CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

IN THE CASTLE

Nine days later he rode across the red clay of the Sagra plain, approaching the walls of Toledo. He saw the city from far off, sharp and clear on its high rock in the afternoon sun. He was a lifetime away from the terror-stricken youth who had escaped from Toledo on a burro, yet as he passed through the Bisagra Gate he was assailed by troublesome memories. He rode past the headquarters of the Inquisition, marked by its stone escutcheon displaying the cross, the olive branch, and the sword. Once when he was a boy in his father’s house he had heard David Mendoza explain the meaning of the symbols to Helkias Toledano: “If you accept the cross they give you the olive branch. If you refuse it, they give you the sword.”

In front of the diocesan offices he tethered the black horse. Stiff from his long days in the saddle, he walked inside, where a friar seated behind a table asked his errand and then motioned him to a stone bench.

Padre Espina appeared after the briefest of waits, beaming. “How good it is to see you again, Señor Callicó!” He was older and more mature, of course, and more relaxed than Yonah had remembered, a more polished priest.

They sat and talked. To Yonah’s relief, Padre Espina showed no disappointment that his letter had produced the physician Callicó instead of the physician Montenegro. “When you get to the castle, you must announce that you are there at the request of Bishop Sagasta and Padre Espina. The count was without a steward when he took ill, and the Church supplied a steward to aid his wife, the Countess María del Mar Cano. She is the daughter of Gonzalo Cano, a rich and influential marquis in Madrid. The steward is Padre Alberto Guzmán.” He looked at Yonah. “As I wrote in my letter, several other physicians have tried to help the count.”

“I understand. I can only try as well.”

Padre Espina asked questions about Saragossa and spoke briefly about the joy he was taking in his work. “My bishop is a Catholic historian, engaged in composing a book of the lives of saints, a blessed project which has the support of our Most Holy Father in Rome, and in which it is my honor and pleasure to assist.” He smiled at Yonah. “I read daily from my father’s breviary and you are often blessed for bringing it to me. I appreciate that you would ride so far in answer to my letter to Señor Montenegro. You have been the kindest of benefactors, giving me back the memory of my father. If ever there is any way I may help you, please tell me of it.

“Would you care to stay and rest here, and go to Tembleque in the morning?” the priest said. “I can offer you a monastery supper, and a monk’s cell in which to rest your head.”

But Yonah had no desire for a monk’s cell. “No, I shall go on, in order to examine the count as soon as possible.”

Padre Espina gave him directions to Tembleque and he repeated them aloud, but he remembered the way.

“I prescribe medication but don’t compound it,” Yonah said. “Do you know of an excellent apothecary who is nearby?”

Espina nodded. “Santiago López, in the shadow of the cathedral’s northern wall. Go with God, señor.”

*   *   *

The shop was tiny and untended, but it had a reassuringly strong scent of herbs. Yonah had to shout the apothecary down from his apartment upstairs. He was middle-aged and balding, with squinting eyes that didn’t hide the intelligence lurking there.

“Do you have myrtle? Balsam, acacia nilotica?” Yonah asked him. “Do you have acid beet? Colocynth? Seeds of pharbitis?”

López took no offense at Yonah’s questioning. “I have most things, señor. As you know, one cannot have all. Should you call for something I do not have, with your permission I will make it known to you and suggest one or more substitute drugs.”

He nodded gravely when Yonah told him he would be ordering medications from the castle of Tembleque. “I hope you have not come this long way on an impossible errand, señor.”

Yonah nodded. “We shall see,” he said, and took his leave.

*   *   *

By the time he reached the castle it had been dark for an hour and the barred gate was down.

“Halloo the wall!”

“Who is it that calls?”

“Ramón Callicó, physician of Saragossa.”

“Hold.”

The sentry hurried off but soon returned, this time accompanied by someone with a torch. The two figures peering down at Yonah were captured in a yellow cone of light that moved away with them.

“Enter, Señor Physician!” the sentry called.

The gate was lifted with a fearsome clanking, causing the black horse to shy before she went forward, her shod hooves clattering and striking sparks on the great stone squares of the courtyard.

*   *   *

Padre Alberto Guzmán, round-shouldered and unsmiling, offered him food and drink.

“Yes, thank you, I would like both, but later, after I have met with the count,” Yonah said.

“Best not to disturb him tonight, but to wait until tomorrow to examine him,” the priest said brusquely. Behind him hovered a stocky, red-faced old man in the rough clothing of a peón, with a cloud of white hair and a full beard of the same color.

“The count cannot move or speak, or understand when he is addressed. There is no reason for you to be in a hurry to see him,” Padre Guzmán said.

Yonah met his stare. “Nevertheless. I shall need candles and lamps about the bed. Many, to provide a bright light.”

Padre Guzmán’s lips thinned in annoyance. “As you wish. Padre Sebbo will see to the light.” The old man behind him nodded, and Yonah realized that he was a priest and not a workman.

Padre Guzmán took up a lamp and Yonah followed him on a march down corridors and up stone stairways. They passed through a room Yonah remembered, the chamber in which he had had an audience with the count after delivering his armor, and they proceeded into the bedchamber beyond, a black space, the priest’s lamp causing the shadows of the giant bedstead to leap crazily on the stone walls. The air was heavily foul.

Yonah took the lamp and held it close to the face on the bed. Vasca, the count of Tembleque, had lost a great deal of weight. His eyes appeared to stare past Yonah. The left side of Vasca’s mouth was pulled down in a permanent sneer.

“I need the illumination.”

Padre Guzmán went to the door and shouted harshly, but Padre Sebbo already was arriving, leading two men and a woman carrying candles and lamps, and after a period of arrangement and setting flames to wicks, the count was bathed in light.

Yonah leaned over the face. “Count Vasca,” he said. “I am Ramón Callicó, the physician of Saragossa.” The eyes stared up at him, the pupils of unequal size.

“As I said, he cannot speak,” Guzmán said.

Vasca was covered by a blanket, not clean. When Yonah threw it back, the stench was multiplied.

“His back is eaten by malignancy,” Padre Guzmán said.

Vasca lay stiffly, his arms held rigidly above his abdomen. His pulse was hard to compress, resisting Yonah’s fingertips, signifying that the blood in the count’s body was under great pressure.

The body on the bed was long, but Yonah turned it easily and grunted at the revealed sight, a panoply of ugly carbuncles, some suppurating.

“They are bedsores,” he said. He indicated the servants, who had been hovering outside the door. “They must heat water over the fire and bring it here without delay, along with clean rags.”

Padre Guzmán cleared his throat. “The last physician, Carlos Sifrina of Fonseca, made it clear there should be no bathing for Count Vasca, lest he absorb the humors of the water.”

“The last physician, Carlos Sifrina of Fonseca, doubtless has never been left to lie in his own shit.” It was time to establish himself, and Yonah did it quietly. “Hot water in good supply, and soap and soft rags. I have a salve, but get me quill and ink and paper, that without delay I may write out what other unguents and medicines I will need, and send a rider to Santiago López, the apothecary of Toledo. The rider must wake the apothecary from sleep if necessary.”

Padre Guzmán looked pained but resigned. As he turned away, Yonah stopped him. “Get soft, thick fleeces to spread beneath him. Clean ones. Bring me fresh nightshirts and an unsoiled blanket,” he said.

It was late before he was finished, the thin body washed, the sores dressed with salve, the sheepskins spread, the bed and the nightshirt changed.

When at last he turned to food to fill his growling belly it was bread and a piece of strong and fatty mutton, and sour wine. He was led to a small chamber containing a bed redolent with the bitter body scent of its last occupant, perhaps Carlos Sifrina, the physician of Fonseca, he thought as he fell into a weary sleep.

*   *   *

In the morning he broke his fast with bread and ham and a better wine, careful to eat the meat bountifully.

The morning light mostly evaded the patient’s chamber, there being only one tiny window high in the wall. Yonah had the servants prepare a couch in the large outer sitting chamber next to a lower, sunny window, and moved Count Vasca out there.

By daylight Vasca’s condition was even more daunting. Atrophied muscles had pulled both of his hands into a fully opened, exaggerated position with the inside of the knuckle bones at the apex of the arch. Yonah asked a servant to cut two small sections from a round tree branch; he curled Vasca’s hands around the wood and tied them into place with cloths.

All four of the man’s limbs appeared lifeless. When he scraped the blunt end of a scalpel over Vasca’s hands, the backs of his legs, and his feet, there appeared to be a slight response in the right limb, but by any practical measure the entire physical being was stricken. The only things in the count’s body that moved were his eyes and eyelids. Vasca could open and close his eyes, and he could look at something or look away.

Yonah addressed the eyes with his own, talking to him all the while. “Do you feel this, Count Vasca? Or this?

“Is there any sensation when I touch you, Count Vasca?

“Are you in pain, Count Vasca?”

Occasionally a grunt or a moan issued from the supine figure, but never in answer to a question.

Padre Guzmán came at times to watch some of Yonah’s efforts with undisguised scorn. Finally he said, “He understands nothing. He feels nothing and understands nothing.”

“Are you certain?”

The priest nodded. “You have come on a fruitless errand. He is nearing the divine journey that beckons to each of us.”

*   *   *

Presently a woman came into the sickroom, carrying a bowl and a spoon. She was perhaps Adriana’s age, with yellow hair and very white skin. She had a pretty, feline face, a small mouth, high cheekbones, puffy little cheeks, large eyes that she gave the shape of almonds by extending their corners with dark paint. Her gown was very fine but stained, and she smelled of wine. For a moment he believed she had a strawberry birthmark on her long throat but then he concluded it was the kind of mark made by a sucking mouth.

“The new physician,” she said, regarding him.

“Yes. And you are the countess?”

“The same. Shall you be able to do anything for him?”

“It is too early to tell, Countess … I am told he has been ill for more than a year?”

“Closer to fourteen months.”

“I see. How long have you been his wife?”

“Four years next spring.”

“You were with him when the illness struck?”

“Mmmm.”

“It would help me to learn in detail what occurred to him that day.”

She shrugged. “He rode and hunted early in the day.”

“What did he do when he returned from hunting?”

“It was fourteen months ago, señor. But … near as I can remember … Well, for one thing. He took me into his bed.”

“That was late in the morning?”

“Midday.” She smiled at the sick man. “When it came to bedding he never cared about time. Daytime or the middle of the night.”

“Countess, if you will forgive the question … Was he strenuous in his sexual activity that day?”

She looked at him appraisingly. “I don’t recall. But he was always strenuous at every activity.”

She said he had seemed normal enough, most of the day. “Late in the afternoon he told me his head ached, but he was well enough to go to table for the evening meal. As the fowl was being served I noticed his mouth pulling down … the way it is. He appeared to have trouble drawing a breath. And he seemed to slip in his chair.

“His hounds had to be killed. They would allow no one near enough to help him.”

“Has he had a similar attack since that day?”

“Once more. He was not as you see him now, after the first attack. He was able to move his right limbs and he could speak. Though his words were clumsy and indistinct, he was able to give me instruction about his funeral. But another spell struck him two weeks after the first, and from then on he has been frozen and mute.”

“I thank you for telling me these things, Countess.”

She nodded, and turned to study the figure in the bed. “He could be rough, as many strong men are. I have seen him act cruelly. Yet always he was a kind lord and husband to me.…”

Yonah propped up the patient with pillows and then watched with interest as she spooned thin gruel into his mouth.

“He has always been able to swallow?”

“He chokes on wine or broth. Nor can he chew meat. But when we sit him up and feed him gruel, he swallows it, as you see, enabling him to receive the nourishment that keeps him in life.”

She fed her husband in silence until the bowl was empty.

As she was leaving, she turned back to Yonah.

“You have not said what you are called?”

“Callicó.”

Her eyes held him for just a moment, then she nodded again and went away.