– XIII –

In which Shiro and Guada walk among the ruins

In a corner of the large room assigned to him, a taper projected tentacles of amber light upon the whitewashed wall. The bed was broad and hard. Shiro lay beneath a sheet of bleached muslin graced with a band of embroidery stitched along the top that intertwined the Duke’s initials with astrological themes. Over the sheet was draped a heavy coverlet made from the skins of lynxes hunted in the Sierra of Grazalema. It was finished with a border of frayed burgundy velvet. The coverlet’s warmth compensated for the gelid air entering through the open shutters, air that carried scents of pine and rosemary.

His head ached. It was just before dawn, and he listened to the clip-clop and occasional slipping of mule hooves navigating the rocky surface of a nearby street. He imagined it was being lead out of the village into the countryside. Though he felt far from home, once again there was something familiar here.

He thought about the wondrous girl. At supper the previous evening, he would have sworn her eyes rose at the ends into a slight slant. The elegance of her bearing, the subtlety of her, had overwhelmed him. When he caught her staring at the extra finger on his right hand, an extravagance the Duke had yet to notice, it tied his tongue. The thought she was married to the rude barbarian, the one called Julian who had paid Diego not to mention the woman they found him with in Sanlúcar, was puzzling. At first he assumed the marriage had been arranged, but each time Julian’s name arose in conversation, she reacted favorably. He could see she cared for her husband, and it had taken all the control he could muster to stifle an urge to reveal what he knew.

It was not hard for him to imagine that had he been able to spend more time with Yokiko, love might have followed, love for a girl enslaved to other men. He’d been told his own mother had passionately loved her first husband, a handsome Samurai not known for his kindness, but then she’d found love again with Katakura Kojuro, a rotund and ungainly sort married to someone else.

He knew he would have to resign himself to the fact that even if Guada had not already been claimed, anything beyond the exchange of pleasantries would be impossible. Neither her tribe of privileged Christians nor his Samurai code would sanction anything but a most politic and constrained friendship. It was in fact her condition as a married woman—and his as an exotic foreign guest—that permitted them a measure of freedom. Had she been unattached, she would never have been unaccompanied, even under the protection of her uncle’s vaulted ceilings. As it was, her mother was due to arrive in a few days’ time to “relieve” the Duke from having to devote so large a fraction of his diminishing energies toward the entertainment of his niece.

Bits of goat braised over a fire had been served with potatoes grown from plantings brought from the New World. The meat was garnished as well with apples and pears. The wine, something he had never tasted, came from the north of Spain, something the Duke seemed quite pleased about. As he kept drinking it, he found his tongue loosened, and it was the discussion about maguro that finally provoked Shiro to shake his shyness altogether. A small village along the coast nearby within the Duke’s domain was known for its families of vigorous tuna fishermen. When the Duke mentioned how the season had begun, Shiro told them what a great a delicacy the fish was in the land he came from. The Duke then insisted they make the excursion that would get underway that morning within the next few hours.

By noon, from high in the hills they spied the sea. With the Duke, Shiro, Guada, and Rosario, and then the Duke’s guards and servants, it was a colorful caravan that wound its way through the green grasses of the gentle slopes and their almond trees. The Duke was dressed in cream and crimson, Shiro in black and white, Guada mounted sidesaddle wearing a billowing ivory-hued skirt and a waistcoat of teal blue with yellow buttons fashioned from Venetian glass. Rosario wore black. The guards wore gray and blue, the servants, muslin tunics. The chaplain had been left behind. One guard riding ahead carried the Duke’s standard fastened to a long, varnished pole. A string of pack mules carrying tents and provisions trailed behind.

In all his life thus far, Shiro had never known terrain like this. Autumn felt like spring. Everything shimmered under a sun that warmed the skin without oppressing. It was a land unblemished by husbandry, interrupted only sparingly by an occasional white house, always with two windows and a tiled roof and sustained by a modest patch of vegetables and a simple sty of small gray pigs. Nothing malign intruded.

For the Duke it was different. Each step taken by his stallion sent stabbing pains through the proud man’s hip. That morning’s flagon of wine had done little to dull it. But his vanity, his masculinity, his desire to remain, if only in his own mind, a romantic figure for Rosario, to remain connected by a solid line to a youthful past in which he’d been an envied roué at court kept him going in stoic denial of how little time his body would allow him to stand erect unaided.

They reached the shore by late afternoon, where a steady wind from the straits blew beige clouds of sand at their ankles. After consulting with local fishermen, they unloaded the mules behind low dunes near a pond at the edge of a sizeable extension of Roman ruins. Numerous tall columns and the remains of an amphitheater and streets leading nowhere paved with blocks of neatly placed stones imbued the encampment with an air of antiquity. Shiro implored upon the Duke immediately.

‘What place is this?’

‘I am pained to say I know very little. Some years back I paid two scholars a handsome sum to explore it, but their findings were scant. They thought it had once been called Baelo Claudia, for the Emperor Claudius had given it the status of a municipium in the First Century. It was a town devoted to fishing and to the production of garum and had once boasted temples dedicated to Isis, Jupiter, and Minerva.’

Shiro knew little about the Romans or their emperors, and the Duke was cajoled to impart a history lesson on the spot that all within earshot took pleasure from. He aptly brought his lecture to an end with references to some of his ancestors who had helped recover the territory from Moorish rule in the middle of the 13th century.

That night they ate ribs of pork and sipped a wine diluted with water. Soon after the Duke retired, Rosario was summoned to his tent. Shiro invited Guada on a stroll about the ruins, lit that night by a new moon. A guard followed them maintaining a discrete distance.

A damp chill was in the air. It seemed to rise from the cracks between the millennial stones they walked upon. Holding her cloak tight about her neck, Guada realized she had never strolled at night, at anytime really, unaccompanied, with a man not her husband, and what an unusual man this one was.

‘Once upon a time this was an active town on the sea,’ she said, ‘filled with men, women, and children living under the protection of Roman law, and all the time they lived here, they assumed it would go on forever. Now no one remembers them.’

She knew how banal it sounded, even as the words left her lips, but she also felt it was up to her to initiate conversation with the stranger who, the evening before, had spoken so little.

‘Impermanence is a condition of life,’ he said. ‘These ruins are good reminders. We have places like this in my country.’

She knew nothing about his country, had only learned of its existence the other day, and her sense of geography was elementary at best.

‘I don’t think I like the way that sounds,’ she said, ‘about impermanence.’

‘Why?’

‘It frightens me,’ she said. ‘I like who and how and where I am now. I don’t like for things to change.’

‘But you know they will.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I know some day I will grow old and die, as surely as we are here tonight. But I don’t like it.’

‘I don’t like it either,’ he said. ‘But I think it can be helpful for—how to live each day.’

‘It sounds like it might be sinful.’

‘How?’

‘Like it might lead to temptation.’

‘Your religion is very concerned with temptation.’

‘It is your religion, too.’

He decided not to challenge her on this point.

‘And the idea,’ he said, ‘that one is always being watched from on high, and judged, and that one will be tried after one’s death is very, how shall I put it…’

‘Tiring?’

He laughed. They both laughed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Just the word.’

‘But we are born to struggle,’ she said, ‘to struggle against sin, just as animals struggle to survive. Relinquishing our vigilance is unbecoming to God.’

They paused and rested upon an uneven ledge of stone, the remnant of a wall that faced the sea. The sea was only visible at that hour because of the moon.

‘These people who lived here so long ago,’ he said, ‘these Romans, were they Christians, do you think?’

‘I doubt it. The Duke mentioned temples built for mythic deities, but none dedicated to the Savior.’

‘They too struggled,’ he said, ‘to survive, as you say. But how, according to our religion, would they have been judged after death?’

‘They would have been, all of them, condemned to hell for eternity.’

‘Does that seem fair?’ he asked.

‘It is best not to question these issues. It, too, can lead to sin.’

‘In some of our mountain villages, when the elderly are no longer useful, they are carried off to a place and left to die.’

‘That is unfair.’

‘I agree. But I fail to see any difference.’

‘Those who are not members of the Church worship false gods by definition, and that is a sin, a mortal sin.’

‘How lucky I am,’ he said, ‘to have been saved.’

She looked at him.

‘Are you toying with me?’

‘A little,’ he said. ‘Is that, too, a sin?’

‘I shall pray for you,’ she said, ‘to St. Thomas perhaps, for your doubting soul, and to St. Joseph, who is the patron of a happy death, because when he died, Jesus and Mary were at his side.’

‘You are too kind,’ he said.

She knew he was mocking her, but she did not mind. She had never had a conversation like this before.

‘I’m cold,’ she said. ‘Let us return to the camp.’

He stood and helped her off the ledge, touching her hands for the first time. He wanted to kiss her, and she knew it.

They began to walk back. The guard bowed as they went past him, a bow Shiro acknowledged with one of his own. They returned in silence, one that made sleep difficult for the both of them. Once in his tent, Shiro listened to the waves and the wind while picturing the coast of Edo so far away in what felt like another lifetime. Guada clung fiercely to a pair of gloves given to her by Julian, smelling them, resting her head upon them, missing her husband with an intensity that bordered on anger.