over at Don Manuel, blood rilling between his teeth.

  I have found my word for Basilio, he said.

  Don Manuel gave Alejo a sly smile and raised his eyebrows. And that is?

  He is my blood-brother now.

  Looking up at Basilio over two decades later, Alejo tried to smile, but his disfigured lip merely curled with menace. “I should have let you take that bullet yourself.”

  “I agree. Thank you.” Basilio cleaned Alejo’s blood from the point of his blade. “Then we are equals again.”

  Whispering, far-off hoofbeats filtered up to Alejo and Basilio from the switchback road.

  “Wounded before the battling even begins.” Alejo twisted at the hips, testing Basilio’s dress of his wound. Then he grinned wolfishly at his compadre. “But to have you on top of me, stripping me, oh, that was paradise.”

  “Be glad that was the only ball I cut from you.”

  Basilio shielded his eyes from the sun and checked its position as he listened to the hoofbeats.

  “A squad of fighters from Zaragoza has been pursuing me. They will be here soon.”

  Alejo started. “Zaragoza? I suppose that makes sense. I assumed that would be the Marqués’s Red Spurs, who have been following me, but it is too soon for them.”

  “No way to know,” Basilio said, helping his friend to his feet with a magnificent smile. “Let’s get the Book of the Seven Hands and see who shows up to kill us.”

  Barreling up the final length of the switchback road was the Vizconte of Zaragoza’s men, thirteen in total, who had been riding at a brutal pace ever since a certain swordsman had slain the troupe’s lieutenant in a raging fistfight that culminated in a duel three nights ago.

  The soldiers dismounted about fifty feet from the stable. Nine of the men removed wheel-lock rifles from their equipment and immediately began assembling and loading the gonnes. A white-sashed officer in an absurdly tall-plumed sky-blue helmet swung from his horse and began mopping his face with a blue kerchief that was perfumed with something so potent that Alejo and Basilio could smell it from the outhouse.

  “How did the Vizconte’s troops get here so quickly? They were a day behind me,” Basilio whispered. He flipped a coin.

  “Heads,” Alejo said.

  Heads it was.

  In irritation, Basilio bit his lip. “Bastard rat-whores.” He looked between the cracks of the outhouse’s weathered plank walls. Outside, sniffing a lazy command, the Zaragozan in the pompous blue plume waved his kerchief at a mounted officer, who then produced a parchment and read it from the saddle.

  “Basilio Arias de Coronado y Morrillo, known in the vulgar as the ‘Great Basilio,’ I am authorized by the court in Zaragoza of his majesty, the imminent and magnificent Holy Roman Emperor Carlos the Fifth, to arrest you for the following crimes.”

  Basilio grunted. “They always do this.”

  “…order to arrest you by the Adelantado de Cuba for the murder of the Indian chief Irrib on the Island of Hispaniola, the murder of the Indian chief Uruda in Santiago de Cuba, and the murder of the commanding Indian chief Rorij in…”

  “What is all that?” Alejo said, frowning at Basilio.

  “…crimes in Santiago de Cuba, along with scores of innocent Carib indians who were cut down by the Great Basilio before they could be converted and saved by the Holy Catholic Church. His esteemed and superb Adelantado de Cuba cedes his interest in this matter to his majesty Carlos the Fifth and authority in Zaragoza…”

  “Cuba? You were in the West Indies?” Alejo said. “Is that where you’ve been for the last two years?”

  “No, I’ve been here, mercenary jobs in Sevilla and Zaragoza, mostly,” Basilio said. “But I had to fake my passage to Hispaniola about a year ago in order to shake a jealous woman in Madrid. Ever since then, I’ve been hearing stories about myself committing crimes in the Spanish islands.” Basilio handed Alejo the dense coil of rope. “Here, wrap one end around your waist, and let’s get this—”

  “Shh. I want to hear.” Alejo leaned his forehead against the outhouse wall so he could peer through a board-knot at the soldiers.

  “…the despicable crimes of sedition, burglary, operating a gambling house and the selling of playing cards, the brewing of…”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Basilio hissed.

  “Half a moment.”

  “…heinous procuring of females, and for the reckless endangerment of a virgin. You are also hereby charged with…—”

  Alejo faced Basilio and smiled his broadest, proudest grin, nodding.

  Basilio shrugged. “Well, that part’s true.”

  “I’m proud of you.” Alejo wrapped one end of the rope around his waist, tied it and handed the rest back to Basilio. “How does one recklessly endanger a virgin?”

  “The only thing I endangered was her rendezvous with a lover from Kiev.”

  “Allow me to rephrase. How do you recklessly endanger a virgin?”

  Basilio gave a wry smile and quoted the don. “‘In la destreza, the desire always wins.’”

  Alejo handed him a small spade. “Your tool.”

  Basilio gave the shovel a dark look from under heavy eyebrows. “This is a new low for the Duke’s line in Medina Sidonia.” The two had pulled up the floorboards of the outhouse before the Zaragozans arrived, and Basilio stood astride the pit, frowning skeptically into the shadows below his boots.

  “Not new. You went down there two years ago.”

  “Two years ago all I had to do was drop in the book. Now I have to dig for it.”

  Alejo watched the Zaragoza m
en through the peephole. The squad’s attention was focused on the stables, where they could see Padrona slurping at the water trough. They were lined up as if they were about to execute the draft horse. “It could be worse.”

  “I’m at the bottom of a latrine filled by you and your drunken Gypsy friends. It’s hard to imagine it being much worse.”

  Alejo could hear the soft sounds of shoveling echoing from the bottom of the latrine. Then a hollow musical note sounded as Basilio’s spade struck metal.

  The don’s iron Bible cask.

  After a few more moments of Basilio cursing Alejo, he said, “All right. Pull.” He was obviously still trying to hold his breath. As Basilio’s raven-haired head emerged into the diffuse light of the outhouse, Alejo could see he was holding the rope one-handed, the little chest tight beneath his other arm. Alejo pulled hard to yank Basilio high enough so that Alejo could grab and hoist the smaller man out of the pit. But he pulled too hard, too suddenly, and the rope slipped through Basilio’s gloved hand. He fell and the rope cinched tight between them, almost dragging Alejo down into the pit. Basilio slammed against the wall of the latrine with a shout of surprise, and the chest flew from his grasp.

  “Dog balls,” Basilio hissed, his voice strangled and urgent. “Lower me.”

  Alejo let out the rope and a moment later, Basilio told him to pull. As he began dragging Basilio upward again, outside, Alejo heard the lieutenant say, “Come with me, you two. We’ll investigate the outhouse.”

  Alejo began letting out rope.

  “No! No! Up,” Basilio whispered. “Keep pulling me up!”

  Alejo gave a little “ssst” to silence his friend. Then Alejo turned and could hear the spurs from three pairs of boots approaching. He drew his espada and stood flat against the outhouse wall next to the door’s cracked leather hinges.

  A Zaragoza soldier opened the door and stuck his head into the outhouse. His gaze landed on the rope coming out of the pit. He followed it with his eyes as it coiled along the floor, slowly making sense of what he saw. A second later, the outhouse door was kicked inward and it struck Alejo in the shoulder, but only hard enough to annoy him. He shoved it back, hitting the soldier on the other side hard, and then Alejo leaped into the sunlight, his espada driving into the man’s chest, then out and in once more. Stepping over the body, Alejo entered the dueling circle of the lieutenant with the preposterous plume on his tall helmet. The officer’s face registered nothing but white-eyed surprise as Alejo’s third in the series of four thrusts hit him in the chest. The thrust didn’t kill him, so Alejo stepped forward into the fourth, which would kill the man.

  But inexplicably, Alejo fell backward, hard on his ass, the rope stretched taught behind him.

  Basilio cried out. “Aagh! Stop strangling me, you sodomite!”

  Alejo mule-kicked himself upright and batted the lieutenant’s sword away with his free hand; in his peripheral vision, he could see the nine gonne men running toward him, weighted down with heavy bags of powder and shot. Alejo neatly swung his espada behind his back and sliced himself free from the rope, and the lieutenant came at Alejo again, chopping his ancient long sword at him in labored, overextended swings. Alejo’s blade turned aside thrust after lugubrious thrust, maneuvering the lieutenant in line between the rifles and himself, until finally, Alejo had retreated inside the door of the outhouse. He took a last, overly deliberate strike from the lieutenant and shoved him into the pit, grabbing the man’s big blue plume as he fell.

  “Take care of that, Basilio!”

  “Stop throwing people on me!”

  “Fire!”

  A shower of splinters exploded at Alejo’s face as screaming balls from the arcabuzes smashed into the outhouse doorframe.

  The officer who had read Alejo’s arrest warrant called out again, “Fire!” And again, wood and dust filled the air in the outhouse.

  “For the love of Christ, they’re shooting at us!” Alejo shouted. “We’re trapped!”

  “No, I’m trapped. You can still get out!”

  “Fire!”

  Cracks and thuds sounded as the nine gonne men fired three by three, shooting and reloading, shooting and reloading, lead balls singing through the walls of the outhouse. Panicked and confused, Alejo crouched as low as he could, but he didn’t really have cover. Balls from the wheel-lock gonnes were big and dense, like little cannon balls, and the wooden planks of the outhouse might as well have been tinder. The little shack is going to last, Alejo thought. The front wall was almost gone.

  “I see sunlight,” Basilio said, delighted. “I’d get out of there if I were you.”

  Alejo turned, kicked out an escape hatch from the back wall and scooted through it. He still had no decent cover, but at least some of the arcabuz ammunition lodged itself in the wood of the back wall.

  Just then, a huge volley came raining through the outhouse and the last walls crumpled in place.

  But then the firing stopped.

  “Reload, you stinking mules!” the officer shouted. Then he called out, “Is Basilio with you, Toreador? Do you surrender?”

  “They broke sequence!” Basilio shouted from beneath the pile of wood.

  He’s right, Alejo realized. They’d all fire at once. Before he could second-guess himself, he leapt over the stack of shattered wood and zigzagged at the gonne troupe, crouching and diving to make himself an impossible target. To the man, the gonne troupe frantically reloaded, ramming shot into the barrels, looking up and down again, distracted by the wild advance of El Toreador. They’d heard the stories, he could tell, by the way they looked up in fear from their gonnes.

  One of the ten had remained calm, however, and stepped three paces forward, raising the weapon to fulfill his duty.

  Alejo stopped dodging, paused long enough to get traction under his boots and ran straight at the one brave gonne man.

  The officer shouted at his man. “Fire!”

  Alejo crouched and bobbed his head downward, coaxing, willing the muzzle of the weapon lower.

  The gonne man squeezed the trigger. The wheel-lock snapped forward. Lit fuse touched powder. The explosion hurled the iron ball at Alejo’s chest.

  At the age of thirteen, Alejo had learned in the ring that the bull commits. It must fully prepare to draw a straight line with its frightening velocity, to bury horns deep into the enemy’s body, to commit to the “one strike” and deliver it with the will to destroy.

  And the response to the arrogance of straight-line strategy is trickery. Once strength and will have been committed to the straight line, once the gonne has been raised, an adept properly trained in la destreza might somersault midair over bull or bullet, horns or hook rifle. Adepts had jumped midair like this for millennia in the Iberian peninsula, of course, hanging fetal over the backs of bulls, the deadly horns passing harmlessly beneath their floating bodies.

  But none like this adept. Balding and deep in the chest, his arms wide like the Christ, with espada in one hand, absurdly blue plume in the other, Alejo landed upon his feet behind the gonne man amid the thronged rank of ten. Stunned at the impossibility of what they’d just seen, the men dropped their useless gonnes, grabbed at swords but stood now in the deadly arc of the espada of the adept, his dueling circle a slaughterhouse, the plume a shield of distraction. With arcabuz smoke still fuming in the air, Alejo was suddenly standing all alone, nine of the gonnemen lying at his feet. The officer too. Ten in all.

  “Cleaning up after Basilio,” Alejo said with satisfaction, wiping his sword clean on an Zaragozan uniform. “The world is as it should be.”

  Then a sound caught Alejo’s ear. It sounded like dogs at first, but then he realized it was the cry of many male voices, and as he listened, there came a rumble of hooves and then one voice was sailing over all the others, piercing like the call of a horn. It was Don César and his knights of the Red Spur.

  “Rojo, don’t just stand there! Let’s go!” Basilio was shouting.

  Alejo shot a look over one should
er and saw Basilio’s slight black figure darting across the yard to the stable. He’d clambered out of the pit and demolished latrine, holding under one arm the iron cask that contained the ancient book.

  “Did you see that? Did you see what I just did?” Alejo shouted back.

  “Do you have a good horse?”

  “All thirteen of them! Never mind. Padrona is with me,” Alejo said, running to catch up with Basilio.

  “That nag is still alive? I owe her for what she did to me in Madrid. We have to meet Don Manuel and his Italian sorcerer in three days, so you’ll need a real steed.”

  “I’ll have you know my woman brought me up the south face just now.”

  “She did not. Impossible.”

  Basilio dashed into the stable and stepped out again with reins in one hand, a magnificent stallion strutting behind him, muscles of its high perfect behind rolling beneath its glossy gold-brown coat. It had a royal neck and an imperious look in its eyes. Alejo hated it immediately.

  “Meet Troya.”

  “That matchstick will never make it down the south face,” Alejo said.

  “We’re not going down that way,” Basilio answered.

  “Padrona and I are,” he said, resaddling her. “You can stay and fight if you like, but those are Red Spurs from Málaga coming up the switchback, not your Zaragoza irregulars.”

  Basilio’s mouth twitched in appreciation. “Well, we’re pressed for time,” Basilio said, mounting up. “I better help you get down the south face.”

  Loops of the knights’ emblem of Red Spurs over a black cross could be seen on doublets and shields, as the Marqués’s men galloped into the farm just as Alejo and Basilio’s horses walked into the cork oak woods. The two were moving slowly and quietly, hoping to secrete themselves into the shadows beyond the stables unnoticed.

  But Don César and his knights didn’t rein up or even slow. They came straight at the two across the farmyard, ignoring the scattered bodies and riding at a full gallop.