‘Will they ensure the bloodline is preserved?’ Hernando had asked as he watched a magnificent five-year-old dappled-grey stallion going through its paces with elegant ease. The animal was being set apart by the groom for despatch to Austria.
‘Yes, of course,’ Don Diego had replied without turning round, his attention focused on the stallion. ‘There are great riders and horse experts in that court. I’m sure that from these stallions they’ll breed stock that will become the pride of Vienna.’
Will they really, though? Hernando was wondering when he was surprised to see his front door was closed. At that time of day in May it was usually left open to the wrought-iron gate that opened on to the patio. Could something have happened? He banged hard again and again on the wooden door. His wife’s smile as she opened it reassured him.
‘Why . . .?’ he started to ask as she quickly barred the door behind them.
Fátima raised a finger to her lips, asking him to be quiet. Then she accompanied him to the courtyard. Hamid had broken the strict rule about where the children should be educated. Hernando had insisted their lessons take place in the bedrooms, so that nobody would be able to hear them speaking Arabic. But Hamid had taken them to the yard instead. Sitting on simple mats beneath the colonnade arches, the children were paying close attention to the scholar as he tried to teach them mathematics.
Hernando was about to complain to his wife but, once again, she had her finger across her lips and he resigned himself to keeping quiet.
‘Hamid has said’, she explained, ‘that water is the source of life. The children won’t be able to learn inside a room whilst they hear running water outside. To learn easily they need the scent of the flowers and contact with nature to delight their senses.’
Hernando sighed and as he turned once more he found three smiling children watching him. Hamid looked at him out of the corner of one eye, like a big child.
‘And he’s right,’ Hernando conceded. ‘We can’t deprive them of paradise.’ He took Fátima by the hand and they went over to teacher and students. Day by day, Hamid was recovering, and this act of defiance . . . Deep down, Hernando was pleased.
He greeted his children and Shamir in Arabic. When they heard him, the children themselves urged him to lower his voice. He sat down in the space remaining on Francisco’s mat and turned to Hamid.
‘Peace,’ Hernando greeted him.
‘Peace be with you, Ibn Hamid,’ replied the old man.
Hernando stayed silent until Aisha and Fátima had prepared the evening meal. He listened to Hamid’s explanations and watched the children’s progress. Shamir reminded him of Brahim: surly, intelligent, but unlike his father he had a generous heart. He showed this in the way he cared for the younger ones. Francisco was the elder of Hernando’s children. Hernando had to scold him several times for chewing on his tongue as he drew numbers with a stick on a reusable tablet of tar-covered leaves. He was an intelligent, kind boy, but always predictable. His blue eyes, inherited from his father, and his spontaneity clearly signalled his every move, and when he committed any mischief they reflected his sense of guilt. Francisco was incapable of lying; he had no idea how to conceal the truth.
Hernando touched the tip of Francisco’s tongue when it stuck out once more when faced with a difficult sum, and saw how quickly it darted back in, like a snake’s. Then he turned his attention to Inés. He was conscious that Hamid did the same, as if he could read Hernando’s thoughts. She was the image of her mother . . . beautiful! The girl was totally absorbed in writing numbers, and her huge black eyes appeared about to bore straight through the tablet. Inés took an interest in everything, and questioned everything. She thought carefully about the answers she was given and, sometimes straightaway, sometimes after a couple of days, would often raise a further doubt about the same question. Her reasoning was not as agile or immediate as the boys’, but unlike theirs was always logical. With every gesture, every movement, Inés lit up their world.
Hernando nodded his head in satisfaction, and his eyes met Hamid’s. Yes, they were in paradise. With the door to the street closed to outside interference, they could hear the murmur of the water flowing in the fountain. They breathed the intense aroma of the flowers, splendid in the twilight hours as the sun was setting and the cool of evening revived the plants and aroused the senses. Yet it was the same, they said silently to each other, the exact same thing that for years the scholar had done with the Morisco boy inside a squalid shack lost in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
As if not wanting to disturb the children’s concentration, Hamid looked at Hernando without a word, acknowledging the worth of his first student. Just as he was now doing with his children, he had imparted his knowledge to Hernando in secret. It had been a long road: being orphaned, a war, slavery at the hands of a corsair and deportation to unknown lands where he found nothing but hatred and misfortune. Poverty and hard work in the tannery; the mistakes and then the return to the community’s fold; good fortune in the stables until he had become the a leading figure among his companions, and now . . . Both men gazed simultaneously at the three children, and a shiver of satisfaction ran down Hernando’s spine: his children!
At that moment Aisha called them to eat.
Hernando helped the old scholar to his feet. Hamid accepted his assistance and leant on him as they crossed the courtyard. They were alone now, the children having scampered across in four rapid strides.
‘Do you remember the water in the mountains?’ asked the holy man as they paused for a few moments by the little fountain.
‘I dream of it.’
‘I’d like to return to Granada,’ whispered Hamid. ‘To end my days among those peaks . . .’
‘There is a sacred sword hidden there that someone, some day, will have to raise again in the name of the one God. That day the spirit of our people, and especially yours, Hamid, will be reborn in the mountains.’
If Hamid instilled the truth in the children, it was Hernando who strove to teach them the essential Christian doctrine so that they could testify to their conversions on Sundays in the cathedral, or during the obligatory visits from the priest of Santa María. The parish justice and his superintendent had abandoned their checks, perhaps because of Hernando’s position in the hierarchy of the royal stable and his special authority. However, Don Álvaro, the cathedral deacon in charge of the parish, always impeccably dressed in his black habit and biretta, continued with his weekly visits as if he was dealing with any other new Christian, although everyone suspected he was more interested in the good wine and Aisha’s delicious sweetmeats than in verifying that the family were true Catholics. He was the guest of honour during his long visits. Don Álvaro settled himself comfortably in a chair under the colonnade and examined the children while he ate and drank. Week after week he listened doggedly to how they recited the prayers and doctrines they had been taught, as if afraid they had forgotten them. It was a farce played out in front of a family terrified lest one of the children let slip a phrase or expression in Arabic. As soon as he had the chance, Hernando took the initiative and sat with the priest to distract him and chat about other matters, mostly about the situation of the other heretical movement that threatened the Spanish empire and in which he was genuinely interested: Lutheranism.
Hamid, for his part, always feigned some indisposition and shut himself away in his little room as soon as Don Álvaro came through the courtyard gate. Hernando was convinced that Hamid went to pray, as a kind of challenge to the presence of the priest.
‘It’s an act of charity,’ explained Hernando in response to Don Álvaro’s interest in the invisible Hamid who, according to the parish records, was listed as living in the house. ‘He’s an old man from our village in the Alpujarra, and as a good Christian I couldn’t allow him to die in the street. He suffers from bouts of fever; would you care to meet him?’
The priest took a mouthful of wine, looked around the pleasant garden and, to Hernando’s relief, shook
his head. Why would he want to go anywhere near an old man who suffered from fevers?
So, after Don Álvaro had checked yet again that the children remembered their catechism, the conversations under the colonnade went on between himself and Hernando, while from the far side of the courtyard Aisha or Fátima ensured they did not run out of wine or sweetmeats. A Spanish version of Calvin’s Institutes edited in England had recently come into the hands of Hernando and Don Julián. Many Protestant books published in Spanish in England, Holland or Zeeland passed clandestinely through the realms of Philip II. The King and the Inquisition fought with all their might to keep the Catholic faith pure and untainted, free from any heretical influence, to the extent that for twenty years the monarch had prohibited Spanish students from attending foreign universities. An exception was made, of course, for the papal institutions in Rome and Bologna.
Many Moriscos looked favourably on the Protestant doctrines, especially the Aragonese because of their geographical contact with France and Béarn, where they fled to convert to Christianity while at the same time renouncing Catholicism.
The Protestants’ attacks on the Pope and the abuses of the clergy, on the selling of papal bulls and indulgences, their condemnation of the use of images as objects of worship or devotion, their support for the right of any believer to interpret the sacred texts independent of any ecclesiastical authority and dislike of the rigid vision of predestination: all of these points were common ground between two minority religions fighting to withstand the attacks of the Catholic Church.
Hernando discussed the matter with both Don Julián and Hamid. They all regretted these coincidences between Muslims and those who were still Christians, whatever sympathy they might feel towards this tendency.
‘After all,’ argued the priest, ‘the Protestants aim to be reconciled with the scriptures within Christianity, whereas the converted Moriscos are not seeking reforms: they want to destroy it. The coincidences between the Lutheran doctrines and the Muslim faith found in some of the believers’ own polemic writings will do nothing but weaken our true objective.’
As soon as Don Álvaro left the house, after having railed against the Lutherans and their attacks on the Catholic clergy’s way of life, Hamid would come indignantly out of his room and pour what remained of the wine down the drain.
‘That costs money,’ Hernando scolded him, but had to force himself to hide a smile as he allowed the old man his revenge.
Azirat was the horse’s name, and it represented one of the greatest changes in Hernando’s life. Since the time of the Emperor Charles V, the monarchy had been continually bankrupt. Five years earlier, the kingdom had stopped repaying its debts. Not even the immense fortunes in silver and gold that arrived from the New World could cover the expenses of the Spanish armies, to which were added the colossal costs of the luxurious Burgundian court, whose protocol the Emperor had adopted. Nor did Spain reap full benefit from her considerable raw materials. The prized wool of the Spanish merino sheep was sold unprocessed to foreign traders, who converted it into woollen cloth that was then resold in Spain for ten or twenty times the purchase price. The same happened with iron, silk and many other raw materials. Gold, for wars or trade, left Spain by the ton. The interest that the King and his bankers paid exceeded 40 per cent, and the income from papal bulls and indulgences sold to finance both Rome and Spain was insufficient. Hidalgos, the clergy and many cities were exempt from paying taxes, so the whole weight fell on the countryside, on the workers and artisans, which made them poorer still and prevented the development of trade. It was a vicious circle that was hard to break.
In 1580 the economic situation became even worse, in the wake of the death in Alcazarquivir of King Sebastian of Portugal during a vain attempt to conquer Morocco. His uncle, King Philip of Spain, claimed the right of succession to the Portuguese throne. The populace refused to crown him, and so he prepared to invade the neighbouring kingdom with an army under the command of the old Duke of Alba, who was then aged seventy-two. Besides Brazil, Portugal dominated the trade route with the East Indies and controlled the African coast, from Tangiers to Mogadishu: the entire edge of the continent. By annexing Portugal, Spain would become the largest empire in history.
All those enormous expenses also affected the royal stables. Despite Philip II continuing to give himself, his favourites, and the foreign courts magnificent examples of the new breed, they suffered from a lack of funds that Don Diego López de Haro was constantly demanding from the Board of Works and Forests, who were responsible for providing them.
So it was that part of the salary owing to riders and stable-hands was met through giving them colts rejected by the stables, on condition that if the King was interested in them when they were fully grown, they could be exchanged for others. This rarely happened because so many horses were born each year and employees were quick to sell the rejected horses for money. The sale of only eight horses from the King’s stable brought in enough to buy thirty good warhorses for the army stationed in the square at Oran!
But Hernando was not willing to sell Azirat, the horse he had been given in part payment of his wages. His way of life was austere and his needs few. When they had branded the colts out in the pasture and entered their details in the register, they’d called him Andarín, the Dancer, for the elegance of his movements. Yet he had been born with a shining coat of burning red that would never appeal to courtly tastes; his chestnut coat was not admitted in the new breed.
Andarín, whose fiery colour suggested rage, energy and speed, captivated Hernando from the second he first saw him.
‘I’m going to call him Azirat,’ he told Abbas. He did not pronounce the Spanish z, but used the cedilla and emphasized the t: açiratt.
Abbas frowned as Hernando nodded. The Assirat bridge, the bridge at the entrance to heaven, was as long and slender as a single hair and extended over hell. The blessed would cross it in a flash whilst the rest would fall into the fire.
‘Changing the original name of a horse not only brings bad luck,’ said the blacksmith, ‘but in some cases it is even punishable by death. Foreigners who do so can be sentenced to death.’
‘I’m not a foreigner and this horse would be capable of crossing that long and delicate hair,’ Hernando retorted, ignoring his friend’s warning. ‘He would be able to cross it without falling off or snapping it. It’s as if he doesn’t touch the ground. He floats on air!’
By now twenty-six, Hernando was head of a family clan and one of the most highly regarded and influential members of the Morisco community. Dedicated to helping others, he lived permanently surrounded by people. Azirat offered him moments of freedom the like of which he had never enjoyed before. So, whenever he had the chance, he saddled the horse and rode out to the countryside in search of solitude. Sometimes they walked in the pastures, Hernando calm and thoughtful; at others he would allow Azirat to show off his speed and power. On occasion he looked for the pastures where they grazed bulls and ran them. He was careful not to injure them but only toy with those dangerous horns, which never quite managed to gore Azirat’s haunches as he pranced agilely before the bulls, taunting them with his luxuriant tail. They could never resist lowering their heads and charging at the long tail hairs waving in front of them.
Hernando never headed north, towards the Sierra Morena, where Ubaid and the outlaws were camped. Abbas had assured him that the muleteer of Narila would not trouble him. They had sent him a message demanding as much, but Hernando was not convinced.
On Sundays Francisco and Shamir, who had grown up as brothers, rode with him. Whenever it was safe to do so, he let them hold the reins. When Hernando rode on his own, he sought out lonely places in order not to show off excessively in front of the Christians, but with the children he did not go into the countryside, limiting their rides to the outskirts of Córdoba. On one such day, at dusk, he crossed the Roman bridge with the proud, smiling children. Francisco sat astride Azirat in front of him and Shamir behind.
br /> ‘Look, Father!’ Francisco pointed as they left the Calahorra tower behind and reached the Campo de la Verdad. ‘There’s Juan the muleteer.’
From afar, Juan greeted them with a weary gesture. Every Sunday they passed by there, Hernando saw him looking ever older. He no longer had even the few teeth with which he had managed to bite the brothel woman’s nipple.
‘Dismount, boys,’ Juan told the children firmly once they had reached him. Hernando was surprised, but the mule dealer gestured him to be quiet. ‘Go and look at the mules. Damián tells me they’ve missed you since you last came to stroke them.’
Damián was a mischievous lad Juan had been forced to take on to help him. Francisco and Shamir ran towards the string of mules and the two men remained facing each other. Juan moved his lips over his gums, preparing to speak.
‘There’s a man, one of your new Christians, asking around, investigating . . .’ Hernando waited as the mule dealer checked that nobody was listening. ‘. . . about the smuggling of sheets of paper.’
‘Who is he?’
‘I don’t know. He hasn’t approached me. But I heard he asked one of the mule-drivers.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Lad, I know about everything that enters and leaves Córdoba illegally. There’s little more I can do now apart from listening to gossip and take my cut here and there.’
Hernando put his hand in his purse and gave Juan some coins. This time he accepted them.
‘Aren’t things going well?’ Hernando asked.
‘The master’s eyes fatten the horse,’ Juan began to quote the old saying, gesturing contemptuously towards Damián, ‘but lads and lackeys wear it out and ruin it,’ he finished. ‘The same applies to mules, but I’ve run out of options. As for trafficking in smuggled goods . . . right now I couldn’t even lift one of the Weary Virgin’s oars!’
‘If you need anything, you can count on me.’
‘You’d do better to worry about yourself, my boy. That Morisco, and I suppose the Inquisition as well, are after all of you who use the paper.’