CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SAINTS AND GLADIATORS

When Fierro perceived that the new prentice appeared to be dependable in every respect, Yonah was assigned the task of chasing a design into the cuirass of Count Vasca’s armor. It required him to make tiny indentations in the steel with a hammer and a punch, following guide lines barely marked on the surface of the steel by Fierro or Luis Plana. Silver was much easier to chase than steel, but the harder metal was a protection against certain errors that would have been disasters in silver. In the beginning, Yonah made a light tap to ascertain that the punch was correctly placed, followed by a hard tap to complete the indentation; but as he continued to work, his sure touch returned. Soon the quick, hard blows of his hammer revealed his confidence.

*   *   *

“Manuel Fierro is careful to test his armor often,” Paco Parmiento told Yonah one morning. “So from time to time we have games. The maestro likes his workers to pretend they are knights, in order to understand what changes he must make in his designs. He wishes you to participate.”

For the first time, Angel Costa’s questions made disturbing sense. “Of course, señor,” Yonah said.

So it happened that the following day he found himself standing in a large round pit, clad in a padded fabric undergarment and regarding with unease a disassembled and somewhat rusted and ill-used suit of metal being fitted to his body by Paco Parmiento. At the other side of the pit Angel Costa was being dressed by his friend Luis, while their fellow workers were gathered at the edges of the pit like spectators at a cockfight.

“Vicente, go to the hut and ready the boy’s pallet, for he will have need of it soon!” Luis called, and there were jeers and laughter.

“Don’t mind that one,” Paco said. Beads of sweat ran down Parmiento’s bald pate.

The cuirass was lifted over Yonah and settled, covering his chest and his back. Mail protected his arms and legs, cuissarts covered his thighs. Steel guards were placed on his shoulders, elbows and lower arms, and knees, while leg pieces covered his shins. He pushed his feet into laminated steel shoes. When the helmet was placed over his head, Paco lowered the face guard.

“I cannot breathe, nor can I see,” Yonah said. He tried to keep his voice calm.

“The perforations allow you to breathe,” Parmiento said.

“They do not.”

Paco raised the guard crankily. “Leave it up,” he said. “Everyone does so.” Yonah could see why.

He was given leather gauntlets with steel guards on the fingers, and a round shield. Everything added to the great weight carried by his body.

“The sword’s edges and point have been blunted and rounded for your safety in the game, until it is more a club than a sword,” Parmiento said, handing it over. The weapon felt strange in Yonah’s hand, which had little flexibility within the stiff gauntlet.

Angel Costa was similarly armored, and the moment came when they shambled toward one another. Yonah was still thinking of how best to strike when he saw Costa’s sword already descending toward his helmeted head, and only just managed to fling up the shield on his arm.

The arm quickly became leaden as Costa struck again and again, with such swift, repeated power that Yonah was unable to react when the sword suddenly came lower. Costa dealt him such a smashing clout to the ribs as would have cleaved his body if the blade had been sharp and the armor less sound. As it was, even though he was protected by padding and well-made steel, he felt the smash of the sword to his very bones, and it was the precursor of many others assaults as Costa rained terrible blow after terrible blow.

Yonah managed to strike Costa only twice before they were stopped by the maestro’s reaching a pole between them, but it was clear to all who watched that if it had been real warfare, Angel would have killed him at once. At any time, Costa could have applied the golpe de gracia.

Yonah sat on a bench, aching and out of wind, as Paco stripped him of the heavy armor.

The maestro came to him and asked many questions. Had the armor inhibited him? Had any of the joints jammed? Did Yonah have any suggestions that might make the armor more protective and less imprisoning? Yonah answered truthfully that the experience had been so foreign to his experience that he had scarcely thought of any of those things.

The maestro had but to look at Yonah’s face to be aware of his humiliation.

“You must not expect to best Angel Costa in these pursuits,” the armorer said. “No man here is able to do so. Costa spent eighteen years tasting blood as a sergeant in constant and bitter combat with the Saracen, and now in these games of testing the steel, our master-at-arms relishes pretending that he is still fighting to the death.”

*   *   *

There was a large and purpled bruise on the left side of Yonah’s rib cage, and he had enough achiness to wonder whether lasting damage had been done to his ribs. For several nights he had to sleep on his back only, and one midnight he suffered enough pain-filled sleeplessness to hear sounds of distress emanating from the other side of the hut.

As he arose with a stifled groan of his own, he determined that the hoarse noises came from Vicente Deza. He went and knelt by the old man’s pallet in the dark.

“Vicente?”

“Peregrino … Santo Perigrino…”

Vicente was weeping raggedly. “El Compasivo! Santa Peregrino el Compasivo!”

Saint Pilgrim the Merciful. What did that mean?

“Vicente,” Yonah said again, but the old man was off on a torrent of prayer, invoking God and the pilgrim saint. Yonah put out a hand and sighed when he touched the heat in Vicente’s face.

When he stood, he knocked over Vicente’s water bottle, which fell with a clatter.

“What the fuck?” Luis Planas asked, wakened on the other side of the room, and waking Paco Piemento.

“What?” Paco said.

“It is Vicente. He has come down with the fever.”

“Keep him quiet or get him out of here to die,” Luis said.

At first Yonah didn’t know what to do. But he remembered what Abba had done when he and Meir had had the fever. He left the hut and stumbled through the dark night to the forge, where a banked fire like a dragon’s tongue cast a red glare over the tables and the tools. He lit a taper from the coals and used it to light an oil lamp, by which illumination he found a basin that he filled with water from a jug. Then he collected rags that had been cut and stacked against the time they would be needed for polishing metal.

When he was back inside the hut he set the lamp on the floor.

“Vicente,” he said.

The old man had gone to sleep fully clothed, and Yonah began to undress him. Perhaps he made more noise than he should have, or maybe the flickering light of the lamp drew Luis Planas from sleep again.

“Damn you!” Luis sat up. “Did I tell you to remove him or not?”

Heartless bastard. Something within Yonah snapped.

“Listen—” Luis said.

Yonah turned and took a step toward him. “Go to sleep.” He tried to keep from being disrespectful, but anger placed a burr in his voice.

Luis remained half sitting for a long moment, glaring across the room at the apprentice who would speak to him so. Finally he lay back and turned his face to the wall.

Paco also had been awakened. He had heard the exchange between Luis and Yonah and was laughing quietly on his pallet.

Vicente’s body seemed composed of filthy skin over bones, the dirt caked on his feet, but Yonah forced himself to bathe him painstakingly, changing the water twice, carefully wiping his body with dry rags so he would not take a chill.

*   *   *

In the morning Vicente’s fever had broken. Yonah went to the kitchen and asked the other Manuel to thin the breakfast gruel with hot water, taking a bowl back to the hut and spooning the gruel into the old man. In the meantime he missed his own breakfast. When he hurried to report to work in Luis’s shed, he was intercepted by the maestro.

He knew that Luis must have complained to Fierro about his impertinence and he braced for trouble, but the maestro spoke to him quietly. “How is Vicente?”

“I believe he will be well again. The fever has gone.”

“That is good. I know that sometimes it is difficult to be an apprentice. I remember when I was apprentice to Abu Adal Khira in Velez Málaga. He was one of the foremost of the Muslim armorers. He is dead now, and his armory is gone.

“Luis was an apprentice with me, and when I came to Gibraltar and opened my own armory I brought him with me. Luis is a very difficult man but he is a wondrous maker of armor. I need him in my shop. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“Yes, maestro.”

Fierro nodded. “I made a mistake placing Vicente in the same hut as Luis Plana. You know the small shed beyond the forge?”

Yonah nodded.

“It is well constructed. It has only a few tools in it. Move the tools elsewhere and you and Vicente will live in that hut. Vicente is fortunate you were willing to help him last night, Ramón Callicó. You did well. But an apprentice would be wise to remember that gross impertinence to a master craftsman will not be tolerated twice in this armory. Is it understood?”

“Yes, señor,” Yonah said.

*   *   *

Luis was angry that Fierro hadn’t beaten the apprentice and sent him away. He was severe and cold to Yonah for a number of days, and Yonah took care to give no cause for complaint as he polished armor unendingly. The steel suit for the count of Tembleque was in its final stages of manufacture, and Yonah worked over piece after piece until they gleamed with a soft brilliance that even Luis acknowledged could not be improved.

It was a relief when he was dispatched to collect needed supplies from the merchants of the village.

Passing the time of day in the chandler’s shop while Tadeo Deza filled Fierro’s order, he told the elderly clerk that his cousin Vicente had been very ill with the fever.

Tadeo paused. “Is he nearing the end?”

“No. The fever abated and then returned, abated and returned, but he appears to be recovering.”

Tadeo Deza sniffed. “That one is too simple to die,” he said.

Yonah was leaving with his supplies when he turned back, struck by a sudden thought.

“Tadeo, do you know anything of Santo Peregrino el Compasivo?”

“Yes, a local saint.”

“Saint Pilgrim the Merciful. It is a strange name.”

“He lived in this region several hundreds of years ago. It is said he was a foreigner, perhaps from France or Germany. At any rate, he had been to Santiago de Compostela to worship at the relics of St. James. You yourself have made the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, perhaps?”

“No, señor.”

“Ah, someday you must go. James was the third apostle chosen by Our Lord. He was present at the Transfiguration, so holy that the emperor Charlmagne decreed his subjects must give water, shelter, and fire to all pilgrims traveling to visit the relics of this saint.

“At any rate, the foreign pilgrim of whom we speak was himself transformed after days of praying with the relics of the apostle. Instead of returning to the life he had led before his pilgrimage, he wandered south, ending in this region. He spent the days of his life here, tending to the needs of the ill and the poor.”

“What was his given name?”

Tadeo shrugged. “It is not known. That is why he is called Saint Pilgrim the Merciful. Nor do we know where he is buried. Some say when he was a very old man he simply wandered away from here, in much the same way he had arrived. But others say he dwelt alone and died alone, someplace nearby, and in every generation men have made a sport of seeking to find his grave hereabouts, without success.

“Where did you hear of our local saint?” Tadeo asked.

Yonah didn’t want to mention Vicente and give his cousin reason for more complaint. “I heard somebody speak of him and I grew curious.”

Tadeo smiled. “Someone in a tavern, no doubt, for drink often deepens a man’s awareness of sin and provokes a desire for the saving grace of angels.”

*   *   *

Yonah was happy when Fierro assigned him to help in the shed of Paco Parmiento, the sword maker. Paco put Yonah to work at once, sharpening to keenness and polishing short cavalry sabers and the long, beautiful swords carried by noblemen and knights, double-edged and narrowing from hilt to point. Three times Paco turned back the first sword Yonah sharpened. “The swordsman’s arm does the work, but the sword must help. Each edge must be as finely honed as the steel will allow.”

Though Paco was a hard taskmaster, Yonah liked him. If Luis reminded Yonah of a fox, Paco brought to mind a kind and gentle bear. Away from his workbench he was forgetful and clumsy, but once he sat down to work his movements were sure and economical, and the maestro had told Yonah that Parmiento’s blades were in great demand.

In Luis’s shed Yonah had worked in virtual silence, but he found that Paco readily answered questions as they worked.

“Did you apprentice with the maestro and Luis?” Yonah asked him.

Paco shook his head. “I am older than they are. When they apprenticed I was already a journeyman in Palma. The maestro sought me out and brought me here.”

“What does Angel do in this workshop?”

Paco shrugged. “The maestro found him soon after he left off soldiering and brought him here as master-at-arms, for he is truly a warrior, an expert at every weapon. We tried to teach him to shape steel but he has no capacity for the work, so Señor Fierro placed him in charge of the peóns.”

They spoke less when the maestro was present, but still it was a relaxed place to work. At a nearby table in the sword maker’s shed, Manuel Fierro often worked on a project dear to his heart. His brother, Nuño Fierro, physician of Saragossa, had sent, through traveling merchants, a set of drawings of surgical instruments. The maestro was using hard steel made from the special ore he and Yonah had brought down from the Gibraltar cavern, fashioning the tools with his own hands, scalpels, lancets, saws, scrapers, probes, and pincers.

In the maestro’s absence, Paco showed Yonah the instruments as a standard of excellence in the working of metal. “He lavishes as much care on each small tool as he would on a full sword or a spear. It is a labor of love.”

He told Yonah proudly that he had helped Fierro fashion the maestro’s own sword of the special steel. “It needed to be a unique blade, because Manuel Fierro has a better command of a sword than anyone else I have ever seen.”

Yonah stopped polishing for a moment. “He is better than Angel Costa?”

“War had taught Angel to be an incomparable killer. In the use of all other weapons he is unchallenged. But in the use of the sword alone, the maestro is the better man.”

*   *   *

Hardly had his bruised ribs a chance to recover before Yonah once again was asked to participate in a game against Angel Costa. This time, again in full armor, he found himself astride a gray Arabian war horse, leveling a lance tipped by a padded wooden ball and galloping toward Angel, who was leveling a similar lance and galloping a glossy brown war horse toward him.

Yonah was unaccustomed to riding a spirited horse. He concentrated on not falling off. The ball at the end of his uncontrolled lance moved this way and that as he slithered and bounced on his mount’s back.

The horses were protected by a low wooden wall that stretched between the contenders, but the riders were not.

There was no time to prepare, merely a short thunder of hooves and then they met. Yonah watched the ball on Costa’s lance become larger and larger, assume the size of a full moon and then of the entireness of life, as it smashed into him and swept him from the horse and onto the ground, into a jarring and ignominious defeat.

Costa was not liked. There was little cheering, but Luis was enjoying every moment. As Paco and several others freed the shaken Yonah from his armor he saw Luis pointing at him and laughing until his cheeks were wet with tears of mirth.

That afternoon, Yonah tried to hide a slight limp. He walked to the Smoke House and found Angel Costa sharpening arrow points on a stone wheel.

“Hola,” he said, but Costa gave him no greeting, continuing with his work.

“I do not know how to fight.”

Costa gave his barking laugh. “No,” he agreed.

“I would like to learn to use weapons. Would you be willing, perhaps, to give me instruction?”

Costa stared at him with hooded eyes. “I do not instruct.” He tested the point of an arrowhead gingerly with his finger. “I will tell you what you must do to learn my skills. You must go for a soldier and spend twenty years fighting the Moor. You must kill and kill, using every weapon and sometimes your bare hands, and whenever possible you must cut the pizzle from the slain. When thus you have acquired more than one hundred circumcized pricks you may come back and challenge me, wagering your collection of pricks against mine. And then I will kill you quickly.”

When Yonah met the maestro in front of the barn, Fierro was kinder. “A disaster, no, Ramón?” he asked Yonah cheerfully. “Are you injured?”

“Only my pride, maestro.”

“I have a few words of advice. From the start of your ride you must grasp the lance more firmly, with both hands, and with the lower end of the weapon tucked tightly between your elbow and your body. You must fix your eyes on your enemy at once and keep them on him as he approaches, following him with the tip of the lance, so it will find his body as if the meeting were preordained.”

“Yes, señor,” Yonah said, but so resignedly that Fierro smiled.

“It is not hopeless, but you ride without confidence. You and the horse must become as one, so you may drop the reins and give full attention to the lance. On days when you are not greatly needed for the work, take the gray horse from the stables and give him his exercise, then groom him and give him feed and water. I think both you and the animal will benefit.”

*   *   *

He was tired and sore when he made his way back to the hut and dropped onto his pallet.

Vicente looked over at him from his own pallet. “At least you have survived. Angel has a mean soul.” Vicente spoke normally and appeared rational.

“Your fever hasn’t returned?”

“Apparently not.”

“Good, Vicente, I am glad.”

“I thank you for seeing after me in my illness, Ramón Callicó.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “I had frightening dreams, under the fever. Did I speak wildly?”

Yonah smiled at him. “Only a few times. Sometimes you prayed to the Pilgrim Saint.”

“The Pilgrim Saint. Did I?”

They were silent for a moment, and then Vicente struggled to sit up. “There is something I would tell you, Ramón. Something I would share with you for being the only one who cared for me.”

Yonah looked at him with concern, certain from the tension and shrillness in his voice that the fevers had returned. “What is it, Vicente?”

“I have discovered him.”

“Who?”

“Santo Peregrino el Compasivo. I have found the saint of pilgrimages,” Vicente Deza said.

“Vicente. What are you saying?” He looked over at the old man in distress. It was only three days since his night of delirium.

“You think me addled. I understand.”

Vicente was right, he did think the old man mad in a harmless way.

Vicente’s hands scrabbled beneath his pallet. Then, holding something in his fist, he crawled to Yonah like a child. “Take it,” he said, and Yonah found an object in his hand. It was small and thin. He held it up, trying to see it in the dim light.

“What is it?”

“It is a bone. From the finger of the saint.” He clutched Yonah’s arm. “You must come with me, Ramón, and see it for yourself. Let us go on Sunday morn.”

Damnation. On Sunday mornings, half a day was given to the workers to attend church services. Yonah was miserly about wasting the precious few hours he had to himself. He wanted to follow the maestro’s advice and take out the gray Arab horse, but he suspected he would have no peace if he continued to ignore Vicente’s claims.

“We will go Sunday if both of us are able to walk by then,” he said, and handed back the bone.

*   *   *

He was worried about Vicente, who continued to talk to him in feverish whispers about a discovery. In all other respects Vicente appeared to have recovered from his illness. He appeared alert and robust, and his appetite for both food and drink had returned prodigiously.

On Sunday morning, the two of them walked over the straight neck of land connecting Gibraltar to Spain. Once they were on the mainland, they walked eastward for only half an hour’s time before Vicente lifted his hand.

“We are arrived.”

Yonah could see only a desolate place of sandy soil broken by numerous low outcroppings of granite rock. He could detect nothing unusual about the site but he followed as Vicente clambered across a number of the rock formations as if he had not been ill for a day.

Then, quite close to the trail, Vicente found the particular rocks for which he was looking, and Yonah saw that in the very center of the formation there was a wide fissure. A natural rock ramp ran down to an opening. It was quite invisible unless someone stood almost atop it.

Vicente had brought a live coal in a small metal box, and Yonah spent a moment blowing on the coal and lighting a pair of stubby candles.

Rainwater would be carried past the opening by the stone ramp that ended below in a patch of sand. Within, the cave beneath the rocks was dry and about the size of Mingo’s cave on the Sacromonte. It ended in a narrow fissure that must have been connected with the surface, because Yonah could feel fresh air.

“See here,” Vicente said.

In the flickering light, Yonah saw a skeleton. The bones of the upper half of the body appeared to be intact, but the bones of both legs and feet had been moved a short distance away, and when Yonah knelt over them with the candle he could see they had been gnawed by an animal. Of the garments that had covered the body, only tufts of material remained here and there. Yonah guessed that the cloth had been consumed long ago by animals attracted to the salt of sweat.

“And here!”

It was a rough altar composed of tree branches. Before it were three shallow earthen pots. Their contents had long since been eaten, perhaps by the same creature that had gnawed the bones.

“Offerings,” Yonah said. “Perhaps to a pagan God.”

“No,” Vicente said. He brought his candle to light the opposite wall, where there leaned a great cross.

And then he illumined the wall next to the cross, so Yonah could see that scratched into the stone was the mark of earliest Christianity, the sign of the fish.

*   *   *

“When did you find it?” Yonah asked as they walked back to the armory.

“Perhaps one month after you came. It happened one day that I found in my possession a bottle of wine—”

“You found it in your possession?”

“I stole it from the tavern when Bernaldo was occupied. But surely I must have been prompted by angels to do so, because I carried the bottle away so I would not be disturbed when I drank. My feet were directed to that place.”

“What do you intend to do with this knowledge?”

“There are those who will pay dearly for the saintly relics. I would like you to bargain with them for me. Get the best price.”

“No, Vicente.”

“I shall pay you well, of course.”

“No, Vicente.”

Vicente’s eyes gleamed shrewdly. “This is why you shall find profit in the bargaining. Very well. You shall have half of all. A full half.”

“I am not bargaining with you. The men who buy and sell relics are vipers. Were I you, I should go to the church in Gibraltar village and lead the priest—What is his name?”

“Padre Vasquez.”

“Yes. I should lead Padre Vasquez here and let him determine if the remains are those of a saint.”

“No!” Vicente appeared febrile again, his face flushed with anger. “God has directed my feet to the saint. God has reasoned, ‘Save for a weakness for strong drink, Vicente is not a bad fellow. I shall bring him good fortune, that he may end his days in a bit of comfort.’”

“It is your decision, Vicente. But I shall have no part in it.”

“Then you must keep your mouth closed concerning what you have seen this morning.”

“I shall be pleased to forget about it.”

“For if you should think of selling the relics on your own, without Vicente, I would see that you would be sorely punished.”

Yonah looked at him in amazement that so soon he should have forgotten who had nursed him through his illness. “Deal with the relics as you may, and be damned,” he said shortly, and they continued their way onto Gibraltar in a strained silence.