The Horse Healer (15 page)

They scrutinized the area without finding anything strange.

“You go … I don't know … maybe your horse sensed the presence of some animal, like a fox or something,” Benazir affirmed. “I'll wait for you close by.”

Fatima walked around the edge of the lake, looking around until she reached the horses and found Asmerion. When she petted him, he was tranquil. She looked in the area where he was standing without seeing anything noteworthy. Only the wind broke the night's silence. She felt calmer when she returned to Benazir, but then she saw in front of her the black outline of an enormous man on horseback. He wore a leather cuirass and had a sword in his belt; there was no doubt, he was an Imesebelen.

He spoke to her in a whisper, but firmly.

“Silence!”

Fatima was paralyzed. Against her will, her tears flowed forth. The man didn't move. He had seen the Arabian mares, and now two women, and close to them, three men who seemed to be asleep. He imagined what they were after and weighed his chances if he decided to neutralize them, while with his ominous manner he manipulated the young girl's will. She remained paralyzed. Slowly, silently, he got off the horse and turned to her.

Benazir, surprised she hadn't yet seen Fatima, finally saw the man as he followed after the young girl. He was right beside her. He was much taller than her, much stronger, much bigger. A wave of panic overcame Benazir and she threw herself to the ground, not knowing whether she'd been seen. She covered herself with the blanket, instinctively, as though inside there she would be protected. But from inside her hiding place, she could hear Fatima scream, and how her scream was choked back instantly, assuredly by the hand of that man who was trying to not alert the others.

Benazir, curled up from fright, listened. She heard the groan with which Fatima took leave of life, her death gargle. Terrified, she imagined the dagger of the man being driven into the girl's heart, and she felt a sharp cramp in her legs; her teeth chattered as she shivered. She squeezed her jaws shut with one hand to stop the noise. She didn't want to think of what he would do to her if he discovered her. She imagined his hand touching her back, taking off the blanket; she almost felt his steel being plunged into her belly. She stopped breathing, swallowed, heard steps around her, someone was coming close. Would it be her Galib, Kabirma, the Imesebelen … What had happened to Fatima?

She sobbed hysterically and thought she would die in that very instant.

“Fatima?” It was Kabirma's voice.

Benazir heard other steps running close by. She huddled up tighter in her tiny hiding place. She could make out someone running and then the hooves of a horse escaping at great speed.

“Benazir! Where are you?” Galib looked for her.

She pulled up one corner of the blanket and looked all around. She saw her husband running to her and embraced him, shivering.

“They've killed her!” Kabirma screamed in anguish. “Noooo!” The man from Jerez had found the bundle lying at the edge of the lake. He knelt at her side and touched her back tenderly, giving her a careful nudge, as if to wake her from a deep and terrible dream, but Fatima didn't respond. He pulled her head from the water with great delicacy and took her in his arms, crying with pity. It was then that he saw the death wound in her breast and contracted until all the muscles in his body hurt, and his soul even more.

“My poor girl …” He clenched his fists with rage. “Who has stolen away your life?”

Diego approached them with timid steps, afraid to look at her, unable to believe what had just happened. He stopped in front of them, unable to express what he had begun to feel. He stretched out his hand to caress his friend, crippled with pain, and when Kabirma saw him, his eyes pouring tears, he showed her to him, bowled over in death. Her hair covered up half her face; blood covered the other half. Diego remembered those same hairs tickling his cheeks and looked at the lips where he had tasted such pleasure. And he cried, without tears, an intense, deep inner grief. He knelt with them and embraced Kabirma and Fatima.

Galib knew that in that moment a cruel task had befallen him: to get them out of there. The one who had fled would undoubtedly bring other Imesebelen. There was no time for anything, not even for mourning Fatima.

“Kabirma, Diego, that man's already escaped, and …” Both looked at him, unwilling to separate from her. “Listen to me, I understand what you are feeling, we are all paralyzed by her horrendous death, but we are running the gravest risk if we don't go. … Even if it's in her honor, we should flee. Think about it, they could already be close, maybe the one who killed her wasn't alone. Imagine if they are only a step away from us.”

Galib didn't stop moving, looking among the trees, attentive to the least movement of a branch and alert to any strange sound.

Benazir supported her husband.

“We must escape, my husband's right.”

“You go!” Kabirma embraced his daughter. “Flee! I won't go. I need to say good-bye, to cry for her, to tell her how much I loved her, to accompany her on her final trip to heaven. After I bury her, I will come to look for you. I'll find you on the way.”

“Kabirma, my friend, I know this is hard, the worst thing that could have happened to us, but don't let those bastards rob you of your life as well; they will kill you. Staying here won't help anything. She is already in heaven and she will see you there. Think that she is happy, that what you have in your hands is just a body, it's not her anymore.”

“Leave me and go. …” He pushed Diego and grasped his daughter with firmness.

Galib understood that he could do nothing and began to give orders. Diego and Benazir ran to gather what they could in their infinite grief. They went without knowing where they were going, dazed, as if living through a horrible nightmare.

Meanwhile, Galib readied the horses and tied four mares to each of them. He left three more with Kabirma, because if they took more, it would slow them down, and they couldn't risk it.

The animals neighed frantically. They had been pushed and buffeted from one place to the other; the men had tied them with strong knots, whistled at them, kicked. The horses breathed in the sharp tension in the atmosphere, smelled the fear, and began to gnash, giving terrible bellows of rage, and bucked in all directions.

Galib armed himself with a long branch and proceeded to flog them to stop the madness, but the animals grew more frantic with his blows and drew face-to-face with him; some even raised their legs to strike him.

Diego mounted Sabba and ordered her over to the group. As frightened as the rest of them, she took a step and began to pull the females that were tied to her. Benazir followed, and Galib got on his horse as well once he saw the group had set off.

He looked at Kabirma and gave him a final salute.

“Don't fail to keep your word. Come back to us.”

The last image of Fatima lying over her father preceded a vertiginous rush of the riders over the shore heading north, looking for another egress that would get them out of that hell.

A scandalous chorus of whinnies accompanied their flight. The animals, still wild, resisted following that frenetic gallop, but Sabba's singular energy and determination, as well as those of Galib's and Benazir's horses, made them cede their resistance, little by little, and be taken.

Diego looked behind them. The sand flew up as they passed, the hooves breaking the smooth surface that had been burnished by the water; they were running for life, escaping the horror and the infinite grief caused by another death, that of a friend, almost of a lover. He clutched Sabba's reins, letting himself be carried, racked with consternation.

All of them left a part of themselves behind.

They heard the sound of horses, and after ascending some dunes, not without enormous difficulties, they soon smelled dry land. From there they sought out the riverbed of the Guadiamar to leave the marshes behind—those beautiful, unique, and mortal wetlands.

XXII.

T
hey thought Kabirma had died.

They didn't know anything for weeks. They had arrived in Toledo after a long, sad journey, a journey they would remember forever.

But one good day, he showed up.

His exhausted tone and his aged face called their attention. He was much leaner, and his body showed the effects of fierce battle. His hands and face were furrowed with cuts and scrapes. He didn't know how he had managed to escape those savages—he could barely even talk—but there he was, beaten, half dead, and with the sole satisfaction of having managed to bury his daughter in that pine forest they would never forget.

Yes, he was wounded, but it wasn't his body that bore the worst damage; it was his soul.

A few days after his arrival, Kabirma surprised them with the news that he was leaving the city. He felt incapable of taking back up the life he'd led before without his daughter. Everything reminded him of her. Peace was no longer possible for him, even less so when he was so close to his memories.

“I will sell the horses we got, but I don't want my part. I can't touch that money now.”

“You're mad, Kabirma. It's not that you deserve your part, it's that you have the obligation to take it.”

“I pledged to make an impossible journey and I put everyone's life in danger. I did it for money. … Now I don't want it. I lost Fatima because of it.”

Kabirma lowered his head and sank into his grief. He wanted to leave, but Galib wouldn't let him.

“Stop punishing yourself. How will you survive? In Toledo you are someone, and people love you. Sadly, Fatima is no longer here, but you should give yourself a chance, sell those horses, move forward.”

“I can't, Galib. I can't,” Kabirma whispered between sobs. “I will sell my house, the stables, and with what I make, I will have a fabulous garden built, as beautiful as she was, as innocent as her gaze. I want it to become a living memory of my daughter, where I can leave a bit of my heart amid the jasmines, rosebushes, and honeysuckle. And then I will go.”

Galib embraced him, sharing everything that the distance had deprived them of. Without words, he expressed how close Kabirma was to him, his understanding, the enormous affection he felt for him.

Diego, hearing that Kabirma had arrived, ran to see him, wanting news, anxious to see him. And he found him with Galib. No words were necessary. When they saw each other, they hugged, and everything was said, an embrace that spoke of Fatima, a crossing of sad sentiments.

“You know, Diego, she loved you, as more than just a friend. …”

That was the only thing Kabirma said after a long silence.

Diego heard those words with great pain, aware that they were true and still with the recent memory of those passionate kisses. He felt deep bitterness in his mouth and also in his soul. He knew something important in his life remained forever inside those two people, but more in the one who had been his only friend, Fatima.

For the following months, Diego and Galib took refuge once again in their work: the construction of the stables, attending to the horses, new patients, the study of illnesses …

They hardly spoke. The death of Fatima had clouded their lives and whenever their work progressed, they thought how it had cost them a life.

Galib paid all his debts, and months later he could look at the finished stables.

One afternoon, alone in the library, he counted the money he had left, the money that should have gone to Kabirma, and he felt greedy for having it in his hands. He missed the man from Jerez every Tuesday when he went to the market. He would have liked to show him the new installations, to explain the improvements.

That money had been won at a high price, the life of Fatima. And here, in the shadows in his home, sitting before that pile of coins, he called Diego.

The boy's face had matured and bore the traces of Fatima's disappearance. Master and student sat down to talk.

“What will you do when you become an albéitar? Where would you like to begin?”

That was a question he had never asked before. Diego hesitated. “I still have two years left, no?”

Galib nodded.

“I don't know, maybe I would go back to Malagón to work there, as long as I could …”

“Be independent. … Of course. …”

“Well, that seems logical … but I still don't know.”

“The beginnings aren't easy. You know the great sacrifices I myself went through until I got the business going in this city. And I didn't start from zero. Thanks to my savings, I could hold out. Listen to me, Diego. In this profession of ours, winning a reputation is everything, that's why you can't begin with limitations. You need to have everything, a proper place to work, books …”

He opened the drawer in the table and took out a leather bag full of money. He left it at his side.

“Here are three hundred
sueldos
. They're yours.”

Diego's eyes opened wide. He made two
sueldos
a week. That was the equivalent of three full years of work.

“I can't accept this.” He pushed the bag away.

“Your gesture is honorable, but I will not deceive you; it's money that Kabirma didn't want to accept for the mares that we took from Las Marismas.”

“I don't want it either.”

“Wait, Diego, I understand. … Everyone is devastated by what happened, but what better use is there for it than establishing a new life, yours. That's why I'm offering it to you, so that you don't have to start from zero. I don't believe there's a better destiny for it.”

“I thank you for it, master, but I don't know … I can't help it.”

“It's fine. Let's do something. I will keep it for you until then. But at least take fifty. With that money you can buy some books and some surgical materials that will be useful for you. … Why not?”

Diego remained pensive and finally accepted.

Days later he visited Gerardo de Cremona, the translator, and proudly bought four books from him. In reality, those were his first acquisitions, books that he began to devour at night and that didn't take him long to memorize. Cremona also let Diego read, without buying, a strange book that he had just translated called
Mekhor Chaim
, or
The Source of Life
. It contained the philosophical principles that were the basis of the kabbalah, a science as old as it was surprising, one they had talked about in depth on various occasions, which Cremona claimed to have a great understanding of.

Many days Diego studied those new titles he had been able to buy alongside Galib and heard his explanations of the parts he didn't understand.

It was then that Galib began to devote himself to the study of botany. He went over it almost every day. He would linger on detailed explanations so that he would learn how to select the curative parts of all the plants and where they were found. He taught Diego to prepare hundreds of unguents and potions: one to soften the hooves, others for mange, for the curing of fevers, even to keep away flies …

Months after Kabirma had abandoned the city of Toledo and his business, they received a letter saying that he had settled in the kingdom of Portugal, in the city of Coimbra. He was trying to start up a horse business there with the help of a woman; his associate, he said, but he admitted that it could become something more than a merely mercantile relation. The news was celebrated by Benazir and by Galib and Diego as well. It seemed that fatality had decided to leave them alone at last, and that they could go back to being happy.

At the end of that winter, Diego met a number of times with the Calatravan friar he had met in the translator's workshop on his first visit. He liked to talk to him; he was loquacious and very cultured. One day, the friar said that besides translation, one of his tasks was to visit the libraries of all the monasteries built in the various Christian kingdoms. With this work, he was attempting to compile an ambitious record of all their books and writings at the behest of his master.

He spoke with passion about some of those temples of learning, but he confessed that the greatest library of them all, the one that possessed the richest resources, was that of the Cistercian monastery in Fitero, in the north of Castile, almost at the border with Navarre. Only there had he seen truly fabulous works, lone copies sometimes, many unknown by even the greatest scholars.

“I spent two years in that monastery, the cradle of the Calatravan order, and I would go back, I assure you. Moreover, I remember that one of the friars there was an albéitar like yourself. He was remarkably prestigious and I suppose that his knowledge was as well. Those who work in your profession aren't called albéitars in those lands, though their job is similar. Some call them veterinarius, others say
mariscal
, and the rest call them horse healers.”

Such was the friar's passion as he revealed the nature and extent of the treasures of that place, that both the monastery and the library began to appear in Diego's dreams with a certain frequency, sometimes in the form of nightmares. Some nights he saw himself running down long dark hallways of stone, followed by a man on horseback hidden under a black garment. It seemed so real that he even felt the hard hooves when they struck him. In other dreams, fortunately nicer ones, he was surrounded by a fabulous crowd of hundreds of books, in a room with an infinite roof and blinding light. There he saw himself enjoying his reading, as well as the feeling of touching the books. They were bound in gold and taffeta, and in his dreams he enjoyed sniffing them, stroking them, as though they'd been bound in the petals of a flower.

The following spring brought with it a torrent of light and color, an explosion of sensations, but also an infinitude of births, almost all with complications.

For a while, Diego came to think that all the mares of Toledo had reached an agreement to foal on the same days. It was so much work, it was almost suffocating.

And thus, during those bustling days, when it seemed impossible to take even another case, Galib passed him a letter from the Laras, an urgent notice.

“For another bleeding?” Diego saw himself again in those stables surrounded by those giant warhorses, half crushed between their ribs and knocked about by their robust necks.

“Don't worry, he's only trying to understand what could be causing a limp in Doña Urraca's walking mare, and afterward, of course, fixing it.”

Galib raised his voice, making it sound slightly feminine.

“And bring that handsome young apprentice of yours to help us. …” He laughed. “That's what Doña Urraca said to me when I saw her early this morning.”

“I remember her well. …” Diego reddened. “She was a very nice woman.”

“Very pretty, no?”

“You're right, she is.”

The mare was standing calmly in the central courtyard of the castle without seeming too affected. To her side stood a boy who brushed her with a currycomb in one hand and a softer bristled brush in the other.

Only a moment after they were announced, she appeared. She was in a green dress and had her hair pulled up in a veil. Her bodice, showing generous cleavage, glimmered with an intricate design of gold. The first person she looked at was Diego.

“I do say, though you've become quite a man, you still have that clean and noble gaze from before. I'm very happy to see you, Diego.”

“Your words do me honor, madame. And forgive me for saying so, but I find you much more beautiful than I remembered.”

She thanked him for the compliment, asking about his age.

“I'm eighteen now, madame. Imagine, four years have passed since I came to Toledo.”

A curly-haired girl, blond and with a roguish gaze, peeped out from behind her mother's skirt.

“This must be little Flora!” Galib stroked her head, impressed by her incredible resemblance to her mother.

“Did you hear her grandfather has remarried?”

Out of pure courtesy, he said he had not, though everyone was informed of the dishonorable episode that Doña Urraca's mother had been involved in; the wife of Don López de Haro, she had fled in the arms of a simple blacksmith from Burgos.

“He's on his way to introduce his new wife to us, Doña Tota Pérez de Azagra. They were married only a month ago. The Azagras are a very influential family in Navarre. They have a title and rights as the lords of Albarracín.”

Diego, estranged from the conversation, looked over the mare without finding any injury, mark, or discoloration on her hooves that might awaken any suspicion.

Doña Urraca continued talking with Galib. She began to explain that her husband, Don Álvaro Núñez de Lara, was in Normandy, on orders from the king, to reclaim the lands of Gascony from his English counterpart. According to him, those lands had been established as a dowry of Queen Eleanor of England, the wife of the Castilian monarch and sister of the English King Richard.

Diego used a small hammer to tap each of the hooves in case some difference of sound indicated foot rot. Galib watched him from the side without ignoring the woman. He trusted that Diego would have seen that detail as well, only that one. … If he did, he would have a definitive diagnosis.

“I need to have her walk on sand.”

The stable boy was the only one who heard Diego. Doña Urraca seemed lost in her thoughts and Galib was at her disposal.

The boy untied the rope and led the mare to a place alongside the courtyard where there was ample river sand. They exercised the horses there regularly to keep them in optimal condition.

“Do you see her limping?”

Galib pulled slowly away from his hostess to come closer to the spot where Diego was, not wanting to miss anything.

“You'll have her trot right in front of me, at least ten or twenty times.” The boy obeyed immediately.

Both Diego and Galib concentrated on how she moved her legs in case she showed any abnormal or strange movement, but they saw nothing until the mare stopped, when the exercise was over.