“You must pray for me, and then go to sleep, and I will come myself, Princess, and tell you and your mother all about it in the morning.”
She swore she would never sleep, and she lay awake, quite rigid in her little cot bed, while her maid tossed and turned on the rug at the door. Slowly, her eyelids drooped until the lashes lay on the round cheeks, the little plump hands unclenched, and Catalina slept.
But in the morning, he did not come, his horse was missing from its stall, and his friends were absent. For the first time in her life, the little girl had some sense of the danger he had run—mortal danger, and for nothing but glory and to be featured in some song.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Where is Hernando?”
The silence of her maid, Madilla, warned her. “He will come?” she asked suddenly doubtful. “He will come back?”
Slowly, it dawns on me that perhaps he will not come back, that life is not like a ballad, where a vain hope is always triumphant and a handsome man is never cut down in his youth. But if he can fail and die, then can my father die? Can my mother die? Can I? Even I? Little Catalina, Infanta of Spain and Princess of Wales?
I kneel in the sacred circular space of my mother’s newly built chapel; but I am not praying. I am puzzling over this strange world that is suddenly opening up before me. If we are in the right—and I am sure of that; if these handsome young men are in the right—and I am sure of that—if we and our cause are under the especial hand of God, then how can we ever fail?
But if I have misunderstood something, then something is very wrong, and we are all indeed mortal, perhaps we can fail. Even handsome Hernando Pérez del Pulgar and his laughing friends, even my mother and father can fail. If Hernando can die, then so too can my mother and father. And if this is so, then what safety is there in the world? If Madre can die, like a common soldier, like a mule pulling a baggage cart, as I have seen men and mules die, then how can the world go on? How could there be a God?
Then it was time for her mother’s audience for petitioners and friends, and suddenly he was there, in his best suit, his beard combed, his eyes dancing, and the whole story spilled out: how they had dressed in their Arab clothes so as to pass for townspeople in the darkness, how they had crept in through the postern gate, how they had dashed up to the mosque, how they had kneeled and gabbled an Ave Maria and stabbed the prayer into the floor of the mosque, and then, surprised by guards, they had fought their way, hand to hand, thrust and parry, blades flashing in the moonlight; back down the narrow street, out of the door that they had forced only moments earlier, and were away into the night before the full alarm had been sounded. Not a scratch on them, not a man lost. A triumph for them and a slap in the face for Granada.
It was a great joke to play on the Moors. It was the funniest thing in the world to take a Christian prayer into the very heart of their holy place. It was the most wonderful gesture to insult them. The queen was delighted, the king too. The princess and her sisters looked at their champion, Hernando Pérez del Pulgar, as if he were a hero from the romances, a knight from the time of Arthur at Camelot. Catalina clapped her hands in delight at the story and commanded that he tell it and retell it, over and over again. But in the back of her mind, pushed far away from thought, she remembered the chill she had felt when she had thought that he was not coming back.
Next, they waited for the reply from the Moors. It was certain to happen. They knew that their enemy would see the venture as the challenge that it was—there was bound to be a response. It was not long in coming.
The queen and her children were visiting Zubia, a village near to Granada, so Her Majesty could see the impregnable walls of the fort herself. They had ridden out with a light guard, and the commander was white with horror when he came dashing up to them in the little village square and shouted that the gates of the red fort had opened and the Moors were thundering out, the full army, armed for attack. There was no time to get back to camp. The queen and the three princesses could never outrun Moorish horsemen on Arab stallions. There was nowhere to hide, there was nowhere even to make a stand.
In desperate haste Queen Isabella climbed to the flat roof of the nearest house, pulling the little princess by her hand up the crumbling stairs, her sisters running behind. “I have to see! I have to see!” she exclaimed.
“Madre! You are hurting me!”
“Quiet, child. We have to see what they intend.”
“Are they coming for us?” the child whimpered, her little voice muffled by her own plump hand.
“They may be. I have to see.”
It was a raiding party, not the full force. They were led by their champion, a giant of a man, dark as mahogany, a glint of a smile beneath his helmet, riding a huge black horse as if he were Night riding to overwhelm them. His horse snarled like a dog at the watching guard, its teeth bared.
“Madre, who is that man?” the Princess of Wales whispered to her mother, staring from the vantage point of the flat roof of the house.
“That is the Moor called Yarfe, and I am afraid he has come for your friend, Hernando.”
“His horse looks so frightening, like it wants to bite.”
“He has cut off its lips to make it snarl at us. But we are not made fearful by such things. We are not frightened children.”
“Should we not run away?” asked the frightened child.
Her mother, watching the Moor parade, did not even hear her daughter’s whisper.
“You won’t let him hurt Hernando, will you? Madre?”
“Hernando laid the challenge. Yarfe is answering it. We will have to fight,” she said levelly. “Yarfe is a knight, a man of honor. He cannot ignore the challenge.”
“How can he be a man of honor if he is a heretic? A Moor?”
“They are most honorable men, Catalina, though they are unbelievers. And this Yarfe is a hero to them.”
“What will you do? How shall we save ourselves? This man is as big as a giant.”
“I shall pray,” Isabella said. “And my champion Garallosco de la Vega will answer Yarfe for Hernando.”
As calmly as if she were in her own chapel at Córdoba, Isabella kneeled on the roof of the little house and gestured that her daughters should do the same. Sulkily, Catalina’s older sister, Juana, dropped to her knees, the princesses Isabel and María, her other two older sisters, followed suit. Catalina saw, peeping through her clasped hands as she kneeled in prayer, that María was shaking with fear and that Isabel, in her widow’s gown, was white with terror.
“Heavenly Father, we pray for the safety of ourselves, of our cause, and of our army.” Queen Isabella looked up at the brilliantly blue sky. “We pray for the victory of Your champion, Garallosco de la Vega, at this time of his trial.”
“Amen,” the girls said promptly, and then followed the direction of their mother’s gaze to where the ranks of the Spanish guard were drawn up, watchful and silent.
“If God is protecting him—” Catalina started.
“Silence,” her mother said gently. “Let him do his work, let God do His, and let me do mine.” She closed her eyes in prayer.
Catalina turned to her eldest sister and pulled at her sleeve. “Isabel, if God is protecting him, then how can he be in danger?”
Isabel looked down at her little sister. “God does not make the way smooth for those He loves,” she said in a harsh whisper. “He sends hardships to try them. Those that God loves the best are those who suffer the worst. I know that. I, who lost the only man that I will ever love. You know that. Think about Job, Catalina.”
“Then how shall we win?” the little girl demanded. “Since God loves Madre, won’t He send her the worst hardships? And so how shall we ever win?”
“Hush,” their mother said. “Watch. Watch and pray with faith.”
Their small guard and the Moorish raiding party were drawn up opposite each other, ready for battle. Then Yarfe rode forwards on his great black charger. Something white bobbed at the ground, tied t
o the horse’s glossy black tail. There was a gasp as the soldiers in the front rank recognized what he had. It was the Ave Maria that Hernando had left speared to the floor of the mosque. The Moor had tied it to the tail of his horse as a calculated insult, and now rode the great creature forwards and back before the Christian ranks and smiled when he heard their roar of rage.
“Heretic,” Queen Isabella whispered. “A man damned to hell. God strike him dead and scourge his sin.”
The queen’s champion, de la Vega, turned his horse and rode towards the little house where the royal guards ringed the courtyard, the tiny olive tree, the doorway. He pulled up his horse beside the olive tree and doffed his helmet, looking up at his queen and the princesses on the roof. His dark hair was curly and sparkling with sweat from the heat, his dark eyes sparkled with anger. “Your Grace, do I have your leave to answer his challenge?”
“Yes,” the queen said, never shrinking for a moment. “Go with God, Garallosco de la Vega.”
“That big man will kill him,” Catalina said, pulling at her mother’s long sleeve. “Tell him he must not go. Yarfe is so much bigger. He will murder de la Vega!”
“It will be as God wills,” Isabella maintained, closing her eyes in prayer.
“Mother! Your Majesty! He is a giant. He will kill our champion.”
Her mother opened her blue eyes and looked down at her daughter and saw her little face was flushed with distress and her eyes were filling with tears. “It will be as God wills it,” she repeated firmly. “You have to have faith that you are doing God’s will. Sometimes you will not understand, sometimes you will doubt, but if you are doing God’s will, you cannot be wrong, you cannot go wrong. Remember it, Catalina. Whether we win this challenge or lose it, it makes no difference. We are soldiers of Christ. You are a soldier of Christ. If we live or die, it makes no difference. We will die in faith, that is all that matters. This battle is God’s battle—He will send a victory, if not today, then tomorrow. And whichever man wins today, we do not doubt that God will win, and we will win in the end.”
“But de la Vega…” Catalina protested, her fat lower lip trembling.
“Perhaps God will take him to His own this afternoon,” her mother said steadily. “We should pray for him.”
Juana made a face at her little sister, but when their mother kneeled again, the two girls clasped hands for comfort. Isabel kneeled beside them, María beside her. All of them squinted through their closed eyelids to the plain where the bay charger of de la Vega rode out from the line of the Spaniards and the black horse of the Moor trotted proudly before the Saracens.
The queen kept her eyes closed until she had finished her prayer. She did not even hear the roar as the two men took up their places, lowered their visors, and clasped their lances.
Catalina leapt to her feet, leaning over the low parapet so that she could see the Spanish champion. His horse thundered towards the other, racing legs a blur, and the black horse came as fast from the opposite direction. The clash when the two lances smacked into solid armor could be heard on the roof of the little house, as both men were flung from their saddles by the force of the impact, the lances smashed, their breastplates buckled. It was nothing like the ritualized jousts of the court. It was a savage impact designed to break a neck or stop a heart.
“He is down! He is dead!” Catalina cried out.
“He is stunned,” her mother corrected her. “See, he is getting up.”
The Spanish knight staggered to his feet, unsteady as a drunkard from the heavy blow to his chest. The bigger man was up already, helmet and heavy breastplate cast aside, coming for him with a huge sickle sword at the ready, the light flashing off the razor-sharp edge. De la Vega drew his own great weapon. There was a tremendous crash as the swords smacked together, and then the two men locked blades and struggled, each trying to force the other down. They circled clumsily, staggering under the weight of their armor and from their concussion; but there could be no doubt that the Moor was the stronger man. The watchers could see that de la Vega was yielding under the pressure. He tried to spring back and get free; but the weight of the Moor was bearing down on him and he stumbled and fell. At once the black knight was on top of him, forcing him downwards. De la Vega’s hand closed uselessly on his long sword, but he could not bring it up. The Moor raised his sword to his victim’s throat, ready to give the death blow, his face a black mask of concentration, his teeth gritted. Suddenly he gave a loud cry and fell back. De la Vega rolled up, scrabbled to his feet, crawling on his hands and knees like a rising dog.
The Moor was down, plucking at his breast, his great sword dropped to one side. In de la Vega’s left hand was a short stabbing dagger, stained with blood, a hidden weapon used in a desperate riposte. With a superhuman effort, the Moor got to his feet, turned his back on the Christian, and staggered towards his own ranks. “I am lost,” he said to the men who ran forwards to catch him. “We have lost.”
At a hidden signal, the great gates of the red fort opened and the soldiers started to pour out. Juana leapt to her feet. “Madre, we must run!” she screamed. “They are coming! They are coming in their thousands!”
Isabella did not rise from her knees, even when her daughter dashed across the roof and ran down the stairs. “Juana, come back,” she ordered in a voice like a whip crack. “Girls, you will pray.”
She rose and went to the parapet. First she looked to the marshaling of her army, saw that the officers were setting the men into formation ready for a charge as the Moorish army, terrifying in their forward rush, came pouring on. Then she glanced down to see Juana, in a frenzy of fear, peeping around the garden wall, unsure whether to run for her horse or back to her mother.
Isabella, who loved her daughter, said not another word. She returned to the other girls and kneeled with them. “Let us pray,” she said and closed her eyes.
“She didn’t even look!” Juana repeated incredulously that night when they were in their room, washing their hands and changing their dirty clothes, Juana’s tear-streaked face finally clean. “There we are, in the middle of a battle, and she closes her eyes!”
“She knew that she would do more good appealing for the intercession of God than running around crying,” Isabel said pointedly. “And it gave the army better heart than anything else to see her, on her knees, in full sight of everyone.”
“What if she had been hit by an arrow or a spear?”
“She was not. We were not. And we won the battle. And you, Juana, behaved like a half-mad peasant. I was ashamed of you. I don’t know what gets into you. Are you mad or just wicked?”
“Oh, who cares what you think, you stupid widow?”
6TH JANUARY 1492
Day by day the heart went out of the Moors. The Queen’s Skirmish turned out to be their last battle. Their champion was dead, their city encircled, they were starving in the land that their fathers had made fertile. Worse, the promised support from Africa had failed them—the Turks had sworn friendship, but the janissaries did not come, their king had lost his nerve, his son was a hostage with the Christians, and before them were the princes of Spain, Isabella and Ferdinand, with all the power of Christendom behind them, with a holy war declared and a Christian crusade gathering pace with the scent of success. Within a few days of the meeting of the champions, Boabdil, the King of Granada, had agreed upon terms of peace, and a few days after, in the ceremony planned with all the grace that was typical of the Moors of Spain, he came down on foot to the iron gates of the city with the keys to the Alhambra Palace on a silken pillow and handed them over to the King and Queen of Spain in a complete surrender.
Granada, the red fort that stood above the city to guard it, and the gorgeous palace which was hidden inside the walls—the Alhambra—were given to Ferdinand and to Isabella.
Dressed in the gorgeous silks of their defeated enemy, turbaned, slippered, glorious as caliphs, the Spanish royal family, glittering with the spoils of Spain, took Granada. That afternoon Cat
alina, the Princess of Wales, walked with her parents up the winding, steep path through the shade of tall trees, to the most beautiful palace in Europe, slept that night in the brilliantly tiled harem and woke to the sound of rippling water in marble fountains, and thought herself a Moorish princess born to luxury and beauty, as well as a Princess of England.
And this is my life, from this day of victory. I had been born as a child of the camp, following the army from siege to battle, seeing things that perhaps no child should see, facing adult fears every day. I had marched past the bodies of dead soldiers rotting in the spring heat because there was no time to bury them, I had ridden behind mules whipped into staggering bloodstained corpses, pulling my father’s guns through the high passes of the Sierra. I saw my mother slap a man’s face for weeping with exhaustion. I heard children of my own age crying for their parents burned at the stake for heresy; but at this moment, when we dressed ourselves in embroidered silk and walked into the red fort of Granada and through the gates to the white pearl that is the Alhambra Palace, at this moment I became a princess for the first time.
I became a girl raised in the most beautiful palace in Christendom, protected by an impregnable fort, blessed by God among all others. I became a girl of immense, unshakable confidence in the God that had brought us to victory, and in my destiny as His most favorite child and my mother’s most favorite daughter.
Alhambra proved to me, once and for all, that I was uniquely favored by God, as my mother had been favored by God. I was his chosen child, raised in the most beautiful palace in Christendom, and destined for the highest things.
The Spanish family with their officers ahead and the royal guard behind, glorious as sultans, entered the fort through the enormous square tower known as the Justice Gate. As the shadow of the first arch of the tower fell on Isabella’s upturned face, the trumpeters played a great shout of defiance, like Joshua before the walls of Jericho, as if they would frighten away the lingering devils of the infidel. At once there was an echo to the blast of sound, a shuddering sigh, from everyone gathered inside the gateway, pressed back against the golden walls, the women half veiled in their robes, the men standing tall and proud and silent, watching, to see what the conquerors would do next. Catalina looked above the sea of heads and saw the flowing shapes of Arabic script engraved on the gleaming walls.
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