By Fire, By Water by Mitchell James Kaplan
She looked at him with her familiar, clear regard. “Why? Because I am a foreigner? A Jew? I thought you said the Jews fared as well here as in Granada.”
He realized she was observing the gray hairs that had appeared here and there on his head, and that he was slumping, slightly but noticeably. He imagined Judith could perceive the black fog that enveloped his heart. When he had last been with her, his life had been difficult, to be sure. Since then, it had become miserable. He adjusted his posture.
“That night, that evening …” The chancellor paused, collecting his thoughts, and continued more deliberately. “I still thought of myself primarily in terms of my function, as a representative of my kingdom.”
“You were lying?”
“I was … I suppose I was. But that’s of little importance now, isn’t it?”
She offered him a tentative smile.
Levi spoke to his aunt in Arabic: “He doesn’t want us here.”
Levi’s voice had grown deeper. Santángel turned to him. Levi was a man now, gangly but strong, his chin covered with a wispy beard.
“That isn’t true.”
Levi blushed. It was the first time he had heard the chancellor speak in Arabic.
“The last time I saw you, you wanted to know whether Jesus was a magician.”
“Yes, I remember. Have you found a better answer?”
“Unfortunately, no.” Santángel turned back to Judith. “Perhaps we can meet after sunset.”
“Where?”
That night, he led Judith and her mule through the concealed passage to the king’s trysting place.
“Where is Levi?”
“We dined in the judería. Baba Shlomo would have been so happy to meet the rabbi. His father was Baba Shlomo’s cousin. Levi fell asleep. He wanted to come, but he needs to rest.”
“Of course. Is that where you intend to spend the night, in the judería?”
“Yes. They’ve been so warm to us, like family.” She reached under the burro’s belly for the tongue of the saddlebag belt. The bag slipped to the side and might have fallen to the ground had Santángel not caught it.
“Let me take that.” As Santángel carried the bag, its contents clinked.
He guided her inside, to the table, where he lit a candle. Judith looked at the paintings and furniture.
“Tell me why you have come here.”
She turned her eyes to meet his. The chancellor once again felt she was reading his heart, that she sensed his desolation. She smiled wistfully and began recounting Baba Shlomo’s dreams, his desire to travel to the land where his parents had lived and died, to see their graves. She described his sudden demise and burial.
“I’m so sorry.”
“The journey here,” reflected Judith, “was a kind of fulfillment for Baba Shlomo. We spent so much time talking. He told us the stories he grew up with. I think that was what he wanted.”
“After he passed away,” observed Santángel, “you continued to Zaragoza.”
“With the war, the market for silver in Granada …” She finished the sentence with a gesture of defeat. “I was hoping we’d find a buyer here.”
“Did you?”
“Not yet.”
“Please, let me purchase your silver.”
Judith laughed. “You haven’t seen it.”
“I should like to.”
She knelt at the saddlebag and removed an elaborate, large sword hilt and an equally impressive, exotic-looking cross, decorated with vine-like silver rope work. She placed the two objects on the table.
The chancellor picked them up one after the other and turned them over in his hands. “They’re exquisite.” He knew what it had cost her to fashion these articles. She had set aside her personal ideals, her Jewish pride, to compromise with the great powers of the world. She was not so very different from him after all. “I’ll purchase them. What else do you have?”
“Candlesticks, goblets, trays.”
“I’ll buy it all.”
Judith smiled, visibly relieved.
“The palace always needs silver,” continued Santángel, “and the king cherishes this kind of ornate ‘Arabic’ work. That’s not the difficulty.”
“What is the difficulty?”
“You’ll need a way to continue selling your work abroad. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in this position again.”
“That would be unfortunate. But I don’t believe in miracles.”
“You believe in the miracles of the Bible, do you not?”
“That was another era. Another world.”
“I know a man who’s convinced such worlds are still accessible.”
“Who?”
“A ship’s captain. He believes he can sail to paradise, the Garden of Eden.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Judith. “But I’ll tell you what Baba Shlomo said about paradise.”
“Please do.”
She described a place where choirs of crickets sang in Hebrew. To this, Santángel contrasted Cristóbal Colón’s paradise of gold and spices.
“In which paradise do you believe?” Judith asked.
“I’m not sure I believe any of it. But I do believe in hell, because my world has come, in so many ways, to resemble it.”
“How so?”
He described the Inquisition, the arrests of his brother and his aide, the disappearance of his aide’s widow. He described the state in which he had found his only son, with whom he imagined he would never again speak. “They’re destroying everyone around me.”
Judith listened, horrified and deeply moved. A silence fell between them.
“The captain I mentioned,” Santángel offered, regaining his composure. “Perhaps he can help you. He has contacts all around the Middle Sea.”
“Where does he live?”
“If you please.” The chancellor found a plume, paper, and sealing wax. He wrote a note for Colón. “On your way back to Granada, stop at the port of Santa Maria. Give this to my friend Colón.”
“Thank you. I am deeply in your debt.”
“Not at all.”
The next morning, the chancellor decided, he would have Iancu deliver a gold brooch, with inlaid pearls and rubies, to the rabbi’s home in the judería.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
HERNANDO DE TALAVERA rode to Zaragoza, where he met with Monsignor Pedro de Monterubio and the priest Raimundo de Cáceres. Both men, he knew, secretly shared the king’s concerns regarding Tomás de Torquemada. They told him a great deal, but not all they knew, about the fierce struggle between the inquisitor general and the chancellor of Aragon.
Talavera proceeded to the ecclesiastical jail. Estefan Santángel slumped in a corner of his cell, his head pressed against his knees, his disheveled hair tumbling over his shoulders in matted ropes, his body contorted in the unnatural dimensions of a man stretched on the rack. Bulky chains needlessly attached his swollen, useless ankles. Despite the grating of the heavy door, he did not look up.
“I have come to console you, my son.” Talavera pushed his candle onto a wrought-iron prong on the wall and leaned forward so as not to strike his head against the ribs of the ceiling. “I’m here to help you.”
Estefan wearily raised his head. His face was bruised and puffy. His lips hung open.
“And if I have come to console you,” resumed Talavera, “it is because I love you, even as the Holy Church loves you, as He who died on the cross loves you.”
“Too generous,” mumbled the tax farmer.
Kneeling, the monk shook his head. “Not as generous as I’d like. I too am made of flesh.” He lifted the prisoner’s chin. “It’s not too late, Señor Santángel.”
A squeaking noise interrupted them. Talavera turned and saw the dwarf-warden’s eye and half his craggy nose through a small grill in the door.
“Let him watch,” breathed Estefan. “I’m used to it.”
Talavera turned back to him and asked in a low voice, almost a whisper, “Señor Santángel, I must
“What is the charge?”
“If you were charged with despising the Lord, would you admit your guilt?”
“I never despised Jesus Christ.”
The monk felt vaguely optimistic. If he could demonstrate that the inquisitor general had concocted complaints against the chancellor’s brother, there was reason for hope. “And the Jews,” he pursued, “do they curse the Lord?”
Estefan let his face fall back between his knees.
“Because if they do hate Christ, as Brother Torquemada claims, and if you never did, then clearly, you could not have been judaizing. Is that not so?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Estefan said softly.
Talavera placed a hand on Estefan’s shoulder. “But if, in your despair, you turned to the philosophy of the Hebrews for consolation, that is not a sin, señor. I understand your curiosity, for I share it.”
The tax farmer slowly raised his head and peered at the man.
“Nevertheless,” added the monk, “I have seen through the arguments of that legalistic and heartless faith. What I’m asking is whether you’ve done the same. For if you failed to see with your heart as well as your mind, that would indeed be a grave and unhappy error.”
Estefan finally answered. “All my life, I strove to be a good Christian. At least, a decent one. But since I’ve been here …”
“You have lost your faith? That would not be surprising, Señor Santángel. Even our Lord was tried by Satan.”
Absorbed in his own thoughts, Estefan smiled weakly. “The words of some of the prayers have come back.” He began muttering fragments of a Sabbath blessing—haltingly, with long pauses.
Talavera recognized the Hebrew. “Señor Santángel, it is your words, and not the words you were taught, that concern me. Surely every mortal, if he searches his soul honestly, can find sin there and earnestly seek the Lord’s forgiveness.”
With what little force remained in his arms, Estefan removed the monk’s hand from his shoulder. “I shall not repent to a fellow mortal, Father. What is between me and God, I need not share with you. I have no use for your penitence.”
The dwarf, at the viewing window, let out a snort.
“You cannot confess?” asked Talavera.
“Not to you, Father.”
“And you understand … You understand the implications of your words?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do for you.” Talavera stood up slowly, retrieved his candle, and turned back to the door. The dwarf pulled it open.
Estefan’s head fell back to his knees.
In the candlelight, the monk exchanged a glance with the warden. “I was too late,” he lamented. “He is lost to us.”
As Talavera walked back down the central aisle of the ecclesiastical jail, one of the common prisoners chained to the wall gestured. “Father, please, one moment. One moment of your time.”
The prior of Prado stopped. In the light of the dwarf’s candle, he knelt to see the man’s persimmon beard, the scar on his forehead, his pitted cheeks.
“I thought … I thought if I gave my life to Christ, Father, He would transform me.”
“Are you a monk?”
The man shook his head. “A constable of the Inquisition, and a devout Christian. I prayed, Father. I prayed.”
“And before you became a constable?”
“I was not a good man.”
“Have you confessed to the sins you committed?”
Juan Rodríguez did not answer directly. “I stole. I raped. More than once, I killed.”
Talavera placed a hand on his shoulder. “You did so, my son, because you were attached to the pleasures of this world.”
“Yes, Father. I tried … I begged Christ to help … but His help was not forthcoming.”
“And who are you to say He didn’t provide it?” asked Talavera. “You cannot see what He sees. Your eyes, too, are made of flesh.”
Juan Rodríguez lowered his head. Elsewhere in the vast dungeon, a woman laughed quietly at some private fantasy.
Estefan Santángel sat in the blackness of his damp subterranean cell. His shoulders, hips, and knees ached. The rack had torn the fibers from his bones. The cotton sheath they had given him hardly kept out the cold, but he no longer shivered. Even when he felt, or thought he felt, the warm, trembling body of a rat against his thighs, he did not move. He was prepared. These unmeasured months had changed him more than the twenty previous years. The cathedral’s clock tower sounded—once, twice … five times. Was it morning or afternoon? The latter, he imagined. Beyond the slit at the top of the wall, children were playing. Their voices floated down through the thick air of his cell. Like motes of dust, they dissolved in obscurity.
“Tell them what they want to hear.”
He looked up. The viewing window in the door was open. The dwarf’s eye moved away. His mouth appeared.
“Please,” he urged him. “Then it will be over.”
The dwarf’s eye disappeared. The door creaked open and he crept in bearing a candle and a cup of wine.
“You’re doing a little better,” the dwarf whispered with satisfaction, “since that man—that high official—visited you, with the Jew, two weeks ago. Was that a friend of yours? A relative?”
Estefan continued staring blankly.
“Drink,” the dwarf urged him, kneeling before him. “It will ease your suffering.” He pressed the cup against Estefan’s lip. Wine ran down the prisoner’s chin, onto the dirt floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MANY OF THE DECKHANDS, thieves, and prostitutes who frequented the port of Santa Maria had worked or consorted with Cristóbal Colón, or at least exchanged sailors’ yarns with him over a bowl of mead, but few felt or even feigned affection for him. As a captain, he was reputed to be short-tempered, reclusive, and autocratic. His mastery of navigation was so inadequate that he had led more than one ship astray—though he always found excuses for the delays and never admitted his errors.
None of that mattered much to Luis de la Cerda. Colón possessed skills rare for one of his ilk. He could read, not merely nautical charts but demanding works of literature, including that most subtle and complex of compositions, the Bible itself. He knew how to perform difficult arithmetical operations. He was savvy enough not to betray the trust of his benefactor.
When he was neither at sea nor at the duke’s house, Colón’s office was a table at the harbor. There, he hired sailors, paid them for a day’s work, and double-checked paperwork.
One foggy morning, a woman came to this desk and asked, “Señor Cristóbal Colón?” Like him, she spoke with an accent.
The captain rose. “Señorita, how may I assist you? Is there something you’re looking for? In this place, one often encounters seaweed blooms, but rarely such lovely roses.”
She smiled. “I have something for you.” From under her cloak, she removed Santángel’s letter.
Colón gestured toward the empty chair. “Please, my lady.”
She sat down. When he finished reading, he looked up at her and nodded. “So the chancellor is well. I’m glad to hear it. And you?” asked the captain. “You and your nephew have been traveling for months, yet you look as fresh as an April morning.” He beckoned a sailor. “Dumitru, bring the lady a cup of hot wine, will you?”
Dumitru, the boy Colón and Santángel had saved from slavery, had grown as big as his father. Life on the sea and in rough ports had hardened him. Sucking on a little stick, he approached them. Judith shook her head. “That won’t be necessary.”
Colón waved Dumitru away. He perused Santángel’s note a second time. “Do you have samples?”
“We’ve sold everything we brought, except this.” She showed him the lustrous bracelet on her wrist.
Colón moved his face closer, marveling at its delicacy, its graceful curves. He folded Santángel’s letter and placed it on the table. “I can sell your silver. But getting th
Dumitru knew better than to answer.
“Can you get past the border, into Granada?”
“There are ways,” said Dumitru. “But it may not be cheap.”
“I want you to accompany this beautiful lady and her nephew back to Granada. You’ll be paid regular wages, just like you were rigging the Santa Juanita.”
Dumitru glanced at Judith, then back at the captain, and nodded without enthusiasm.
“When you get there, she’ll give you a box of merchandise.” He turned back to Judith. “How much do you have for him?”
Judith smiled. “Right now? Perhaps one small crate.”
“Come back with her crate,” Colón instructed Dumitru. “And if this works out, it could be a regular job. Land, land, all the way. You hate sailing, don’t you?”
Dumitru took the stick out of his mouth and threw it down. “I hate sailing.”
“You are very kind,” Judith told the captain.
Colón waved Dumitru away. “Anything for a friend of the chancellor,” he told Judith. “He arranged my audience with the queen.”
“Your audience with the queen?”
“In Cordoba. In a few months, at most. You’ll be hearing all about it. Everyone will. But for now, why don’t we draw up some sort of agreement, you and I.”
He jotted down Judith’s name and other information, more for the sake of his records than to protect himself legally. In his letter to Colón, Luis de Santángel had provided all the necessary guarantees.
Some five hundred years prior to the reign of Ysabel and Fernando, when the Moors ruled a large portion of the Iberian Peninsula, the city of Cordoba was Europe’s most important capital. The greatest thinkers of the age, Maimonides and Averroës, were born there. Its alcazar housed the largest library in the world. Cordoba’s Great Mosque preserved the holiest relics in the Islamic world, one of Mohammed’s arms and the original Koran. Pilgrims, scholars, and diplomats traveled to Cordoba from Damascus and Paris.