by Peter Kerr
The old fellow was doing his best to pull himself together. ‘No, no, Little Pedro,’ he blurted out, ‘I mean – that is, I only meant that – well, what I’m trying to say is that no man deserves such a thing to happen to him.’
Pedrito pulled him into another hug, patting his back the way one would an upset child. ‘Well, all right,’ he said soothingly, ‘I have to admit that spending a few years as a galley slave wasn’t all that pleasant.’ He leaned back, looked into the old man’s upturned face and smiled. ‘But don’t you fret. It could have been worse. The main thing is that I survived, and I’ve come back – back here, back home, where I belong.’
The look that Baltazar now gave Pedrito sent a shiver down his spine. It was obvious that the old neighbour was struggling to find the right words to say.
‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ Pedrito prompted, his heart in his mouth. ‘If anything’s wrong, just tell me. It’s better I know if something’s –’
Baltazar silenced him with a raised hand. ‘So, you – you didn’t talk to anyone in the village as you came through?’
Pedrito told him that he was so desperate to see his family that he’d taken a shortcut and had come straight here.
Baltazar inhaled slowly, making a supreme effort to control his emotions. He gestured towards the higher gound on the opposite side of the Torrent. ‘I was grazing my goats on one of the bancales there on the day you were taken. I saw it all, but – well, I was too far away to…’ His lowered his voice with his eyes. ‘What could I have done anyway – you know, one old man against a raiding party of Moorish pirates?’
Pedrito assured him that there was nothing any one person could have done to alter what had happened to him, so Baltazar shouldn’t feel guilty. He repeated that the main thing was that he’d survived the ensuing years of bondage and had come safely home at last.
But the look on Baltazar’s face throughout this increasingly forlorn attempt at stoicism told Pedrito that what had been on the tip of the old man’s tongue all along concerned something much more painful than his own abduction, regrettable though that had been.
‘I saw it all,’ Baltazar repeated, his eyes downcast, his voice quavering. ‘But there was nothing I could do.’
Several tense moments passed, before Pedrito braced himself and said, ‘It’s my father, isn’t it? Something’s happened to my father, hasn’t it?’
Tears were filling Baltazar’s eyes again. ‘If only you’d come though the village, they would have said … and I wouldn’t have to tell you that the …’ Again, his words faded away and he began to sniffle.
Although Pedrito knew that he would have to face the truth, no matter how unpleasant, he just could not bring himself to press the old neighbour further at this moment. His feelings were too confused: anticipation having become elation, elation having turned to joy, joy having been tempered by apprehension, and now the blood-chilling dread that he was about to be confronted with news of a type he had refused to even contemplate during the long years of separation from his family.
Eventually, it was Baltazar who recovered enough composure to speak again. ‘They – the Moors, when they took you – they came at you from behind that wall by the Torrent down there, while you were working the ground with your mule, no?’
Pedrito indicated the affirmative. How could he forget that?
‘Well,’ Baltazar continued, ‘you were slung over the back of your own mule and taken down to the bay by a couple of Moors, while some more of them – maybe five or six – crept up here to the horta, where –’
‘Where my mother and father were working. Sí, sí, I remember that.’ A sudden surge of anger was now beginning to vie with the dread churning Pedrito’s stomach. ‘But why would they want to take my father? A fit man, certainly – fitter than most men his age – but too old to be sold as a slave, so why would they want to …’
Baltazar feigned a cough, steadying his voice. He motioned towards a corner of the horta nearest the house. ‘They, uh – we, that is – well, you know that your father and mother’s favourite view of the bay –’
‘Is from there. Sí, sí, I know, I know!’ Pedrito snapped. He didn’t mean to sound blunt or unsympathetic towards the old man’s feelings, which he could tell were just as much in disarray as his own, but he was being controlled now by a terrible inner conflict between a need to know the truth and a fear of being presented with it.
Baltazar could sense this too. Searching for the right words, he nodded again towards the same corner of the horta. ‘We put little wooden crosses – two of them, side by side – in the same place they used to sit and watch the sun setting over the…’ He heaved a great, shuddering sigh, tears dripping from the end of his nose. ‘I’m sorry, Little Pedro,’ he sniffed. ‘I’m truly, truly sorry.’
It was as if an icy arrow had pierced Pedrito’s very soul. He had witnessed so much cruelty and sorrow during his years as a galley slave and had seen death and suffering on a hitherto unimaginable scale over the past few days, yet none of those horrors had prepared him for this, the loss of his own parents – or the only parents he had ever known. He stood silent for a while, stunned, unable to even think, hardly aware of anything but the depths of emptiness into which he was sinking. But there was one thing he still needed to know – the only thing that could now light a candle of hope in his enveloping darkness.
‘And my little sister,’ he said after a bit. ‘Little Esperança. Pray to God that she’s still safe. She is, isn’t she, Baltazar?’
Baltazar looked at Pedrito in a way that sent another chill through his bones. Again, it was obvious that Baltazar was trying to find words which might lessen the pain of what he had to say. Yet the very fact that he was hesitating merely added to Pedrito’s agony.
‘Please, Baltazar,’ he said softly, ‘– I need to know.’
‘I saw it all,’ the old man repeated, wringing his hands. ‘I saw it all, but there was nothing I could do.’
Pedrito patted his shoulder. ‘I know, I know,’ he murmured. ‘And please don’t blame yourself for whatever happened. Believe me, I know only too well the torture of being powerless to prevent –’
‘It was Esperança they wanted,’ Baltazar interrupted, spitting out the words as if ridding his mouth of a bad taste that had been endured too long. ‘You see, after they took you, they looked up here and saw her coming from the house. Carrying a jug of water to your mother and father, maybe? I don’t know, but they noticed her anyway. I saw them – five or six of them, creeping up here from the Torrent.’ The old fellow looked appealingly into Pedrito’s eyes. ‘I shouted a warning – honestly I did – but I was so far away – too far away for them to hear.’
Pedrito stood as if turned to stone while Baltazar went on to tell of how his parents had fought frantically to protect their daughter, of how Esperança herself had put up a desperate struggle to free herself from the clutches of the pirates. He spared Pedrito the details of how his mother and father had met their deaths, while assuring him that he and the other neighbours had laid them to rest with all the love and respect they deserved, side-by-side in the place that everyone knew was not only their favourite view of Port d’Andtratx bay, but also of the sea on which their son and daughter had been taken away and, God willing, would one day return.
Pedrito remained motionless, gazing through misty eyes at that very view, hardly hearing Baltazar’s assurances that the land on their finca had been tilled diligently by himself and other neighbours during the intervening years, and only half taking in what he said about the little house having been maintained in the same trim that it had been left on that awful day. There was always the hope, he said again, that Pedrito or Esperança, or both of them, would indeed come back home … one day … somehow.
Pedrito thanked him, though absently, for his thoughts were already racing back to the morning of his capture. ‘You say they took Esperança as well,’ he said quizzically, ‘but I saw every one of the captives being herded
off the galley for the slave market on Ibiza the following day. I saw every one of their faces – terrified, desperate, lost. I looked at every one of those poor souls as they passed between the rowing thwarts, and Esperança wasn’t among them. She wasn’t on that galley, Baltazar. I’d have known if she was, believe me.’ Suddenly, hope was springing from the depths of Pedrito’s depair. ‘Maybe she escaped! Maybe there’s a chance she’s still…’ But his words trailed off as he noticed the doleful look in Baltazar’s eyes.
Gravely, the old man shook his head. ‘Two galleys came into the bay that morning, Little Pedro.’ He gestured out towards the mouth of the bay. ‘They must have been anchored all night behind the Punta Moragues headland there – hiding, waiting for the dawn.’
Pedrito felt his heart sink once more.
‘When the galleys left,’ Baltazar went on, ‘one of them headed north, the other south.’
Pedrito shuddered, rubbing his forehead. ‘My God, and to think that I saw so many frightened and humiliated young girls crammed into the holds of that damned galley over the years. Little more than children, screaming, crying for their mothers night after night, until they were bundled out again, to be sold at whatever market the captain thought would bring the best prices.’ He stared unblinkingly at the ground, tormented by his own thoughts. ‘How many times did I pray for them?’ he murmured. ‘And how many times did I thank God in his mercy that my own little sister was safe at home here with Mamà and Papà?’ A cold tremor raked his body again. ‘God in his mercy?’ he muttered, his lips quivering. ‘What God? What mercy?’
After a few more moments of strained silence, Baltazar touched Pedrito’s arm lightly. ‘I’ll leave you to … I mean, you’ll want to be on your own here for a while now, so I…’ The old man was too upset to continue. With a nod in the direction of his own house on the other side of the valley, he indicated without need for words that Pedrito would be welcome there at any time. ‘Adéu, Little Pedro,’ he whispered through his tears. ‘Adéu.’
As if in a trance, Pedrito wandered over to the house. It was just as he’d remembered it, though seeming smaller in a strange way. Parting makes the heart grow fonder, it was said, so perhaps time and distance had made his home grow larger. Anyway, it was virtually as he’d pictured it in his mind every day without exception during the past five years. The same stout walls built from the island’s straw-coloured stone, the same wooden shutters covering the windows, the same arched entrance shaded by a canopy of vines, the same old well in the back yard, the same oven set into the wall by the kitchen door.
That oven. The same stone oven in which his mother would bake her bread. The oven, the smell of its wood smoke. The bread, the aroma of his mother’s freshly-baked loaves. How the merest suggestion of these simple things had transported him back here from however far his Moorish masters had driven him.
He reached out and touched the charred stonework round the oven’s mouth. It was cold. Dead. Just as dead as the woman who used to sing her cheerful songs while she tended it.
He looked around the little yard. Still the ancient fig tree shading the well, and beneath it the stone bench on which his mother would sit and tell his little sister stories while the bread baked. He could almost hear little Esperança’s gasps of delight and cascades of laughter even now. Almost. But no, not even almost, for in truth there was nothing here now but silence – the still, eerie hush of a once-happy home from which the pulse of life had been wrenched.
His heart aching, Pedrito approached the corner of the horta, where Baltazar had told him his parents had been laid to rest. And there they were, just as the old man had said – two little crosses, side-by-side. The crosses couldn’t have been more simple; nothing more than two bits of almond branch bound together. And the graves couldn’t have been less ornate, their perimeters market by rough chunks of limestone of the sort that ploughs had nudged from Mallorcan soil since time immemorial.
Yet it was obvious that someone, perhaps old Baltazar or his wife, had cared for this humble little burial ground as fastidiously as if it had been the marble-decked tomb of some grand lord and lady. Not a weed had been allowed to grow within its confines, the ochre soil meticulously raked into furrows that ran from head to foot like the neatly arranged folds of a shroud. There were even two little posies of wild flowers placed in earthenware cups of water at the base of each cross. And the freshness of the blooms revealed that they had been picked that very morning.
Pedrito felt a lump rise in his throat as he thought of how such kind-hearted neighbours – simple country folk of modest means and devoid of any self-interest beyond the wellbeing of their families – had honoured the memory of his mother and father so unfailingly and for so long. He fell to his knees, all the pent-up feelings of those long years of exile coming to the surface at last. Burying his face in his hands, he began to sob uncontrollably, his body raked by spasms of grief, his mind gripped by an all-consuming sense of desolation.
There had been so many times on that galley from hell when all that had kept him from despairing to the point of insanity had been thoughts of returning here – to his family, to his home. Times, when pulling an oar in mountainous seas, wet, aching, exhaused and lashed both by the chill of the waves and the burning sting of the galley master’s whip, when his only source of strength was the belief that he would one day be welcomed back into the bosom of his family – right here, in the very spot where they had sat together on so many summer evenings, watching the sun set over the sea beyond the Punta Moragues headland; that same rocky bluff behind which the destroyers of his family had anchored that night, lying in wait for the right moment to strike.
Pedrito didn’t know how long he had knelt in front of those two little crosses, shedding silent tears, his face buried in his hands. All he knew was that he felt totally lost, alone in a world that now seemed to hold no place for him, a world in which greed, violence and man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man had become the bywords of life for so many. And so much was in the ‘holy’ cause of religion, fought and killed for in the name of God – or Allah. Yet Pedrito knew that allegiance to no deity other than the god of evil had been the motivation for the actions of those plunderers who had stolen everything that was dear to him, had taken away his very reason for living.
But wasn’t that precisely what King Jaume was set on doing on a vast scale for the glory of God? And wouldn’t his adversary, the Moorish King of Mallorca, match this spreading of human suffering to protect and preserve the interests of Allah?
What hope, Pedrito asked himself, was there for anyone?
He was staring now into an abyss of misery, a black hole from which there was no escape. No escape, except by one route. For the first time ever, his thoughts began to drift towards ways of ending a life that no longer held any meaning for him. Without his family, it wouldn’t be a life at all, merely an existence in a dark and hopeless world that promised him nothing but loneliness and despair. It was a form of torture more cruel than any he had suffered at the hands of the slave masters, and his will to resist was draining away.
Just then, he felt something cold and moist touching his hand. Startled, he glanced between his fingers, and there, peering at him through a fringe of shaggy black hair, were two brown eyes, exuding a curious mix of puzzlement and understanding.
‘Nedi!’ Pedrito gasped. ‘But – but I thought you would have gone back to…’ He paused, realising that the dog had chosen to come here, rather than return to the camp at Bendinat and his master, the king. He ruffled the tousled head. ‘But how on earth did you find me, boy? Do I smell that bad, eh?’
Usually, Nedi would have responded to this sort of attention by jumping up and, tail wagging frantically, slobbering doggy kisses all over the face of his ‘playmate’. But not this time. Instead, he laid his head on Pedrito’s lap and looked up at him, the puzzlement gone from his eyes and replaced now by a look that said more in the way of sympathy and commiseration than any number of words could ever
have done. Somehow, Nedi knew that Pedrito was grieving, and he was trying to tell him, in the only way he could, that he was here to help him find a way though.
Fresh tears welled in Pedrito’s eyes, but instead of tears of sorrow, these were tears of release. These were tears that come when a sense of hope suddenly replaces one of despair. The quiet, bitter-sweet laughter that escaped Pedrito’s lips now was both involuntary and healing. At once, he felt the leaden weight lifting from his heart.
Sensing this, Nedi raised his head and canted it to one side, as dogs do when they invite humans to share their innate optimism. His ears were pricked, his eyes shining like little black beads, his face smiling, his tongue dangling from one side of his mouth in the same way that had appeared gormless back at the Coll d’Andritxol water well only a little while ago. But now his open smile and dangling tongue conveyed an entirely different message.
Just then, a soft breeze wafted up through the valley, carrying on its breath the tang of the sea and, although faint at this time of year, a hint of the heat of Africa, the land of the Moors.
This was the Migjorn, the southerly note of the ‘Song of the Eight Winds’, the wind that Pedrito’s father had always said blew the shoals of sardines into the fishermen’s nets. This was the wind of hope. Hope, the meaning of his little sister Esperança’s name.
Nedi tilted his head to the other side. ‘Well,’ his expectant grin seemed to say, ‘shall we sink, or shall we swim?’
He was, as Pedrito recalled, a breed of water dog, so who better to teach you how to keep your spirits afloat than him?
15
‘THE STRANGE CONTRARINESS OF TEARS’
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, 14th SEPTEMBER…
While making his way back to the King’s encampment, Pedrito was stopped by a small patrol led by Robert St Clair de Roslin, the tyro Templar Knight, who, perhaps in jest, had lately revealed a dislike of bagpipes, but a taste for Aragonese chireta, which he judged to be a rather poor immitation of his native country’s great delicacy, haggis. There was nothing even faintly jocular about his demeanour now, however. He and his men were stationed by the roadway skirting Es Coll de Sa Batalla, scene of the massacre of so many Moors in their first confrontation with the Christian forces just three days earlier. It was the same stretch of road on which Pedrito had experienced a creepy sensation while passing along in darkness two nights ago.
