Chapter 22

The Dream of the Ill-Clad Ladies

He stood atop the high bell-tower of the Alcazaba, the very nose of the Alhambra, looking down over a city which was and was not the great Karnattah he had twice visited as a boy. He understood the reason for its strangeness when he saw Rosemary standing beside him.

“Yet it is not entirely as strange as I might have expected,” he mused. “The Río Darro still flows through the city, like a thread of shining silver. The neighborhood on our right shows that they have respected their promise to the Moors; and they have respected the Alhambra itself.”

“Look behind you,” said Rosemary.

Obeying her, he gasped to see that much of the Moorish wonder of the modern world had been knocked away to leave a ragged, gaping hole.

“Charles V decided to build himself a new palace right there,” Rosemary explained, “and then died before finishing it. They’ll make another effort pretty soon. We’re in 1610 now.”

The bell began to sway, but its tolling sounded less like a bell than like the cry of a muezzin wailing his call to worshippers who could no longer either hear him or spread their carpets for prayer.

“And that,” Rosemary added, jerking her head at the destruction to the Alhambra, “makes a fair symbol of how they’ve honored their promise to the Moors.”

“I had forgotten.” Sighing, he turned to gaze again at the city.

“This time we aren’t here to see blood, anyway,” said Rosemary. “Just symbols.”

All about the city stood women clad in sanbenitos—heavy, garish, the garb of penitents on their way to an Act of Faith. At times these women seemed of ordinary size, so that it was wonderful how clearly he thought he saw them; at others, they seemed to tower above the highest roofs, so that they could hardly have taken a step without crushing anyone beneath their feet; and there were moments when he thought it was not the single city of Granada that spread out before him, but all the kingdoms of Spain.

“Churches,” Rosemary explained with a nod.

“They are our churches?” Looking more closely, he saw that each of them wore, not a single sanbenito, but layers upon layers of them one atop another, weighing each lady down like so much lead. Most of the women here wept like Rachel in Rama. A few of them, here and there, laughed. “It is this accursed new custom of hanging the penitents’ sanbenitos in their parish churches,” Don Felipe cried, “to the perpetual disgrace both of them and their descendants!”

“‘Unto the thousandth generation,’” Rosemary said dryly. “Exodus, somewhere near the middle of the book. I did my homework.”

“‘Unto the thousandth generation,’ was God’s promise of His mercy. Punishment was to be inflicted only unto the third and fourth generation.”

“That was Yahweh’s idea, not the Inquisition’s. Not that it’d make much difference to mere children and grandchildren.”

“You are Pagan,” said Don Felipe.

“I honor Divinity in my own way. Which isn’t by clogging holy places up with souvenirs of alleged heresy.”

A man wearing rich vestments recognizable as those of an archbishop in times of celebration could be seen now, striding joyfully toward one of the women—the tallest lady in Karnattah, who stood directly in Don Felipe’s line of vision, wearing on her head a crown with the inscription, “Ave Maria.” He remembered the tale he had heard, and been forced by his Christianity and priesthood publicly to applaud, of the Catholic captain who, creeping into the besieged city one dark night during the Glorious Reconquest, had nailed a banner with these words to the door of the mosque that had stood on that spot in Moorish times. Sure enough, by squinting hard, he could see blood still trickling down the woman’s brow from the Castilian captain’s nails. The banner, indeed, resembled Christ’s crown of thorns.

“You had said this time we would see no blood,” he accused Rosemary.

“Symbolic blood only,” she replied.

“My bride!” the man in archiepiscopal vestments cried aloud to the cathedral-woman. “Strip thyself! He grants his permission!”

“Archbishop Pedro González de Mendoza,” Rosemary explained with a nod. “‘He’ being Inquisitor-general Sandoval, who just consecrated him and gave permission to move all those sanbenitos out of the cathedral.”

“Archbishop consecrated by inquisitor general!” cried Don Felipe. “It is as though the Holy Office were establishing itself as papacy of the Spanish Church!”

But bells and laughter drowned out his words. Not only the bell beside him, but every bell, so it seemed, in all the city was pealing with joy, as the cathedral woman raised her head, her tears turned to laughter, and began to strip garment after sorrowful garment from her body, flinging them this way and that.

Half of them fell upon a church-lady in the old Moorish neighborhood to Felipe’s right, who knelt weeping to arrange them over those that already burdened her down. The rest fell to a woman who stood—Felipe thought somewhere to his left—and she gathered them up and waved them above her head, dancing and exalting before draping them upon her shoulders.

Everywhere he looked, they were all laughing, both the cathedral who disrobed herself until she stood straight and unbowed in her simple shift of stainless white, and all of those who did nothing save witness; but none rejoiced more exuberantly than she who gathered up half of the discarded sanbenitos, and none still wept save she upon whom the other half fell.

“Who are these?” Felipe asked his guide.

“San Salvador in the Albaycin,” said Rosemary, nodding to the weeping one, “who has to take the Moriscos’ sanbenitos. And Saint James, who gets to keep those of the Judaizers, and who happens to be the Inquisition’s own local church.”

The cathedral-woman spread her arms, and the new archbishop rushed into her unencumbered embrace.

“But why?” cried she of the Albaycin, and in her voice Don Felipe seemed to hear again the wail of the muezzin and the accusing tones of an El Santon. “Why cannot we hurl them into the sea, bury them in the earth, burn them in a pyre, unburden ourselves of them completely? Why cannot we all stand as pure and unfettered as his Grace Mendoza’s own bride?”

“Lest the world forget!” the Inquisition’s local church crowed in reply. “Because we must never forget! The world must never be allowed to forget!”

“Why the hell not?” Rosemary grumbled.

The bells pealed more loudly yet, and Don Felipe awoke, hardly knowing whether to rejoice or to mourn, nor why he might wish to do either.