Inquisitor Dreams

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “For these scoundrels, that could be enough! I wish we had burned the devil when we had him!”

  “No, old friend,” Felipe admonished his servant, “never wish that evil had been done in place of good, not even when it seems to our weak and selfish sight that the results might have been more to our own comfort. Such a wish, uttered within hearing of any knowledgeable soul less well acquainted with you than I, could smack of heresy.”

  “Still the scholar of godly things,” Pilar murmured huskily, sliding her hand over her husband’s wrinkled cheek to pinch his ear with gentle fingers. “Still and ever. Win free, my love, and I promise that we will all of us go to Rome together.”

  * * * *

  Manuel Urtigo’s last threat had seemed to promise them the night, crowded together. Yet it could have been little more than half flown when Tiberio came. “Your Excellency,” he announced, with a bow that might have been reverential in earnest, “they are waiting for you, and pray do not hold me in any way to blame.”

  “Why, then, do you bring the summons?”

  The bandit lieutenant set his lamp in a convenient niche before making a self-deprecatory shrug. “Papa Mano insisted on this in token of my loyalty. You understand, your Excellency?”

  Don Felipe stood. “Whether I understand or not, Tiberio, it is for God to pass the judgment on you. But I admonish you to choose your master well. I have seen terrible sins committed in the name of loyalty.”

  Tiberio bowed his head and, turning the key in the padlock, answered only, “We have guards at the entrance.”

  His caution was hardly needed. Wooden bars would have presented little obstacle to five cramped prisoners, were it not for the bandit camp just outside, at least part of which seemed never to sleep. Felipe pressed his silver rosary—the last thing of value, save his garments and his crucifix, that he had about his person—into his daughter’s hand, and stepped forward to go with the lieutenant.

  Halfway along the tunnel, Felipe said, “I am no longer a young man, and the body has certain needs, especially pressing in the old, which dignity dislikes fulfilling in the presence of the other sex… you understand?”

  Tiberio nodded slowly. “A fig for Papa Mano’s command! If your Excellency pleases to turn aside into that little corner to your left, we can say, if we must, that your lady delayed us with clinging and weeping.”

  “Your mercy, Tiberio, may perhaps in God’s sight outweigh your readiness to lie.” Don Felipe turned aside. He had wondered how the Calé, with that wonderful delicacy which held them from so much as hinting in company of this particular need, had fared during their days of imprisonment. Surely the outlaws had made some provision, perhaps led them out singly to some private place from time to time, and Papa Mano’s ‘command’ had applied only to this night.

  After Don Felipe finished adding his part to the foulness of the cavern’s air, he gave Tiberio a quick priestly blessing before they went on again. Nourishing the bud of friendship could do no harm.

  At the mouth of the tunnel his steps faltered, if only for a moment. Ten paces from the opening stood a stake.

  He glanced at Tiberio, who bowed his head again, replaced his lamp among the stones, and blew out its flame, almost as if that might hide the shame from his prisoner. It did not. The moon was but a crescent, and the bandits’ campfire small; but its glow sufficed. A thick chain wrapped the stake as though in readiness and, while the brush and faggots piled round its foot were scarcely enough to roast a lamb, more fuel waited in a tall stack at a little distance.

  The thought flooded his brain, Is it for this that I have never in all my life, outside involuntary dreams, witnessed a burning? The emptiness of his stomach was as if a mountain peak had been pulled out from under him, the base of his skull felt like something squeezed to bursting by pressure from beneath. Was this, then, what they felt at last—all those relaxed to the justice of the secular arm?

  But it was not for a descendant of El Cid and Aguilar, as also of the holy heretic martyr Raymonde, to show fear in the presence of his enemy. Walking away from Tiberio’s touch on his arm, Don Felipe strode forward to face Manuel Urtigo, once the scourge of Axtilan and before that the monster of the rape of Alhama, who still sat in the same rocky perch he had filled that afternoon.

  “Well, Don Inquisitor,” Urtigo said, sneering, “and how do you like it, hey?”

  Most of the bandits and some of their women laughed as if their Papa Mano had made a fine joke. Don Felipe noted with a trace of satisfaction that not all of them laughed. It was a beginning, especially with Tiberio among the silent ones.

  “I can look beyond this, ‘Papa Mano,’” the inquisitor replied in a voice of purpose, “to the hope of Heaven. Can you say as much? however your pitiful earthly life may end.”

  Some of the bandits looked thoughtful, but ‘Papa Mano’ said quickly, “Ah! No fear for that, Don Inquisitor. When my time comes, we send someone out to bring us a priest who knows how to hold his tongue. No fear that it will ever be you. Hey, lads?”

  This time the laughter was a little less loud, a little more ragged than before.

  “Make sure, then,” Don Felipe told them, “that death does not take you by surprise. As I have heard can happen in the life you have chosen.”

  Urtigo grunted. His next speech had a rehearsed sound, down to its heavy sarcasm. “I apologize to your Reverence that we cannot risk too much fire. Begging your blessing, we will have to roast you slowly. Bit by bit. The little flames licking up to your knees, like fawning little puppies…” He licked his dark lips. “First they take off your fine clothes—puff! puff! puff! They pop your skin open, sputter in your blood, we give them a little more wood to keep them company—as much as we dare—they start reaching above your knees. The chain heats up, brands your skin while it waits for its little fiery friends… ahhh! You will still be alive to see the sun come up, but I think by then you will not much care. Hey, lads?”

  And now only a few of them laughed, although those few laughed loudly.

  “I perceive, ‘Papa Mano,’ that you have witnessed these things before now. I suspect that you have watched them as often as you could, and with great relish. This does not surprise me. But: have you taken no wholesome warning at all from them?”

  “Have you, Papa Inquisitor?” The bandit leered. “Holy Mother Church tells us to enjoy seeing heretics burn, hey?”

  Tiberio protested, with a glance at Don Felipe, “Not to enjoy it, no—but to take warning by it, as his Excellency says. To see Hell in it, and—”

  “Mouth in the ground, Tiberio!” the chief interrupted in a way that showed why no one else, before his lieutenant, had ventured an opinion in the debate between Manuel Urtigo and his prisoner. “Well, Don Inquisitor,” Papa Mano went on, “we are merciful, too. We offer you the same mercy you offer us, when you have us. Recant and confess, beg our merciful pardon, and we will strangle you quick. That way your lady in there will get only your stench, not your screaming.”

  Pilar and Felicitas, Gubbio and Don Sagesse. Don Felipe knew that his daughter would survive to bear at least one child… but the circumstances of her life? and of her child’s begetting? He knew nothing of the fate of the others. Nevertheless, he would endanger them all the more if he betrayed his concern for them any further than he had already done by bringing their ransom in person. Drawing himself up, he answered only, “What can such as you, Manuel Urtigo, possibly call upon me to recant and confess?”

  “Confess that your ‘Holy Inquisition’ is a stinking monster!”

  “Confess any such thing at the demand of a murderer? In a few moments—to spare your people the full warning of what may someday befall them, in their souls if not also their bodies, unless they repent—I may perhaps agree to some such proposition. But now, at this moment, while still in full possession of my reason and free will, I tell you, Manuel Urtigo, that we of the Holy Inquisition have labored hard, long, and with any sacrifice for the glory of God and the truth of His Holy
Catholic Church, as we understand it in this age of our frail human history; and in thus blaspheming against the Holy Office, you have betrayed yourself at last as an accursed heretic!”

  “And who reports me, hey?” Urtigo half screamed, waving one hand furiously. “Chain him! Chain him up to the stake and light our fire under him!”

  “No!” Tiberio cried, and a thin murmur seconded him. “He is a brave old lad. Let him finish what he has to say.”

  Some of the bandits started toward Don Felipe. The rest held back as if to see what would happen. Tiberio took a step forward and drew his sword partway. Those who had started to obey Papa Mano stopped and looked back at him.

  Don Felipe seized the word first. “Once, Manuel Urtigo, we found you guiltless and innocent of heresy. We mounted you upon a fine horse and set you free with honor. This alone proves that we are capable of error, or, at least, that we lack foresight.” Trying to take advantage of the hesitation he sensed in Urtigo’s band, he looked around at them and said, “Any and all of you who, having heard this man’s heresy, fail in your duty to God and Holy Church of bearing witness against him, make yourselves fautors of his heresy and partakers in his guilt.”

  “What would your Excellency have?” Tiberio asked in tones of mild protest. “We are hunted outlaws. We cannot approach a tribunal without putting ourselves in danger of our very lives. Besides—forgive me, these are not my own words—but I have heard that you yourselves make them heretics, with what you do to them in your secret prisons.”

  “Where have you heard such a thing? What can you know of the Holy Inquisition’s secrets?”

  “Hah!” cried Manuel Urtigo. “Have I not been there? Does Papa Mano not know by his own experience how you could make a heretic out of the sweet Ihesu Himself?”

  This time the mutterings, even a few exclamations uttered aloud, were on Papa Mano’s side; but Don Felipe hardly heard them. “And you have spoken of these things?” he whispered, thunderstruck. Then, seeing whatever slight moral advantage his enemy might have enjoyed over him until now dissolve away, he raised his voice to a cry: “You have broken your Oath of Silence!”

  If Don Felipe had once, while still young, broken the Seal of Confession in order to save a friend from false accusation, Manuel Urtigo had, in full maturity, broken the equally solemn Oath of Silence, apparently for no other reason than to rouse his followers.

  “You and your forced oaths!” Manuel snarled, as if having had to think out his reply. “First you torture us to make us speak, and then you do it again to make us keep silent. You with all your subtle new tortures that leave no marks! You and your oaths forced in blood!”

  Once only had Manuel Urtigo been tortured—at least by the Inquisition—and that no farther than in conspectu tormentarum. Never had he been denied food, drink, bedding… he had waxed fat and healthy during his half-year in the secret cells, and that almost entirely at the Inquisition’s own expense. Never had the Holy Office, to Don Felipe’s personal knowledge, introduced into Aragon any torture that was not already old in the secular justice of Spain’s other kingdoms.

  “You may have broken the Oath of Silence in spirit only,” cried the inquisitor, “by telling falsehoods of your experience. Or you may have broken it both in spirit and in letter. Whether you have uttered truth or falsehood, I do not say, for I will not break the sacred Silence. But this I say: that in the eyes of God and Heaven, if not of this sinful world, you are a murderer many times over!”

  “So are most of us, your Excellency,” Tiberio said, loudly enough for Papa Mano to hear and bark an appreciative laugh; but Don Felipe thundered on:

  “You are the murderer of my own father and mother, of both of my brothers—the one hardly more than a child—of the wife of my elder brother and of her infant child in her arms, and of my sister, a helpless maid! Yes, you slew them all, my sister with your own bloody hands and the others, if not in person, then by command! My sister you raped before slaying—”

  “What else are women for?” Manuel Urtigo interrupted. “Hey, lads?”

  Some ragged laughter. Not much.

  “Following which, you broke her neck with a cruel blow to her chin,” Don Felipe continued, “breaking skin and flesh so that her blood gushed forth. Your men stood by and cheered you on—‘Bravissimo, Manuel!’ Even the one who had just lost a thumb to some defender’s blade.”

  One of the old bandits standing near his chief’s rock uttered a low cry.

  “My mother also,” the inquisitor added, “I think, from the way in which her blood soaked her bed, you must have raped. All those of you here present who have laughed at the raping of women, if you have ever loved a woman—bride or mistress, sister or mother—think of her raped, then murdered and lying in her blood!”

  “Alhama!” moaned one of the bandits. The same one, Felipe guessed, who had cried out at mention of the severed thumb.

  “That was war!” Urtigo protested. “That was when we helped reconquer Granada gloriously for their Most Catholic Majesties!”

  “True!” Don Felipe agreed. “And for that reason, beyond the touch of mere human justice. Nevertheless, the family of Bivar y Aguilar—my family—was Christian, Catholic. Had they not sent one son to Rome for schooling? so that I alone, of all my family, survived. Even Jews, even Moslems, were among those spared and taken prisoner by the Castilian army that day, but you and your men, Manuel Urtigo, destroyed a Christian family with great murder—an entire household of good Catholic Christians, descended in direct line from El Cid! In my father’s library, you broke the head from a marble bust of Tully and thrust into its place the head of my younger brother, a boy half grown, whose life you had severed for the mere joy of murder!”

  “How does he know?” exclaimed the bandit who had spoken once to moan and again to breathe the name Alhama. “Holy Inquisitor, how do you know these things?”

  “They were revealed to me even at the time, miles away in Aragon as I was, in a vision sent by Almighty God, Who beholds all things, from Whom nothing is hidden!”

  “They are true?” cried Tiberio. “Enrico, are they all true?”

  “To the smallest detail,” the old man who obviously remembered Alhama answered with a groan.

  “God!” Tiberio ejaculated with something between a gasp and a sigh. “Your Excellency knew all this, and yet you let him free?”

  “Rightly or wrongly,” the inquisitor repeated, “we found no heresy in your ‘Papa Mano.’ The Holy Office is not for the wreaking of personal vengeance, nor the punishment of mere murder. Such sins as Manuel Urtigo has committed in battle and warfare, remain for God’s judgment alone.”

  “Brothers!” shouted Tiberio. “I say that we free the old priest and his people, and burn Papa Mano instead!”

  A great outcry went up. The cheers all but drowned the protests—Tiberio’s party must have long been gathering strength, the lieutenant waiting like a young ram to topple the old leader.

  Manuel Urtigo rose to his full height and stood a moment, bawling back at them. His words were unintelligible, his face darkened and contorted like that of a demon. Then, all at once, he clutched his head and crumpled.

  The camp gradually quieting as it watched, he slipped… slowly, as it seemed… fell, lay still at the foot of his rocky throne. Two of his older men and one of the women hurried to him, touched him, turned him over. The woman laid her hand on his brow and shook her head.

  “Bring me candles and water,” Don Felipe said clearly, “such oil as you have and a little salt. And free my companions, and let my servant bring my stole and my book from our saddlebags. I will give this man, my ancient enemy though he is, Extreme Unction before we go.”

  “And the ransom, your Excellency?” Tiberio asked.

  Not until that moment, hearing the respect in the new leader’s voice, did Don Felipe expel a sigh of relief. “Let us say, my friend Tiberio, that you and your fellows shall keep fully half of it.”

  They answered with another cheer. Don Felip
e folded his arms and nodded, waiting for what he needed to give his ancient enemy the last sacrament. He could sense both Raymonde and Rosemary standing at his sides, and even Rosemary, he thought, might this time be smiling.

  Chapter 30

  The Dream of the Tug-of-War

  “What place is this?” he asked.

  “Hospital,” said Rosemary.

  He looked around. They stood in a passageway, painted in bright pastels, adorned only with framed pictures, stretching into infinity. All angles were stark, most lines straight. The light, which flowed through a honeycombed ceiling, resembled that of the sun when behind high clouds, casting a harsh glare over all things.

  “It is as clean,” he remarked, “as even Moors could ever wish.” He spoke doubtfully, for, although Moors would have appreciated its cleanliness, they would have made of it something artistic and lovely, with graceful arches and twining curls painted over the walls in rich colors.

  “Clean?” Rosemary snorted. “The dirt’s just invisible. People can still pick up more disease bugs in hospitals than anywhere else. In here,” she went on, pushing one of the largest pictures.

  He saw that, after all, some of them—those in frames that touched the floor—were not pictures, but doors. This one opened to her shove. He followed her in.

  The chamber was large, but held four beds only, one in each corner. It could have held three times that number. White screens partially shielded each bed from the others, so that he could see only one, the one to his immediate left, clearly and entirely. In that bed, a man lay, half covered with rumpled bedclothes. He wore a light sleeveless tunic that, but for its dark though faded colors, might have appeared part of his sheets. His head alone, resting restlessly on a pillow covered with white cloth, and his arms could be seen uncovered. His face was ruddy and had once been round, but now was drawn with long suffering. His hair had been black and now was more than half silver. His eyes were closed, but Don Felipe thought he did not sleep. A woman sat at his bedside, both her hands upon one of his.