The Apprentice's Masterpiece (12 page)

A voice cries, “By Santiago!”
“Santiago!” the men in the camp answer as one.

The name vibrates through me
as though I myself have shouted it out.

Terms

The wait is not over.
Delegations come out
from the vanquished city
to talk out the terms of surrender.

None of us knows what is said.
But each time the Malagans emerge
from the royal tent, their faces have lengthened.
They look afraid.

Three times they come.
Three times they go back.

I suppose they're among the city's elite.
But their clothes hang like rags.

Are my uncles, as merchants of silk,
among these brave men?

I must find my moment.
But daren't approach.

No matter.
The moment finds me.

No

A voice barks, “You there.”
I don't move. “You there! Boy!”

Why do I know it means me?

I should ignore it.
But, like a falcon,
I'm trained all too well.

I look up.

“You are that translator, no?”
It's the Queen's man.
“Come, ride with me.
Our sovereigns can use you.”

And the man sweeps me onto
the back of his horse before
I can agree with him:
No.

Sight

I wish I didn't have eyes,
to see such things.

Bodies—my people—litter the streets.
And animals, dead and rotting, everywhere.

I pass by a horse with its side torn for food.
A woman lies sobbing, crunched in a heap.
When I approach her, she jolts to her feet.
Flees like she thinks I'll cut off her head.

And the sound. It's strange, a high hum,
as from a guitar with only one string.
But it's nothing like music.
I can't stop my eyes.
They look to the bodies.
The sound's made by flies.

To think I once cringed at the thought
of soldiers—alive ones—
who don't favor baths.

The Fortress of Gibralfaro

A much different sound from the hilltop,
last holdout of the Malagan Moors.
Huzzah!
The fortress itself has surrendered.
The crescent-moon banner is torn from the ramparts
and impaled on the blade of a sword.

In its place goes a flag with the sign of the cross.
I hear strains of the Christian
Te Deum
,
their triumphal hymn.

My rider dismounts and he kneels at the sight.
I kneel too—for a minute:
then use the chance of bowed heads
as the wings for my flight.

Doors

Heralds move through the city,
proclaiming.
Malaga is now
a part of Castile.

They charge everyone
to stay in their houses.

By the good offices
of the merciful Queen,
food and drink will be brought
to the door of each family.

Stray from your homes,
and you'll miss your chance.

And what of us vagabonds
without even a door?

The Torment of Bells

It's true once again—
the Queen trails decorum behind her
the way ships leave a wake
in the water.

All kneel as she passes.
Her long, fur-trimmed mantle
drags Allah knows what
through the still-gory streets.

The monarchs make speeches
from the high balconies
of the alcazaba.

The Queen's theme is constant:
the war is but one more great hymn
to the glory of God.
Her confessor, the Friar Torquemada,
sits at her side like a purring cat.
He is now Chief Inquisitor—
and the most pitiless man,
many say, in the land.
Small wonder blood flows like water
when the Queen has advisers like that!

King Fernando is much more concerned with the present.
His attention is turned to “God's foes.”
Some of the conquered Muslims
have accepted baptism. They've become “Moriscos.”
But more resist it.

The King calls for all minarets—the towers of mosques—
to be turned into belfries. The cry
of the muezzin shall be replaced with bells.

“Let the sounds of their ringing be torment,” he shouts,
“to those infidels who refuse to take Christ.
Let the bells peal through Malaga the rest of its days.”

Bells

I think how Ramon would smirk at this speech.
At last, his equation of torture and church bells confirmed!
And by no less a source than our King himself.

Mercy

The Christians are famous for mercy, you know.
Their prophet, like ours, preached about that.

But I see few signs of mercy so far.

Never mind the words of Fernando,
ringing, along with the bells, in my ears.
Infidels. Torment.
Compared to their actions,
those words are a kiss.

One bright day, a Christian, a traitor,
is killed in the plaza.
Men take turns poking him
with long, steel-tipped sticks,
much the way picadors torture bulls in the ring.

They keep on with it even after he dies.
But you'd be surprised.
Death sometimes takes
a very long time.

The Cabbage

I walk through what's left of Malaga, seeking my uncles.
I'm losing all hope. The few people
I meet who will talk to me
have not heard of them. And they look at me
as if I am mad. Why search for life
amidst so much death?

When business dried up in our Cordoba shop,
food was all we could think of.
I once wrote
pastry
when I meant to write
paltry
,
marring a till-then clean page of script.

During that time I brought home a cabbage.
It was given to me by a woman whose stall
in the market we'd shopped at—when we could shop.
On this day, I offered some lines
of a poem as a trade.

“All right,” said the woman, “but put me in your verse.”
So I wrote a few lines in praise of Consuela, and her beauty
(not true), and prayed that the cabbage would prove
to be worth it.

(That, by the way, was my first go at a poem!
No wonder I find them so hard. Perhaps
I've been cursed by the muse for that use!)

The outside of the cabbage was wilted—nothing new there.
But each leaf, pulled back, uncovered more rot.
I peeled it in private, not wanting the others
to see how I'd failed.
Its center was black with decay.

So goes today's journey. I keep expecting
the horror to end, but it won't.
No matter how deep in the city
I go, the alleys all stink with dead things.

I push to the outskirts.
Night is falling.
At last I find a cave in a hill.
Just as I'm falling asleep
light shines in my eye.
Discovered, so soon?
Am I ready to die?

Hunger

What I see is the smallest of hands.
It barely fits round the butt of the torch.

I lift up my gaze.
A girl, no older than six, peers into my face.

When our eyes meet, she smiles.
She speaks Arabic! But not the sort that belongs
to books and discussions. This Arabic is
the sound of the streets, and the shops,
and the caves. The sound of my mother.
She speaks it so matter-of-factly I almost believe,
for a moment, I have heard
no other tongue in my life.

“Good evening, my brother.
Have you brought us some food?”

I sit up. Now I see, in the dim light of the flame,
what I hadn't before.
A whole family is here, huddled and mute,
more like some jag of rock in the cave
than people. They're that silent and still.

And their faces—
so shrunken with hunger
their eyes dwarf their cheeks.

I open my bag. In the morning I stowed there
my ration of food, as has been my practice in camp.
One never knows what the day ahead holds.

I tear it in five. Such pure joy from crumbs!
The children are grinning so wide
I can very near watch as each measly morsel
tumbles down their throats.

The youngest keeps chewing even when nothing
is left in his mouth but a few budding teeth.

The Next Morning

The children beam at me,
clearly expecting more magical food.
I cast down my eyes.
Feel like the rotten core of that cabbage
as I shuffle my way from their lives.

A man near the docks pulls pages from books.
He tears these to strips. He will boil them in water,
he tells me, until they have softened to rags.
He can wear them that way. The nights are cold here.

A sign on his cart reads, “Books and Letters.”
It's in Arabic.
I take a breath, then offer
myself as a scribe.

He laughs in my face.
“Do you have nothing else but your skinny self?”

My heart flops.
I tell him.

“A book!” he scoffs. “You can see what use
I've for
those
things right now.
In Arabic too, I'll just bet.
Tell me, young clown, who in this place would
buy it from me? Have you no sword
made of feathers you'd like to sell me instead?
That would be more practical!”

But I show him which book. He actually gasps.
For one fleeting moment his eye's candle's not out.
Now he's eager to lose me.
“Take it,” he says. Shoves a single maravedi in my hand.
“Good fortune to you finding something to buy.”

The Cup You Hold

Of course I opened Hafiz one last time.
One line to divine the whole rest of my life.

Do I really believe in such nonsense?
Of course not.
Of course.

Here's what he said:

Respect the cup you hold. The clay it's made from
was the skulls of buried kings.

I liked that. It made sense, especially
for thinking of the past.

But what did it tell of my future?
I'll admit it. I cheated.
I opened the book once again.
How can you blame me? I was giving him up.

But Hafiz had the last laugh.

Don't be surprised at Fortune's twists and turns.
That wheel has spun a thousand times before.

If I ever have a home of my own,
perhaps I'll nail that to my door.

Cattle Call

Seven days since the capture.
Finally, the call comes.
All must repair to the great courtyard
of the alcazaba. Ten thousand Malagans—
children among them—swarm to the castle.

Soldiers preside from the ramparts.
We are framed on all sides.

Stubborn hope in the courtyard.
For hundreds of years
Muslims, Christians, and Jews
have shared the peninsula
upon which Spain rests.
What's more, this new jewel of Castile
needs people to fill it. If we promise
to live like good subjects, what should we fear?

The woman beside me is not so convinced.
Might they not just be stockpiling
fuel for their fires?

Gifts

We are, every one, to be slaves.
The Malagans have earned, says the King,
this dreadful sentence
with their stubborn hearts.

What some call stubborn,
others call brave.
This is their home, after all!
Or, it was.

One-third of the captives,
the luckiest, will go to Africa.
In exchange, Christian slaves
will be freed and returned.

Another third will be kept by the Crown.
This is payment, you see, for the high cost of war.

The remainder will go to the crusaders.
Each noble soldier who mounted this siege
will get one as a gift.

I look at the footmen who stand
on the walls. Noble?
I wonder.
They laugh at our gaunt,
stricken faces.

What kind of master
will I serve this time round?

Only Money!

Even cramped like cattle
into this square, many of us
still perform prayers.
Have they now been answered?

Fernando has given
a dribble of hope.
If the Malagans can raise—as a group—
half a million maravedis,
they may buy back their freedom.

We're given nine months.

Every man, woman, and child
must give to the Crown
a full accounting of all that they own.
Then the Crown will inform us
if it is enough.

No one sleeps.
One man stands on the shoulders
of a friend to be heard.

Rich and poor—we shall pool
our resources. How can our goods
be divided when our fates are one?

The Calculations of Clerks

There's a problem.
The clerks who make the accounts
are all Christian men, in the employ
of the Crown.

They examine our lists
with furrowed brows, like parents
assessing poor work done by children.

Some even wrinkle their noses
inspecting the treasures we have on us now.

I offer my quill.
Pretending to think, the clerk names a sum
far below its value.

It's not only quills they don't prize.
Fine lace and rich silk, even houses and orchards:
all are matched with figures so laughably low
the Malagans must struggle to hold in their anger
and not slap their smug faces.

I look at this sneering young man
who holds his own quill.
He calmly writes down the worth of our lives.
Think of
my
life a short season ago:
transcribing letters and books
for much better men.

My fingers were stained with ink spots
instead of the filth of not having washed
properly in a month.
How can that Amir and this one
be the same soul?

The Nasrid Emir

Not even close, says the head treasurer.
We have not made the sum.
People wail, wring their hands.
So much loss. And now this.

There is one hope.

Granada itself
is still Muslim.

It is said that Boabdil, the emir,
is so rich he wears ten
rings of gold on his toes.

We've just heard of some Malagan Jews
whose freedom was bought by a man from Castile.

When Boabdil hears
that
,
his pride will be stirred.
He'll saddle his Arabian horse
and bring us the money himself!

Appeals

Three messengers have gone
to Granada.

The first two came back with a promise.
We would be helped.
We must only hold on.

The third, once a long week had passed,
came back with a
no
.

The fourth
did not come back
at all.

Manumission (2)

I have an idea.
Could Papa's paper—the one that declares
I am free—
be my salvation?