The weather had finally begun to cool, and the walk through the city was a pleasant one. Santángel had known plenty of misery, but summer in
the stench of Madrid was its own unique punishment. He turned his feet south to the rougher part of town. He could go far enough to manage his errand, but if he pushed much beyond the city walls, he knew he would feel the tether that bound him to De Paredes pulling him back. Santángel could ignore it, but not for long, not if he didn’t wish to endure the consequences.
He didn’t. Because he was a coward. He had always feared death more than he resented this unrelenting life.
His first lesson with the scullion had shown him two things: she had an agile mind and she was doing her best to hide it. Never a bad strategy for a servant, though he’d long since stopped bothering with such deception.
Neither Víctor nor Antonio Pérez would be eager for a champion with thoughts of her own. She was stubborn, combative, secretive. But she wanted to learn and she was capable of it. He’d gleaned little else.
She might be a conversa or a morisca. Most of the magic that survived in Spain came from Morvedre or Zaragoza or Yepes. But who knew how long any of it would last, lost to exile and the Inquisition, magic bleeding away with the bodies of Jews and Muslims, their poetry silenced, their knowledge buried in the stones of synagogues made into churches, the arches of Mudéjar palaces. The tolerance for mysterious texts like the Picatrix would be stamped out by the Pope, and King Philip would follow.
He could already feel the effects of his brief time with her. His stride was surer, his lungs breathed more deeply. There was pleasure in shared magic, and danger too. It pricked the mind and the spirit. It filled the room with possibility.
Santángel cut down one of the crooked alleys, keeping Avapiés to his left, and hurried on to Garavito’s workshop and kennels. This was the part of the
city known as El Rastro, crowded with tanneries and coal burners and coopers, its slumping buildings snug against each other, its streets choked with mud and shit and blood from the slaughterhouse. No one saw him as he moved through the traffic of carts and wagons, men loaded down with cargo and goods. His gift for stealth served Víctor well, and so it had come easily to Santángel, but he wondered sometimes if, as he’d lost interest in
the world, the world had taken less notice of him.
Garavito lived on the lower floor of a building with sweating plaster
walls built around a courtyard where his landlord let him keep his cages. He came from a family of trappers, and though he’d tried his hand at becoming a furrier, he didn’t have a talent for it. He sold lesser pelts to peasants and
merchants for their bedding, but the martens and genet cats screeching and crying from the cramped wooden boxes in the courtyard would be sold to men with a greater gift for turning living things into fashionable fur-lined coats, felted hats, and scented gloves.
Santángel could have entered the house easily enough, but he knocked instead. A young man answered the door, hiding his face from the passersby on the street.
“Hello, Manuel,” he said. “Is your father home?”
The boy nodded and stepped aside, turning away from Santángel. When Manuel had been only eight years old he’d accidentally released a fox in his father’s care. Garavito had seized the hammer he used to nail and stretch skins, and smashed in the left side of Manuel’s head. The boy should have died, but he’d kept on living, his eye forever half-shut, the skin of his forehead healing over the crater in his skull. His mother was long gone, but whether she’d run away in the night or been murdered by Garavito depended on where you got your gossip.
Santángel set a stack of silver reales on the battered table. “Go from here.
Find your uncles. Or set out on your own.”
The boy kept his gaze on Santángel as if fearing a trick. “Are you going to kill him?”
Santángel didn’t answer, only waited. There was a time when some sense of justice or righteousness would have made him want to kill a brute like Garavito, but now it was just a task to be done with.
Manuel snatched the coins from the table, holding them close to his chest.
“Go,” Santángel repeated.
As he made his way through the courtyard, he caught the glint of panicked eyes and scrabbling claws through the holes in the cages. He hated this place and he was only glad that after today he wouldn’t have to visit it again.
Garavito was seated on a bench, hunched over the body of a bloodied squirrel, his knife making messy work of separating the animal’s limp body from its skin.
“Garavito,” Santángel said softly.
The big man startled and lurched to his feet, knocking the bench backward. He had a thick head of black hair and a nose that had been broken so many times it lay nearly flat against his face.
“Shit,” he blurted, registering Santángel. He stood with the mangled squirrel in one hand, his knife in the other, and bowed awkwardly. “Señor,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
Again, Santángel held his tongue, letting silence fill the courtyard, the only sounds the mewls and hissing from the cages.
“I … I have no new information,” Garavito said. “You can be sure I will send word when I do.”
Garavito’s brothers hunted and trapped far afield and spoke to other
hunters and trappers. In the past, those contacts had provided Víctor with vital information and word of unusual happenings in the countryside.
Garavito shifted uneasily as the quiet stretched, then he tossed the squirrel’s body onto the overturned bench. He wiped the blade of his knife on his breeches. His hands were still stained red.
“Well?” he demanded. “What do you want? I have work to do.” “Since you like to talk, I thought I’d let you talk.”
Now Garavito’s eyes skittered away. “Don Víctor knows I can be trusted.”
“You were late bringing us word of the olive farmer.”
“I explained all that. There were rumors, nothing more.”
“Rumors of a milagrero. A milagrero who now belongs to Beatriz Hortolano.”
Garavito spat. “If Don Víctor has a problem with—”
“It would be wise to stop saying his name. You’ve spoken it too freely already. He forgave the loss of Donadei, but he cannot tolerate being the subject of gossip. You’ve been talking about my inquiries into the olive farmer and our acquaintance in Toledo. You brought our employer’s name
into the conversation. So, no, he doesn’t trust you, and that’s a very bad thing.”
Garavito lunged. Santángel knew he would. He’d seen the way the big man’s stance shifted, the grip he adjusted on his knife. He stepped aside and let Garavito stumble past.
Garavito whirled and struck out again. Santángel could have dodged the blow, but his morning lesson with the scullion must have ruffled his mood. He let the strike land.
The knife lodged in Santángel’s gut, its dirty handle jutting from his torso like a mysterious growth.
A surprised laugh burbled from Garavito’s throat, as if he couldn’t quite
believe what he’d accomplished. “Don Víctor’s scorpion doesn’t have much of a sting!”
He sounded so proud, so triumphant. Santángel almost felt guilty. Even so, he took some satisfaction in watching that triumph turn to bafflement when he yanked the knife from beneath his sternum.
He offered the hilt back to Garavito courteously. “Would you like to try again?”
Garavito stared at the knife in Santángel’s hand with the same suspicion his son had shown the stack of coins. Then he grabbed the hilt and stabbed again and again and again, driving Santángel back against the wall.
Santángel let himself be shoved about. He knew he was being silly, theatrical. He should have crept into Garavito’s house and slit his throat.
Now he was bleeding and he’d probably have to suffer through some kind of fever tonight. Maybe he thought Garavito, who called his son half-moon and liked to skin the creatures in his keeping while they were still alive to feel it, didn’t deserve a quick death. Maybe he was bored. His mind had moved ahead to the walk home and what he would choose for tomorrow’s lesson.
Again he pulled the knife from his gut.
“Devil,” Garavito said, backing away. He crossed himself, eyes locked on the blood seeping through Santángel’s doublet. “God help me. Jesus save
me.”
“It does hurt,” Santángel said. “If that makes you feel any better.”
It was time to bring this scene to an end. He turned the knife on Garavito: quick jabs to the stomach—an echo of the attack he’d just endured, another
bit of theater—one strike after another until his opponent crumpled, then a slash behind each knee to make sure he couldn’t get up.
Santángel opened the cages, releasing coney, genet cats, weasels, ermines that had not yet sloughed off their brown coats for winter white, a single fox. Some fled. Others rose on back legs, scenting the blood on the air, their hunger making them bold.
He watched them creep tentatively toward where Garavito lay moaning, trying to cover the enticement of his wound. Maybe his neighbors would hear the screaming and come help him. Maybe they’d remember the shove he’d given them in the street or the clout across the face and they’d close their windows against the sound.
As Santángel passed through the cramped apartment, he saw Manuel hadn’t left. He was lurking by the window, watching his father die.
“I needed to know,” Manuel said. “Please don’t kill me.”
“Make sure you’re gone before the authorities arrive,” Santángel replied, and slipped back onto the street. Víctor would tell him to murder the boy too, but Víctor wasn’t here.
It took him less than half an hour to traverse the city, his cloak drawn tight over his ruined clothing, the distraction of the crowded streets
welcome as he made his way past the houses built over the old garrison walls. He hadn’t lied to Garavito. His injuries were painful, but pain held no real interest for him. He knew it would stop. He knew death wasn’t coming.
Pain without fear was easy to bear. He would wash his hands and change his clothes, and forget Garavito’s name the way he’d forgotten so many others.
Too soon he saw the Casa de los Estudios, the women calling to one another from the grocers’ stalls in the Plaza del Arrabal, the acrobats performing in the square that fronted the Alcázar, and there, Víctor’s new palace—a great slab of achievement. This was the third De Paredes palace Santángel had lived in. There had been rented rooms, then humble houses, then grand ones as the family’s wealth grew. This palace had been built in
the Italianate style, all stone instead of brick, a testimony to the De Paredes fortune. It was the newest of his many properties, built when rumors began that Philip would move his court to Madrid.
Víctor’s massive bodyguard was outside his library. El Peñaco, he was called, a wrestler and fighter from somewhere near Sigüenza. Víctor always kept him near when Santángel wasn’t in his presence.
“Garavito?” Víctor asked when he glimpsed Santángel in the doorway. “Will gossip no longer.”
“And the scullion? Is she hopeless?” “Very much so.”
“What a tragedy for you.” Víctor did not look up from his writing. Santángel had forgotten emotion long ago. He had no humors to balance,
no bile, no spleen, no desire. And yet as he watched Víctor scratch away at his correspondence, he felt the old rage stir. Once he had craved revenge almost as much as freedom. It had driven him through the sameness of his days and given him purpose. But in time, even his fury had waned,
extinguished by the truth of his curse, by the relentless march of years. How strange to discover it within him still, an underground spring that might feed a great river.
