“To bring me the news? Old friend, I thank you.” Don Felipe laid one hand on Gamito’s shoulder. “And I grieve for your own losses, and rejoice that they were not even worse. As mine to you, yours was a second family to me.”
Gamaliel covered Felipe’s hand with his own. For a moment, one man seated, the other standing, both heads slightly bowed, they remained in silence.
At length, Don Felipe spoke again. “But your clothes, Gamito? Has the ransom left your family so impoverished? Your beard? The sidelocks? And…the hated yellow badge? Was all this necessary?”
After refilling his guest’s cup and pouring wine for himself, Gamaliel drew up another chair and sat.
“Afoot or on shipboard, I call it safer to travel through these most Catholic realms as the unbaptized Jew I am than to risk being mistaken for a relapsed converso. Better to be spat upon than court the flames. They say there have already been burnings in Castile.”
Don Felipe nodded. “At Seville, after the Act of Faith a year ago this February just past. But, by our information, the conspiracy there had been actual, my friend. Not the mere bag of wind and empty rumors that most such plots dissolve into at a sufficiently forceful touch. Unfortunately, it has enabled the people to find new conspiracies in every shadow.”
“Is it true that plague struck the day after the burnings?”
“I have heard that the first cases appeared before the Act, but who, now, can say for sure? Certainly plague struck at about the same time, and the people saw it as God’s judgment on the conspirators. Even though one of the inquisitors was among its earliest victims,” Don Felipe added wryly, “which some graceless wits might have seen as divine judgment on the other party, had the general wrath burned less fiercely against the victims of the stake.”
“How is it that you have such clear news of these matters?”
Felipe almost winked. “Is it not in my interest to know as much as possible about this new, half-legal Inquisition their Majesties are trying to plant? Do you suppose I am eager to see Fernando bring it here to Aragon? where folk have done very well with the true old Inquisition since the days of the Albigensians. Do you think that I, as secular priest and bishop’s Ordinary, care for the thought of these hot new hounds of Torquemada’s replacing our sleepy old Fra Guillaume? who regards me as invigorating new blood!”
“Old friend, old friend,” Gamaliel replied, shaking his head, “their Majesties may succeed. All my way here, I heard the sailors talk as if they panted for Queen Isabel’s Inquisition as we prisoners in the mosques of Alhama had panted for water and food.”
“Perhaps. But what is true of Castile may not hold true of Aragon. I have found that the people here take fierce pride in their own will, their own ancient fueros, privileges, and liberties. Each Aragonese noble holds himself fully equal with his king, whom he serves of his own free will, only as long as it pleases himself to do so—and when it does not, he appeals to the Justicia of Aragon and his court! As long as your people guard themselves in prudence and avoid following the example of Seville, I think you may find our Old Christians of Aragon your strongest allies in keeping this new Inquisition out of Fernando’s kingdom. But as for you yourself, Gamito…I hope and believe that we shall preserve Aragon relatively safe, but…” Don Felipe thought of the new law restricting the children of Israel to their own quarters of the cities. “…were I you, I should join your brother’s family in Rome, and bring your mother there from Karnattah as soon as she can bear the journey, along with your sister and cousins.”
“Do you think that I have not thought of all this? Every step of the way to port, every rise and fall of the ship, as I saw, and felt in my own person, how the Castilians treat us, not only in siege and war, but… But no, my friend.” Gamaliel shook his head. “I believe that the Lord calls me to remain here and do everything in my power to help my people in the times that lie ahead.”
“I know you were studying to be a rabbi.”
“It is a longer study, perhaps, for us than for you,” Gamaliel replied with a smile that touched soft irony. “But I have also been schooled in the trials of Alhama de Karnattah.”
“And so you plan to remain here with us?” Felipe raised his cup in salute to his boyhood companion. “It cheers me already to have you near.”
For a time they sipped in silence, as if all the new things had been said and it was as yet too painful to reminisce about the old. Eventually, however, his wine three-quarters drunk, Felipe asked, “And Hamet and his family? Are they still in the city of Karnattah, where they went…was it in ’70?”
“In 1471. Yes. I saw them twice, the time I spent in that city after we were ransomed. They have done well, as well as possible in these days.” After a pause, Gamito added, “He told me that his sister Morayma is happy with her Moorish husband.”
The priest replied with a fatalistic nod and the comment, “It is enough.”
Why, after all, should she not be happy in her marriage?
Chapter 3
Morayma
The Moors were freer about allowing infidels than fellow Islamites into the company of their women, so that Felipe and Gamito had twice seen their friend Hamet’s younger sister. Those two visions of Morayma, coupled with her brother’s accounts of her, had been enough. After his second glimpse, the boy Felipe had begged his father to approach her father with the proposal of an alliance between their houses.
In wealth, the two families were equal. In social standing, comparable: if Morayma’s family was Moorish in a Moorish kingdom, Felipe’s was descended on both sides from some of the noblest blood of Old Spain—on one side, as family tradition maintained, from El Cid himself. It might have been argued forever which family lowered itself to the other. But the barrier of religion, although in the old ways of the kingdom of Karnattah preventing neither friendship nor good business relations, held both fathers back when it came to arranging a union between their offspring while still little more than children.
Felipe was then fourteen, and his father lost little time before shipping him off to Italy, to complete his education in that completely Catholic country. Two years later, in Rome, he received a letter from his mother which included the news that Hamet’s father had wedded Morayma to a rich Moor of the city of Karnattah, where the whole family had moved. Morayma would have been fourteen at the time of her marriage.
As though sensing Felipe’s emotions, in the same packet with that news his mother had sent him her own golden betrothal ring, set with a carnelian bearing the carven likeness of Juno’s head, in hopes that when the time came he would set it upon the finger of his bride to be.
Not that he would ever find one to take the place of Morayma in his heart! No, nothing was left for young Felipe save to worship her as a knight his sovereign lady—the devotion that neither time nor distance could ever dim, for it depended upon the excellence of the lady rather than the fleshly hope of the knight.
Not that actual knighthood was a vocation which held great allure for young Felipe de Bivar y Aguilar, even despite his proud family name. While not sickly, he had no exceptional strength nor stamina. Neither did he feel any burning desire to dress in iron for the purpose of battering and being battered by a fellow mortal similarly armed and clad. Such sports were all very well for leather-coated boys at play with wooden staves; but Felipe had been thwacked twice or thrice with such a mock weapon wielded over-forcefully, and he saw little honor and less usefulness in putting his excellent brain at the mercy of a true sword or mace.
Therefore, he decided upon the Church. Was not a priest in some sense a knight of God? As well as a man in the way to considerable success even in the worldly sense.
He would take orders, but not enter an Order. Being the child of a cloth merchant, he appreciated fine clothing. Being the child of a wealthy family of Karnattah, he possessed a finely developed if somewhat delicate palate, and misliked the thought of coarse diet as much as he misliked that of sleeping with