by Jane Feather
After that, no further attempt had been made to reason with her. They had left the fortress the following morning, a large group of soldiers, retainers, and the three monks with their prisoner. Even in her despair, the livery of Castile had puzzled her. It seemed to imply that their Majesties had had some say in her fate. But why would Ferdinand and Isabella be interested in the fate of a member of a tribe of gypsies? Except that they were interested in Granada … and she had been, albeit unwittingly, instrumental in the present turmoil in that kingdom.
She tried to find a smidgen of hope in the thought of that august interest. Maybe she would not disappear into the torture chambers of the Inquisition, only to reappear on the day of her burning. Maybe their Majesties had another use for her. But the hope hardly flickered before it was extinguished. Their Catholic Majesties were renowned for their passionate interest in the redemption of souls. This one had just been brought forcibly to their notice and had thus attracted the full power of church and state.
She tried to think of Abul, to take herself out of the despair and dread of the present and create another world. But she could only think of how she had failed him. And if he did prevail against his enemies, if he did go to Cordova to fetch her, because Yusuf would have told him that he would find her there, he would never find her … Would he ever discover what had happened to her? Maybe the emir of the Abencerrajes, in victory, would taunt him with the knowledge …
They reached Cordova on the second day’s ride, having crossed the border by a circuitous route that avoided the passes held by Abul’s men. Sarita looked around at the familiar territory of her homeland, heard the familiar sounds, smelled the familiar smells, and none of it meant anything to her. Her senses were dulled, her body aching with the effort to keep upright in the saddle on her jolting mount, her spirit leaden with despair and fear. If she could think of the faintest possibility for rescue, maybe it would infuse her with courage, but never had she felt more alone … indeed, known herself to be utterly alone, defenseless and friendless.
Not even the realization that they were riding through the gates of the royal palace could stir a spark of speculation. The hustle and bustle in the court around her barely penetrated her abstraction. She was half lifted, half pulled from her horse by the retainer who held her rein. She stood with her hands bound, staring down at the cobbles mired with mud and manure, strewn with straw, until one of the monks issued a harsh order and seized her arm. The other two fell in around her, and she was propelled across the court, away from the liveliness in front of the palace, toward a forbidding gray building at the rear.
A small portal set within large, studded entrance doors opened when one of her escort rapped. They pushed her over the raised threshold into a dark, cold passage. The small door slammed shut behind her, shutting out the sounds, the smells, the light of day.
The caliph of Granada entered the palace of their Catholic Majesties with all the pomp and ceremony of a visiting monarch. Abul had planned it carefully. The robes of his retinue were of the richest and most ceremonial, the horses beautifully caparisoned, the procession accompanied by musicians playing the flute and tambor. The vast wealth of his mountain kingdom was on display, just as were the power and the prestige of its monarch. If his hosts suspected he had come as a suppliant, there would be no outward evidence for such a suspicion. The more powerful he appeared, the more intriguing and appealing would be his proposition.
He was granted an immediate audience with their Majesties, as befitted his regal status, but it was an audience of welcome, where courteous greetings were exchanged and no business could be discussed. There should have been some surprise at his visit—surprise carefully masked, certainly—but something. Yet Abul could detect not the slightest shift in the blandly smiling countenances of his hosts, in the protestations of welcome. They would know, of course, that something other than courtesy lay behind the visit. They knew him to be a consummate diplomat as well as an opponent to be reckoned with. But why was he convinced they were expecting him? He would not have come to beg their intercession in his troubled cause. They would know that absolutely, just as they knew he knew where their own support lay and for what reason.
The lord Abul and his retinue were housed with all honor in a guest wing of the palace. Yusuf disappeared, losing himself in the warren of passages in the palace and in the twisting cobbled streets and alleys of the town: his mission to discover when and how Sarita had been brought to Cordova. And where she was held.
Abul waited in a fever of impatience through the elaborate ceremonies of welcome, through the hours of banqueting and dancing. Not a flicker of his dread anxiety was visible on his smiling countenance. He spoke only pleasantries, he danced with grace, he sang a haunting melody of his own land, and he responded with appropriate gallantry to those of the young, carefully chaperoned maidens of the court who were brought his way.
He retired early, when their Majesties did, much to the secret disappointment of several maiden hearts. Such an exotic figure was rarely to be seen at this court, resplendently formal though it was.
Yusuf was waiting for him in his bedchamber. “A woman was brought in this morning, my lord Abul. In the company of two friars and Fra Timoteo, their Majesties’ confessor.”
Abul turned from Yusuf and went to the window. The scent of orange blossom drifted upward on the soft spring air. They were treating Sarita as a heretic of some considerable importance, employing the monarchs’ personal confessor in the business. It might mean he had some time … that Sarita had some time … before they began to break her. But why?
They had been expecting him. Were they using her as bait? Who would have thought he would rise to such a bait?
But even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. Aicha. He had been lured away from the Alhambra with the one fly Aicha had known he would find irresistible.
The knowledge, once absorbed, surprisingly did not trouble him. He had done what they had expected. But he had also done what he had chosen to do. The only aspect that did trouble him was the knowledge that Aicha would relish her rival’s suffering and death. She would hope to achieve that as well as Muley Abul Hassan’s submission.
But she would not succeed. Aicha was not as experienced a diplomat as her husband. She worked from the muddled imperatives of a vengeful heart. Abul could subordinate the imperatives of the heart to the cool reasoning of the head. Even where Sarita was concerned … or so he told himself as he looked out at the velvet night. He had to.
“Where are they holding her?” he asked Yusuf, who had been standing as immobile as his lord through the long period of cogitation.
“In the palace prison,” Yusuf replied quietly. “The secular arm and the religious arm share facilities, I understand.”
The images rose in screaming clarity before Abul’s tightly closed eyes. He fought them down, banished them, but the effort left him weak. He could do nothing for her tonight. Although he was so close to her, he could do nothing for her, except to try to send his spirit to her, across the darkness between them and into the darkness of her prison. To infuse her with his strength to withstand her suffering as he had done before, when he’d brought her back from the borders of death.
She was suffering. There was only suffering in that place. Was it unendurable as yet? A groan escaped him, a sound of such dreadful anguish that Yusuf slipped out of the chamber, shaking with his own sense of guilt.
Sarita swayed, blinking as the torchlight flickered before her tired eyes. The sound of their voices was trapped in her head, the same demand, the same phrases, alternating, sometimes the one voice, sometimes the other. They would not let her lean against the wall at her back, but her knees were buckling. She slipped to her knees on the hard stone, and they hauled her upright again, screaming at her to stand still, to keep her toes against the line they had scratched on the floor …
The morning dawned bright, filled with the softnesses of spring, the harmonious cooing of pigeons nesting
in the turrets of the palace. Abul bathed and dressed in ceremonial robes of black, embroidered with gold. His request for a private audience with their Majesties had been made the previous evening. Now he could do nothing but wait in readiness.
He had been waiting throughout the interminable reaches of the night. He had kept vigil, concentrating on the inner core that would bring quiet to his soul, would clear his head of the extraneous tendrils of panic so that he could do what he had to without the interference of his nightmare imaginings.
He broke his fast and went out into the city, accompanied by men of his retinue, ostensibly to examine the merchandise in the marketplace, to talk with the vendors of leather, silks, and satins, of Venetian glassware and the fine porcelain of the Orient. Their Majesties must not find him straining at the bit, desperately awaiting their summons. So he spent an hour in the dark shop of one who sold illustrated manuscripts, beautiful pieces of work that the caliph of Granada would buy to grace the library of the Alhambra. He examined, he gave instructions to his retinue to discuss the price of those items that interested him, and he strolled back to the palace at midmorning, to all appearances a man utterly at peace, enjoying a leisurely sojourn in this Spanish city.
A liveried flunky awaited his return. Their Majesties would do themselves the honor of receiving the lord caliph before dinner in the Great Hall.
Ferdinand and Isabella greeted their guest with ceremony. Their own councillors were present, but Abul had entered alone. The significance of this was lost on no one, as he had expected. Whatever the caliph had to say was not to be common knowledge among his own people.
He came straight to the point: his abdication for the life of the woman held by the Inquisition in the palace prison.
“You are direct, my lord caliph,” Ferdinand said.
“I see little virtue in being otherwise, your Majesty.” Not a hint of his inner turmoil was revealed on his face or in his posture. He sat easily in the carved armchair, his hands resting loosely on the arms.
“The woman is a heretic. She has betrayed her faith,” Isabella said. “We are concerned for her immortal soul, my lord caliph. It is the unequivocal duty of all Christians to have a care for the souls of their brethren.”
Abul inclined his head. “I honor your resolve, your Majesty. Even from my own differing religious perspective, I cannot fail to honor such piety. However, I would bargain with you for this soul.” He allowed a smile to touch his lips, as if the matter were not of such deadly serious import.
“If we release the woman, how can we be certain you will leave the Alhambra for your son?” It was Ferdinand who spoke.
He received no response, just a steady stare from the lord Abul. Ferdinand cleared his throat and turned to his wife.
Isabella gathered up her skirts and rose. “We will consider your proposal, my lord caliph. But you must understand that temporal matters are of no weight in spiritual concerns. We have our duty to do. A benighted soul to bring back to the light. We are answerable to our God.”
“As I am answerable to mine, lady,” Abul said softly, rising with her. “The woman belongs to me.” He had offered the carrot; now he would flourish the stick. “I will leave here with the woman; my retinue and soldiers will go to the Mocarabes and acknowledge my son as caliph. Or, you will keep the woman and her immortal soul, and I will bring into Granada the support of my brothers across the water, in Morocco, and we will destroy the Mocarabes and the Abencerrajes, and it will not be in your reign that the Spaniards will drive the Moors from Granada.”
His voice was as still and cold as the frozen wastes of the tundra, his eyes as black and piercing as the eagle’s.
Isabella’s hauteur slipped as her eyes shifted sideways. Her husband stood up, signaling to the surrounding court that it should withdraw. “We will consider your proposal, my lord caliph.”
“The woman belongs to me,” Abul reiterated in the same soft voice. Then he bowed, turned, and swept from the chamber.
“It would seem the Mocarabes were not incorrect in their assessment,” Isabella said into the hush following Abul’s departure. “I would not be confident of prevailing against such a man.”
“No.” Ferdinand touched his sword hilt. “One soul for a kingdom.”
“To drive out the Moors after eight centuries,” murmured Isabella. “That would be an epitaph indeed, husband, if we could claim such a victory.”
“Muley Abul Hassan has offered us the victory. The boy and his mother will not be able to gather together the disparate components of the kingdom, shattered by this conflict. The man could, if he prevailed. But without him …”
“A little more manipulation, and it will be ours. Without bloodshed.”
“Are they working on the woman?”
“Yes, but Fra Timoteo agreed with me that they should proceed slowly,” Isabella said. “True repentance rarely comes with speed.” She pursed her lips piously.
“Indeed,” Ferdinand agreed. “Perhaps it would be as well to encourage even more care … just until we have taken counsel and come to a decision.”
If only they would let her sleep. Sometimes she heard her voice begging them to allow her to lie down on the cold stone … just for a minute. But her voice fell, cracked, into the great void of indifference in which she floundered. She was not flesh and blood to these people, whose faces blurred before her, whom she identified only as voices. There was the hard voice, the cold one, the screaming one, the deceptively gentle one. The demands, the questions, the statements came at her relentlessly. Her throat was so parched she could not have answered if she had been able to formulate answers. They wanted her to admit she had had carnal knowledge of an infidel, and she knew she must not admit it. They wanted her to say she had embraced the religion of the infidel. When they said she could sleep if only she would confess, the words rose to her lips. Then she saw the wolf’s gleam in the eyes of the hard-voiced one, glittering in expectation of triumph, and she shook her head. She was thirsty … so dreadfully thirsty. Hunger had come and gone. Her ankles felt enormous, her feet ice-cold on the slabs, like dead fish left swollen with decay on the seashore. Her interrogators came and went. New faces, fresh voices, replaced the old, but still she stood, wondering when the flesh-tearing agony would begin, ready now to embrace it as the beginning of the end.
Abul continued to frequent the court throughout the day. He dined in the Great Hall, joined a hunting party in the afternoon, gave the appearance of a man enjoying himself and the hospitality of his hosts. Not once did his eyes flick toward the grim gray building of the prison, although his heart and soul were within those walls and his body was a mere husk, going through the motions until he learned whether he had won the game.
At midnight, he was summoned to the private council chamber. Ferdinand and Isabella were attended by their senior advisors. “You will send your retinue back to Granada with your written abdication?” Ferdinand asked. “Naming your son Boabdil as caliph in your place?”
“I will do that,” Abul said. “My men will obey my commands. They will swear loyalty to Boabdil.”
“And where will you go?”
Abul laughed, but it was a harsh and unpleasant sound in the paneled, lamplit chamber. “Forgive me, sir, but I do not think that is any business of yours. You have my word that I will not interfere in the affairs of Granada. I will take from here a train of pack mules, a dappled gray palfrey, and Sarita of the tribe of Raphael. All else I bequeath to my son.”
“The woman will be released in the hour before dawn.”
* * *
The questioning ceased with an astonishing abruptness. They took her out of the room where she had stood for nearly two days, allowed only the briefest respite to use the commode, to sit for a very few minutes. But she had learned that sitting only increased the agony when they made her stand again. She had had a few sips of brackish water from a leather flask held to her lips, a crust of dry bread that she had been unable to swallow through her parched throat
.
But now they took her out of the room and locked her into a pitch-dark cell. She stumbled to her knees, waited for the voice that would scream at her, the hands that would drag her to her feet. But there was nothing, only absolute silence. She slipped down until she was lying flat. Her body shrieked in perverse agony at the end of agony. The floor was rough and cold beneath her cheek. The air was damp and chill. She lost consciousness.
All too soon the door was flung wide, and hands hauled her to her feet. Torchlight flickered from the corridor, blinding her tired eyes. Absolute desperation filled her as she staggered on her agonized feet out into the passage. Where now? Down into the depths of this place? Depths reeking of pain, haunted by the screams of so many. She stumbled forward, barely aware of the gray robes of the figures in front of her, of the hands on her arm keeping her upright.
They stopped. A key grated in the darkness. A door creaked open. A square of lighter gray appeared. A hand in the small of her back propelled her forward. She tripped over the raised threshold of a door, lifted her feet with a blind, supreme effort, stepped through the doorway, and found herself standing, swaying, drawing deep gulps of fresh night air.
Abul moved out of the shadows in the deserted court. He stopped, frozen with horror as he sensed her dreadful pain. They had pulled her hair away from her face, so tightly that her forehead was puckered, and tied it with a piece of twine at the nape of her neck. They had dressed her in a penitential robe of coarse sacking. Her eyes stared blankly from the deathly pallor of her face.
“Sarita.” He spoke her name as if only thus could he be certain she was no spirit, condemned to wander the halls of the Inquisition in her soul’s agony.
Her head turned slowly, as if she had to think through each phase of the movement. “Abul?”
