Iacobus

by Matilde Asensi

  When I awoke, I had lost all sense of time and place. I had no idea where I was, nor why, nor what day, month or year it was. I had a horrific pain in the back of my head where I had been hit — just above my neck —, and I couldn’t string together my thoughts or move my body. My stomach was in knots and I didn’t start to feel better until I had vomited up my soul. I slowly started to regain consciousness and gingerly began to sit up, leaning my elbow on the flagstones of the floor. That place stunk (I had helped to contribute to the smell) and it was terribly cold. Next to me, tossed on the floor, were our poor possessions; it seems that after taking a good look at them, they hadn’t considered them to be valuable enough to take from us.

  By the light of a faint glow that filtered through the bars on the door, I could see Sara and Jonas, who were lying unconscious at the back of the dungeon on a pile of straw. As best I could, I moved over to the boy to check that he was breathing; I then did the same with Sara and then, without realizing what I was doing, I fell down next to her and buried my nose in her neck.

  Much later, when I woke up again and stirred, the Jew, who had barely moved away enough to look at me, asked me in a whisper:

  “How are you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. A doubt passed through my mind as to whether she was asking about my state of health or whether I was comfortable leaning against her. I sat up, dazed and confused, and it was an effort to separate myself from her body.

  “My head hurts terribly but other than that I’m fine. How about you?”

  “They hit me as well,” she muttered, raising a hand to her forehead. “But I’m O.K.. Nothing’s broken, so don’t worry.”

  “Jonas!” I called the boy.

  He opened an eye and looked at me.

  “I … I don’t think … that I’ll ever be able to move again,” he cried between sobs.

  “Let’s take a look. Raise your hand. Good, that’s it. Now your whole arm. Perfect. Now try moving one of those legs that will never walk again. Splendid! You’re doing great. I can’t examine your eyes because there isn’t enough light but we’ll put our faith in your strong constitution and your young body’s desire to live.”

  “We should start to think about how to get out of here,” said Sara impatiently.

  “We don’t even know where we are.”

  “It’s obvious that we’re in an underground dungeon. This place doesn’t exactly look like a palace!”

  I went over to the door and inspected what lay beyond the bars.

  “It’s a gallery that’s so long I can’t see the end and the torch that’s providing the light is about to go out.”

  “Someone will come to replenish it.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “I refuse to believe that they have decided on such a cruel destiny for us.”

  “Really …?” I said sarcastically. “Well, think about Pope Clement, King Philip the Fair, Nogaret the Keeper of the Seal, the frere at St. John of Ortega and that wretched Count Le Mans.”

  “That’s different, freire. They won’t let us die like this, trust me.”

  “You really seem to think a lot of the Templar virtue.”

  “I was raised in the Fortress of Marais, remember, and the Templars saved my life and the life of my family. I know them better than you and I’m sure that somebody will soon come to replenish the torch and I hope that they also bring us food.”

  “And if they don’t?” asked the boy, terrified.

  “If they don’t, Jonas,” I replied, “we will prepare ourselves for death.”

  “Sire, please!” disapproved Sara rather rudely. “Stop scaring your son with foolishness! Don’t worry, Jonas. We’ll get out of here.”

  There was nothing else to do other than wait for someone to come along that silent gallery. Different plans crossed my mind: If the situation allowed, we could attack the guards but if it wasn’t possible — as I greatly feared —, we were left with the option of making a hole in the wall which was made of soft earth and clay, although that would take weeks of work; and if that idea wasn’t feasible either, we could still work on the rickety door hinges and rusty iron lock, or the splintered beams and wood paneling.

  Looking around, it didn’t seem that the Templars were too concerned with the security of our cell. That door was anything but an unbeatable obstacle to escape from the dungeon. But if I wasn’t surprised enough after checking how easily that thin plank of wood could be knocked down, my amazement increased when I heard the sound of a key turning and the familiar voice of Nobody requesting our authorization to enter and bring us food. Jonas looked resentfully towards the door and turned around ostentatiously.

  A couple of servant freires, dressed in the black cloaks of secondary Templars, accompanied the now transformed Nobody, who looked at us with curiosity and then looked around the cell. With a wave of his hand, one of the servants began to change the old straw for new straw, cleaned up my vomit and brushed the dirt from the floor. The other placed a large tray full of food in front of Sara (white bread, an earthenware pot filled with soup, salted fish, fresh leeks and an amphora of wine); he then left the dungeon and came back with a leather stool that he placed behind Nobody — which he sat down on, removing the cotton biretta that covered his bald head —, and then left discretely, followed by his companion.

  The door was left wide open.

  “It’s always a pleasure to see old friends,” said Nobody. He looked pleased with himself. He was proudly wearing the Knight Templar garments and he wrapped his white cloak around him in such a natural and comfortable way that it was impossible for me to remember him dressed as a pilgrim merchant.

  Jonas grunted from his corner and Sara decided that it was time to go over to the boy. I didn’t say a word.

  “I must ask your forgiveness for what happened in Castrojeriz, Doña Sara,” he said to her. “If it’s of any consolation, know that I have been severely punished for my lack of respect towards you.”

  “I couldn’t care less, sire. I don’t have the slightest interest in your matters,” replied with Jew with her voice full of dignity.

  Seeing that his humility and meekness weren’t helping him at all, Brother Rodrigo decided to get straight to the point.

  “I have been sent to inform you of your situation. At present you are deep underground, at the bottom of a dead-end tunnel that forms part of the hundreds of tunnels dug into this side of the Aquilianos Mountains. This place, called Las Medulas, twelve miles from Ponferrada is, unfortunately, my Order’s last free stronghold in this and many other kingdoms. We used to have a real network of castles and fortresses in this part of Bierzo: Pieros, Cornatel, Corullon, Ponferrada itself, Balboa, Tremor, Antares, Sarracin … and houses in Bembibre, Rabanal, Cacabelos and Villafranca. Now, unfortunately, we only have these tunnels left.”

  The silence surrounding Nobody thickened.

  “I assume that you, Don Galceran,” he continued, showing a very determined attitude, “have already seen the weakness of your prison but let me tell you that escaping from Las Medulas is impossible and if you have read Pliny (46) you will know what I’m talking about.

  The mention of Pliny brought back a memory. In his great Natural History, the Roman sage spoke of the large scale mining carried out by the Emperor Augustus in Nearer Spain back in the dawn of our era. One place in particular in that Roman Hispania deserved the scholar’s full attention: Las Medulas, where the Romans obtained twenty thousand pounds of pure gold every year. The system used to extract the metal from the earth was called ruina montium which consisted of releasing huge amounts of water all at once from formidable reservoirs located on the highest points of the Aquilianos Mountains This water descended at great speed via seven aqueducts and, when it reached Las Medulas, it ran through a network of tunnels previously excavated by slaves, causing landslides and boring through the land. The gold remains were dragged to the agogas, huge lakes that acted as panning sites, where the golden metal was collected and cl
eaned. That went on non-stop for two hundred years.

  That was the reason behind the red peaks and orange spires: remains of mountains devastated by furious currents. It was also the reason behind the tremendous security of our imprisonment: Not even with the thread of Ariadne — used by Theseus to get out of the labyrinth —, could we have escaped from that hellish maze of tunnels. We were more trapped than if we had been wrapped in chains.

  “I see, by the look on your face, Don Galceran, that you have understood the futility of any attempt to escape. If that is the case, we won’t have any problems. And there’s only one thing left for me to say.” Nobody stood up and walked to the door. “I have been ordered to tell you that you will be transferred, forever, to a much more secure place than this, and this, Don Galceran, is one of the most secure on earth, I can promise you that.

  He left our cell with much dignity and the door slammed noisily behind him. When we were alone again, we remained for a long time in the same silence we had maintained while Nobody was with us. There was no doubt in my mind about the next step we had to take. While we were still alive we had to carry on fighting and given that our destiny, whatever it may be, seemed to be written in stone, why not try to introduce all of the possible variations, if at the end of the day we were going to end up in the same place?

  “Get up!” I said jumping to my feet.

  “Get up?” asked Sara, bewildered.

  “We’re getting out of here.”

  “We’re getting out of here?” repeated Jonas, even more bewildered.

  “Are you going to repeat everything I say until Judgment Day? Am I not making myself clear? I said we’re getting out of here, so get the bags because we have a hard road ahead.” While they were getting ready, and seeing as Le Man’s dagger was the only thing that they had not returned, I took the false documents and passes out of the tin box and, dropping it on the floor, stamped on it, folded it and stamped on it again until it had turned into a small, resistant scalpru (47). I then went over to the door, and using the tool I had just made, pried off the old, rusty nails on the lock which came out of its hole in one piece. The door opened slightly, dragged by its own weight.

  “Let’s go” I said, elated.

  Followed by Sara and Jonas, I began our escape down the long underground passageway but not without having first grabbed the torch that blazed on the wall next to the cell. My only concern was stumbling headlong into a patrol of Templars.

  The passageway carried on in a straight line for five stadiums and then descended down some steps carved into the ground and continued for another five stadiums. It suddenly began to curve to the left, drawing a perfect arch, until reaching a fork. I stopped, indecisive. Which way should we go? The best thing would be to use an ‘always to the right’ or ‘always to the left’ tactic — in a labyrinth it’s the only possible decision —, and mark the intersections we passed so as to recognize them in the unfortunate event that we ended up back there.

  “Which way do you both think we should go?” I asked quietly, pulling the scalpru from my belt to make an indentation in the wall.

  “Do you see, Jonas?” I heard Sara whisper. “This is what I was telling you about. The path is marked like the tunnels underneath Paris.”

  I turned in surprise and had to lower my gaze to find Jonas and Sara kneeling in front of a corner with their backs to me.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I bellowed (quietly, of course, as all of our conversations were whispered so as not to alert the Templars).

  “Look, sire!” said Jonas, with shining eyes. “Sara has found the signs to get out of here.”

  “Do you remember the indentations we saw in the underground tunnels of Paris?”

  “You were guiding me, I didn’t see anything at all!”

  “You did see them but you didn’t pay any attention to them, freire Galceran. Every now and again I checked the marks on the corners so that we didn’t get lost, just in case, for precaution, we had to take another route each day.”

  “Now you say that …,” I muttered grudgingly, remembering those overnight trips we had made just three months ago. Just three months! I told myself surprised. It felt like a lifetime had passed since then.

  “You see?” said Sara, turning her face back to the bottom of the corner. “Bring the torch closer.”

  I illuminated the area she was pointing at as best I could and leaned over to look. Three deep indentations were visible on the edge of the ridge, all identical, with the same width and depth, made, no doubt, with the same instrument.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Oh, well …! It can mean many things depending on what you are looking for.”

  “We’re looking for the way out,” said Jonas, just in case we had forgotten.

  “So we should go right. That’s the right way.”

  We walked another three stadiums further along that corridor until we came across another intersection of tunnels. This time there were four possibilities, one to the right and another, that split off into three branches, to the left. They were huge and the entrance to each tunnel measured between six to twelve fathoms. We looked like small ants walking through the naves of a cathedral. Sara pulled me over to the marks on each of the corners to illuminate them while she looked. She pointed to a passageway that continued straight on from the one we had followed to reach that point.

  “That one,” she said very confidently.

  “That one is also signaled with three marks,” said Jonas.

  “The three marks mean ‘right way’, although they can also mean ‘entrance’ or ‘exit’.

  “But that’s impossible! The same signal can’t have three different meanings.”

  “Well, this one has plenty of others but I’m just mentioning the ones that best fit what we are looking for.”

  “And if there are three indentations instead of two?”

  “That can also mean many different things. In our case, for example, ‘detour’, ‘shortcut’, ‘refuge’ or ‘chapel’, in case you want to pray before you leave.”

  “And a single indentation?”

  “Never follow the tunnels marked with a single indentation, Jonas!” exclaimed Sara very seriously with a grave voice. “You will never return.”

  “But what does it mean?”

  “One indentation can mean, for example, ‘trap’, ‘dead-end’ or … ‘death’. If we have to split up for any reason, always follow the tunnels with the triple marking, and if there aren’t any, follow the ones with the double marking. Never, ever, you hear me, take the route with just one indentation. If all the passages are marked with a single indentation, go back to the previous intersection and pick the least bad of the remaining directions.”

  At the end of that immense tunnel was a vast, empty, open space that had just one exit to the right. Overwhelmed by the sheer size of that place and the darkness that surrounded us, we stealthily moved towards it. Luckily, it was another triple marking. The catacomb gently curved to the left before continuing straight. To the right we left behind a series of seven entrances to tunnels marked with the single marking, the one with just one indentation which we obviously didn’t enter. When we reached the end, we found another open space, although slightly smaller than the previous one. We froze when we saw that there was no way out.

  “What now? Didn’t you say that we were going the right way?” Jonas asked the witch.

  “And we were going the right away, I assure you. I don’t understand this either.”

  With one quick movement, she took the torch from me and began to examine the curved walls, tapping them with the palm of her hand and kicking up the dirt with her feet.

  “There’s something over here!” She joyously exclaimed after a while. “Look!”

  The boy and I leaned over the clearing that Sara had made on the floor with her sandals. A small engraving, barely the size of my palm, and very well made, displayed the figure of a rooster with its neck outstretched and its beak
open as if it were crowing. I recognized it straight away and remembered where I had recently seen an identical image.

  “What could it mean?” Jonas asked me, arching his eyebrows.

  “The rooster can symbolize many things,” I explained, letting my bag fall to the floor and quickly pulled out my pouch of remedies which I had brought in case we needed medicine during our journey and which, so far, I had only used to make the purgative I had prepared back in Najera to get rid of old Nobody. “Because of its relationship with dawn,” I continued, “it symbolizes the victory of light over darkness. Amongst the ancient Greeks and Romans, and still today in some Eastern areas, the rooster represents combat, fighting and value. However, for Christians, it is a symbol of the Resurrection and the return of Christ.”

  As I spoke, I pulled fistfuls of sachets containing the healing herbs from the pouch and, when they were all on the floor, I began to undo the strings that held them together and roughly threw the contents into the air, Sara and Jonas watched me open-mouthed.

  “What on earth are you doing, micer?” the witch finally managed to ask.

  “Jonas, do you remember that in the crypt of St. John of Ortega we found a parchment of leather with the Templar seal?

  “Yes. You grabbed it as we were escaping.”

  “Well, the day I was on my own in the Hospital of the King in Burgos, waiting to hear from you, I remembered that I hadn’t examined it, so I broke the seal and opened it. It was a piece of leather, about half a yard long and half a yard wide, and it was covered in secretive drawings accompanied by short Latin texts written in Visigoth writing. The heading was a verse from the Gospel of Matthew: Nihil enim est opertum quod non revelabitur, aut occultum quod non scietur (48), ‘There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed, and nothing secret that will not be made known’. At that moment, of course, I didn’t understand it but there was no doubt in my mind that it was something important that I should hold onto and seeing as I didn’t trust Joffroi of Le Mans, I began to think about a safe way to hide it, one that would not arouse suspicions, so I cut the leather up into pieces, more or less of the same size and shape as the ones I had used to keep the herbs in, and replaced the old pouches for the new ones.”