The Last Jew (23 page)

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 has 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 on 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 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.

24

The Chosen

The following Sunday morning, Yonah took the gray Arabian horse from the stables in the gloom of dawn, departing the compound before the other workers had stirred. In the beginning he tried only to accustom himself to the act of being on the creature's back. It took him three weeks more to work up the courage to drop the reins. The maestro had told him it was not enough simply to retain his seat in the saddle; he must learn to give directions to the horse without the use of reins or bit. When he wanted the horse to gallop, a kick of his heels. A single pressure of both knees to direct the animal to stop. A series of quick pressures from the knees to cause the horse to walk backward.