“From the bishop’s table?” Don Felipe inquired with a glance.
“I saw plenty there,” Gubbio responded, “and a belly needs fuel in times like these.”
“Indeed. What else did you take for your own needs, out of the plenty that you saw there?”
“A hand-loaf and a fig or two.” Having eaten the egg in two bites, Gubbio reached again into his pocket. “What great difference, master, whether I take my share of the table scraps now, when I feel the need, or later? A fig for you?”
“Argued like a true philosopher,” Don Felipe observed dryly, pretending not to see Gubbio’s wink. “But is this a time for pleasantries? Has the alcalde been summoned?”
“How could he remain unaware of what is happening?”
“How can many things come to pass? Go and make sure that he has been summoned.”
Swallowing his mouthful of fig, Gubbio imitated his master’s bow to the bishop and turned in the direction of the alcalde’s house. To do him justice, he ran at his utmost speed, and he was fleet.
Somewhat restraining his own steps, as befit the dignity of bishop’s Ordinary, and to avoid arriving out of breath, Don Felipe hastened toward the Jewish quarter.
Although it was but twilight, torches already flowered above the heads of the crowd around the gates. Mere half-completed piles of masonry, doorless as yet, the great posts rose like pretended but nonexistent fortifications in some nightmare of invasion. With his grandparents’ tales pounding through his head—those great massacres they had heard of in their youth, fifty thousand killed in the terrible year of 1391 alone, when so many cities of Castile, Valencia, Catalonia, all those Christian kingdoms to Karnattah’s north, drenched in the misdirected piety of overzealous preachers—Don Felipe suddenly saw Daroca’s new gates as serving less for the isolation of her Hebrew inhabitants than for their protection, and regretted that the workers had been too long in finishing their task.
At any moment, the mob might burst over that intangible barrier and set to work with fire, steel, and stone. What mystery held them in check thus far? Ah—the good alguazil Manrique de Dios—Don Felipe glimpsed him now, standing wide-legged and watchful, holding his wand of office in one hand and his drawn sword in the other. So his Honor the alcalde had been notified, and Gubbio sent on a superfluous errand. But it needed only one single soul more zealous than the rest to step forward shouting about God’s honor and glory, and the entire mob would surge across the line to take holy vengeance for Estevan del Quivir and save their remaining children from similar fates.
Every instinct of self-preservation ordered Felipe de Alhama de Granada to hang back, avoid notice, slip away and denounce this thing from a safe distance. Yet he was ordained priest and bishop’s Ordinary. Who would be safe from a religiously motivated mob, if not he? Who else could hope to turn them back from their purpose, if not a man armed with ecclesiastical authority? Bitterly regretting that he had not Gubbio at his side to perform the office for him, Don Felipe cleared his throat and proclaimed his own “Make way!”
To his gratification, the alguazil caught sight of him and took over the cry, even as the outer fringe of the throng began to obey it. The Ordinary pushed through the crowd relatively unhindered, save by the stenches of fear and garlic.
Reaching the front, he spied a fair-sized stone waiting for the masons to fit it into the gatepost, and signified with a gesture that he wished it placed as his platform from which to address the crowd. Two or three men at the front understood his desire and hurried to obey, thus heartening him further. Stepping up onto the hewn stone, he spread his hands and cried,
“My people! In the voice of your bishop, I command you: Go to your homes—or to your churches—fall upon your knees, and pray! Do not mar the young saint’s entrance into Heaven with your own violence!”
“Justice!” shrieked a woman’s voice from the back of the crowd, and a man’s took it up: “We want justice!”
“Justice shall be had!” Don Felipe shouted back. “As your bishop’s Ordinary, I promise you that the Holy Inquisition—”
“What, old Fray Potbelly?” shrilled the voice of a second woman, earning a little ragged laughter.
Manrique de Dios stepped forward and raised his wand of office, shouting: “I tell you again, even now my companions are arresting the foreign Jew and his host!”
“They are all murderers! All of them!” screamed a voice so hoarse it might have been either man’s or woman’s, and another added, “Will you jail every Jew in Daroca?”
The alguazil answered, “They will all be held fast in their own quarter until this matter is sifted through.”
“And then burned!” “Burned or hanged!” “To Hell with them all now at once!” Three shouts, coming almost simultaneously, raising many more shouts and a general loud mutter, like heavy seas on rocky shores.
“Hear me!” Don Felipe shouted above it. “Hear the voice of your bishop!” As they fell grumblingly silent, he hurried on, “You have lived side by side with these people for many years! Have they ever been known to do such a deed among you? Why now—”
One of the anonymous voices cut in, “That foreign Jew!”
“Stop!” The Ordinary raised his hands higher. “We, your priests, have studied their faith more deeply than is permitted to any of you! For we must know in order to combat. A false faith, yes, and riddled with many errors, but—mark this and mark it well!—nowhere does it allow the sacrifice of children! Indeed, from the days of Abraham down to our own, all Jews everywhere have ever and always been most strictly forbidden to harm or kill any human child!”
This speech, at least, they heard through; but as he paused for breath, someone shouted, “What of God’s own Son?” At the same time, a clod of earth sailed out of the mob and struck Don Felipe on the shoulder.
Catching his resolution with difficulty, he pointed a slightly trembling finger in the direction from which he thought the clod had come, and shouted, “In striking me, you strike your bishop! In striking any ordained priest, you strike at God Himself!”
“Does God defend murdering Jews?” came the response from somewhere in the crowd.
Thank God and our Lady, thought the priest, that all these cries came from several different throats. Had it been always the same voice, the mob would have had its leader, its spearhead. “In striking out at God,” he told them, “at God as represented by the lawful authority He has appointed over you, you make yourselves worse than the boy’s murderer—than the boy’s as yet unknown murderer! You place yourselves on a level with the damned archrebel Satan!”
That seemed to cow them a little. Or perhaps—he saw by glancing round—it was the appearance of Gamaliel Ben Joseph and his host Nathaniel the Silversmith, in chains and surrounded by four of the alcalde’s soldiers, that caused the breathless silence.
It lasted for only seconds before the muttering started again, with waving of torches and movements as of gathering missiles.
Brandishing both wand and sword, the alguazil shouted: “Clear our way!”
“Justice!” shrilled the woman near the back.
“Justice?” Don Felipe shouted back. “You shall have justice! Yes, you shall all have justice indeed! You have heard of the new Inquisition your king and his Castilian queen have brought, under the pope’s own authority, into her realms to the south! By your own actions, you shall bring it here as well—down upon your own heads! No more old Fra Guillaume, whom you should shudder to insult, as you should shudder to insult any of God’s anointed servants—but harsh strong men, stern and fierce in their righteous calling, men who will know well how to ferret out each and every one of you who raises hand or voice against your bishop’s authority here tonight, men who will have less mercy on the baptized Christian than on the unconverted Jew—for to whom much is given, from him much more will