CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

THE WITNESS

In the first week of April, a man from the office of the alguacil of Saragossa came and informed Yonah that he was required to appear as a witness before the municipal court, “in a judgment to take place on Thursday a fortnight hence.”

The evening before the hearing, Yonah came downstairs while Reyna was in her cooling bath in front of the fire. He took the kettle from its hook over the flames, and as he poured fresh heat into the bath water they talked of his summons to the court. “It is about the two boys,” he told her.

The case was already celebrated in the district. On a midwinter’s morning two boys, both fourteen years of age and fast friends since they were small, had had a falling-out over a little wooden horse. The boys, Oliverio Pita and Guillermo de Roda, had played with the horse for years; sometimes it was kept in the home of one, at other times in the home of the other. It was crudely carved, little more than a trinket, but one day they quarreled about its ownership.

Each claimed the horse as property he had gladly shared with his friend.

As often happens with boys, the quarrel became physical. Had they been a few years older an altercation might have resulted in a challenge and a duel, but they resorted to fists and hard feelings. Things were made worse when a parent of each of the boys reported a memory that their family owned the horse.

The next time the boys met, they threw stones at one another. Oliverio was by far the better marksman; he was untouched, but several of the missiles he launched found Guillermo, one of the stones raking his right temple. When he appeared at home with his face covered with blood, his frightened mother had sent for the physician at once, and Yonah had gone to the Roda home and treated the boy. The incident might have had a chance to fade away in time, had not Guillermo subsequently contracted a fever and died.

Yonah had explained to the grief-stricken parents that Guillermo had died of a contagious disease and not from the slight injury he had suffered weeks before. But in his grief Ramiro de Roda had gone to the alguacil and sworn out a charge against Oliverio Pita, stating that the illness had followed the head injury, and that therefore Oliverio had been the cause of Guillermo’s demise. The alguacil had scheduled the hearing to determine whether the boy would be charged with homicide.

“It is a tragedy,” Reyna said, “and now the physician of Saragossa has been drawn into it.” She was able to sense the extent to which Yonah was troubled. “But what have you to fear in this tale of two boys?”

“I have heard that a new inquisitor has been assigned to Saragossa, and he will be looking for trouble. In testifying, I shall alienate a powerful Saragossa family. As we both know, physicians can be denounced anonymously to the Inquisition. I am not eager to make enemies of the Rodas.”

Reyna nodded. “Yet you do not dare ignore an order from the alguacil.”

“No. And there is a question of justice that must be settled. It leaves me with one alternative.”

“What is that?” Reyna asked, soaping an arm.

“To make my appearance and tell the truth,” Yonah said.

*   *   *

The hearing was held in the small meeting hall on the upper story of the municipal building, which was already crowded when Yonah arrived.

José Pita and his wife, Rosa Menendez, looked straight at Yonah when he entered the room. They had come to him soon after their son had been charged, and he had told them the truth as he saw it.

The boy Oliverio Pita sat alone, his eyes large, facing the unsmiling and businesslike magistrate who began the proceedings without delay by rapping his great ring of office against the tabletop.

Alberto Porreño, the monarch’s prosecutor, with whom Yonah had a greeting acquaintance, was a short man with a head enlarged by a great mane of black hair. For his first witness he called Ramiro de Roda.

“Señor Roda, your son, Guillermo de Roda, age fourteen years, expired on the fourteenth day of February, the year of Our Lord 1508?”

“Yes, señor.”

“Of what did he die, Señor Roda?”

“He was struck in the head by a rock hurled at him in anger, the murderous injury leading to a terrible illness that carried him off.” He looked over to where Yonah was sitting. “The physician could not save Guillermo, my only son.”

“Who threw the rock?”

“He.” He extended his arm and pointed a finger. “Oliverio Pita.” The Pita boy, very pale, stared at the table in front of him.

“How do you know this?”

“It was seen by a mutual neighbor, Señor Rodrigo Zurita.”

“Is Señor Zurita present?” the prosecutor asked, and when a skinny, white-bearded man raised his hand, the prosecutor moved to him.

“How did you come to see the boys throwing stones at one another?”

“I was sitting by my house, warming my bones in the sun. I saw the whole thing.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw José Pita’s son, the boy over there, throw the stone that struck poor Guillermo, that good lad.”

“You saw where it hit him?”

“Yes. It struck him in the head,” he said, pointing to his forehead, between his eyes. “I saw it clearly. He was struck so cruelly, I saw blood and pus come from the wound.”

“Thank you, señor.”

Señor Porreño now approached Yonah. “Señor Callicó, you treated the boy following the incident?”

“I did, señor.”

“And what did you find?”

“He could not have been struck squarely by the stone,” Yonah said uncomfortably. “Rather, it had grazed him in the region of the right temple, just above and in front of the right ear.”

“Not … here?” The prosecutor touched his finger to the center of Yonah’s forehead.

“No, señor. Here,” Yonah said, and touched his temple.

“Could you tell anything else from the wound?”

“It was a minor wound. More of a scratch. I washed the dried blood from his face and from the scratch. Such scrapes and scratches usually do well when they are bathed in wine, so I soaked a cloth with wine and wiped the wound, but otherwise I left it alone.

“At the time,” Yonah said, “I could not help but feel that Guillermo was a fortunate youth, because if the stone had struck him just a bit to the left his injury would have been far more serious.”

“Is it not a serious injury when blood and pus appear from a wound?”

Within himself, Yonah sighed; but there was no escape from the truth.

“There was no pus.” He saw Señor Zurita’s furious eyes. “Pus is not something that exists within the skin of humans, to ooze free when the skin is punctured. Pus often appears after the injury, engendered when a breakage of the skin allows an open wound to come under the influence of putrid scents in the air, the stink of such things as ordure or rotting flesh. There was no pus in the wound when first I saw it, and there was no discharge of any sort when I saw Guillermo three weeks later. By then the scratch had developed a scab. It was cool to the touch, it was not angry looking. I considered him almost healed.”

“Yet two weeks later he was dead,” the prosecutor said.

“Yes. But not of the slight injury to his head.”

“Of what then, señor?”

“Of a ragged coughing and mucus in the lungs that brought on his final fever.”

“And what caused the malady?”

“I do not know, señor. Would that I knew. A physician sees such illness with discouraging regularity, and some of the afflicted die.”

“You are certain that the stone thrown by Oliverio Pita did not cause the death of Guillermo de Roda?”

“I am certain.”

“Will you take your oath on it, Señor Physician?”

“I shall.”

When the town-owned bible was brought, Yonah placed his hand on it and swore that his testimony had been true.

The prosecutor nodded and instructed the accused to rise. The magistrate warned the youth that he would face swift and severe punishment if any of his actions should bring him back to stand before the bar of justice. Rapping the table a final time with his heavy ring, he declared Oliverio Pita to be free.

*   *   *

“Señor,” José Pita said. He was still embracing his weeping son. “We are in your debt for all time.”

“I merely testified to what is true,” Yonah said.

He made his escape at once and soon rode from the center of town, trying to forget the cold dislike he had seen in Ramiro de Roda’s eyes. He knew the Roda family and their friends would die still believing that young Guillermo had been slain by a thrown stone, but he had testified truly and was glad to be done with it.

From the other end of the street, three horsemen were riding toward him. As they drew nearer, Yonah could see two men-at-arms and a cleric in black habit.

A friar. Tall, even as he rode.

Dear God, no.

But as the distance between them closed, Yonah knew who it was. When they drew abreast he saw that in middle age the friar had put on flesh. There were dark veins in his nose and his unruly hair was cut in a tonsure that showed gray.

“A good day to you,” Yonah said politely to the group as they passed and the friar gave a small nod of his head.

But before Yonah’s horse had taken half a dozen steps, he heard the voice.

“Señor!”

He turned the gray Arab and went back.

“I seem to know you, señor.”

“Yes, Fray Bonestruca. We met some years ago in Toledo.”

Bonestruca waved his hand. “Yes, in Toledo. But … your name?…”

“Ramón Callicó. I had come to Toledo in order to deliver a suit of armor to the count of Tembleque.”

“Yes, by my faith, the armorer’s apprentice from Gibraltar! I have admired Count Vasca’s fine armor, of which he is rightfully proud. Are you in Saragossa on a similar errand?”

“No, I reside here. My maestro and uncle, the armorer Manuel Fierro, passed on, and I came to Saragossa to apprentice with his brother, Nuño, a physician.”

Bonestruca nodded with interest. “I would say you have been rich in uncles.”

“And I would agree with you. Sadly, Nuño has gone to his rest as well, and now I am the physician of this place.”

“The physician … Well, then we shall see one another from time to time, for I am come here to stay.”

“Then I trust Saragossa will please you, for it is a town of good people.”

“Indeed? Truly good people are treasures beyond price. But I have long since discovered that often beneath an appearance of rectitude there is something darker and far less benign than goodness.”

“I am certain that is true.”

“It is good to discover an acquaintance when one is uprooted and transferred to a new location. We must meet again, Señor Callicó.”

“We must indeed.”

“For now, Christ be with you.”

“Christ be with you, Fray Bonestruca.”

Yonah was numb as he rode away, lost in thought. Halfway home the reins dropped from his hands and the Arab horse moved to the side of the track and began to graze in the shade of a tree while his rider sat in the saddle, unheeding. Yonah had failed to kill Bonestruca once before, in his youth, when opportunity had presented itself. And then he had used the friar to rid himself of enemies who would have killed him.

And now the inquisitor was going to be in close proximity to him. Every day.

He realized, almost with surprise, that he would never again attempt to kill Bonestruca. He had become a healer, ruined for work as an assassin. If he committed murder, even if no one else knew about it, it would change him, spoil him as a doctor. Somewhere during his apprenticeship to Nuño Fierro he had crossed an important line. Being a physician—fighting death—was the most important part of him, the tether that anchored him to the earth. It was a priesthood that had taken the place of religion, culture, and family, and it far outweighed any dry and bitter satisfaction to be found in a revenge that could not bring back his loved ones.

Yet he hated Bonestruca and Count Vasca and had no forgiveness in his heart for the men who had been involved in the deaths of his father and his brother. He told himself that if Bonestruca was to be in close proximity, he would keep a watch on him, in the hope that circumstances might yet permit him to bring this rogue friar to justice.

Comforted and resolute, he picked up the reins again and directed the Arabian back onto the road that took them home.