by Kage Baker
“I’m hungry and I want some water,” I told the nose.
“You shut up,” it said, “or I’ll bring the gag in here.”
“But I want something to eat.” I backed away from the door a little.
“Got any money?”
“No.” I blinked. Was he serious? I’d never held so much as a maravedi in my hand in my whole life.
“Then you may ask San Fructuoso to bring you some,” he said, and clumped away. I sat down and cried. After a while I went back to sleep in the straw and was awakened by the sound of the cell door opening. A hand thrust through the blinding crack of light and set a pitcher of water on the floor; then it withdrew, and the door bumped shut. I scrambled to the water and drank greedily, until I got sick and spilled half of it on the floor.
After that I wasn’t doing so well. I slept and woke and still got no food; I was beginning to feel very strange, very bad. The next time I woke to see the hand putting water in, I cried at it:
“Please, I need to have some bread!”
It hesitated, and a voice replied: “Your mother is supposed to pay for your food.”
“My mama!” I was so excited. “Is she here?”
“Well, yes,” said the voice.
“Tell her to come get me! Right away!”
The voice laughed and the door shut.
I got through the next few sleeps in happy anticipation of my mama coming for me, until once again the truth began to insinuate itself, whispering nastily behind its hand like the Devil in the paintings. I don’t know how long I was a prisoner there. I couldn’t see the sun; time had altered its pace with me. The Holy Office, I was to discover, had a whole different perception of time from the rest of the world.
Time had a few more tricks to play on me, as will be seen. That old devil Chronos.
At some point my door crashed open and brilliant light streamed in. I rubbed my eyes and tried to sit up. The figure of a man appeared in the light and looked at me.
“Little girl? Get up and come with me.”
“You get me some food first,” I croaked, glaring at him. He took a step or two into the room and crouched down to look at me. And though I know he had to be speaking Galician, because of course I couldn’t speak Cinema Standard yet, I swear to God I remember him saying:
“Wow. You’re in bad shape, aren’t you?”
“Nobody has given me anything to eat since I’ve been in here!” I tried to yell.
He looked at another man, who was standing just outside the door. “Why is this?” he asked.
“Her mother, the woman Mendoza, has not made any provision for her keeping.”
“She’s not my mama!” I exclaimed. “She bought me from my mama! I don’t have anything to do with her and she’s a witch.”
“Well, she says she’s your mother,” said the first man.
“She isn’t either! She is Bad. I am Good. She’s a witch and I told you all and you mean I’ve been stuck in here because nobody listened?” In my rage and frustration I beat my fist against the floor.
The man regarded me with interest. He was short, stocky, and dark, like a Biscayan, with a close neat beard. His clothes were good but rather sober and nondescript.
“Days and days down here without any food and you’re pretty mad about that, huh?” he observed. I was so angry, I just stared at him in disbelief.
He gave a wry sort of smile and glanced over his shoulder at the other man. He gestured. The other man ostentatiously turned his back and stared at the opposite wall. From inside his doublet the Biscayan took a thing like a little book, and from its leaves he extracted something small. With great deftness he slapped it behind my ear before I could see what it was. I reached up to feel it, but he struck my hand away and said:
“Don’t touch it. Maybe later you’ll get some food, but right now the Holy Inquisition wants to talk to you.”
“Good,” I said sullenly as he picked me up.
“You think that’s good?” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“Yes. I have a lot to tell them.”
He nodded thoughtfully and said nothing for a while as he carried me through endless stone passageways. Finally we came into a high room, very fine, with paneled walls and a distant ceiling. I felt swell and feared nothing.
There were three other men in this room, older than the Biscayan. One was a priest. One was dressed all in red. The other was mousy plain and I couldn’t see much of him behind the lectern where his pen scratched. I was put down in a chair, and the others sat at a table to face me.
“So,” said the priest. “You are the child Mendoza.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
Raised eyebrows. “May we ask who you are, then?” asked the man in red.
“I got kidnapped by that bad lady, and her name is Mendoza,” I said. “She’s a wicked, terrible, evil lady. And a witch.” The man in red looked interested. The other two exchanged glances. The priest leaned forward and said:
“Little girl, tell us the truth.” And, that first time, there was nothing terrible in the phrase, no ominous reverberation.
Well, I told them the truth, the whole story, just as I’d rehearsed it so often in the dark. I enjoyed the attention. They only interrupted me once or twice, to ask questions. I finished quite cheerfully and concluded:
“Can I go home now, señors?”
There was no reply. The man in red was flipping through some papers on the table in front of him. “This seems very clear to me,” he said. “Look here, at the inventory of goods taken from the house. A straw image of Satan. Various tools of witchcraft. Stars chalked on the floor.”
“But how many points on the stars?” asked the priest.
“Some had five and some had six,” conceded the man in red. The priest smiled tightly. The man in red went on, “Therefore, in my opinion, this is genuine witchcraft. The woman and her confederates were courting the powers of the Prince of Darkness and intended to sacrifice this child at a Sabbat.”
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“I think otherwise,” said the priest, ignoring me. “With respect to his Grace, the Holy Office does not concern itself with superstitions. These are modern times, señor. Peasants believe in witchcraft; the odd corrupt nobleman plays at it; but it is not a thing to be feared.”
“Surely you don’t deny the evidence of the Malleus Malificorum?” demanded the man in red. His face was red too, and his eyes were bugging out a little.
“We disregard it entirely, señor,” said the priest. “I mean, really. Women flying through the air on brooms. Toads that speak. What intelligent person credits such nonsense?”
“The Bishop, for one,” said the man in red hotly. The Biscayan’s smile twisted deeper into his beard, and the priest sighed and rested his chin in his palm. The man in red went on: “Do you deny that demons can be raised to give powers to those who worship Satan? The German, Paracelsus, was carried off by just such, as all men know. These things have been witnessed and proved, worthy Inquisidor.”
“You are treading on very shaky theological ground, señor.” The priest placed his hands flat on the table. “I would not, if I were you, assert that the Devil has powers equal to God’s.”
“I never said that.” Now the man in red went white.
“Good.” The priest nodded. “So, to the matter in hand.”
“Nevertheless, we should remember that certain deluded souls do form cults to attempt to practice witchcraft,” said the Biscayan diplomatically. I lifted my head to stare at him. This time he had spoken in flawless, erudite Castilian, with just a little Biscayan accent. “And the evidence found in the house resembles such things as these cults use.”
“That is possible, that they were cult objects,” admitted the priest. “But there are other dark rites that involve, for example, stars.” He rounded on me. “I believe this child is a secret Jew.”
Well, my hair stood on end. I couldn’t get a word out, I was so terrified.
“Now,
how have you arrived at such a conclusion, worthy señor?” the Biscayan was asking in an intrigued voice.
“I think that house was a nest of secret Jews,” said the priest. “Look, in all this inventory you will find not one Christian object of worship. Those that dabble in sorcery keep inverted crucifixes, defiled hosts, and such trash. All their cult is based on Christian belief. But the secret enclaves of Judaism find such things abhorrent. Then, too, the woman Mendoza has consistently testified that this child is her child. I point out to you that they both have hair as red as Judas’s beard. I think the child is lying, to disassociate herself from the others in hopes of escape. And you may depend upon it, she is our best hope of getting at the truth.”
I shook my head numbly. I didn’t understand, they didn’t understand, and what did all those big words mean? The man in red was looking considerably deflated, but he rallied enough to say (yes, I swear he did):
“She doesn’t look Jewish.”
“None of them do anymore.” The priest pointed at me with a sneer. “Insidiously they have married into our noblest families and polluted the most ancient racial stock of Spain. Even here in the north, where the Moors never conquered! She may well have fair skin; it’s only the more likely there’s polluted blood there. The Jews have no interest in honest Spanish yeomen. They want noble wives, with rich dowers.”
“No!” I yelled. “I’m very poor! But pure, señor, my mama says so, we’re descended from the Goths!” Whatever they were, I certainly didn’t know, but surely it was important.
“Tell us the truth,” said the priest.
“I am telling the truth!”
“Who is your mother, if not the woman Mendoza?” asked the Biscayan.
My downfall was coming, the consequence of spending my brief life as one of a swarming knot of children. “She lives with my papa and the others. Our house is made of stones. It has tiles on the roof,” I stammered.
“But what are your parents’ names?” pressed the Biscayan.
“Mama and Papa,” I said.
“What is your family name?”
I stared in confusion. The truth was, our house had been remote from the village and I had never heard anyone address my parents as Señor or Señora Anything. And my parents had been in the habit of addressing each other as Papacito or Mamacita or Mi Esposa. Very affectionate, I’m sure, but it sank me in deep waters. I sat there racking my brains.
The priest smote the table with his palm. “What is your name?” he said slowly.
“Hija?” I said at last. I had a long sonorous baptismal name, I knew I had, but I couldn’t remember what it was.
“What is the name of your village?” tried the man in red.
A memory floated by and desperately I grabbed at it. “It’s not Orense because Mama comes from there and she says it’s better and she wishes she could go back.”
“But where do you live?”
“I told you, in a little house. With a fence. And we have a goat.”
Well, it went on like that for what seemed hours, with the dry quiet scratching of the pen taking it all down, establishing only that I was a little girl of unknown origin and apparently no Christian name. The priest seemed very excited, very happy. The man in red fumed. The Biscayan just looked fascinated by it all and kept pressing me for details, which of course I didn’t have.
Then abruptly, in the middle of a question, he stopped and peered at me.
“Are you going to faint?”
“What?” I stared at him. But lights were dancing in front of my eyes.
“The child has had no food since the time of her arrest,” he explained to the others. “It was assumed that she was the child of the woman Mendoza and her food would be paid for accordingly. However, no arrangements were made.” He looked encouragingly at the man in red. “Which could be an argument for your point of view, señor. Surely, if the child was really her daughter, she’d have paid to send the child some food?”
“An oversight,” the priest objected. “The woman has been in continuous interrogation since she was arrested. It could easily have slipped her mind.”
“On the other hand, if the child’s story is true, then the Holy Tribunal has the responsibility of providing her meals, assuming that she is, as she says, a pauper.” The man in red tapped his finger on the documents in front of them.
The priest glared at him. “We have not yet established that her story is true in any respect.”
“Worthy señors,” the Biscayan started to say, at which point I swayed forward and threw up bile all over the floor. So the man in red, acting as the Bishop’s representative, was able to authorize a loan with the Tribunal that I might buy a supper of milk and broth. The Biscayan took me off to a little side room and watched me as I dined.
Before I drank, he took a flask of something from within his doublet and poured it into my milk. I grabbed it and gulped at it.
“That tastes funny,” I said suspiciously.
“What do you want, Rhenish wine?” he replied. “Drink. It’ll make you strong. And believe me, you’re going to need to be strong.”
I shrugged. He leaned there, watching me. The intensity of his watching made me angry. There was no malice there, nor any sympathy, nor any human reaction at all that I could identify.
“You know, they put the woman Mendoza on the rack today,” he remarked. “They’re torturing her. To make her confess she’s a secret Jew.”
Was he trying to make me cry? I’d show him. I shrugged.
He studied me. “Doesn’t upset you, eh?”
“She’s a bad lady. She was going to kill me. I told you that.”
He just nodded. “They’re going to try to make you confess to being a Jew yourself, you know.”
“But I’m not a Jew. I told them that,” I said wearily. “If they would only take me back to my mama, she’d tell them.”
“But they don’t know where your mama is. You can’t remember.”
He had me there. I blinked back tears.
“Come with me now,” he said, and held out his hand.
We went back into the other room, he sat me in my chair, and I glared at them all.
“Little girl, tell us the truth,” said the priest.
“I told you the truth already,” I said.
“If you do not tell us the truth,” he said, just as if I hadn’t spoken, “you will be severely punished.”
“I did tell you the truth,” I squeaked.
“Are you a Jew, little girl?”
“No!”
“When were you first taught Jewish rites?”
“What?”
“Have you ever been inside a Christian church?”
“Yes.”
“That proves nothing.” The priest made a gesture of dismissal. “The Jews go to Mass to mock the Sacrament. Many have confessed to it. What creed have you been taught, little girl?”
What was a creed? I sat mute.
“How often does your mother change her linen?”
“Oh, lots,” I said. “She has to wash and wash, all the time.” I meant rows and rows of little diapers drying on the bushes, but that hadn’t been what he’d meant.
“She washes, eh? And does she wash your food, also, before she prepares it?”
“Sometimes.”
The priest shot a triumphant look at the man in red. “You see? Even considering the child’s age and mendacity, certain things may be discovered.” Apparently he had scored a point of some kind. I looked from one to another of their faces, trying to guess what I’d done. The secretary got up to light a taper, because the room was filling with night. In this pause, the door opened and in came another Inquisidor.
“Excellence.” He bowed. “The woman Mendoza has testified.”
“And?”
He looked cautiously at me, but the priest waved him on. “She has confessed that she is a practitioner of sorcery and stole the child from her parents.”
“See!” I yelled, and the man in
red positively grinned.
“She has also confessed, however,” the Inquisidor continued, “to being a secret Jew, to being a Morisca, to being the concubine of Almanzor, and to being the Empress of Muscovy.” There fell a disgruntled silence.
“Continue the inquiry,” ordered the priest. “Persuade her.”
The Inquisidor bowed and left. “This always happens,” remarked the man in red.
The priest swung back to me. “Do you see what happens to liars, little girl?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t think you do.” He stood up. “We must show you.”
They got up, and the Biscayan took me firmly by the wrist, and we left that room with the secretary scurrying after us, fumbling his paper and pen. We went along some halls to a dark place that smelled bad. I could hear crying, loud crying. I remember a little window high in a wall. They opened it and lifted me up to look through. It was dark in there, but as my eyes got used to the darkness, I could see glowing coals … and other things I would prefer not to describe.
My eyes hurt. And I couldn’t breathe. The priest put his face up very close and said:
“You can save your mother. All you have to do is tell us the truth.”
I remember trying to push his face away with my hand because his breath was very hot. I found myself staring at the Biscayan. He was leaning against the wall, watching me, his mouth set, his eyes blank.
I don’t remember what I said, but I must have said something to make them take me down from that terrible little window and let me look anywhere else. They didn’t take me back to my cell. I was taken to a different room, a tiny place. One chair filled it entirely. Here I was put, and the door was closed. I was left alone in the dark.
But not for long. Briefly the door opened, and the man in red looked in at me. His eyes were full of compassion. “Pray, my child,” he told me. “Accept Jesus Christ as your Savior. Take this comfort.” He hung something on the inside of the door and closed it again.
A little light slanted down from somewhere, and a figure swam toward me out of the darkness. It was Jesus on the Cross.
A word here about comparative styles in religious art. My little village church had been built in the Gothic style. Stone arches, no plaster, not much decoration. Its furnishings were similarly rude and rustic, for we were, after all, a very poor parish. A few rough saints chopped out of the local stone, smoky candles guttering on rock. The church’s great crucifix was old and ax-hewn, stuck up in the shadows behind the altar, and what with the distance and the darkness, Jesus looked as if He were standing in a tree, watching us with alert if yellowed eyes.
